The holidays start here at Ralph's, with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. You could do a classic herb roasted turkey, or spice it up and make turkey tacos. Serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail, or use Simple Truth wild-caught shrimp for your first Cajun risotto. Make creamy mac and cheese, or a spinach artichoke fondue from our selection of Murray's cheese.

No matter how you shop, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace all your holiday traditions, Ralph's, 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 each and every day, while also building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, I'm your host, and today on the show we do live Q&A. Works just like Call and Talk Radio. Call in, ask about anything you want, raise any topics, get any personalized answers that you desire. Basically, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, "Open line Friday." If you would like to gain access to one of these Friday Q&A shows, I would welcome you to do so.

You can do so by going to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, support the show on Patreon, and that will gain access for you to these scheduled Q&A calls. Patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance will gain access to you. We begin with Martin, and let's see, is it, oops, wrong button, there we go. Martin, welcome. Are you in Prague?

Or is this a phone line from Prague? - Yes, I'm from, hey, Joshua. - Welcome. - Can you hear me all right? - Sounds great, sir, go ahead. - Thank you. Long time, I'm from the Czech Republic, Europe. I've been following your content since 2018, I think, and even grabbed a bunch of your courses.

I love what you do. So first of all, thank you. - My pleasure. - Now, I'm wondering, in your recent podcast with Mikhail, you touched on this interesting residency program in Panama, where you only need to spend one day there every two years in order to maintain your residency.

- Right. - It's really promising, but I'm a bit lost on the details. Unfortunately, neither me nor my wife can come with you to Panama in January, which would be amazing and probably solve this, but it's not possible, unfortunately. Well, to be more specific with my question, or rather questions, so first, what is this residency program?

As in, does it have a name by which I could find more information on it? Can I fill out the application online, or is it a personal visit required? And if so, is it a matter of going to the immigration office and, I don't know, walking out two hours later with a permit, or does it take a couple of days?

And then I'm thinking, once the residency permit is approved, do I need to be present to collect the documents, or can they be mailed to Europe? I'm asking because if me and my wife are planning a round trip from Europe to Panama, we don't want to waste time and money by having to go multiple times.

Ideally, we'd want to do it in one go. I know it's a lot of quite specific questions, but I feel like the answers might be quick and concise. - Why are you interested in residency in another country such as Panama? - Well, I'm in Europe, and as everybody knows, the situation is just not amazing.

We would like to have a plan B, ideally on a different continent. I bought your international escape plan course, which was great, I could recommend it to anyone. It's more of like the general understanding of these concepts, but not really many practical examples which I think wouldn't make sense to put it in the course, but that's what I'm missing now.

Panama, it's just, it looks good, but I just don't know where to pick up, where to start. - So I know that you would love specific information, and I would like to give it to you, but I I'm going to just gently sidestep that for a couple of reasons.

Number one, things change in the world of immigration all the time. I'm happy to answer specific information, but at the moment, I don't know all of the answers to your question, because I'm not presenting those sessions at the event in Panama. Mikel is. So he's the one to ask.

I would begin by going to his podcast, which is Expat Money, and search for some of his episodes, his public episodes that are about Panama, and see those details that are there. Also, there is quite a lot of information, more specific information around for specific countries, but I can't answer you exactly all of the details of each of the Panamanian residency programs, because I'm not current on all of them.

He's going to be the one who's presenting those sessions in January, and I'll be learning alongside everyone who's there at the event, which, of course, everyone who's able to travel in January should sign up at expatmoney.com/radical and come and hang out with us in Panama. What I would say for you, kind of just speaking more generally, is that there are a number of residence programs that would fit what you're looking for, if by what you're looking for is just to have basically an ability to have a residence permit in another country, and a residence permit in another country where you don't have to move there, but a place where if I wanted to go there, I could.

Some of the better ones are in the Americas. Probably the top three would be Panama, Mexico, Paraguay are probably the top three that have minimal kind of time on the ground requirements, and they all work about the same. Basically you're going to need to make some kind of investment into the country, so Panama has the Friendly Nations Visa, again, Mikel's going to go over all those details there of that, but basically there's going to be a variety of different options for you to make an investment into the country in some way.

Now sometimes that can be done by simply opening a company, so you open a company, put money in a bank account, et cetera. Sometimes it can be done by actually purchasing land or something in the country. Sometimes it's done just by showing, "Hey, I have this amount of money in the bank," or "I have this amount of passive income." So if you have income that is regular and that's coming in from a pension or some passive source, pretty much, I would say 80% of Latin America, you can get a residence permit with that.

Now all of the residence permits that I am aware of in Latin America, all of the residence permits are going to require you to physically go to the country. None of these countries are doing scams, none of them where it's just, "Oh, fill out something online." All of them are going to require you to go to the country, and I would say that if you don't have at least some connection to the country or desire to have some connection to the country, then that's probably not a country you should choose.

When it was a few years ago and I was in a position kind of like what I'm guessing you're in, which means that I didn't have much of a backup plan, I was from one country, I didn't have a long solution of anything, then I thought to myself, "Oh, you know what?

I'll go anywhere, I'll do anything, et cetera, and I'll definitely go where I can just get a permit and even if I'm only going just to renew my permit, that's going to be fine." Well things changed and as time went on, I realized that's probably not really enough. And so if I were you, I would rather see you choose a residence permit or some kind of backup plan in a country that has a "less high quality program" but that you actually want to spend time in or go to or are going to enjoy traveling to than someone with a better program that you just don't want to go.

And so before I would encourage you to go deep into Panama or any country, I would say you owe it to yourself to at least visit the place if capable. Now, you can visit it with the plan of going and establishing for the first time with a plan of establishing residency, that's fine, I've done that.

But what I'm saying is that if that's the only thing and you don't find other things that attract you to it, it may not be the best thing. And so in some cases, you might be better off to choosing something that's closer to home for where you are in the Czech Republic or looking for something that's closer to home.

You asked another question that I – oh, costs, I think it was. Basically, once you – with most residency programs, especially in Latin America, it's a few thousand dollars of lawyer fees, a few thousand dollars of miscellaneous fees to get all of your stuff and then the cost of the paperwork.

And so the costs are fairly accessible, it's just a matter of finding out do I need to purchase property, if I do need to purchase property, how much, is it going to be a good investment, is there a way to make money on it, etc. And those are of course very personal questions that are going to come down to how much money do you want to invest.

The world of internationalization is wide open to somebody who's willing to invest money and you can make money on it. You can go to many places where they have formalized residency by investment programs or citizenship by investment programs and invest in those countries. And if your investment is large enough, you can – almost any country will roll out the carpet for you.

But that's where it's fairly personal and you'll want to look through your investment portfolio and choose something that is appropriate to you. So I know I'm sidestepping the answer slightly, it's simply because I can't quote off the top of my head all of the details of the Panamanian programs.

I will be able to after January, but that's Mikel's job. But did I give you something to think about there? Do you want to ask another question? No, I appreciate it, thank you. I'll just go to Mikel's podcast, but this was also helpful. Thank you. Good, good. Have you also, being from the Czech Republic, have you and – if you're married – have you and your wife fully looked into your European heritage to see if there are any other options that are available to you with your European heritage?

Yes, we have. Unfortunately, everyone's just European. We would at best get a – maybe get a second passport for another EU country, which is – well, it's a good start, but it doesn't solve our problems, really. Not necessarily, but I think you should still do it. What would be the other country that you might have the ability to claim a passport for?

Sweden. Sweden. Yeah. So I think that Europeans don't tend to do this because they don't see the point. Like, look, we're all in the EU, there's no point, EU's going to be fine, et cetera, and they don't go and claim heritage passports because they just don't want to do it.

But I would point out to you a few things. Your first step, before you go and establish a residency somewhere else, your first step should be to claim any kind of heritage citizenship that you have the ability to claim, you should claim it and you should get the documentation for it.

Now one reason people don't do that is they don't want to pay for the passport fees. Maybe it's 150 euros every 10 years, something like that. I think that's a small price to pay for something that could be passed along and endure for your children, be passed along throughout the many years, et cetera.

So you should do it even – but you don't always have to get the passport. So I've worked with families who didn't have a lot of money, but they had a bunch of children, and then my point was go ahead and register for the citizenship, get your documentation, and even if you don't keep the passports current, at least have that.

The next thing is that even within the European Union, yes, it is true that if you were to put side by side, say, a Swedish passport with a Czech passport, there would be a very similar profile and both of them give you easy access to the European Union. That may be true, but that doesn't mean that it's always the case that there's no value.

So I couldn't comment on Sweden and Czech Republic, but countries I do know about. Say you're a citizen of France and you have the ability to be a citizen of France, well, as a French citizen, you would have access to all of the French overseas territories that you don't have access to as a Czech citizen, or similar with the Netherlands.

The Netherlands, huge number of overseas territories that Dutch citizens can move to with minimal paperwork but that Czech citizens can't. And so there are benefits to having the different passports. And then in addition to that, trying to find your happiness this winter? Let Fiji Airways fly you there direct.

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I don't think the European Union as a project is dead this decade, but it's one of those things where it wouldn't surprise me if in 50 years it were either disbanded or very different than it is now. And you see enough cracks in it to recognize the value of having those things claimed.

But countries like Sweden, if you don't maintain your ties to the country, then your options can be limited there. So before you go and establish necessarily your foreign residence on the other side of the world, you should first go ahead and claim any other citizenships that you have access to and then go ahead and build your plan B of a place that I'd want to go.

And then don't think also that it has to be on the other side of the world. So Latin America is great and it's pretty accessible from Europe depending on where you are. And Latin America has the benefit of being a very open place with lots of great programs that are a great deal.

But again, if you're not willing to go there and look forward to those trips, then I think you should consider something that is closer to home where you would actually want to go. So I know I'm repeating myself there, but claim the Swedish citizenship and for any other European listeners, go ahead and claim the citizenship.

Even if you don't maintain four passports that all have a red or burgundy cover, that's fine. But at least claim the citizenships and keep them current because your children and your grandchildren may be very grateful that you did. Thank you Joshua, this is very helpful. My pleasure. Thank you.

We move on to Timothy in Virginia. Timothy, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi Joshua, thanks for taking my call. I have what probably is a quick question for you, which is I'm hoping you can just give me a quick and dirty answer to how you would go about sort of a low budget, low hanging fruit audio recording setup.

So for background, I have a two and a half year old son and he's got one of those sort of proprietary format music players for toddlers. And we figured out that he really likes when I record his picture books, put them all on a card as it turns out in this format for him.

And then he just listens to them over and over again, far in excess of how much time I could spend reading to him. Anyway, I just want to sort of up the quality on that a little bit. I've done recording on my phone and sometimes the microphone isn't great.

And then I guess the other piece of the question is post-processing. I'm not sure what a good tool would be to get the volume sort of set at the right level, maybe equalize the different tracks so that again, it just works a little bit better. Absolutely. When you recorded on your phone and you said the quality wasn't great, did you take any pains to create something like a recording booth, even if it was in your closet or something like that?

Spend it all. Okay. So there is your basic problem because if you don't want to spend any money, I'll tell you the thing that you don't want to spend any money on, you already have it and it's the phone. It's your phone. Not a headset, not necessarily, not an ear pod, air pods or anything like that, just the actual phone.

And the microphone that is in the phone is perfectly functional and can be perfectly high quality. But the kind of microphone that it is requires you to spend some time and effort on basically an acoustic system. And so the best thing that you can do is walk into your walk-in closet where you're surrounded by fabric, coats, et cetera.

Go into the very back corner of the closet, slide aside your coats and whatever soft things are there hanging and set your phone on the shelf in front of you where it'll be completely surrounded by fabric in the back of a carpeted closet, et cetera. And basically what you're trying to do is you're trying to use any version of that where you have sound deadening.

So for example, I recently recorded sometime back, I recorded a podcast in a hotel. We were traveling, my family was in the room, there was no business center, we were in an airport hotel, so I was out by the airport, I couldn't find any decent place to record like I usually can.

