- Hi, it's Helen. Are you ready to feel sexy, confident, and liberated by ditching the dye and embracing your natural hair color? Go Gray has a salon-quality hair color remover treatment infused with hair-healthy ingredients, allowing you to free yourself from time-consuming salon visits. Or you can fade away colored hair with their activated charcoal shampoo and conditioner.

Next, brighten your silver or grays with purple-toning pigmented products, leaving you looking stunning and gorgeous. Go Gray is available at Walgreens, Walmart, Target, and CVS and go-gray.com. - Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's a live Q&A. (upbeat music) 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 Josh Rasheeds. Today is Friday, February 16, 2024. And on this Friday, after a multi-week hiatus, we do live Q&A. You call in, talk about anything you want, any questions, any topics, it's up to you. (upbeat music) If you don't know what to call in and talk about, well, welcome to my world.

I actually really enjoy doing these Friday Q&A shows 'cause they're easy for me 'cause I don't have to pick the topic. (laughs) It's not hard for me to record podcasts. It's hard for me to choose the topics to record podcasts on because there's so many twists and turns. Oh, I could talk about this, but I could talk about that, or how much should I talk about it, et cetera.

Showing up to Friday shows is easy because you have to do all that work. You have to decide what we talk about. If you would like to join me in one of these Friday Q&A shows, you could do that by becoming a patron of the show. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance.

That will gain access for you to these Friday Q&A shows. I do that just to meter the amount of calls to an appropriate number so that we don't wind up with 25 callers on the line, et cetera, and it's something that I can't do. So please go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance.

We begin today with Dan in Colorado. Dan, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? - Hey, Joshua, thanks so much. I am 32 years old. I have a two-year-old and a seven-month-old. I currently work remotely, have a salary of about 150,000 with a 10 to 20% bonus.

My wife works remotely part-time with a really flexible schedule, and then she takes care of the boys the rest of the time. We plan to move close to our family this spring, but my boss recently offered me a promotion that I would need to move to a different city for.

It's a vice president, executive-level role that would roughly double my salary, come with a much larger bonus, and would also include some ownership in a company that is likely to IPO in the next year. - Awesome. - Thanks. We saved a lot of money in our 20s. Pretty comfortable.

I also have a side business with a FinTech product that is about to hit the market, and I expect it to do really well. I really like the lifestyle of working remotely, but with the new job, I would need to go into the office two or three days a week.

Not really a big deal. My initial thought, though, was to turn the position down so that we could still move kind of close to our family like we intended, but after sitting with it for a while, I'm kind of wondering if I'm crazy for not taking a role like this, especially since it's the first quarter of my career.

Certainly be among the youngest VPs in the industry, and the title could lend some additional credibility to my side venture, and would absolutely make it easier to get another VP gig at any point in my life after this. So, three quick questions. Would I be crazy for not taking this if I decided not to, or would I be crazy for taking it?

Either way, I guess. If I were to take the job for a year or two, just to get the street cred, and then would moving a two-year-old and a seven-month-old out and then back be an okay thing to do? I think it is, but it might be nice to hear somebody else say that.

And then finally, if I were to negotiate a schedule where I could be in the new city for a month and then back home for one to two months, would moving my family back and forth that often for a couple of years be irresponsible in your opinion? - When you talk about moving your family to be back home or close to the rest of your family, specifically, which family members are you referring to?

How many of them are there? And what does close mean? - Good question. Yeah, so it's basically everyone. It's both of our parents. So, all the grandparents, all of our siblings, and their children. And we would be within about two hours of them initially, 'cause we were gonna move to our vacation property for a year or two.

We have a lot of projects going on out there. So, it'd be easily within a weekend drive, whereas we are not now. With about three to four years out when my older son starts kindergarten, we would move probably back into the same county. - Okay. First thing is, I don't know how to answer the question of living close to family in any kind of financial framework.

And I don't know that I have any kind of broadly applicable framework. So, let me just kind of lay out a couple of thoughts to consider as we talk about it. First, let's acknowledge that moving close to family would ordinarily be considered by most people a positive thing to do, unless there's some kind of dysfunctional or toxic family, et cetera.

Generally speaking, we appreciate that we want to be close to those that we're most dear to, that we love those who we're most dear to. And so, that generally, I think, is a positive thing. And the fact that all of your family is together in one place, meaning both sides of the family, across the board, that creates an enormous attraction because those relationships for you and for your wife and for your children, those relationships will be very productive and helpful, especially in these early years of you having some help, some relief, interactions, friends, people that you know well, et cetera.

So, that's a positive, beneficial thing. I don't know that that is always the determining factor, though. I've wrestled with this a lot. I don't currently live close to my family, and I've repeatedly questioned my own motives 'cause I could live anywhere. And the question is, why don't I live close to my family?

If I believe what I just said, which I do, that living near family is useful and helpful and productive, et cetera, then why don't I, myself, at this time, live close to my family? Part of it is that I did for a long time, and without getting into my story, just saying that I guess the reason is you need to have some kind of strong reason not to.

And so, there can be many reasons, and no one is out here judging your decisions, but you'd wanna have some reason as to why you're not living close to family. And you have something of a reason, and that's what you're wrestling with. You didn't have a great alternative choice, and so the previous plan was move close to family.

Now, all of a sudden, you've got a really strong job offer, can advance your career, could possibly be a shorter-term thing. Now you have a good, compelling reason to consider an alternative. And I'm not gonna be the guy to tell you what you should or shouldn't do, just that it's fine, I think, to consider it as you are.

And at the end of the day, the basic thought that I have on that subject is that living close to family doesn't seem to me like a goal in and of itself that really should make the difference. And I've wrestled with this a lot with my own children, is that is my goal in raising children, is my goal to raise them so that they can live next to me for the rest of their life?

And when I put it in kind of a blunt and crass way, I think most people would say, "Well, no, that's not my goal." So what is my goal? Well, I want to enjoy relationship with my children, but I also want my children to do something and to impact the world.

We're here on mission. We've got a job to do. And so that's the standard that I'm gonna apply to my own children. I'm gonna say that I'm not bringing you into the world so that you can be my next-door neighbors as our highest and best goal. I'm bringing you into the world so that you can serve mankind so that we can transform the world.

We're on a mission. And so to me, in that light, it seems perfectly reasonable for me to look forward to close relationships with my children, but I'm not gonna hold my children to some standard that exists in my mind that somehow the height of family goals and future is to be my next-door neighbor.

That's not the goal. The goal is that you do something in the world and that you fulfill your purpose in the world. God put you here for a reason and you have a purpose, something to do, and I'm gonna support you in that. And if that means we can do that, being my next-door neighbor and laboring together in something, wonderful.

And if that means that you're gonna go to the other side of the world and do something on the other side of the world, absolutely, I'm gonna support you. And we're gonna look to enjoy as much fellowship and relationship between us as we possibly can. That would be the first thing.

The second thing is, do I need my family at this point in time? And so you got a wife with a two-year-old and a seven-month-old. Let's say you have another baby next year. All of a sudden, her life's pretty intense. And so there may be a phase of life in which she really needs some help.

And maybe being near family could be a really important component of that. Or it might be the opposite. It might be that other things are better. So you should always look at your family, look at your wife, just ask, do we need our family's help at this point in time?

But I don't think that the goal is to always be specifically there. That's not the life goal. And so if there's purpose in your making an alternative choice and one of the costs is going to be distance in your family relationships, to me, that seems an acceptable decision if that's what you decide.

The reason I ask about distance is quite simply, I think there's an enormous difference in the lifestyle that you have if you're two hours away from family versus if you are 15 minutes away from family versus if you are three-minute walk away from family. And what I have experienced and observed from a lot of people is that the idea of being close to family actually, in reality, turns out to be, well, we see each other once a month.

And you say, well, is this really the key? And then instead of actually doing something together, being intimately involved in one another's lives and pursuing similar goals, it often turns into, well, we watch the Super Bowl together and that's about it. And we have these superficial relationships and superficial contact.

And so you should judge your family relationships and ask, is there going to be something where we're genuinely going to be working together in a close way, or are we just going to be living in the same town? And if you're two hours away, you're probably not seeing them weekly.

If you are seeing them weekly, it's going to feel like a real burden and it's going to take real effort for you to say, on Saturday morning, we're going to drive over to the next town over. On Sunday morning, we're going to drive to the next two hours away.

And that's something you're going to do once or twice a month. So now all of a sudden you're down quite a lot. And so in terms of strategy, my point is that if you can quite literally live walking distance to your parents so that your children can just run in and out of their house all the time, and anytime you need to step out, you can call them over to take care of the children.

