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Book now at FijiAirways.com. From here to happiness. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. 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 am your host. And today I hope to give you a little insight and a little bit of encouragement. But we begin with the bad news. CBS News, quote, "The American dream costs far more than most people will earn over their lifetime. The American dream costs about $3.4 million to achieve over the course of a lifetime from getting married to saving for retirement according to a recent analysis from financial site Investopedia.

Meanwhile, median lifetime earnings for the typical U.S. worker stand at $1.7 million, earlier research from the Georgetown University has found. Such figures underline the financial pressures that many families face trying to afford a middle-class life as expenses like child care, college tuition, and buying a home continue to climb.

The Investopedia analysis tallies the average cost of achieving other aspects traditionally associated with the American dream, such as owning a house and raising two children to age 18. Another analysis from USA Today found that funding the American dream costs about $130,000 a year for a family of four. Median household income stands at about $74,450, according to the Census Bureau." Article goes on for a few more paragraphs, but we hear about some of the expenses, etc.

But this article sparked my thinking, and I sat down and considered, you know, how do you deal with stuff like this? And as usual, my goal is to be solutions-oriented, and I want to begin with solutions. This kind of article is a bit vapid. It's the kind of thing that just gets churned out, gets some clicks.

And you can take this to affirm whatever, basically, position you want to have. If you want to affirm the position that, yeah, everything's going great in the United States, then you'll look at some of the numbers, and you'll say, "Ah, that's ridiculous. It doesn't cost that much." For example, it talks about expenses, and it says, you know, hospital birth and wedding and engagement rings, $35,800, and pets, $67,935.

You can say, "Ah, that's ridiculous. You don't have to do all that stuff." On the other hand, you can take it and you can say, "Well, the whole system is broken. Everything is completely falling apart," and that's also probably true. But neither of those approaches necessarily help you. Neither of those approaches necessarily move you closer to your goals.

And I believe that whenever possible, if there's something that we ourselves can do individually, we should start with that. After all, it's very unlikely that you can change another person. It's probably unlikely that you can change yourself. But if you have a chance, you're more able to change yourself than you are to change another person.

And so a prudent, intelligent man would always begin with saying, "What can I do differently? How can I change myself? Is there something that I myself am able to do without asking permission, without asking for another person to do it for me, without requiring my neighbor to do something?

Is there something that I myself can do, and have I done all that I know to do?" I think for many of us, the answer to these questions is, "No, I haven't done all that I know to do." And so we should begin there. We should begin by doing what we're able to do so that we can then go on and fight for whatever collective solutions are appropriate after having built the confidence that we've done something.

Because if you sit around and you wait for a collective solution, there's a good chance you're going to miss your life. But if you work on your own situation as diligently as you yourself are capable of, then there's a good chance you won't need the collective solution, but rather it'll be one of those things that when you're able to influence it, you will so do.

And so here's what I want to focus on. How do these numbers shake out? Because we can take a simple news article like this, and we can understand what to do if we simply read it. So for example, clicking on the link, and of course I know you can't click on it in real time, but I will include the link in the show notes so you can go and take a look at it.

But we can follow this simple news article on cabsnews.com, and we can follow it to the expenses, and we can follow it to the income section. So the expenses opens up Investopedia. And let's start though with income, because before we talk about the expenses, it's good to take a look at income.

And in income, we go to a paper from Georgetown University that's called The College Payoff, Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings. And if we just look at the first initial graph in this, we can see in the executive summary, we can see that the median lifetime earnings vary fairly directionally obviously by educational attainment.

We can see that somebody who has less than a high school education, less than a high school credential, earns over his or her lifetime about $973,000. Earning a high school diploma allows you to earn about $1,304,000 over your lifetime. Getting some college but no degree raises that from $1.3 to about $1.55 million.

Then getting an associate's degree raises it by about $1.7 million. Having a bachelor's degree indicates that your lifetime earnings will probably be somewhere around $2,268,000, again quoting the median, which is basically almost double somebody with a high school degree and more than double somebody with less than high school.

So that bachelor's degree, $2,268,000. We can see that a master's degree raises your lifetime earnings from $2.2 million to $2.6 million, whereas there's a bigger jump getting a doctoral degree, which raises your earnings from $2.6 million to $3.2 million. And then finally we have a professional degree. Normally professional degrees are heavily dominated by lawyers and physicians, and that raises your lifetime earnings, your median lifetime earnings to $3,648,000.