So I wound up going to a corner of the lobby, I pushed the couch back, I sat down on the floor behind the couch, I took the couch cushions, put them over my head and my audio quality, no one really would have known that it was perfectly reasonable. And I tried to create instead of an echoey room, even what I have right now, which I'll explain in a moment, I tried to create some form of sound dampening.

And so if you do that and then you put your mouth about a foot and a half, two feet away from the phone, something like that, and you speak in a good tone of voice, you'll get a perfectly usable recording from that. And there's really no need for you to go out and purchase other microphones if that's good enough for you.

But it won't work if you sit at your desk where it's hard surfaces, it won't work if you are in your living room where there's a lot of echoey space. It needs to be a small room with as much fabric and padding as possible and then you can just use your phone.

The second thing that you do with it is then process it and there's lots of audio processing equipment that you can use if you know what you're doing. So there's a free one that you can use called Audacity that's available for all of the platforms. That's the most popular and it's a very powerful audio editing system.

So if you want to trim your audio or you want to break it up into tracks and things like that, just take the audio file that you created on your phone and then move it into Audacity on your computer and you can edit it there. And you can also do any kind of dynamic corrections that you want to do.

What I would recommend to you is use a service, use something called Auphonic. And Auphonic is A-U-P-H-O-N-I-C. This is different from Audacity. Audacity is the free open source piece of audio editing equipment that you can put on your computers. Auphonic is an automatic piece of software that will automatically help to improve your audio quality.

And it basically does two or three things. The first thing it does is you can run a background noise processor on it. So let's say that there's some kind of hiss or let's say you have some electrical noise that slips into your recording or just some background noise or something like that.

Auphonic uses basically an algorithm to trim that background noise out of the system. The second thing that Auphonic will do is it will level the voices. And so there is a standard in audio recording for the loudness for an audio track. And so all professionally produced podcasts or audio books, etc.

will have a consistent loudness factor. And so what Auphonic will do is it will automatically create that loudness with your voice file using an algorithm. And it does a really good job with it and it's really simple. And so you can actually just put the Auphonic app on your phone and you can buy a little time from them.

They give you a little bit free. I don't remember how much. And then you can just run it through the app and it'll give you the MP3 out the other side. And so when I record a podcast episode on my phone, I just hold out my phone in front of me.

And if I find a soft environment, like let's say that I'm on the road, sometimes I'll sit in a car or someplace where there's fabric and the sound waves aren't going to be bouncing all over the place. I'll hold my phone about a foot or so in front of me, I'll record and then I just upload it straight to the Auphonic app on my phone and then from there it can go straight to the podcast feed.

In your case, it would just go straight to an audio file that you can download and put onto your son's MP3 player. And I would say that that's probably all that you need. If you want to buy a microphone, then what you're going to look for is, and I won't go through specific models, I'll just tell you what you need to know.

If you want to buy a microphone, look for something that is called a dynamic microphone. And a dynamic microphone as contrasted with a condenser microphone. So if you were to go to a professional audio studio to record your audio book or something like that, you would be standing in front of a condenser microphone.

And a condenser microphone is really wonderful because it creates a really high quality audio recording because it picks up all the sound. But the problem is in order for it to function well, you need to have a very well built sound booth or sound stage with good acoustics. A dynamic microphone is the kind of microphone that a news reporter holds in his hands while he's standing in a noisy crowd.

And it's designed to only really pick up what is close to the microphone and to exclude most of the noise that's around. And so I record, basically all of my microphones are dynamic microphones. And what that means is that I don't really give much thought at all to sound treatment.

I don't record in a sound booth. I can record basically anywhere because I have a dynamic microphone. And you can buy a dynamic microphone that you can plug into your computer with a USB cable. That works really well. I'm not current in all the models. The model that I used to recommend for that was the Audio-Technica ATR2100.

But I'm sure that they have changed that. But if you just do a web search of some kind for dynamic microphone with USB input, you'll find lots of those. And then there's a whole slew of new microphones that are available for podcasters, et cetera, that will give you a direct connection to your computer so you can record directly into a program like Audacity.

But you can do it sitting at your desk and you don't need any kind of sound treatment. And so those are my recommendations of how to start. But I think your cell phone is good enough as long as you do the recordings in your closet. Great. Thanks for all those recommendations.

That's what I needed. My pleasure. We move on to Teresa in Missouri. Welcome, Teresa. How can I serve you today? Hi, Joshua. This is Brendan, not Teresa, but it's okay. That was surprising. Go ahead. I have a question about everyone's favorite topic, which is permanent or whole life insurance.

I've been working with a financial guy from Northwestern about two things, exploring whole life insurance and then disability insurance, disability. I'm fine with what he's proposed and everything. The rates look reasonable. On the whole life side, however, he's explained it to me several different ways. And I'll be honest, the whole thing kind of seems like a pyramid scheme.

He shows me this table and the basis is, you don't want everything in the stock market because you want to draw on a different asset base, which is tax advantage when the market is down in retirement. And that makes sense. But there's, in my opinion, there's ways around, there's ways to achieve that in retirement or closer to retirement than for me at 27 years old, for me and my wife to open up whole life policy and pile a bunch of money in there and the cash value doesn't actually break even until year 13.

And in addition to that, I don't see how the tax advantage-ness of the cash value when you take it out of the account outweighs that return risk, so to speak, because if anything changes between me and my wife's age now and 10 years from now, a lot can happen, especially since we're starting to raise a family and we don't know what our situation is going to look like after kids are here.

So anyway, I don't think that necessarily outweighs the inflexibility of, or sorry, I guess rather flexibility, if we were to keep the money in, you know, CD, high yield savings account, bonds, what have you, just in a brokerage account and manage it our way. Am I missing something that I haven't considered yet?

Or is that basically it? What's your household income? Between my wife and I, we make about $250,000. Do you need whole life insurance? Well, to answer that question, you have to say, "Do I need life insurance?" So remember, first of all, if you do not value having whole life insurance, or let me use the word permanent life insurance, meaning life insurance that's going to last forever, I don't think you should buy it.

If it's exclusively an investment play where you're trying to say, "Okay, there's the cash value and that's the only thing you care about," then I don't think anybody should buy whole life insurance in that situation. You need to at least appreciate the whole life insurance, that factor of the whole life insurance.

So that would be the first thing that I think is important to note. Now it might be difficult for you in your mid to late 20s. You said 27 you were? That's right. Okay. Do you currently own life insurance, term life insurance? The only life insurance my wife and I own is through our employers at that standard one-year salary.

So I had this conversation exactly with the advisor, I said, "As of right now, if you remove the word whole and just said, 'Do you need life insurance?'" I'd say, "No, because if either my wife or I were to die today, we could take off work for a year with all the money we have saved now, we would be totally fine, and a year from now, either one of us could pick up and carry on with our lives." Right.

Right. So here's where I think. I think you've got a young advisor who hasn't figured out how to sell guys like you insurance, and he's being super intellectual, which I'm willing to be intellectual, right? I don't make any commissions, et cetera. But I think he's being silly for not first selling you insurance.

Because in my experience, any time I tried to sell a 27-year-old insurance who didn't own insurance first, they just didn't have the same appreciation of it. And so if I were in his shoes trying to sell you life insurance, I wouldn't be trying to sell you whole life insurance, I'd be trying to sell you term life insurance.

And I would speak about it kind of the way that I speak about it publicly, which is somewhat flippantly. I would emphasize the fact that, meaning I wouldn't drag you through a long detailed needs analysis, because you just said it yourself, "I don't need the stuff. Don't need it." And after all, if I died, my wife would be fine.

She's got a year worth of stuff, she can go and she can take care of herself, she can go find someone else, she can work for herself, I'd be fine if she was gone, et cetera. You don't really need it. And so the reason you're wrestling with it is because most guys in your situation will wrestle with it.

Being 27, being male, not having children, never having owned significant amounts of life insurance, you don't really value those things. And so you're open to it, that's why you're calling me, but you don't value those things on a real basis. What I'll tell you is that I value insurance.

I value it enormously. And I value it regardless of whether I have children or not. There's a whole discussion there, et cetera, that it does change quite a lot when you have children. But I value the ability that I had as a young man before I really had any significant assets.

I valued the ability that I had to take care of people around me. And for a 27-year-old guy, non-smoker, you could buy a million dollars of life insurance for about 50 bucks a month, probably less. And so in your world, 50 bucks a month doesn't make any difference whatsoever to your budget.

But once you own a term life insurance policy with a million dollars of coverage, and you recognize that, hey, if I die, my wife is going to be, she's in good shape, or my parents, they're going to have half a million dollars that's going to see them through, it starts to change things.

And I vividly remember when I was a young life insurance agent, because remember, I started selling life insurance at 23 years old. And so I was trying to sell people who were, I sold a lot of people in my natural market, people who were not parents, sometimes they were single, et cetera.

And this good friend of mine bought a life insurance policy from me. And he was a young guy, single guy, he was getting a job, it doesn't matter. But he bought a term life insurance policy from me, bought a disability insurance and a term life insurance policy from me.

And there was not much, and it was basically a conversation like this. And this guy loved to fish, and he would go out on his boat, he would drive up from South Florida up to his family's place in Southwest Florida, excuse me, Northwest Florida, and he would go fishing on the bay.

And he told me one time, after he owned the policy about six months or so, he said, you know, something happened recently. And he'd gone out fishing on the bay, and he'd done something dumb, and he almost fell on top of his, I can't remember, maybe it was his spear, I mean, this is a long time ago.

But he did something where he wondered if he was going to make it. And he was out by himself on the boat fishing by himself, and he almost killed himself. And he realized, and he told me, unprompted, he realized how glad he was that he had bought a term life insurance policy from me, because of the money that it allowed him to pass along for his family, for his parents, etc.

And that always stuck with me, because I had the same feeling. I never owned life insurance until I signed up at 23 years old to be a life insurance agent. I didn't know what it felt like. And then I bought life insurance, but I bought it just because I figured I should own what I had.

But after a while, I started to recognize, no, it feels really good to know that, in my case, my first beneficiary was my parents. It feels really good to know that I've taken care of my parents if I'm dead. Because after all, I'm their son, I'll take care of them, etc.

And so what I've found is that, as the years go by, and you actually have life insurance, most men appreciate that. And they start to recognize the value of that, that they're able to take care of their loved ones even if they're dead and gone. And by purchasing insurance, they're able to control large amounts of money for their loved ones if they're not here.

And we have unlimited amounts of confidence, when we're young, in our ability to make our wives multi-millionaires many times over, and our parents are going to live their golden age in comfort, etc. But it's very much ambition when we're young, and yet life insurance is a tool that allows us to actually make that happen.

And so until you actually own life insurance, I don't think you're going to get any of those emotions. You're not going to experience that. That's only going to come when you actually buy a life insurance policy. An individual life insurance policy is not at your job, a term life insurance policy, so it's inexpensive.

And then you'll recognize that, "Hey, I've got this covered, and that's going to be something that takes care of other people." So that would be the first thing that I would suggest to you. Now, the next thing that happens is you need to, if you were to buy permanent life insurance, you would need to actually appreciate the value of having that life insurance around forever.

And I don't think this happens as quickly. But what happens is that when we are younger, we are filled again with unlimited amounts of confidence about our ability to be rich very, very quickly. And then what happens is sometimes it doesn't go as quickly as we had imagined, and we suffer various setbacks.

And a business fails, or we make some dumb decisions and lose a bunch of money, or we go through a divorce, or something happens. And what we realize is that life is more precarious. And it's not unusual for a guy who's, say, 47 – let's say you buy a 20-year term policy when you're 27, which I don't recommend – but you get to 47, and all of a sudden you realize, "You know, I'm still a little behind." And then what happens is also you watch people go through medical things, and you start to be aware of your mortality.

