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

I'm your host. This is Friday, March 1, 2024, Episode 999 of Radical Personal Finance. On this Friday, as we do on every Friday in which I can arrange the equipment to record, we do live Q&A. If this is your first time here with us at Radical Personal Finance, welcome.

I'm glad that you are here. I record these live Friday Q&A shows whenever possible, and I love doing them. If you would like to gain access to one of these Friday Q&A shows, you can do it at patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. If this is not your first time here with us, then as you know, we've been doing this quite a while.

I've got 10 years, 999 episodes, but if I haven't talked to you, then remember, I would love to talk to you. I always love it when new people join the Patreon, new people call in, talk about interesting new topics, raise questions. Remember, your questions can be technical, they can be philosophical, you can talk about anything that you want.

The mics are open, the calls are open, I don't screen them other than just trying to keep the numbers down with an appropriate, with a slight paid filter, so that I don't have 57 callers each and every day. But we begin today with Jeremy in Montana. Jeremy, welcome to the show.

How can I serve you today, sir? Yeah, I was curious if you think that having an openness to talk about money is important. I was raised where money was like a really taboo topic, even amongst my immediate family, and I feel that it kind of maybe stifled or hindered my development coming into adulthood.

And the reason I ask is, I was listening to your episode with the private money, and obviously, I don't want you to rehash that whole episode, I thought it was well done, but it just caught me off guard at times, because I see value in normalizing talking about finance and money and investing, and I think that it's an opportunity to help friends and family realize there can be a better solution to their lives, that if they are living in poverty, that that's not something they have to forever be stuck in.

And it just seemed like I was a little conflicted, because I understand the liability side, the insurance side, and even like what you were talking about with pro athletes and people not appreciating them giving money and buying meals and stuff, but I just thought that maybe there's like a happy medium or something that could be established between those two.

There's definitely a tension in that podcast that you're defending, in which I defended the idea of being quite circumspect and private about your money. In the latter part of that episode, I tried to work through a little bit of that tension, saying, for example, that if you don't talk about money, you may be limiting your impact, you may be limiting your ability to even encourage someone in the way that you're describing.

For example, if I always lie down about my wealth, and I just don't ever, I just let everyone assume I'm totally broke and have no money, no assets, et cetera, then what if my sharp young nephew or niece doesn't come to me and talk to me, and I could guide my nephews and nieces on a better path?

How do I work through that? How do I have the kind of impact in my community that I would like to have? And it is a balance, and that balance will probably change in different contexts. It will also probably be a balance that has different levels. So I would like people to, I think each person should make an informed decision based upon the potential benefits and the potential risks of anything that you say or anything that you do, and not forget about those goals that you're describing.

So I can think of a couple levels or a couple of filters through which we should pass this. So the first filter would be, is the person with whom I am speaking or considering speaking about money, is this person trustworthy? Or I have people in my life that are quite close to me with whom I would never speak about my finances in any way, shape, or form, because these are people who I know tend to speak quite openly about other people's secrets.

So if I'm engaging with somebody who brings consistently private information or personal information to me, at the least, or a gossip at the worst, then I immediately put an enormous red flag on that person, and I say I will never reveal personal or sensitive information to this person, because this person is untrustworthy.

The ability of a man or woman to understand and protect people's privacy, that is a very important component. And I would draw a distinction here between secrecy and privacy. And what I mean here is that I don't want – for example, in my life, I don't want to ever do anything that would ever have to be a secret.

I don't want to keep any secrets. I want to live a life that is without secrets. But that's not to say that I'm not going to do things that are private. And so in the intimacy of my relationship with my wife or my relationship with a good friend, you might speak about things that are private, but we would not want to speak about things that are secret.

And there's a balance there, because sometimes money could be simply private, sometimes money could be secret. And that's another filter, is that if you're going to talk to somebody, you might share in some safe context with people who are circumspect, know how to control their mouth, know how to protect people's privacy, protect people's interests, etc.

You might share some private details. And there may be appropriate areas for that. So an example would be, as a financial advisor, I frequently know quite a lot about quite a lot of people's private details of their lives. Many people tell me truthfully about their financial position. And I have a very privileged source of information because I talk to people about money.

So I know far more about, not everyone, but I know an enormous amount of personal private information of just about anybody in my life, many friends, many acquaintances, etc. People come to me and talk to me about things. But I am also extremely circumspect, I'm extremely careful, I never, ever reveal other people's information.

Even on the show, I occasionally will tell stories about friends or clients, but that's why I just never use names. I try to use only details that are necessary. I speak in generalities, etc., because I have a responsibility to protect people's privacy. Now there is an interesting line here that I've spoken about previously.

I don't have any legal ability to maintain the confidentiality of any information that somebody shares with me. Years ago, I did podcasts on this, talking about why it's actually dangerous to talk about your finances with someone who is a financial advisor. Let's say that a guy is getting ready to commit some kind of fraud or getting ready to commit some kind of some questionable shady dealing that would approach fraud.

Maybe it's not outright fraud, but maybe it would approach fraud. He's preparing to hide money from his wife in a divorce or hide money as he signs a prenup or something like that. Well, if he talks to me as a financial advisor about his money and he shares all these details with me, I'll have all those details and I'll put all those details into my notes.

Those notes will be in case notes that are filed under his name. Everything is there in the files. If then an investigator is able to obtain a subpoena or able to subpoena me or obtain a warrant of some kind, then all of the information that the guy has disclosed to me or to his accountant or to his insurance agent or etc., all of that can be subpoenaed and I can be obligated to testify in court.

All of my client case notes and records and that etc. can be disclosed in court. So the only person with whom he could protect that personal information would be a lawyer, which is why for people who have an intense need for privacy in their lives for some reason, I've recommended that they work with someone who's like a lawyer CPA type where they can actually offer that legal attorney-client confidentiality.

Now, obviously a lawyer can't maintain information confidentially if somebody is planning to commit a crime, but that still matters. So as a person, I guess my point is that I've developed a habit of just never ever, I don't ever talk about people's personal details with anybody. But that's privacy.

It's not secrecy. There's nothing that I do, for example, in a client conversation that I would ever keep secret from my wife, but I never ever even tell my wife who I talk to, who I work with, who hires me etc. She has no clue whatsoever who among our friends and family have been clients of mine etc.

Because it's just simpler not to talk. So if you know people who are trustworthy or you're interacting with people who are trustworthy who give you the expression of confidentiality, you know that if I go to this person and I talk about a matter of the heart, can I trust that this person, if I've told this person that I have feelings for this woman over here, that this family member at the next family gathering is not going to start ragging on me in public and betraying my trust, then that would be an appropriate context to then talk about more trustworthy things, talk about money etc.

In the context of things like family relationships, close family relationships with say parents and children, then I think that it's very important to talk about money and that privacy should not be maintained in those circumstances, as long as we're dealing with normal healthy relationships. And so here there's a balance.

So for example, I do not tell my children at this point in time how much money I control. I don't tell my children how much money I earn, because they have no need to know those details. But I do talk to them about money. I talk to them about the principles of money, the concepts of money etc.

Why don't I talk to them about how much money I myself have and control? Well it's because number one, there's no need to know and more importantly, I don't want them to gain some kind of false impression. I don't want them to look down on people who have more money than I have or who have less money than I have.

It's not necessary. Now fast forward, let's say that I'm working with a mature son or a mature daughter. Now I want them to have a sense of our family finances and so appropriate disclosure might be to talk about how much we spend. They may not need to know all of the details of all of our investment holdings, but as teenagers I think it's perfectly reasonable that my teenage children should understand what our normal expenses are.

They need to have an expectation of what is the scale of life cost. How much does it cost us to have a roof over our heads? How much does it cost us to have food on the table? How much does it cost us to take a two week trip to Europe?

What is the scale of these things so that they can be prepared for what they need to earn and kind of what life costs? Now fast forward. Let's say that I'm 60 years old and now I have a 35 or a 40 year old son and I'm thinking about retirement.

Well now I definitely want to recruit my son into my life to give me counsel, give me insight and start to look out over my finances. And so I think that one thing that parents who are older should do is bring their children, trustworthy children into their financial situation so that their children can help them and understand where they are.