And maybe you send your six-year-old over to work with grandpa on his math exercises, et cetera. That's a much more worthy being close to family than is being 20 minutes away or being two hours away. And so that's why I ask those questions. Now, to the specific things, are you crazy to take or to not take?

No, I don't think you're crazy to take or to not take. You are young and your career is an enormous component of your life. And it is not wrong to prioritize career advancement. Career advancement and your accepting responsibility when it is offered to you, that is an important component of why you're here on this earth.

Certainly the money and the additional financial power that you accumulate with higher salary and with more savings, that will be an important component of your work. But also just simply having more power and more status and authority in your company and in your career is an important thing for you to embrace, especially as young as you are.

Because most careers properly managed work on a ratcheting mechanism, is that once you reach a certain status, a certain job description, I'm a vice president of XYZ, a certain salary, a certain type of work environment, then you're often not going to go beneath that. And for you to accomplish your purpose in life, as long as you don't feel like you're in the wrong career or the wrong business or something like that, you want to embrace responsibility whenever it's offered to you.

And so I didn't have, years ago, this is a major change that I made in the last 10 years. Years ago, I thought that the point of working was to get financially independent so I could quit working. I now don't see it that way. And I think I was foolish and naive to formally even consider that as an appropriate scenario.

Rather, you need to bear responsibility, and bearing responsibility in society and in your community and in your company, et cetera, is going to mean saying yes to additional responsibility when it's offered to you. And so your default answer to that should be yes. And it's only if there's a strong, compelling reason not to do that, as in, my wife is sick and dying and I've got to care for her, or my children are heading into a ditch and I got to rescue them, or my parents desperately need me, or something like that.

Then the general default should be say yes to more responsibility because that will broaden your impact in your family, your community, and in the world around. And it's a good thing. Number two, if you work for one or two more years and then move, would that work? I think absolutely.

Now, you should consider, of course, things like the age of your parents. Are your parents younger or older? We, none of us, know how long our parents would live. But if your parents are, say, 50 years old, and there's a decent chance that they're gonna have a long and healthy life, then now it's easier for you to stay away for another couple of years until you make this move.

If your parents are 99 years old, well, and they don't know your children, then now there's more of a reason for you to move closer. But doing this for one or two more years, I think is absolutely, absolutely great. I don't think that there's any reason to give much thought to what children need in a specific location until you reach the early teenage years, something like 12 years old or so.

And what I mean by that is that if you have a four-year-old and you move your four-year-old across the country, and your four-year-old's best friend that he played with every day becomes someone else, is that harmful to the child? I don't think so. And I don't think that you need to worry too much about really almost any of those things until you, again, reach those early teen years where a child is starting to develop an independent vision of life, of what his life is going to look like after he passes out of your immediate family.

And that's where you wanna be thoughtful about, how can I help this child enhance his career? How can I help him pursue the path that's gonna be best for him? I need to be respectful of his wishes and his vision for his life, things like that, in addition to just what's best for the family.

But up until that point, I think that you should just consider your family unit as a whole, and you don't need to worry too much about moving people around, et cetera. You can figure out the best circumstances in any particular schedule. And then number three, negotiating the schedule for one month here, one month there, et cetera.

I don't know, you would have to test that out. What I would say is that it's probably more stressful on your family than it will be on you. You can come and go pretty easily, but unless you have a really great home in both places, then that's gonna be super stressful.

So just as like a practical discussion of this, my wife and I, we've done quite a lot of traveling with young children. And generally speaking, my wife doesn't enjoy it, and I don't really enjoy it either, but a lot with young children. But the reason is that when you have one space that you know, you know what the risks are, you know what's there, you know what the toys are, you know where the boundaries are, et cetera, that makes your job as a parent of young children a lot easier.

My wife didn't enjoy traveling around the country in an RV, because even though we had an RV, she didn't have any continuity between what was outside of the RV. So you can't just send the children off randomly to go ride their bikes, because you don't know what's out there.

You have to go out and scout it for danger and try to figure out what's appropriate, what's here. So that just adds a lot of work to caring for little children. Whereas if you're in one place, one home, and we know where all the toys are, and the children have their own things, then they can be a little bit more independent, and that really reduces the burden on the parents when you are in one place.

And so I'm skeptical that kind of flipping back and forth, unless you're going between two houses that you own, that you have a good infrastructure set up in both places, I'm skeptical of that being a productive lifestyle. - All right, perfect, man. Yeah, totally agree with all of that.

And you always offer some new insight, too. So really appreciate it. - My pleasure. At its core, if we're gonna do anything, then we need to have a reason for doing it. And so being close to family needs to be part of the broader purpose, not the sole and exclusive thing, unless there's a clear, again, service-related focus to it.

And I'll keep working on it. I reassess continually my own decisions, et cetera. But, and I'm not sure of these answers that I'm giving you. It's just the best that I've given you, and I've tried to explain it as clearly as I'm able. We move to Taylor in Alabama.

Taylor, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hey, Joshua, thanks for taking my call. I wanted to see if you might have some thoughts about allowances for kids. And in particular, in my situation, I've got 13-year-old daughters, twins, seventh grade, and we've never given them an allowance before, but we're thinking that they're getting to an age where it might be nice for them to have to kind of budget their money a little bit and learn how to use a bank accountant.

Perhaps a debit card, other things like that. And so I've looked into it a little bit. I've seen a lot of differing advice about the best way to structure it, the best mechanics of how to do it. I guess, first of all, do you think it's a good idea at all?

But anyway, I figure you probably do have some ideas and wanted to see if you could share 'em. - Yeah, I'll make this fairly concise, 'cause I think it's relatively straightforward. To begin with, I was never given an allowance when I was young. And I think, I'd have to confirm this with my parents, but basically, I think my parents probably would have been sympathetic to the viewpoint of simply saying that if you give, we're not welfare, we're not giving out welfare here.

I think Dave Ramsey at least used to say this. I would assume he still does, unless he's changed on something. But he'd say, I'm not giving out welfare to my children. So giving money to my children doesn't seem like the right pathway. And that's a common mindset, especially common in our US American culture, where we believe strongly in instilling a work ethic into our children and so we don't wanna give away free money.

So that was my basic idea when I first had children. I then came to see the other side and I realized that if I don't give my children money, then they're not going to handle money until they can earn it for themselves. And I realized that if I want my children to manage money, they're going to need practice and skill in managing money.

And so I decided that I would change and I decided that I would, in fact, give an allowance. And my reason for deciding to give my children an allowance is that I want them to have money that they have to decide what to do with so that they can experience the joys of having money, using money, spending money, et cetera.

And I'm hoping that they will make lots and lots of mistakes with the handling of their money. And so I'm hoping that they'll blow their money on stupid things. I'm hoping that they'll waste it and feel the emotions of poorly considered purchases and things like that. And I want those lessons to happen early.

I want them to happen at a young age, not till a later age. Because when we talk about blowing it, I want them to blow $2 on some worthless trinket and experience how it gets thrown away at it. I don't want them to wait and blow $2,000 on a worthless trinket when they're teenagers.

And so I realized that money management and the handling of money is a skill in and of itself that needs to be taught. And in order for it to be taught, and since the children are gonna be too young to handle money, they need to be able to have money flowing through their hands.

Also, I want them to have money flowing through their hands over which they don't have full control. And so I think the downside is if we wait, let's say we wait until a child is 15 and your daughter goes out and gets her first job at 15 and she's got her paycheck and she brings home her paycheck and $400.

And then you try to tell her what to do with it. Well, then there's a question is, do I have the right to tell her what to do with it? On the one hand, obviously, yes, she's a minor, you could tell her what to do with it, but we're respecting her person.

She's a young adult, et cetera. And so we would be more thoughtful about, we would give advice, et cetera, but we would be more thoughtful. But if you start when she's five, then it's not such a big deal. And so what I have done is I have given my children an allowance and then required them to spend the money in the way that I say.

And so I just split it into thirds and a third of the money we give away, they give away, excuse me, a third of the money they give away, I don't tell them who to give it to, I just tell them they gotta give it away. A third of the money goes into their investment fund.

I don't tell them what that has to be invested in, I just tell them it has to be invested and I explain what that means. And then a third of the money goes into their spending fund. And then in their spending fund, that's where they naturally save. So we don't have a save jar.

It bothers me that people say, oh, we're gonna save money, but they're saving money for accumulation. They're not saving money to grow it as a capital. So I allow them to experience accumulation in their spending funds so that they can have the skill of saving money for things, bigger purchases that they wanna make, but that's separate from investing.

And then I look to try to have opportunities for that money to flow through their hands. So if we see somebody who needs money or we're aware of a need or something like that, then they can give it. They have money that's set aside in advance for giving away to other people.

