Today on Radical Personal Finance is live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheath, today is Friday, January 19, 2024.

And on this Friday, as we do each Friday, in which I can arrange the appropriate recording and broadcasting technology, we record a live Q&A. You call in, talk about anything you want. If you've been listening to these shows, looking for a chance to talk to me, bring up your topic of conversation, bring up any questions that you have, I'd love for you to do that.

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By the way, if those of you who want to talk to me, this is probably your cheapest way to do that. I've had people, of course, I want you to stay around for years and years as a patron, I've had people sign up, sign up for one month, talk to me on Q&A calls each week for a month or something like that, and then they're done and they're out of here.

Also remember though, so if you'd like to talk to me, that's a fair way to do it. However, also remember that right now, consulting calls are open during the month of January. If you'd like to book a private consultation with me, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult, probably one of the most competent, most discreet financial advisors that you can talk to.

I don't have any conflicts of interest, don't sell any products, I'm just simply here to talk to you about anything that you want. You can judge by the way that I handle these Q&A calls and see if you think it might be useful. But if you think I might be able to serve you, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult.

We begin with Andrew in Minnesota. Andrew, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Andrew Hiltzik, CFO Alphabet and Google: Yeah, good afternoon, Josh. I just want to first off say thanks and appreciate the opportunity to do this on a regular basis. My question is to just get general advice.

I'm interested to start my own podcast around building wealth and investing specifically in a niche to build mid-six-figure to mid-seven-figure wealth. Or I want to be mindful to Christians with respect to tithing, generosity in general, biblical financial advice. And I'm just curious if you have any recommendations on how to build a brand around that concept that would eventually generate income over months to years that I could potentially live off of.

You said podcast. Do you mean audio podcast or do you mean video podcast? Either/both. I would assume just to get... I'm not a content creator by any way currently. So I think I'd get started generally doing audio, but I'm definitely open to video and even just a common webcam videotaping the conversation.

Right. So let me begin with that. I would say that the era of audio-only podcasting is basically behind us. And so if I were starting over today, even as I think about with my own stuff, I would never again start an audio-only podcast. And let me explain why that is so you can see if I'm right or wrong.

Because there are many audio podcasts. Many people listen to audio podcasts. But audio podcasts face some significant challenges that other forms of media do not. The first problem that you face with audio podcasts is the problem of findability. Now if somebody wants to go and look for an audio podcast, there is no problem of findability.

You can go to Apple Podcasts, you can go to Stitcher, you can go to Spotify. You can go wherever you want. You can find podcasts. But that's only serving the people who are going and looking for those audio podcasts. And so those people can go and find an audio podcast.

And that's great. But once they find it, they can't really share it. And this is the first big problem with audio-only podcasting. Audio-only podcasts are not shareable. And thus they basically never go viral. A show can sort of kind of go viral. Although I haven't heard of an audio podcast going viral in years, there are certainly many large audio podcasts.

But a podcast itself, like a specific episode of a podcast cannot go viral because there's no easy way to share it. There's no easy way to share a clip from it. There's no functional way that it can go. So you might have a show of mine that you really enjoy.

And so you'll send an episode to a friend and that friend may click on a link and listen to the episode. I do that occasionally when someone sends me a link. But they can often listen without subscribing. And the listening is often buried in a long format of show.

I of course produce a long format podcast and my listeners that are here for the long format, they like that. I like the medium. It fits what I like to do. But in general it means that it's very hard for people to find the content. And a specific podcast episode or a specific audio podcast only moment never goes viral.

Let's pretend that the problem of shareability was instantly solved. Let's pretend that you recorded a podcast and you had somehow some custom software that could take a perfect three minute clip from an audio podcast. And so anytime somebody wanted to share that clip of some profound thought that you've had with your audio podcast and they wanted to share that with all their friends on social media and they click that, you're still left with just audio.

And unless there's some kind of automated transcription service that's transcribing it and putting words on it, it's such a boring video and you've all lost all of our attention span that nobody's going to sit there and pay attention to a three minute audio only clip. And so you don't even have something that can go viral the way that a three minute video clip from a show or something like that could go viral because there's nothing interesting to see.

And so when your listeners are sitting there scrolling and swiping while they're sitting on the bus or whatever, then they're not likely to sit there for long enough to listen to your audio, especially in a TikTok generation where now our attention spans are even shorter. Now the second big problem with podcasts is that there's no algorithm to feed your content to someone else.

So if you have an audio only podcast that is positioned on a traditional audio only platform and somebody listens to your episode, there's no algorithm that's going to pitch them the next episode. There's no algorithm that's going to say, "Hey, have you checked this out?" Now compare and contrast that with YouTube.

If I go to YouTube and I search for something, I'll get a lot of interesting search results and I'll find a video and I'll watch two or three videos. Then the next day when I'm flipping through my YouTube feed, all of a sudden YouTube pitches me a video on the thing that I watched yesterday.

And I say, "Oh, that's cool." And if I watch one person's video, then all of a sudden now it'll pitch me another person's that video. And many of the channels or things that I consume on an ongoing basis are things that I consume based upon the fact that they were recommended to me by the algorithm.

And so that recommendation engine of the algorithm is really, really a valuable thing about the video platforms and it doesn't exist on any of the audio platforms. So the third thing that has happened is with the absolute collapse of the price of bandwidth that most of us basically have enough data that we don't much care whether we're listening to audio or we're watching video.

So when I started Radical Personal Finance in 2013, it was a very pivotal moment in the technology of audio podcasting because we had gone past the stage at which you had to take your iPod, plug it into your computer and upload all your podcasts that you downloaded from iTunes.

That was where I started listening to audio podcasting. Some people were before that, but that's where I ended in. It was past that stage, but we weren't yet to the stage where bandwidth was cheap. We were at the smartphone revolution where people didn't have to deal with iTunes and plugging their iPod and MP3 players into the computer, but we hadn't yet reached absolute zero cost bandwidth.

And so audio podcasts were very attractive because you could download all kinds of podcasts, have them all ready for you and you could, while you're driving around, easily listen to those things. And that was where the mega podcast listeners kind of started and came from. That's dead and gone.

I don't do that anymore and I'm a podcast creator. I do not today listen to any audio only podcasts and the audio podcasts that I do listen to, I usually stream them on something like YouTube because it's more convenient for me to have it there than it is for me to use podcast players.

And actually that's not true. Excuse me, there is one podcast that I do listen to that is an audio podcast that's not on YouTube. But beyond that, the whole world of kind of audio podcast listening has dramatically decreased. Now what has increased is video. So video is absolutely enormous and video in all of its formats, long form video, two hour video, two second video, all of video, we are living in the day and age of video.

Now let me pivot for just a moment to writing. Writing is not dead and gone. Writing is still extremely powerful and extremely useful. But the methods of writing have changed and writing has the great benefit of being scannable and having the ability to go viral in an appropriate forum.

And so as I see it, the future is for strong writers and for strong video creators to really flourish in the future. Now that doesn't mean that you can't have an audio only podcast because there is still a great contingent of people that may want to listen to your content because it is convenient for them.

