Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's a live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insights, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets.

I am your host. It is Monday, January 1, 2024, the first live Q&A show of the new year. Kicking it off in style. Thank you for being here with me. Each and every Friday here at Radical Personal Finance, when I am able to arrange the technology, we normally do live Q&A.

Those live Q&A shows are available generally to patrons of the show, but I decided to kick off the show with a special – kick off the new year with a special live Q&A show, something that I really enjoy doing. It makes it easy for me. You guys call me up.

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To begin with Hadi in Texas, Hadi, welcome to the show, or is it Hadi or Harry? >> Hari. >> Okay. It says H-A-R-I. So I figured it was probably a Hadi. Hadi, welcome. How can I serve you today? >> Thank you so much, Joshua. Everyone is happy to have someone in their life and I'm happy to have you in my life because you have pretty much influenced many things in my life.

Thank you for referring to the math academy and we are using that. >> Wonderful. Thank you so much. >> My age is 49, my wife is 47, I have two kids, 17 and 14. Our income is about $300,000 per year. We have a net worth of $2.3 million, roughly split into a million in real estate, a million in 401k, 200k in 529 college savings, 100k in CDs and brokerage.

I max out 401k and HSA. Our monthly expense is about $5,000. What should I do with my surplus income? We live in Texas. >> How much is the total surplus income right now if you continue to do all of those things? >> Yeah, probably $8,000 to $9,000 a month.

>> What are your goals? What do you want to do? Like, why would you invest into anything? What are you trying to accomplish with your money? >> I'm not trying to accomplish anything. Everything I want is already there in my life, so there's nothing more I want. There's nothing more I need.

And I'm not a big fan of charity, so I'm not passionate about it, I would say that. So the extra income is just going to be accumulating. >> Do you want to retire at some point? >> I mean, I can do whatever I would do in retirement today. My workload is very minimal.

I could watch movies, sleep during the day. I could do whatever I want during the day. So it's not something -- there's no constraint in my life right now that I have to leave my job to go somewhere. Plus, my kids are still studying, so I have to be in a school district that they are used to.

>> Your wife is not currently earning an income, is that correct? >> She's also working. So it's two of us working. >> And does she want to retire? >> Nope. >> She's also satisfied with her work life? >> Yeah, it's not any pressure. Life is good. >> What you choose to invest in is going to be determined by what you're trying to accomplish.

And so you're already using all of the standard financial models, all the standard accounts, 401ks, 529s, et cetera, and you have everything squared away. To me, the biggest thing -- and if you continue on this pathway, you continue earning the way you're earning, you continue investing the way that you're investing, then you will continue to accumulate a significant amount of money in the fullness of time.

The first thing to pay attention to is the ages of your children. They are currently 17 and 14. And there are two aspects to the age of children that I think are really important to pay attention to. Number one, very soon you will no longer have minor children, which means very soon the relationship with your children will change dramatically.

And I really believe that one of your primary focuses should be to maximize the relationship with your children. And if you can spend money on that profitably, that's something that you should do. It may be that you were very frugal in the past and you didn't do a lot, you didn't spend a lot, et cetera, but now you have more resources, and so investing into your relationship with your children, to me, seems like a very smart way to invest money.

If that means spending more money on, you know, fancy international travel, buying more toys that you can enjoy together, to me, that's some of the best money you're ever going to spend. You know, I like -- there's a YouTube channel that I enjoy called Wrangler Star. Wrangler Star is this guy.

His name is Cody. He's out in Washington area, in Washington state. And what's interesting is that Cody started with nothing, and then over time he made it big on YouTube, now has lots of money from his YouTube business, et cetera. But I really admire how he's done a good job of spending money to cultivate his relationship with his son.

And specifically what he's done is he cultivated things like motor sports. So for a time it was off-road motorcycles, then it became snow biking. And he has spent and spends enormous amounts of money to have these fancy motorcycles that he rides with his son, and these fancy snow bikes, and they go off and they enjoy it together.

And I'm using that as a metaphor to say that if I've got a 17-year-old and a 14-year-old and I've got money, then I'm going to say how can -- first, before anything else, I'm going to say first and foremost, how can I spend money on activities that will make it really productive for me to hang out with my children and to invest into that relationship?

Because four or five years from now, your 17-year-old will be 22, 23, probably be more engaged with career, probably be more engaged with his own goals, et cetera, and you'll want to have that time back. But with a 17-year-old and a 14-year-old, the actual activities that you do are something that you'll want to actually do something.

It's not like when you're seven and, "Hey, let's just hang around the house." You want to actually spend money doing something. So that's the first thing I would focus on, because 10 years from now, you're not going to have those same opportunities. Related to that, I think it's really important to build a vision for your family and say, how can I spend money profitably on this long-term vision for my family?

And so I released a podcast episode, can't remember if it was this year or last, but basically on why a vacation home may be a really great investment into your family. And I wholeheartedly believe that that is something that most people should consider. So being frugal and just having one home may not develop as much of the relationships and the environment that you want as if you go ahead and purchase a second home and make it a second home that's really nice, really convenient, et cetera.

Now in terms of investing into your children, I think this is also something that you could spend money on to help them. And so one of my ambitions as a father is to make certain that I have the basic infrastructure in our home and in our lifestyle to help support my children's social lives.

Because the friends that they have and the relationships that they build will be very, very useful to them. But if they don't feel like they have the basic infrastructure to support that, then they may not be as socially competent or as socially fulfilled as they otherwise could be. So a simple example is that when I was younger, one of my close friends, his family had a theater room.

It wasn't as fancy as you might see in a Rob Report special that didn't have theater chairs, et cetera. It had a big couch, a set-aside room, a big couch, and basically a projector on a 20-to-25-foot screen onto the wall, and then a nice surround sound system. But because he had that basic infrastructure, then his house was the go-to place for us to go and watch movies.

It was always the house because of this 25-foot screen and nice surround sound system. And for young people, having your house that's the destination is really, really helpful to support your social life. And then for you as a parent, it's really helpful for you as a parent because now you can get to know your children's friends very well.

You're not isolated from them. You're very involved in what's going on, and I think that's a really great structure for life. The same friend also had a private water ski lake outside of the house, a ski boat, et cetera. And those things create really good, useful ways to build relationships.

So if you don't currently have a water ski boat or a wakeboard boat, if you don't currently have a really great game room at home and a really awesome system for your children to play the kinds of games or watch movies or whatever the kinds of activities that they're into, then that would be the first thing that I would look at in terms of investing into your children.

Now related to that, I think, so I guess, excuse me, first it was experiences with you together, second into their social life. Third would be that I think you should invest into them directly, but not strictly into the college environment. And so the big imbalance that I see all the time is that people have a 529 account, and they think that successfully graduating from college is going to be the thing that launches their children's success.

But a lot of times spending more money on other things to support them, encourage them in their areas of interest, and to encourage them to go far and wide, to build independence at an early age, that's going to be a really great move. Now pivoting from that, there are two basic ideas, two different paths that you go down with long-term financial planning.

The first path is the path of hedonistic consumption. And so you start to increase your personal consumption to a higher level that matches your current income. Based upon what you've said so far, I doubt that's going to be a good fit for you. However, the other path you also kind of discounted, you said the charitable path.

But I would say that I don't like the word charity very much, because I think that undersells the basic concept. You may not like giving money away because you don't like some of the organizations that have so far requested your money. But I don't know that that absolves you from being interested in the thing that's probably the biggest long-term passion for you.

If you can find a particular area of interest, a particular problem that you want to solve, then to me, that's where you should be investing your money. And I believe, I'm not going to take you through that process here in the context of this particular public call, but what I would say is that over the coming years, especially as your children start to be grown, et cetera, you and your wife should identify a list of things that you believe are wrong in the world, some things that you would like to change.

And then you should start to involve yourselves in a process of engaging with those particular issues, finding out what other people who also want to change those things in the world are doing, and then start to get involved and put your money behind it and invest into changing some aspect of the world that we live in.

Because that is going to bring you a tremendous amount of joy, a tremendous amount of fulfillment, and a tremendous amount of focus for your money. From what you've described, just accumulating more money so you can increase your consumption is not probably, for you personally, a pathway towards enjoyment and happiness, but everyone has something they would like to see change in the world.

And putting money behind that will probably be your most fruitful long-term endeavor and a good way to use up some of the extra millions that you will undoubtedly acquire. So those would be the four basic things that I would suggest that you think about at this stage of life.

Thank you, Joshua. My pleasure. Anything else real quick? That's all. Thank you. Good. Congratulations on all your success. Keep up the good work. We go to Jeff in Georgia. Jeff, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, Joshua. Happy New Year. And to you? I'm a healthy 35-year-old, and I kind of see myself being single probably for kind of the majority of my life.

And just due to the fact that a lot of the advice out there is kind of for families or for people who are going through a difficult time in their lives, I don't think I'm going to be single for the rest of my life. But I think I'm going to be single for the rest of my life.

So I'm going to be single for the rest of my life. You didn't say the rest of your life. You said the majority of your life. Tell me what you mean by that. Well, you know, I think a lot of young men my age may claim that they will be single for the rest of their lives.

But I don't want to be so closed-minded that it couldn't happen. Okay. And I know that I'm probing a little bit, but it's important that I understand why you are making this choice in order that I could guide the answer to your question. What is it about singleness that is particularly appealing to you?

I enjoy the flexibility of it. I have a lot of friends who kind of live a single lifestyle and, you know, it's been fun to travel with them and, you know, just kind of see parts of the world. So I guess predominantly, again, sort of the fact that I found some folks with similar values and really sort of a desire to kind of do some long-term travel.

Okay. You're 35 years old. How much do you earn? About $80,000. And ballpark, your current net worth is? I have quite a bit of debt, so I'm roughly, you know, negative $100,000. Okay. So the first thing, I'll answer your question, but I would be lying to you if I didn't start by just mentioning the singleness factor because I have known a small number of people who chose to be single, chose not to have children, and at the end of their life, that seems to have been the right decision for them.

So I do not deny that there are people in the world in which—for whom that particular decision may not be the right decision. However, I don't think that most of the people who pursue that, who do it for the purposes of, say, hedonistic consumption, which is basically what you're describing, meaning I like my freedom, I like my flexibility, I want to be able to travel, I want to do long-term travel, etc., I don't think that really endures for very long.

And I think the people who seem to me—and this is purely from my own personal experience, I couldn't cite any data, I don't know if any social scientists have dug into this question—but the people who seem to me to be the most satisfied with this particular decision are those who have made it because it freed them up to do something that was important to them.

So the most obvious example is that I have known priests who took vows of celibacy, I've known Christian preachers who took the encouragement of the Apostle Paul in the New Testament who said that basically that if you are single, you're more free to serve God, you're more available to do that kind of work more effectively.

And those people, because of that decision, have often seemed to be quite content. They made a specific choice, and they said, "I'm going to be single so that I can dedicate my life to the kingdom of God, I'm going to take a vow of singleness so that I can contribute my life's energy to this particular cause." I've interacted with a few people who didn't have children who seemed to really take pleasure in that decision from a personal consumption perspective, but they weren't generally single.

And so they had a relationship that provided them with romantic companionship, it provided them with the basic comfort of having another person whom they loved in their life, but they didn't want the hassle of children. And so I think there's a higher percentage of people who are content with that decision than who are content with just singleness.

And I'm assuming that also included in singleness, you don't wish to have children. That's not always the assumption. I have interacted, especially over the last couple years, with a lot of women who are single women who are choosing to have children, but not to have a relationship with a man, but they still want to have children.

But I didn't hear that in what you said, so I'm assuming that you also, by single you also mean I don't want to have children. The narrowest one, however, is the guys who say, "Well, I just like being by myself and I don't ever want to have anyone involved in my life." And there seems to come a turning point when you become old where you look back and you say, "Was that really the right decision?" And again, I'm not denying that some people could find that to be the case, but in my own personal life, I have found that a lot of those guys start to want something different at the end of their life.

The problem is that it's just infinitely more difficult to have something different at the end of their life than it is in the prime of your life. So think very carefully about that decision, and then also assess how much your actions would change based upon how committed you are to your philosophy versus how committed you are to what you've done just simply because you haven't met somebody who has been able to sway your philosophy.

For example, one of my great friends for a long time, since I was a kid, I've mentioned him before on the show, but his motorcycle license plate is quite literally "Lone Wolf," his vanity plate says "Lone Wolf." That's his identity, and it has been his identity his entire life.

And so he's moved all around the country and all around the world living kind of just the "Lone Wolf" lifestyle, always had girlfriends here, girlfriends there, etc. And then I saw him kind of get to about his mid to late 50s, and first of all, his perspective on life changed a little bit because he looked around and realized, "I'd like to have something more than endures.

I'd like to have family." And then he met someone who was super special. Now it turns out that it didn't work out for him, but unfortunately, she passed away. But his entire philosophy changed when he met the right person. So consider those things as just some thoughtful warnings that be really careful to know yourself deeply and don't settle for this philosophy that you are embracing unless there's a strong commitment that you have to a reason for this philosophy.

And I think it will be most fruitful not for traveling or any of that kind of stuff, but rather because you want to make a sacrificial life of service in some case. Now with regard to traveling, I think I love traveling more than most people. But what I would encourage you to do is as quickly as possible, try on whatever it is that you perceive as the kind of lifestyle that you want to live as a single man.

If you want to go and be a vagabond hobo traveling around the world, then figure out how to get yourself a job, start a business where you can do that, and go do it as quickly as possible. Because once you've experienced it, you will find your own perspective on it more solidified.

You may find that, "Oh, indeed, I really love this and I'm super enthusiastic about this and I'm going to do this forever." Fair, right? I follow a couple of hobos on YouTube that I really enjoy their content and just these old single guys that have done this for 30 years and they bounce around the world living out of a backpack and I enjoy their perspective on life.

I learn a lot from them. But a lot of people also find that, "You know what, this isn't quite all it was cracked up to be." And what you want to avoid the error is the error of committing your life to a certain set of decisions for a very long period of time without having tried it out a little bit.

And so get as quickly as possible to your ideal lifestyle. And as a single guy, you have enormous flexibility to accomplish that right now. So if traveling is your thing, then this year, spend three to six months traveling. Quit your apartment, whatever you got to do to fix your finances, fix them, meaning quit your apartment, move into a box truck, convert a box truck into your home, go and live in beautiful places, stay in national parks, work online, get a job.

If you want to go travel to another country, then get rid of all your stuff, get on an airplane and go. You can simultaneously fix your current financial troubles with having a negative net worth being deeply in debt, etc., while also testing these things out. And that process will inform you very significantly about what you actually like and what you don't like in an important way.

Now pivoting to financial planning. Let's assume that after all of this, you say, "Joshua, you know, that's fine, but I definitely want to be completely independent. I'm not going to sacrifice my independence to another person. And you know, it sounds fine that some people want to go and dedicate their life to their religion or a cause or something, but that's not me, I'm dedicating my life to me." And then the second thing is, "I've tested this, for the last five years I've been testing this lifestyle, now I'm trying to fix it." So what are your basic financial steps?