Usually this happens as you maybe approach about your 35th, 40th, 45th birthday, somewhere in there. Whereas at the stage of life that you're in as a young man, you think that it's pretty unlikely that you yourself would ever be significantly sick or significantly disabled in any way. But you reach my age, as I'm approaching my fifth decade, and I'm not that much older, but then I see enough people around that are peers of mine.

And this guy has a stroke, that guy has a heart attack, this guy breaks his legs, and you realize, "I'm mortal," and that mortality hits you. And when that mortality hits you, you recognize that while you may be blessed with good genetics, as I am, and probably you are, and while you yourself may do everything possible to maintain your health, et cetera, there's a certain amount that none of us control.

And if you wind up behind on your money, and you wind up worrying about your mortality, then all of a sudden the idea of having whole life insurance hits differently, and you're more grateful for it, because instead of having to figure out, "Am I going to die this year or not," then you're worried about those things.

And so those are just some lessons that I learned selling life insurance, and I think the guy that you're an agent hasn't learned that yet. Because I think most experienced agents, if they walked into a situation like a sales situation, if I were advising that agent in the sales situation that he's in, based upon the two minutes you told me, I would tell that agent, "You're a fool for bringing up the idea of whole life insurance." I would sell you disability income insurance, I would sell you a million dollar term life insurance, maybe two, and I would move on.

And I would come back a year later, and after you've owned those things for a year, I would check in and see how you're feeling, and then I would just start converting the term life insurance. Now we'll move to the intellectual thing about like, well, should one versus another?

But I think just from life experience, that's what's at the core of kind of this conflict you're feeling, is you don't yet value life insurance, and you certainly don't value whole life insurance. It's just purely a cash on cash return, where do I get more money, setting up a seedy ladder at my bank, or a life insurance policy.

Do you agree? Yes. I agree. All right. So now let me address your question directly. And by the way, let me just be to you. For your situation, I don't think you should buy whole life insurance. I think you should just buy a disability policy. I think you should buy a term insurance policy from your guy.

Make sure it's an annual renewable term policy, so you have lots of flexibility. Buy one for you. Buy one for your wife. Let it go. The other thing is from a purely investment standpoint, because let's talk about kind of intellectually, et cetera, from a purely investment standpoint, buying whole life insurance should be behind maxing out all of your retirement accounts.

And so I want to make sure that your 401(k) is maxed out, your wife's 401(k) is completely maxed out, access to Roth IRAs, if you're eligible, is maxed out. I want to make sure you're maxing out every possible account, because those accounts, when pushed against life insurance, they share all of the same benefits that life insurance has, but yet they're superior because of better potential investment returns, because of stocks versus bonds, as well as superior for matching money, tax breaks, et cetera.

So it's only after you've maxed out all of those things that we would come back to whole life insurance and say, "Does this play a role in your plan?" Does that make sense intellectually? Yes, it does. Okay. Now, life insurance has a couple of features that you can't match yourself in a fixed income portfolio or something like a seedy ladder.

Those features may or may not be valuable to you based upon where you are in life. So first, life insurance provides you with an insurance benefit. I'm not going to go through it in depth, but that's what I mentioned to you, because life insurance gives you insurance, and that's really valuable.

Because even though your cost of premium versus benefit of death benefit is so much bigger with term life insurance, $50 a month, $1 million of coverage, whereas with your whole life policy, it's $600 a month, $1 million of coverage, what kind of policy are you looking at in terms of numbers?

For me, it was $6,000 a year, and the death benefit immediately was $450,000. Here's a $5 bet. Cold drink next time we see each other in person. Guarantee you, your agent that you're talking to has been in the business less than three years, guarantee you, because he's doing what I would have done in times past until I learned that this is a dumb way to sell life insurance and whatnot.

So yeah, $500 a month for what was the face amount you said? $450,000. For $450,000, right. So there's a big difference between $50 a month and over a million of coverage versus $500 a month and $450,000. However, if you were to go and put $500 a month into your seedy ladder, it would take you several decades before you wind up with $450,000 of coverage in it.

And so even though the cost now with whole life insurance is significantly higher than the cost of term life insurance, you do still get a significant benefit that if you put that $6,000 in this year, $6,000 for the next three years, you're $18,000 in, but then you die and your beneficiary gets $450,000, that's a benefit.

And you can't replicate that with a seedy ladder without also going out and supplementing a term insurance policy. So that's the first feature that whole life insurance has that your own investment has. Hello, Jan from Toyota here. Hi, Jan. Just wanted to say thanks. With the Grand Highlander we got at Toyotathon, we've been able to do so much, including five different ski trips, four family functions, three potlucks, two shopping sprees, and we even got a really big tree.

Wow, I'm really impressed. Dealer inventory Mayberry offers our subject to change throughout Toyotathon, which ends on January 2nd. See your participating Toyota dealer for details. Toyota, let's go places. The second feature that the term insurance has is that it is primarily a fixed income asset. And so this can be an advantage or a disadvantage.

The disadvantage is that you're generally going to have a lower overall rate of return than you will have from your stock investments, because generally the return on bonds is lower than the return on stocks because lenders make less money than owners. Owners make more money than lenders. Of course, the flip side is that you get less volatility.

And in a life insurance policy, in exchange for lower return, you get zero volatility. So you get an asset that increases in value each and every year on a guaranteed basis no matter what. And that can be a useful feature in smoothing out other aspects of your portfolio. So if you have a highly volatile investment portfolio and you also have money that is not volatile, then if things are bad in your other investments, in your volatile investments, at least you still have a pot of money here that is not volatile.

And that's a huge feature that life insurance has that is very valuable in supplementing those other pots of money. I think we all of us should never have all of our money in volatile investments. We should always have a few safer pots of money that are our insurance funds.

And I mean that loosely, but it can be quite literally insurance funds because it balances out the other things that we're doing. And so that's a feature of whole life insurance. You can replicate that feature with a CD ladder, a bond ladder, your own bond fund. The bond fund can be tricky because if you're in a bond fund and interest rates increase, then of course your bond values would decrease.

And so you don't face that risk in a whole life insurance policy. Your cash values will never decrease in a whole life policy. Whereas if you're investing in a bond fund, your actual values could decrease. But generally you could build that with, as you said, a CD ladder or individual bond purchases, a bond ladder of some kind.

The third feature of life insurance is that the inside buildup of cash values is tax deferred. And so as those cash values increase, there is no current tax owed on those increases. And that's not the same case if you have your CD ladder or your bond ladder. So if you build your CD ladder or your bond ladder at your bank, every year that those bonds come due or mature, you're going to have interest and you're going to pay that interest at current tax rates.

Whereas the inside buildup of cash values are not taxed currently. So that's a feature of life insurance. The next feature of whole life insurance is that in some cases, in some states, cash value in a life insurance policy is exempt from the claims of creditors by state law. And so let's say that you accumulate $100,000 in a life insurance policy as compared to $100,000 in a CD ladder that you have at your bank.

Well if somebody sues you and they win a lawsuit against you, they would be able to claim against your $100,000 in the bank, whereas they wouldn't be able to if you live in a state where those assets are protected. Similar things of bankruptcy claims, et cetera, is that in some cases, in some states, even through bankruptcy, your assets in your life insurance policy are exempt from the claims of creditors, whereas the assets that are at your bank are not.

And so for some people that can be more valuable or less valuable. When we get to the concept of actually withdrawing money, it gets complicated, and I like to avoid that a lot of times in public conversation because it's a bit sticky. One feature of life insurance is that you can gain access to the cash values through the form of a policy loan, and that policy loan is not taxable when you take it out.

And so if you compare that to, say, the CD ladder, there's just not really any comparison. You wouldn't take a loan necessarily against your CD ladder, although you could in theory pledge it as collateral, but you wouldn't take a loan. And because you're being taxed on that on a current basis, it's not perfectly comparable.

This feature of a life insurance policy can be an advantage, meaning you can get the money out with no tax, but it can also be a disadvantage because what the insurance agent undoubtedly is not telling you is that if you ever cancel the policy and lapse the policy, cancel the policy, et cetera, then all of your gain in the policy is taxed to you as ordinary income.

And so if you don't keep the policy in force forever, then all of your benefits, all of those tax benefits just slide away because now it's taxed to you as ordinary income when the policy is canceled. You would get your basis out first to tax-free, and then all of your gain is taxed as ordinary income.

Now, ordinarily when insurance agents talk about it, they encourage you to plan to keep the policy in force, and you can keep the policy in force, but you can never quite access all of the money. And so you have to actually access – you have to want the policy.

So those are the basic features that do make a life insurance policy different than what you could have at your bank, the CD ladder or a bond ladder. I don't know that one is superior to another. It's just a matter of do you value those features. What I primarily use my whole life insurance for is simply as my emergency fund.

And so my emergency fund, I keep money in the bank. I keep cash, et cetera, physical currency, et cetera, as far as my emergency fund. But I like to have a big emergency fund, and I don't want to go around and keep that much money in a bank account.

And so this to me is where my whole life insurance policies really shine because they go up every year. There's no time where they ever get smaller. They always go up. They're completely protected from the claims of creditors. I don't have to worry about them. They're private money. Yes, I have the record at the insurance companies, the money that I own, but that doesn't generally come up in other things.

They're not tied to my credit score, et cetera. So it's private money. And then if I have an emergency and I need a lot of money, I can quickly go and get it. And of course, I would use a credit card first, and then if I needed to pay off the credit card, I would just use the life insurance cash values.

And to me, that feels like an appropriate thing for most people. And so I don't think that you should go and try to buy big, enormous policies or view this as a primary investment objective. I think that just for your longer term, safer dollars that you're going to have for a long time, that's where these policies work out well.

They're not big money makers. Mine doesn't make me a fortune, but it's a useful asset that complements some of the other assets. And I've used on various occasions when I needed cash, and I just go to the policy, take it out, pay it back in a few months, a year or two, whatever is needed.

And it's really nice. And the nice thing about it is that the interest rate, when I first started selling life insurance in 2003, the interest rates were down. And it just seemed like they just went down, down, down, down, down my entire career of selling. Well, now, and so policy interest rates, you get an 8% policy interest rate.

And I always thought, because I could always borrow it much cheaper, that's no big deal. Today, as interest rates have gone up, then now all of a sudden the idea that you can borrow against your policy at 8% is a much more attractive thing. So in summary, if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't worry too much about whole life insurance.

I would buy the disability policy. I would buy a term life policy. If I were going to buy a whole life policy, I would buy something like a burial policy, you know, a $50,000 policy, something like that, something that I know I'll want around forever. And then I would max out all my investment accounts.

I would take a good hard look at my career plans, etc. And then I would come back and I would reassess that in the future. And I would just tell the insurance agent, "Look, I'm open to it, but I'll reassess it in the future." And what I want you to be cautious of is the big downside.

One of the big negatives of owning life insurance is that once you commit to a premium payment, you're committed to the premium payment. And so real example, where that's not the case with the money you put in your CD ladder. If you're going to put $6,000 a year in a life insurance, you've got to put that $6,000 every year in.

Well, if you're 27 years old, you've got a dual income, etc., no big deal. But what if you're 29 years old and your wife's going to stay home with a baby and now your income has dropped by half? Well, that can be more difficult to make that $6,000 payment.

And so I'd never want you to put an amount of money in life insurance that you're not very confident that you can keep making that premium payment no matter what. And that usually means you want to do something that's meaningful, but a little bit less than what you would otherwise need.

So those are my comments. Go ahead. That helps a lot. As far as the term policies go, I come back to them and say, "Hey, I'd rather do this instead. What limits would you recommend, a million dollars on both my wife and I?" So you can do this technically with a needs analysis.

That's the correct way to do it. Needs analysis is where you sit down and you say, "All right, how much debt would need to be paid off? How much money would need to be provided, et cetera?" That's the way that an insurance agent does it, is to do a needs analysis.