If they see a way to make money, then they have investment funds. And my goal is that my children get richer every single year of their life. Because what I tell them is that your investment capital is how you get richer, is you put money into your investment capital.

As it grows, you start off with $10 and you figure out, well, what can I buy and sell? So you go and you buy something for $10 and you turn around and sell it for 20, okay. Then we take the profits and we split those profits a third, a third, a third.

So a third gets given away, a third gets set aside for spending, and a third goes back into the investment capital. So then that investment capital should grow and grow, and it should be hundreds of dollars when a child is, say, under 10. It should be thousands of dollars when a child is in his or her teen age years, and it should be tens of thousands of dollars when a child is in his or her 20s.

And we wanna train the idea of looking for opportunities to invest money. Like Jim Rohn said, you know, you should always have a bike to ride and a bike to rent. Two bikes, one to ride, one to rent. And so we wanna train children to look for opportunities to grow money, and we can't do that if investing is just something that they get tossed at them at 15 years old.

It's a way of thinking that I think should be cultivated from, say, four or five on, on a continual basis. And then, so I believe in giving an allowance for that reason. Now, I don't think that an allowance should be a permanent thing, nor do I think it should be a particularly luxurious thing.

But as a father, I find it a nice thing because it allows me to be more of a, a stick in the mud, in some cases, than I otherwise would be. 'Cause as a father, you wanna give your children great things, right? We spend lots of money on our children, and we derive a great deal of joy and pleasure on spending money on them.

But if they don't have any money, then everything comes down to a decision of, am I gonna make you happy by buying this for you, or am I not gonna make you happy by buying this for you? So I find it really satisfying that my children have money, and I've given them a modest amount of money, and now they can go and do that.

Hey, you wanna go and buy that dumb trinket over there? I don't have to sit here and decide, well, am I gonna hurt Johnny's future because I said no? Or fine, if you wanna buy it, you buy whatever you want. If you have enough money, you're welcome to buy it.

And so I find it to be a useful parenting technique for me as well, to make sure that they have some money, 'cause then they have to go through those choices. And I always can get to choose more things that I give, et cetera, that's my prerogative as a parent.

Now, continuing on, I think this should change as time goes on. I don't know, years ago, I thought, well, we should just end the allowance entirely at, say, 12 years old, 'cause after all, you can work now, you should make your own money. But then we move into, I think, a different expression.

The same reason that we started the allowance in the first place, under my thinking, which is to have money flowing through your hands, is probably the same reason we should continue it. But there should be more demands placed upon it. And so I think part of training of a young adult needs to be to train a young adult to make proper decisions with the handling of money.

And so I think that as a parent, let's say you have a 14-year-old or 15-year-old, there are certain things that you as a parent are obligated to do for your child. For example, you're obligated to feed your child, you're obligated to clothe your child. And so I think that those are things that you should decide your budget as to how much money you're going to spend on those things.

And then ideally, you should transition the control of those things over to your child. And so your child should be responsible for purchasing her own clothing. You know, your annual clothing budget, we're gonna spend $200 a quarter or whatever your family's number is, this is gonna be your clothing budget, this is the amount of money, and you're required to clothe yourself.

Now, you let her be the one who chooses where she gets the clothes. Does she go to the expensive place or the inexpensive place? And then what she wears, how many outfits she buys, or whatever the application of this. Obviously, you still have authority over her decisions on that.

But in general, your goal is to teach her a model. You know, this is how a young lady dresses. These are the kinds of clothes that are appealing. These are the kinds of clothes that are becoming. These are the kinds of things you should do. Let me show you how to get a great value for them, et cetera.

But she should have experience doing those things. And the money is, you're just changing the purchasing decisions out of your hands into her hands. And then secondarily is that you're, or I mean also, not in secondary priority, but also then, you're working hard to find opportunities for your child to earn his or her own money.

And that's where the real money should come from, is it should still be, I think the allowance should be reasonably high enough that there's enough money for your child to buy the things that you can transition responsibility over for her to make the decisions on. But it should be a low enough amount that she's still excited to get a job.

And when you get that first paycheck, it should be enough money lumped together that it's exciting. And those are the basic rules that I've come up with and the logic behind them. At its core, money management is a skill. It's not something that you're born with. It's not innate and natural.

It's not like there's some people who are just naturally savers and some people who aren't. I deny that entirely. There may be people who have an environmental compulsion in a certain direction, but people who save money, save money because they've learned the skills of saving money and they have enough reasons to save money.

People who don't save money don't save money because they don't have any reasons to save money and they haven't accumulated the skills of saving money. And so what we should do is focus on laying out a clear vision of the reasons and goals as to how money gets handled in a young man or woman's life and then help them practice the skills on a continual basis until they become really good with them.

So I have changed. I now support an allowance for that reason with the caveats that we're not just trying to get people accustomed to free money, but we're trying to make money pass through their hands, recognizing that that's a component of our responsibility as parents. - That sounds really good.

Those are sort of the ideas that I had in mind. Do you also have any thoughts about the mechanics of it? Do you use cash? Do you use a debit card with some sort of shared bank account with them? Or how do you do it? - I think in the beginning years, it should all be cash because it keeps it very simple.

So my children have a spending bag. I use little money bags. And I have a big collection of them. They're all color-coded for each child. And so you have your giving bag, your saving bag, and your spending bag. When I started this plan, I was overly complicated, as is what, excuse me, as is my wont.

And so I had a careful ledger of every dollar made in the investment return, et cetera, and that was too much. And so I don't think that there needs to be careful records kept on it in the beginning. But there should be then a transition over to careful record-keeping.

And I think that cash has far more advantages than disadvantages. We're much too quick to search for an electronic solution to a problem that doesn't exist. And the vast majority of us, if we ran our lives quite literally with physical currency, we would all be richer and better off, even at our advanced, sophisticated stage of life.

Now, I don't run my life entirely on physical currency. So I understand that there is important value in these other forms of money management. But they're all inferior to physical currency, especially for young people. Most of us have no basic concept of what digits feel like to spend. And our children definitely don't have it.

And so if you and I, I routinely encourage people to use physical currency, and forgive the slightly roundabout, and it's important to make the point as to why I'm making the recommendation I am. I routinely encourage people to use physical currency because you feel what physical currency feels like.

So let's say you're at an adult stage of life, and it's very normal for you to spend hundreds of dollars and thousands of dollars. It wouldn't be unusual for you to spend $1,000 on a weekend, right? You'll have a $700 Costco trip, and $150 dinner out, and I don't know, $100 gas bill, right?

That would be a very reasonable weekend for most of us. If you make all those purchases with a card, and I ask you to estimate how much money you spent, let's say it's Tuesday, or even at the end of your Saturday or on Sunday, then you won't have much of a sense of exactly how much money you spent.

It's too hard to keep track of. Our brains do not track digits. But if you routinely take out $1,000 or $2,000 and $100 bills and you put them in your wallet, every bill has a feeling to you. And so if you know you've spent about half the stack, every time you hand over the seven $100 bills at Costco, you feel about what that's like, because five bills feels different from seven bills feels different from 10 bills.

And so it's much easier to track. Now that's, you're in my situation after years of managing money, and most of us who are older, years of managing money in a non-digital context. So then we just assume that we have to train our children to manage digital money. And so the answer to that is give them a debit card.

But they have the same problem. They don't have a feeling of what that feels like. And so I think it's perfectly reasonable to do all money management with currency until you get into the teenage years. And then you need to bring in additional skills. So then I think the idea should be, we should probably have multiple accounts.

So I have not gotten to this stage yet. I've tested a few solutions. There are some financial, there are some financial companies that have products for this. I'm a big fan of Revolut. I think they've got a decent system for this. But I think it really can be, any bank can do it.

But in essence, I think that we should simply teach our children to have multiple accounts. So we take the physical account structure that I have described, and we transfer the physical account structure into a bank account structure. So you should have three accounts. You should have a giving account, you should have a spending account, and you should have an investing account.

And anytime you spend money, it should all be out of the spending account. Anytime you give money, you give out of the giving account. And then obviously investing, that never gets spent. It only gets invested, profits go back in, profits get split, et cetera. And so I think choosing some kind of debit card system that will work for you and give you that product for your child to split money into, I think is what you're looking for.

Again, a lot of the, I wish I hadn't created a list of all the things. I'm sure most banks are looking for options. I'm a fan of Revolut, like I said, because it allows people to have a prepaid debit card that doesn't have, you don't overdraft, you don't incur fees, et cetera.

You just look in the account, is there money there? I can spend it, if there's not, I don't. And that works really well. And by the way, to be clear, generally the child only needs one debit card for her spending account, that's it. And she needs some way to keep track of it.