Step number one is to figure out how to generate an income that allows you to live the lifestyle you want to live with a minimal amount of waiting. So if you were married and/or had children, what the pressure that puts on your shoulders as a man is that you have to subjugate some of your personal desires to what's best for the family.

And so, for example, if I were single, I probably would live in a box truck somewhere because I have that kind of vagabond personality, I enjoy a lot of aspects of that. I'd probably have an apartment somewhere, but I enjoy kind of that weird lifestyle of traveling around. But obviously, although I've tested it, I don't think that's an appropriate or useful lifestyle for my wife or my children to grow up in.

And so I consciously make the decision to move away from how I would live and I focus on what's right for my family. You don't have that constraint. You can live however you want to live. And the only thing that's the impediment to your living however you want to live is you're having enough income to pay for it.

And so that should be your primary focus. You have an $80,000 income. You should, number one, clear away this debt as quickly as possible, whatever it is, even if it's student loans, even if it's low interest, et cetera, because it's harming to some degree your independence, et cetera. But you should focus most of all on earning your income in a way that is personally agreeable to you, that provides you with the kind of lifestyle that you want to live, because that's the fastest way to even just getting and testing it.

And if you can earn your income in a way that is agreeable to you personally, then you don't need to do that much else with money. In the fullness of time, you do need to pay careful attention to building a plan that protects yourself, knowing that you cannot depend on any other people.

So if I get sick or if I get hurt and I can't work, I have a wife to fall back upon. I have children to fall back upon if I'm older and they're adults, et cetera. And so I have to maintain insurance when my children are younger, and of course I will maintain appropriate protection as my children are older, but I have a very strong and robust fallback plan, where if something happened to me, I got sick, I got hurt, I got paralyzed, et cetera, then I can fall back on other people.

As a single man, you don't have that. You don't have the ability to rely on other people through love relationships, therefore you have to rely on other people through contractual financial relationships. And so you need to think very carefully about appropriate insurance coverages, and you need to think very carefully about making sure you have money to pay for yourself when you're old and crippled, unable to provide for yourself, et cetera.

And so for you, it becomes much, much more important for you to accumulate wealth, to invest for the long term, to maintain high quality disability income insurance, high quality health insurance. You obviously don't need life insurance if there's nobody depending on your income, but you definitely need to care for health insurance, disability income insurance, and those insurance plans need to see you for the very long term.

And so you need to accumulate quite a lot of money so that when you're 65 and you're worrying about Medicare falling apart, you have an additional backup plan, because you don't have the backup plan that I'll have of five children that can care for me if I need it, et cetera.

And so also then now, you need to be very, very focused on building up your reserves and seeing to your health and seeing to try to avoid those negative outcomes. And that should be the guiding point. However, I would put all of that still secondary to saying, whatever lifestyle is that you think you're going to go, that you want to do, go and test it as vigorously as possible and then fit all that financial planning into that lifestyle as quickly as possible.

So those are kind of my initial thoughts. What's the debt from, the $100,000? Is that student loans or did you spend a bunch of money? What's that from? Yeah, I just spent a bunch of money. But I've recently got that onto like a credit counseling thing. So I was paying like $2,500 a month, but now we got that under so I can actually take care of it within my income.

So I feel a lot better about that. Good. Are you living a fairly conventional lifestyle, living in a house, living in an apartment, et cetera? Or are you already living an unconventional lifestyle? No, I'm in an apartment. And we've actually spoken previously about the merits of living in my Prius, which I thought very, very closely about, but that was like right before COVID and I'm glad I didn't do it.

But yeah, I mean, I think I've bounced around the ideas of van life and that, but I think just a basic comfortable apartment is for me. Okay. So I would just say, get rid of the past decisions, meaning get rid of the debt, especially if the debt just came from previous overspending, get rid of the debt and then resolve to yourself that in the future, you're not going to spend more than you have because you don't want to put yourself into bankruptcy if it can at all be avoided and especially dumb to go into bankruptcy for a consumer debt.

But get rid of the debt as quickly as possible and then just craft the income to fit your lifestyle. And so recognize that it's very accessible to you. So if you want to, and don't be scared of quick change. One of the things that I wish I had done more of when I was single was pursue some of the aggressive plans.

I played it more conservative than I should have. But if you want to pick up and move to Southeast Asia, then pick up and move to Southeast Asia. You can pay off your debt and et cetera if you can keep your job while working from the place that you want to go.

And I urge you as quickly as possible, do the testing of the lifestyle that you want to see if that's a great lifestyle. Because if you change, because you started the conversation by saying I'm probably going to be single the majority of your life. If you're ever going to change that, it's much better to change at 40 than at 60.

Everything about marriage is easier when you're younger, especially if you ever have children. Everything about children is easier when you're younger. So you want to change as early as possible and that means you want to test as aggressively as possible. We go to Kulin in BY. I don't know that, is that one of the Canadian provinces?

Welcome Kulin. Hi Joshua. Yes, it's actually in Germany. Okay. There we go. Yeah. And thanks for the opportunity talking to you again today. We talked a year ago and you helped me a lot with a big career decision. So I'm working as a strategic advisor, a self-employed, and I'm actually wondering how I do the marketing.

I'm wondering about increasing my visibility through any dedicated channels like website, LinkedIn content, speaking and engagements whatsoever. As I see the potential to boost my earnings, but I also, I recognize that actually stepping out into the public is significant and cannot be reversed, let's say it's an irreversible decision and actually I'm worried about privacy, asset protection stuff and so on.

Okay. So, let me just make sure I'm understanding. You are building right now a side hustle, kind of a new thing of working as a strategic advisor or this is your full-time job? It's my full-time job. Okay. So you're working as a full-time job and you want to build a business working as a strategic business advisor, but you're thinking about how do I bring in clients, how do I bring in business and in an effective way so that my business can be successful, but I'm also concerned about privacy.

Is that correct? Correct. Okay. Do you rely for your current business, whatever current clients and customers that you have, are you currently relying on your reputation that's associated with your personal name from your previous career before this one? Yes, a bit, and also from my previous clients in my current role, yeah.

So it's all about referrals right now and what I can observe from other strategic advisors is that they really have a great reputation and they are doing a lot of speaking engagements and so on. So, if you have a name in the world, then it's easier for you to get booked.

Okay. And I may remember speaking to you in the past, it's my impression that while you're trying to build this business, you also are not relying entirely on this business for your financial needs. You have some other assets saved, is that correct? Correct. Okay. So if that's the case, if you have other resources that can provide you with long-term support, then it means that you can take a more strategic approach to building the kind of business that you'll definitely want to have 10 years from now.

And that may be different than the business that you would build if you definitely needed money 10 weeks from now. And so that is an important consideration. One more question, then I'll give you my thoughts. Why would you be concerned about privacy? What benefits do you personally perceive in maintaining your privacy?

Yeah, just to live a life which is absolutely independent from my profession, right? And so what I can see is you never know how successful you could become, right? And what I see is that very successful, very rich people, they made the decision very early to not go out into the public, right?

So they are, especially in Germany, we have a lot of hidden champions. Nobody knows how rich they are. And you need to make that decision very early. So this is actually the thought process behind it. Okay. Privacy would have a number of different layers. And almost everything that you do for privacy will harm your business success, unless your business is something related to privacy itself, which is not what you're talking about.

So by pursuing privacy, you are handicapping yourself. You're making it hard for yourself to succeed. It doesn't mean it's not worth doing. I personally believe that every private dollar that you earn is worth probably double to triple of every non-private dollar. And I'm not referring to tax evasion, I'm just simply saying that you receive less trouble, less difficulty, et cetera, if you can avoid public scrutiny.

And so I affirm your desire, and I'm going to tell you my thoughts on how to accomplish it, but we must acknowledge that you're making it difficult for yourself when you do that. So there would be a number of different things that you could keep private, and you could decide how aggressively you want to pursue privacy.

The first thing that you could do is you could operate under your current name, the name that you're known by, and you could just protect your face. You could even protect your voice. And to me, the face is actually your most valuable form of privacy. If you were a skilled business strategist, and you have the ability to write compelling articles that are useful, maybe creating a podcast where it's just your voice, but there's no face associated with it, then you avoid most of the frustrating aspects of notoriety, which is being recognized personally in public, et cetera, but you're able to be competitive and effective with your clients by simply using your ideas.

And as a business strategist, that is probably something that performs a good or provides a good and effective form of marketing. And so can you write an effective blog, can you write effective papers, can you publish in trade journals of the industry that you're targeting, et cetera, and just keep your face out of it.

That's going to maintain a lot of privacy for you. If you want to change and you want to change the name that you're associated with, the simplest thing to do that is simply to have a business name that you work under. And that's very, very normal and relatively easy to accomplish.

So as an example, I have a friend of mine that I've worked with on various projects named Gabriel Custodiate. Gabriel, I'm quite certain, is not his legal name. I have no idea what his legal name is, and I don't care, because to me his name is Gabriel. It's just as good as anything else.

And so I'll just interact with him under that name. And so legally speaking, and I'm not expert on all the EU laws, but I can speak from the American perspective, what you should do is simply operate your business under a business name in the same way that an author may publish under a pen name.

And to do that avoids all of your legal risks, because you're not representing yourself to a government agent as somebody other than who you are, you're just simply representing yourself to the public under a certain name. And the classic example is any author. Again, Mark Twain is a well-known author, but his legal name is not Mark Twain, or who's the guy, Ibram Kendi, or Muhammad Ali, almost any of these guys, their name that they operate their business under is an assumed name that fits their personality, or it fits the image that they're trying to reflect, etc.

It's not their legal name. And you can do that as well. So you just choose a name that you do business under, and then the name that you do business under is not your legal name. That eliminates all legal risk, because whenever you present an identification, you're using your formal, official government identification, but whenever you do business in public, or you give a speech, etc., you're known under this other name.

Now a good way to do this, that I think is probably the best privacy advice that most people should do, is just simply have a nickname that you operate under. And so years ago I knew a man named Sonny, I'll skip saying his last name, but I thought for basically all of the time that I have known him, that his name was Sonny, like that was just his name, his name was Sonny.

And because he, that was, had everyone called him, that was his name, it was on everything. It was only decades later that I realized that was not his legal name. His legal name was something else that I'm completely ignorant of. Or I have another friend who has a name that is often shortened into letters, and so in English we do this a lot with AJ and DJ and things like that.

So this friend, he always did business under his, he was known by this abbreviation. And then one time he was arrested, but he was booked and arrested under his legal name. And so because he was always known under the initials AJ, for example, then everyone knew him as AJ, not Alex Jones.

And so when Alex Jones is legally incarcerated, then he still maintains privacy because when people search for him, they search for AJ, not Alex Jones, and it provides him some protection. And so those are just kind of some simple things that you could do that probably are not too disruptive and work out fairly well.

In terms of building the business, the most important thing, if you're going to build something private, is to focus on results. And so your best solution to building a private business is to be known as extremely effective and extremely discreet. So the guy who can come in and who can double revenue or double profit in three years will be talked about among other people in that industry, and they don't really care what he does business under, what name he does anything under.

And so that is going to be your most effective marketing term. If you have to go to the public and try to market in public, then you're automatically going to bring in more scrutiny. So there's probably a lot more that could be said about effective marketing, but I would like to sidestep some of that discussion because that'll be so focused on this particular niche that you're in.

My comment is simply that people who get results are the most important thing, and that if you are the guy who gets results, then your privacy bent, your proclivity to privacy, your inclination towards privacy can actually be a very appealing aspect of your business, especially if you are in the business of just making people money.

So what I would say put simply is I would assume a nickname, and a nickname or a pen name under which you do business, have it be something related to what you're doing, if convenient, so that people who know you in the past, you just say, "Hey, I've changed that." Consider going to initials and not make too much of a big deal out of it, but just do business under this new name and keep your current identity the way that it is, and then focus on being someone who gets results and gets referred around the industry privately for the good results that you have, rather than trying to do a lot of public marketing.

And that would avoid a lot of those problems that you're describing. Thank you very much. My pleasure. All right. We move on to Max in Virginia. Max, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, Joshua. Can you hear me? Sounds good. Awesome. Happy New Year. Thanks for taking my call.

I've got sort of a two-part question. They're different topics, but tied together, at least in my life. So for some context, we've got some major life changes coming up in the next year. My wife and I are expecting our first child in June, and then we're likely going to be moving after I complete a residency program.

And that move will accompany me in a new job and a potential big increase in our income. My question pertains to entering a business contract agreement with someone who has been more or less a mentor/family friend for me. We have a relationship on great terms, someone that I trust and value, and kind of navigating the contract details and doing my due diligence, because I've never entered a business contract agreement with someone who's been a student most of my life.

So at this point, we've essentially just had a verbal agreement to move forward with formalizing a contract. And a couple of the big points that at least I know we'll want to cover on this contract are how I'll be paid, whether it's 1099 or W-2, the potential for ownership in the future.

And the way these contracts are normally done is there's like a one- or two-year associate trial period. And then if the doctor/owner wants to sell a portion of the practice, then you could potentially buy in if that works out. But usually, that's baked into the first contract. And then I guess the trickier thing is a lot of the time, these contracts have non-compete clauses.

And we both want to protect ourselves, but kind of within reason. I'm trying to come up with what would be a fair compromise for that, just to preserve the relationship, but being cognizant of just the business side of things. So I was hoping for your insight just on things that I should prioritize in a business contract like this.

And then if we have time at the end, I'll add on. In what way will your business partnership put both of you individually in a better situation because you're together than you could achieve on your own? I think in our profession, we probably would both agree that it's better to have two to three doctors in an existing practice, just in terms of sharing the workload, and also to be able to take time off more liberally and more flexibility with that.

That's kind of my perspective. I'm pretty sure he has the same. And also, starting my own thing is not really something that I'm too keen on doing right now just because of the workload that would come along with that. I'd like to join an existing operation, so I don't have to go through all the startup work.

In terms of what I hear you asking is a fairly general question of what advice would you have for entering into a business partnership as I come out of residency. Is that basically, in a nutshell, your question, or was there something more specific that I missed? Yeah. No, that's the question, and then I don't know if it's with someone that I already know and trust, I guess.

I'm a little cautious moving into that. To me, the most useful advice that I can give you would be fairly general, but also extremely impactful. In any kind of partnership, be it a business partnership, be it a marriage, be it just a project that you're working on, etc., both partners need to be fully persuaded that they're better off together than each one individually is on his or her own.

And if you can accomplish that, if you can be convinced that we're better off together, then in many ways it doesn't really matter what the paper says, it doesn't really matter the details of the contract, you've solved it. But if there's any question about whether or not we're better off together than we are apart, then the details of the paper don't necessarily fix anything, no matter how beautifully and professionally the details are committed to in a legally binding document.