When you do a needs analysis, generally you're going to always come out for someone in your situation with somewhere between 10 to 20 times your annual income of life insurance. And you do it just that way because our expenditures and our lifestyle is normally calibrated to our income. And so you're going to wind up with somewhere between 10 to 20 times your annual income of life insurance need.

So if your income is 150 and your wife is 150 or 125 and 125, then I would recommend you buy at least 10 times your income for you, at least 10 times for her. If you like the idea of insurance and it feels good, buy more. But I don't think you're there right now.

So with the belief that I have about insurance, I would buy more. But with the belief that you have about insurance, if you bought a million dollars, a million and a half dollars for each of you, I would be totally happy because I would know that I've covered everything from the worst case scenario as an insurance agent, meaning my ethical duty as an insurance agent.

As an insurance agent, my ethical duty to you, the client, is to persuade you, if I'm able at all, to buy enough insurance that your loved ones are protected in the case of either death, obviously, or in the case that you can't get insurance in the future. So if I'm working with you at 27 years old, you don't have children, but let's assume that you and your wife want to have children in the future, which would be common, then I want to make sure that you have at least some insurance if your wife dies on childbirth or if you, two years from now, get stricken with cancer and now you can't get insurance anymore for the rest of your life.

And what happens is that just like doctors see a lot of blood, insurance agents wind up experiencing a lot of difficult stories. And those stories fill us with, over time, with more conviction to make sure that every family is taken care of. And it genuinely does become a moral duty, an ethical duty, to try to make sure that your family is taken care of.

Now, if you've got at least a million dollars, I can take care of everything. Your family is not destitute if you're dead. And so while I would like you to have as much as would be appropriate to your lifestyle, all I really need in the case of, let's say, that you die when your baby is one year old, all I really need is five or six years of care for your wife so that she can get that one-year-old to school age and she can recalibrate and get back to a job, et cetera.

And so basically, a million dollars allows that to happen, whereas a few million dollars means that if she ever marries again, she marries for love, not money, and the kids are taken care of, and college funds, et cetera. But my job is at least enough. And so a million dollars is at least enough.

And then if you're willing to buy more, you should buy up to 20 times your income. Got it. Thank you very much, Joshua. I appreciate it. I hope to answer your question. My pleasure. Congratulations. And then we skipped over it. You said it. But just make sure that you absolutely get the disability income insurance, because that's the one that matters.

If you could only afford disability, get disability, and skip the life insurance, because that's the one that really matters. We go on to Daniel in Texas. Daniel, welcome to the show. What can I serve you today? Thank you, Joshua. So my question is about buying a business and then running with it and kind of the attitude behind it.

The more specific question with that is, would you ever buy a business in a close market to something you want to do, or close niche, and then try and shift that existing business to do what you want it to do? I can give you an example. Looking at, I would like to start a business doing decorative water features, having some struggles getting that off the ground into a going venture.

And so I've kind of looked into the realm of, well, what if I bought an existing landscaping business, especially it's easier to buy ones that are primarily maintenance. Obviously some of them still do some landscaping installs, et cetera, right? And then my intention would be over time to basically shift only to the water features and get rid of the other stuff, at least the lawn maintenance kind of thing.

So I guess my thought is, is that viable? Does that make sense? So if I go in there on day one, well, I've lost my entire customer base. My marketing base no longer matters, right? Because I've totally done it, I've gotten rid of that. But if I slowly transition, say, over a couple of years, does that make sense or is that a bad attitude to have or bad outlook to have when you're looking at purchasing a business?

I think it could make sense, but the primary question to me would be, is this necessary for you to make the transition? And is this necessary for me to make the transition? So if we use that as a specific example, let's play two scenarios here. Scenario A is you're working a job that you despise, but you're making enough money to provide you with your income.

You have enough money saved, you can go buy the landscaping business. You really want to start the water feature business, but you don't have any customers right now, and you just hate your job with everything that's in you, and the job itself is keeping you from being able to do the water features.

Well, in that situation, it makes all the sense in the world to me to go and buy the landscaping business. That switches you from something that you despise to something that you could tolerate, and then in the fullness of time, after a few years, you can move yourself fully in the direction of the water features business.

But it's more of an escape plan from a locked-in situation that you're in right now. Now, scenario B is let's say that you're doing a business right now that would allow you to have full flexibility. You could go and get customers. You could go and build water features, et cetera.

It's just that you need to find customers first, and you have enough money coming in from this job that it's covering. Well, in that situation, the idea of buying a landscaping business as a pathway to the water features doesn't, to me, make so much sense, unless it provides you with something that you specifically need.

But if I imagine the water features business, that, to me, seems like a business that you don't need a lot of infrastructure for. You need some knowledge, and you're going to need a crew, but you could hire the crew for the job using day laborers as long as you're there to supervise them.

So unless you needed the landscape business to transition, then it just seems like an unwieldy path, and after all, you're going to wind up with a couple of broken-down trucks and a crew of people, two of whom are going to quit on day one, and the other is you didn't hire them, and they just want to do things the old way, and they want to run a lawnmower and a weed eater, and they don't want to put in water features.

We don't like this work, et cetera. It sounds like a real hassle. So I think the compelling reason, to me, would be, is this a better transition from where you are? If so, go for it. If not, does this help you in some way that just going directly after the water features business doesn't provide?

Sure. That makes sense. Yeah, I was kind of thinking about it as there's obviously all of that, right? It seems like it would also, one, it's kind of the statistics are statistics, right? But at least according to the statistics, a business that's purchased with an SBA loan, which partially just represents that the numbers have been adequately run to make sure they actually work, right?

When the seller says, yeah, it makes a million dollars in revenue, it actually does, and that's not been fudged around with, right? So they have a, accordingly, a 98% success rate, as opposed to a startup, which has, I don't know, probably overall, it's less than 5%, something like that.

Certainly it's not high. Now, I'm assuming that the business kind of in the SBA statistics is going relatively in a straight path, right, as opposed to shifting its course. But it seems like that could be a far more successful path. And worst case, to some degree, you buy a job that you don't love, but you have all the benefits of owning your own business along with that as well.

So that was kind of the pathway in some ways as I was thinking about it. And I think what you just said, though, aligns with what I'm saying. So if you're stuck right now in a situation that, if you're stuck in a situation right now that is not allowing you all the freedom that you would like to have to build the water features business, and if you are willing to own the landscape business, then absolutely, go buy the landscape business, as long as you're willing for that to be your primary day job.

But when you started asking, it sounds like you really don't want to do landscaping, you want to do water features, and I don't know how successful you would be switching from landscaping to doing water features. And so to me, it seems like it's more important to go as directly in the direction of your goals.

If the water features are what you want to do, then go after the water features as diligently as possible, and only change course when you need to. And so something like a water features business, to me, seems like the kind of thing that all of your expenses, most of your expenses, can take place after you actually book some business.

So you don't need a lot of infrastructure. You might need to do a project or two so that you can show people what you've done. Maybe it's your house, your neighbor's house, or something like that. But a lot of your work is just a matter of booking the business, and once you actually have a check that clears the bank, then you can go out, hire the laborers, purchase the equipment, you can rent all of your stuff, and you can get the work done, and that will teach you more.

So business failure and success, those statistics are interesting to look at, but they're not a good guidance of what you yourself should expect. So for example, do a majority or at least many new businesses fail? Absolutely, they do. But if you look at the businesses that fail from people who've run businesses before, the percentage is much, much lower.

And so people who've run businesses successfully understand how to run businesses, and their new businesses don't fail. And I think one of the big reasons their new businesses generally don't fail is they don't spend any money until they make money, and they only spend money when they make money.

And so what is different from me now versus me when I was 20 years old, when I was 20 years old and I wanted to start a business, I would have gone out, bought a new pickup truck, put my sign on the side, and been like, "Look, I got a great business.

Today, I'll go rent a U-Haul pickup truck or a U-Haul van and keep the expenses down and just do it in a U-Haul van until you get to the point where that's just not appropriate and you need more equipment." And so I think experienced business people understand you get money in the bank first and you sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, and then you only start buying stuff when you absolutely need it and when the business has proven itself.

So I think the best model for what you're describing is five years from now, if you own a landscaping business that makes you a good living as expected based upon the numbers that you're describing and you do one water feature a year, are you happier with that decision or are you happier staying with what you're doing right now, not having to deal with the business, not having taken out a bunch of debt, et cetera, and doing one water feature a year?

Which of those is the better fit? Yeah, that makes sense. Probably the second one. And that's partially I'm at a place where I have lots of flexibility with my job, which is great, but it's also not providing for me monetarily in the way that I would like it to at this point.

So I'm trying to parlay all of that and also not put our family in a bad financial place by just going for it kind of thing. So in that situation, don't go into debt. Don't buy a business that you don't want to own. Don't go into debt. Just market like crazy and develop, do a water feature in your yard.

Make sure you create a portfolio of ideas, even if it's just a portfolio of other people's ideas and go to the neighborhoods where those kinds of things might be interested and figure out how to get marketing materials in front of those people. Maybe it's door-to-door, flyering a neighborhood, I don't know, but making some kind of targeted ads, targeting people on Facebook, on whatever it is in your area.

Create some ways of advertising and just spend some money on advertising and marketing and go and meet with some people. Do some water features on Saturday-Sunday jobs, take a week of vacation, do a water feature on a week of vacation if you need to, but get some actual business done and then start getting the referrals from the business and see if there's repeat business.

And then just quit your job when your job is getting in the way of your business. To me, that's a more direct path. You won't go into debt. You won't assume all of the unknowns of the crews and the deferred maintenance on the trucks and all the stuff that you're going to pay for and you'll be doing the business that you want to have and probably you'd have a better business because again, the water features business won't need much overhead.

You can do most of it with rented equipment. You can do most of it with day laborers, etc. And so that lower overhead will lead to a higher chance of success as well versus all of the overhead of the existing lawn maintenance business. That'd be my guess. Sure. That makes sense.

All right. Okay. Cool. Keep me in the loop. Thank you much. Want to hear about it in the future. And with that, we go to Billings, Montana. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey Joshua. I was curious if your thoughts have changed at all on food insecurity and famine kind of on a global level.

You had an episode maybe a year ago or so. I think you had some relevant concerns and just curious if that's changed, if any of those things that you were concerned about played out or maybe you haven't thought about it anymore. Just curious. That's a good question. So I would not create that show today because I don't have the same pressing fear or concern or need to warn as I felt at that time.

We've had good global harvests. We've had all kinds of good news. And so most of the worst-case scenarios of the last year or two were avoided. And so I'm incredibly grateful for that. I'm a little chagrined because I don't enjoy being wrong about stuff, but I'm confident that I'd made the right decision of warning about things that I did at the time.

From a systemic basis, the risks continue to be high, and there are real problems. I'm just not as emotionally invested in them as I was. And so I think things were better. I'm grateful that nothing horrific for most of us has happened over the last year. There are still significant problems.

There's every reason to be concerned about food insecurity on a long-term basis, but it didn't emerge over the past year. I think if I went back and listened to that podcast, I'd try to be very responsible in how I talk about things. I think I would be satisfied with what I did.

On that issue, it was funny. When Gary North was alive, I asked him a question one time in his forums because Gary North was a big proponent of Y2K concerns. He acquired the moniker of Scary Gary because of all of his Y2K warnings, and he was warning about Y2K and writing all over the place.

I asked him, I don't know, sometime 2018, somewhere like that, I asked him if he regretted it. And he made a comment to me of something like, "It's much more important to be courageous enough to speak the truth as you see it than it is to worry about your reputation," or something like that.

He was more eloquent, but that was the basic idea, was that there's a good chance that you're going to be wrong about things. But if you care about people, you owe it to yourself and to them to have the courage to act, even if you're wrong, and to say things how you see it.

So I'm satisfied with that. Now, what do you do for it? I think the actual preparation is exactly the same, and so I felt a need at that time to go a little bit beyond my usual laconic attitude and encourage people strongly. But I think that all sensible men and all sensible women should be prepared for famine at all times, because famine has been one of the biggest killers of mankind throughout all of recorded history.