And so if it's attached to a phone app, if she has a phone, that's an ideal thing as well. This is where I see enormous value in teaching all the old skills of checkbook balancing, et cetera. I think it's really great to have those records, et cetera, but I also acknowledge the fact that nobody does it.

And so those are some of those skills that are probably gonna go by the wayside. But that's my answer, is three different accounts, one with a debit card for spending, making sure that there's an easy way to check the balance, to see if there's money in the account, things like that.

- That sounds great. I really, really appreciate it. - My pleasure. All right, we move on to Garth was next. Garth in Minnesota, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hey, Joshua, my wife and I are in our mid forties. We have two kids that are in their tween years.

And in the past few years, our income, our net worth have ramped up quite a bit. Careers have grown and it's unlocking more options, I think, than we would have anticipated maybe five, 10 years ago. And as our kids are getting a little older, I'm starting to think more and more about like the next stages of life.

And my wife has always preferred to be a little bit more spontaneous. We've been really focused on, we both work full time, focusing on raising our children and thinking and planning in terms of the coming months and what needs to get done today. And maybe it's a midlife thing, but as my perspective is changing, and I'm trying to think more longer term about money, career, and us building the next stage of our life together.

And again, I think she's really kind of, you know, she thinks in terms of more of that spontaneous, which provides a nice balance in our relationship. But I'd love to get kind of your perspective on that, right? I'd love to be able to unlock that power of long-term goal setting and move in a direction together, but I don't know.

Hopefully that's enough to riff on for you. - I think what you're, so it sounds like, at first I thought you were going to kind of, how does this relate to children? But that's not the question you're asking. You're primarily saying, you know, how do we build a vision for our life in the coming decades, given that we're likely to be wealthier than we ever imagined, is that right?

- Yeah, that's exactly it. - Okay. As you stated, it's a wide question, but I'll give you my best shot. First, it's perfectly fine to focus on short and medium-term goals. And there is, you are in a stage of life that is only going to be here for a short period of time.

And if you need to set aside the long-term goal planning to really focus on this stage, I think that is perfectly reasonable and appropriate. I think a lot about time-bound goals versus money-bound goals. And right now you have some very intensely time-bound goals. You have two twin children that are with you, and most of your experiences of long-term of life, most of the positive experiences that you're looking forward to in your life, and most of the negative experiences that could destroy your life, will be dependent upon the success of your children and your relationship, the quality of your relationship with your children.

When I say success, let me define the context I'm saying that. If you have a child who becomes a drug addict and bears you a grandchild while a drug addict, and now you have to raise your grandchild while your daughter is off in the streets or your son is off shooting up people in the hood or something like that, the coming decades of your life are going to be extraordinarily painful.

On the other hand, if your children do well in school, they have a good sense of who they are, they know what they like, what they don't like, they have a good sense of kind of the kinds of lifestyles that would be a good fit for them. If they proceed smoothly through the stages of life, they become competent and mature adults, they attract a high quality husband or a high quality wife, they get married, they have children, they have a satisfying life full of rich family relationships, et cetera, and they live stable, productive lives, then you can look forward to enormous amounts of pleasure for the coming decades.

Pleasure in watching your children thrive and succeed, watching them experience all of the joys of young adulthood and passing through the stages, watching them bear grandchildren, raise grandchildren, et cetera, that's gonna be an enormous source of pleasure, and you will wind up like many grandparents moving across the country, so you can be close to your grandchildren, et cetera.

And so to the extent that there's anything that you could do to determine the pathway of your children, whether they were on the pathway of success or the pathway of failure as human beings, that, then you should do those things. And yet, there's a very, a relatively narrow window in which you can do those things, because you are launching your children into independence over, let's say, the next five to seven years, depending on the specific ages and each individual child's process of maturity.

So for you to be intensely focused on this over the course of these five years is a perfectly adequate thing to focus on, because that's what's gonna set the course for the next 50 years of your life. And so if 80% of your attention is on that and 20% is on the 50-year vision, then that's not wrong as a result.

Now, what will happen is that as your children move from tweens to upper high school students and ultimately college students, you'll have naturally a lot more time available to you to think about those 50-year goals, just due to the natural process of independence. But don't think that it's more important to focus on the 50-year goals.

To the neglect of your work right now, it's not. It's your work right now that's gonna make a big difference. Now, what is an enormous danger to be guarded against of where you are right now? Well, I think a danger is that your identity as husband and wife doesn't exist.

Instead, your identity is father and mother. And so then if we think forward to a period of time, just a few short years from now, when you're empty nesters, if you wake up and you don't know your wife and you don't know anything about her goals and dreams for the future and her ambition for the future, et cetera, then you're doomed.

And there's divorce court, you know, in some worst-case scenarios, waiting for you. And it's not necessary. So you do need to give attention to those long-term goals and dreams. But I just wanna, I'm just acknowledging that it may be a modest amount of attention. What I would say is the most important thing is for you and your wife to spend time together as husband and wife and to really make a priority of it.

So having tweens is different than having very young children. You know, I just took my wife away for a short getaway for Valentine's Day. And, you know, when we're in baby mode as we are right now, we still have a baby with us, but I've gotta find multiple families to have multiple people who can take all the children 'cause there's tons of children and they're all young.

And so it's a lot of work. As you pass into the teenage years, it's relatively easy for you and your wife to get away. And so get away, get away for a weekend every quarter and just the two of you. And just talk about and think about what is in the future.

And you need to make certain that you really understand her and her ambitions and what she's going to, what are the kinds of things that she wants more of in her life. The fact that she is more serendipitous in nature and more willing to accept what comes doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to plan for her to have all the things that she's serendipitous, gonna be serendipitously happy about.

And so in some ways, what you're describing is a function of my own relationship with my wife. I'm the long-term thinker. Here's the plan. Here's the, okay, with this decade, it's gonna be this strategy. The following decade is gonna be these things. Here's what we're gonna do. Here's what we're gonna do, et cetera.

But I still need to make sure that I know her because the fact that her way of planning is different than mine and her way of envisioning the future is different than mine doesn't make it more or less valid. And so I have to get out of her vision and I have to make certain that our family plan accounts for that.

It counts for her to achieve those things. And that just comes with knowing your wife in an intimate way. And then talking to her in a context that is going to suss out what she's into. And so here's where I think some good goal-setting questions are important. And then just taking them and doing this as a couple.

You go to a nice resort once a quarter, once every six months or whatever, get away. And don't pack your schedule full of activities, but spend some time talking about it and make the lists, right? Here are 30 things I wanna do, 30 things I wanna be, 30 things I wanna have before I die.

Go through, envision, okay, if we could do anything in the world, what would it look like? What would we do if we knew there was no possibility of failure? All the many dozens of great goal-setting questions and visioning exercises. Do those exercises and look for the themes and then start to schedule those things in intentionally.

And recognize that your lives will be very different as you launch your children than they are now. And anything out more? I mean, I guess that's a starting point. Is that directionally helpful in any way? - Yeah, absolutely. And I logged you a non-specific question and I think you hit on all the key points I was hoping you would riff on.

And I guess more than anything, it's a function of, hey, if we're following the 80/20 framework that you looked at and making sure that we're focused on that, that's, I think, some really sage advice and probably what I needed to hear on the call today. So thank you, Joshua.

- My pleasure. It does really matter and you won't regret. If you spend more money now with your tweens, if you build more intimacy of relationship with them, et cetera, I think that, and by the way, you don't have to spend money, but my point is that if you're thinking about, well, should we get richer ourselves or should we really do this dream thing that we've wanted to do with our children?

Take six months off and backpack Europe or whatever. You are in a very precious period of time where in terms of investing into relationship, there's going to be, there's just a very narrow window where your children are old enough to basically interact with you as adults, but they are not yet transitioning to full independence to where they are legal adults and et cetera.

And I think that's a really satisfying phase of life where you can have enormous amounts of input into your children's lives, and also, but yet interact with them as adults. 'Cause when you've got a 20 year old who's telling you, your daughter's telling you what she's thinking about, et cetera, you're not gonna be interfering in her life.

You're not gonna be directing her life like you do when she's 13. You're gonna be listening. You're gonna be coaching. You're gonna be asking good questions, but you're not gonna be telling her what to do. She's 20 years old. But when she's 13, you're spending, you're able to direct her in a better way.

And so anything you can do to really engage in relationship and help your children at this stage should be the 80% of your activities. I guess there's just one more thing. I really think that, I'm blanking on the name of the book. I think if you haven't read it, you should read Gabor Mate's book on, find the title here real quick, called "Hold On To Your Kids".