So to me, that's always where I want to spend 80% of my time, is simply saying, "In what way do we, each of us, contribute to one another in a way that we're just convinced makes our partnership synergistic?" Meaning one plus one is more than two, that's what synergy means.

So you could have one plus one, but if it's not more than two when you come together, then you don't have a synergistic relationship. And so what is at the core of a synergistic relationship? Well, usually it will be partners providing skills and abilities to one another that each one individually lacks.

And so the classic example that I repeatedly use is, if you have one person who loves management and another person who loves sales and hates management, or one person who loves sales and another person who loves design, then those people can come together and be a very effective partnership because each of them can focus on what he or she does well while leaving the things that they don't want to do to the other person.

In your situation as doctors, especially as doctors who are basically performing the same basic function, you're going to need to find your synergistic value in size, in scale, in providing easy relief to one another, that there'll be more time off for each one, etc. But you need to clearly identify and clearly delineate, write out, communicate clearly how we're better off together and what makes us better off together.

And that's something that I would do absent of any individual contract negotiations. I would simply do it and be very explicit about it and say, "Why do we get together?" So for example, you, the young physician, you're gaining a whole lot of benefit of coming into a practice, you don't have to work so much, there's an established patient base, etc., there's demand, and so you're getting a lot of benefit, but what is he getting?

That would be the question. He needs to know what he's getting, otherwise the partnership will feel very one-sided and he'll feel like, "Well, the young guy, Max is getting all the benefit, but what am I getting for it? Max is just taking all my clients, etc." And so that should be where most of your focus is.

And I believe that if we spend a good amount of time on this before any partnership going into a partnership, before going in any marriage, etc., is how do we complement one another? How do we have a synergistic relationship? And we know that, and we know that the other partner really values what I have to contribute, and I know that I really value what my partner has to contribute, then we build strong and enduring partnerships.

And strong and enduring partnerships don't need a lot of legal protection. They don't need a lot of carefully negotiated clauses, because the benefit to the partnership is obvious, and it should be the kind of benefit that will endure throughout time and remain obvious over time. Any partnership that I have seen fall down and fall apart, become filled with rancor, fighting, etc., has basically fallen apart because the partners don't think that we're better off together than we are together, which leads me to part two.

You should anticipate all of the reasons why the partnership would disintegrate and how we would each feel that we're better off apart. And so an example often in a business partnership would be this. You're coming out of residency, and you're choosing this path because you don't want to work very much, meaning you're ready to work, but you don't want to work the way that you would have to work if you were building your own practice.

And so you're hoping that I can do 50 hours a week, not 90 hours a week. Meanwhile, your business partner is expecting you to do 90 hours a week, because after all, that's what I did. I did 90 hours a week after residency, and you could do that too.

And so where would be the breakdown? The breakdown would be he's looking at you and thinking you're a lazy bum because you're not working like he worked. Meanwhile, you're saying, "This was the whole reason I got into this," and that leads to a breakdown of communication. This happens when business partners, one of them wants to maximize profit, one of them wants to maximize lifestyle.

This happens in marriages when one person wants to maximize children, the other person wants to maximize global travel, anything. It's any time you have a breakdown of vision, then people start to question, "Why am I in this relationship in the first place?" And that's where things go bad. And so you should talk together and say, "Well, where would be our weak points?

What would be the kinds of things that would cause you to feel like the synergy of our relationship has collapsed? And then am I willing to not do those things? Am I willing to avoid those actions that would lead to a collapse of synergy that would ultimately lead to a collapse of partnership?" Now when you and he have had those conversations and you have a good understanding, each of you individually, about how you're better off together than you are on your own, and both of you clearly see that you're better off together than on your own, then that's when you bring in the lawyer and you draw up the business agreement.

And you can save yourself an enormous amount of money by simply clearly knowing how you're ready to go, and then you just bring in the lawyer to cover anything that you've missed. And the legal process is mostly a matter of putting in place what happens if something falls apart.

And so what happens if we die? What happens if one of us is disabled? What happens if one of us is divorced, etc.? But all of that stuff can be handled fairly straightforward with specific contract clauses that are common in your industry, with insurance policies. You might have a buy-sell agreement, etc., funded with insurance, all kinds of things that you'll put in place.

But it all rests on clearly understanding how we are compatible together. Then for the specific details, I have no idea what's a reasonable non-compete clause. What I would say is that those kinds of things are set by the marketplace. And so let's say that the standard amount of time for a non-compete in your industry is five years, that if this partnership were to dissolve, you can't compete with me in this market for a period of five years.

Well in that situation, it would be generally unfair to your partner to say, "Well, I don't want it to be a five-year non-compete clause, I want it to be a one-year." But it would also be unfair for him to say, "I want it to be a ten-year." And so you'll rely on industry norms, because in essence, your partner is not in competition with you, he's in competition with all of the other senior physicians who would like to have you come into their practice.

And you're not in competition with him, rather you're in competition with all the other residents that he would like to bring into practice. And then my final comment would be in terms of relationship, okay, what value is there to the relationship? Clearly, having a friend, having someone that you trust, etc., is incredibly rewarding and should give you a good solid foundation to go on.

But it doesn't mean that you can avoid communicating about these difficult things. And at the end of the day, I don't think there's any relationship of friendship that can overcome a basic mismatch in expectation in the fullness of time. And so I would not rely on the fact that we're friends, etc., in any of this.

I would rely on the fact that we've clearly communicated with one another and we understand how we have a synergistic relationship. And because we understand how we have a synergistic relationship, then we can negotiate the details. Those are my thoughts. Thanks, Joshua. That's really helpful. And I knew I could count on you for your perspective there.

I think I was getting too lost in the details and you're right, I think just kind of focusing on the fact that if we're better together, then the details will kind of work themselves out, you know, after the scenes. And then I guess my other question was just, so we're having our first job in June, and then I'm going to go back and re-listen.

I know you have a ton of content on raising kids, but just in terms of like being a father to a newborn, do you, what's your general resource, you have an episode about that. I'll go back and listen to it. And then my wife and I were considering talking with the doula, and I don't know if you have any experience with them, or I don't know a lot about it.

Yeah, yeah, I do. I have talked about that publicly previously in detail, and when I get my new website launched here very soon, you'll be able to search all the past episodes and specifically zoom in on that. And so that'll be a good resource for you. I'm going to give you a fairly abbreviated rapid-fire answer here, just because I have a long list of callers afterwards.

But I do want to make sure that I give you kind of some big points. So what I'll try to do is I'll give you the bullet points, but I won't try to defend them in detail. Number one, the first thing, as your wife is pregnant, the first thing that you have to think about is her health and the specifics of childbirth.

And so you should take a very careful look at everything that you can do to support her and her health. What I would say is I think the best nutrition book out there is called Deep Nutrition. The baby has already been conceived. The physician author of the book Deep Nutrition has a protocol for women who are planning to conceive and who are hoping to conceive, because her preconception diet is really, really important.

But I would say the most important thing is to get your wife the very best nutrition that she possibly has. Your genetic contribution to the baby is done. And so you want to make sure that for future children that you keep your health as good as possible. Once you have this baby, it's done.

And so now you're totally focused on her and on her well-being. The most important things for a pregnant mother are nutrition, lots and lots of high-quality nutrition, lots of really great meat, really high-quality foods and no junk, and then also making sure that she gets abundant exercise, lots of walking, etc.

The exercise should be modest but consistent, because you want her to be really, really strong. And a strong woman who goes into childbirth as a strong woman will have a better experience. Related to childbirth, it's really important to dig into your philosophy and create a philosophy of childbirth. I'm always acutely aware when I'm speaking to someone who knows much more about biology than I do and human biology.

However, what I would say is that in Western medicine, my biggest complaint is that in many ways children and babies are treated as a disease from which a woman needs to be delivered instead of as something that is natural and normal and a natural and normal part of life.

I believe that her body is uniquely designed to successfully and painlessly and easily deliver a baby. There are always individual exceptions to that. She may have poor bone structure, she may have some unique biological thing that makes it more difficult for her. But our standard approach should not be to identify babies as a disease from which a woman needs to be delivered, but rather as a normal and natural component of that.

And so you'll want to dig into how to help her have a healthy, successful childbirth. I generally recommend as a starting point the old Ricki Lake documentary called The Business of Being Born. My wife and I, we watched that doc, it was recommended to us when we were having our first baby and I think it's really a great starting point to kind of get an idea of what are my decisions about this.

In general, the most important thing that you as a husband need to do is make sure that your wife feels confident with whatever the choices are that you make regarding childbirth. And so you'll have three basic choices. Choice number one is do we plan to have the baby in the hospital?

Choice number two, do we plan to have the baby in a birthing center? And choice number three, do we plan to have the baby at home? Now I would guess that your natural inclination as a physician would be to go to the hospital. And clearly, from a medical perspective, there may be good reasons to do that.

However, the problem is that the hospital is generally a pretty uncomfortable place for mothers to be. There are enormous numbers of interventions, it's very uncomfortable for her, and your experience of having a baby in a hospital is generally not particularly enjoyable. And so what many mothers, especially mothers who are having pregnancies, where there's no contraindications, there's no indication that this is a high-risk pregnancy, etc., then what many mothers will do is they will focus on choosing either a birthing center or an at-home birth.

And if you go to a birthing center or an at-home birth, then the mother is in charge and she can have the kind of birthing experience that she herself wants to have. And I think that in many cases that itself can lead to more successful medical outcomes than being in the hospital.

And so usually, however, for a first-time birth, unless she's very persuaded that that's something that she wants, then you'll probably wind up choosing a hospital just because of that being kind of the standard default. If you choose a hospital, then as a husband, that's when you have to go into doula mode, and that's when you have to go into advocate mode.

Because in many cases in the hospital, you have to be the one who fights against the physician staff for your wife to have the kind of childbirth that she wants to have and is capable of having. Because the hospital is designed around risk minimization and around the convenience of the hospital staff, it's not designed for the pleasurable outcome of the mother.

And so a doula is basically an advocate, somebody that you hire to be the mother's advocate. I consider this to be my primary job as a husband. I'm her advocate. And so what I want to make sure is I know exactly what she wants and that I intervene and all medical things have to come through me because I'm her advocate.

And so that is something that you can do. But I think a doula, especially in a hospital, is basically a requirement. Because what can happen if you hire a great doula is that you're there for your wife, you're focusing on her. The doula is there intervening for you with the hospital staff to make sure that your wife's desires and wishes are being carried out.

So that only the interventions that are actually necessary, that the medical team can actually say this is necessary, happen and the rest of it she can focus on herself. But you'll need to do some thoughts and research on that. If your wife doesn't have any counterindications during pregnancy, then I think most people should be strongly biased in favor of giving birth in something like a birth center that has a hospital as backup.

Because the midwives, and here I'm talking about licensed midwives, not nurse midwives, but midwives, their training is very different than that of an obstetrician gynecologist. Because the midwife is trained to see to the mother's, to allow the mother to be in charge of her childbirth and to make sure that the medical indications that need to be followed are followed, rather than for the physician to be in charge.

And I don't fault obstetricians for this, but basically they get accustomed to being in charge. Because when they're called in, there's usually an emergency happening and they've got to be in charge because they've got to save a life. But most childbirths are not emergencies, and that's where there's a big difference there that you want to think about.

That was a longer explanation than I meant to, but I think it's important. Now related to that, I am persuaded that a standard of care should be that pregnant women should receive consistent chiropractic adjustments to make sure that their hips are properly aligned to create a maximal possibility of a safe, healthy, vaginal childbirth.

And I think the most important thing that you want to do as a husband and work with your wife is you want to focus very deeply on eliminating any fear that is related to childbirth. American women broadly, Western women broadly, often are quite apprehensive about childbirth for various reasons, but largely related to the fact that they've only ever seen, like a lot of times for a new mother, the first childbirth she ever sees is her own baby.

And she's never been in childbirth that's different than that. And so all of the childbirths that she's ever witnessed are on a TV show, and they show a woman screaming her head off underneath a bright fluorescent light, lying in a hospital bed surrounded by people who are screaming and shouting and shouting out for an emergency.

And that's why I always like the Business of Being Born documentary, because you can see that childbirth doesn't have to be like that. And so thankfully, with five children and counting, my wife and I, our childbirth experiences have been night and day from that. Rather than them being medical emergencies that are loud or that are painful, etc., we've had smooth, easy births.

The process of labor has always been something that is very intimate, where we're together, we're very close. I know how to support her, she knows how her body labors, she can listen to her body. And generally speaking, while I wouldn't say that it's not fair to say that childbirth is pain-free, there is certainly intense sensation related to childbirth, but it has never been for my wife a debilitating pain the way that it's pictured.

And a significant portion of that is physical, but a significant portion of that is just mental, because a woman who is scared of childbirth will tense up, she experiences the sensations of labor very differently than a woman who is relaxed and confident. And if you study cultures around the world, there are cultures around the world where mothers have a completely different experience with childbirth than they do in the West.

And I care about this because if your wife is – first of all, you want her to have kind of the best possible outcome, but I also care about this because the experience that she has with childbirth can make an enormous difference in the experience that – in your guys' willingness to have multiple babies.

I had a close friend of mine who, when they got married, they said, "We're going to have a huge family." And right off the gate, the first baby childbirth experience was so terrible that they resolved we're never having children again. And those kinds of things can, in some cases, be avoided.

Final thing is that hypnobirthing is quite popular. It's the best that I've found of the different methods, and we've used the hypnobirthing techniques very effectively, and I encourage that. But those are kind of your big decisions. Now, what you asked me about was kind of baby. First thing is that, if at all possible, schedule some time after the childbirth to take significant amounts of time to take care of your wife.

What caught us unawares because we had spent so much time researching childbirth, et cetera, was how difficult the first few weeks of a baby's life are. Hypnobirthing, brutal, worse than childbirth. You know, all this other stuff has been much more difficult for us. And so that was a separate thing.

That was what I was unprepared for first time around. So I would encourage you, engage with as much as possible, plan, learn about breastfeeding, make sure you have a lactation consultant that you can call if needed, et cetera. And then your most important job is just make sure that she is super comfortable and taken care of.

There's almost nothing that you yourself can do for a new baby. For the first week, obviously, your wife's not going to lift the baby, so you'll change all the diapers. You'll take care of all that stuff because she can't lift the baby. And she needs to recover. But after that point in time, there's not really much that you can do with a newborn.

And so it's fine. You go back to work. Everything's good. But what you got to do is you got to make sure that she's prepared for that and that she's supported through the process so that she can do her job in that period of time. And then after a few years, after a few months, frankly, it's a few months, but after a couple of years, then the baby's no longer a newborn and then they're actually fun and then you actually enjoy being with them.

So your wife falls in love with a newborn, and I've never fallen in love with any of my newborns. It always takes a couple of years. Then I'm like, wow, this is an actual child that I can interact with, not a newborn baby. So that's my broad picture overview of kind of the points that I always try to hit that I think are really important.