And so I think the first thing that to me is fairly obvious is that we should focus on and encourage education in ourselves, in our loved ones, et cetera. I'm not going to go down this rabbit trail deeply, but I do want to point out that the data with regard to education continues and every analytical survey that I have seen continues to show this general trend.

And so whenever possible, when someone has the ability, the intellectual ability, to complete formal education, to get higher levels of formal education, we should understand that that means that there's a very high chance that that person is going to make more money. And so don't take the average, you know, the mean of income earners out there and say, "Well, everyone spends this amount of money," and think that the American dream is dead, because it is quite wide open to you, but you have to do it.

And so when you think about these numbers, do everything you can to raise your income, because what you'll see is simply that the American dream is not dead for those who make a lot of money. And income, while not having a direct correlation to making more money, excuse me, a direct causal relationship necessarily, it does have a high correlation to the likelihood of your making money.

And so we need to be those who consistently encourage high levels of education amongst ourselves, our family members, our friends, et cetera. Being highly educated is an excellent way for you to enhance your experience as a human being. You and I are homo sapiens. We are men who know.

And so education is an important component of that. And formal education, while certainly not always the first step, nor even necessarily the most effective step of education, formal education has many benefits and can very closely connect us with having more opportunities to make more money. And so let's be those who maximize our education as much as possible so that we can increase our earnings as much as we are able to.

Now, after we've seen to education, are there other things that we can do to increase our earnings so that this idea, this doom and gloom of the American dream costing more than most people earn over their lifetime, so this won't affect us personally? I think so, definitely. So after education or alongside education, we need to look at our own current level of employment.

One of the major challenges that we face all across society is that people are underemployed. For whatever reason, many, many people are underemployed. They're simply not earning as much money as they are capable of. In fact, I hesitate to put a percentage on it, but I would say that most of us are not earning as much money as we are capable of earning, but only some of us have made that decision intentionally.

Most of us give very little attention to our earnings, and yet there's a lot that can be done. On the lower end, one of the things that always frustrates me about reading articles like this is you just say, "Well, who's creating those median wages and does this even apply?" Does this even apply?

Because, I mean, I feel like-- I don't know the statistics, I didn't look them up, but it just seems to me like I know a whole lot of people who sit around stoned all the time and don't actually get any meaningful work done, and they're dragging things down for the rest of us.

And so what can I do? Well, let me start by fixing anything in my life that's keeping me from work, anything that is fixable, whether it's work ethic, whether it's diligence, whether it's drug use or any kind of personal vice. Let me ditch those things. Let me get help and figure out how to get myself employed, as employed as possible.

Then let me look at my career and let me build out for myself the best kind of career that I'm capable of. Let me find a job that pays me as close to what I'm worth as I'm able to find. Let me not just sit around and wait and wait and wait, but let me be diligent and proactive.

And if nothing else, just make it a habit to regularly go out and search for jobs and interview for jobs. The average person went out and interviewed for two or three jobs a year, regardless of whether he actually wanted to take one. And then when receiving an offer, comes back and gets a counteroffer from his boss or just switches jobs every few years, he probably increases wages 15%, 20% per year.

And if you do that every two or three years, you have major increases in your wages. So be diligent about your career. Be diligent about everything that you're capable of being diligent about. The other aspect to how you can handle something like this is recognize that these numbers represent lifetime career earnings.

And while in a moment I'm going to try to pull apart the idea of the American dream being primarily a dream of consumption or something related to standard of living, I want to do that at the end of the show. And I want to point out these variables to you.

How can you increase your lifetime earnings as an employee? One way, in addition to earning more, is to earn more for longer. And this is, I think, where we have a lot of room to grow as a society. Remember, we're talking about lifetime earnings. And so the two basic features of lifetime earnings are the amount of time earning money and the amount of money earned per period of time.

That's it. It's a very simple math calculation. The amount of money earned per period of time, let's just say per annum in this context, and the amount of periods, in this case, the amount of years spent earning money. And so how do we get more years earning money? The answer is we start younger and we work later.

And we work till we're older. And we could make massive improvements as a society in raising the number of years that people work. It's good to start young, as young as possible, and it's good to work until old, as old as possible. And if you will add more years to your calculations, then all of a sudden you'll find that you don't need to struggle quite so much that, in fact, a lot of these struggles and difficulties iron their way out.