I think that's a really valuable book, a really valuable parenting book. And basically, my two sentence summary of it is that you should be very intentional about keeping your children connected to you as a father and to your wife as a mother, rather than forcing your children onto their peers as a primary source of direction in the culture.

And Mate makes the point in that book about the novelty that is modern youth culture. And I realize this is a big blind spot for me as a parent, is that I've always believed that we should help children to develop independence at an early age. It's my basic belief that we should, kind of like they used to do, our vision should be that by 13 or 14 or 15, that our children are fully independent adults.

Now, obviously, they're not gonna be fully independent adults, but you're dealing with an adult at that point in time that in all historical cultures has been considered an adult. So we shouldn't aim for 18, we should aim for 13 as the age at which to produce adults. With various modifications of that due to the reality of the fact that they're not legal adults, and that we're not trying to force them into a path, you don't want your 13 year old getting married, but your ambition is not to extend childhood.

However, what I realized when I read Mate's book was that it's very easy to, if you have a mindset of independence, it's very easy to force your children to go out into their peer culture and to attach to their peer culture instead of being attached to their family and in their community.

And we don't want that because the peer culture is toxic. What we want is them to have great and fulfilling relationships with peers, but not to look to their peers for wisdom and for direction, but we want them to be very consciously attached to us as parents, to our community that we're in across the generations.

And so check that out and think about how you can apply anything that is relevant from that as well. All right, we go to the great state of Ontario. Welcome to the show, how can I serve you today? - Oh, Joshua, thank you so much for those last couple of answers, they were excellent.

- My pleasure, thank you very much. - So my basic question is to do with real estate versus Bitcoin. So I'll give you a quick background. I have some real estate properties I purchased about 20 years ago in a fairly depressed market, which sat quite still for about 15 years.

And then approximately five years ago, things turned around here as they did in so many places. We're about four times our purchase price now. And basically they've cashflowed all the way along, they're still doing fine. However, I'm thinking in terms of the, sort of that four X that happened, that is unlikely to happen again at that class.

So I'm just trying to consider if I should divest myself of some portion of the properties and consider other asset classes. To give some context, I'm not like new to Bitcoin, I would say about 18% of my net worth is there. And so I've been investing in that since about 2017.

So I've weathered the highs and lows of it and I'm not afraid of it, but I just, you've always given great advice in these kinds of scenarios, so I thought I'd ask. - Yeah, so let's break the decision apart. I'm not gonna give you, and obviously I'm not gonna tell you what to do.

- I'm not looking for your specific advice on them, but yeah, how to think about that. - But we can break it apart and we can kind of make good strategic decision-making, I think, if we break it apart. So first, recognize that the decision that you have in front of you is not either Ontario real estate or Bitcoin.

And forgive me, the next caller is from Oregon and I misread on my screen, Ontario versus Oregon, ON versus OR, but we're talking about Ontario here. So the decision is not Ontario Canada real estate or Bitcoin, but there are a variety of other options available. So the first decision is, should I sell my Ontario real estate that has been good to me, I made a lot of money, or should I not sell my Ontario real estate that has made a good amount of money?

So let's start with that. Let me just simplify it to that. If you were starting over today with the amount of, and are we talking half a million dollars, a million dollars, basically just big picture, how much money are we talking about that you're considering making a change with?

- It could be, yeah, we'll go with half of it. - Okay, so if you had a half a million dollars of cash sitting in the bank account, would you purchase Ontario real estate today on February 16, 2024? - No. - Okay, so then the answer is you should sell it.

Because even if you just took the money and you put it in the bank, you wouldn't purchase it again, so you should sell it. That was a very different decision than previous when you bought it, and you've had a forex return, et cetera. So you should sell the real estate and you should get out of it for I think the reasons that were obvious in the quickness of your answer.

And I would generally affirm that. It seems that to me that real estate in Canada doesn't have, I don't wanna get, I'm not out trying to buy real estate in Canada with what I see today. But you know the market and you were confident in that. So you should sell the real estate in Canada.

Now, what should you do with the money? Well, I don't know. And if you don't know, then that is a perfectly, it's perfectly reasonable just to put the money in the bank and sit tight and wait until you do know. But one option that you have is to put the money into Bitcoin or put some money into Bitcoin.

So now tell me why you would buy Bitcoin and what you would hope that Bitcoin can do for you in your life. - All right. I can resell it, I like that. So it's interesting because I first started selling I first started thinking about this with Bitcoin at a significantly lower value than it is today.

So I have become overwhelmingly convinced that it's not going to zero. It's not going to zero and the money continues to flow into it. And I only see one direction it can go. So it seems to me like it is, I believe it to be currently undervalued. And I am enjoying all the purchases I've ever made of it, including ones that I'm currently in the red on.

It's not like they've increased my personal security and happiness. - Okay. All right. So it sounds to me then like you should buy some Bitcoin. So how much Bitcoin do you think you should buy? How much do you want to own and why? - I don't have that answer.

I don't know. - And that's the hardest question, right? Because you could have conviction about an investment thesis. In your case, you believe that this is an asset class. It's not going to zero. It probably has good room to run and from your perspective. So you have the idea that I want to go after this with some of my money, but how do we figure out how to do it?

And that's the hardest question. So what I would say is the framework without getting into all the personal details of your affairs is to think about what would happen if there were big wins and what would happen if there were big losses. So there are two basic models that I think can make a lot of sense.

First of all, is you can just simply have a simple, strong asset allocation model. And the model doesn't have to be something that you necessarily have to defend to someone else. It just needs to be something that makes sense to you. So here would be an example of something that I think would make sense in terms of somebody who had that perspective, two examples.

So the first example would be somebody who says, you know what, this is very common in personal finance. This would be the most, of all the things I'm going to say, this is the most conventional where you're sitting down with most financial advisors. They wouldn't say you're stupid if you said this.

So if you said, you know what? I'm going to, with my investment capital, I'm not going to include my personal residence or et cetera, but with my investment capital, I'm going to keep 80% of my investment capital into mutual funds. I'm going to take 20% of my capital and not put it in mutual funds.

Of that 20%, I'm going to put 5% in physical gold and I'm going to put 5% in Bitcoin and as insurance policies against crazy stuff happening with the bulk of my investment account and I'm going to keep 10% for my stock trading account where I'm going to trade stocks and derivatives.

So that would be, nobody would argue with that. They would say, okay, well, you know, you've got 80% of your money in good, safe mutual funds and stocks, et cetera. We know that those have a pretty decent history. We think that they'll probably be okay in the future and you've got 5% investment funds.

That would be a reasonable thing. Now, this would not be normal, but this would also be still in the realm of kind of not crazy thinking. Would be, if you said something like, you know what? I don't know what's going to happen and so I just want to own all the asset classes.

So I'm going to put 20% of my money in stocks. I'm going to put 20% of my money in gold. I'm going to put 20% of my money into Bitcoin. I'm going to put 20% of my money in real estate and I'm going to put 20% of my money in long-term bonds.

And that would be a model that is kind of interesting is that we've got quite a lot of exposure to different asset classes. We could backtest that. It's kind of interesting when you do it, but it's still kind of a spread it around type of scenario. So you could come up with some version of that that's going to feel good to you.

And it's probably more, what I'm guessing would be your number would be more than 1% and less than 90% in terms of the amount of money that you're going to invest in Bitcoin. And you don't have to have a great logical argument for this necessarily. If you just instinctively know that my number is 20% or 10% or 5% and that's the amount of money I want to have in this asset class, that's a reasonable way to go about it.

Even if you can't justify it, that kind of initial reaction that you have to me throwing out some numbers, pay attention to that. The second thing would be to analyze it based upon kind of potential. And so the best I've come up with, if we're speculating on something, then my rules of speculation are these.

Your speculation needs to be big enough to make a difference if it wins big and small enough not to wipe you out if it completely loses. So let's put a little texture on this. What do you think is the absolute maximum thing that could happen to the value of Bitcoin?

- I don't, I mean, it depends on the timeline. I mean, if it's 10 years, then I don't see it, yeah. It's a lot. - Okay, so as-- - Too many people try to put a number on it and they're so wildly divergent. - All right, so let's just make some things up.

So as we talk today, Bitcoin is trading for something like 50, just a little less than 52,000 US dollar tokens to each Bitcoin token in the current market, okay? So let's say that the value of Bitcoin tokens compared to US dollar tokens, let's say that the ratio between those doubled.

And then you were trading with Bitcoin at 100,000 US dollar tokens as compared to today, right? That'd be pretty amazing investment performance, right? - Yeah. - All right. Let's say that it quadrupled and we were talking about 400,000 US dollar tokens for every one Bitcoin token. So that would be amazing, right, amazing.