- Thanks, Joshua. Very, very helpful. - My pleasure. All right. We go on to, oh, people are jumping back on after I got rid of them. Gail. Gail in California. That's you. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Gail in California. All right. We'll come back to Gail.

We'll go to Mike. Mike, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Mike, that's you. Can you hear me? All right. Mike, mute yourself. Mike, can you hear me? Mike, can you hear me? Mike, can you hear me? Mike, can you hear me? Mike, can you hear me?

Mike, can you hear me? Mike, can you hear me? Mike, can you hear me? Mike, can you hear me? All right. Mike muted himself. We'll go to Jonathan in Colorado. Jonathan, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Jonathan, that's me. That's you. Coincidentally, last name Medicaid.

I wondered. I saw it on the screen. Is that actually your last name? No. Okay. I was going to say. That's funny. I'm a little into privacy kind of the way I know you are. My favorite about my audience is that when I sell a course or something, I get all these opaque, blurred email addresses and whatnot.

It makes me happy to see you guys doing that. So I'm happy to have you here, Jonathan, Medicaid. Yeah. Awesome. I really appreciate the podcast. I've been a long-time listener, just all the way back. No, I didn't start all the way back, but I've definitely lurked very far back, so I'm just really grateful for this as a ministry.

Thank you. I had a question. My relative, he's very close to end of life, and now he has a house that's worth roughly $300,000. That's the only assets that he has left, besides a car or something, and he's in long-term care. My parents are afraid that Medicaid, in order to qualify, he needs to get his assets or whatever down, but I think he can qualify for Medicaid if it's his own personal residence, but there'll be a loan.

So whenever he dies, they put a Medicare lien on the estate and so they'll take it, or they'll go through all that closure. They're super afraid, and to my knowledge, they don't have any equity in the house. It's all the guy who's going to have Medicaid, and so I was wondering if you had any recommendations about how to navigate that, how could they maybe get the equity in their name or something, because they're kind of afraid whenever he dies that they're going to foreclose on the house, or not foreclose.

They're just going to sell it to get the equity out. So the question is, how do they try to protect it from Medicaid forcing the sale of the house? Yeah, and if they could somehow protect equity, the whole look back thing, they can't go sell it now and give, or they can't sell it for like 10 bucks or whatever to his child because the look back period, they would say that it's worth $300,000, you've got that.

You said he has children. Does this man have children? Yes. And does he have a wife? Is she deceased? Where is she in this? He had a wife deceased like 10 years ago, and then his child is living in the house, and he is in long-term care, has been in long-term care for a long time, and again, now I feel bad.

I should have told him five years ago to set it up in a medical trust, like, "I'm so sorry, please forgive me." Right. And have you consulted with qualified local legal counsel, like a Medicaid lawyer or someone like that to find out the detailed rules of your state? It's in North Carolina.

They've reached out, just I think like a preliminary conversation. I just found out about this like a week ago, and then it was the same day that you sent out the email saying, "This is for all the poor folks." So the first thing I would say is let's get our ideology straight here, and let's understand that the goal of his assets is not to keep the money away from the government.

The goal is for him to use the money that he has to pay for his care. And this is his asset, and as such, it's something that should be used for his well-being. And that is the primary focus. And so whatever the right decision is that leads to the best outcome for him and his well-being, that's where our focus needs to be.

And I know that we all agree on that, but a lot of times we get into this idea that, "Well, how can I skin the government program and get as much money as I can from the government program instead of using the money?" And that to me is a complete reversal of any intelligent planning, and often very, very harmful.

Any time anyone else does that, and they say, "Well, I'm going to get as much as I can from this unemployment program and keep my unemployment checks coming in," or, "From this medical program," et cetera, there's never any good long-term outcome from that, because the people that do that wind up not living the life that they're capable of, and in some cases they wind up soiling their soul by committing fraud, either minor or major, et cetera, and they just don't get a good outcome.

And you don't want somebody spending the last months of his life looking over his shoulder and thinking, "Well, what's going to happen with the Medicaid people," et cetera. You want him to have the best outcome. So if that were to mean, for example, that the house is sold so that the money of $300,000 is freed up to pay for his care, if his family and you or whoever else is involved decides that that's the best thing to do, then that's the best thing to do, and that's what should be done.

Now probably, because he's living in the house, receiving care, et cetera, then probably that's not the best thing that should be done, but all of your first conversations, all of your first advice, all of your first discussions should be related to what is the best outcome for him and how do we use his assets to provide for his best outcome.

Only after you're clear on what the ideal outcome is do you then turn and say, "Is there a way that we can get this ideal outcome in a more efficient way?" And that's where you turn to Medicaid planning. Now in terms of Medicaid planning, the rules are very clear, and so you want to check the rules of your state, they're publicly available, you can read about them.

I don't know what the rules of North Carolina are, but generally there is an exception for equity that's in a personal residence. And so if he owns this house outright and it's $300,000, generally those assets are accepted from Medicaid eligibility. If however, there's a cap on how much, and let's say it's $150,000, then just follow the rules and you say, "Okay, well when he dies the house is going to be sold, the $150,000 is going to be paid back to Medicaid, and then we're going to have the rest and the rest is going to go on to his children," or whatever the next situation is.

And this is why it's so important to focus on the fact that our goal is to provide him with the best quality care, whatever that is. And so make sure that this is there for him, that the care is there for him. Medicaid care may not be the best quality care, even if it is paid for.

And so this will depend on your state. In some states, Medicaid nursing homes are not the greatest nursing homes. In some states, Medicaid in-home care, in theory, should be available, but in reality it's often not. And so I don't have any insight into that. You will know that by talking to your local Medicaid office, understanding what's available to you.

At this point in time, there may be very few planning options that are available to you, but you would know your planning options by reading the Medicaid rules and then talking to a Medicaid lawyer in your area that specializes in this. And generally in one brief consultation, you'll get better advice, they'll tell you if anything could be done to protect the asset or not, and then you'll know and be able to move forward.

Don't think that by saving $500 for a consultation with a lawyer, you're making any progress. Spend the $500, get the consultation with a lawyer, get a solid authoritative answer from somebody who knows, and then move on. If Medicaid is going to result in them taking, say, half the house, so he goes on Medicaid, understand carefully how the money would be actually used.

Because it may be the case that what you would want him to do would be just to—it may be the case that just a personal loan from, say, a child who is set to inherit the house may be a better solution, or the child can just pay for the care.

And so if he has a child who's living in the house, and the child is going to inherit the $300,000 house, and if the child needs to start making payments of $5,000 a month to provide for the in-home care, but we can do that independent of filing for Medicaid and putting a lien on the house, that might be something that is better as well.

But I guess at its core, I don't have any other, like, brilliant ideas to add other than to solicit the proper advice of the Medicaid lawyer and to focus on his personal well-being, whatever that happens to be. If you want to recognize that if you don't—what's the point of the Medicaid, right?

What value do you get for Medicaid? And I guess this would be just one more creative idea, is that maybe the child who is living in the house can just care for dad, and the care for dad is provided knowing that at the end of his life, he's going to have the $300,000 of inheritance that would pay him back for six months of care, something like that.

And so don't jump to Medicaid unless you're sure that Medicaid is going to provide something that can't be provided otherwise. That would be how I would basically approach it. Okay. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. It's a little—he's been in long-term care for a long time. His daughter lives in the house, and so the daughter is afraid if he dies, there's this lien on the house, then it will get taken from her, right?

So she doesn't want to—she's kind of afraid, but okay, yeah, no, I appreciate it. Yeah. I wish I had better answers, but remember, I'll be the harsh one here. It's not the daughter's house. The fact that she's living in her dad's house may be great, but it's his house.

And so you can't let that stuff interfere. Find out what the rules are. There will be an exception for his personal residence, et cetera. But Medicaid is a government program that is designed to help people who are completely impoverished. That's all it is. And so in order to qualify for Medicaid, you have to be completely impoverished.

Now you are correct that if the goal is that he be impoverished at the end of his life, he could have done all kinds of things five, ten years ago in order for him to be impoverished. I have yet, in any financial planning circumstance, ever recommended that to anybody because I don't think being impoverished is a great idea, and I don't think relying on government programs that are designed for people who are impoverished is a great idea.

And so I bristle at people trying to game the system and try to use programs that are designed for people who are impoverished so that they can keep their $300,000 houses. It's not appropriate, and I'm not accusing them of – I'm speaking clearly in hopes that it will help them to think clearly.

But you don't have the right to access a government program that is designed for people who are impoverished and then also keep a giant asset for yourself. There are rules that can protect the house, but all of the rest of the money should be spent on his care, and that is his right.

It is his asset, and his asset should be spent on his care, not try to manipulate it so that he can qualify for a substandard government program. Sean or Shan in Tennessee, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi, Joshua. Can you hear me? Yes. Go ahead.

Yeah. Hey, Joshua. First of all, thank you so much for all the podcasts over the years. I've been a pretty regular listener, so I appreciate this opportunity. Joshua, we're in a unique situation. My wife is a very high income earner, so am I, and we recently visited a few Latin American countries.

And every time we go visit a country, we feel like we should move here, right? Because I'm learning Spanish, she's fluent in Spanish, and so forth. But the problem we face is if we move there, we give up this high income. For example, when I say high income, we made over 800,000 last year.

So we feel like we should stay back in Tennessee then, right? So I just wonder, when you counsel or coach people, very high income earners like us, right, who are looking to possibly go somewhere else, how should we think about that? Generally, you should not give up an $800,000 income to move to a Latin American country.

So I would counsel against that in almost every circumstance. When you have the ability to create a high income, that is far and away your most important asset, and it's something that deserves to be treated with tender loving care for a very long period of time, because it can fundamentally transform your lives and the lives of many people around you if leveraged appropriately.

So we begin by saying, is the generation of this income unpleasant or undoable in some way? Is there a reason, other than the fact that you enjoy being in Latin America, do you not like your work? Do you not like your businesses, et cetera? Tell me about how satisfied you are with your jobs.

Yeah, so it's one of those things where with her profession, it's all or nothing, meaning the contract is tacitly written such that you're going to make over 600,000 or zero. There is no in between. So it's like one of those things where if she could scale back, we could just stay back in the U.S.

So every time we go visit these places, they're so cheap to live in, they're super safe. We feel culturally at home there. That's where it comes from. So it's one of those, if you will, a first world problem, but yeah, that's where it comes from, Josh. Basically, Joshua, basically it's zero or 600,000 in our case.

What does she do? She does telemedicine. By license, she can't practice anywhere else, basically. Anywhere else in the United States or anywhere else outside the U.S.? Could she practice in a U.S. territory? We haven't explored that. You mean like Puerto Rico or Virgin Islands, perhaps? We haven't explored that, Joshua, that's a good point.

So unless the job or business is deeply unpleasant, in which case, obviously, make changes, then don't give up a job or a business that's working. There's an old saying, right? Make hay while the sun shines, and financially, make hay while the sun shines. Almost any one of our jobs or businesses can be disrupted in no time at all.

And so when you have a high income, you've gotten there by creating something really special, and having that high income can buy you freedom very quickly. What's your current net worth at the moment? Over $4 million, let's say $4.1 million-ish. And about how much do you spend normally in your lifestyle right now?

That's a good thing about Tennessee, Joshua, right? We probably spend, let's say, $65,000 to $70,000 a year. Great. So right now, you could cover your lifestyle, basically, as current state with income from your current portfolio, and every year that goes forward, you could do that again. So obviously, financial independence is a very real possibility.

Do you want to retire? Does she want to retire for some reason? She wants to scale back down, and she feels like the only way she scales back down is if she leaves the country where she cannot really work. So let's say, for example, we're in Mexico. She can't work.

Why can't she work? It's one of those weird things. It's for insurance reasons, I guess, and an employer has some kind of VPN block, and she can't log in, let's say, Josh, one of those things. All right. So first of all, technologically, where there's a will, there's always a way.

I probably would not take the risk of losing a $600,000-a-year job just so I can go to Mexico. However, just note that where there's a will, there is always a way, and technologically, this is easy to solve. So if she wants to be in Mexico, then obviously, she can put on her own VPN on her own system, but what I would do is I would set up my computer and all of my infrastructure in Tennessee, and then I would just use a remote log-me-in software and always log into my computer and work through Tennessee, and that's the simple and obvious solution to solving those geographic issues.

I probably wouldn't take the risk of it for reasons I said. If they're that hard-nosed about it, then I'm not going to do that, but she could very easily just simply set up a computer through which she does all of her consultations and use a log-me-in program into that computer, and no one will ever know that she's elsewhere, and that's the safest way to accomplish that other than—it's much safer to do that than to use a VPN in her while she's—and then just set her location to the United States.

So that I would do, and it's worth testing to see kind of does this work, because while you may not move full-time and spend 12 months a year in Latin America, knowing that you could go for a couple weeks whenever you wanted to without necessarily causing trouble would be worth pursuing.

Number two is that very seriously consider Puerto Rico, because if you like the Latin culture and you want to live in Latin America, but you want to keep your job, but you have to live in the United States, Puerto Rico is part of the United States. And so while it may not be listed in every contract, Puerto Rico is genuinely part of the United States, and unless they say specifically that U.S.

territories are excluded, then U.S. territories are included. And so check the paperwork, but that is the obvious solution. You have a lovely Latin environment, Spanish-speaking environment. You could find a great house in a great neighborhood that provides you with the beach lifestyle, the Latin culture, all the Latin things that you like.

It's a domestic flight. You don't have to have a passport. You're back and forth pretty quickly. You've got great flight connections. You've got Amazon. Everything works just like in the United States, except for the things that don't. But the things that don't generally work better than in many other places.

She's not going to save any. There may be some tax planning that's necessary. I don't think she would be able to use the advantageous Puerto Rican tax programs to save any money, and in fact, it may wind up costing more money than Tennessee, but I'd have to carefully think through those details.

Because if she is a resident of Puerto Rico and she's earning this income as an employee, then she'll be subject to Puerto Rican tax rates, which will be higher than the federal tax rates that she's paying in Tennessee. And I don't think she would qualify for, again, any of the tax programs.

But that is an option that allows you to keep $600,000, and if you can keep $600,000 working from a house on the beach, follow all the rules, not put your job in legal jeopardy, and pay another $20,000 of tax, then I'll take that all day long, versus living in a place that you don't want to live if the alternative is walking away from the $600,000 income.

So I guess, put simply, unless you have a compelling reason to move to Latin America, you shouldn't. You shouldn't. And if you want to move, don't burn all the bridges. And so take an extended sabbatical, take three months off, and go for three months, and just don't work for three months.

Take a year off, end her current contract, and don't renew. Go take a year, and then come back and renew. But don't burn any bridges, because my experience of interacting with people who've moved abroad, et cetera, is that the things that if you think you like a lifestyle, you should pursue it.

But as with any choice, you quickly become accustomed to whatever the lifestyle is that you've ended up with. And so if you're thinking about buying a brand new car, and you're dreaming about it, buying that car just feels like something you've got to have. And so then you go and buy the car, and you love it for the first weeks, first months, et cetera.