And even though our societies have done seemingly a better job of distributing food, et cetera, for us, it's one of those things that is so core that we really should be prepared at all times. And the cost of preparation from a financial cost is very, very low. Generally speaking, most of us don't spend that big of our money on food.

And so living in the West, it's ironic that our need for preparation seems lower than a lot of people. We're not living in Pakistan and dealing with horrific climate change and all kinds of issues that they're dealing with, so we don't think about it. But on the other hand, if we wanted to actually protect ourselves, you know, 5,000 bucks spent and you're covered, your family is taken care of.

And so I think that all people should have some reserves of food. I think that all people should have some long-term reserves of food, and that it should be enough that if there is a disruption, a couple of bad harvests, a climatic change, a volcano blows off and wrecks crops this year, natural gas means that we can't fertilize as much as possible.

So the impact of famine and the potential for famine is very, very high. And so we should absolutely be prepared for it at all times. It's a sensible thing to do. And the easiest time to prepare for famine is when no one else is preparing for famine and food is abundant.

So I'm grateful that I was wrong about my biggest worries, but I still stand by the value of the need to be prepared for bad scenarios like famine. Yeah. I appreciate your insight and also glad we didn't have a famine. Do you have time for unrelated? Sure. Go ahead.

Second question? Yep. Sure. I'm curious for someone that is learning a second language, would you typically recommend that they would get to the point of some level of fluency before adding a third language? Or is there benefit to adding additional in parallel? And then I guess, you know, is there an estimated amount of time that you think on an ongoing basis is needed kind of per foreign language to keep at a fluent or semi-fluent level?

I think it would be different. If someone is learning a second language, I think my answer would be different than if someone is learning a fourth language. If you've never acquired a second language to a high degree of fluency, then I think that's an experience that you will want to go through before trying to do it in a second and a third language because it changes your confidence level.

And so if you're interested in languages, but you haven't demonstrated that interest even to the point of learning a second language to a moderately high degree, then I think you should do that first. Because after you've done that, your confidence will be very high. I think there's a somewhat well-known polyglot named Steve Kaufman.

And Steve Kaufman is a guy in history. He grew up as a monolingual English-speaking Canadian. He studied a little bit of French in high school, etc. But his first real second language was when he, after high school, went to France as a laborer and ultimately learned French after being inspired by a very enthusiastic French teacher.

And after learning French, he went to college in France, etc. So after learning French to a high degree, that inspired him where some years down the road, he was working for the Canadian Diplomatic Corps. And he raised his hand and said, "I can learn Chinese." And that started his career and ultimately started his true multilingualism.

But it was all based upon the confidence that he had developed from learning French to a high level. Now, once you have that confidence and once you've figured out kind of what works for you, because if you talk to language learners, all language learners will have a different idea of what works for them.

Some people just want to sit around and watch movies. Some people just want to sit around and read. Some people want to study grammar books. Some people want to take classes, etc. And so all of the lessons that you learn in learning your second language are things that will dramatically infuse your approach with future languages.

Now, if somebody has successfully learned at least a foreign language, then I think the answer to the question is much more related to interest and goals than it is actual technique. From my experience and from listening to a lot of polyglots talk about it, the human brain seems perfectly capable of distinguishing among languages without very much confusion.

It may be true that if you're just starting for the very first time, and again, you've never learned a foreign language, starting to study Italian and Spanish or Spanish and Portuguese simultaneously, that's not smart. You want to have some separation. But a skilled Spanish speaker who can certainly study Portuguese and keep them distinct, it's more just a matter of time, of how much time are you actually going to do this and what kind of results do you want.

True polyglots don't seem to have any real skill or aptitude for languages that can be measurable. What they do have is they have interest, and that interest causes them to put in the hours, and then the hours result in high skill in languages. And so if somebody has a high interest and they want to learn three new languages simultaneously to the point where they're totally ready to put four hours per day into all three of them, then there's no downside to studying the three.

And if their interest is in learning the three languages rather than in learning one language to a high degree, that would be the qualifying factor. Do what you want to. We're just doing this for fun. What I have found is that it's more a matter of, again, they don't really compete, it's a matter of interest and it's a matter of how quickly do I get results.

So I'm not, I wouldn't term myself as a polyglot. I speak advanced intermediate Spanish, I speak intermediate French, and I dabble in German and Latin and Greek and some of the other things, but I just go based upon my interest. And I don't see that they interfere with one another, but I also observe that the progress I make only comes when I spend time with the language.

And so it's a matter of, and the languages that I spend time with, I can make progress in them. It's just a matter of, do I want to make progress in them? Is that clear enough? - Yep. That makes sense. Thank you. Appreciate it. - Go with what you're interested in.

All right. We move on to Austin in Louisiana. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, Austin? - Hey, Josh. The reason I'm calling today is I have recently gotten engaged and in preparation for us getting married, sorry, I'm finishing up a run here, so I'm a little out of breath.

We are looking at signing a prenuptial agreement. And so I just wanted your thoughts on anything that we should be considering when putting that together. Why do you want to sign a prenuptial agreement? - So going into marriage, we have a pretty big, or what I would consider a pretty big disparity in our net worth.

And so I'm looking at it from the concept of, if anything were ever to go wrong and we were to end up getting divorced, that those assets that I'm bringing into the marriage would be protected. - Good. I think that is the appropriate reason and the disparity does make it important.

Which of you has more wealth? - That would be me. - And are you already discussing the details of a prenuptial agreement going into that? Is that a comfortable conversation for you or you haven't started it yet? - No, we've had the conversation prior to getting engaged and we've actually been together for approximately nine years at this point, so we're common law in the states that recognize common law, but we're just making it official in the state we live in.

- Okay. So the first recommendation is, I would recommend to you the NOLO book, N-O-L-O, the Legal Self-Help Publishers. They have a book called "Prenuptial Agreements, How to Write a Fair and Lasting Contract." And that is always my first recommendation because while you will undoubtedly retain the services of a lawyer, the work that you and she do in advance will make your legal fees significantly cheaper.

And it's way better for you to grab a $30 book and work your way through it and spend 10 hours on it. And you and she together going through it, that'll drive a good outcome. And so I would begin with purchasing the book on prenuptial agreements from NOLO. That's the starting point.

Now that book is a self-help book and I, of course, can't summarize a 400-page book and I'm not a lawyer. So most of my education on this subject is just study just like anyone else. But there are a few principles that I want to bring your attention to. The first principle is that if you are going to establish a prenup, that process requires you to make a complete and honest and transparent declaration of all of your assets for both of you.

And so don't have any illusions for either of you that there's going to be anything hidden or anything undisclosed. And so I think the process of going through a prenup book and using the self-help forms and everything in there to kind of lay things out is almost a good test for are we willing to communicate about these things and is there any decision.

Because in order for a prenup to be legally binding, it has to have complete disclosure of all of your assets. And if you leave any assets out of that disclosure process, that automatically invalidates the prenup and invalidates the entire process. I have known people who for this reason alone, they didn't initiate a prenup because they decided that it was better for them to try to maintain secrecy than it was to do a prenup.

I don't recommend that. I'm just saying that it's an important point that even moving to the point of a prenup requires full disclosure. Number two is that if you're going to establish a prenup, it'll be important that each of you has your own separate counsel. And so it's important that you can go through it together, but I wouldn't take, she needs to have her lawyer, you need to have your lawyer who are looking over your shoulders and actually making sure that it's fully defensible.

Because in order for the contract not to be invalidated by the court, there has to be proof that the contract was entered into with good representation and that both parties were fully informed. And in this situation, that's super important for her because as the disadvantaged party, the party who's less wealthy, then she needs to have really good counsel, she needs to have counsel defending her and making sure that her interests are taken care of.

Because presumably, the way the court will see it, you're the one pushing the prenup because you're the one who has the wealth. She's disadvantaged and so therefore you have to defend her in that way and that starts now. The third thing that's really important is that in order for the contract to be valid, there can't be any emotional manipulation or any kind of reason to think that, I forget the legal terms, but basically it has to be entered into when there's no pressure.

So there's a famous story online of a basketball player or a sports athlete who was engaged to this girl and he sent her the prenup, like you gotta sign the prenup, but she didn't sign it. And she didn't sign it, I'm gonna sign it, I'm gonna sign it, I'm gonna sign it.

We get to the wedding day and she didn't sign the prenup and he called off the whole wedding even after I spent a lot of money. And it's an interesting story, he tells the story. And the point of it is that even if she had signed it on the wedding day when she's breaking down in tears because he signed off the wedding, it's too late.

The prenup has to be signed long in advance of the wedding and there needs to be no emotional pressure that could later be used to invalidate the agreement. So your proper planning needs to include that. So those are the key things that I always warn everybody about, that in order for the prenup to be valid, you have to be super careful about how you go about it.

And then it's a matter of sitting down and laying out, here is what works and it's gotta be fair to you and fair to her. And so going through the self-help book I think will be a good way for you to do that pre-work and then when you're ready to sit with your lawyers, their job will be a little bit easier and a little bit less time-consuming.

Okay. And then do you have a moment for a follow-up? Absolutely. Go ahead. So on that same line of thinking as two people that are getting ready to officially merge their lives, would you have any other recommendations as we're looking at our finances, starting to combine finances and all that, of things that we should do prior to our marriage or shortly thereafter to kind of just strengthen our household financially?

How old are you guys? I'm 39. She's 33. And do either of you have children? We do not, but that is kind of in the plans for us in the near future. I don't know. I guess what I would say is it's hard. The way that you've gone about this relationship makes it hard because there's no bright line indicator.

So, for example, normally you say, "Well, don't merge any finances until you're married." But as you said, well, common law marriage, some people consider you married and right now if you left her and abandoned her, she could probably bring a suit against you because of and possibly file some claim against you.

It's better that the fact that you don't have children is important. But it's not as simple and as obvious as unmarried married. So I guess what I would say is that it's better to keep things as separate as possible until you're married because your legal protections come with marriage and also your legal opportunities.

So simple things like transferring money, a husband and wife had the unlimited ability to transfer money between each other without any issues. So you could transfer money, transfer assets, all that stuff. Meanwhile, if she's not your legal wife and you give her a car because you wanted to, well, technically you should have filed a gift tax return, things like that.

It all becomes muddy, et cetera, because our legal system is structured around marriage. So since you're moving in the direction of marriage, I would say just work on the prenup as quickly as possible and then move to the marriage as quickly as possible. There's no reason to wait a long time for marriage and then fully merge everything.

And the good thing is that you're young enough that I think that you'll be able to do that with minimal problems. Where most of the issues get really difficult is when two people are together in their middle age and both of them are calcified in their independence and unwilling to submit to one another, unwilling to work together, unwilling to do those things.

And that's where it just doesn't seem like getting together doesn't seem like a good idea in the first place. It's like we've got to keep everything separate. But both you and she being together for nine years, you've been together when young, you're probably well-suited for each other. I would just say do the prenup conversation and then get the wedding done and get to it and then merge everything fully and work it out between you.

But don't muddy the waters of the prenup conversation by trying to merge things and arrange property, etc. You just pay all the bills just like you have been and get the prenup and the marriage done and then merge her and she'll be your wife. That's how I do it.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. I appreciate the feedback. My pleasure. Congratulations and I hope that everything works out well and that the conversations go smoothly and productively. And just one quick comment, I've got you muted Austin and I'll just say this real quick before I move on to the next caller.

I think that the conversation around the prenup is more important than anything else. Just basically to judge like how well are we able to do this. And a fair prenup I really believe needs to take care of your wife and this is your duty. And I guess I'll moralize for just a moment because it is really important to me.

There are a lot of men who are taken advantage of in divorce court. There are a lot of men who have been ruined in divorce court. And that is why many men don't want to marry and it's very common in marriage circles for those men to say, "I'm never getting married and if I do get married, I'm going to get a prenup." And I do think that when there is a significant disparity in wealth, you need to have a prenuptial agreement.