They might not live in a place where they have great connectivity, etc. And so those people, creating an audio podcast feed is certainly something that should be done but I would not recommend it as a primary platform for almost anybody in today's age. Now here is one comment however where I would say it is worth considering.

If creating the audio podcast is something that is useful for you personally as a way to articulate your thoughts and to force you and if it is the simple first step to going from being a consumer to being a producer, then you should do that. But you should as quickly as possible add in other forms of content that have the opportunity to go viral, to be shared more easily in a compact, concise way and also that have the opportunity to get algorithms working on your side sharing your content in some way, shape, or form.

And audio podcasts as I see it suffer enormously from those two major problems in today's world. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, good advice. When would you find it appropriate to spend money on advertising on any social media advertising platform spending a few hundred dollars a month there to try to kickstart that going viral or searchability?

When you have some saleable product where you can profit from it. So for the business model to work, you have to have some kind of product that you can sell and if you have that, then go ahead and start spending money on ads. Okay, sounds good. Okay, thank you very much.

My pleasure. And feel free to call back and we can go over more steps but I feel strongly about that. The era of audio only podcasting, the great rise in it, it's still there just like radio is still there but it's not where the excitement is, it's not where the masses are and I believe that it suffers from those two enormous flaws.

Peter in New York, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey Joshua, can I ask you some questions about cash management both strategic and tactical? Yes. All right. My portfolio has gotten a little out of whack and I'm happy to go into that but I wanted to first strategically try to figure out if my stock to cash balance should also include my real estate holdings or not and then I had some specific tactical questions about getting the stock portion or the cash portion of my portfolio built back up.

What is your target percentage and allocation towards cash? So with investable money, I'm interested in 90% mutual funds and 10% cash. And how much total cash does that represent in terms of your portfolio? So it depends on whether the real estate's in there or not. That's what I'm trying to figure out first which is my network when you throw in the real estate is like double what it is if you just looked at the investable assets.

So I'm trying to figure out what my cash number should be if it should include the total number with the real estate or not. What's the net worth with real estate and what's the net worth without real estate? With real estate it's about 5 million and without the real estate it's about 2 million.

And how did you come up with a 10% target? What's the logic behind that target? I just picked, Warren Buffet always said 90% S&P index and 10% short term treasuries. So I said that sounds like a good mix to me. And currently is the money in treasuries? So currently my cash position's gotten a little bit whacked.

The biggest chunk of it is in a high yield savings account. And then the next biggest tranche is the cash balance of the whole life insurance policy and then after that is in a checking account. Why did Warren Buffet say 10% treasuries, 90% mutual funds? I think the idea always was just to have some cash on the sideline for interesting opportunities that come around.

I always had the sense it was for dry powder purposes. So I'm fine with it. We just always have to ask that question. Why are we doing this? And so I have some thoughts and I have a framework but before I give that to you, what specifically is your first question then?

So my real question is I've gotten out of whack because I simultaneously had a large inheritance tax bill, which is how the real estate portion of the portfolio got really big all of a sudden, and I had a car that I came off of a lease that I bought.

So I simultaneously had a huge tax bill and a huge car loan bill and all of my usual sort of emergency fund cash that I had went to that. I've been doing a little 0% credit card games and have a whole life insurance loan that I'm paying back. And I'm trying to, you know, the credit card game is sort of easy to do the three card Monty.

The real question I had is with the whole life insurance loan, how beneficial it is to drag that out versus paying it down, you know, give it that it's even though I'm paying myself back as my highest interest debt right now. That's really the tactical question I have. But also I was trying to figure out do I, does the number that I'm shooting for need to reflect the fact that I've got these big real estate holdings or can it just, you know, print out what's in the 401k and everything else that's invested.

I don't know of a way that we could answer that cat, that last question categorically until we project a few scenarios. And so there's, when you think about your cash holdings, then you want to say, well, what are, what are my targets? What are my scenarios? That's why I pressed on the 10% number.

You could imagine, for example, let me, let me just set out a couple of scenarios to try to prove the point. Let's say that somebody has a $10,000 net worth and so he's trying to take Warren Buffett's advice and he's trying to keep $9,000 invested in mutual funds and $1,000 in cash.

Well that's obviously dumb, right? Somebody with a $10,000 net worth should have all $10,000 in cash because you're going to need that money to move apartments and put down first, last and security. You're going to need that money to fix the car when it breaks. When you have $10,000 net worth, the 10/90 rule doesn't make any sense because it needs to be a hundred percent cash and zero percent mutual funds at that level of net worth.

Now if somebody's got a hundred bazillion dollars and they're trying to keep 90% in mutual funds, so somebody's got a hundred bazillion dollars and they're trying to keep 90% in mutual funds and their 10% means that they've got $58 million sitting in cash and they have no intention of buying a business or anything like that, then what's the point of having $58 million sitting in cash?

Now you could understand Warren Buffett giving that advice about kind of a dry powder target but I don't think it's very helpful for us to begin there. I think we need to begin first by saying what are some reasons we might want to have cash and then target those reasons.

So the example, this is where we get into kind of day-to-day normal stuff, three to six months worth of expenses in cash. Why? Well we might lose our job. If we lose our job we don't want to be in a difficult situation, we want to be able to get a good next job, we want to make sure we have money so if we have six months of expenses, that six months of wiggle room, I think I could probably get a job fairly quickly within that, especially if I'm fairly employable.

Now let's say that instead of being fairly employable you have a job where you have a very unique skill set and maybe you can make a lot of money when you're working but it's not uncommon at all for you to have say eight months without a contract or ten months without a contract.

Well now in that situation we would immediately go and say I need to have a year's worth of emergency fund, a year's worth of expenses because I might go a year without having income. So now the goal is a year. Now if someone has real estate then let's say we want to look at it and we say what could likely happen.

Well the worst scenario that might happen is I would have a hurricane with a bad tornado spawned from it that rolls across all four of my rental houses at the same exact time destroying all four of them. Well I have insurance policies, my deductibles on each property are $25,000 and so if I have $100,000 in cash then that covers my deductibles on four properties.

It's probably more extreme than I need to think about but that's kind of a starting point because now we're putting a name on the cash and we're giving it a job to do and now we understand how much we might want to have. Similarly in the real estate space if we're looking at it and we recognize you know what from time to time I have a two month vacancy I need to make sure that I'm always prepared to have money for a two month vacancy and I need to make sure that my average turnaround on a house when someone moves out and kind of fixing it up is say $4,000 so I need enough money to cover my expenses for mortgage expenses and other stuff for a two month vacancy on average plus $4,000 turnarounds plus 50% of a roof or something like that.

And so the only way we can arrive at the appropriate amount of cash to have on hand is based upon the kinds of scenarios that we would envision needing that money for. And then that's actually what funds a lot of kind of what I say about where and how cash should be stored.

So I tell people they should start their cash savings by having a certain amount of money that they have at home. And so why do I say that? Physical currency. Well how do you figure out what amount of physical currency you should have? Well you make up a scenario.

So my scenario is you know all of a sudden they pass some law against homeschooling or something like that and it's going to be retroactive and I've got to flee the country so they don't put my children in prison. And so I need to make sure that I have $10,000 of cash to go down to the airport and buy plane tickets out of the country so they don't arrest me and my children.