And then after a few months, the emotions taper off, and you realize, hey, I'm really glad I've got this car. Or you know what? I could have done without this car, but it works. It's fine. So in terms of moving to places, my choice A is keep the job, keep the great income, keep stacking money, because it's going to massively increase your footprint in the world.

Number two is, if necessary, try to see, can we get something that will satisfice for the situation, Puerto Rico, et cetera. Number three is go for a year and build a vision, but don't burn any bridges. And then number four is, OK, we really want to do this. Let's walk away, because we're definitely going to start a vineyard in Chile, or whatever it is.

In that case, that's why you became financially independent in the first place. And then probably then in that situation, the question is, how can you use your current job, your current connections, et cetera, and set up a new opportunity that pays you very well with a lifestyle that you like, but that just doesn't have the contractual limitations and they're totally fine with your living in Argentina.

But those are some ideas that hopefully will get you started. Thank you, Joshua. Joshua, do you have time for another quick question? Very quickly. Yes. Yep. Joshua, so I'm in tech sector, one of the fan companies, if you will. And I'm finding that because a lot of people I work with are immigrants like myself, our English is, I mean, don't get me wrong, I have a master's in engineering and so forth.

So reading English is fine, like comprehending English is fine. But I'm finding that a higher echelon, my speaking English, the way I communicate, needs to get better. I've heard of Toastmasters before, I've tried to join them. They're just not quick enough for me. What I mean is I'd rather just pay someone, like a personal coach, who would just coach me in expressing myself better.

Could you give me some ideas around that? Is your concern your ability to formulate and clearly express ideas? Or is your concern the very light, non-standard accent that you have? Actually, I'm not worried about the accent, but I'm interested in, let's say, speaking off the cuff, right, which I struggle or I just mask it by just making silly jokes, right?

Because I feel like in tech sector, we don't need to be as smooth as, let's say, a lawyer. My concern is just speaking articulately, like a lawyer, let's say. Well, first, with regard to accent, you don't have in any way an objectionable accent. And I think in general, having a native-sounding accent is not necessarily an important goal.

And in some cases, it can be actually counterproductive. So I don't think you should worry too much about accent. Your accent is perfectly understandable. I can quickly detect that you're not a native U.S. American speaker of English, but I can't, it's not so thick that I can place it easily and obviously, and it doesn't hamper communication.

That's the goal. You don't want an accent that's so thick that people have to work really hard to understand it. But a little bit of trace of an accent is no problem. On the topic of accent, though, if you want to moderate your accent, I think there are a couple of things that you can do.

For one, I think a lot of accent seems to be related to your willingness to embrace the culture that you're trying to model. I haven't experienced this myself with regard to language acquisition, but I have found a number of people who confirm this, that in essence, people who are able to acquire a native-sounding accent are people who are happy to be associated with the host culture, the culture of the accent that they're trying to acquire.

And I think this is one of the reasons that children, generally speaking, acquire a better accent or a more native-sounding accent than adults do, that children don't have preconceived ideas about not wanting to associate with this particular culture, and so therefore they just speak the way that locals speak.

And I think that adults can do that as well. I've found many language learners who have developed a native or nearly native accent, even though they learned a language as adults, but what they have in common is that they embrace the culture of that language, and they want to be identified with those people.

And if somebody doesn't have, if somebody has a very thick non-native accent, I think in many cases they don't really want to be identified with the culture, and they prefer to maintain, whether they know it or not, they prefer to maintain a little bit of their independence. Regarding accent, accent training can be done, it's something that can be done yourself intentionally, and it's something that can be done with a coach.

You can find an accent coach. Usually they work in acting circles, et cetera, they're acting coaches. But I have a book that I've looked at for accent training, and it teaches you how to do all the different accents. I haven't done anything with it, but I've always wanted to be able to put on various accents when I wanted to, and it's a trainable skill, and it's a trainable skill for you as well.

And it largely would involve finding a speaker, starting off without hiring a coach, what I would encourage you to do is find an English speaker that you respect, that you want to model, and then find a dialogue from that English speaker that you really like, break it up into parts, and then listen to it, and record yourself speaking the text or the words that the speaker that you admire, that speaks the way you want to speak, would speak them, and then listen to them, compare them, correct as appropriate.

And I think that that exercise, if you put 50 or 100 hours into that, would adjust your – and then also a little bit of formalized study. You sound like you might be Indian, what are the vowels that Indian speakers, or the consonants that Indian speakers struggle with because of their native language?

And then what are the new vowel sounds in the language that I'm trying to target? Why is this? Because the reason we have accents, and the reason that if I could do an Indian accent, or a German accent, or a British accent, you can immediately – excuse me, I meant a German accent or a French accent, all of the traces of accent have to do with the native language, and the native grammar.

And so if I were trying to put on a German accent, I would change my word order, I would say – I would use since instead of – all the things that German speakers do, and then use all the vowel sounds that come from the native language. So once you identify those, then you can practice them, and instead of saying the soft R, you say the English-sounding R, and those kinds of things that can be done just with a little bit of focus.

So 50 or 100 hours there would change it. With regard to being articulate, and especially in an extemporaneous circumstance, I think part of that is practice, and that's where opportunities like Toastmasters, et cetera, are useful. Where you have an opportunity to practice speaking in an extemporaneous way. But I think it's more important to go slow in order to go fast.

And what I mean is when I am articulate, especially in an extemporaneous format like I'm speaking to you right now, it's not because I have some unique skill of being able to formulate my ideas, sentences, and words clearly just off the cuff. Rather, it's that I know a lot about what I'm talking about, and I've thought a lot about what I'm talking about.

And if you're talking about something that you know a lot about, and have thought a lot about, then speaking about that subject is not difficult. The little monologue that I just gave you regarding accent coaching and accent formation did not come out in a hopefully coherent and smooth way because I have a unique skill of speaking extemporaneously.

Rather, it came out because this is a subject that I know something about, it's a subject that I have an interest in, it's a subject that I've had questions on and I've dug into the details, I've dug into the research, and as a result, it's fairly straightforward and simple for me to say the three or four points that I want to say.

And so I think there's real value in going slow to go fast. And so if I wanted to be more articulate, I would spend more time thinking and probably writing, because the skill of being able to articulate your thoughts verbally clearly is primarily a skill of having thoughts that are worth making verbal.

And that means that you should dedicate time to practicing forming the language in an effective way. And if you can't do that quickly, then do it slowly. And as you do it slowly over time, you'll get better at doing it quickly. So I would start with a series of topics.

Choose a time in which you recently found yourself at a loss for words and didn't know what to say. Think of what the subject was, and then write about that subject. And create a little paragraph saying, "Here's what I think." When I speak extemporaneously, in essence, I'm going through a catalog of ideas that I have developed.

These are ideas that have come to me from thinking about questions, trying to understand what an answer to those questions is, formulating an answer to those questions, and cataloging it away in my brain. So earlier in this call, when a listener called me and asked me about, "I'm expecting a baby," I gave the speech that anybody who's listened to previous speeches that I've given on this particular topic would recognize the basic points of that.

Because in my mind, I basically have this catalog of 8 to 15 points, depending on how much time, and I have a depth of content behind them or a shortness of content that I can stretch or shorten up, depending on the context. And I've given this speech a dozen times.

Most of those times being in personal interaction, etc. Some of those times publicly. And so while not everything is going to fit into that, I think that when you have a catalog of ideas, or we could call them stump speeches, then you can then be creative from those. And so let's use a metaphor or just another field that we could look at this.

If you study something like jazz, jazz music, jazz music to an untrained observer seems like complete improvisation, like it's just being made up on the spot. But that's not actually true. Jazz is indeed improvisation, but the whole structure of improvisation is built upon the basic structure of that style of music.

And so there are certain things that don't change, and then within those rules, then the jazz musician improvises while not necessarily breaking those rules. And when he breaks those rules, he's conscious of the fact that he's breaking a certain rule or a certain pattern, and he does that for effect.

A politician will do this. If you watch a politician speak, if you ever travel around for a couple days with a politician, they have a stump speech. And they say the same basic five points at every speech, but they adjust it a little bit here and there, etc. And so I think before I would go and try to hire a coach, a speaking coach, I would first work on building skill with communicating my ideas.

And when you build skill at communicating ideas, do that slowly using writing, and then practice those skills in verbal contexts when you have those. And I give you just one final piece of evidence for this. This is exactly the same skill that a dedicated language learner applies when building skill in a foreign language.

A dedicated language learner who has skill and experience with language learning will choose a certain number of domains about which he wants to become skilled in speaking. And if he wants to—and the proper term here for what we're talking about is fluency. And I use the term fluency, especially in a foreign language context.

What I refer to is the ability to communicate ideas in a fluid, flowing manner. That's fluency. Fluency doesn't mean that you know everything about a subject, doesn't imply a certain number of ideas or a certain amount of vocabulary that you require. It simply refers to your ability to fluidly convey your ideas.

And so if you want to develop fluency in a foreign language, you begin by learning the vocabulary of a certain domain. And so, for example, a foreign language learner will start with very simple things like, "You're speaking Spanish. Well, why are you studying Spanish?" And that language learner will go to a translator, a Google translator, a chat GPT or something, and create a series of sentences.

"Here's why I'm studying Spanish. I've been studying Spanish for this amount of time. Here's how I'm studying Spanish. How did you learn Spanish?" or whatever the version is. Or they'll develop kind of a set of lines about their job, "I'm from this place. I do this thing. I'm this number of years old.

I have this number of children," et cetera. And they'll write out those sentences and they'll study just those sentences. Then when the occasion calls for it, they can articulate those sentences because they know those sentences very well. They're not fluent in every domain. They're not fluent enough to talk about quantum mechanics, but I'm fluent and able to talk about where I'm from and why I like traveling in Latin America.

And so then over time, you expand your domains of knowledge and the different areas in which you can articulate those concepts, and that's how you build verbal fluency. But you do it by slowing down, writing things out, communicating, and then reflecting on that language that you're trying to create.

Then when you're in the opportunity or when you're in the moment, then you can articulate those things. And finally, I would say that if there's something that's very high pressure, if there's a conversation or an event or an occasion that really is going to call for top performance, then you should have your commentary memorized.

And so many of us in today's world have become quite lazy about learning to memorize. And so our memory muscles have atrophied significantly. But you can build those memory muscles up and memorize the texts, memorize the things that you want to say. And in essence, what I do here on Radical Personal Finance is that I've memorized my ideas about certain things, and I just deliver the same speech over and over again.

When I was a financial advisor, actively selling financial products, et cetera, I was always working with memorized speeches. I would memorize my approach language. What do I say when I walk into someone's office and for the first time I'm going to just ask you about your money? I had those speeches memorized.

I had an answer prepared for every single objection. "Well, Joshua, it's too expensive. What about term versus whole life?" Or, "I don't really need this," or "I'll just end my life. Why would I need long-term care when I got a revolver in the bedroom drawer?" And so every single thing I would ever say in those sales contexts was basically memorized.

And in some cases, it was memorized proactively because I sat down and I thought about what I would say or how I would respond to that objection. In many cases, it was memorized reactively, meaning someone would give me an objection, I would stumble through it, and then I would take it home and think about how to say it better and create a better solution, and then try it out the next time around, next time I got that objection, and then just deliver that again and again.

And so to me, I think this is going to be your most productive approach is understand what you believe, build practice slowly saying what you want to say, and then the verbal fluency that you desire to have will be there when you're ready for it to be there. All right, it actually looks like he dropped off.

No problem. So usually people mute themselves and they come back. Let me go on to several of you had jumped off earlier when I came to you. I will try rapid-fire to get through the rest of the callers on the line. If you're here to just listen and you're calling back in and you've noticed I've hung up on you a couple times, then you'll go ahead and dump yourself off.

Otherwise, pay attention to those of you who are here to just listen and you're calling back in and you've noticed I've hung up on you a couple times, then you'll go ahead and dump yourself off. Otherwise, pay attention to those of you who are here to just listen and you're calling back in and you've noticed I've hung up on you a couple times, then you'll go ahead and dump yourself off.

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Now, I don't think you should listen to the broader real estate market because I've been wrong too many times for me to have any confidence in my prognostication. I do think that you should listen to your local market and so the reason that I have been wrong about a lot of my personal bets and predictions is that I have been predicting across a country, an enormous country with 380 million people, all of whom are interacting with each other and so I've had almost no ability to get that right.

But I think on a local basis, you do have more ability to get it right and the people who are on the ground and people who are facing things know something about the local market and local markets are somewhat predictable. And so my first response would be what do you think is going to happen in your local market based upon the trends that you see, based upon the volume of sales, the days on market, all of the basic numbers that you see, you should do a little bit of predicting and you should do it with a specific eye towards the data, not just what does your real estate agent say, that's a good source of feedback, but more a matter of the actual data of your area.

So if you haven't cultivated a source of data for your county, your city, whatever the area that you're targeting is, cultivate a source of data and look for a group of some kind of people who are paying attention to this. Look for a real estate investors club, look for an online group, look for a sub-forum in a real estate group somewhere, look for just conversations on Facebook, start a conversation about what's happening in a local area and try to develop a little bit of a prediction for your own area.

In doing that, you should arrive at an assessment of the long-term potential of this area. And I think that in many cases, if you're buying into an area that has a stable base underneath it, of attractive qualities underneath it, then overbuying a house because it's the right thing for your family and experiencing a temporary pinch in your finances turns out to be the right move in the fullness of time.

If we go back and we calculate the times where it turned out to be a mistake to buy real estate as compared with the times that turned out to be a smart choice to buy real estate. Smart choice wins out a huge portion of the time. And in any case in which it was a mistake, it was really only a mistake in the short term.

So, I started my financial advisor career in 2008 in the middle of one of the world's greatest collapses of real estate in South Florida. And it was insane how many people I knew who went bankrupt with real estate and how they were selling their houses at 50% below what they paid for them, just a complete and total collapse.

But anybody who held on for, I mean, even only four or five years was able to get out. And then today, more than 10 years, but 15 years later, then everything is squared away. That's not a universal case though, right? If you bought into, say, a place where all the industry was leaving, somewhere in the rust belt, et cetera, and you bought this big home because you thought the things were going to be there, and it turns out there was no economic strength underneath the area, then yeah, the home values would never come back.

But I guess the bias is that if you're buying a house because you need the space in order to raise a child, then there's a good chance that you're in it for a 10-year deal. And overbuying on your personal house does have a useful investment component to it. It's not all consumption, especially if you're buying a good neighborhood, a good area that has good structure and good demand for those houses.

And if you wind up being a little bit house poor for three or four years, and then you're not so house poor, then that kind of works out pretty well with when all of a sudden your other expenses start to increase, and just due to the natural rates of inflation, et cetera.

So I think our bias always has to be in favor of buying a property if we can find a way to swing it. And you should know your local market to see, is there something that could happen in 2024? But our bias should be in favor of buying. When you're buying for a reason like you're describing, I need a house to raise my children in, you're not dependent on short-term swings, short-term moves.