That is appropriate. However, in the same way that even working out the details of it, a prenuptial agreement does not mean that if we divorce, I get everything and my wife gets nothing. That is immoral. If a woman comes and marries you and especially if she gives up her life and her livelihood to be your wife, she is deserving of legal protection.

And so I'm very sympathetic to men who get wronged by divorce courts. But I'm more sympathetic in many cases to women who get wronged by divorce. And this is where unfortunately it's a very difficult time to work through in our modern era. Because since the inception of no fault divorce, everything has gotten muddied.

I believe that if a man or a woman abandon his or her marriage vows, that is cause for appropriate sanctions. And so let's say that a man comes along, he's married to a woman, the woman is faithful to him, but he is unfaithful to her. He commits adultery against her, he abandons her, etc.

Well I want the court to have full power to invade his life, invade his finances, etc. and take care of her. Because in entering into a relationship with him, in bearing his children, in caring for his home, etc. to say nothing of any financial contribution that she brought into it, she deserves to be cared for.

And so I want the court to have that power. On the same hand, let's say that a man and a woman are married, and the man is perfectly faithful but the woman is unfaithful to him, and she commits adultery against him, or she abandons him, or does some great deed that is wrong and violates the marriage contract.

Then I absolutely do not want the man's life to be destroyed to provide for her, because that's immoral. If a woman walks away from the marriage and she abandons her work, why should she be paid from the man on an ongoing basis alimony and child support, etc. But on the other hand, if there was wrong done and the man was wrong, then absolutely he should pay child support, alimony, etc.

And I think most people agree with this. The problem is, has become very acute in the age of no-fault divorce. Whereas now, as a man and a woman, you can divorce each other for any reason or for no reason at all. And of course most people don't do that, there's always a reason.

But because a man and a woman can do that, it eliminates all safety from marriage. So if in this situation where you're getting married and your wife is coming to the marriage with you, if she decides five years from now, she just doesn't have the feelings for you anymore, and she turns around and she wants to leave, legally speaking, she can do that.

She can divorce you and leave. And that's where the prenup is really important. But the flip side of this is that you owe her a duty of care as your wife. And so let's assume that you and she are married, she bears you your children, and 15 years from now she has three children, and then you decide, "I'm going to up and divorce her." Your prenup had better compensate her properly for her work and for her contribution.

It's super, super important, morally speaking. You are responsible for her. You are her husband, you are her head, and therefore you must care for her and provide for her even in the case of divorce. So the prenup has to reflect this moral truth and it has to be weighty enough on you and weighty enough on her that you're in it and in it for life, otherwise, you know, don't get married in the first place.

So the easiest thing to do is when people are young and they get married, they get married young and they build it together, right? So my wife and I married relatively young. We didn't have much when we started and I don't have a prenup and nor would I want one nor would I advise one because we're in it and she is just as responsible for the success of our family as I am.

We are a team. We are indivisible. That's different than if you're, you know, 60 years old and she's 30 and you've built your... Well, there's obviously a different situation. And so you guys being closer in age, you just want to work this out and you want to be very clear and I want to be clear to you as the wealthier party that as you're working this through, your agreement, what you agree, what you reach in your agreement has to be not only legally acceptable, which is where you'll get the advice of the lawyers and what the courts and everything would actually uphold because remember, this contract, if this contract is deemed to be unfair, then it can be held as null and void by the courts and so it has to be fair.

But just in your own psychology, you need to embrace fully the idea that, you know, I'm responsible and that I owe her and that her job, if she's going to be my wife, it's not like you bring everything to the marriage because you got the money and she brings nothing.

What she brings to the marriage is enormously important and is enormously valuable and you just want to recognize it emotionally. So it's hard to go too deep into that stuff without insight, but just hopefully that's a small encouragement that puts you in the right frame of mind, Austin. No, that's great stuff to think about, Joshua, and I appreciate you taking the time to go a little bit deeper than just consulting a lawyer, which you always do.

You never disappoint on that front. Good. My pleasure. It's really important because it's a super emotional issue and the way that I think these issues are dealt with, especially in a sea of men who have been hurt by divorce court and who are in difficult situations, is they're just often dealt with very callously.

And I think we need to deal with them appropriately. We need to speak directly to men and directly to women that when men and women sin and they violate their marriage vows and they divorce, etc., it needs to be dealt with. But our courts are in a wreck because they've lost the ability to deal with this.

And they treat all divorce claims seemingly as the same, and morally they are not the same. So talk about those things and work them through directly with her, and I think you guys, congratulations. I think you guys are going to have great success. We finish up today in the great state of Indiana.

Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, Joshua. Can you hear me? I can hear you, but we got a little bit of digital lag, so go ahead and let's make sure it's clear. All right. Well, I'm happy to get on the line, first of all.

Thank you for all you've been doing. And I just got a couple of questions. I am that listener that you've been talking about. I started listening to you when I was only making about $30,000. You've inspired me to advance my life and make strides, and I want to thank you for that.

Wonderful. That makes my day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I always hear you say that you don't hear from these scholars, so I just wanted to make sure you knew I was one. Thank you. At the moment, I've kind of transferred from driving CDL commercial vehicles, and I'm making twice as much as I was two years ago.

And I'm just kind of looking, trying to cast a big net to where I can actually go next to maybe double my income again, or stuff I can do that. So I've been listening to a lot of podcasts, and just getting a broad view of the world, and maybe something I can get into and dive into.

And entrepreneurship kind of seems to have that drawing allure for me, and something I kind of want to get into. But with all the advances with AI and everything, it seems like it's a real crazy time to try to do something like that. So I just wanted to get your take on the landscape of AI versus business, and what are you thinking?

How old are you currently? I am 39. And do you have family that is dependent on you? Do you have wife, children to support? I do. I do. I have two boys, and my wife is actually pregnant right now. Oh, congratulations. Wonderful. Thank you. And are you over the road right now, or are you local or regional?

I'm home every night. So yeah, I'm a dedicated home driver. All right. And in terms of your own background, prior to driving, do you have any particular academic things that you studied in the past? Do you have degrees, et cetera? Or kind of starting from zero? Okay. I am starting from zero.

I never even graduated high school. Are you capable of academics if you were interested? Are things like reading books, taking tests, academic discussions, and things like that, are you capable of them if you're interested? Yeah, I believe I am. I haven't been in school since high school, but when I put my mind to getting the CDL it was really not a big deal.

I sat down with the manual, took the test. It was pretty easy for me to wrap my head around the whole thing. I believe in my last few, about five years of my life, I really got more into audiobooks and things like that. So I believe I'm educated. I believe I can go to school and get something if I was passionate about it.

Right. So it's important to identify this because there are a lot of people who didn't finish high school or didn't go to do anything beyond high school who are perfectly cognitively capable. They're smart enough to do plenty of college work. They just never cared. And it wasn't important to them.

And because they didn't care, it wasn't important to them, they didn't pursue it, et cetera. They didn't do it at the normal time when it was convenient to do it. And so that doesn't really say much, but you do need to understand where your strengths lie, is that if you are interested in an intellectual life or an intellectual job, you need to make sure that you have a good basic natural strength there.

On the other hand, if you're not interested in that and you're really skillful with other forms of knowledge and skill, you really work well with your hands, you really work well with people, et cetera, then you want to have some sense of that. And so I would begin by taking some kind of psychological career surveys and tests and get an idea of what the psychologists think might be good careers for me.

That would be a good starting place. Have you done that yet? No, no, no. I haven't done that. Okay. I don't have them off the top of my mind. Yeah, go ahead. I was just saying, like I just said, I've kind of just been casting a big net to just see if anything really grabs ahold of me and feels like something I could get into or really grab ahold of.

I've done really well with skill-based things like construction and a lot of glass work. I'd sell anything that really took a skill with my hands, but that's all I've really been able to apply myself to. Right. So I would suggest that you take as many career-oriented tests as you're able to.

I don't have my list current. In my career and income course that I used to teach, I gave a whole list, and some of those still are valid, but they changed. So if I woke up in your shoes, I would go to chat GPT, and I would ask chat, and I would say I'm interested in changing my career, and I'd like to take a list of – I'd like to take some psychological evaluations to see the kinds of careers that I'm more interested in.

Please give me a list of 10 different career tests that I should consider taking and see what's given to you, and take four or five, eight of them, whatever is appropriate. A lot of them will be done yourself. A lot of them you could just do online. A lot of them will cost you $40, $50, et cetera, but those things will give you a starting place based upon what the psychologists think you might be well-suited for, and regardless of whether you pursue entrepreneurship or whether you pursue a job or just a career change of a job to something else, it can inform you about some of the fields that you're interested in, and that will inform your educational pathway in terms of the next step.

Then in terms of job change and career change, yes, change is omnipresent. That's always happening, and yes, entire industries are being enormously disrupted by artificial intelligence, and it's only just getting started, but I don't think that generally speaking you should worry too much about that. Rather, you should just simply go where there's opportunity because that's your first thing is before you leave your job, you need to create something better, and in order for you to create something better, you have to go and look for opportunity, and once you find opportunity and you have a job offer for something that's better, then you can assess it in the light of a risk, and is this job subject to artificial intelligence.

But without a specific idea of a job or idea of a business, there's really no point in worrying too much about the risks because you're just going to spend time finding reasons why it won't work rather than reasons why it will work. The only time that you want to really think deeply about the risks is when you have a clear positive plan as to what you really want to do, and then you're just testing it and saying how susceptible is this to self-driving cars, how susceptible is this job or business to automation, how susceptible is this job or business to offshoring or artificial intelligence, etc.

But don't do that until you actually have an idea of where you want to go. Could you list today three different ideas of jobs or businesses or industries that you think you might be interested in? Yes. Okay. Shoot. One's a board game making company. I've already made two of them, just out of a hobby for a gift for a family member, but they came out really well.

They played through really well. I felt that there was a lot of passion in that for me, and I figured it had a lot of leverage and something that I might be able to go. So I've kind of looked into that a little bit. Something else is, obviously, the big trend with robots and AI, I would love to play around and have some kind of little company that makes robots because that just seems like I'd be ahead of the curve, but that's more fantasy style, but definitely interesting to me.

And then something else would be like, me and my wife have kind of looked into doing a franchise kind of restaurant or bar or something like that, but I feel like that's more complex with a lot of people turner over rate. Me and her both worked in a lot of restaurants our entire life, so we do know the industry from kind of front to back.

So those are three things that we've kind of shot around. Right. Well, the good news about those three things is that probably with all of them, with possibly the exception of robots or AI, it doesn't sound like more degrees or academic qualifications are necessary. You certainly have to learn a lot, but in terms of getting a college degree, et cetera, for all three of those, it's not necessary.

So that's one of the themes that I was looking for because if you are interested in a direction that's going to require more academic qualifications, then your answer is go get yourself a college degree as quickly as you can, get it done so that you have that. But if you don't need that, then focus mostly on learning what you need to learn for the actual task at hand.

For the board game company, that I would say is probably a matter of licensing. And what I mean is that it would be hard for me to see how you would start a board game company, but in terms of creating a board game and having a licensing deal for the game that you have created, that is probably a productive use of time and that's probably something that you could do with learning your way around, figuring out what do you need to know about how to license something, how do you negotiate something like that, figure out who you would speak to in terms of getting your game brought to life, et cetera.

But I would think that if I had created a board game, the first path that I would explore very deeply would just be selling the license to the board game rather than actually trying to create a "board game company." And to me, that seems simple and that seems something you could produce, that seems something you could pursue.

And so get yourself involved in whatever education is necessary and to kind of figure out how to go about doing that and then see what kind of contacts you can make and see what options are out there. In terms of robots and AI, I would say there are clearly – I don't know anything about robots.