And I need to make sure that I have enough money to flee and have three months of expenses in a foreign area, foreign land. So maybe if I have $20,000 in currency that allows me to go and get on an airplane and start over somewhere else. You know I'm using kind of a goofy but real scenario.

Or you might look and say if everything went bad and I lost everything I had at least I have three months of expenses and so I want to have that in physical currency. Or you look at how much money do you keep in a bank account in another country.

Well my answer is something like two years worth of living expenses. That's a target. Why? Well maybe my home currency is collapsing and I have to move abroad because there's hyperinflation where I'm from and I need two years to kind of figure things out so I keep two years worth of living expenses abroad and I invest everything else etc.

So I've given enough examples now but that's the way that you figure out how much cash you need. And a guy with $100 million doesn't need $10 million of cash just because of a 90/10 rule and a guy with $10,000 doesn't need $1,000 of cash just because of a 90/10 rule.

There needs to be a name that's put on it based upon probable potential life circumstances that may happen and how you might use cash to negotiate those circumstances. Got it. Got it. I've always sort of done the standard three to six months reserve has always been my usual just to cover living expenses on the odd chance that nobody's working for a little while.

And I think that's reasonable. Beyond that, yeah, beyond that I've never really targeted for anything other than that. I mean occasionally it's nice to have some if there's some dip in the market or something like that but really that's all I've ever earmarked it for. And so I didn't give trading examples but a trader will go through a similar thought process.

You know I never commit more than let's say you had some rules. Let's say you said I'm never going to commit more than 10% of my net worth to a position and I always want to have enough money to be able to take advantage of a really great buying opportunity when it's there.

I want to have that dry powder. So then that person might say I'm going to always keep 10% of my net worth in cash so that I have the ability to jump on something when I see it or whatever other logic works based upon your particular strategy. My point is it's fine to accept a rule of thumb.

You routinely hear me use rules of thumb because rules of thumb work. If somebody has six months of expenses and that fits if somebody always has an emergency fund that covers three to six months of expenses by definition that amount of money will scale to somebody's lifestyle. And so people who live a lifestyle of say $3,000 a month they don't have $30,000 emergencies.

They just don't because everything in their life is scaled to their expenses. On the other hand a guy who lives a lifestyle of $15,000 a month it wouldn't be uncommon for him to have a $30,000 emergency. It's just a different expression of emergency because our financial transactions are always scaled to our normal life.

So the rule of thumb is perfectly fine to use because it kind of automatically fits most of those circumstances. You wanted to buy out a lease on a car you're the kind of guy who has six months of expenses for you buying a lease on a car. I don't know what you paid but let's just say $40,000 to buy out your lease.

Okay done great this was no problem because that's the scale of your financial life. So I don't want to keep you too much longer on the whole life loan just from a practical standpoint is it beneficial to drag out paying that out for however the policy and no okay so it doesn't matter how I do that.

It gets paid off when it's paid off and neither here nor there on the rate of doing it. Right so my answer to you was the first thing we look at is do we need the cash right now or are we simply kind of rebuilding the supplies. If we're rebuilding our reserves then my first answer and I'll just give it to you we don't need to go through it in a question and answer way is you start by funneling extra amounts from your income towards just simply building cash again.

So for a guy like you who's wealthy who could sell property for a guy like you who has the ability to open up your stock account sell $100,000 and have it covered immediately. I don't think you need to freak out and start selling property unnecessarily. You don't need to start incurring taxable gains unnecessarily.

You just want to go ahead and say hey I spent down a lot of cash let's rebuild up the reserves and the ideal way to build up reserves is to simply build them up from income. And so you want to of course make sure that you maximize qualified account contributions because as the calendar year passes you'll lose the ability to make those contributions but after you've maximized 401ks, HSAs, etc.

whatever your qualified accounts or otherwise you're using then just stop additional investing unless there's a really great deal and you're just buying bargain shares of something. Stop additional investing and start rebuilding cash just from income flows and then that in and of itself should handle it. The first thing I would pay off would be the life insurance loan and the reason is that if you're successfully surfing your 0% balances and I'm assuming maybe you took my credit card course or at least you're familiar with the concepts I taught in that is that if you're successfully surfing those balances and they're small balances let's say it's 20% of your total credit line then those are pretty cheap balances and anytime you need to you can always just take out another life insurance loan and pay them down if you need to.

But so I would rather go ahead and pay down the life insurance loan first, pay off that interest, surf the balances using the 3% or 5% offers if necessary while just simply paying them down out of cash flows. And then if something happens and let's say that they reduce your credit limits or credit score goes down or something like that then what you do is just go ahead and take out another policy loan against the cash values, use that to pay down the credit card balances until you get a more advantageous offer and then switch back.

So you kind of go back and forth. But there's no reason to want to maintain a life insurance policy loan on your policy. There's no benefit to maintaining it. The only reason to have it is if it was useful for you to do something else but once you've used it you want to take it out, put it back, pay it down and get the policy restored back to full operating condition by not having a loan on it.

Got it. All right. Thank you. Great. My pleasure. All right. We move on to the state of Washington. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Is that me? Can you hear me? That's you. Whoever you is. Yep. Oh cool. My name is Kevin. I had a, I guess a technical question like a short story as building a house this year and I was trying to think of ways that I could generate additional cash flow from possibly my taxable investment account or turning off 401k contributions or even HELOC on the current property which is going to be sold at the end, stuff like that.

Because I'm going to have to be paying interest only payments on the loan as the stuff progresses throughout the year as it gets built. How much money do you need? Very unknown at the moment. Very unknown. The first check I wrote was 6,500 bucks and I'm sure that's going to get bigger and quicker.

Are you borrowing money? Do you have a construction loan for the construction? Yes. We will have a construction loan but just try to cash flow it if I can, as much as I can. All right. Well let me give you two models to think about, two just frameworks to put in your thinking.

I think that if these models are accurate then you'll be able to answer all of the day-to-day questions. So let's begin with model number one. Model number one is if you want to have the lowest possible cost to the construction then you should not borrow money for it. Anytime we do anything with borrowed money we spend more money because psychologically it's just easy to spend money.

Maybe it's just me but at least that's always been my experience. If you actually have to watch your dollars leave your bank account you take much better care of those dollars than if those dollars leaving your bank account are there because of your construction loan than if those dollars are there because of your credit card or whatever the SBA loan, etc.

New business people who go and borrow money to start their business waste money left, right, and center in a way that you don't when it's actually your money that you saved. And so if you came to me and you said I am going to pay cash for everything and because of that I'm going to stop contributing to my 401k, I'm going to stop saving anything, etc.

I'm just paying cash. I think that's a perfectly reasonable and even advisable plan because of those psychological effects. You'll make generally speaking better decisions, you'll spend less money, your overall cost to create the house that you want will be lower. Now does that mean that you have to do it debt free?

It doesn't sound like that's even a choice that you're making but I would say no because there may be certain things that are just set. So for example you have to borrow money to buy the land or you have to borrow money to get the shell built out and that's going to cost you X number of dollars and I'm definitely going to borrow money for that.