What you are dependent on is figuring out how to get a house to work. And so yes, maybe you tried 15 times, but there are plenty of houses and your requirements are probably not so unique that there aren't plenty of other houses. And so I would focus on, with each loss of a house, I would focus on saying, "How could I make my contract more appealing in the future?" If possible, I would stop all other investing just to pile up more money so I could make a bigger down payment or whatever was needed to make the numbers work.

I think those are your obvious solutions. Of course, if you can make more money, do that as a temporary thing. And then try to figure out, "How could I make my contract more appealing?" But I've worked with a lot of real estate investors who the idea of making 15 offers on a house and then not a single one be accepted is not really that big of a deal.

So I think in summary, I'm trying to give you some pointers without being too specific, but my bias should be in favor of buying and do everything I can to free up money, live frugally so I can put more down, close faster, figure out what is working in the current market and then be ready for the 2024 season and then see what happens.

But if it takes you a year to buy a house or two years to buy a house, but you get a house that works for you for the long term, then that to me is still a win. Was that too vague or is that something to go on? Yeah, so it's a little general.

I was hoping for something a little bit more specific. I suppose, let me ask maybe a more specific question. Please. At what point does it become too much house, I guess, is maybe a good way of thinking about it, right? I mean, where do I have to draw the line and stand because, I mean, I'm going to throw out real, these are public numbers, but in some of these houses, people are bidding over half a million dollars over AFT and I'm not talking about McMansion here, right?

And we're losing by miles. And I guess the question is, where do I draw that line and stand for me? Percentages would be great. If you need net worth, I can throw that out there, but where do I draw that sign of like, where do I get uncomfortable knowing that I've overextended in the house?

I would draw the line of saying, number one, if it were me, I would only ever calculate on my income. So I wouldn't buy a house depending on my wife's income because I want her to be a mother and that probably means that I can afford less house than a lot of other people who have a dual income.

Number two is I would take a very careful look at what my cash flow needs are. So a guy who has no debt and who makes a high income could put 50% of his income into a housing payment and be fine. A guy who's got a lot of other payments and even if he had the same income and a lower income, for him, 20% would be too much.

So I'm fine with like, there's the useful ratios of 25, 30, 35% of income, that's pretty much the standard advice. That's fine, but that's not all-encompassing. I would look at my personal budget and, again, the guy who makes a lot of money and doesn't have any other payments and isn't going out looking for payments could afford to put a higher percentage of income towards a personal house than the other.

But if you're uncomfortable with it, what I would say is that having a larger house doesn't solve anything with children, especially in the early years. And so I would wait because in the beginning, they don't actually take that much space. But I can't give you the specific answer you're asking me for because there are too many variables.

So I apologize for being vague, but I'm not comfortable giving like a personal answer because we're all different. And so I can tell you what I would do, but if you're uncomfortable, don't do it. Just wait. Because if you're a well-employed professional, there's got to be a solution in the local market that works for you in the fullness of time.

And if you're in a market where there's just nothing you can afford, then you should seriously consider quitting that market and going somewhere else. But markets don't stay irrational forever. At a point in time, they have to become rational. There is an adjustment factor because what happens is real estate prices and normal people being able to live in an area that they can sit, there can be normal people who are able to afford a house because they lived in the house for the last 20 years.

And their house price, they would never be able to afford to get back into that market, but they can sit in that market because they've been there for 20 years, but somebody coming into that market can't get in because the prices are completely out of whack. So I don't like to fail you, but I can't give you more specifics.

Thank you, Joshua. Thank you. I call it because these are tough questions, right? It is. And hence why, hey, right, these are not easy situations for any of us. And ultimately, you know, I'm not giving a ton of personal situation, you know, details of my situation. It's a question because some of the best advice I've ever given in my life has come from third party individuals, right, such as yourself, you know, over a phone call.

And those individuals often don't know that they're giving good advice until years later. But I find sometimes I need a different perspective and that's what you're providing me. And quite frankly, even your comments here are giving me things to think about in a different way. And I appreciate you, you know, giving your opinion and advice on this.

So I do. I'll call in again and later with different questions in the future. But thank you. I know you have other calls online. I won't be respectful, but thank you. And it's been a pleasure speaking to you after 10 years of listening. I appreciate your being here. I guess the point I would leave you on would be to say that affordability in a strong market with a strong foundation, with strong desirability, with a strong house, affordability is often a temporary phenomenon.

And the variability, if you're being outbid on a house that's way out in the suburbs of a city that's kind of mediocre, well, I would be very concerned about overbidding on that. If you're bidding on a house that's right in the center of a city that has a long history, strong local economy, etc., and you're bidding at a level that's uncomfortable for you for a few years, to me, I'm still willing to push that comfort level, recognizing that after a few years things will probably change.

And I wish I could make a prediction on the 2024 markets, I wish I could make a prediction on interest rates, I wish I could make comments on some of that stuff, but I'm uncomfortable doing so, and I think it's important to be careful and just focus primarily on the personal situation.

All right. Move to Kilgore, Texas. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Oops. Thank you for taking my call. Can you hear me? Yes. I'm sorry. I'd forgotten to unmute you. So tell me your name again, please. Oh, my name's Nicole. Nicole, welcome. How can I serve you today?

So I had a question, Joshua, similar to the previous caller, it's about a housing situation. Can I just give you a quick rundown of our finances? Please. So we have about $90,000 saved, our annual income is about $70,000, so that is mostly my husband's income, and we're not looking to relocate because he works in-person and he enjoys the job.

I don't know if I said we don't have any debt. Our current rent is about $700,000, and it's in a relatively safe area. The only difference is we have a child and are expecting more, and it's just a two-bed, one-bath. So we are looking to get a house in the future, but in our area, we've noticed prices have gone up, I think about $50,000 to $100,000 in just a few years.

So our concern is that we would like to buy a house with as big of a down payment as possible, just to reduce the amount that we pay in interest, but our concern is if we keep waiting for years to save up $150,000, something like that, to get a house that we'd be happy with, we're worried that the market's going to keep outstripping us.

Do you have any input on that calculation or in terms of what we should do as a first-time homebuyer? I don't believe that the future of the market should be a primary factor of analysis in a situation like you're describing. I don't deny that it's unimportant. If any of us could predict the market, then wouldn't that be wonderful, it'd be great.

We'd all buy options contracts on all the houses in our market and make a bundle. But it's famously difficult to predict, especially in the world of real estate, because it reflects "the market" simply reflects the thousands and thousands and thousands of individual decisions made by this buyer, this seller, this buyer, this seller, and people buy and sell for any number of reasons.

So what could we stand on? If we can't stand on the prediction of the market or prognostication, what could we stand on? Well, I think we could stand on personal financial planning. And how I would define that would be to say, "Do we need a house?" If we have a baby and we're having more, probably yes.

Obviously people could raise their children in $700 a month apartments, but the quality of life that you're going to experience probably being proved significantly by being in a house that serves you. And so we want to look around and say, "Is buying a house good for us?" Now when buying a house, for this reason, it's a fairly stable thing.

When people buy houses because they're having babies, they're probably going to be somewhere for a significant period of time. Ten years is kind of a minimum plan. You can understand that things might change when my child is a teenager, but if you're buying a house to have children in, you can probably plan for the long term.

You're planning on a 10-year ownership. And even when you have 10 years, the whole idea of market changes go out the window. It's not that big of a deal. If you reflect back on what a house that you're considering cost 10 years ago as to now, you'll see that the long-term trend is what it is, and the short-term ups and downs of $50,000 here, $50,000 there, is not that big of a deal.

So to me, these are good reasons for you to buy a house. In addition, you're obviously prepared financially to buy a house. You have no debt, you have savings, and you have a stable income. And you want to buy a house for lifestyle reasons. So all of that would say that you should buy a house.

Now in terms of what you can afford, you have to go and look in the market, run the numbers, talk to a mortgage broker, see what you can afford in terms of a mortgage, look at all the alternatives, right, could we do a $70,000, could we buy a $40,000 piece of land and get a shed from Home Depot for $20,000 and fix it up ourselves and live in that?

Are you those kinds of people? Assuming that you're not kind of unusual radicals in some way. That actually is one of our interests, actually just what you said, we were trying to think of different ways. So I'm open to that, but that's usually going to be, if that's the kind of people you are, you're the kind of people who would buy a piece of land, live in an RV on it for a while, put up a tiny house, expand over time, that's awesome.

And that's a very different set of decisions though than the normal path that I'm going down, which is to say, you're going to buy a conventional home in a suburb somewhere, etc. And if you are committed to being debt-free, then it's just a matter of, is there land that has zoning that I need?

Could we build a tiny house or a barn dominium, or what are they called, you know, a metal shed? Exactly what you mean. Yeah. Like, is there some unique thing that we could do? And I would say, go for it. In that case, then yeah, you should just go with what you can pay cash for.

You should go ahead and do that if you're those kinds of people. Not many people are those kinds of people, which is why I usually give the more conventional advice. But in your situation, if that's you, then I would say if there's any way to make it work, then go for it.

Because not having a mortgage and if you're adventurous enough to do that kind of stuff, you guys can totally win doing that. It's just a matter of, can you find a piece of land that works, etc. That's good. Yeah. Definitely our priorities are staying debt-free and just, we really want land to enjoy the outdoors.

We're not so big on the suburbs or anything like that. Okay. So here's, I think this relates then, this is what I was going to say, is that I believe that when you're buying a house, either your down payment should be as small as possible or you should pay cash.

Either one. There's enormous value to both of them. But the idea of saying, "I'm going to save up from $90,000 to $150,000," so that I can – let's assume that you were less radical and more conventional. Let's assume that you were going to go and buy a $300,000 house.

If you call me and say, "Joshua, we're going to buy a $300,000 house. Should we just go with our down payment of $90,000 that we have saved or should we sit for another two or three years and save $150,000 so we can make a $150,000 down payment?" My answer is no.

Buy a house now because there's no – you're better off putting a small of a down payment down so that you have maximum flexibility and get as big of a mortgage as possible rather than saving for a few more years so you can make a $150,000 down payment on a $300,000 house.

Now, if you're committed to being debt-free, then I'm all in. Great. That's the other one that's really valuable because someone who's genuinely debt-free and who's committed to staying debt-free, you're going to have such an enormous benefit from life for that that you keep it up. Either you put a small of a down payment down as possible or you pay cash.

If you're going to pay cash, then your budget is determined by what cash you have. That's a matter of is there some way that we can find to make this work. Then you look at is there a piece of land? What are the land prices? How much land? What are the costs, et cetera?

Then is there a way that we can get onto the property in a somewhat uncomfortable way while we're building and saving for our dream house? Your rent is very, very modest so you can still save money, but if you can get onto the land and start improving the land and there's some path where you pay $50,000 for a piece of land, you buy a $15,000 or $20,000 trailer, you move onto it, you start putting in your gardens, you start putting in your trees, et cetera, and then you start building a house over time using recycled materials, doing it inexpensively, doing whatever kind of methodology.

I'm all in favor. Then yes, if you're committed to going debt-free, I'm with you and you should just set your budget based upon how much money you have. If you don't have enough money to do something that makes sense, then yes, you should wait a few more years until you have money to make sense.

Recognize that in your scenario, if you're going to operate on cash, your particular decisions will not flow with the rest of the market because you're operating based upon cash. So what's affordable for you is very different than what's affordable for other people. You don't have many competitors. You're just not in the same world as your neighbor who's going out and buying a house with a mortgage.

You don't have to worry about interest rates. You don't have to worry about any of this stuff because you're paying cash. You're in a very different world that's much more a matter of is there a lifestyle or a certain type of house that we could build based upon the money we have, how could we get into it as quickly as possible, etc.

Okay, thank you very much. Could I ask you a book recommendation as well? Sure, go ahead. Both my husband and I have only ever earned income from an employer and we're interested in learning more about how to gain income separate from the employer. Do you have any book recommendations or ideas of where to start in terms of learning how to use our skills?

Or like as a third, not changing our income but like an additional income stream. Understood. I don't have a book recommendation off the bat because that's such a broad general topic. What I would say is look around your personal life. Find someone that you know and admire who does this and then spend the money you would spend on a book taking that person out to dinner and pumping him or her for ideas because there are tons of people who do this and a lot of people don't write books.

I've known so many people over the years that have become financially independent in totally non – in ways that – so fast on ways that are not publishable. I know a couple that – my family that started off divorced totally basically out of money because the divorce had all their money, started off, got remarried, driving a truck, lived on nothing, saved like crazy, started buying houses and basically six years later financially independent on rents from houses, never borrowed a dime and it was all based upon putting in skills and learning skills, etc.

and things like that. That stuff is not in a book and I don't have a general book to recommend. What I would say is the place for books is when there's something that you're trying to learn how to do, to do that. I'm sure there are good books out there.

Go to the library, grab 20 or 30 of them, flip through them, see what sparks your interest and go with that. But probably more productive is start with somebody that you know who's done something you admire and see if that person could provide you with help. All right. We move on to Alberta.

Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Alberta, go ahead. Hi, Jeff. Can you hear me? Sounds good. Go ahead, please. Hi there. My name is Kathleen and I've listened to you for a long time. So I want to say thank you for all the advice that you've given.

My pleasure. And Happy New Year. And to you. So I was wondering, I know you've given some advice about how to set up one's life generally in the past and I was wondering if you could help with some of the specifics of my situation. Okay. So I live in a small mountain community with limited career opportunities, but I really want to progress my career and contribute.

And so because it's so limited in my area, but I really want to be here for the community and the people, I was wondering how to do that with being so remote. Well, the obvious answer is a Starlink dish on your back porch and the Internet. But I assume you've thought of that, so we have to kind of go a little bit more detailed.

But basically the price of living in the middle of nowhere in terms of your ability to connect to the world has basically become zero because Starlink has transformed everything. And so now it's more a matter of saying how do I express my skills, how do I develop skills, ability, et cetera, and then how do I use the Internet to service those skills.

How are you earning your living right now? Currently, I work in local government and I think I have lots of transferable skills, but it's a bit hard to market them since I'm basically a municipal bureaucrat that isn't in the private sector. Do you know, let's say that you are committing yourself that two years from today, I'm not going to be working in local government, I'm no longer going to be a municipal bureaucrat, I'm going to be doing my own thing, and I'm going to be doing it through an Internet connection.

Do you have any idea where you would start? Yeah, I've started by updating my resume and contacting consultants in my field to see if anyone needs help and if I can offer anything on a contract basis, but so far I haven't had any response. Have you applied, so you're responding to job ads, to help-wanted ads, is that right?

Yes, that's right, or just anyone whose work is interested, I kind of cold email them and say, "Oh, I think your work's really interesting and here's how I think I could contribute." Have you read any books on career planning yet? No, I don't think so. So there would be two tools that I would encourage you to do, and this would be probably the best.