And a lot harder to see how it quadruples than where we went from a dollar to whatever, 40,000. But it would be amazing if it 4X'd. So you just figure out whatever you think is the most optimistic thing that could happen. Now let's assume that you invested 50,000 US dollars into Bitcoin at today's prices.

And then it quadrupled in value from 50,000 US dollars to 200,000 US dollars. Would that make any meaningful difference in your financial life? - I mean, yes, it would. But at the same time, it would just sit there because outside of that, there's still lots of liquidity available. So it would just, I guess, be a number.

- Right, I think it would probably be largely a number because there's, from what you described, if you got half a million dollars of real estate, I don't think having an extra $200,000 sitting here and not sitting here is gonna make much of a difference in your case. Now, I made up the numbers, so you feel free to judge for yourself.

But you wouldn't quit working today because now you're independent for the rest of your life. It would just be a little bit more money than what you have right now. But now on the flip side, let's say that your $50,000 that you invested today went to zero. Would that make any meaningful difference in your life?

- I mean, it wouldn't be any fun, but no, it would not end anything. - Right, and so you see the point that I'm driving at is that if you really believe in the Bitcoin thesis, the idea that Bitcoin is gonna increase in value, and you wanna speculate on that, then you need to speculate with enough money so that whatever your biggest winning opportunity is that you believe could happen, that that would make a meaningful difference in your life.

But you don't wanna speculate with so much money that whatever you think is the worst case scenario would wipe you out. That's the idea that I'm driving at. And so if you think about those two extremes, there's probably some amount, and those numbers will vary based upon where you are in life.

And so let's use, I have a lot of Bitcoin millionaires in my audience. Here's what has happened with many of them. Many of them saw the Bitcoin thesis early on, and they believed in it. They were often young, and they often didn't have a lot of money, but they took everything that they had, and they put it into Bitcoin.

And so there are lots of people out there who are working a job as a waiter and putting every dollar they earned, sleeping on an air mattress in a friend's living room, putting every dollar they earned into Bitcoin because they really believed in it. So that kind of speculation for somebody who's, say, 23 years old, for a 23-year-old who's gained $50,000 of life savings to put all of it into Bitcoin and every dollar beside, for that 23-year-old to get wiped out, that's not that big of a deal because there's not a big crash in lifestyle that if things get wiped out, okay, I get another job and I start again.

And so that guy could put 100% of his money into Bitcoin because he really believed in the long-term outcome, and he, yeah, losing his life savings was no fun, but he was depending on his job primarily as a pathway through that. After all, there's lots of 23-year-olds who don't have any money, and they just depend upon their job.

Now, compare that with, you know, I've got a client of mine who's a physician, and he sold his practice. And I forget the exact number, but it was a 10-figure payday after taxes, a 10-figure payout after taxes. He's in his early 40s, and he's still making money as a physician, et cetera, but he basically was set up for the rest of his life based upon his lifestyle if he wanted to be.

So imagine you're in your early 40s, or it's actually, yeah, maybe younger, anyway, about 40 or so, and you've got a 10-figure payday after taxes. Do you really wanna take your 10-figure payday and put it all in Bitcoin because Bitcoin's going to the moon? That would be an enormous price tag if Bitcoin disappeared.

And so you would be much more thoughtful about how much, and you might actually wager significant amounts of money on your bet, you might invest seven figures, but you need to make certain your goal is not, there's not gonna be a big difference in your life between a $12 million net worth and a $30 million net worth.

There's not that much there. There could be a difference between 12 million and 120 million, sure, okay, fine, but the difference of you going from a $12 million lifestyle to a $2 million lifestyle, because you risked it all on Bitcoin, that's enormously costly. So my point is you're basically playing a game with your speculation of best case scenario, worst case scenario, where I'm at in life, cost of a loss, time that I have to make up for it, how much income do I have, what percentage of my net worth, and that's a very personalized game that I couldn't answer for you, but I think that's a decent model to begin with to figure out how much money you're gonna speculate with.

- That framework is exactly the type of answer I was looking for from you just to help think this through better. I appreciate that. And also, the last couple of answers on parenting, always appreciated your parenting, your podcast that was Radical Fatherhood, Radical something, anyway, that was very helpful to me.

We've got a bunch of kids that have appreciated your advice on that over the years. - Good, thank you so much. - Thank you. - My pleasure, my pleasure. All right, we move on. Now we go to Oregon. Oregon, you're gonna wrap us up today. Welcome to the show, how can I serve you today?

- Hey there, I just wanted to say I really wish I could come to your family camp, so I'm a little irritated I can't go. I hope you do it some other year, first of all. Sounds a lot of fun. - Absolutely. - Yeah, and then two questions. First one's really short, is you had an episode where you kind of did some self-talk.

You told us your kind of rhythm in the morning where we talked to yourself. So I was wondering if you still do that, one, and if you could tell me which episode that is 'cause I have looked and looked and cannot find it. (laughing) - Sure, sure. So by the way, for the uninitiated, I meant to do an ad for this earlier, but I am hosting in April, the middle of April, just the weekend before Tax Day, am hosting Radical Family Camp in Indiana.

You can find details at RadicalFamilyCamp.com and at the end of the episode I'll say more about that. The initial sale tickets are more than half sold out now, so RadicalFamilyCamp.com if you're interested in coming and spending a weekend with me and other listeners. So the self-talk, I learned that years ago primarily from Zig Ziglar.

In the early days of podcasting, one of the first podcasts I was, Apple Podcasts had almost nothing and I was working a job where I could listen to stuff while I was working and I didn't have much to listen to. This was, I guess when I was, I don't remember.

It was in college, early years of college. And so I would load up iTunes and I was looking for podcasts. And at the time, Zig Ziglar's company had his stuff going out as podcasts. I listened to all his podcast episodes. Then I started listening to the, then I started listening to the, I bought his, started buying his CDs of his courses.

You know, I would listen to them driving to work every morning and I just found them to be incredibly insightful and incredibly, incredibly useful. And what the basic idea behind Ziglar's version of affirmations, which was again, 1980s, '90s kind of stuff where personal development had not gotten as popularly known as today and affirmations were still going, was that he used his affirmations and talked about character qualities.

And the point that he made that rocked my world as a young man was he pointed out that character qualities are all skills, that they are not innate attributes. You're not born honest or born dishonest. Rather, honesty is something that you exercise and you can become increasingly honest or increasingly dishonest based upon the, based upon the way that you live and the way that you act.

And things like discipline, you're not, you don't come out of your mother's womb and the doctor holds you up and says, "Hey, here's a disciplined boy." You know, it's discipline is something that is developed. So if you're a disciplined person or you're focused or you're compassionate or you're respectful or you're kind, you know, kindness is not an innate attribute.

And that rocked my world. It started a process of self-development that continues to this day with even just a lot of my recent interests. I've recently been really into "Peak" by Anders Ericsson, his insight into genius. I read "Talent is Overrated" by Jeff Colvin, his research into kind of synthesizing the field.

I'm reading "Range" at the moment. And basically, these books and this concept for me has been an enormous mindset shift because I grew up thinking that all of these things were innate, that either you had them or you didn't have them. I thought that character qualities were either things that you were born with or weren't born with, just like I thought that innate ability and talent and genius was something that you're either born with or you're not born with.

I distinctly remember an experience I had when I was in college, sorry, in high school, where I had a friend of mine, we were signing up for our classes and choosing our electives, and a friend of mine signed up for an art class. And I thought, oh, that's pretty cool.

And I thought, wouldn't that be fun to take an art class? But I can't draw, I'm not artistic. And it never dawned on me as a high school student, it never even occurred to me that artistic ability is something that can be developed. I never imagined that it could be taught.

I just assumed and thought that you either are an artist or you're not an artist, and you're born an artist with artistic skill or you're not. And I knew I didn't have it, so therefore there's no point in taking an art class. It sounds stupid when you say it out loud, but I distinctly recall having that experience and thinking, oh, bummer, wouldn't it be neat to be good at art?

And I never thought I should sign up for the class. And it continues to this day what I've realized is that a lot of us think the same way. We think that these things are fixed. And all of the research that I can find indicates that all of these things that we think in some cases are innate, they're not in any way innate.

They are talent. Let me continue on this theme. Sorry, they're developed. Let me continue for a moment. I'm gonna come back and tell you where to find these affirmations and go over them with you. But it's important to understand the basis of them as I see them as being useful.

The most interesting book to me that I read was Anders Erikson's book called "Peak." And in this book, Erikson, who dedicated his entire career to studying the genius performers of the world, he came away and wrote this book at the end of his career. And as I understand his thesis, basically says that all genius level performance is attributable to two functions.

