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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's live Q&A. ♪ Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets. Today is Friday. That's what we're going for. Today is Friday, September 29, 2023. And on this Friday, we have live Q&A. ♪ Each and every Friday here at Radical Personal Finance, in which I can arrange the relevant recording technology, we have a live Friday Q&A show.

Works just like Call & Talk Radio. You call in, talk about anything you want, ask any questions, make any comments, bring up any topics of conversation. If you would like to join me for 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. Sign up to support the show on Patreon, and that will gain access for you to one of these live Q&A shows. We begin with Derek in Maryland--or Maine, sorry. M-E is Maine. Derek in Maine, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, good afternoon, Joshua.

Thanks for taking my call. You may or may not remember this, but I purchased some of your time back in-- you were having a--I believe it was a Black Friday special, and I took advantage of that. We had chatted. I had some questions about the path that I was on with my career.

You gave me some really encouraging advice at the time, which was I should probably start looking into getting better at software and changing my career. That was advice that I valued. The conversation was excellent. But I will admit that I tabled it, because as life does, it--life has momentum.

So I tabled the idea for a while, and some things have come up, and there's an opportunity that allowed me to actually move back up closer to where I want to move, pursuant to the first--within your framework of thinking, kind of the number--the second thing that you should be thinking of, the first being who you want to live with, the second being where you want to live.

And based on the fact that I have a GI Bill, which I don't know how well you understand that benefit, the post-9/11 GI Bill, I've been considering--I found a university that actually caters not only to my needs as a mid-career person to get a master's in computer science and engineering, but they offer pretty significant benefits with regards to--if you plan on staying in the state of Maine, if you plan on-- they actually work with the state of Maine to try to actually build out--that's kind of their mission.

But getting to my question is, I'm 36, I'll be 37 next year, and I'm 13 years into a career. If I were to go full-time, which the GI Bill, the way it's structured, encourages you to do, is that something that might be looked at unfavorably as like a gap in your resume?

Or if you have decided that mid-career that you're going to get more serious about being technically proficient, and you're going to take that seriously, is that something that they will look at-- most employers will look at as a gap in your resume or an enhancer? Your idea would be after completing your college degree to get a job in the software field?

Correct. I think that especially in the software field, that kind of question is largely irrelevant. In the software field especially, you're judged by what you can do. You're not judged by your degree, whether you have a college degree or not. The college degree could be, obviously, a form of certification if you were studying some kind of computer science or advanced form of computer science that works well in a classroom setting.

But I think more than most other fields, software is something that is based upon competence. And it's relatively simple and straightforward to test and demonstrate competence. So for that reason especially, I wouldn't worry too much about a gap in the resume. If that's the direction that you believe you should take your career, then you should go in that direction as quickly as possible.

And if what you need to do is go to college, and that makes sense in your overall life plan to go full-time, then go full-time. That is not in any--so let's talk about a gap in a career. Let's pretend it weren't from a software perspective. I think, first of all, the worries about a gap in a career are probably things of the past more so than the present.

I want to be cautious in that opinion because I'm not a recruiter. I don't work in the trenches every day. But it just seems to me that that kind of feels like a layover from 1977, meaning that there was a time in which it was expected that a man goes to work, he works at a company, he does his entire career there, he's at that company for a very long time.

That was the culture, that was the expectation. That culture and that expectation disappeared. It disappeared in the sense that now it's completely expected that you do multiple jobs and that you're at a company for a few years here and there, and just a few years at a company is certainly considered perfectly normal.

I think we're even more in a scenario in which more and more modern workers, including especially even, I don't know what modifier to use, but modern workers, modern American workers, are more and more designing more interesting lives for themselves. The whole concept of a gap year or a gap in your resume is something that I don't think has any kind of significant social stigma or any kind of business stigma in the modern world.

I think the only stigma that you want to avoid is the stigma of not having been hired. So the only reason a gap, I think, in the current age would be dangerous is if, excuse me, is simply if an employer is sitting there saying, "This guy seemed perfectly qualified.

Why was he not working for two years?" And so if there's a clear story as in, "I went to college to get a degree. Here's my degree that I completed. Done." That fear is erased from the employer's mind. If there is a good story as in, "Oh, we went backpacking around the world and spent 24 months going to 24 countries.

Well, boom, problem solved. Here's some pictures. Here's my blog," or whatever, or, "Dad was sick and I spent 24 months taking care of Dad during that period of time," then that makes sense. It's all taken care of. So the whole concept of a gap year in and of itself, I think, is not a significant concern at this point in time.

So I wouldn't worry about it. And I think that going to college, if that's what you need to do for the career, that's exactly what you should do. So in that context, I would say no problem. My bigger question would be, is going to college specifically to get an academic degree, yes, you have the GI Bill, but is that the right use of time for you in the software field?

Obviously, you think it is, but I would just question, is there a good straight path through the college degree for you into the field that you want to be in? It is a field that I would like to be in. I have weighed this. There are several programs that are arguous and very straight to the point, and they're very well -- it's a good credential.

And you can get it in like a year to 18 months, and you can do them all online at night and whatever. But this particular situation has other benefits. This institution, there's two primary ones. One is we've also been tied down with a house that we're not crazy about, and we kind of want to go have a short stint of not dealing with a house anymore, and we miss the city.

So we'd like to do the city thing for a couple of years, and this seems like a fun way to do that. That's number one. We have a young child. It also gets us closer to my own family to spend time. So there's other perks there. But the other one is that this institution is particularly well known for what's called a co-op program, and they have partnerships that they build, and they put you into these environments as part of the program.

And the fact that it doubles up as a way to build the economy for the state of Maine, that's kind of like -- that's their thing. That was another way that it sort of felt like a good fit for me. The lingering question that I had was, as a 36th -- someone's getting out of this right before turning 40.

Is this something that's going to look kind of weird, or is this more common than I'm imagining? Yeah, I don't think it's going to look weird. What I would say is simply that you -- and this would be regardless of it looking weird, for all the reasons stated that I'm not going to repeat.

I don't think it's going to look weird. What I think you should do is simply use the time very effectively. So if you're not going to do a fast-track program to pure technical skills, one thing you'll have more of is you'll have more time. So if you've got four years, and probably the amount of time could be compressed into 12 months, because there are 12-month programs that would be competitors to this program, you've got loads of extra time that you can really invest into your career.