That would seem to me something where you would need to educate yourself and probably get involved with a company as an employee of some kind to begin with, unless you tinker with robots in your garage and have something through. Creating physical items, physical things requires a whole more complex set of skills than just creating digital items.

Digital items have a very low barrier to entry because it's just lines of code. And of course, lines of code can be very complex, but you can learn to use tools very effectively. I was following a guy's story yesterday on Twitter and he – I guess I should switch to X.

I hate the name, but I'll switch. Anyway, he was telling about how he's building up – he's creating AI models for companies. And he had this video that he had made using AI. Just this beautiful lady walking on a beach, etc. Beautiful lady and he was talking about how he's creating customized AI models for companies to basically create their models, to model their apparel, model their products, etc.

And helping them create their own in-house set of computer-generated avatars for their products. And I thought, "Isn't that fascinating?" That's the kind of business that certainly you need to learn some tools and everything, but that's the kind of thing that has a lot more opportunity for a guy to hustle rather than needing technical capacity.

You have to have enough technical capacity to do the work, but that's more of a matter of going and applying your hustle to finding customers for it and working out the agreements. And so, things like that are within your reach in terms of AI, and I think there's going to be a whole slew of opportunities as we watch these new models transform, industry after industry after industry.

And so, I don't know how relevant coding ability will be to that or how relevant just hustle will be to that, but you should explore that. You should explore coding and see if you are attracted to the idea of learning to be a coder. There's plenty of resources out there for how to be a self-developed coder, and I think a year or two of nighttime weekends work could transform you into a perfectly hireable coder that would make more than what you're making right now and have a lot more upside potential as your skills grow.

Or you might be attracted to the entrepreneurial side of finding some little niche that makes sense to you and then applying it. Robots, on the other hand, because of the intersection with hardware and software, do have a higher barrier to entry. And so, while I'm never going to deny that an individual could develop skills and create a robot in your yard that does something useful, I would think that that would be more appropriate to finding a job in something that interests you from a robot perspective.

Third one, opening a franchise restaurant or a bar, that's probably your most likely money maker and absolutely kind of the simplest thing. It's also, of the three that you said, it's the least likely to be impacted by the risks of AI. Restaurants aren't going anywhere. A bar is always going to be popular, and that's a business that you know based upon your background and your wife's background, et cetera.

And so, opening a restaurant or opening a bar, to me, sounds like a winner in a totally protected business from the risks of AI. And who knows? Maybe you bring in a robot hamburger machine or a robot drink maker and that's kind of a component of what you offer.

But that's going to be probably the biggest limitation there would be your access to capital. So depending on how much money you have saved or depending on how much money you can borrow or what you have access to in terms of your money that you have saved, investments that you have, access to other people's money, people that would believe in you, et cetera, your biggest challenge is just going to be access to capital.

And so, that to me is kind of your highest success probability endeavor that could quickly free you from trucking, but you're going to have to figure out where to get the money and you're going to have to have the franchise that you want to do if you want to do a franchise location.

So, I like all those ideas, all I can just say is keep pursuing it, pursue it aggressively and then see what you're drawn towards in terms of interest and opportunity, et cetera. I wish I had something more profound, but that's what I got. No, no, no, that's, I mean, that's kind of what I expected was, you know, a generalized summarization and like I just bouncing ideas.

I've got one more question if you've got time. Sure, go ahead. Okay. So, I'm completely sold on trying to homeschool my kids. I kind of come off in the conversation a little bit overbearing with my wife and I think that slightly put her off of the situation and I don't, I'd like to try to work on getting back on track, but I don't think she believes me when I say that the school systems aren't really doing the best job and that I think we could do better and I think one of the big thing determining factors is that, well, we just had twin, we have four-year-old twins.

So, when they were born, we were very busy back and forth and they're about four and they, they'll talk to us, but like they're not having conversations with us, you know, they'll give us demands and, you know, prompts and, you know, and it's getting a lot better in the last six months.

It's gotten a lot better, but what happened is we kind of got spooked and we had them and we wanted to get, you know, some professional help. So, we signed them up at, you know, a speech therapist and it was at the local school and they seen them. They said they, you know, they were a little bit underdeveloped.

They suggested kindergarten, pre-K, and so we were like, well, okay. And so, now they're already in school and I'm kind of like, I think it's doing good for them because the teachers all very care and I think at this level, they all are very interactive and care and I think it's doing good for them.

So, I'm kind of like caught between this like, oh no, school's not that good, but, you know, but we weren't doing as good a job as we felt like or, you know, I don't know, I just want to run that by you. Yeah. So, your oldest two children are four and then you, do you have another younger or do you have another older?

I have another older, he's 14. Okay. And then your wife is expecting a baby right now? Yep. Okay. So, maybe twins, who knows? Maybe twins again. And in terms of your, in terms of your 14 year old, what has been his or her pathway through school? Just public schooling the whole time and, you know, I'm really not that satisfied with it.

Okay. And how's he doing? Like, is it working or you said you're not satisfied, but how's he doing? He's making it through. He's not interested in it. Okay. So, he, you know, he's a typical 14 year old boy. He did well. He, you know, the last two years before this, we kind of really had to get on him about doing his grades.

He just, he's good enough to do the grades. He's just lazy about getting them. Right. So, and then now we're into high school and he's just kind of like, this isn't for me, you know, I'm doing it because I have to, kind of thing. And how recent is your personal interest in this topic of homeschooling?

I got to say in the last two years, you know, you kind of hit me with some, some podcasts and I, you've kind of really gotten me thinking and kind of like analyzing my 14 year old and seeing some of the bad trends and like, kind of like listening to a more about what's going on in school and, you know, it's, it's not really a bad school, but like all the kids, all they want to do or seems like they want to fight.

I mean, like that's, that's the majority of stories that I hear is like, oh, the kids were fighting in the bathroom or, you know, in the lunchroom or whatever. And I'm just kind of like, man, do I really want my kid in this area? Like, and we're in, we're like actually in a good part of town.

Right. Right. Okay. So first of all, I'm glad that you're interested in this. I'm glad that my content has had an influence on that. So I think this is however, how you deal with this or how you interact with this, I think is really important and you're going to get great results if you go about this in a thoughtful way and, and, and you can get really bad results if you aren't careful and thoughtful.

So let's begin with this, right up until two years ago, you didn't have much interest in the topic of schooling, education, et cetera. This is a fairly recent thing for you. And while it's wonderful that you are now interested, you have to recognize that other people are going to remember you more about how you were up until two years ago, rather than how you are today.

And so whenever you get super interested in something and you start educating yourself, et cetera, you've got to be thoughtful about how you share that with other people and not just go around telling everyone why they're wrong and rather be, be more considerate in how you do that. And so it's your, what you are learning is perfectly valid, but wisdom would say that you shouldn't just spout it out to everybody else and expect them to just be a hundred percent on the same board with you.

After all, it took you 12 years with your older child, you had a child who was 12 years old before you took an interest in his education. And so you're not going to undo that in two years or in two months. So it's important for you to be thoughtful and considerate in how you interact with others.

Also in terms of your relationship with your wife, it's really, really important that you are thoughtful and considerate in how you approach the subject with her. She has four-year-old twins, regardless of whether they were in school or not, that is an enormous workload for her. It is hard work to take care of four-year-old twins.

And then with her expecting another baby, that makes it even more difficult. And if she's looking at you and she saw that for 12 years, you were totally disinterested in education of your kid and just, "Oh, send him home, he's doing fine, blah, blah, blah," et cetera. And now all of a sudden there's a random podcast on the internet that you're listening to, it's got all these weird radical ideas, et cetera.

You're going to need to really be wise in how you approach this subject and you're going to need to understand what she's willing to do and what she's not willing to do. Because there's a good chance that regardless of what you do, a lot of it's going to come down on her.

Now if you can do it yourself, then okay, great, but that's probably not going to work well until or unless you're able to adjust some of your schedule. And so it's perfectly understandable if your wife gives some pushback to you with your latest crazy ideas that aren't borne out by bringing her along with you and are all going to result in a whole lot of work for her.

And after all, she's going to question what she was doing before. So you got to be really thoughtful. And as a husband, a husband who arrives at a great destination and doesn't have his wife beside him is a failure as a husband. So one of your jobs is you can never outpace your wife on the change that you're leading your family in, is that she's got to be right there with you.

And that often means that you're going to go slower than what you otherwise would have been, but you have to have her with you. And that means that you have to think together with her and you have to listen to her and you have to interact in a way that demonstrates that you value her input and that it's not just you, you know, being a dictator that I heard this great podcast, but rather that you initiate conversations and that conviction of whatever you guys are going to do with your children has to come together.

Otherwise it's going to be a complete and total failure. And so the first thing you should assess is over the last couple of years, what have I done or what can I do to bring, what have I done to bring my wife together with me to think with her?

Have I shared with her what I'm thinking about? That's usually the first thing is that a lot of times as a guy, you spend all your time thinking and your wife says, you know, Hey, you know, how was your day? What are you thinking about? And you're thinking, but you don't want to talk to her.

And so it's important to make sure that she's always in the loop of what you're thinking, that you open your mouth and you tell her what you're thinking about and the ideas that you have, et cetera. And I'm not saying what you have or haven't done, just speaking broadly, broadly on the subject.

So no criticism here, but you want to make sure that you're really diligent about that. And then you want to give her time to think about these things. And then you want to ask her for her input and her perspective in order for her to feel confident in you.

She has to feel like you care about her. And the way that we show people that we care about them is generally, we listen to them. We spend time with them and we listen to them and we take their input and we take their feedback, et cetera. And that's the starting point.

So then in that context, if you've done a good job with that, now you can start to go in a different direction. But if not, you'll want to start there. Now, if you don't have super productive conversations, then one of the things that you'll want to bring in is you'll want to bring in a resource, something that you'll talk about together, you'll think about together.

So husbands and wives, especially if you don't have, if it's not natural, if you don't naturally think together, one thing that can be really helpful is to have something that you work on together. So a book that you're reading together or a podcast that you're listening to together, a book that you're listening together, et cetera.

On this subject, school, I now have, I've just finished a book that was new to me. I now have a starting point that I would recommend to you. And the book is called Rethinking School by author Susan Wise Bower. Again, it's called Rethinking School by author Susan Wise Bower.

Susan Wise Bower is fairly well-known in homeschooling circles because she wrote various books, but her most well-known ones are books called The Well-Trained Mind and The Well-Educated Mind, et cetera, that are widely used in the classical homeschooling tradition. But this book, I think it's fairly recent of her, I really appreciated this book.

And what I appreciated the most about it is she does a good job of carefully laying out some of the great things about the school system and also where a lot of this tension that we have with the school system comes. And then she systematically gives good advice for parents at every level of engagement with the system.

And what's really important about this is that I don't think that the answers are either you put your children in a government school or you homeschool. There are a lot of people who can't homeschool, don't want to homeschool, won't homeschool. And I think we need to have a lot of options beyond that.

And so I really appreciated how she works through this step-by-step. And if you're going to have your children in the government school, she goes through how to get the best results out of that. For example, with your 14-year-old, one of the first things I would do before disrupting his life would be to focus on afterschooling him.

What I mean is that it's your job, regardless of what the school does or doesn't do well, it's your job as a father to help him to succeed. And that means that he's going to have to succeed in the academics where he's good at it. And you're going to have to coach him into a life path that is productive so he doesn't just wander in the desert for 10 years and then wake up as a 30-year-old and say, "Okay, I'm going to get serious about life 10 years behind." And so you need to be working with him very intensively as a father regardless of what school he's in or not in.

And in that process, you will shore up those areas where the schooling is weak. You'll find solutions. You'll interact with him, etc. And a lot of that can be done independent of the schooling. Other things you want to test on. So I'm not going to do this in a personalized way.

So I'm going to ask these to you rhetorically. But other things I'm going to test on is, do you go to your parent-teacher meetings? Do you know who your children's parents are? There's a lot you... Sorry, your children's parents. Do you know who your children's teachers are? A very different meaning there.