It's very helpful for both parents and children to understand where we're at in terms of a financial position. I've worked with many clients for example of parents who are modestly wealthy and in some cases the children are very wealthy. And if the parent is modestly wealthy and is scrimping and saving to try to pass along money to the children, the children really want the parent to know that listen you don't need to do that.

I've got plenty of money. I want to see you enjoy and use up your money yourself. And then things can go the other way as well is that if you have a parent who is very wealthy and the children are confident that the parents are very wealthy then it instills confidence into the children that no I don't need to set aside a large fund to take care of my parents.

They're all taken care of etc. So I do think that communicating about money in these kinds of confidential situations is a wise practice, but that there's always a way that we can communicate about things that is appropriate. One more layer of filtering. There are different levels of wealth and there are different types of things that simply can be understood without being said.

So for example, there's the classic meme of some millionaire next door type who works as a janitor and he drives a $500 car or something like that. They write stories about him at his death because he's a one-off example. Wealthy people don't drive $500 cars, doesn't happen. That's not a proper expression.

But you can also see based upon how someone manages his assets, the things that he purchases, the ways that he spends etc., you can see who is wealthy. It's very difficult to hide wealth and generally wealthy people don't want to hide wealth, but there are still benefits of not disclosing everything.

So I would say certainly it's valuable to talk about money and people should talk about money and talking about money among friends and family is a healthy thing. It's probably a better subject of conversation because your friends will guide you, will encourage you etc., but you don't have to talk about every dollar and every dollar's location and everything that you have purchased just because you're talking about money.

And I would say a good metaphor that we would use would be how we talk about our most intimate relationships. I can talk with you quite a lot about my marriage relationship with my wife and I can do that in one way in public, I can do it another way in private in a confidential situation and I can do that without ever exposing any detail that could potentially be harmful to my wife or to me or to our relationship and that's what I was talking about in terms of secrecy versus privacy.

The things that might be injurious to my wife or to our relationship if I disclosed something, those things aren't secrets, but they're definitely private. They're not things that I would be and have embarrassed to be disclosed, but they're things that don't need to be disclosed and shouldn't be disclosed because that keeps a confidence of relationship.

So you can speak broadly about money on many different levels. You can make the points that you want to make, you can spend your money etc. while still also being circumspect and not necessarily publishing your social security number on a billboard. Yeah, that makes sense. I guess I've probably historically been maybe a little bit more open trying to like create disciples of five so to speak and probably would be wise to take a step back on some of those things.

So I appreciate your feedback. If you don't mind, do you have time for one more quick question? Go ahead. Awesome. So I just signed up for your camp coming up in I guess what a month and a half or so? Yes. And super excited about that. Just curious if there's any ways or things that you think people need to prepare in advance to get the most out of it.

I know you talked about the different tracks and whatnot. Just curious if there's questions or specific things that we should be coming and being prepared for or just show up and have fun. Absolutely. The camp is sold out now. So rather than answering that in public, you will receive at the beginning of next week, you will receive some extensive communications from me, survey, etc.

and we'll communicate about those things among those who purchased tickets to the camp rather than my using public air time here for that. Okay? All right. Sounds good. Thank you. Have a great weekend. My pleasure. Good questions, Jeremy. I guess the only other comment I wanted to say that I think is important enough for me to say is just that in general, I don't know how old you are, but in general, as I get older, I increasingly learn not to tell people about my opinion about things unless they ask me for it and in many ways, unless they pay me for it.

So it's hard because whenever I get enthusiastic about something, I want to be an evangelist for it. I want to persuade others. And so if I get super interested in, you know, financial independence, then I want to go and recruit others. But in general, most people aren't interested and the older I get, I just try.

It's not always appropriate. You do want to share your opinions. That's normal human relationships. But in general, I'm not that interested in telling people about my ideas or the things that I want to persuade them of unless they've asked because I know what that feels like on the other side.

And so I want to drop enough hints or breadcrumbs about things that are possible to stimulate some ideas, but I'm not going to go on and on and on. And so if I were going to talk about financial independence, I would say, you know, financial independence is very, very accessible and it can actually be done pretty quickly and there's some cool ways to do it.

And then if someone's interested, I would say you can save a certain percentage of your income, you know, in a certain amount of time. You can accomplish it by building a business or you can, here's what house hacking works. Super, super cool. I have friends who are doing it.

Those are all ways of kind of generally bringing up topics in a really healthy way to stimulate and help people who might be interested in that information. But none of that requires the disclosure of confidential personal information of here's how much money I have and here's how much money I'm saving and I'm going to be financially independent on this date.

Because those kinds of things, what good do they do? They're more likely to inspire jealousy, frustrations, risks to your family, risks to your wealth, etc. People don't need to know any of that personal information for you to talk about ideas effectively. Blake in Georgia. Blake, welcome to the show.

How can I serve you today? Hey Joshua, thanks for having me. Long time, first time. Welcome. So my first question, I have some UTMA accounts for my kids and in a previous Q&A, I heard you say those are not the best accounts and I wanted to understand why and what is better and I saw what the 529s now with the new, I don't know how new it is, the Roth conversion.

Is that the way to go or am I, is there something else I don't even know about? The basic problem with UTMA accounts, Uniform Transfer to Minors Act or UGMA accounts, Uniform Gift to Minors Act is simply when your child becomes an adult, all of the money that you have transferred or gifted to the child immediately becomes part of, comes under the child's control.

So you can't exercise discretion over the accounts. When you put the money into that account, then you're saying that at 18 years old, on my child's birthday, my child is going to control this money, regardless of whether or not, you know, he or she is going to school, regardless of whether he or she is addicted to drugs, regardless of whether he or she needs this money, regardless of if it should stay invested, no, you're saying that on my child's 18th birthday, he or she legally controls this money.

Now the rebuttal to this is ordinarily, but that's only if he or she knows about it. Okay, fair enough. Then you don't tell him about it. And then he turns around and sues you at 22 years old. And now you have a legal obligation because the money is his, but you haven't told him about it for the last four years.

Well, I can't confirm for certain because I've not reviewed those cases. I think, going on memory, I think that I have heard that there have been lawsuits like that. And there's a clear legal case for your child to sue you. So it's not that it's a bad thing. It's simply that I would call it suboptimal, subpar.

I wouldn't cash out a UTMA account or try to make any changes. You can't. Just keep it there. But I have not seen the circumstance in which I have recommended that account. I should come up with a case study as to when I would recommend it, but I haven't done that homework.

But I've just not seen an example in which I would recommend it. And I don't like the idea of you're giving up control over money for a very modest tax benefit. Right. You're talking about with 529s or… UTMAs. Okay. Well, that's why I never did a 529 because I saw a very modest tax benefit that I didn't think was worth the strings being tied to it.

Agreed. Agreed. And I have been a very prominent promoter of that exact same thing, that for most people, a 529 plan gives only a very modest tax benefit, and in many cases, it's probably not worth the surrendering of the control. So the same principle applies to the UTMA account.

Why not just keep the money yourself, manage it yourself? And if you want to give your children money, just give them money. Why put it into an account that's segregated that has to be there? And to ask the question is to answer it, to say, "Well, there can be circumstances in which this is appropriate." You want to actually affect that transfer.

But in most cases, you don't need a separate account for you to set aside money for your child's future. That makes sense. One more question about a previous podcast. I heard you say a while ago, basically, along the lines of, "You're responsible for the way your children turn out or behave," and that really helped me take more responsibility for the things I didn't like about how my children behaved.

Do you remember, by any chance, where I could find that again? No idea. No idea. I have, right now, it got delayed for a few weeks. Check back in a few weeks, and ideally, you will be able to have a searchable archive of all the previous podcasts as they're all transcribed, and you can search them, and you may be able to find that.

But I don't even know what search terms you would use to find that. So I would just say you gain the benefit from the principle, and that's all you need. It's one of those things that clearly we acknowledge that, at the end of the day, our children are human beings, they're separate entities, they're separate persons, and they're born as persons.

There's, of course, the endless debate about nature versus nurture, etc. All of us have seen what we perceive to be good parents who've had catastrophic results, and all of us have seen what we perceive to be horrific parents whose children have turned out really well. So our children ultimately have agency, but at the end of the day, as parents, even if it's only a metaphorical truth, as I spoke about recently in response to a term that a listener introduced me to, even if it's only a metaphorical truth, it's something that we should live by.