And so what I would encourage you to do is don't just do the bare minimum, the classwork. Make sure, obviously, that you ace your classes. Make sure that you do academically very well in the program. But in addition to that, make sure you're using the university environment to build connections in the industry that you're interested in going into, and to promote yourself more broadly around the industry.

So four years with you, again, maybe publishing on this topic, interacting and making friends with people who are the leaders in this topic or your area of particular interest, just simply documenting your progress and some kind of personal career-oriented website would be ideal. When you have four years to do this, then by the time you come out of college, your ambition should be to have four to six very high-quality, high-level offers in your hand because of the hard work that you've put into building connections over those four years.

So it sounds like a great program to me, and I think that's one of the huge benefits that you have of going into an undergraduate program as a mature man rather than as an immature 18-year-old, that you recognize what a break this is, and taking 15 to 18 hours of class is a pretty easy life.

You have plenty of time to do a great job on the side to build your connections. And that's what's fantastic about college. College is a really friendly environment for you to really build those connections. Just a quick errata on that. It's a graduate program, fully two and a half years, and it is structured for mid-career folks.

So that if halfway through it I get a job, then I should be able to structure the job around the program. So that's something that I was also hoping would be part of it. But just in case, that's sort of what I would do. Love it. Awesome. Go for it.

Keep in touch. I want to hear how things are going in a year or two. Dimitri in Texas, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Well, hi, Joshua. Do you hear me well? Sounds good. Yes, sir. Perfect. Well, first time caller, long-time listener. Welcome. I would like to talk a little bit about reading.

And I listened to your podcast from 2019. And so those ideas that you put there, how to read the book, the podcast, how to read the book, those ideas that were not really foreign to me, but what I noticed that you stress learning phonics. And the reason why I kind of noticed that, because, you know, I'm a slow reader.

So like when I read, I read silently but aloud in my head, and that slows me down. I know that I took one of these reading classes a while ago. And one of the ideas that you read with your eyes, not reading aloud inside silently. So I'm curious, like when you read books, first, if you still use that concept that you put in that podcast.

And secondly, if you actually read with your eyes, but or if you read aloud inside your brain. That's a good question. I don't remember specifically the context of that podcast. So instead of saying what I did or didn't say at the time, let me just kind of tell, let me address the question presently.

First, with regard to phonics, phonics is simply refers to a method of teaching readers how to read in the first place. And phonics is often contrasted with what, with reading using memorized words, what is often called sight words in the English language. The idea with phonics is you learn how to sound out words phonetically.

So children learn all the different sounds. If you have P-H-O in English, that's always going to be like F. It's not going to be P-H-O. That's phonics. And so you teach students to sound out words phonetically. And the big argument here, and the reason it's important in kind of the teaching to read, was that back 30 years ago, something like that, there was a big push away from phonics, which had always been the method that people used to teach people how to read.

And there was a push to get children to memorize words. And this was called the whole word or the sight word approach. And then basically, I don't know whether how to judge the history. All of the promoters of phonics say it was a total catastrophe. I don't know if it was or wasn't.

The reality is the English language has to function with both of them, meaning that phonics is definitely a great way to unlock the language. However, there are simply many words that you cannot sound out phonetically and that you just have to know. You know, the best example that you always see when teaching a child to read is the word "the." You know, "tuh" is how they always go for it, and it just has to be memorized.

This is the word "the." There's no other way around it. There's no phonetic anything. It's just "the." Memorize it. And there are many words like that. So I don't worry too much about that debate. I do think that we should use phonics, and I think that the key is just to get people to read voluminously.

And once students read a lot, then the whole reading conversation goes away. So to answer your question, do I use phonics, no, I don't. I was taught to read with phonics, and I do teach phonics to my children. But that's just--it's not something that an advanced reader uses in any way.

On the topic of speed reading, I have looked into it quite a lot over the years. Obviously, it's extremely attractive. You think, "Man, if I could read at triple the rate of speed that I'm reading today, and I can do that while still having great comprehension, wouldn't that be fantastic?" I have taken some courses on speed reading here and there, not a classroom environment, but I took one of the courses from one of the speed reading software programs.

It wasn't Spreader. It was one of the competitors to Spreader. I also bought a manual, a course, from a guy who had written a course on how to teach students or children to speed read. I was considering whether I should teach speed reading to my children or to others.

I have a course on how to teach speed reading, and I've looked a lot into it. I am not a speed reader using speed reading techniques, and I'll explain why. You can break speed reading techniques down into a couple different camps. You mentioned sub-vocalization. That's the technical term for it.

One of the first lessons that they teach people is that you should avoid sub-vocalization, which means you should avoid trying to sound out words in your mind while you're reading them. You should look at the word and recognize what it means rather than sounding it out. Sub-vocalization is the implementation of phonics for an advanced reader.

Eliminating sub-vocalization is basically an expression of sight words. That's what the connection is. I don't really sub-vocalize at all when I read, just because I've read a lot. But I don't think that sub-vocalization is actually necessarily always a bad thing. Other techniques of speed reading involve using your peripheral vision.

Another technique is learning to focus your eyes on the middle of the page rather than all the way from the beginning to the end of the line. Another technique that is taught in speed reading is basically learning to absorb chunks of words at a time rather than individual words, etc.

And then you use various timing techniques, tapping a pencil on the desk or putting on a metronome, and just disciplining yourself to go faster. I think that most readers can read faster with those techniques. But what I think is missing from that conversation or from a juvenile understanding of speed reading is, what is the purpose of reading in the first place?

The answer is, it depends on what you're reading. And so the purpose of reading varies depending on what you're reading, and thus your reading technique will change based upon the reading technique. So when I read a novel, I read quite quickly. I don't sub-vocalize at all when I'm reading novels.

I fly through it. I don't slow down. I don't absorb the language. I just fly through the content. And that's what I think most experienced readers do when it comes to fiction. You're engrossed in the story. You're interested in what's happening. And I would bet that -- I mean, I could pull up in my notes sometimes when I've checked my reading speed.