So that's okay and it's fine to do half and half but if you did something like say I paid cash for the land, I have to borrow money to get the house shell built so that it's dried in and everything but everything after that I'm going to pay cash and do it myself little by little even if it takes you a couple years to do that etc.

Because of those behavioral changes I think that's often a perfectly fine thing to do and a smart thing to do. And so it's fine to stop saving and investing, it's fine to do that stuff. Now if you're, that's framework number one and I think for most people you're better off just to do that.

I don't think almost anyone would regret not contributing to their 401k for a couple of years if that allowed them to have a lower balance at the end, to know that they had squeezed every penny as much as possible so that they bought the right things and also to make sure that they had enough money to comfortably buy the things that make the house really nice to have.

Because the opposite argument for what I've described is that sometimes people pinch their pennies so hard when they're building a new house that they wind up not creating the house to the level that they really want. And so they buy all the cheap fixtures and eight years in everything's rusted and you're pulling it all out.

It would have been better if you just increased your budget 30% and bought the nice fixtures that would have lasted for a longer period of time and helped the house as well. And so if debt is one way you do that or just not saving is one way you do that, that's a reasonable choice.

Now beyond that when we get to the topic of should I stop putting money in my 401k or should I cash flow from my stocks, those are two separate questions, let me deal with those separately. If you don't contribute to your 401k, you lose your 401k contribution for the year once the calendar year is finished.

And so if that's an important component of your long-term wealth building plan, as it is for most people, recognize that every calendar year that passes that you don't max your accounts is a calendar year that you won't be able to contribute. It doesn't mean you can't still invest later, it doesn't mean you can't still get rich, but it's a calendar year that you won't be able to contribute.

And so if you want that contribution, then you've got to do that, which would lead us to say if you have taxable investments, yeah, you should sell them, etc. Now moving to the other thing that you alluded to, should I divert my cash flow from my taxable accounts? Sure, you should divert all cash flow.

Wherever it comes in, any cash flow should be treated the same and it should go to your highest financial priority, which is to build this house. If you have to sell investments, then it's more a matter of tax planning the future of the investment and would I rather kind of pay for the things that I'm buying or would I rather not pay for the things that I'm buying.

But in general, I believe that for most people, the first principle that I described is going to be your most important one. You'll make better decisions, you'll be more careful, more thoughtful, and you'll feel better at the end when you're dealing with your money for stuff rather than overspending by 82% because you did it all with debt.

Yeah, it's pretty much everything I thought through on my own as well. But buying the land and everything else, all my cash is gone effectively. So the other thing you pointed out was good. So you got to get more cash and obviously that's what you're saying, but that's going to come from either selling some of your investments to free up cash or it's going to come from making more money or it's just going to come from waiting until you can save more money.

And so you take a look at the situation and figure out what makes sense for you. But those are the frameworks that I think will answer your questions. Good enough? Yeah, cool. Thank you. Yeah. My pleasure. All right, move to David in Texas. David, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

Hey, Joshua. This is a "What would Joshua do?" type of question. WWJD, baby. And so, yeah, exactly. And we've spoken in the past in the consulting, so you might remember some of my intricacies. But anyway, I have a full-time technical W2 job and then I also have a side business that probably around half of my full-time W2 job.

The company that just offered me this new job, and the job I was working was about to get shut down for the project. So this new job offered me to move actually closer to family. It's about an hour closer. We live out in the country where I would call ourselves prepared.

We run five acres, small home with a shop and some other stuff for being off-grid. But anyway, this other company offered to move us closer, which is actually closer to family. It's about an hour closer to family. And so we'd be about 10 to 15 minutes closer. I'm sorry, 10 to 15 minutes from family in this new area.

But the dilemma is, do I stay and pursue my part-time side job and let it grow while spending more time with family? Or do I continue to do this technical job with the side job, being closer to family and help? I don't know what answers you need from me.

Do you need more time with your family? Time is a commodity right now. I have a two-year-old and a three-month-old. Oh, sorry. Do you mean my wife and kids or do you mean my extended family? Do you need to spend more time with your family right now? I would like to.

But as a husband and father, I'm also trying to not neglect that aspect of having a good, strong income. I don't ask the question as a joke. I ask it as a genuine question. Let me just give some examples. I mean, a guy – let's say that you come in and you've got a 15-year-old kid and you come in and surprise your 15-year-old kid in his bedroom and he's sitting there cutting himself.

Well, obviously, you need more with your family. And so you quit your job, you sell everything, you go and hike the Adirondack Trail and you fix your son, whatever can be done. You go crazy, you act like a maniac and you fix it. You pour all of your energy and all of your focus onto this.

And the thing that you obviously desperately need in that situation because your son is abandoned and going – I don't mean to be too hyperbolic here, but he's down a very wrong path. He could be dead in two years. Then you desperately need time with your family. And so as a father, then you completely reorient everything else in your life and you fix that.

And that basic principle applies at different times. I mean, let's say you've got a – I don't know. You've got two children right now, but let's say you've got four children, a four-year-old, a three-year-old, a two-year-old and a one-year-old, and your wife is falling apart and the burden is just enormous and you're worried about her health, et cetera, then obviously, yes, you need more time with the family.

On the other hand, if you're doing your job well and you're a good husband and your wife is strengthened and she's doing well and you've got healthy children, et cetera, then you don't need more time with your family. And that's where I think that there's something that is happening in our current age.

And I'm probably guilty of perpetuating this, but there's some kind of idea that has been created that somehow an ideal man is a man who's with his family 168 hours a week. And while I clearly care very much about family, your family, you being there for yours, me being there with mine, I don't think that's the ideal.

I don't think that that's a proper framework. I don't think that we look at the idea of time with family and say that 168 hours a week is the perfect standard, 158 hours a week with our family is a grade B, and so therefore, 40 hours a week with our family is an F, and we've got to move ourselves better by spending more time with our family.

I have made statements such as it's quality of time at work that counts and quantity of time at home that counts. I think that that is true and that matters. I want to be with my family. I have made lifestyle decisions that have allowed me to be with my family 168 hours a week, but I reject the idea that that's the only correct path and that that is the only thing that you as a husband are responsible for doing.

So as you said, the amount of income that your family has matters. It matters a lot. And your work matters. It matters a lot. It is important. Your work is important. Your contribution to the world through your work is important. Your sense of mission in your job is important.

The things that you do are important. And so as a man, you have to look at your family and you have to say, "Do I need more time with my family? And what is the cost of that time versus how kind of other things are going well?" And here's where you want to consider your family situation.

You want to, I mean, there's a huge difference between a guy who has a wife who's a full-time mother, he can get in his car, he can go off and work a long day just totally confident that his children are well cared for, that they know that mommy and daddy love me.

That's a very different scenario than husband and wife who both have demanding jobs and they rush off in the morning and they don't even see the kids because the babysitter or the au pair gets the children ready for work, etc. And so there's not an ideal perfect standard. It's a standard that will adjust and will adapt throughout your life.