And I think that every time I review the nature versus nurture stuff, I become pretty persuaded that the argument that it's all nature is pretty silly, and that the environment in which a child is raised, how his or her parents interact with a child, etc., it really does guide a child and set a child forward on a path.

Awesome. Thank you. My pleasure. We move on to Adam in Washington. Welcome, Adam. How can I serve you today? Hello, Joshua. It's a pleasure to be able to call in, and first, thank you for all the content over the years. I mean, the introduction of different ideas, from investing in your children, money as a renewable resource, there's lots of really fascinating ideas, so thank you.

My pleasure. Thank you. Yeah. So a question I have for you today is around homeschooling, and so that's one of the things that I never really thought much about until you started talking about it, or not started talking about it until I started listening to you talk about it.

And the question I have particularly is around business education, and so I'm curious if you found any interesting resources for teaching kids, both kind of at an industry level and at a function level, sales, marketing, human resources, growth, strategy, and then also, some exposure to different industries, if you've seen that done at all in the homeschooling world.

I mean, I look at it, I'm having a hard time finding anything that even comes close to that, and I'm wondering if you've kind of got a deeper understanding. There are people, many people who are promoting this kind of experience, this kind of education. I have, a couple of years ago, I signed up for, I bought somebody's information product called, I think, Kidpreneur, but I never dug into their program.

I just signed up for it and paid for it, and then kind of took a quick glance and meant to come back, and I haven't gotten around to getting back to it yet. But they had something built around that. A few years ago, I signed up for Caleb Maddox's Apex Kids thing.

I tried to use some of his things with my children, and that's his more overall personal development for kids kind of approach. That didn't really take with my particular children, and so I let that go. I have a number of books on the topic. I have a book called How to Turn $100 Into $1,000,000, and it's been in the library.

I haven't required the reading of it, but my 10-year-old has read it a couple of times, enjoys it, and I think it's a good opening to it. I know that there are people who are trying to build this kind of approach, and I intend to introduce more of these ideas as I get into the teenage world.

So I have a plan in terms of my own curriculum that I am building for my children. I have a plan to introduce more of these contexts at a later time. So there is a course that is on my plan from the Ron Paul Curriculum, where they teach Business 1 and Business 2 as part of the Ron Paul Curriculum, kind of a homeschooling curriculum.

The author of that course in the Ron Paul Curriculum – I can't remember his name off the top of my head, forgive me – but he also has a website that he is building teaching business skills to teens, taking them through the process. That's another resource that is on my planned list that I haven't reviewed personally yet.

But on the whole, I am skeptical of the idea of "teaching business" for two reasons. Number one, I am skeptical of making the concept of education practical. What I mean is, I have complained, just like a lot of other people have complained, "Well, why do we have to learn all this stuff that we never use in life?

Why are we taking algebra? You never do algebra in real life. Why are we taking chemistry? We never do chemistry in real life. Why don't they teach normal, useful stuff in school? Why don't they teach you how to do your taxes in school?" That's a very common refrain. If you go to any social media thread and you post something or find something about what should children study in school, you'll find that a lot of people feel this way about their education.

"Why wasn't it more practical?" I have the opposite regret. I pursued a very practical education, I got a degree in business, and I now look back and I just think, "That was a waste of four years. Why did I waste four years of my life studying business when I could have studied something actually interesting?

If I could have studied philosophy or humanities or history or something that would actually be interesting to me?" And I know how silly that sounds, but the reason is that I think we need to get past the idea of education being a functional commodity, and we should embrace education as an opportunity for truly creating free human beings.

I'm a proponent of a liberal education, and the goal of a liberal education is to liberate people. And I would consider it a very sad person who has gone through years of schooling and has only come out the other side with the ability to do business. Now, you're not saying this, I'm just kind of trying to set out a basic framework.

That business is one component of life, and it's an important component, but it is not the purpose of an education. And I reject pretty strongly now that the idea of school subjects or the curriculum that we choose should be primarily practical in nature. I think that our goal with education is to spread a delectable buffet, a delectable feast in front of our children from an enormous diverse array of options, and then allow them to choose among those options and be exposed to this broad general experience of life so that they can create and chart their own path.

The second objection that I have is to think that somehow business is something that is difficult to learn or difficult to teach. I don't think that you would need much more than, you know, six months or a year of a business curriculum to know just about everything you need to know to get started.

It's very different, learning the skills of business is very different than, say, learning to be a skillful writer or learning to be skilled at mathematics. There's just an enormous learning curve with writing and mathematics that doesn't exist in business. And academic knowledge related to business is not an effective way of building business skills beyond the basic fundamentals.

And so I think that a better way to approach the concept of business education rather than from a general perspective should be to give specific skills that could be leveraged into a specific job or a specific career. So here are a couple of examples from my list. One of the things, one of the opportunities that I think is – well, the basic skill of business is the skill of sales.

So anytime we can find something related to sales, then I want to encourage that. But sales skills are hard to teach academically and they're better taught when there's an opportunity to sell. And so that's something that I look – I want to look for opportunities to teach for a young person to sell and encourage them to sell so that they can start to acquire those skills.

But I'm not going to start going through five books on selling if there's no context for it. However, there are skills that I think could relate to things like selling but also relate to a specific career. So when my students are in their teenage years, I intend to require an enormous amount of writing from them.

Writing and speaking. I believe that the most important literacies for students to be really skilled at are the active literacies of public speaking or speaking in general both in a private context and in a public context and also in writing. The ability to write is fundamental. And so I would – I plan to introduce things like let's do a copywriting course and let's practice copywriting.

It's a very useful form of writing. It is writing so it's perfectly functional in terms of a component of an English curriculum yet it is something where you can genuinely build a phenomenal career as an independent copywriter. It's a career that a child can do from any corner of the world and make tens of thousands of dollars per year, nay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, even as a teenager.

And it's also something that is enormously useful in one's own personal business if someone has his own personal business. And so that to me is one of those really foundational things and I'm much more excited about a child going through a copywriting course than I am about some general business education.

The second example I would use is something like accounting or bookkeeping. Although this market is changing right now and I don't know where we'll be three or four years from now, but it is very doable for a teenager to not only learn about bookkeeping and accounting but also to become credentialed and certified either as a bookkeeper or as an accountant and build an independent business in the teenage years that allows a teen to earn adult wages but in a teenage context.

And yet that's a fundamental business skill. You are understanding, starting to understand financial statements, understanding the basic functioning of taxes, again financial statements are the most important thing, but that can be leveraged both to create income now but then also as a general component of business education. So I'm pretty excited about this idea of saying what are some basic skills and let's learn the business skills but in the context of the meta skills, the meta skills that can be applied in various businesses.

And I think with an encouraging environment, say yeah, try that, go ahead and do that, and don't force a child to stick with something for a very long time but encourage them to try something, I think that's a good way of gaining expertise. And then finally, I have the personal MBA reading list, both the actual book written by Josh Kaufman as well as the reading list, I have that scheduled as part of kind of overall exposure to business concepts.

While I acknowledge that reading 100 books on business is pretty large, but I think that in general if someone reads 10 or 15 or 20 books on business, especially if they're books that are being studied in specific application to a business, then I think that's an abundantly useful business education.

So those are my ideas, probably less well stated than I would like, but those are my ideas on a business education, that it's important but I don't think it's more important than academic subjects. I think that business is one of the easier things to learn and that it should be a modest component of, certainly a very modest component of the younger years.

And then as we move to the teenage years, it should be a component but not an overwhelming component because the major goal of education is not strictly practical but rather it is an important component and what we want to do is help our children and fit them for a couple of careers.

In conclusion, one of the reasons I'm very passionate about homeschooling is I think that it's the best context for both of these things together. So my basic mental model for a really good teenage homeschool curriculum is that an academic curriculum is imposed upon the student during his or her teenage years to the tune of about three to four hours a day of work.

So ideally, student starts at eight and is done at noon. And I think with three to four hours of focused work a day, you can produce top-tier academics in a homeschooling context because of the efficiency of time use as well as the efficiency of education because you don't have to be held back by classroom movements but the student can always be right at his frontier of learning where learning is efficient.