But I don't speed read, but I read very speedily. And I don't really want to go any faster. If I could double my reading speed in a novel, it wouldn't necessarily bring me any more pleasure. I read as fast as I want to for the story, and that's it.

And I just enjoy the story. And so I don't see that speed reading techniques are important for a novel. Now, if we switch it, what about -- I think the biggest thing that makes the difference in how quickly you can read is your familiarity with the content. So let's say that, you know, for me with a finance book, I've shown people I can read a finance book in 90 seconds, most of them.

I can walk into any bookstore, pick up a finance book in English language. I can flip through the table of contents, maybe just flip through the charts. 90 seconds is probably a little bit much. I can certainly do it in five minutes. I can look at it in five minutes, and I can lecture from that book with probably 60 to 80 percent accuracy just based upon the chapter titles and based upon my familiarity with all of the conflicts and all of the arguments of the subject.

So because I have so much knowledge and so many connections with the debates, et cetera, I can speed read a 200-page popular-level personal finance book in five minutes. But I can't do that when reading an IRS publication. I can't do that when reading an advanced planning topic because my knowledge of the content is not so high.

So I could do that with personal finance-level stuff, but I can't popular-level stuff. But I couldn't do that with academic stuff. I couldn't do that with an IRS publication and do it, you know, specifically completely like I can. And so I could read certain things very fast, but other things are very slow.

And so then we get back to what's the purpose of reading. Well, generally I think the purpose of reading is learning. And so there is no speed-reading technique that I have ever come across or that I'm aware of that can make up for lack of comprehension. Speed-reading is a technique that you can implement in order to absorb something from subjects that you already know well.

But if you're approaching a subject that you don't already know well, you don't want to speed read it. You want to slow down. You want to engage with it, and you want to make sure that you understand it. Because your most efficient path through the material is to read it one time with perfect comprehension and perfect encoding so it goes deep and you understand it.

And then you will remember it, and then you have no reason to go through it again. So speed-reading through a text and losing comprehension would be a mistake. Now, I think that speed readers would generally acknowledge it, but to me that takes away most of the issues with speed-reading.

Is that I think that speed-reading is something that naturally comes as someone reads a lot more. And some of the techniques are probably helpful. So if you're reading and you're not a skilled reader, being reminded to just read more by putting on a metronome or tapping with a pencil or just consciously reminding yourself to pick up the pace will show you that you can actually read a lot faster.

But you should be careful and only apply that to things that you are not looking to learn from. And then we go again to why are you reading it in the first place? Why are you reading something that you already know well? You shouldn't be doing that. Generally, unless you need to do it for your career, you need to be aware of all of the ideas that are reflected in your career, you should be learning something that you don't know, which naturally you're going to want to slow down.

Or you should be reading for enjoyment, in which case go as fast or as slow as you want. Those are kind of the two big buckets of reading. And so reading things that you can read fast just to show yourself that you can read fast might be a useful exercise for you to do 10 minutes a day that could reflect on other things, kind of like a piano player will warm up with scales or other finger exercises.

Maybe as a reader you might do that for a time. But I don't think it is a great exercise. What I think is a better exercise is just reading more. And what I think is super powerful is reading with audio. And so if you're not a skilled reader, one of the techniques I discovered in teaching myself to read in foreign languages was that I sympathized with all of the frustrations of readers that reading is hard because I found reading in a foreign language hard.

And I discovered that if I put on an audio book as an accompaniment, that would help pull me through the text and it would make reading a lot easier. So then I started trying it out with my children and I found it an incredible technique. And I used it.

And in fact in my recent Q&A I had had a second point when talking about reading with children. And what it was that I had meant to make in that show that I forgot in the middle of my monologue was that I have changed my mind on the value of reading text with audio accompaniment.

Formerly I used to think, well, that should just be a crutch that gets you through. That should just be a crutch that gets the student up in a reading level. But as quickly as possible you want to get rid of the audio. I no longer think that. I now believe there's no downside whatsoever to reading a book with your eyes while simultaneously reading it with your ears, listening to a professional narrator narrate the book to you.

And there are two benefits to it. Number one, if this is material that you -- if you're a poor reader, this makes absorbing the material -- if you're a poor reader it pulls you through the text. That's a great thing. If you're an excellent reader it forces you to slow down and it causes you to listen to the text.

So you might be able to remember it better. So in contrast with the speed reading class where they teach you to not sub-vocalize, I think there's value in vocalizing the text because you can possibly remember it better because it's imprinted in a stronger fashion because you're slowing down as you work your way through it.

And then if you're reading something that has beautiful language, I think that a big benefit is that that beautiful language is imprinted in your mind in a better way. A few months ago I went to a homeschooling conference where I listened to several talks by Andrew Padawa, I think, the guy who started the Institute for the Excellence in Writing.

And he gave this presentation and he was talking about how to create great writers and children. And one of the things that was really wonderful that he described is he talked about the value of listening to books. And he said that in his observation people, sometimes readers, didn't turn out to be great writers because they devoured their books so fast they didn't absorb the language.

And that's something that I have done, is that I just devour something and you fly through all the beautiful language. And he discovered that children, he had a child of his, one of his sons, or his son, who was extremely autistic, or is, I don't know, is very, very autistic, couldn't read until he was 14 years old, something like that.

So he just listened to audiobooks. Basically his entire homeschool education was audiobooks until he was an early teenager and they finally somehow cracked the code on reading. And, sorry, dyslexic, not autistic, dyslexic. And he discovered that when his son was writing, his son was a very skilled writer because he had listened to the language rather than reading it and he had absorbed it more.

And Pudawa's comment was that if you want your children to be great writers and they are reading great literature, sometimes you need to make them listen to it so that they slow down and actually absorb the language and don't just fly through it. And he was ultimately the one that convinced me that whenever I can find an audiobook that is the same translation, same version, etc., then I'll have my students read and listen at the same time so they get the benefits of being exposed to the language and having stronger memory of the content rather than just flying through it.

They'll get plenty of reading with the stuff that I can't find audio for, but when I can find an audio, I always am now having my students and I myself, although I don't do it much in English, I just want it to go faster generally, but when you're trying to learn something, reading and listening to it at the same time is helpful.