There is a very intense period of time in most of our lifestyles where life is very expensive. And it usually begins around the time that you have children. And it usually ends around the time that your children leave your house. And that's because children do entail enormous amounts of expenses.

You wind up living in larger, sometimes fancier housing. You wind up having all kinds of additional normal expenses that are inflated. You wind up having all kinds of additional expenses that other people don't have. Children are expensive. And so that's the time in life at which most people are the most crunched.

The people who get through that period of time, the best are usually those who had a bit of a head start or those who have a little bit of room to run on the other side, and they feel like they're going to be okay, they're going to be fine.

And so think about that. If you're struggling with your lifetime expenses, if you could just get through the expensive years as best you're capable of, then you can adjust your lifetime earnings to the highest degree possible. And again, help your children to create and build their lifetime earnings as young as possible.

Because not only does that put more money in their pocket, but it helps their skills to start to accumulate and to compound in value the younger they begin. And one of the great trends that I see in today's world that we can be very thankful for is that there is less discrimination against the very young than there has ever been.

And many marketplaces and industries are open to children and teenagers and adolescents than ever were before. And all that is needed in many cases is for somebody to come along and give them a gentle push, give them a little encouragement, and they can really flourish. When I think back to some of the summer jobs and things that I had as a young man, I was grateful for them because I learned a lot from them.

But all of my thinking at that time was very conventional. I didn't have anybody to mentor me in business, in creating my own business. The businesses that I did pursue were fairly harebrained schemes of various types. And there weren't that many opportunities. I was on the cusp of the Internet age that has opened all kinds of things up.

But today, the opportunities are abundant, and you already have the tools at your disposal. There are so many things that teens can do, so many skills that they can apply to the marketplace. And all they need is a little bit of coaching, a little bit of encouragement, and they can start making real money quickly.

And that real money compounds, and it opens up the world to them in a spectacular way. On the other end, also, there has rarely been an age, I don't know of any other age in the history of mankind, at which there's been more opportunities for the very old to continue to work in a very satisfying way.

Maybe if we focus on more of a community, you know, a very tight-knit community, an agricultural community, we could say that the work for the very aged of shelling the peas and caring for the children was very meaningful. I'll buy that. I'm totally willing to buy that. But what I mean is that if you will think about your career, and you'll think about something that you can do for the long term, there'll be many opportunities.

There are more opportunities available to extend your career today than there's ever been before. Because historically, one of the reasons that people retired was that their body was worn up. And when a man's body is worn up and used out, he doesn't feel like he can do much. But if you keep your body in good shape and keep your mind sharp and keep yourself in a career where you have the opportunity to grow and to express wisdom and other skills that you have, other than just physical ability, then we can extend that out and we can raise our lifetime earnings.

Those are the important things. And so if we can raise our lifetime earnings, for you and for me, we can keep the American dream more and more accessible. So now let's pivot to expenses. How else can we keep the American dream accessible? We can diminish expenses. And an article like this is interesting to look at.

And it's not--I wouldn't say that it's crazy in terms of the numbers. Let me read you from Investopedia. Let me read you the numbers that Investopedia says that an American dream costs. The American dream now costs $3,455,305. Milestones. One, hospital birth, individual costs, $5,708. Average out-of-pocket costs for those enrolled in large group plans, $16,011 covered by insurance.

Total shown for two children, so that's $5,708. Milestone number two, raising children to the age of 18, $576,896. The average cost of raising a child until age 18. Total shown for two children. These are 2015 USDA numbers adjusted for inflation to 2022. Car purchases, $271,330. Average purchase price for a used car.

Total shown for 10 purchases, purchasing a six-year-old used car, lasting around six years each over a lifetime, driving ages 16 to 80. 2023iccars.com. College, $42,070. Average cost of one year at a public in-state four-year institution, including room and board. Total shown for two children. I don't know why they would use one year as their number, but that's what they chose to do.

Wedding, $35,800. The average cost of a wedding and engagement ring for 2022. I guess your kid's wedding, who knows? Hopefully you're having the wedding before the kids. Home, $796,998. Average purchase price for a home with lifetime mortgage costs. Mortgage assumes 10% down payment, 30-year fixed loan at 7.2% interest.

Does not include other costs, including taxes, origination, and lender charges, etc. Pets, $67,935. Midpoint cost of lifetime care, 15 years for a dog and cat. Health insurance, $934,752. Average family premium costs. Total showing 39 years of current annual costs. Retirement, $715,968. 80% of 2022 median household income. Total showing 12 years.