Then the student should be encouraged from noon to night and also we can eliminate homework, we can eliminate all the rest of the stuff, the student should be encouraged from noon to night to develop his or her own businesses, his or her own expressions of business and those things can be learned in the context of a job, a business, a skill that's being developed and that that's the best way to learn those skills.

And then I see myself not as providing a formal academic curriculum to teach you the skills of business but rather mentoring and coaching through the real experiences of being in business. eBay Motors is here for the ride. With over 122 million parts for your number one ride or die, you can make sure your ride stays running smoothly, brake kits, LED headlights, bumpers, whatever your baby needs, eBay Motors has it.

And with eBay Guaranteed Fit, it's guaranteed to fit your ride the first time, every time. Plus, at these prices, you're burning rubber, not cash. Keep your ride or die alive at ebaymotors.com, eligible items only, exclusions apply. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense and I guess the lens I was thinking about through more was the world of stories, one of the things that you mentioned a few months ago, I think, was reading your kids the biography of Marie Curie as a way to introduce them to this whole world of books as the ultimate instructor or the best tutor in the world.

And I guess one of the ideas that you put out there even earlier than that was around spending money to learn things related to your industry and give yourself a personal education budget. So I've been spending a whole bunch of money on Harvard Business School case studies related to the industry that I work in and I found that it's been some of the best money I've ever spent going through these different stories and seeing it through that lens.

So I appreciate your answer. For someone who has a high interest in business, we want to encourage that. I don't want to be recently trying to keep these comments short. We want to encourage business but I'm nervous about an exclusive focus on business. I would not want to graduate an 18-year-old who is only skilled with business but is not well informed about other important components of what it means to be highly educated.

I also don't want to graduate an 18-year-old who exclusively has academic knowledge and academic skills and doesn't have any experience applying learning to the world and doesn't have any context of business, doesn't have any sense of how to make money in the world. So I want to shoot right up the middle.

I don't want to sacrifice either of those things and I definitely do want to encourage business knowledge and I think that your expression of Harvard Business Review case studies is really great. There's a whole lot of other skills that need to be applied. So things like gaining access to people.

I think one of the high school projects that we want to teach high schoolers is we want to make sure that they are systematically building the skills of gaining access to important people and we want to figure out a reason for them to gain access to important people which is probably going to involve some kind of sales skills, some kind of advocacy for something, etc.

And so all of these I see are related to business and that they will serve a child well who then wants to pursue business in an entrepreneurial way. Yeah, that makes sense. And two other kind of quicker ones if that's okay. You mentioned investing in your children's bodies. I thought that whole series was great by the way.

Just on balance and something I've got three kids under five years old and my five-year-old and three-year-old are really interested in gymnastics which is like quickly becoming a huge time investment like as they get better and better at it, they get invited to spend more and more time doing it.

I'm wondering if your kids have expressed an interest in that or if you've dabbled with that at all. Kind of in the spirit of that, investing in balance and finding a way to invest in your kids' bodies from a strength standpoint. And the other one just to put it out there, you can answer them together and I'll be done.

You had mentioned at some point that you were self-recording English-Spanish translations and you were considering releasing it. I was wondering if you had an update on that and it'd be something I would love to listen to as I dabble in that world of learning another language. Thank you. Yeah.

To the subject of the books, it's an ambition of mine and my ambitions are far beyond my capacity to deliver them in a timely manner. And it's an enormous point of frustration that I myself am fixing because these things need to exist. I just am working on expanding my team to make it happen and I find the same limits that we all do.

But it's a new day, working better and making progress on that. With regard to the physical stuff, I was just quite literally before recording this podcast, I was just talking with my wife about this and I'll just share specifically what we're talking about. I'm almost finished with this book called Range by David Epstein and I've been reading this book as a rebuttal to some of my other readings.

I read a book called Peak by Anders Ericsson and a book called Talent is Overrated by Jeff Colvin. Both excellent books, but especially Talent is Overrated, Colvin, I think, would advocate, he does advocate for a highly specialized form of training that if we want to produce, say, you know, someone's interested in gymnastics, then if we want our child to be a world-class gymnast, then we should sign up for the gymnastic gym, we should be there four hours a day with kind of what I think we would think if I say a Soviet-style gymnastics training program, I think that would resonate, you know, with what the Soviets often did.

They would find a student who, a young child who displayed some basic promise, they would take the child away from his or her parents, put him under a coach and all the child's life would be gymnastics or boxing or hockey or whatever it happened to be, and to this very intense level of development.

So David Epstein's book, Range, is very much a rebuttal to that, basically saying that it's not the only way that people learn is to just do one thing all the time and only do that well. And I'm pretty nervous about what I think could be called the tiger mom, you know, idea that you have a mom who comes along and says, "My child is going to be great at this," and push, push, push, push, push.

I don't see that as appropriate parenting. I see that as more harmful than helpful, even though it may result in somebody developing genius-level skills in an environment. And the conversation that I had with my wife just today was a good approach to this is seasonality. And I think that's one thing that is often missing.

I assume it's still this way. When I was in high school, we had sports. We had basically fall sports and spring sports, and I think this is still the case. So you have your football season, you have your basketball season. You have your baseball season, you have your swimming season.

And an athlete could do multiple sports. And I think there's abundant evidence to say that that's probably a good thing and not a bad thing, because right now where you see this is parents, you know, they push their child into Little League, and then they push their child on their travel team.

And it's like you've got a dad or a mom who's just trying to fulfill his own dreams with his child. And yes, the child may be good at baseball, and ultimately is burned out by 18 and never wants to see a baseball again. I don't see that as a proper frame.

So I think seasonality is an answer, is to say, "Hey, we're really into gymnastics. Great. Let's do it. Let's do it for three months. And let's be really into gymnastics for three months, and then let's quit it. And let's go do rock climbing, and rock climbing is going to be our thing for three months.

And then after that, it's going to be baseball. Let's do baseball." And we want to expose our children to a diverse level of things, and then listen to them. And if they really, really, really want to go back to gymnastics, great, let's go back to gymnastics. But we can guide appropriately.

We want to think about those basic skills. Every sport's going to have a different set of skills. Every sport's going to cultivate something unique. But not let it take over your life to where you're spending hours and hours every week doing it. You can do that for three months.

So call it a season and say, "For this season, we're going to do gymnastics." Then what would you guys like to do next? And let's take a break. Let's have an off-season. And then let's think about what we're going to do in the fall or the spring. I think that's a good way of approaching it.

Awesome. Thank you. My pleasure. All right. An enormous number of callers, so we'll go a little faster. Preston in Arizona. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, Joshua. Appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. My question is based on, generally, what's an appropriate amount to invest in a single investment, more specifically, in your own company stock?

So for some context, have about $300,000 worth of company stock. You're dropping out on me. $300,000 a company stock. Go ahead. Okay. Maybe a little bit more, $70,000, the best over the next few years. There's an opportunity to buy more today. I have the expectation that the stock is going to perform very, very well over the next few years.

I just want to keep in mind maybe some ideas that you have on what's an appropriate amount of allocation for one investment, particularly company stock. This is a hard question because I could present a few different models that I have learned and heard, but at the end of the day, I think it's going to be a gut call by you.

Because if your company stock performs well, and you know, you feel like, and you believe that it's going to perform well, then you're going to want to be invested in it heavily. So in hindsight, let's look back. Imagine that you are an early engineer at Facebook, or an early engineer at Tesla, and you're being paid in company stock.

And imagine you're talking to your financial advisor, and your financial advisor is saying to you, "Well, you really should be prudent. And after all, we have an enormous amount of isolated risk between your employment and your company. And after all, you should know about the company stock. So why don't you go ahead and put it all into an index fund?" Well, fast forward 10 years.

You're not very happy with that advice, are you? No. Okay. So now we can say the flip side. Let's say that you have all your company in stock, and I don't know what bankruptcy to refer to. It seems kind of dumb to talk about WorldCom or Enron at the moment, but those were kind of classic examples that you're an early employee, etc.

Well, now you would appreciate that diversification. So at the end of the day, every man is going to have a different gut feeling, a different decision and be willing to take a different amount of risk on his beliefs. And then you're going to have to consider your phase of life and to say, "Can I afford to take this risk?" So let's just – I can't give you a perfect answer because knowledgeable, smart people would give you a variety of models.