So those would be my comments. >> I've been at the conference of Andrew Pudawa several years ago, so I know what you're talking about. My challenge with my kids is that they listen at 4.0 and I don't know how much comprehension they got. So I'm trying to slow them down in that aspect.

But going back to that selective reading, when you take a finance book and you kind of skim through that in five minutes, I caught myself that my challenge is that even if I know the topic, I'm a little bit afraid to miss any new ideas. And that forces me to read it from page to page, like almost every word.

And I just want to say thank you for that podcast back in 2019 because now I'm reflecting on that idea that you don't have to read like page to page, but actually skim for new ideas. I'm just going to reconsider, I guess, my reading approach. >> Yeah. It's a really fascinating topic.

How to read a book or how to be a reader is something that is worth thinking about. There are some really good -- I would guess there are podcasts out there, but I've certainly found some great YouTube channels. There's a great book community online that you can find where people talk about this and talk about their techniques.

I think that as core, we should just recognize that reading is a skill. It's a skill that can and will be applied in different ways depending on how it's being expressed. And it's something that deserves attention. And we're all faced with constraints. At the beginning, the question is why am I reading this?

What is my goal in reading this? And then that will kind of emerge. And so even with your children, sure, reading fast is fine, but you're not going to read everything the same. And so there are some things where you may allow them to read it as fast as they want, but there are other things where you may force them to slow down.

And I'm doing that with my students, my homeschool students. I'm doing two things. Number one, I'm forcing them to stretch the books out. That's back to what I was talking about in the most recent Q&A show where I talked about kind of Charlotte Mason, how she would stretch the books out.

She would stretch the books out in terms of one chapter per week or half a chapter per week or a page a week and stretch them out over a very long period of time so that the students could engage with the ideas. And they could sit with the ideas and become friends with the ideas.

So the purpose of reading certain books is not the language. It's the ideas. And those books, you want to read them very slowly so that you can think about them over time. Now, different books, so I stretch them out in terms of forcing them to take more weeks rather than just devouring them and getting them done, and then slow them down in terms of actually the reading.

So if this is a book that is genuinely important, we're going to go through it one time. And the way that you check comprehension is practice narration. So narration means we finish the passage, and then you ask the student or yourself, you can do this exercise yourself, and you should do it yourself.

It's a version of Richard Feynman's Lecture to the Wall technique, basically, is you read a passage, and then you stop. And then you close the book, and after one reading, you tell what was in the passage, and you retell the story. And if a student can, after one reading, can retell the story with adequate level of comprehensiveness based upon his age and his development and the subject matter at hand, then you know the comprehension was fine and you can move on.

If the student can't adequately narrate it, can't adequately retell it, then you know you have to impose a greater change. We're not going to read the material multiple times, because that trains the habit of inattention. We want to train the habit of attention. If something's at an appropriate level, we should be able to read it one time, and with one time have very high levels of comprehension, have very high levels of understanding, and be able to articulate it in our own words to narrate it.

So we want to train the habit of attention, which is why we want to have a very short passage if necessary, but then we slow it down and we test with narration. So I find that as long as my students can narrate something to me and tell me about it, then we're good.

Comprehension is there, and the human brain is going to ultimately remember what's important to it, and ultimately going to not remember what's not important to it. So that's the other thing that you can try to do. The other thing is pre-reading, and so pre-reading happens in various ways. In a collegiate setting, if you're going to do pre-reading for one of your courses, you'll take several chapters, you'll pre-read them.

That doesn't mean skimming them necessarily. It means going through them and trying to organize the content so that when you read them, you have an organization structure in your mind as to where you're going to fit the content in. So pre-reading is a very useful skill to go through and organize the content using your own organization schema that you will then go through and make sure you don't miss anything as you're reading it through.

But with children or students, one technique would be to basically make it important. So you want to think in advance, before we read this passage, how can we make this important? How can we make it relevant? Because a lot of times we don't remember what we read because it's not important to us and it's not relevant to us.

And so even if we have to make it artificial through a conversation, through an interest sparker, if we can make it important or we can make it relevant, then there's a higher chance that we'll remember and retain what we read. So there's lots more techniques we can talk about.

It's just the tip of the iceberg. It is important that we are researching that and thinking about it because if we're going to invest thousands of hours of reading over our lifetimes, then we want to get as much value from that as possible. Yep. Got it. Well, thank you, Josh.

I appreciate your thoughts and also your ability to structure the problem and solutions presented in a structured way. So thank you for your work. My pleasure, sir. Thank you very much. Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

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Offer in soon. See dealer for details. Neil in Georgia. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hello. That's you. Ready to go. Welcome, Neil. Okay. Thank you. So I'm new to the personal finance sphere. Welcome. But I discovered that that's my educator for 3B has an expense charge of about 1.6.

Okay. And so I'm just looking for some advice on what should I do with this monthly contribution of 1,000. Should I move it into a into the brokerage account or should I just put it in savings? I just feel that's just a lot. Yeah. Just look for some direction.

And the school district does not have any options that have low fees. Okay. So let me just give the background. I'm going to answer it very specifically, but the background will be helpful to understanding it. So you are a school teacher and you have access to a 403B as is common in 403B.

You are investing into and through a tax sheltered annuity. I do not understand why this is common. I forget the reasons. But the point is that many 403B are funded with tax sheltered annuities because an annuity has multiple sets of fees. It has multiple sets of charges. Its expenses are very high.

An annuity has charges for the investment subaccounts inside of it as well as the insurance contract and the expenses for the insurance company. And so on your funds and your contribution through the 403B, you are being exposed to a very high expense charge. If you could go out to a brokerage account at some other and basically almost any other provider that wasn't invested into a tax sheltered annuity, you could cut your expenses by 130 basis points, by 145, 150, 1.3%, 1.5%, get them down to basically nothing in the open market.

So if we understand that, now we can come back and say what should you do. First, do you have an employer match on your contributions to your 403B? No. Okay. Not at all. No employer match anywhere. Not at all. Wow. No match. I'm double checking because I'm surprised. That's really shocking to me that you have no match and yet they have this set up for you.

That's really shocking. So then in your situation -- so if you did have an employer match, then my advice would be, well, you definitely want to contribute as much as the employer matches because "free money" or a match is much more valuable than a low expense ratio elsewhere. But in your case, you don't have access to an employer match so that doesn't matter.