And in terms of time with family, the thing that I don't even want to say it again because I've said it a bazillion times quite literally on the – not quite literally, that was not right. I've said it many, many times on the show and I feel like I'm just always over here beating this drum and I should quit beating that drum and find a new drum to beat on.

But things like the age of your children matters. If you've got a two-year-old and a three-month-old, as a father, there's really very little – like obviously you want to play with your children and be there and build a relationship, etc. But you're being there with them more and let's say you could free up five hours a day, it's not particularly productive especially if your wife is there with them for those extra five hours a day.

It's not that productive. And so again, if your wife is falling apart, if she needs your help, if she needs your support in some way, then you roll up your sleeves and you strengthen your home. But if your home is strong and things are going well, then you keep focusing on building what you need to build, building the empire, building your dynasty, building your vision, etc.

Yeah, it's the former. She's struggling and we want more kids. Okay, so now, good. So perfect. Thank you for interrupting me because I was – so if your wife is struggling, then you need to strengthen your wife and you have to then look at your wife, your individual wife, not a generic woman but your woman, you need to look at your household and you need wisdom and you need to apply wisdom and say, "How do I strengthen my wife and how do I strengthen my household?" One way of doing it might be for you to be involved and for you to be there.

I have done this, right? I have many young children. I have done this. I have done this repeatedly on different occasions. In many ways, I'm much better at running my household than my wife is in terms of just keeping everything running very, very well. And so if she's struggling, then I step in and I try to work on things.

We've had various discipline issues with various children. And if my children are disrespecting my wife and they're not obedient, then I have to step in and I have to correct that. But I don't look at it as a long-term career. I look at it as I have a responsibility to change this and as soon as I get this child's behavior changed and fixed so that he or she is back in a proper place of respectful obedience and respect for my wife, etc., then my goal is not to just to be there.

And it's kind of a balance, right? Because if my wife is struggling, the goal is not for me to just take over. The goal is for me to strengthen her, to help support her so that she's no longer struggling, and then for her to grow and be stronger in her area of domain and her area of responsibility.

And that sometimes comes from you, right? A three-month-old is rough. We've had a rough year with our fifth baby. Last year was really difficult and a lot of it was difficult just because of having a baby in the house. And so you adapt to that, but don't think it's a long-term thing.

It doesn't have to be a long-term thing. It's just this is what it's like dealing with babies. And you may have a particularly difficult baby. You have a sick baby, etc. And all that stuff is draining. So you figure out what is there. Now I would remind you, though, that you being home is a great solution.

It's not the only solution. And so sometimes a better solution is find somebody who can lighten the load for her. Find a housekeeper who can come in, who can clean the house so she doesn't need to do that. Find a really great place to put your two-year-old for the morning so she has a break.

Find someone, a family member, who can come over and be in the home a couple days so she can have some time to herself and go for a walk around the neighborhood, etc. Sometimes it is just you being there. But look at it holistically and then make your job decisions, your career decisions in light of what you think is the best solution for your family.

If the stress is primarily due to the difficulties of a three-month-old baby, then just recognize that this is not necessarily a long-term thing. And so don't commit yourself to a long-term solution of quitting a job or something like that when good chance four months from now you're out of the woods, she's back to her normal self, she's feeling good, she's fully recovered, she's sleeping, the baby's back healthy, etc.

And then finally, don't neglect whatever solving the actual needs are. So for example, with a baby, don't neglect, you know, why is this baby not sleeping so that my wife is frazzled because she's not sleeping. Is there something that can be done? Be really good at driving your family through all of those things on a comprehensive way.

>> Yeah, it's actually the opposite. It's actually our two-year-old that's very strong-willed and bucking against the power as it were. And so the problem is right now we bought five acres in a property and we're kind of isolated. We're not, I mean, I guess that's the whole point of buying five acres on land.

Really pretty property, but we're not near family. We're about probably an hour away from family. And so, and we put our oldest daughter on Mother's Day out. We don't really like a full daycare schedule. It's like two days a week just so we could be present. And so with the W-2 job, we would have to either move or, and they've actually said they would accommodate a hybrid schedule.

So I would basically drive an hour two days a week or three days a week and then work from home two days a week so that we could keep, you know, the house. But I honestly don't know if that's the best for our family, you know, because again, we're isolated a little bit further out from the city versus again, my wife, you know, us being a little bit, you know, maybe 10 to 15 minutes from family.

But one thing we realized, Josh, was unless it's very convenient for family to help, they just don't. And yeah, I think that's just, we were starting to realize that both of our parents are past, my parents and her parents are not in the picture, so they're not helpful. And so we just realized people that have jobs don't really, don't really got other way to help.

And so it's unfortunate, but it's just kind of the way it is with our siblings. So. I would not say that you were wrong if you left your job, moved or whatever the actual circumstances are so that you could be there, you know, as a stay at home dad or very close to that for a significant period of time.

And in many ways, it kind of feels like that's almost what we have to do in today's world. If you've got a big vision of the family that you're trying to build and the work that's going to be involved in that, etc, then you have to do that. I have sacrificed enormously in my career, in my business, in all of my own pursuits, because I have a vision for the family empire that I desire to build and the dynasty that I desire to leave behind.

And so it's costly and it's financially costly and costly in many ways. And so I respect you for that decision if that's what you choose to do. And I'm not trying to, I'm not going to be able to, nor am I willing even to give you an answer on this just to help you think it through.

So just understand what the core issues are. The reason I was saying like I would respect you for that is that for whatever reason, our culture is not, and this is very key to kind of the American culture, every positive good or value has a negative flip side, right?

Confidence and assertiveness are positive traits, but the flip side is aggression or mowing people down and lack of empathy, right? So everything can have a positive trait. In the United States, we are a very independent people, and that leads to a lot of positive traits. But what has happened is we have taken our individualistic independence and we've taken it to the absolute maximum, to the point where you see this in our culture, where the greatest sin that anybody could think could be foisted against them is for somebody to try to minimize their libertarian freedom to do whatever they want to do.

And so who are you to tell me I can't do that? You can't tell me. It's like this extreme, ugly form of independence. And so our culture lacks any sense of coherent interdependence as a cultural value. And so we have no collective culture. And that lack of collective culture expresses itself in our families, our churches, our neighborhoods, et cetera, that we just don't work together.

And so it's tragic. It's a very lonely existence compared to some aspects of a collective culture. It has its positive upsides. You listen to somebody who comes from a very collectivist culture, and they talk about the pressure that's put on them and the control that's put on them, and they're just happy to be left alone.

So everything has a positive and a negative. But I affirm that in the American culture, it's very unlikely for you to get the kind of support that you would like to get from your family members, from your community, et cetera. We're all—it's the same for everybody. And so what that means is it has put an enormous pressure on people who have children, and it's much, much harder to have children today because of this, where you basically have to bear the load alone.

And so that—and it's one reason many people don't want to have children or don't want to have more children, et cetera, is because they know they've got to bear the load alone. And so I don't have any great solutions. I've just accepted that this is the way it is, and I'm just going to have to bear the load alone, which means I have to build stronger shoulders, my wife has to build stronger shoulders, and we'll just—I'll make up my own strategies to get through it, and I'll arrange my life to do it.