Number one is proper training and practice techniques. He has developed a term of what he calls deliberate practice, which means something very specific. It's a type of coached practice in a chosen field or discipline that causes you to get better because you're working continually on the things that you're not good at.

And this could be contrasted with what could be called naive practice. The idea is that sometimes people think, well, if I just do something more, if I do something more frequently, then I'll get better at it. But this turns out not to be the case, and that's what we call naive practice.

So a good example would be driving. You may drive over the next five years, if you're an adult, you may drive, say, 1,000 hours. But at the end of those 1,000 hours, you're unlikely to be in any way a better driver than you are today. And in fact, you're probably going to be a worse driver than you are today because there's some amount of entropy that's happening in your skills from when you were more focused.

And so what they've shown is that in many fields, even fields with experience, for example, medicine, that if you're a physician and you've just been practicing medicine for a long time, you're actually not any more likely to give better medical advice than somebody who's been practicing medicine for a very short period of time, unless you have been engaging in very focused personal development and deliberate practice.

Just doing more of a thing doesn't make you better at it. You have to engage in deliberate practice where you are intentionally choosing to get better. Usually this is going to be, you're being coached to get better, or you're coaching yourself to get better. You are specifically focusing on specific skills that relate to the field that you're trying to improve in.

So that's number one is deliberate practice. Number two is just enough time. And so if you engage in deliberate practice for a sufficient amount of time, that accounts for all world-class performers, for all genius, at least according to Erickson. And he has made a personal study of studying all of the child prodigies and all of the savants and all the hard cases, et cetera, and that's his conclusion.

And I find, you know, I don't have any reason to doubt him. He's the expert, I'm not. And so what's fascinating about that is, I find it a very freeing concept, is that I can be a world-class performer in anything that I choose to focus on if I'm willing to engage, if I'm willing and motivated to engage in deliberate practice for a sufficient period of time as is necessary for each field.

In some fields, if I didn't begin as a child, I probably will never achieve that genius level. In other fields, I may be able to, but it comes down to me and what I do. And so art is no different, that artistic skills, even artistic art savants and children who just, you know, create beautiful pictures at eight years old and things like that.

They're not born with an art gene. There's no evidence of artistic genes. It's not innate, it's based upon environment, environmental cues, practice, good coaching, and enough time to develop those skills. Even, you know, Mozart, young child prodigies, all included. Even things that are fixed. So for example, Anderson talks about things like IQ.

IQ is a really fascinating thing because it seems to be broadly heritable and broadly fixed. It doesn't seem to be, it's not like we have a long list of things that dramatically affect IQ. There's some things, but it doesn't, dramatic effects. But even IQ, that thing that we can measure, sort of, that has some reflection of innate ability, doesn't turn out to be particularly important in the development or expression of genius-level performance in any field of human endeavor.

Erickson talks about chess players, and he indicates that they did a very careful study of IQ test performance among chess players. And what they found is that IQ seemed to give chess players a slight advantage in the early stages of learning chess. So chess players with a higher measured IQ than other chess players with a lower measured IQ seem to learn and grasp the basic concepts of chess more quickly.

But that difference very quickly disappeared. And at the highest level of chess grandmasters, chess grandmasters don't show any higher level of IQ than is expected based upon the general population. And they don't, their performance doesn't seem to be driven by IQ in any way. And so really it does come down to practice and development of oneself.

Now, back to affirmations. When Ziegler convinced me of the fact that skills, that character qualities are skills, then that concept convinced me of the value of affirmations. Because I've never liked or been in any way comfortable with the woo-woo side of kind of personal development. Because the woo-woo side is, again, it's just something that, you know, it's like look in the mirror and say I'm rich.

In reality, I know I'm broke. To me, how do you ever do that? You're lying to yourself. Start by telling the truth. I'd rather just look in the mirror and say I'm broke and I don't wanna be than, you know, I'm rich, et cetera. But based upon being convinced of those attributes being genuine skills, then I realized that if I affirm these skills to myself, then that may have some valuable effect.

That may help me to do better and to be able to develop these things. And then I can focus on different skills at different parts of my day and in my life and I can develop them. I don't know how to say it any differently than that. So that was where it was.

So if you wanna find the affirmation, just search Zig Ziglar Affirmations and you'll find, you can find a PDF of the card that he would send out with his stuff. And then what I will do is I will play for you the audio here of the morning affirmations that I use.

And I'll play it for you here. I think, let's see if this will work while I'm recording. Stand by a moment. All right, so that's not gonna work based upon how I have the computer set up for today. So I'll just read these to you. And what I did was I just found some music and recorded them, recorded them.

But here they are, the text of them. And as I say these, I'll read them a little bit slowly, but I just want you to recognize that these things are, these things are, just recognize that these are skills that you can grow in. So here's how I say them.

I, Joshua Sheets, am a child of the King, living in the will of God, and I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. I claim the following attributes because I have the mind of Christ. I am a confidant of God. And by the way, I have scriptures that I use for these to convince myself of these things biblically.

And although I am weak in many of these qualities, I am specifically told to let the weak say I am strong. So I am strong. By claiming, developing, and using these biblical qualities, I will become the person God created me to be, and I will glorify God and benefit mankind.

I, Joshua Sheets, am an honest, intelligent, organized, responsible, committed, teachable person who is sober, loyal, and who clearly understands that regardless of who signs my paycheck, I am self-employed. I am an optimistic, punctual, enthusiastic, goal-setting, smart-working, self-starter who is a disciplined, focused, dependable, persistent, positive thinker with great self-control, and I am an energetic and diligent team player and hard worker who appreciates the opportunity my company and the free enterprise system offer me.

I am thrifty with my resources, and I apply common sense to my daily tasks. I take honest pride in my competence, appearance, and manners, and am motivated to be and do my best so that my healthy self-image will remain on solid ground. These are the qualities which enable me to manage myself and help give me employment security in a no-job security world.

I, Joshua Sheets, am a compassionate, respectful, encourager who is a considerate, generous, gentle, patient, caring, sensitive, personable, attentive, fun-loving person. I am a supportive, giving and forgiving, clean, kind, unselfish, affectionate, loving, family-oriented man, and I am a sincere and open-minded good listener and a good finder who is trustworthy.

These are the qualities which enable me to build good relationships. I, Joshua Sheets, am a person of integrity with the faith and wisdom to know what I should do and the courage and conviction to follow through. I have the vision to manage myself and to lead others. I am authoritative, confident, and humbly grateful for the opportunity life offers me.

I am fair, flexible, resourceful, creative, knowledgeable, decisive, and an extra miler with a servant's attitude who communicates well with others. I am a consistent, pragmatic teacher with character, and I have a finely-tuned sense of humor. I am an honorable person and I'm balanced in my personal, family, and business life, and I have a passion for being, doing, and learning more today so I can be, do, and have more tomorrow.

These are the qualities of the winner I was born to be, and I am fully committed to developing these marvelous qualities with which I have been entrusted. And then you can go into either the morning version or the daytime version, et cetera. But the last sentence that I like from the nighttime version is, recognizing, claiming, and developing these qualities, which I already have, gives me a legitimate chance to be happier, healthier, more prosperous, more secure, have more friends, greater peace of mind, better family relationships, and legitimate hope that the future will be even better.

So you can find the text of that. As I said, go online, search Zig Ziglar Affirmations, and you'll find it. But that's the basis of it. And I wish that I did this every day, but since I am honest, I cannot say that. What I can say is that every time I engage in this practice, I feel better.

And as is common, when we do something that works, then we, because it works, we usually stop doing it, and it's frustrating about that. And so what I will do is I tend to do it in phases, though, is that I listen to the recording, usually when I make my coffee, I have the little recording that I made with some dramatic movie score music, et cetera, of my voice reading it to myself.

I put my earbuds in while I wait for the water to heat, and I listen to that in the morning, and I like it, because it just causes me to want to, it makes me stand up straighter, 'cause I recognize, yes, I am those things. Those things do describe me.

They do describe me in a measure, and I want them to describe me more and more. And what usually happens is, as I'm reading the list or listening to the list, et cetera, I'll find something where there's a little twinge of conscience. And for example, as I go through this now, and I say it's disciplined, right?

Well, am I disciplined to do this thing that I'm telling you about that has been a good factor of my life? Well, no, and I haven't been super disciplined, but even as I'm recording this, then I sit up a little bit straighter, my chest goes up. No, I'm gonna express discipline, I'm gonna cultivate discipline, and I'm gonna do this more frequently, 'cause it's a healthy thing.

And then you recognize times when I wasn't compassionate, or I was unkind to someone, and it tweaks your conscience, and you can go and apologize or fix something. But I think it's a very healthy habit. And then the final thing is, I'm making that right now, I'm planning to give my children, well, I can get it done, 'cause it's a long list, but I'm making books for my children, and I'm gonna teach this affirmation to my children.