So now we go and say, well, what are the benefits of contributing to your 403B versus something else? What's your annual income right now? It's about 170. 170? Yes. Okay. So with $170,000, then we start to run into the world where you need this 403B in some form. So if somebody was a new teacher making $37,000 a year, then I would say, well, put money into a Roth IRA.

And I have a Roth. Yep, great. So the benefit of a -- if you make $37,000, you could put $5,000 or $6,000 into a Roth IRA. That represents a pretty good amount of money to be saving and you can just have the money in your brokerage account and it's cheap and there's no high expense charges.

So that would be the advice. At $170,000 a year, you face two problems. One is you're quickly coming up on the phase-out amount where your adjusted gross income is beyond the limit that allows you to contribute to a Roth IRA. The second problem is it's just not enough. It doesn't move the needle for you to put $5,000 or $6,000 in a Roth IRA.

So you need something else. And that something else that you need is an employer-sponsored plan such as a 403B or a 401(k) in the private market. So you need to put -- to save enough out of $170,000 in a retirement account, you need to put money into the 403B regardless of what the expense ratio is.

So I would say that probably -- well, actually, one more question and then I'll give you my full answer. Other than investing through a retirement plan, do you invest into anything else? Do you do any other thing on the side or have any other ways that you invest? Again, I have the Roth IRA and my wife has one and then also I have recently opened a brokerage account.

So it's about a year old. Does your wife have a 401(k) or a 403(b)? Same as me. Teacher also? Yes, she was a stay-at-home for many years, almost 15 years. So right now she just has the Roth IRA. Okay, but she's a teacher also and she has only access to the 403(b) with the same expenses as you?

Correct. Okay. The reason I was asking was because, well, if she has a 401(k) that she's not funding, maybe her income might be lower, but you could use her 401(k) and put all the money in there because it has lower expenses. So the answer is basically this. You should do two things -- well, three things.

Number one, you should contribute to the 403(b) and the reason is you'll save money on the taxes up front. That's helpful to you with $170,000 income. You'll also get the money into a qualified plan. That's helpful to you so that you have some money that's protected from creditors by putting it in the 403(b).

The expenses suck? That's okay. That's how it is, all right? So you should contribute as far as I can see based upon what you've described so far. Number two, you should organize within your teachers. You should organize, if possible, talk to your union, if you're a part of a union or a union representative.

Organize within your teachers and start to raise a stink about the fees because it's ridiculous that you're paying those kinds of fees and that you have no other options. The reason you don't have options is because somebody has a sweetheart deal somewhere and basically there's an enormous kickback happening somewhere.

You should have options. There's no fundamental reason why a tax-sheltered annuity cannot function with a lower expense ratio. And so you should organize and beat around. I don't remember the websites off the top of my head to point you to, but if you'll go online, I'm sure that there is somebody out there who basically has a website that is devoted to helping teachers improve their 403(b) plan.

And so if you can expose the system a little bit, you might call a local newspaper editor. You might say, maybe there's a local finance writer or a local financial planner or somebody who you could raise a stink with and say, "Listen, the normal fund ratio on mutual funds is 0.0 whatever now.

We should have access to these. Why is it the teachers are getting this ripoff, etc.? So you should try to raise a stink and see if you can get something to happen at the district level or etc. I wouldn't put all of my effort into it, but that's probably what you should do is see if you can get something to change at the system level.

The third thing you should do is simply, when you leave your job, as quickly as possible, roll the funds over into an IRA. And when you roll them into an IRA, then you can buy a cheap mutual fund or a cheap exchange-traded fund, and that will allow you to lower your expense ratio significantly.

So based on what you're describing, if I woke up in your shoes, I would contribute to the 403(b). I would contribute all that I could to the 403(b) because I need the tax deduction. I need the qualified plan protection, etc. I would go ahead and do that. I think it's okay, but I would ask around, try to figure out why we don't have better options.

And then when I left that job, I would as quickly as possible move it over. If at some point you develop an alternative investment strategy, then this would be a reason to go to the alternative investment strategy. But I myself would not choose to just contribute to a taxable brokerage account just because it has lower-cost funds.

I want the tax deduction up front. That's hard to make up for. And I want the creditor protection from the qualified plan. Okay. Well, thank you. My pleasure. Anything else? No, I think that's it. Great. Appreciate it. That concludes my live callers, but I have an enormous list of unanswered questions on the Patreon page.

So we're going to continue with Zach's question. Zach writes in and says, "Hi, Joshua. I burned out and quit my job last week. In this instance, it wasn't a hard decision to make because I had been assigned a lot of new work quickly. And then it in short time aggravated mental and subsequently physical symptoms that made the income less important than my health." Yeah, take care of your health, man.

"Regardless, it's starting to become a pattern of thinking this career path" I'm currently a project manager. "isn't my purpose, and I don't see any further growth I want to pursue in it. Given this, I guess my question boils down to how should I approach thinking about my next steps?

I'm open to a lot of possibilities, but is there a framework or a state of mind you could recommend or point me to that I could use as a starting point? I guess what I'm saying is how can I approach this so that whatever next decision I make, it's in pursuit of something that gives me a chance at fulfillment and ultimately purpose for my family and I?

I suppose when you have limitless possibilities, it's difficult to know where to begin and not just impulsively go towards what interests me initially. I understand my question is quite open-ended. I suppose that's how my mind feels at the moment, but I'd be glad to try to clarify anything I can.

Thank you in advance for any guidance." So it is an open-ended question, and you gave me just a few details, and I'll just talk about this broadly and kind of give you my framework. So let's go back to the beginning and talk about what's the purpose of work. Why do we work in the first place?

So at its core, there are multiple levels of which we could answer this question. The first level is obviously, "Well, I need money." Most of us like to work because we like to eat, and if a man doesn't work, neither shall he eat. And so we like to eat, so we work.

So I need money. That's obvious. There's a whole lot of luxuries of life that are really nice, and work generally provides money for us. And so I like to myself not live out in the cold. I like to myself not have rainfall on my head while I'm sleeping. Some people go out and live as a hobo and sleep under a tree.