So I'm going to give you some filters to pass it through instead because I think that's the most useful. Number one, think about – on a recent Q&A, I went through kind of an elaborate discussion around Bitcoin. Go back and listen to the most recent Friday Q&A where a listener called and said, "Should I sell my real estate and move to Bitcoin?" And I gave an elaborate discussion of how you would decide whether to do that and how to do that and whatnot.

I think a lot of that applies to your situation. So since that's already there, let me go to a few more things. Number one, think about your stage in life. There's a big difference between being very young and wanting and really needing to make big wins versus being very old and not needing to make big wins but wanting to avoid big losses.

And so it makes all the sense in the world to me for a younger man who is at a company that's giving him company stock and he believes in the company, it makes all the sense in the world to me for him to keep it in company stock even though there's an intense concentration of risk because it may turn out to be a great long-term move for him if he believes in the company as you do with yours, that I think it's going to perform well.

On the other hand, there's a great deal of risk to the guy who is older in his career to have an extreme concentration in his company stock especially that if he loses his job and he loses his stock value at the same time, then it's a double whammy. So you want to think about the phase of life.

You want to think about the alternative use of the dollar. So if you sell the stock, what are you going to do with the money? And then go through that way of thinking that I described in the Bitcoin course, okay, if I sell the stock, am I going to put it in the index fund?

Well, now I know I'm not going to get much wins but at least I'm not going to get much losses ideally as compared to the current scenario. And then just simply go with the scenario that feels best for you. And while you're doing that, make a plan to say here's how I would know if things are going to change.

So here's how I would know if I'm going to go ahead and sell my company stock. I would get married and want to buy a house. Well, this would be the money that I would use to buy a house and if I could pay cash for a house, that would be fantastic because imagine starting your life as a young man with a debt-free house, that would be well worth it.

That would be a smart move. Or if I didn't start feeling confident in the company, I'm going to start selling stock but that's also my sign that I'm going to look for a job. I think this kind of subjective discussion, even though it's not specific, is the best way that you're going to come to arriving at what you personally think and believe.

And I think it's a better answer than only put 10% of your net wealth in any one thing, etc. You need to ask yourself, where am I in my wealth building journey? Am I looking for a big win? Is this company a big win? Is there a better use of the dollar?

And not just play the conservative angle if you don't need to play the conservative angle. But if you do need to be conservative, then go ahead and start being conservative. Okay. Yeah. That's helpful. I appreciate your thoughts. Thank you. I don't have a mathematical model to offer to you, but I do have my own personal regret of not being more aggressive.

And there are some who have regrets from being aggressive. And so you yourself, for example, you might have your salary and then your company stock that you receive as part of your compensation package. You might not take your entire salary and go and buy more company stock. But so you might choose your diversification that way.

But in general, if you believe in the future of the company and you have no other information that would say that you're wrong, I think you're going to want to bet on yourself and bet on the company and have the confidence that comes with trusting yourself versus trying to take some external person's framework to say, "Well, we never own individual stocks.

It's too much concentration of risk," et cetera. I think you'll feel better betting on yourself than the other way. Andrew in Mexico City. Welcome, Andrew. How can I serve you today? Hi. Good afternoon, Joshua. Thank you for your time today. I had a question on behalf of my wife and I.

We recently created a revocable living trust in order to have a say in how our life's work would be drawn down. In the event of our early passing, a percentage would remain with our family, pay for education, healthcare expenses. We have that pretty nailed down. Our primary plan, assuming that we live long and healthy lives, is to eventually donate a majority of it to charity, charitable causes during our lifetimes.

We're in our mid-30s right now. We have time to identify those organizations closer to our 60s and 70s. What I'm having trouble with is how to identify high-quality organizations that make a significant difference in the communities in which they operate and have a high likelihood of continuing to do so in the future.

We need to get these written down in case of our early passing and we don't get the chance to spend or donate the money before or during our retirement years. How would you go about identifying these organizations in a way that doesn't involve Google searches just until the end of time?

I guess I'm just looking for an effective way of going about this since there are so many options. And the pressure at the moment is that you need to state in your new trust documents, you need to state specific organizations, is that right? Correct. That page is currently blank.

We created this trust about a year ago and we've had many discussions. It just kind of feels like we're stalled out at the moment and just need to see a fresh way of how to name these particular organizations, yes. Do you have any personal experience with volunteering for an organization, your mother working for an organization, etc.?

Is there just an organization that you've been around? Yes, we're both on the board of directors for a small non-profit based in Minnesota that is involved in high school education. So we do have experience with operating non-profits, how they operate, actually operating them, finding effective ways of spending money on tight budgets, etc.

How would you feel if you just simply chose the organization that you currently are involved in, just to fill it in for now, recognizing that you have time to come back in the future? Would that solve your problem? That is at the top of our list. I think the budget of that organization is probably smaller than what we'd be leaving behind.

So we're trying to find some other organizations as well. And this particular organization does have a bit of a cap in the impact that we can make in terms of quantity of students. We've reached that. So I think that anything over and above, there wouldn't be as good of a use of the funds.

You are hitting on a subject, a question that is one of my most pressing interests and passions. I am pretty obsessed at the moment with this exact question that you're talking about. How do we identify effective ways of causing change in the world so that we can support them?

This is an enormous passion of mine, and it's something that I desire very strongly in the coming months and years to try to figure out. About all I know right now is I'm pretty dissatisfied with virtually all of the advice that I hear anybody giving, and I'm dissatisfied with the advice that I myself can give.

I don't know the answers to it. So let me just tell you a few of the models to talk about. So a good starting point, there are a number of publications that rate charities. Charity Navigator I think is probably the most prominent one. So I would begin there. Charity Navigator is an organization that is focused on identifying the basic functioning of various not-for-profit organizations and identifying their metrics, what's their income, what's the compensation of their employees, their boards, et cetera, what percentage of their efforts go to project work versus administration, et cetera.

And I have no reason to think that they do a bad job or are in any way untrustworthy. And so I would encourage you to start there. And I would basically say to you, just pick a couple of topics or interests that are from an organization like Charity Navigator for now just to fill it in, because that's where you start.

Now, my questions are bigger because I question a lot of the basic fundamental assumptions that people have. And I'll give one example that is like the Pilata example. I forget the guy's first name, but years ago when I was doing my – I have a designation called a Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy, C-A-P designation.

And it was a series of classes and courses that I went through. It was one of my more interesting ones that I did because we did it – I was a financial advisor and we had basically a cohort of like 20 people. And there were about three or four of us from financial services.

There were about three or four lawyers in the cohort. There were about three or four executive directors of not-for-profit organizations. There were – I forget the other things, but basically this interesting cohort of interdisciplinary people and we all did the classes together. And we read an essay by a guy named Pilata, I think Dan Pilata or something like that.

And it was quite controversial at the time. This is more than a decade ago, but – or not – yeah, more than a decade ago. It was very popular because Pilata was making the case that one of the worst metrics to look at is the metric that most people start with, which is what percentage of an organization's budget goes to organization overhead versus actual impact.

And Pilata's argument was that while people say, "Oh, a well-run charity is one that has a very thin overhead and puts most of its money into project work, et cetera," that that's nonsense. That the best run – a well-run charity is one that makes the biggest impact on the desired focus, on the desired area, rather than overhead.

What's better? To have an organization, for example, that has a 10% overhead budget and contributes 90% to the project but has a total budget of say $100 million so that $90 million is going to the project work or an organization that has a 30% overhead but 70% goes to project work but has a budget amount of say $1 billion.

Well, obviously, $700 million is a much bigger impact than say $90 million to the actual cause. And so if you had to increase the overhead of the organization from 10% to 30% but at the end of the day, you could increase the impact from $90 million to $700 million, then wouldn't that be a much better move?

And the point has stuck with me since then. Now it's been debated. There were a lot of people that disagreed with that. But this is an example that has always stood by me because prior to coming into that essay, I would have firmly sided on that, "Well, the mark of a good organization is one that spends the least amount on overhead and the mark of a bad organization is one that has a high overhead ratio where a lot of people working for it are making too much money," things like that.