So are you involved? You can go a long way towards just simply being involved with your child within the current school context before you even think about doing something else, before you think about homeschooling, etc. And then you can assign your child. One good way of seeing how homeschooling is going to work is going to be to find out, is my child willing to take direction from me?

Can I give my 14-year-old a course on Khan Academy and require him... By the way, Khan Academy has a great career course that maybe you and he could go through together because you might enjoy that, and talk about that, and will he take assignments from me there? Or if I put out resources for him, will he sit down and pick up some of the books that I leave strewn around the house, or can we...

What can we do? And so you want to test these things before you just disrupt everything for you to move in a thoughtful and wise way. So I would encourage you, go through the Rethinking School book. Now, in terms of homeschooling, one of the things that you'll really want to do is that especially if your wife is going to be doing...

Would be doing some of the... Some or most of the work, right? I always say that because I do most of the homeschooling for my older children. My wife does for the younger children. So our family, I'm the guy who's really into it, but that's not the normal case.

Most of the time, the fathers are not that into it, the mothers are. And so I think homeschooling moms is an appropriate moniker to use, even though I'm a homeschooling mom, I guess. But when dealing with females who are going to homeschool, there's usually a few basic things that they have to come to conviction about.

And these take time, but I'm just going to list three for you. Thing number one is, is this normal? Is this normal? And if you don't know anybody who homeschools, you've never been around homeschoolers, you never had the idea, whatever, just the whole normality of this is hard for some people to get to.

I don't understand this because it's been normal for me my entire life, and I'm surrounded by people for whom it's normal, et cetera. And so what's weird for me is the idea that any parent would send their child to a government school. To me, that's the craziest thing in the world.

You don't know? You didn't pick the teacher for your child? It's quite unthinkable for me, but I recognize that I don't reflect the general trend. I'm pointing out that influence matters. And so if your wife doesn't know any other homeschoolers, she doesn't know any homeschooling family, she's never been around it, she's just going to say, "It's not even normal.

I don't know." So you have to make sure that you and she both understand, if you're going to go in that direction, okay, this is normal, and that's going to require exposure. Number two is going to be a question of, is this good? Is this good for a child?

Because if somebody has an idea that homeschooling is not good for a child, then no mother is going to allow her children to be put in a situation that's not good for them. That would be unthinkable. That's a dereliction of her duty. And so you have to be convinced that it's good, and that's also kind of a philosophical discussion.

How would we know if it's good? How do we know what a good education is? What do we want for our children? What are our ambitions? What's possible for them, et cetera? So you want to get around people and hear their stories and just ask yourself, "Is this good?" And then the number three is, "Am I capable?

Am I capable?" And one of the weaknesses that really besets a lot of homeschooling moms is they doubt their capability. They think, "Oh, I can't do that. After all, I didn't go to college," or, "I don't have a teaching degree," or, "How am I going to teach calculus to my child?

Am I capable of doing it?" And they really doubt their abilities. And I think this is something that moms struggle with more than we do. As men, we're full of unbridled confidence in our ability to do anything, whether we've ever tried it or not. Most of it misplaced, but we still have the confidence, whereas women are much more akin to saying, "Well, I just can't do it." But that's where you need a plan.

And what you can do is, number one, is you need to build her confidence. And part of the way you build her confidence is by showing her a way that she can do it. And so this is where you need to understand, because there's a learning process. A mother who's never homeschooled her children might exclusively have the idea of what she was exposed to as schooling growing up.

She's like, "I can't do that. I can't set up a blackboard in my living room and stand in front of it for eight hours and watch my child through eight subjects, et cetera. I can't do that." But if you understand how different homeschooling can actually be, and often is, from that, it's different.

And so you'll want to expose to curriculum options. You want to expose to a little bit of ideas about what you're drawn towards, et cetera. You want her to understand that she can do it, because the reality is that any mom can easily homeschool her children. It really helps if a mother can read and write, at least at a fourth grade level, because then it makes it a little easier.

But now, being a little joking, but not really, I'm convinced that a mother who had a little bit of thought, even if she herself couldn't read or write, could effectively homeschool a child, because we're not dealing with areas where it's the actual specialized instruction that makes the difference. Most of it is a matter of a general environment and working on a systematic basis with the child.

And then she just needs to have the confidence that she can bring in experts wherever appropriate. So for example, right now, you could probably, because in most places you can, you could probably have access to all of the special education teachers or all of the therapists and whatnot in the school system, even if you homeschooled and just sent the children there for therapy.

Many school districts will allow you to pick and choose what you participate in. And so you can do things at home that are better at home, and then go and find teachers for where that's better. And that's the most important thing that she understands, is that you don't have to make it up.

There are dozens and dozens of completely done-for-you curricula that are great, that are really wonderful, wonderful environments that she can just sit down and say, "Work through the thing with the child, and read these pages from this book, ask these questions, do these worksheets," et cetera. It's all laid out by whatever curriculum provider you're interested in.

And then if she needs, if the children need a more advanced teacher, you just go get the more advanced teacher. But that takes time to build that belief, and that takes time to build that experience. So I have it in abundance because of exposure, research, and experience, but it would be very unusual for her to have that without a good amount of work on your part, and you guys going and getting exposed, and her knowing other homeschooled moms, and asking all of her questions, and going to a convention, and seeing all the things, and finding a message board that she's into, or a Facebook group, or a YouTube channel, or something like that.

I think it's going to take some time for those things to build. And if she's going to be the homeschooled mom, she's got to be in it, like in it. It can't be you pushing it on her, or it's just going to create problems in your marriage, in your house, and with your children.

She's got to be in it. So your job is to bring her along with you, to work together, to say what's best for our family. And then here's my final thing of my fairly lengthy monologue here. Nothing is forever. All this stuff can change all the time, and you don't have to decide anything that's for good.

So I think that classrooms for young children can be wonderful places. They're just great. There's a major difference between your four-year-old's classrooms and your 14-year-old's classrooms in terms of the experience. Four-year-old classrooms are awesome. They're just so fun. The teachers love the children. The teachers do all the work.

They're fantastic. Your 14-year-old classroom may be different. And so things are different at different ages. And you can enroll your child in school, and you can pull your child out of school, and you can homeschool for six months, and you can go right back into the government school, and you can do this thing for a year, and you can do that thing for a year, and you can try this, and you can drop that, and you can change this.

None of this stuff is permanent. So don't think that you have to do this forever like this, or you're going to screw up your child. Just get an idea, do your research, and be thoughtful, and then go in that direction. And then reassess regularly and say, "Is what we're doing working, or do we want to change something?" Maybe that should give you enough freedom and flexibility in your thinking to approach your children and say, "What is necessary for my children to flourish?" Because I conclude with this.

Regardless of what you choose in terms of this particular school, your responsibility as a father for your children does not change. Their education is your responsibility. It's absolutely your responsibility to see that they are educated and prepared in all ways that they need to be for success in life.

That includes academic knowledge, because we live in an academic society. That includes moral knowledge, because we live in a moral world. That includes career knowledge, because we live in a financial system, et cetera. So you are responsible to prepare your children for that. And then in that context, as you embrace fully your responsibility, then you can go and say, "Well, am I going to use the government school?

What aspects of the government school can I use for it? Am I going to use a private school? Am I going to use a private tutor? Am I going to teach? How am I going to do that?" And then ask God for wisdom to say, "Here, in this context, is what I can do." Because you have that responsibility no matter those external factors.

And especially with your 14-year-old, this is where you've got to roll up your sleeves and you've got to be in there with him every single day, constantly engaging him, helping him to think, coaching him to where he needs, because these are the most crucial years for you as a father.

You could disappear out of the lives of your four-year-olds and come back in a year and pick up where you left off with minimal damage. But with a 14-year-old, this is where you're on stage. These are your years. And so you've got to be in there day and night.

So those are my thoughts. Hope that helps. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. You know, in the last two years, I've really taken, maybe I felt guilty that I wasn't involved in my son's education as much as I felt like maybe I should have. Well, I should have been more. Maybe I think that's the feelings I harbored and why I may have came on so strong to my wife about pushing to make a better situation for the more children that are on the way and I think, you know, like you said, the confidence thing is her big issue because we've had a lot of conversations and we're both kind of on par.

Yes, we think it's a good idea. You know, we kind of throw it around a little bit, but we're not, we haven't like, you know, put anything in stone. And then the fact that, you know, we had to go get them evaluated, kind of like said it felt like we put us on our heels on the whole situation.

But yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for going through that again. And I know you've done the homeschool thing, several episodes on that, but, you know, I just wanted to shoot it by you. Yeah. Keep your ears out. I have, you know, we're coming up on episode 1000 of Radical Personal Finance and I haven't publicized what my plans are and whatnot.

And I do intend to continue with Radical Personal Finance. But as is probably no doubt obvious to any long-term listener of the show, I have enormous levels of passion for this subject. And so, I intend to do more on this in the future and share more. I have enormous levels of passion.

I have increasing levels of confidence from my own experience. And I just, I believe that this is so important because we are living in a world in which the systems of the old are not working. They are collapsing left, right and center. And we have to envision the systems of the new world.

And so, just very practically with your wife, get around some homeschooled people, you know, in your local community. Look for a community in terms of people that you can interact with. And if you can get her around some homeschool moms, again, whatever function is locally, there's plenty there for you.

Recognize that with four-year-olds, there is nothing that needs to be done. And so, yes, you should seek out specialists. That's your job. And if those specialists are helping, great. But there is zero evidence that you need to put your children in school at four, five, etc. There are plenty of people who didn't start anything formalized until seven and you're not behind.

And so, like, you have plenty of time. There's no reason to stress at all. Now, with your 14-year-old, you have proven that a man can make it in the world without a high school diploma. So you have that experience, but that experience also probably shows you that it's better off that he have it.

But guess what? You can write up a high school diploma on a piece of paper with a pencil and a ruler, and it's just as valid as the high school diploma from your local government school. It's something that you make up based upon what you do. And that's what the secret, like, I appreciate when people start looking into it, you're scandalized.

And you realize, wait a second, my government school doesn't have to be accredited, it just continues issuing diplomas even if it's not accredited and all kinds of stuff. So what you really need to focus on is with your 14-year-old, explore the options, and then figure out what would be some of the best options for him to see to his success.

And at this point in time, we can see even from our discussions with AI and everything that you're going through, et cetera, probably those subjects that he's studying in school, I believe they're important for knowledge, et cetera, but it's going to be more important that you start laboring with him on areas of interest and developing skills, et cetera.

So I'm an academic, I think we need to encourage the academics. I'm not in favor of abandoning a liberal arts education and just funneling people into trade schools. But you want to interact with him and figure out where his interests are and really connect with him and coach him.

So I will quit. Thank you all so much for listening to today's Friday Q&A show. I hope you've enjoyed it. I have certainly enjoyed it. I always enjoy these shows, they make me think, they make it easy, I just show up and do my best to give you my thoughts and hopefully it's useful to you.

Thank you so much for listening. A couple of things that were mentioned on the show today that I will remind you of, number one, I had the caller that I called in the beginning about internationalization, said nice things about my course, unsolicited, internationalskateplan.com. If you yourself are interested in figuring out a backup plan, internationalskateplan.com.

I would really love for you to come and hang out with me in Panama if you are able or interested in any of those things. I feel like I wish I'd done a better job. I have not looked into the details of the Panama details in the last year and they changed everything enormously 18 months ago.

So I'll be educating myself on their specific visa options when I'm there in January. But I'd love for you to come and be there alongside and we'll talk about it over cigars or cold drinks at night or something like that. Go to expatmoney.com/radical, expatmoney.com/radical, sign up for that event there in January.

It's coming up soon, expatmoney.com/radical. And if you'd like to join me next week, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, and with that, I'm out of here. The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. You could do a classic herb roasted turkey or spice it up and make turkey tacos, serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail or use simple truth wild-caught shrimp for your first Cajun risotto.

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