That's fine. I like to sleep in a house, or I like to sleep in something. I'm happy to sleep in a car, but I like to sleep and keep the rain off. So you get the point. So let me not belabor it too much, but just to point out that we work because we need money, and that's one basic reason for work.

And so when you quit your job or something, you immediately, of course, need to do an overall assessment of, "What's my need for income?" And you mentioned family here. A big driving factor is going to be, "What's my need for income and lifestyle?" I don't know why, but forever I've always been attracted to kind of the vagabond lifestyle, the people who either they vagabond around living out of a backpack or they live in their car or something like that.

But there's an enormous community of people around the world that has chosen to live inexpensively in order that they don't have to work so much. And so let's say maybe your low budget estimation is $500 a month. There's guys out there who--a guy will get divorced. He has no money whatsoever.

He'll go buy a box truck, fix up the back of his box truck, put a bed in there, have a nice stove. He can make his meals. And what else does a guy need? And so he recognizes, "I don't need much money. I just need $500 a month," and he does a little bit of labor here and there or has some savings and lives cheap.

Another guy will go and--again, usually it will be a single guy, but he'll go and live out of a backpack and he'll travel the world and he'll live in $10 a night hostels and just live cheaply. There's vagabonds all around the world that live that way. And so if you didn't need much money, then you wouldn't have to work very much to provide for it.

And if you wanted to live one of those lifestyles of sleeping in your car or sleeping in a convert pickup truck or sleeping in a tent in the woods and eating beans and rice every day, you don't need to work much. Now, if you want to do something different though, let's say you have a wife, you have children, and you want to provide your loved ones with more and you want to get ahead yourself, you want to save money, etc., then you might do more.

You're going to want a job that provides you with more. I take a great deal of enjoyment from providing for my family. I've got a lot of dependents and there's certainly times when I think, "Wouldn't it be nice just to be a vagabond?" But at this point in time, I've made other decisions and I'm happy with those decisions.

I have no interest in changing them. And so I have a responsibility to others. I have a responsibility to earn more and not subject them unnecessarily to that lifestyle. Now, I think that certainly if situations warranted, if we were living in a Great Depression and the best I could do with as much labor as I could do was us living out in the tent in the woods, then I would be an honorable father in doing that if that were the best I could do.

But in my situation, that's not the best I could do. In your situation, that's not the best you could do either. And so you have a responsibility to provide the best that you can for others. And so that's why most of us are certainly going to turn away from living in a car or living in a tent out in the desert and we're going to turn in favor in the direction of something else.

But that's the first reason that we work is because we want to provide something. And you'll assess kind of the next level of provision that you need for yourself and your family and then you'll make choices based upon that. But that's not the only reason we work. Why else do we work?

Well, I think we work because work is good for us. I believe that man is built to work. He's designed to work, and a man who's not working is a man who's generally not fulfilled and is generally not fulfilling his purpose. And so I think that work is something that's fundamentally good for the human condition and to be embraced for that reason.

And so even if you could get by on an hour or two of work here and there, I think you should work more. I think work is good for the soul, and it's a core part of God's calling for man, for all mankind. But what I don't think applies to that is that any definition of what that work has to be.

One man may work diligently tilling the ground. Another man may work diligently filling the air with words, as I myself find myself right now. They're both work, but the point is that there's something more than just money. There's a sense of purpose. There's a sense of mission, and there's a sense of filling the time.

So you've got 168 hours in a week. Let's say you're going to sleep eight hours a night. That sounds pretty good to me. 56 hours gone. So you're left with 112, is that right? 112 hours. So how are you going to fill those 112 hours? That's the question that we all face is how do I fill my 112 hours?

And a good portion of that is going to be filled with work. And so I think that if you could find some work that seems like a good use of time, then great. But that doesn't have to be any particular kind of work. A good friend of mine grew up with, spent a lot of time talking to him.

He was a mailman, a mailman his entire career. And I asked him how he chose that. There were always times in my life where it was stressful, and I was like, "Wouldn't it be the greatest thing in the world just to go and deliver mail? It just seems simple and straightforward.

The job is just simple and straightforward." And his comment was like, "It didn't want to interact with people very much." So you might find some work that you say, "I don't like interacting with people," or "I don't like the stress of being a project manager, but I want to do something that's useful.

I'm going to be a mail delivery driver," or "I'm going to be a truck driver," or "I'm going to do something that fills more of my time." And if you can find a sense of enjoyment or satisfaction in it, wonderful. I've spent a lot of time in national parks, and I'm always intrigued by people who are park rangers because for someone who says, "I want to be outdoors a lot," it seems like an ideal job, just a relatively straightforward, low-stress government job, and yet all out in nature, beautiful surroundings, interacting with people, interacting with animals.

There's all kinds of jobs like that that can be productive, suitable, etc., and that give you kind of a sense of satisfaction. And so if you identify that my previous job of working as a project manager didn't work out, I didn't like it, and what I didn't like about it was the pressure that I have to deliver this on a certain time, and I'm expected to do all this over time, and you recognize, "I'd just like to replace this with another job.

Maybe you can get a job of--I always think of a teacher because that's one of my dream jobs. I would be a teacher." If a classroom teacher, yeah, you have to be accountable for your class, but there's no deadlines. It's not like we're not sending a man to the moon.

We don't have to be called in on Saturday night by Elon Musk to go and work crazy hours. We just go to the classroom. We show up on time. We do our job, and we leave. Done. Simple. And there's many jobs like that, so you might replace it with a job that way.

And that can give you a great sense of satisfaction, and the satisfaction here that I'm focusing on is the satisfaction of a job well done, not the satisfaction of what the job does, but the satisfaction that you get in doing a job well. I believe that work is important for mankind, but I don't think that we should judge the outcome of the work in that judgment, meaning that let's say that there's a guy who's doing a very simple work, but he's doing it well.

It's honest work. It's not immoral, but he's doing his job well. He's doing something. A bricklayer who's laying a brick wall, that may not be considered by many to be a noble task, but I believe it is a noble task. It's good, honest work that contributes to a functional society.

And not all of us are going to go out and have some high-level job that somehow brings us to the forefront of human condition. Most work experience is based upon, like most life experience, is based upon just simple, repetitive things, and that's perfectly fine. And what we should do is we should honor those jobs and those people who do those jobs well, regardless of if they're publicly famous or regardless of if they bring some kind of notoriety or acclaim.