I now don't believe that. So we want to look for impact. The problem is how do you judge impact if you're not intimately familiar with the industry? And I don't think you can be intimately familiar by perusing any marketing brochures or even charity navigator to – how can you get that level of familiarity?

You have to go to something where you actually know, something that you're actually going to be involved in. So on the whole, the long-term answer that I would love to give to you is to say you and your wife choose an issue or a couple of issues that are really important to you and then dedicate a significant portion of your time and your resources towards investigating those particular issues.

And so you say, "We really want to make a change in education." I think you mentioned the organization you're involved with is involved in education. Okay. Well, what's the change? You want to really be as knowledgeable in that space as possible. And in the process of becoming knowledgeable about that space, then you'll be aware of the organizations that need your help, the organizations that are doing things, and you'll be aware of the impact of those organizations.

And those things are all impossible to find from a public perspective, but they're pretty easy to find when you start building relationships and contacts in that industry. I find this in any new industry is that from the outsider's perspective, all I have is marketing literature. But once I start meeting some people and the microphones are off and the cameras are off and they'll just quietly say, "Well, this company over here, they don't do anything and these guys are the scammers." And I can't say that publicly, but these guys are the scammers and these guys are the good guys.

And the same thing I think is happening in charitable organizations. And then the other comment I would make is you need to question the entire premise of is a not-for-profit organization actually the way that you're going to accomplish your goals. That's something that I think is too often accepted as a given.

It's too often accepted as a given that a not-for-profit is a superior option, but is not something that should be accepted. And so you may want to, in the fullness of time, as you get closer to the actual disbursements, you may want to regularly revisit this. And sometimes you may want to put individuals on there, you may want to put companies that are even for-profit companies, and then include also not-for-profits in it.

So short answer, charity navigator, longer answer, choose one area of interest or two areas of interest and make that the research project that you and your wife are involved in. And if you have one area of interest and you go to four or five galas for the organization or some fundraisers, donate a small amount of money, get on the mailing lists, get involved, etc.

Then over the next three, five, ten years, as you pay attention, you'll get a much better sense of who's actually doing well, who's making an impact in the fields that you care about. Wonderful. Thank you. My pleasure. We move on to Sheldahl in Minnesota. Welcome, Sheldahl. Hi, Joshua. Say, I want to get your thoughts on a framework on valuing a business, attempting to help a couple of brothers.

They own a bar in a small town in middle America. They inherited it from their parents and so everything's free of any debt. It includes the land, building, and the business. The older brother spends five to ten hours a week doing some bookkeeping, inventory, that kind of stuff, and he takes a small salary for that.

Other than that, they're basically receiving, since they own the land and the building, they're basically renting those facilities to the business and paying themselves rent checks. So that, along with distributions, they're getting about $80,000 a year in profit or cash flow from the business. Basically one wants to buy the other out and have his son kind of run the business.

The younger brother's not necessarily ready to sell, but feeling like just to keep things cordial in the family or whatever, they're considering it. The hard part is, since the younger brother doesn't necessarily want to sell, he likes getting his $40,000 a year in income, the two of them still have to come to a price for the business to buy the other person out.

So I'm wondering what you have for kind of setting up a framework, what you think we should be looking at, what kind of questions we should ask as we work through this. Are you in the middle, kind of representing both of them or do you have one party on your … You're representing just one party in this negotiation?

I'm basically friends with both, so I'm just trying to help bring conversation among them and try to keep things friendly as we talk through it. We've talked about bringing in their accountant that's worked with them for a number of years with the business to kind of go through some annual reports and put together some histories and stuff like that.

I'm not legally representing either of them at this point. Okay. Well, I think there are at least three different valuations that could be applied to just about any business, and I think probably more, but let's start with three. The first valuation is the easiest. It's going to be some form of industry standard.

Every different industry is going to have some kind of generally accepted industry standard. There's somebody who is a broker of bars in your region that you can reach out to and contact, and that would be the first person I would look for, is find a business broker, find a business website, find a broker who has worked with these kinds of businesses, and then just get some insight, what do these things sell for, and figure out how it's calculated, what the pre-multiple numbers are, what the multiple is, et cetera.

Work through that list, and you'll get some sense of the industry valuation. The problem is that that's not really the most impactful thing. The second form of valuation is, well, what would I need to do to replace this? If I'm a part-time owner of a business like this, and I'm making $40,000 a year with a very modest amount of work, maybe even no work, or just a few hours here and there to make sure things are being run honestly, that's a pretty significant thing to replace.

$40,000 of income is quite a lot. Let's use the 4% rule as an example. If I needed to replace that $40,000 a year with mutual funds, and I'm using the 4% rule of drawing money on mutual funds, I need about a million dollars in mutual funds. That's a lot.

I would be pretty surprised if a brother was ready to, if one is ready to offer the other a million dollars on this kind of business. And yet, if this guy wants to replace this $40,000 that he's getting, he kind of needs a million dollars. You see the logic?

Yeah. Yep, that's what I kind of think about the different options or different ways of looking at it. Like, okay, there's challenges. Right. And so he's got a pretty good deal. Now we could argue left, right, and center that, well, obviously you're a lot safer with a million dollars in mutual funds than you are with one little bar in the middle of nowhere.

But at the end of the day, I'm not thinking about that. I'm thinking about the fact that, hey, I've done this business for a while. People's drinking habits are unlikely to change very frequently, especially in the Midwest. There's not going to be a big change. We own everything outright.

There's not really any risk. I got $40,000. How am I going to replace that? And so you can do this valuation with real estate. He may go out and say, well, if I'm going to take the money that he's going to pay me, then how many houses do I need to buy to replace my $40,000 a year free and clear?

And that's going to be the most compelling valuation. Because the same question, let's say that a guy calls me and says, should I sell this investment and buy a different one? Well, the answer is, what are you going to replace it with? And virtually all of the things that he could replace it with to get $40,000 of income, all the things that he could replace it with are probably going to be on the level of, again, that million dollars.

So that's the second level of valuation. And then the problem is then you have a third level of valuation, which is, what is it going to take for me to feel secure? Or what is it going to take for me to be confident that this was the right move?

So in this discussion with two owners, and one owner wants to pass it along to the son and kind of get them involved, then if I'm the guy who's being asked to sell, I'm going to be thinking about, what are the growth prospects here? What if we can grow this thing and now my share can turn not from $40,000 but into $75,000?

How do I get better than that? And so there's the walkaway number, and the walkaway number is usually the highest. And so I think I've ordered these numbers and what I think would usually be the three numbers. Number one is going to be – and we can argue about the order a little bit, but usually the industry average is going to be the lowest.

Then the how do I replace this is going to be significantly higher. And then in many cases, the walkaway number of here's what it takes for me to walk away happily today is going to be the real number that we're going to get to, but that's often going to be the highest because it's not tied to any specific outcome.

It's just a number that feels good. Okay, that's definitely enough money. You can be ridiculous about it. If somebody walked in here and offered us $5 million for this bar, we'd sell today, obviously. Well, no one's going to do that. So we're coming down from it, but what that actual walkaway number is, is going to vary.

So the pathway that I would see that might result in some kind of successful negotiation is going to be less about the valuation of the business and more about the settling of the life path. Why would somebody want to sell in the first place? For example, I might be getting older.

I might not want to come in to do the work, etc. All right, well, you want to sell. What do you need from it? Well, I need income. And so maybe we can have a higher buyout number, but we can deliver it in the form of income payments that are going to come in for 15 years or 10 years because that's a way of satisfying both of those things, that I'm getting a higher number, but the number instead of being paid out up front is being paid out of the profits of the business.

I don't know what all the other alternatives are because I don't know their situation, but I would try that track to understand why they would want to sell. And the person who wants to buy out his brother, he's going to need to build a case that would cause the seller to want to sell.

And that's going to involve the number. It's going to have to be high enough to make it better. And it's also going to probably need to involve some alternative pathway because most people are not investors, especially most business owners. And so they've got comfort and experience with the bar.

You can't just build that same confidence in with, "Hey, here's a mutual fund or here's a piece of real estate. It's a different market." So, I don't know that I'm giving you any insight, but there is no one number. There are at least those three numbers. Okay. That at least gives us a starting point.