And it's kind of ultimately what I've come to. And again, I'm not casting any harm or any blame on anybody. I have wonderful family members. I've got great friends. I've got neighbors, et cetera. But we don't know how to really work together, nor are we particularly willing to work together.

And so like in—here's just an example. I'm stereotyping, but I believe this stereotype is true. If you went to your siblings or your in-laws or whomever it is in your family, and you say to them, "Hey, guys, listen. There's a town that is—or even just our friends, right?" And we said, "Look, there's a town that's 300 miles away, and they've got houses that are great houses, mansions for 50 grand apiece.

If all of us moved there, we could all be neighbors, and we could live a great life, and we could support one another, we could encourage one another, et cetera." In the American culture, it doesn't fly. It doesn't work. It's never worked. People won't do it. Nobody will move.

Nobody is willing to work together. Nobody is willing to sacrifice my independence to go and do that. Meanwhile, all around the world, people that are from more collectivist cultures, one person goes to another country, gets a residence visa, gets a house, brings over two of his siblings. He's got his brother there, and everyone's putting their money in the pot.

They got 18 people living in a two-bedroom apartment, and all of a sudden, 10 years later, everyone's rich because they're willing to work together. It happens every single day, and it's this cultural values of collectivism versus individualism. Not ironically. That was my father. My father came from Pakistan, and three, four siblings living in a house, four-bedroom, two-bath house for 10 years before they split up.

It sounds like you probably took the ... If you were in my position, you probably took the, "Hey, I'm going to be the family, raise my kids," because I want a strong family. We both would like three, four, maybe five kids. My wife is rethinking that now, though, with the realization that, "Oh, David is not ...

He's out of the home, and he's working back at a W-2 job." I don't want to forsake that for ... I guess ... We're Coast Fire, right? Just putting that out there. Is there anything that you look back now ... I don't think I would have any regrets from a time perspective of just being like, "Wow, I had so much time with my kids in their formative years and even as they grew up." Are there things from a financial perspective?

I guess that's the only thing that I am concerned about, that 2024 and onward are just rocky years and my side job is now my main job and my only job. All of a sudden, we have to, from an income perspective, we have to go on a rice and beans type of diet.

Maybe it'll be worth it. I don't know. David: If I were doing it over again, I would not change any of the decisions that I myself have made because we have five children, my wife and I. If I just left her at home all day and said, "You got to be super mom," especially with things like homeschooling and whatnot, it's impossible for a woman to do that in our world.

It's also ... One more comment on that. It's impossible because of the standards that are imposed upon us by our society or on ourselves. If we were to go back 75 years ago, and I see this all around the world more clearly than I do in the United States, but I know it's there in the United States, the standards for what was expected from a parent were relatively modest.

It was expected that you fed your children at least as much as you could and they ate a couple times a day. It was expected that they went to school, and beyond that, children had an enormous degree of freedom. Our culture was very open to children and they could come and go.

They could come and go in the house. They could go and play in the neighborhood. They entertained themselves. They took care of themselves, et cetera. I just finished reading with my perfect example, if you want a picture of the world before. I just finished reading the third of the Moffat series of books to my family.

It's Elizabeth Estes. I think it's Elizabeth. Anyway, her name is Estes. She wrote this great trilogy of books, amazing children's author. The first one is called Meet the Moffats. Forget the second one. The third one is called Rufus. They're all about these children that are living in a fairly typical town, New York, something like that, actually in New York State.

The mother is a widow and she has four children. She's a dressmaker. That's how she earns her income. They're clearly basically in poverty. But what's so fascinating about the story is that basically the children are free-range kids all the time. They sleep at home and they have dinners with their mother, but beyond that, they come and go around the town as they wish and they are what today we would call free-range kids.

This was entirely normal. This was the normal way of being. The children are not a great impediment to your life in that situation. Well, fast forward to today, if you let your children walk to the park half a mile away, the police are going to get four calls on why are these unsupervised children walking to the park.

Basically every single layer of our society has built up to like with this intense protectionism where nothing can happen. You can't ask your sister to take your children and first of all, no one would take their kids to the mall and just leave them. A lot of us grew up in the day in which that was a fairly normal thing.

No cell phones. Okay, I'll take you to the mall. I'll pick you up at 6 o'clock. But even if you ask them to take them today, of course, you can only take our children to a supervised place with lots of referees and lots of padding where we're going to pay $30 for playtime and latte.

So you ask your sister to do that. Oh no, I can't do that because she's got to have car seats. And so she's got two children and your two children need to have two car seats and of course four car seats can't fit in the car so she can't do it.

And so basically that's our society in a nutshell is it makes everything about it is forcing families to be individualized, forcing families to do it all themselves. You have to take your children because you're the only one with car seats and your friends can't pick them up and so you can't even get an afternoon off.

And so why am I ranting about this? Just to say that this is what has happened. And so children are instead of being a relatively not that big of a deal, they become an enormous nuisance in our society based upon the way that they are. And this is one of the many reasons why birth rates have collapsed around the world.

Now you can change that, right? You got five acres and so your kids can be free-range kids. I live on a farm. My children are free-range kids to a significant degree. And what happens is you have more of them then you realize I don't have to be quite so uptight as I was with the first time around and I can just let them hang out and that's actually good for them and you wind up with a bigger car and so you can fit them and things change.

And so they don't over time you become your standards can change and you recognize it's not such a demanding thing. But it is still demanding and it would be a very unusually strong woman who would be able to have four or five children in a situation like you're describing and be able to do it without significant input and help from you.

I know a few women who do it and they are incredible women, incredibly strong women. But if you want to have a large family then you've got to make sure that your wife is on board with that and a significant component of that is just going to be meeting her needs and taking care of her.

And so that's what I did is that I made that decision and I have sacrificed a lot to do it and I believe that it's the decision that I'll be happy with at the end of my life. I'm quite happy with it right now but it is a lot.

And what I have seen also is that my wife is much, much stronger today than she was 10 years ago. And so being a mother and being a father these are skills that develop over time. I'm a vastly better father today than I was 10 years ago and she is as well.

And so I can do more, she can do more, etc. And it's just a matter of kind of changing your perspective. And last story, like literally today my eldest two are away at a short-term camp and I'm sitting at the table with my younger three and just thinking like, "This isn't difficult.

This is – the house is quiet." Anytime you go from five to three it's like, "This is easy. I could do this in no time." But it wasn't that way when I had three children. And so just recognize that if you've got a vision you're going to have to press through and I think it's the vision that will pay off at the end of your life.

And you've worked really hard to get to this point. And if you have to take 10 years and go on to kind of a sideline career track and then 10 years from now you step back in then that would be fine. What you should do – but this was actually – I intended to say this but I got sidetracked with my monologue.

What you should do and what I have done is always try to keep a good backup plan. So every year for example I pay the CFP board – I can't remember what their dues are. It's like $600 a year, something like that. And every year that stupid bill comes in.

And every year I sit there and I look at it and I don't today care at all about being a certified financial planner. It makes no difference to me whatsoever. It's like the day that I passed the exam and I put it on my business card it completely lost all meaning to me.