I wish I had, I'd love to spend hours with you on this, but the problem is that what I hear you asking, and I'll give you a moment to disagree in a moment, but what I hear you asking is a very vague question. The question I hear you asking is, as modified by me, "How do I earn money on the Internet?" And that's just way too big of a question for anybody to answer, because we don't live in the world that we lived in in 1980, where there was five or six basic ideas, five or six businesses that you could do, you could stuff envelopes from your kitchen table while living in a rural area.

Today, there's virtually no business, there's virtually no job that can't be done over an Internet connection, and there are plenty of just mainstream jobs, customer service representative, you know, insurance company employee, claims adjuster, there are plenty of just straightforward bureaucratic jobs that would probably be in line with what you're currently doing, that are all done over the Internet, and in some cases your employer will just ship you a computer and you're good to go.

Now, so it's too general of a question in order to ask, to find solutions, and general questions are very hard to answer, whereas specific questions are much easier to answer and they're much easier for you to answer. And so your number one goal is to try to develop a specific question and understand a specific job, a specific career, a specific industry, something that you are interested in, something that might provide you with the kind of work life that you're interested in pursuing.

And so that's the essence of good career planning, is to identify some area of personal interest mixed with some area of kind of an external industry fit that winds up being a good connection to you. And there's any number of ways. So these things can be jobs, right? You may be into outdoor sports.

After all, I live in a beautiful remote community in Alberta, you're probably outdoor sports available to you, and so you might find some kind of outdoor sports company that you want to work with, and they may need a representative or may need an employee, et cetera, but you have to have somewhere to go looking.

So what I would recommend is that you begin with reading a couple of career planning books and go to your library. Years ago, I used to teach for a brief time Dan Miller's 48 Days to the Work You Love course. I think that's really great. It's still a great book.

So grab a copy of Dan Miller's book. I haven't checked in on him in five years at least, so as far as I know, he's probably still there, but I don't know if he's still even doing his podcast and his business. But I would take a pause on radical personal finance content and go and start looking for career podcasts.

And so 48 Days to the Work You Love is probably great. There's probably a dozen other new ones that I haven't followed in the last number of years. I would go on Amazon and go to your library, if you have a local library, and go to their career section and check out every book they have on career planning and read through them.

I would go to, if they don't have a great selection, I would go on Amazon and I would purchase five books on career planning. You don't need five, but you'll want to just poke through five until you find one that resonates for you. And then grab one of them and go through the exercises, and one of those books will give you a set of basic analyses to do.

They might give you some profiles that you want to take to get to know yourself, some psychological profiles, etc. They might have you create various charts of industries you're interested in, people that have had jobs that you're interested in, etc. And go through those books until you have some kind of more meaningful target of a career opportunity that you want to target.

Because if you know that I want to do financial sales, after all, the fact that you listen to my podcast tells me you're interested in money, and you say, "I want to be an insurance agent," or, "I want to do financial sales," you can do that from your little town.

A lot of financial sales is done virtually now, and so you can do that from your little town. But that will put you on a very different pathway than if you say, "I want to continue as a customer service representative for an outdoors company." And so you need to narrow in your focus on something that you actually want.

And then when you have an idea of what you actually want, you should develop a specific career plan or a job plan to go after what you want. And that probably doesn't mean answering a bunch of help wanted ads. Help wanted ads are primarily useful to you as a way of seeing what resonates with you versus what doesn't resonate with you.

And I'm not saying don't do that. You probably should do that. But your best opportunities will generally come when you're going after a specific industry, a specific company, a specific position that you have come up with the idea that this is what you want. And since you already have a job, you can afford to take the time to do this right.

So my goal would be that at the end of this year, you would have a job that you really want, not just a random job that you stumbled across. And so I would begin with some career planning books. I would begin by taking some tests and some psychological profiles to see what might be a good fit for you.

And as I've talked about in other shows, also just do an introspective consideration of what are the kinds of jobs that I've said would be interesting to me, etc. You can either do it with external testing or internal expression. But that's where I would begin. And when you can ask a more specific question of yourself, then you'll be able to get a much better answer from me or from someone else than just asking a vague general question like how do I support myself?

The obvious answer is through the internet, but today that's everything can be done through the internet. So you'll have to find an industry or a job or a vision that you're actually going to pursue. Okay, yeah, that's helpful. I think I know a career path that I'm interested in that I want to pursue and the job I'm in, there's kind of half oriented towards that and half very, you know, bureaucratic.

So I guess what I'd like to do is get to a job that's all oriented towards what I want to do. Yeah, I've been kind of trying to negotiate that in my current role, but getting some resistance and wondering if it's better to pursue something online. Yeah, the only other thing and forgive me, I am trying to move just a little quickly because I've still got several calls jumped off, I still got four others that I want to try to get to.

But one other comment I would make is that if you can't find something that's completely online today, but you know you want to stay in this town, then if it fits with your family and where you are, etc., you might be willing to relocate for a time, especially if it gets you into a company that seems like it'll be a better fit for you.

So in certain industries, working online is totally expected and it's totally normal. But you may not want to be a computer programmer, so you may want to develop other skills. In some cases, another strategy for you to consider, and I'm sidestepping any discussion of a particular industry and just favor of these general discussions, in some cases your best bet is to go ahead, go somewhere for a time, move to a different place, work in a company for a couple of years and then get the inside track on a job that would allow you to be remote and then you could go ahead and move back to your little town.

So consider that strategy as well. And then keep in touch, call me back in the future and let's see if we can come up with more ideas as you can be more specific. Samuel in England, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today? Samuel, going once. Samuel in Nottingham, going twice.

All right, Samuel, you're out of here. Margaret in, maybe that's the same, Margaret, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today? All right, no Samuel, I see your chat, I cannot hear you, so check your microphone, I'll come back to you in just a moment, I see and I'll come back to you in a moment, see if you can get it fixed.

Remember that you can call in on the phone if necessary. Josh in British Columbia, Josh, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today? Josh, can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. Great, so I've been listening to your show for about eight years and I really appreciate everything you've done.

My issue right now is I currently just recently had a newborn, job-wise pretty stable, government again, my wife works in the health authority as well. I feel kind of stuck in life, I don't really know what I want to do, I know that I want to help people and a lot of people have actually told me that I'm pretty approachable, I tend to take initiative to do things for people that people would never ask, but a lot of them seem to see me as a good candidate for potentially sales or insurance, but I don't really see myself as the kind that would push people to buy stuff.

I probably just need advice on, I guess, life and how we manage to really just bring up a family and create your own business while helping people without so much. I'll do my best, and by the way, I've muted you for a moment, if there's anything you can do to boost your audio by, for example, turning off of a hands-free or something, that's fine, I was barely able to hear you, but I was able to hear you, but I'll do my best to give you a useful answer, but I would point out to you that your question suffers from the same curse as the previous listener, is quite simply that it's too general to be answerable in the first place.

And so if you're just saying general advice in life, there's all kinds of advice that could be given, but you're going to need to develop more specific questions. General questions, again, can't be answered really by anybody. Specific questions can be answered by you, yourself alone, without any external input.

And so cultivate the skill of asking good questions. The man who can ask good questions is really the king of his life and the king of society, because when we ask questions, we divert function, we divert attention, we control the conversation. And so building the skill of asking good questions is important.

Now that's convenient as a segue for me to talk about sales. I think, first of all, sales is something that's not a great fit for a lot of people. And if you think it might be a good fit for you, then the best thing you should do is just go and get involved as quickly as you can and get involved in sales and see what it's like.

But sales is great because it's one of those things that can pretty quickly show you that it's for me or it's not for me. Basically three months and you'll probably have a good sense of whether it's for you or not. I got into sales because I always respected salespeople and I always loved sales.

And that's not super common, but I understood that somebody who could sell is a powerful skill and it's a very highly compensated skill, and it's a skill that can be transferred from one thing to the next. And there's a sales trainer, I don't remember who to ascribe it to or attribute it to, excuse me, but a sales trainer used to say that selling is nothing other than a transference of emotion, transference of feeling.

And if that's true, I believe it's true, then that answers the question as to how could I pressure somebody into buying from me. There's a large misconception that sales is a function of pressure. To be clear, there is plenty of pressure that's exerted in some sales circumstances. But a lot of that is just an artifact of a past generation.

I don't enjoy, generally speaking, sales pressure. I don't like it. Most people don't like it, especially in our North American culture, most people don't like it. If we were in other parts of the world, it's more common, but most of us don't like it. And it's just not really a particularly effective sales technique, because somebody who feels pressured to do something that he doesn't want to do will ultimately find a way to undo the thing that he did that he didn't want to do.

And so if you're selling an insurance policy and you pressure somebody into taking the insurance policy, it'll cancel right out from under you. If you're selling a car and you pressure someone to take a car, it'll show up back at your lot and the whole deal will be undone.

We know how to undo things that we can do. Professional selling, modern selling, is much more a matter of identifying clearly a specific need that someone has and then articulating to that person how the product or service that you have to sell solves that need. And when there's a good fit between what somebody needs or wants and what you have to offer, then selling is easy.

And most of sales is just a matter of finding people for whom it's a good fit. And a professional salesperson, someone who's skilled, generally doesn't care that much about the ones who aren't a good fit. He recognizes this isn't a good fit and you just go on. When I was doing insurance sales, my mantra that I repeated to myself was in or out, you know, now or later.

And basically it was simply, is this the kind of person who's in and who I have an opportunity with? Or is this the kind of person who's out? If you're sitting on the wrong side of the tracks, late at night, selling life insurance to somebody whose car just got repossessed in the front yard, there's no amount of high pressure sales that you can use that's going to make that policy stick.

This is not a person for whom life insurance is a good fit. And so this person's out. On the other hand, if you're sitting in front of a, you know, a thoughtful, future-oriented person who's got a job and who's working and who has a wife and a baby wants to protect, then life insurance probably is a good fit.

And so when you're a salesperson, basically what you're doing is judging the people that you're listening to and just trying to categorize them, in or out, and then second step, now or later. So someone can be in, but not now, that's later. Someone can be in now or someone can be in later.

And so in essence, if I'm a salesman, all I'm doing is trying to find prospect through people and I'm saying to myself, are you in or out? Is it now or later? And then I just respond appropriately. If you find someone who's in and you find someone who's potentially in now, then your job as a salesperson is to figure out how to uncover very clearly the specific needs that someone has and then articulate how your product fills those needs so that they can see it and understand it.

And ideally you only want to be selling something that you personally, passionately believe in, that you are really enthusiastic about, because that makes the transference of emotion really, really useful. So I consider that I sell every day. But what I sell are things that I believe in and I don't sell anything that I don't believe in.

And if I don't believe in something, then I just, I don't try to pressure somebody. And just give a simple example. I think you said you're having a baby or hoping to have a baby. And so it's one of the reasons why you're giving focus and attention to this.

I firmly believe that all men should have babies. I think it makes them better men and I think it's one of the best things that we can do in society. We're facing an enormous birthrate collapse and we desperately need more babies in our societies. We need more babies in our lives, etc.

I believe that passionately. But earlier in this call I received a question from someone who said, you know, I'm not really, I'm not really, I'm not, I don't want to have a baby. I don't want to, I want to be single for life. And I didn't try to come and beat on that guy and say you have to have a baby.

I respected his decision, his perspective. He's going to make his own decisions on life. And it's perfectly fine for him to make his decisions on life that are different from mine just like it's perfectly fine for you to buy a Mac and me to buy a PC. And so I'm not going to spend any time trying to sell him hard on something he doesn't believe in.

If I'm trying to sell the concept of, you know, having babies, then he's probably out. And if he's in ever, it's certainly later. So I'm not going to try to push on him. I'm going to answer in a different way. And that's what sales is. Good professional sales is that.

And so some of the people who are the most successful at sales are those who are, like let's use insurance, a world that I know. Some of the most successful life insurance salesmen are the least pushy people you would ever find. Because I used to study under a guy who was a musician.

He never wanted to be a pushy salesman, he was a musician. But he was a really good listener. And because of his skill of listening, he could accurately identify what somebody wanted and needed and then help to articulate in a very cool and smooth way, specifically how his products and services filled that.

And he made millions of dollars a year because of that skill. And I think that's common among virtually all sales. I don't want to say all, because there are sales circumstances where pushiness, usually those are small transactions, you're selling a $20 painting or a $20 fake Rolex on the street or something like that.

Somebody walks past you, they're not going to buy again. Those guys push, push, push, push because they're never going to have a second chance. But that's not professional sales, that's street sales and it's a very different market. In terms of general advice, I would say that your duty as a potential father or as a father is to build a large and comprehensive vision for your life in every dimension.

And when you can see that vision, then you start putting in place the specific steps for it. And this is what is so great about having children is that it often forces you, in some cases for the first time, to think outside of yourself, to think outside of just the pleasure of today.

And it forces you and over time causes you to become a long-term thinker. And so the skill of success is basically to envision what I want to achieve, then to put in place a list of actions or steps that could potentially help me to achieve what it is that I'm trying to achieve, and then start taking those actions step-by-step.

And if you do that consistently, then you build the skill of goal accomplishment, goal achievement. And it really doesn't matter where you start. What matters is that you continue practicing that skill and then 10 years later you're basically unrecognizable. Yeah, my pleasure. The audio is still low, so I'm just going to move on to the next caller, and I'd love to hear from you more in the future.

Keep me in the loop. We've got two left to go here. Samuel has come to you. I see you're trying to fix your microphone. Hold on. All right, there. You're unmuted. Go ahead, Samuel. How can I serve you today? Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

Yes, perfect. You're up. Great. Lovely to speak to you, Joshua. I've listened to your program for a long while. It's been really helpful to me and my wife, and happy new year to you and your family. And to you. My question is sort of about debt, and the specific question is how would you approach reducing debt to clear it within two to three years?

I'll give you a little bit of a background. So myself and my wife are professionals, probably have a joint income of about £170,000, and we have debts of about £65,000 due to sort of a period of unemployment, education, some maternity leave, and childcare costs. And right now we have an income of about £10,000 a month, but our margin is very, very low.

So we have sort of expenses of sort of £9,500 thereabouts. And we're just looking to, we're expecting a third child, and just trying to look at the constraints, looking at the constraints, how would you approach things in the future? What is your career, and like basically what do you do for work, and does your wife earn an income?

So yeah, so my wife, we're both in the healthcare profession, I'm a medical doctor, and she earns an income at the moment. Do you expect, is there some way that you can make some extra money picking up extra shifts, working overtime, doing locums work, or something like that? Yes, so I really do that as much as I can within the constraints of childcare and my contractual obligations.

You mentioned $9,500 a month is committed. Why are your expenses so high, so structurally high? Because earlier on in our relationship, due to sort of education, period of unemployment, and some period of ill health, we had to take out some loans, and so those loan repayments and a car repayment eat up a lot of our disposable income.