Any successful negotiation is going to have to be win-win. And so the person who wants to convince his brother to sell has to sit down and say, "What does my brother want? What does he actually want?" And in order for the brother to sell without causing harm to the family relationships, the brother has to be persuaded without coercion that selling is better than keeping and that he's better off selling than keeping.

And that often requires some creativity. So I would ask myself if I had a son and I'm trying to convince my brother to sell me half of a business, then I might do something like say, "Let's set the baseline of what our business has been and maybe we sell over a period of time as my son is able to increase the profits of the business." And if he can increase profits by 50%, then not only will we make some money because we brought him in, but now here's a vesting schedule and we're going to sell out 5% of the business to him per year as he's able to increase the profits.

I don't know. Some kind of creative solution. But you've got to begin with what's going to cause the selling brother to be happier after having sold than he was when he had it. And that's the only way of navigating this without bringing harm to the family relationships. It has to be a genuine deal where both people are better off.

Okay. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Hard question. I don't know if there's a solution, but that's where I would begin to work on one. Joe Sellius in North Carolina. Welcome to the show. How are you today? Hi. This is Jose Luis. Jose Luis. There we go. I don't know why.

I looked at your name and it said Joe Sellius, and I should have seen Jose Luis. Sorry about that. That's funny. That's very common, actually. Now you know your fake name to use whenever you want to convince people of it. Joe Sellius. Yes. Oh, I've heard that before many times.

Go ahead, sir. So this question is about homeschooling and behavior. Most of the time our homeschooling goes smoothly. Sometimes our son, who is almost eight and a half, he delays and complains, and that ruins the mood and ruins pretty much the day. I remember that in a past episode, you mentioned that I think it was your oldest son that maybe initially had some behavior issues related to homeschooling, and you had to step in.

I would like to know if you have some strategies that you can share that work, that maybe you still use. Specifically, I would like to know if you actually use deadlines, like do you have to do this math by certain time before you move on, and if you don't do this, what happens?

Sure. Anyway. It's about behavior and compliance. Yeah. So let's begin with acknowledging a couple of the facts that you just shared. You have an eight-year-old and you have a boy. So one of the reasons that I myself homeschool, and I especially would want to homeschool an eight-year-old boy, is quite simply that school, generally speaking, is a toxic environment for boys.

It's a toxic environment because all of the things that make a school run smoothly are unnatural for boys. Sitting still in a chair to focus on a piece of paper and keep your pencil moving for long periods of time, to show deference and respect to the teacher standing in front of the class, to do that for hours and hours every day, frequently with quite boring subject matter that kills the mind, this is not something that boys generally do well in.

And I think this is one of many reasons why boys are consistently falling behind. Girls thrive in that environment, and what has happened in the school system is that the entire structure of the industrial school system has been reoriented for the success of girls and for the failure of boys.

You have primarily female teachers who create a very feminine environment, and it's an environment that works beautifully for the strengths of girls, and it's an environment that works almost exactly the opposite of the strengths for boys. And so one of the reasons I homeschool is I don't want my young boys to be in that toxic environment where they're going to wind up facing nonstop disciplinary actions.

They're going to wind up facing nonstop feeling like they're always the problem just because they want to move while they read, and they want to bounce up and down and yell, etc. And worse, they might wind up drugged and diagnosed with some wacky condition and drugged. It's entirely toxic for boys.

And I would encourage you to think seriously about it, because what you don't want to do in a homeschool environment is take the toxicity of the industrial school system and then insert that into your home environment. And that's what I think many people do. And so I'm trying to be picturesque to point out the problem.

This is one of the reasons that's very important to me as to why I want to homeschool, especially in the younger years. Now, all these things can be worked out, but it's astonishing to me how beautifully well my eight-year-old daughter adapts herself to long school days as compared to her ten and her six-year-old brothers, who are completely different.

And we need to be aware of that, because in homeschooling environment, we do not need to try to force an industrial system onto a child before the child is ready. And at eight, a child is probably just barely ready. Now, I'm not saying – I myself, I'm not an unschooling advocate, nor am I a wild and free advocate.

I think that there's a balance. But we should begin with the fact that we're looking to help and set our students up for success, not for failure. So my goal is not to create an environment that's going to lead to failure, but rather create an environment that's going to lead to success and is going to lead to increasing levels of skill over time.

And I really want to protect the ego of a young child, and I want him to feel like he can win. I want him to feel like he can succeed, especially in the early years, because psychologically, if he views himself as defective or inferior in some way, that has very damaging long-term results.

So with an eight-year-old, I think you should begin at the level of your curriculum. Is your curriculum something that is going – that works well not only for boys in general and eight-year-old boys in particular, but is it something that's going to work well for your particular eight-year-old boy?

And I'm going to – I'm speaking broadly. You have to figure out how to apply this stuff, but this is a very big deal to me. One of the complaints – be careful, because I'm not complaining, but I'm not attracted, for example, to most worksheet-based curricula. I don't think that they're useful.

I don't think they're helpful. They don't inspire the mind. They don't engage with the mind. And so look at your curricula and ask yourself, if I'm an eight-year-old boy, is this curriculum that we're going through, is this something that's going to engage with me? Is this something that's going to inspire me to want to learn?

Because we don't want learning to taste like eating sawdust. We want learning to be as appetizing as possible, especially in the early years, because our most important goal in the young years of education should not be to try to maintain – to try to stick to some external schedule.

There is no schedule anywhere in the United States of what any particular child is always capable of doing. Different people have different ideas on curriculum and etc., but it's all made up. There's no national standard. There's generally no state-level standard. In the younger years, you have complete and total freedom to do anything that you want.

And all you're basically trying to do is give basic skills and inspire a love of learning. Those are the goals. And I want to do both of them. And if I have to err, I want to err on the side of inspiring the mind and inspiring a love of learning rather than even the basic skills.

Because the basic skills can come very easily when the student is ready for it, but if we destroy the love of learning with an oppressive environment, then that's not so great. So look at the curriculum and then look at what the child is attracted to and say, "Can I emphasize these things?

And do I have to do these other things?" So I'll give a few examples from my own experience. Number one, ask yourself, "Is this thing that we're going to do even necessary?" So things like spelling, you know, spelling worksheets. These are a common component of elementary school curricula. I don't know if they're necessary or not, but so far right now as one homeschooling dad, I've just tossed them out.

I don't see any point. My answer is, my guess is that let's just put in a few more thousands of pages of reading and probably the spelling will mostly fix itself and it really doesn't matter right now. So let's just set that aside because here's this thing that's dreadfully dull, dreadfully like uninteresting.

Let's just toss spelling aside and let's just focus on more reading. And then, now is that true or not? I don't know. But if I have a child who's fighting a spelling worksheet, maybe it doesn't need to be done right now. So here's another example. Is there a way that we can keep making progress, but progress on a level that's appropriate?

So my eldest child, now 10, he was horrific at writing. Writing, which is considered to be kind of a standard thing that elementary school students are supposed to be, he had an enormous pencil allergy. And I think that most young boys have an enormous pencil allergy. And he would go through worksheets and workbooks of let's practice letter formation and whatnot and none of it worked.

It was like pulling teeth. And so, we have to impose discipline, we have to say you have to finish this, you have to write it. And a boy will find every excuse to sit and dawdle for hours over this thing that he doesn't like to do. And so I tried to understand what is actually happening, what's going on here.

So first of all, when you're dealing with very young children, just toss the whole thing out for three months. And if you're struggling with something, whatever it is, just come back in three months, try it again. If it doesn't work in three months, we'll try it in another three months.

Again, you're under no external obligations to be on any particular schedule. And so I tossed the writing curriculum, I said, we're not doing that. And so a year ago, I had a nine-year-old child who is reading at a college level and can't write at a first grade level. But to me, that's not a problem because one of the reasons I homeschool is so that we don't have to fit a standardized median approach, but rather so we can help each student to advance right at the frontier of learning in an appropriate way.

So what I mean is that only in an industrial school system do you need to be writing on a fifth grade level and reading on a fifth grade level and doing math on a fifth grade level and whatever the other skills are. In homeschooling, you don't need to do that.

You can be reading on a college level and writing at a first grade level. And as long as you are aware of the deficiencies and aware of what you're working towards, then no problem. We'll work towards it. And over the coming months, we'll make progress. The goal is not to stay behind forever, but we want to be careful and not try to feel like we're on someone else's imposed schedule.