Just this very day, the poem I want to read to you, the poem that I read to my family. I've just pulled it up here. And here's the poem. Basically, "Be the best of whatever you are." And at my breakfast table this morning, this was what I read to my children.

"If you can't be a pine on the top of the hill, be a scrub in the valley. But be the best little scrub by the side of the rill. Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a bush, be a bit of the grass, and some highway some happier make.

If you can't be a muskie, then just be a bass, but the liveliest bass in the lake. We can't all be captains. We've got to be crew. There's something for all of us here. There's big work to do, and there's lesser to do. And the task we must do is the near.

If you can't be a highway, then just be a trail. If you can't be the sun, be a star. It isn't by size that you win or you fail. Be the best of whatever you are." That's by Douglas Malik. Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

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Offer in soon. See dealer for details. And so I really believe that that is important, and I believe that we can fulfill our life purpose by doing productive work. And that if we don't do that productive work, we are harmed by it, and our society is made poorer for our lack of productivity.

But I remind you that you get to choose the work that you do. One man writes a poem, another man builds a wall. The man who writes poetry is not going to be happy doing anything except writing poetry. And the man who builds a wall is going to be one who's building the wall.

So we don't need to look for some kind of great impactful work. We just need work that satisfies our bills and our living conditions, and does something that contributes to society. And I wish I would like to do a better job. I'm trying to emphasize this point. I'd like to do a better job emphasizing the ordinary and the mundane as being useful and valuable.

No matter the job, if the guy who is supposed to do it doesn't show up and do it, we have a problem. And I think you see that, especially as men are dropping out of work, which is a big problem across the United States right now that men are choosing not to work.

We see the impact in them, and we also see the harm in society that is coming from that. And so those are the first two levels. The first level was we work because we need to make money. How much money do you need to make? That's going to guide your decisions.

Work number two is we work because we're called to work. God orders us to work. And as men who are called to work, we find something to do and we do it. And you choose what that is, but doing work is good for the soul. And it's good for you to have a structure to your week, meaning and a purpose to your life, and improve society.

Then I would say the third level is kind of that very lofty level that sounds really awesome. And that would be some kind of work that is done for passion or for impact or for an impact on the world. Purpose, something that involves some kind of general sense of purpose.

My friend the mailman, he didn't have any purpose in his work. He didn't see himself as changing the world because of this particular letter or sadly at the end of his career, this particular piece of junk mail that is being delivered. It's not like he's going to write a novel about his – he's not Napoleon.

He's not Alexander the Great. He's not Elon Musk or whomever you yourself would see as a world changer. And yet again, I would affirm that he's no better or worse a man than anyone else. He did his job honorably and well and we shouldn't expect that everyone is going to change the world.

It would be ridiculous to think that that were even possible. And so sometimes I think we're in a world in which we've accepted almost the ridiculous as being commonplace. That didn't come out quite right. Basically what I'm saying is I find it amazing that it seems to me like many people now think they need to be extraordinary.

Well, if everyone is extraordinary, no one is extraordinary. Extraordinary only comes and is measured against the backdrop of the ordinary. But what is remarkable about the day and age that we're living in is we're so constantly surrounded by the extraordinary due to reaching it on a global level that it can cause our own accomplishments to feel very ordinary because the best and the brightest in the world are always available to us.

And so think about it – here's how I think about it because generally this is something that bothers me. I often feel myself a bit embarrassed about my lack of success, about my lack of notoriety, I should do better, I could do better, etc. But what is that really?

Is that because somebody that I know is saying that to me? No, usually it's because I'm measuring myself against the people on the Internet. And the people on the Internet come from the entire world. If you were to go back a century or two, your normal reference group would be a localized reference group.

So you would have a localized reference group of your company or your block that you lived on or your town that you lived in. And so there's wide room for a lot of people to be extraordinary in the town that they live in because there are a lot of towns.

What I think is happening today is we're comparing ourselves not against the people in our company, not against the people in our school, not against the people in our town, but we're sometimes comparing ourselves against the best and the greatest in the world. And that comparison can come with a whole lot of damaging effects.

We know that social media causes these damaging effects. People are posting just the peak experiences of their lives and we pull out a social media feed somewhere and start flipping and immediately we feel like our lives aren't measuring up because it's not an enormous set of peak experiences and you're just seeing the peak experiences of other people's lives and it creates a false set, a false comparison in your mind.

And I think similarly in terms of work. We turn on somewhere, some podcast somewhere, and someone's droning on about great, wonderful, fulfilling work and passion and et cetera and we feel like, "Well, everyone has that." No, everyone doesn't have that. I think it would be nice if everyone had it, but everyone doesn't have it.

That's just not normal. So we need to be careful of the reference group that we compare ourselves. Incidentally, there's really good reasons to choose a different reference group sometimes. I watched a talk, I forget who it was, some well-known author, it was one of these talks at Google, and he was explaining basically why you should not go to Harvard.

And the gist of his talk was that if you go to Harvard, no matter how good you are, you've come from some place where you're the best in your class, you were the valedictorian of your high school class. But if you go to Harvard, there is zero chance that you will be the absolute best at Harvard because you're among the best and the brightest.

And you will find yourself comparing yourself to a hundred other people that are all better than you. And because all those other hundred people are better than you, they're brighter than you, they're better looking than you, they study less than you, and yet they get better grades than you, et cetera, that will dramatically cause you to feel bad about yourself and it will lower your self-esteem.

And the author that was giving this talk said, "You'd be far better off going to a great state school, a great government college in your state, because then you can easily be top of the campus. And if you're the top of the campus, you will feel much better about yourself than if you're the lowest person at Harvard." The lowest person at Harvard could be the top dog at the local government college and feel great about himself because of his peer reference group.

And I've thought about that for a long time, because a lot of times what we're doing now is we're exposing ourselves to the greatest people in the world. And so instead of taking pride and satisfaction in our progress, and in what we're doing, measuring ourselves by ourselves and by our own metrics, we're measuring ourselves against other people that have impossible metrics.