Whenever someone is trying to get out of debt, I look at it and I first, the first question I ask myself is, is this a debt that can be paid off by "standard means", or is this something that's going to require some unique circumstance? So there's one thing if a guy gets into debt because he's got some unemployment, winds up with some credit card debt, or whatever it happens to be, and it's just kind of standard amount.

Or it's another thing if a guy winds up in debt because he's trying to start a business, or something like that. I've worked with clients that had hundreds of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, but the credit card debt was because they're trying to start a business, and if the business failed, they were certainly bankrupt, and if the business succeeded, they would be wealthy beyond their imagination.

And my answer in questions like that is, don't worry about the debt, just focus on the business. If the business fails, you're going to be bankrupt, and if the business succeeds, then you're going to be wealthy, and you can pay the debt back easily. So a guy who's got hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and he's trying to start a business, he can't work a little extra, he can't go and get an extra job and somehow make it work.

There's no way to do that, it's not going to work. And so he has to go for extraordinary means, such as make the business work and sell, or get investors, or something like that. What you're describing is not in that circumstance. What you're describing is just an ordinary situation.

You make 170,000 pounds, and you have 65,000 pounds of debt. That's half of an annual income, and that's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. So I think that it's fine to use kind of ordinary methods. The first thing would be that you may not be able to, or you may not choose to pay it off aggressively.

You may only be able to pay off 500 pounds a month, and in that scenario, then it may take several years before it's paid off. And that would be okay, especially if this was the money that got your family through a difficult position. So you only have two areas that, if you and your wife are employed, you only have two levers that you can push.

You have the lever of your income, and you have the lever of your expenses. So either you increase your income, or you decrease your expenses. So you should look at your income, and ask yourself, "How could I increase my income?" And I would encourage you, go back, I'm going to give your answer a fairly short answer, but listen to the podcast episode that I did just prior to this one, that was about how to save a down payment for a house, because I did about a 30-minute discussion on this exact topic where we discussed how do you push things up and down for a short period of time, and you're in the same exact situation.

So in terms of your income, you can do a lot of things with your income that are short term that you won't do long term. So maybe you have a third baby on the way, and you are used to working five days a week, but for three months, especially before the baby comes, you can go ahead and pick up extra shifts and do seven days a week.

I think you should do that. I think you can absolutely do that for three months, and if you could clear off 20,000 pounds of debt in three months, or whatever it winds up being, because you work every single day, that's a great thing to do, and that's something that you should do.

You should always look at long term wins, as far as how do I advance in my career, how do I advance in my job, how can I pick up extra shifts, how can I pick up overtime, and you should look at short term wins. And so short term wins are extra shifts, overtime, and it may be side work.

I don't think, obviously a doctor should be out, I do not believe that a doctor should be out driving on the weekends for Uber or something like that, but you should look for any chance that you have to make extra money, and generally you should look close to what you're currently doing.

So if you're in the healthcare business, but you can find something related to healthcare, focus on that, and then just work more hours. For ordinary debt, working more hours is a great way to make significant progress over a period of a few months. Then you should look at the stuff that you have, the assets that you have.

So you may have stuff that could sell you, you may have an old camera that's worth 500 pounds, you may have a car that's worth 4,000 pounds that you don't need anymore. And so if you could get rid of 10,000 pounds worth of stuff, and use that to pay off your debt, then now your debt comes down very quickly as well.

And then in terms of your expenses, you go through your expenses systematically and you ask yourself, what can I change, what can I cut? And so probably if you and your wife both have jobs, a big expense is childcare. Could you renegotiate your shifts so that one of you is on, one of you is off on different days, so that you can care for the children and you can reduce your childcare bills.

Maybe it's not for two more years until your children are in school, and then when your children are in school, then you'll be able to get this debt cleared off. Anything that you can exercise frugality over, you should do. Can you cancel the cable? Can you cancel the internet?

Can you cancel a cell phone? A lot of these things that we think are necessary are not actually necessary. And so I usually want to look for big wins, but I'm going to be super, meaning, you know, can we change houses or something like that? But I'm going to be super cautious with you, with a pregnant wife, et cetera, you're going to have more constraints on your situation than someone else does.

But you'd look, so don't discount the small things, don't discount the canceling your cell phone plan, don't discount the bringing your coffee from home, all the little stuff. It can add up significantly over time. And what I do and what I recommend is that you just basically focus on these areas one at a time.

And so choose for each month a different theme. And so maybe January is going to be the income theme. And during the month of January, you spend a lot of time journaling and thinking about how do I increase my income in, you know, how do I increase my income to the highest degree possible?

And is there some service that I can sell online? Is there something that I can kind of work extra shifts, et cetera? And then in February, you look at your expenses. So you track all your expenses, you go through, and you spend February focusing on how can we reduce our energy bills.

And lo and behold, you're spending 180 pounds per month, when in reality, if you just unplugged a bunch of extra stuff, you could spend 100 pounds per month. So I would go down that pathway and I would say the long version of what I'm saying is in the previous episode.

But this is an ordinary amount of debt that is not a big deal and could be pretty easily paid off in a year or two, but it's probably going to be a bumpy year or two as you try different things until you find some ways to earn more money and reduce expenses that work.

Thank you, Joshua. That's really good. Helpful input there. My pleasure. Anything else? You mentioned in a previous episode about sort of your dad or your granddad in the past having sort of dementia or sort of memory impairment. So another thing that's sort of kind of playing is aging parents where you feel like you're in the squeezed middle where you've got young children, aging parents.

My mother has similar condition, it's getting to a stage now where she might need some care, which we're not local. And that's sort of weighing me in my mind as I think about all these things going on in my family. It's brutal. It is possibly one of the most difficult things.

Do you have brothers and sisters? Yeah, I have a couple of brothers and a couple of sisters as well who are more local to them, but I'm like the big earner and so it's just a bit – people kind of look into me, but I don't have that flexibility.

Of course. It's a bit kind of – and I want to do more, but I'm a bit constrained. You can only do what you can do. The fact that you have a couple of brothers and a couple of sisters is an enormous blessing. The people who bear the load the heaviest is when you have a single child who's married to a single child and they've got four parents that they have to care for between two people and then sometimes they have their own children as well.

And that's what's happening all across our society as our birth pyramids are collapsing. And so on a personal basis, instead of a parent having parents – two parents having five children to care for them and split the load among them, they are having too few children and it's one child to five parents instead of five to one or one to five – two to five instead of five to two.

And then on a government-wide – or sorry, a society-wide basis, the same exact problem is happening. We're having five taxpayers paying for the retirements of two elderly people. We have two taxpayers paying for the retirements of five elderly people or paying for the social services, the Medicaid or the health service of the older people, etc.

So my thought would be that in general, most care doesn't actually cost that much. And so this doesn't have to be a financial issue. Are your parents in England or are they elsewhere? What country are they in? They're in England. So in England, you're going to have a situation kind of like the United States where, yes, there is institutional care, but what I'm referring to is the cost of care is primarily an emotional cost and a physical cost more so than a financial cost.

When we do financial planning with people, the financial cost comes because many times elderly people are trying to insulate their children from having to provide the physical care and the day-to-day physical care that an aging person might need. And so in order to do that, you have to hire a nurse and that nurse can be very, very expensive, obviously.

And so the cost is there because the bodies are not there or the aging parents are trying to make sure that their children never have to provide the physical care. If your parents don't have the money and you don't have the money and your siblings don't have the money, then obviously paying for the care is out of the question.

And so the answer is we're going to have to provide the care. And that's where you're going to have to find a way that works among the five of you or however many there are and try to figure out what's best for mom and dad and how do we do that.

And at the end of the day, you can contribute what you're able to, but you can't do more than you're able to. And so if you're away and they're all providing physical care, then it's your responsibility to spend more money to support them in some way. But of course, that will have to fit into your budget.

So I'm kind of saying generalities, but just encouraging you that it is hard work, but it's not that hard. My parents were the primary caregivers for my grandfather and later my grandmother, and they did it basically alone for many years. And we children helped out when possible, but they did it basically alone.

And so it's certainly difficult, but it's not impossible. And if you can't provide money, then you're going to have to provide care in your home. That's your responsibility. And so if that means that you don't have a living room anymore, but rather there's a hospital bed in the front room and that's where you care for the people, well, that's your duty to your parents to be grateful for their contributions to you.

So again, I'm speaking generalities, but just to encourage you, bear your load, but I'm grateful you have siblings among whom you can share that load. >> Yeah. Okay. That's great. Thank you so much. >> My pleasure. Pleasure. And then I see the other name, Margaret, but it says Nottingham.

Is that? I think that's probably your second computer. All right. Gail in California. >> Yes, it is. Yes, sir. >> Gail. >> Rocky with a lady. Joshua's calling. Are we going to call her at work for a test, sir? >> Yes. I'm on post for three. >> Sorry. Gail's on the other phone.

I'm sorry. Gail's waited for a long time. Tell you what I'm going to do is, Gail, I'm going to answer a couple of calls that came in. I'm going to answer a couple of quick questions, and I'll come back to you, but I don't want to miss you when you came in from staying online for two and a half hours.

So Gail will be to you in just a moment. All right. A listener asks, a listener on Facebook asks, "Thoughts on Christians reading the great books of Western literature, Homer, Virgil, Dante, et cetera, and what ratio to the Bible is appropriate in your eyes?" Thanks a lot for an unusual question.

I think that it's one of those things where I don't think that there's any reason to have to choose between them. In general, you can make enormous progress on most things with a small amount of time. So with less than 15 minutes a day, you can read the Bible through cover to cover every single year.

That's easy to do. And so someone saying, "I can't read a Bible because I'm spending all my time on works of Western literature," is to say that I can't spend 15 minutes a day listening to an audiobook that's free on a bazillion apps on my phone. That's nonsense, of course.

To try to understand the works of Western literature, not Homer, but Dante, you can't understand any of this stuff without the Bible. And so the Bible, even without religious connections, absolutely needs to be studied by anybody who's a serious student of history and of Western culture. I think there's enormous value in the humanities.

I think that for me as a U.S. American, someone who's an inheritor of the Western tradition, that it is really important, if at all possible, for the life of the mind to understand the great books, etc. And I don't think it's necessary for someone's career success. I think people can live a happy life without ever studying this stuff.

Not all people are intellectuals, but it's certainly helpful to those of us who want to engage in a life of the mind, to think about the big ideas, and we need more of them. So I think we can do both, and it's relatively easy to do both. I do think that there's often far too much Greek thought in Christianity and not enough Hebrew thought.

And so this has been kind of a bone to pick that I've made. This is a very thing that a lot of people don't talk much about. But especially since St. Augustine, Greek thought has so infused modern Christianity that it's very hard to separate it. And the Greek thought is broadly pagan, and I would like to see a lot of the Greek thought replaced with Hebrew thought.

But that's something that's going to take a significant amount of time, and I think it's an important thing. But obviously, in a public format like this, it's something that's going to need to be dug through, but I'm not prepared to do that extemporaneously. So those are my thoughts. A couple other questions.

Let's go back to Gail. Gail, are you here this time? Gail, can you hear me? All right, I'm sorry, Gail. You waited on two and a half hours. I've come to you three times, and I apologize. That pains me to do it, but I will have to—I'll give you one more chance, I'll answer one more question.

Nick says, "You previously mentioned you kept notes for "summer camp skills" to teach your kids at certain ages. Can you elaborate on that?" Yeah, basically, I think that a lot of things that people try to put into modern education, curricula, et cetera—so there's a couple of arguments that I see that I think are both fallacious with regards to education.

The first argument that a lot of people make is that, you know, "Why did I have to study algebra? I don't do algebra or trigonometry, but why didn't they teach me how to do taxes in school?" et cetera. And so many people argue for this intensely practical, career-oriented, daily life skills-oriented aspect of education.

And what they usually want to replace with that kind of argument is they want to replace the humanities or the great books or something like that. And I think that's a very short-sighted argument because those career skills are not the fundamental foundation of an education. I don't think that being an educated person, acquiring liberty, freedom from a liberal education—liberal, liberty—the goal of a liberal education is not to give someone career skills.

That's what you do for slaves. So if you want to create a wage slave, then you go out and give them a bunch of career skills. If you want to create a free man, then you teach him about—you give him a liberal education. And so I'm not on board with people who want to replace the basic fundamentals of a liberal education with, you know, basic career skills.

On the other hand, it's clearly also the case that career skills and various practical skills are necessary. And so I think they're oversold that a lot of times, "Why don't we teach tax preparation in school?" Because tax preparation is really easy. All you need is basically 30 minutes with a tax program or a couple hours with a textbook and you know everything you need to know about basic taxes.

And you can't really teach it 10 years in advance. You don't go and teach a third grader tax preparation. You teach tax preparation when somebody makes his first money and he's got to sit down and do his tax return. So how does a school waste hours and hours and hours teaching tax preparation when you can teach that in a couple of hours of focus when it actually comes time to do a tax return?

And so I think the same thing can be applied to a lot of basic practical skills is to say that this is not something that needs hours and hours around. When I read these tweets and people talking about, you know, "They should have taught me this." And I'm like, "This is 30 hours of self-education.

This is easy." What we teach in academics should be much more intense and should be much more enhanced. But there's a whole lot of skills that we do want our children to acquire. And so summer camp skills is one way that I have talked about that. And it's basically here are some ideas of things that would be really useful for someone to know.

And yet it doesn't fit into necessarily an academic year, but it should fit into a summer project. And so I do have some camps and things that I have looked at. First, I don't want to give my whole list, but I have a list of things like language camps.

I think language camps should be a high priority. If you are a wealthy, you know, Argentine family and you want your children to get better at English, if you're not doing English skills at school every day, then the obvious solution is you enroll your children in an English-language summer camp.

And it works kind of like any other summer camp of canoeing and hiking, et cetera, just happens to be done in English. But what I find is that English-speaking people from the English-speaking world don't often think of that, but they should. So enroll your children into a Spanish-language summer camp or a Chinese-language summer camp and give them a chance to use it.

You may not move to China for a year of school, fine, but go ahead and go to China for a month or for a few weeks and enroll your children in a Chinese-language summer camp and that will be a big, big benefit. So I think language camps are really useful.

There are a lot of skills that can be acquired in a really efficient way in a short period of time. So for example, I think we should teach young men and women to dance. I think that the physical grace that comes with dancing and just the enjoyment of the physical movement of dancing is something that should be done.

But dance may not be something that you do all the time, but there may be a dance summer camp where a few weeks at a dance summer camp and a guy can come out being a very skilled Latin dancer. It's not that hard. And so you should make a list of your own things that you want your children to learn and supplement.

And I think this is a really important structure for people who are able to provide their children. For people who are not going to homeschool, but who are going to keep their children in some form of just ordinary industrial school, then you should still supplement that with the things that you think are really important.

And so if it's a religious camp to teach the doctrines and fundamental foundations of your faith or apologetics or dancing or woodworking, et cetera, summer camps are going to be a huge benefit for you. So that's the best I could do extemporaneously. And with that, I will close out today's podcast.

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