Average life expectancy past 65. Funeral costs, $7,848. Average costs of a funeral with a viewing and burial. 2023 policy genius. So we can look at those costs, and I'm not going to go line item by line item through them, but you should think about them carefully, and you should see, is there a way that I can change costs in order to stay within my budget?

This is obvious. I feel like I'm -- I don't think I'm delivering platitudes here, but this is just obvious. But you should still consider it because a huge component of the "American dream" being unaffordable simply has to do with changing expectations of what is normal and what is affordable.

So something like a wedding, right? $35,800 being the average cost of a wedding and engagement ring. That may be true, but that is entirely a choice that is made by those who are paying for weddings. And it's a little bit misleading here to think that you yourself have to do that.

I love a good wedding and a fancy wedding as much as anyone else. And if you have the money, man, by all means, throw a huge party and spend your money. It's great. I would love to come and have a great time at a beautiful wedding. But the cost of the wedding has zero impact whatsoever on the duration of the marriage.

And many of us are from a generation in which that really wasn't a thing. My parents married in their parents' living room. Most people go down to their church and have a wedding ceremony after the Sunday morning church service and a potluck dinner afterwards. It's only in the modern age where we've decided that weddings are these huge, enormous affairs.

Weddings normally, like that, were only a component of the very wealthy, the royalty and the aristocracy, etc. And that's fine. Again, if you have the money to pay for it, pay for it. But don't be one who thinks that you have to come in and do that. I think that their numbers here on things like car purchases are actually surprisingly well thought out to use six-year-old cars.

I think their numbers are reasonable. Hospital birth, $5,708. That's, I mean, the amount being for two children, the amount out of pocket, that's perfectly reasonable for two children. College, you can adjust that. I think one of the great things about college is that college is simultaneously more expensive than ever before and cheaper than ever before.

Whereas right now, many states are offering free four-year college tuition all across the United States. Many countries around the world offer that, and I expect that trend to continue. And so if you're going to pay for college for your children or for yourself, then it's really only going to be necessary at advanced degree levels or if you really want to, if you really want something expensive for some reason.

Pets, I think, were the most surprising number to me. We often don't sit down and actually calculate how much they cost, and yet they are indeed quite expensive. And so you may want to be thoughtful about some of those things. I'm not going to tell you what to spend your money on.

I am going to point out to you that these choices are up to you. And if you're going to choose them, you are going to have to choose them. You should choose them intentionally based upon what you want. And here I want to pivot to the idea of what is the American dream.

Because it's one thing to read an article that says the American dream costs far more than most people earn over their lifetime. But that article presupposes that the American dream is primarily based on consumption. And while I understand that that may be related, you know, what some people's idea of the American dream is, and with a term like this, you can apply your own definition.

After all, free country, do what you want. But I don't think that's what the American dream is or was or like ever was. Again, I think this is common that people think that the American dream means that I can have, you know, a house with a white picket fence and a nice late model car in the driveway or something like that.

Fine. That's fine. And by the way, I would point out to you that that is still perfectly accessible to you. If you want that, guess what? You can buy a house today, a perfectly reasonable three-bedroom house in a nice suburbs of an American city for about $122,000. Just so happens that it's going to be in Iowa or Ohio or Arkansas or something like that.

And a majority of people that would be listening to this show and thinking about that don't want to live in those places, even though those are phenomenal places to live with very high quality of lifestyle. Many people want to live in Miami or New York City or Phoenix, Arizona or Seattle, Washington, etc.

And hey, you live where you want, but recognize that you could today go and pay $115,000 and get yourself a nice three-bedroom house in the suburbs and have plenty of money left over for a late model car to park in the driveway and enough paint to put on your picket fence.

Perfectly accessible. But our standards change and all of these standards of consumption are standards that basically go with what's in style. You know, even the concept of a pet costing you $67,000, this is because pets are in style. One of the most enormous fastest growing industries that's out there.

And it's completely out of touch with historical reality. Throughout history, if a man had a pet, the pet had to earn its living and the pet lived on what was given to it. It didn't get special food, it got scraps from the table or what it could find, what it could hunt, what it could get for itself.