And again, back to this work of passion. I've tried throughout my work at Radical Personal Finance to do my best to simultaneously look for passion, purpose, meaning, effect, fulfillment, impact, etc., but also to acknowledge that it's not easy. It's not always great. It's very hard. And it's a grind.

Everybody in the world grinds. And so I think we're better off looking first to be passionate about the work that we do than we are to strive constantly for work that we're passionate for, because at the end of the day it's work. And one of those is very winnable.

The other one is only sometimes possible. We can be passionate about the work that we do and do it with passion, but we may not be able to find work that we're passionate about. And passion comes and goes, feelings come and go, etc. But I do think that looking for this level of impact is cool.

It's really nice if we can find it. And here I would say a sense of purpose is going to be doing something that you care about the results of. And this is not going to be measured by money. This is going to be measured by impact in some way.

And I have never found a better solution for how to find this than to make a list of all the things that drive you crazy in the world or things you would like to see improved. I bet you could make a long list. And if you can make a long list of some things that you wish were different in the world and then you could actively start working on something that might in the fullness of time affect one of those things, I think it feels really good.

I think it would make a big difference. So, for example, with my work here at Radical Personal Finance, I'm not particularly motivated by the money. I like to make money. I want to make a lot of money. But I'm not trying to make the most money. If I wanted to make the most money, I would do something very differently.

I would go back into the world of professional financial advice where I could make much more money. And I may do that at some point. I always keep the door open. One of the reasons, though, that I love my work is because I feel like it has an impact.

And I feel like that impact that I'm able to have is something that strengthens society. And what I care about more than anything is I want to see society set right. I want to see society brought to a place of justice, righteousness. And I know that's not going to happen in my lifetime because society is a very large thing.

But I know that we can improve it with financial stability, with good, honest communication. I can improve it with motivation and encouragement, being a guy who comes along when people are hurting and being an encourager. I know that we can improve it by strengthening men, strengthening women, families that are in financial stability produce better children, better children produce stable societies, everything about it.

And so ultimately I want to see the world transformed. I want to see the world saved in every sense of the word. And so I feel like if I can speak to that, if I can point out different ways little by little that people can do that, then I can have a little impact on the world.

And that feels really nice. It's really gratifying to know that dozens, hundreds, thousands of people per chance make a slight difference, make a slight change in the world. And that feels really good. But that fits into my overall vision, my worldview, et cetera. So if you can find something like that, great.

And I think you can naturally move in that direction by trying to think about what you wish were different in the world and being involved in it. But it doesn't always have to be something that you kind of have the sense of purpose or the sense of mission, the sense of passion.

It should be something that you care about. And I would also finally encourage you to think of that broadly. I'll give you one example from my own kind of interests. I personally have an interest in urban design. I have an interest in the strong towns movement. I have an interest in enduring physical design.

I believe that our places should reflect our strength as a culture. And I get quite embarrassed about my own home culture, the United States, and our disposable culture. I don't like it. I'm a greeny at heart. I want to see cultures built that endure. I would like to transform most of the United States into Switzerland where people build their garden sheds with a plan that they last for 350 years.

That's what I would like to see. And so I think that you can find that sense of purpose even in a fairly mundane application. Because of my interest in some of this traditional architecture and enduring sustainable design, et cetera, I follow on the social media world. I follow various people that make brick houses, do landscape design, et cetera.

And what I love about it is I feel like they're doing work that contributes to the social fabric. And yet it's just ordinary mundane work. It's laying brick. It's building walls. It's creating beautiful communities for people to live and raise their children in. This is just ordinary work, but it connects with a sense of purpose.

And so for me, let's say that I were going to be a builder. I could either be a builder who just smashed out as many homes made of sticks and drywall as possible, knowing that they're not going to last 50 years before they have to be torn down, or I could say I want to build homes that endure.

And you can make a slight move within a career and I think derive a lot more satisfaction from your career. I want to build homes that endure. Or, for example, with me with a podcast, I have no interest in being an influencer who creates ephemeral content. I can't bring myself to even post it.

I don't want to create ephemeral content. I appreciate that it's not bad to do that. It gives people a moment of enjoyment, entertainment. Fine, that's all fine. But I want to talk about stuff that matters. I don't want to talk about ephemeralities. If I'm going to go through the work of articulating my thoughts, I want them to be relevant today and also relevant in a week.

If possible, I'd like them to be relevant in a year. It'd be my dream that they'd be relevant in five years or 50 years. Certainly my podcast content can't always be relevant in 50 years, but that's an ambition that I have. And so this is just an example to say that here's how you can get to purpose.

You say, "I need a job." Okay. A lot of things I can do to have a job. "I like to build stuff. It makes me feel good to build stuff, and I want to build stuff that lasts. So I'm going to go and build beautiful brick homes for real people that will last a couple of centuries instead of flim-flam stuff that's going to fall apart in a few decades." Or, "I want to be a great teacher." Or, "I want to impact the lives of these students in a way that's going to go on, and I'm going to fight for it." By the way, I think most teachers have that ambition when they begin their careers, and then the system is so destructive to them that they lose it in the difficulties of the day-to-day, and many professions have the same thing.

And yet any person can turn. Doctors face the same thing. They go into medicine full of noble aspirations to cure the sick, and they often find themselves ground up and spit out by a system that is not always focused on curing the sick. But the day you decide to change it, you can change it, and you can go and connect with that longer-term purpose.

But don't think it has to be huge and grandiose, and don't think that it's something that you can find immediately, necessarily. I close today's podcast with those words that I already said. If you can't be a pine on the top of the hill, be a scrub in the valley.

But be the best little scrub by the side of the rill. Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a bush, be a bit of the grass, and some highway some happier make. If you can't be a muskie, then just be a bass, but the liveliest bass in the lake.

We can't all be captains. We've got to be crew. There's something for all of us here. There's big work to do, and there's lesser to do, and the task we must do is the near. If you can't be a highway, then just be a trail. If you can't be the sun, be a star.

It isn't by size that you win or you fail. Be the best of whatever you are. Thank you for listening to today's podcast. As we close, if you would like to join me next week, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. I remind you also, still taking reservations for my January event in Panama.

For information on that event, go to expatmoney.com/radical, https://expatmoney.com/radical for all the details on that event. I would really love to come and hang out with you in January in Panama for a week. With Kroger Brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.

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