So I'm using AI to make inspirational, forward-looking pictures of these things. And then I've created a set of text that's associated with each of these character qualities. And this is kind of a component of my character education with my children, is I'm gonna give them all a printed photo book that have the AI images.

They love it when I make AI images for them. So AI images of each of my children, forward, expressing these qualities. And I believe that this is something that we need to do as part of our education, the same way that, so character education is important for us, and it's also important for our children.

And so that begins by identifying character qualities. And I've got a collection of about a half a dozen books that we go through that discuss different character qualities. So integrity, what does that mean? Responsibility, what is that? And my ambition and my hope is that I can set them on a stronger foundation by being intimately aware of the definition of these qualities, the fact that they have them, and the fact that they need to be developed.

And then I try to supplement that with lots of literature, et cetera, to reinforce that. But that's the affirmations, that's how I use them. Yes, I do them, not as much as I should. Not as much as I will, based upon your reminding me of the importance of them, et cetera.

- Well, I'm looking forward to stealing a lot of that, and I'm inspired with my family as well to try to figure out how to implement that, just not for me, but also for my family. I don't know if you have time for another question, but it was totally different on-- - Sure, go ahead.

- You know, is Texas gonna secede? What do you think of the odds of that? And do you think there are, it's a good plan B potential, and if so, how might we do that beforehand? Maybe like buying a piece of property, do you think that might help with the residency at some point down the line?

Or what are your thoughts on that? Because you're one of the only people, weird enough that I respect, that might actually have an opinion on this matter. - Yeah, it's a fun question. So, buying a piece of property, if you could do it, and it were a small, modest part of your life and your component, then absolutely, I would say, go for it.

Because after all, isn't it fun to have a little flag planted in a place that you appreciate or that you are interested in, et cetera? I think what would be a more practical thing than necessarily buying property is to change, if it were appropriate, and again, you can't commit fraud, but Texas is one of the states that allows nomad residency.

And so, you can be a resident of the state of Texas, if you were deeply convinced of the thesis that you're describing, that Texas may secede, and I wanna have a flag planted there, then you can be a resident of the state of Texas, with a Texas driver's license, a Texas mailing address, et cetera, even if you don't spend all of your time in Texas.

There are a few things to be careful of. That's not a system that should be abused. So, if you live in Minnesota and that's where you are all the time, then obviously, you need to, then you're probably gonna, a lot of your stuff is gonna reflect that. But Texas is a state that would be relatively easy for many people to place a flag in.

Again, as I said, you could be a resident of the state of Texas, formally, officially, legally with the court system, et cetera. You would just need to make sure that you weren't violating any local laws of where you spent more time if you weren't spending time in Texas. I think the future of Texas is very strong.

It just seems that Texas has a great structure. I listened to Peter Zeihan's analysis of it, and he goes on and on about Texas, the future of Texas, and I can't argue with his comments. I think he's correct. I've said to various people, I was like, hey, you probably ought to move to Texas and get potentially involved into the future growth of Texas.

The Texas Triangle is powerfully enormous growth potential, and the integration of Texas with Mexico, enormous potential, et cetera. So I think Texas has a very strong economic future. I don't think there's any chance of Texas seceding, and it's not that technically they couldn't in the sense that all the arguments for Texas secession, and look, we've got, we're a, oh, what do they call the state?

What's the name they use for the Republic of Texas, I guess? Is that the name that they call Texas? - I'm sorry, go ahead, what was that? - Sorry, what is the thing that Texans call themselves? Like, we're not a republic, but they don't call themselves a state. They call themselves something else.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. - Oh, yeah, I think it's the Republic of Texas, I don't think. - So in their state constitution, we've got the Republic of Texas, et cetera, and we're the Republic of Texas, we've got an independent power grid, we're one of the few people that could secede.

So could they do it? Yeah, probably so. My answer on that is quite simply that I think the entire idea of a state being able to secede from the United States federal entity was decided in the Civil War, and I'm no Civil War historian, but as far as I can tell, the actions of the South to secede from the Union were entirely legal.

I can't see any law that they broke by seceding from the South. As distasteful as it is to talk about slavery and all of the issues associated with it, as far as I can tell from a strict legal perspective, it seems persuasive to me that the South and the Southern states were able, legally speaking, to secede from the Union.

And Abraham Lincoln, as much as we wish to lionize him for his anti-slavery work, Abraham Lincoln broke enormous swaths of law and precedent in order to prosecute the war against the South. And the war happened, and I think that was where it was settled, is that the official stance of the United States is basically once you're in, you ain't getting out.

Now, I'm just shooting from the hip. Imagine we're having a cold drink together, that's what I would say. Maybe someone could convince me of that, but when I think about the clear legal arguments that the Southern states had for the Confederacy, when I think about what the process they did, they did secede from the Union to establish the Confederate States of America, et cetera, and then how that war was ultimately prosecuted, then I think the same basic thing that happened then would happen again.

And so, as I understand the history of the Civil War, an enormous component of the Civil War was around tariffs and around, basically, economic policies of keeping the country integrated. A significant component of it was also the arguments over slavery, but it wasn't exclusively over slavery, and it wasn't exclusively over economics and tariffs and who had the right to collect taxes.

When I was in high school, I wrote a paper for a history class in which I argued that the Civil War was not about slavery, not about ending slavery. And in that paper, I quoted all of President Lincoln's addresses in which he said, "I'm not interested in ending slavery." I now believe that I was wrong in high school, I was naive, and that Lincoln was engaging in political convenience by not fully stating publicly his ambition to end slavery, but simply keeping that in reserve as trying to basically say one thing.

Basically the same thing Barack Obama did around the concept of homosexual marriage, et cetera. I'm gonna say one thing, do another, et cetera, no difference. So I think Lincoln did the same thing. But those issues were related. And so if Texas seceded, what would be the justification for that secession?

So there would have to be a lot of change that would happen in order for that kind of thing to be supported more broadly. Now, I was encouraged to see that, was it like 20 states, 22 states or something like that, signed the letter about the recent scuffle at the border, and that a lot of other state governors were willing to put their names down.

And so I think that there is enough of a pressure that I think the actions of the federal government may be somewhat limited because of some of this pressure. So I expect some kind of significant political change. And I think that this is much more, I'm pretty persuaded of the thesis that the current scenario in the United States, the frustration, the vitriol, the arguing, the fighting, is more of a turning of the age than it is of any specific thing.

And I first became persuaded of that by reading George, the geopolitical, George Friedman's book called "The Storm Before the Calm." And he talked about the cyclical nature and the two trends in the United States that are converging on the 2020s and why he predicted years ago the 2020s were gonna be hugely, hugely frustrating and filled with anger and vitriol, et cetera, but it was gonna lead to a complete transformation of the political system and of the economic system in the United States.

And then finally, a listener convinced me, and I'm halfway through the recent book, "The Fourth Turning is Here," and I find his arguments persuasive of the cyclical nature of the seculum in "The Fourth Turning" arguments. I never read the original one, and I knew that I should, but I just got annoyed by everyone who went on and on about "The Fourth Turning," and so I'd never read the book 'cause I just got annoyed by the people who promoted the book.

So I'm reading "The Fourth Turning is Here," and it seems persuasive to me. So I think that we're just in kind of a fairly intense period in the 2020s, and that intensity is gonna lead to a transformation of the political system, a transformation of the economic system, and we're gonna emerge in the 2030s, mid-2030s, something like that, with a new and unrecognizable system because that's what happened about four or five times before in the American system.

And I see good historical evidence for that that goes a lot farther than expecting a civil war. So those are my thoughts. Who knows, we'll sit back and watch and see what happens. - Thank you very much, love hearing it. - My pleasure, and thank you for the good questions.

As we close, I think it was that caller who mentioned that I am indeed hosting a Radical Family Camp. If you are interested in that, check out the previous show that I just did, the one right before this show in the podcast feed. You can find all of the details on that, and if you'd like to sign up for that, go to www.radicalfamilycamp.com.

Move soon, again, the early bird sale tickets are more than half sold out. So go to radicalfamilycamp.com. Basically, the short version is that we're gonna have a great three-day camp together, financial conversations, lifestyle conversations, camp activities for you, for your children, et cetera, and just hanging out. So I'll be there with my wife and all of our children, and very excited to start moving our relationship out of the digital world and into the physical world.

We can argue about the next civil war and the causes of the last one, et cetera, around a campfire. I look forward to that conversation and hearing your input on that. Also, if you would like to join me on next week's show, go to www.patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, www.patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Sign up there and you'll gain access to next week's show.