And if the pet was sick and the vet couldn't fix it easily and cheaply, the pet was buried in the backyard and another pet was gotten. That's normal. And so the idea that you would have to pay $67,000 for a dog and a cat over their lifetime is something that you choose to do.

And that's because that's what's in style. This is a cultural fad. It's a cultural thing that people adopt. Anyway, again, I'm not mad about expenses and I don't want to take that negative tone. I want to point out to you that if you define the American dream as consumption related, then consumption is always going to equal just about income.

Because that's what people like to do. They like to consume their income. If it were fun to save money, then more people would do it. But it's more fun to spend it. That's why people do it. And so defining the American dream as consumption related goes back, and we could write without question the same story 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and we'll write exactly the same story 50 years from now.

But I don't think that's the core of the American dream, and it never has been. Because the American dream is much more about opportunity and about your individual access to that opportunity, your autonomy, than it is about consumption. The American peoples have never been focused primarily on consumption. They've always been focused on access to opportunity.

And the United States, the idea of America was that the country would offer opportunity for financial success and economic mobility and social mobility, et cetera, to anyone who was willing to come and do the work, to anyone who was willing to take the risk and go. And it's always been a country that was open to the risk taker.

To the risk takers who were willing to sail across the ocean and brave a long and difficult journey with significant risk of shipwreck to make it. The risk takers that were able to blaze across the frontier and risk death and disease and all of the associated difficulties with that.

And that America is alive and well regardless of what the consumption numbers say. Because there is plenty of opportunity for those who want to take risk, for those who want to go for it. There is plenty of access to social mobility. The American experiment was always about creating an egalitarian society that was a meritocracy, that opened up to whoever was able to provide value regardless of background, skin color, language, et cetera.

All of those things were to be ignored in favor of providing value. And today in this world it is more accessible than ever before to anybody who's willing to come and provide value. And then the concepts of freedom and equality or even just individual entrepreneurship. One of the things that I think has always been a major part of the American dream is simply the idea that you can do it on your own.

You can create your own thing. You don't have to be a peasant on someone else's manor. You don't have to be a slave in someone else's plantation. You don't have to be a wage slave in someone else's corporation. You can create your own thing. That was – clearly you look at Jefferson and a nation of gentleman farmers.

But even Abraham Lincoln, I always think when he was debating in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and he was debating Douglas against mudsill theory, the idea that you had to have an oppressive ruling class and a subservient class. And Lincoln said no. We are a nation of independent farmers. And the man would rather have 20 acres of his own that was truly his own than be an employee working for someone else.

And I look around the United States of America today and I see more opportunity for that than ever before. And this is one of those things that I'm very grateful that America has exported to the world, this basically access to opportunity. It was not always that way. Yet it is increasingly that way.

And so these things come with enormous risk. They come with the risk of bankruptcy and loss and financial ruin, etc. But they also come with enormous potential for opportunity. And that has always been the American dream, the land of opportunity, your ability to get up and go and do it.

And the American dream, if we say that it only succeeds and exists and works when you can consume, consume, consume, we're ignoring all of our cultural heritage. The man who burned down his house in Maryland in order to get the nails out of it so he could load up a Conestoga wagon and set off across the frontier was not doing it so that he could have the American dream of consumption.

He wasn't doing it because he was guaranteed a house in the suburbs with a late model car and a white picket fence. He was doing it because it was a land of opportunity and he could go out and he could compete with others just like anyone else. And he had the potential to strike it rich or he had the potential to put in a homestead claim and make it.

And that's still open to every one of us. And while I'm not unsympathetic to the incredibly dysfunctional systems that we have created, the ridiculous interest rate manipulation and the awful societal issues and the dysfunctional government, it just goes on and on and on. All that stuff matters. And it should be changed, right?

It should be changed. But the problem is that it won't be changed by people who sit around, upset the American dream of consumption is unavailable to them. But it will be changed by those who sat out and say the American dream of opportunity is alive and well. So I don't love to do just raw, raw American stuff.

Long-time listeners know that it's not about one particular country. It's about a mindset. And you can be an American no matter where in the world you live, no matter what citizenship you hold, etc. If you buy into the idea that if it's to be, it's up to me and I just got to go out and get it.

And there are no promised results. There's no guarantees whatsoever. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch or guaranteed results. You can't get rid of the risk, etc. But you can roll your sleeves up. You can put your shoulder into the work. And there's a decent chance that if you do that for long enough, consistently enough, etc., it'll all work out.

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