It's like you graduate from high school and then you're enrolled in college and all of a sudden your high school graduation – wow, what does it mean? I'm a freshman again. And so I don't care at all about being a certified financial planner. I practically don't even tell anyone although I've tried to change that.

But I've always kept all those designations and I pay that $600 bill every year because it's my backup plan so that if for some reason my business failed or I needed it I can go and I can quickly get re-employed and in a month I can have a job making a few hundred thousand dollars a year and I can get the interview because of the credentials, etc.

And I can make that happen. And so those things are really important. And so look at your job and your career and ask yourself, "Do I have an easy on-ramp back-in?" Because I think the people who suffer the most of dialing back their career for a time are those who wind up becoming irrelevant and obsolete.

Their skills start to atrophy and if they don't have the ability to get back in then it really hurts them. And where you see this hurt a lot of – where this is the most obvious is when you look at moms, mothers who become stay-at-home mothers. They pay an enormous price in their career options because they step out of the workforce to raise children.

And so they're at the top of their career and they're 30 years old and she goes home, spends 10 years raising babies and then she wants to go back in. Well, she's looking around at all of her friends and they're all 10 years ahead and she's not able to compete with them in the workforce.

And so that can be a frustrating thing. And so if she doesn't value the fact that she's got four children that they don't have and then it's a big price for her to pay. And the same thing can apply to someone in your situation. So it's a price that I would pay.

It's a price that I have paid, I am paying and I would pay again. But it's also something where you want to be smart. Keep your certifications, keep your contacts, keep yourself connected, make sure you have a good backup plan so that if you quit your job you can go back in again and start over again and create the money that your family needs.

And if you off ramped, aside from like healthcare maybe going on to the exchange, are there any other financial uh-ohs that you've experienced? Most of the issues are psychological rather than practical. Once you reach this point, especially if you've accumulated assets and you're coast fi, etc. you know how to do the tactical everyday stuff.

You know how to make sure you don't overspend your income. You know how to do all that stuff. So a lot of it is psychological because as a man you want to compete and slipping into irrelevant oblivion is a big price to pay. It's basically part of the same standard speech that I give to men who are retiring.

I don't think men should retire from work even when they can afford to. And the reason is that work provides us with a lot of things that a lot of self-worth and self-image that cannot be achieved sitting at home. In your work you are respected, you're looked up to, you're a leader, you have influence, you have authority, you have power, etc.

And when you leave your job you lose those things and you become just another guy. If you're old, just another old guy. And it doesn't matter how much money you have, you're just another old guy. And I think even in a lot of cases this can cause problems in your marriage.

That one reason your wife is attracted to you is because you're confident, you're a leader, you're looked up to, you're respected, other people respect you and that increases her attraction to you. She's attracted to you because you're a high status man in some circle, in your job, in your business, in whatever it is that you do.

And you come home and you're just kind of the guy sitting around the house, there are a lot of psychological costs to that. And if you don't have some way to manage those costs then that can be the biggest thing that affects you. It's not the money, it's not living on your income.

You can do that and your expenses can go down and you can live well on not a ton of money. But if you experience those psychological things they can be pretty heavy. Now it's not insurmountable. I have taken an enormous amount of joy in the work that I do with my children's education.

There is no possible way that anyone else in the world would be able to, any school or any tutor that I found would be able to help my children to achieve at the level that I have been able to coach them into in their academics and in other non-academic pursuits as well.

Because I'm trying to build a well-rounded education. So I take a lot of joy in that and a lot of sense of self-worth in that. But it is also a weakness in my life that I'm trying to change. Is that being alone and independent, it's not good for a man to be alone.

And being alone and independent, it comes with a cost. It's not good. And so it's a decision that I made but if I were to make it over that would be the biggest thing that I would work hard to fix and I'm working hard to fix, to be more connected.

Especially with babies and whatnot. I used to travel. You got me in story mode. I used to travel. I used to be involved in all the communities. I used to go to all the conferences like I tell other people to do, etc. And it got to the point where if I left it was just so hard on my wife.

I couldn't leave her in a difficult situation, be gone for a week here and a week there and whatnot. There's men who do it. There's women who can handle it. But since I don't have to do it, it didn't feel like I should do that. How can I put that on her and cause her to bear that heavy load of me being gone traveling when I don't have to go and do it?

But that has caused me to in many ways feel less relevant, less connected, less accomplished, less successful. And it has come at the cost of just basically being a devoted father. And so again, I accept those costs but it's not something that I want to continue. And so even this year I'm traveling more.

I'm away more. I'm connecting with people more. I'm working to connect people with more. But it was an intense period of life. My eldest is 10 and my youngest is a year. And it's been an intense period of life. And so I don't see any way around it in our culture.

It used to be that if you could figure out a community where there's a lot of women and grandmothers and whatnot who could help your wife and a great community of people, the children can run out the door and spend all day playing, go there. But lacking that, you're just going to have to do it.

But try to handle these costs and be intelligent about how you approach them. >>Joseph: And sorry, last question. If I wanted to off-ramp, like let's say I was like, "Hey, I'm going to do the technical full-time position and the side hustle until X years." At what age? I mean, you've done this for a long time now.

At what age is, I mean, as I've said, two and three months old, at what age do you start having those experiences where they're actually, I mean, I know kids are always learning, but is there a certain age where it's like, "Okay, you're really developing those strong ties." >>Tavis: Six.

Six is magic. Six is magic. And it's like with babies, I mean, I love my babies. They're cute, et cetera. But I don't really have an emotional connection to babies like my wife does. A mother somehow builds, thank God she does, right? Because the baby wrecks her life for a year.

But a mother, my wife sees her babies and she's just filled with this exuberance and joy and what a cute baby. For me, it's like it's a baby and I have to take care of it. And I take care of it and whatnot, but it's not really, I don't really connect with babies.

And then they're one and they're walking and then they're two and eventually they start talking and then they're three and they're four and whatnot. And I try to do my best to be the dad who plays. I want to be the dad who plays with my children and whatnot, because I know that that stuff matters and so I do it as much as I'm able to.

But the joy for me is never about the kid. The joy for me as a father is about who the young man or the young woman will be, where you really start to see that stuff is around five, around six and beyond. And so in my mind, the ages from six to about 12 are golden, because depending on the level of intellectual and emotional maturity, at six-ish, and again, there's no hard line, but around six, you're dealing with a child who can think.

And of course, they love to ask questions and it's question after question after question after question. And so being with a human being who can think is infinitely more satisfying to me than interacting with a human being who's just driven by his or her emotions. And then there's that just golden period from six to 12, where there's not really any need for outside experience.

There's not really any need for outside. What I mean is children don't need friends outside of their family if they have a lot of siblings. Obviously, you work to do that, because socialization is important. And so you try to make sure they have friends and you try to make sure that they have opportunities to learn to play well with others, et cetera.

Those are important social skills, but there's no real need. They don't have an emotional need for that. Their whole source of supply of stability comes from their family, from their siblings, from their parents, et cetera. And so it's just that to me, that's the golden time where you have an individual who can think and you have an individual that you can really pour into.

And you don't need to encourage independence in a child that young. Now when you get to a child who's, say, 11, 12, et cetera, then now you need to start making sure that the child is developing his or her own independent interests. And you need to make sure that there's more and more confidence and self-confidence is being built in strength.

And so you're intentionally maintaining the closeness of relationship, and you're trying to keep your children connected to you emotionally, but you're trying to make sure that they have room to explore and investigate their own things and to have space to make their mistakes and have to respond to other people and learn lessons, et cetera.

So to me, those are the golden years that things really pay off and they start to remember stuff, et cetera. And so I love traveling with my children. I love doing their school. I love supervising all those things. I really enjoy it because my older children, they're able to think and they ask me questions and it leads to interesting conversations, et cetera.

And I really feel like you're building something and you don't yet have to deal with their independent ambitions and you don't yet have to coach them to independence because of their youth. And so I'm circling back on one question. So on the, like I said, we're about an hour away from family, but we're on five acres.

Would that play a factor? I mean, would you, forget about the job and all that. Would you, would it be better to be closer to family, sell our house on five acres and move into the city? It's not my preference just because I feel like for the last like seven years, I mean, listening to you and other people and just making my own thoughts, I think living out in the country is a better decision.

But regardless, what weight or factor do you put on that in terms of raising a family? One primary reason that I live where I live is I live on a very large property where I can simply tell the children, go outside. My wife can tell the children, go outside.

Do not come in until I call you for dinner. And that I believe is really, really important both for the sanity and good functioning of our household and also for children. That today in today's world, one of the most important gifts that we need to give our children is significant quantities of unstructured playtime outside.

And that is something that is really, really important. And it's important on every level. Physiologically, we are living in right now, I'm not using hyperbole, we are living in an epidemic of myopia, nearsightedness. And a significant causal factor seems to be that the epidemic of myopia is that children are not outside and they're constantly engaged in some form of close work, always reading a book, on a screen, writing, something up close.

And so quite literally, our children's eyes are losing the ability to focus normally and to function normally because they're spending all their time with stuff that's in their faces. They're also not getting enough sunlight. And so their eyes are not being stimulated sufficiently with sufficient sunlight. And so minimum, children need to be outside for at least two to three hours a day, ideally more.

And that's to say nothing of the benefits of free play, of the benefits of exploring, the physical benefits of running and throwing and climbing and etc., and interacting with their siblings, etc. It's fundamentally important. And it's very, very difficult to do that in the city. It's very difficult to do it in the suburbs.

And so, you know, depending on what you're talking about, obviously many children have raised that. But again, back to the issues with being reported to CPS is that you will get reported that you will have Child Protective Services knocking on your door if you let your children go out alone to the park.

The American culture is utterly broken right now on this topic. And so if you went back to say 1940s Brooklyn, then the children weren't hindered by living in a tenement house because they were outside playing in the street and on the abandoned lot, etc. And that was normal. Today, the children growing up in Brooklyn, they can't play in the street.

And so this is one of the problems. And what's your solution? Well, either we change the culture, and some people are doing that. Either we normalize again the fact that it's perfectly reasonable for your eight-year-old and your nine-year-old to ride their bikes half a mile to go to the park and play at the park for a couple hours and then come home.

So either we normalize that or what's your solution? Your solution is to go to a place where you can do that on basically the sanctity of your own property and/or in a culture that accepts that, and a rural culture is more accepting of that. And so I believe that it's necessary that children have multiple hours a day of outside play.

And if you look at kind of a barren suburb quarter acre or half acre even, etc., it's got one tiny little swing set in it, what are they going to do? They got nothing to do. And here's the other aspect, is that basically everything associated with living in the suburbs or living in the city, to keep your sanity as a father, you want to keep everything nice.

And so you don't want your children digging in the backyard and destroying your nice pretty yard. But if you got five acres, you can say, "Listen, do you see this place near the house? You don't dig here. The rest of it where I can..." That's basically my rule with my children.

I'm like, "Don't bring the stuff onto the porch. If I don't see it, it's okay. And you can have as much of a mess as you want out there, but I don't want to see it." And it works. So then they can get those benefits. So yeah, I would...

In terms of your lifestyle, I think that you'll... Since it's unlikely that your siblings would be able and willing to change their lifestyle structure such that you're willing to spend 15 to 20 hours a week working together so that you can send your children over on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and they can send their children over on Thursdays and Fridays, et cetera, and interacting.

Unless there's some strong indication that you can work together on a close basis, you're better off being an hour away and having five acres than the opposite. Okay. That's helpful. Yeah, I think the word for this year is being intentional. We have to just... They're not going to come see us.

We have to go see them. We have to be intentional about it. Whether we're 10 minutes or an hour away. All right. Thanks, Joshua. Have a good weekend. My pleasure. Just recognize as you're making all these decisions that the pregnancy stuff... Or sorry, the baby stuff, there's no... Don't make long-term decisions over short-term factors.

I've never met a mother who wanted to have a baby when she had a three-month-old. So just relax and get through it. Do your best to help her recover. Work really hard to have her physical energy. Work really hard to have her sunlight. Work really hard to help her get fully...

To have as much sleep as possible, even though it's not going to be all connected, et cetera. Work really hard if she has any symptoms of postpartum depression, anything like that. Work really hard at that stuff. And then recognize six months from now, you're going to be in a very different situation.

Anyway, thanks for the stimulating conversation. That sort of kind of was about finances, but about the actual purpose of finances much more. Thanks, Joshua. I appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. My pleasure. All right, that wraps up our final call for today. And let's see as we go, announcements. I said as we go, remember I'm doing consulting appointments right now during the month of January.

Go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult. Sign up there, radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult. Or if you just like to call me up and talk to me next week on the show, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, I hope that these conversations are useful. I always wondered on radical personal finance, of course, it's easy for me to do on a Friday show, but I always think carefully about the content and things that I cover.

And the point of it is that these are the reasons that we have money. And we have a culture that has made the foolish decision to focus primarily on numbers on a balance sheet. And we do that, we make that focus because numbers are easy to measure. Money as a goal is something that is easy to measure because it is numerical.

But just because something is easy to measure doesn't mean that that is the ideal measurement to shoot for. Money is a tool that allows us to live the life that we want, have access to certain things, et cetera. And so we need in personal finance, we need to spend a lot more time talking about the reasons that we are accumulating money and the reasons we're making the decisions we're doing rather than exclusively focusing on the numbers of zeros and dollars.

The end of your life, that's why basically I hope it came through, but at the end of your life, would you trade half a million dollars in net worth at the end of your life to have two more children? It's a serious question. What is your ambition? Is your ambition to be 80 years old and have an additional half a million dollars in net worth or would you rather be 80 years old and have an additional two children and maybe an additional eight grandchildren, et cetera?

The answers to those questions need to drive your life now because money is the thing that's basically the easiest to solve. There's always opportunities to go and work. But if you're living in a culture that is unfriendly to children and you want to have children, then you're going to have conversations kind of like the one that we just had.

Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back with you very soon. I want you to go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult to book a personal consultee call with me and Patreon.com/RadicalPersonalFinance to be on next week's podcast.