So with the writing, what I did, how I dealt with that was, number one, as I tried to see, is there any evidence that my child has a learning disability? Some expression of dysgraphia or etc. I couldn't detect any evidence of anything fundamentally wrong. I just figured I've got a boy here who doesn't like to write.

No problem. I can deal with that. I scrapped writing and I brought in art because one of the reasons that young children don't like to write is because it literally hurts. Their hands hurt from holding pencils and things. So I brought in art and I said, let's just do lots of art.

What are we doing with art? Well, it's fun. The children enjoy drawing, but we're building up those pencil skills. It's the same basic function of motor control and building up the strength in the hands as is writing words, but we're just approaching it in a different way. So we did that and we did that for several months.

And then I figured out that in order to write effectively, what we want to do is we want to pull apart the act of writing from the act of composing. So being a skilled writer is two basic skills. It involves the skill of taking abstract thoughts and turning them into words.

And secondly, it involves the skill of putting words down on paper in the artificial manner that is writing, which is not like the way that we speak and doing proper punctuation, spacing, et cetera. And I mean, if we went back a year and a half, year and a year ago, and I showed you my son's writing papers, it was terrible.

He could form the letters, but no spacing, no sense of spacing, no sense of scale, et cetera. None of that worked. So I pulled those apart. And so I said, "We're going to begin by focusing a lot on narration." And the narration that we were doing in our family was quite weak, and I was trying to figure out what to do about it.

And so I just really started focusing on narration. And so I'm practicing hand strength with drawing, with art, and I'm practicing formulating ideas with narration. Narration just means, "Hey, tell me about the chapter of the book that you just read," or "Tell me about the page," or whatever it happens to be.

That's narration. And the child is practicing taking abstract thoughts and turning them into words. That's what narration does. Then I came back to it, I can't remember, four or five months later, and then I introduced copy work, a new book, a new copy work. And what I found was that there was an enormous difference between the four months prior and now.

And so now we went in one year from being way behind "grade level" to now being substantially ahead of "grade level," as best I can tell, by just giving some time and working on those basic skills. And I did it without needing to resort to a whole lot of problems and challenges, etc.

So if you're getting feedback, pushback, a lot of negative energy, I think we should first take responsibility for that and say, "Before I try to impose discipline or force a student to do something, can I change something about the task or the environment that would help him to succeed?" A couple more examples from just practical stuff.

Math, right? Math is often a challenge. So once again, what is the challenge with math? Well, math doesn't need to be done formally at a young age. It's something that can be deferred with no problem. You don't really need to do any formal workbook math until fifth grade, and you can make up whatever you're behind in a few months in fifth grade.

So let's give ourselves a break. But let's look for, let's try a curriculum that appeals to us. Let's break it apart. So what I do whenever there's a problem is I try to say, "How can we dial back the ease just a little bit?" So I view resistance, if I get resistance as either complaining or dawdling or resistance of any form, I just say, "Let's go back a level and make it a level easier." So with reading, if there's something that I've assigned to be read, read with the eyes, and there's resistance, then the first thing I do is say, "Let me make the reading shorter." Instead of it being a 30-minute reading, let's make it a 10-minute reading.

Or before that, I'll do, "Let's keep it a 30-minute reading, but let's add an audiobook." If that didn't work and there's still resistance, then let's pull it back from a 30-minute reading to a 15-minute reading with an audiobook. If that doesn't work, let's pull it back to a 15-minute reading with dad doing the reading, because now we have a relational dynamic and it's not impersonal with an audiobook narration.

If that doesn't work, let's just toss the book aside, let's come back to it in three months and let's try it in three months. And every time I do that, I find that three months is kind of magical, six months is magical and everything gets a little bit better.

So I don't think that we should focus first and foremost on discipline, et cetera, especially at the younger age. Now, flipping, the ability to concentrate is a superpower that we want to develop in a student. So let's focus on approaching it as a skill to be developed rather than as something that has to be overcome with discipline.

So with my, this has been with both of my older children, math is what I have chosen to use as the application of that, because math is hard. And I teach my children, why do we do math? We do math because math is hard and math makes us smart.

We don't do it because it's useful. We don't do it because you need it. We do it because it's hard. It's a workout. It's making our brain smart. And so let's start and let's figure out what is the amount of focused math that we can do that doesn't result in loss of focus and loss of concentration.

So I had some significant challenges with my daughter, my eight-year-old daughter, and I spent some time and I pulled it back to exactly this. Let's focus on math for 15 minutes and I'm going to make it as easy as possible. I'm going to sit next to you. I'm going to sit next to you while you do math and let's remove all the distractions and let's see how many minutes of focused activity we can do.

And then as soon as we lose focus, let's stop and let's see if we can do more tomorrow. So if we did eight minutes of focused work today, great, wonderful. Let's see if we can get to nine minutes and nine minutes and stop and 10 minutes and stop, etc.

And I found that to work really effectively is let's pull back the scale of it and let's focus on doing what we can do and then when we reach the limit, let's stop there. And I think that that's also a better model. Once we've – and think of it like weightlifting.

You don't take your eight-year-old into a gym and put a 200-pound barbell on his back and say squat. You say let's start with how many squats can you do right with body weight. Then what can we – how much squat can you do with a bar with good form?

And you want to keep adding the weight steadily but you want to be doing it with good form. And I think the same basic principle applies to homeschooling. So before we get to anything of rewards or punishments or if you're not done in this time, let's do all of that stuff first and then let's bring in any additional systems that we need.

But in general, I think that – I'm trying to think for a moment. I am not currently using any form of rewards or penalties or any of those things because I don't see that that's helpful. I think that it's better to focus on the core of what we're doing and then go from there.

So right now, your school day should be probably two hours, maybe three hours maximum. It should be broken up into 10 to 15-minute lessons. No lesson should be longer than about 15 minutes and there should be a big fat break. Before school, there should be a whole big play outside session with lots of energy and lots of movement.

There should be a big fat play outside session right in the middle and then you should be done and go from there. And if you look at it and say, where are we going over time, then – and let me give one more example, practical example because I can actually speak practically on this.

I have a six-year-old boy who is doing school. The problem is that he doesn't seem to have much interest in academic stuff. So we keep bringing in a little measure and so we had an exciting start to first grade. Okay, let's go through and let's do some workbooks and things like that.

Well, this boy is not interested in reading. He's just not interested, doesn't want to learn to read. You go through the same thing, just not grasping it. So my wife scrapped the entire curriculum and she inserted night training. And so quite literally, she built – I forget what she calls it but those things that you take a lance and you joust with and put the younger boys on their bicycle and they go out and they do night training every day and we have swords, we do sword fighting and we do night training, et cetera.

All those things, they're all physical. He's a super physical child. But I'm not going to give up on the skill, I'm just going to focus on what we can do. And so we use one – a couple of – I found a video-based learn to read program that we do for 10 minutes every day.

I don't require performance on it, I just require 10 minutes of input. And then I'm focusing on concentration with audiobook listening. And so I require a certain amount of audiobook listening. He doesn't have to read with his ears – sorry, with his eyes but he does have to read with his ears.

And we do a lot of reading aloud too. My wife does a lot of reading aloud. We do art, we do picture study, we do all the other stuff. And so I'm seeing this work with this child who is very resistant to learning to read and I would expect that – I don't know if it will happen six months from now, a year from now.

I would expect that the learning to read thing will just naturally solve itself. It seems to resolve – most of these problems seem to resolve themselves with either a few more trips of the moon around the earth or in some cases, a couple more trips, revolutions of the earth about the sun.

So these approaches I think should be our primary thing, especially at a young age and don't resort to discipline or punishments or etc. unless you've gone through a long list of these approaches – making the curriculum more attractive, bringing it down to its level, shortening the lessons up, requiring total concentration for five minutes and then being done.

Do all of that stuff before you get to punishments, rewards, things like that. Excellent. This is very helpful. It has opened the doors to a new approach to our problem that we haven't considered. Good. I'm glad. Thank you, Joshua. Yeah, I tried to give you as many practical examples as I could from this perspective and even if we were dealing with a teenager, I think the same basic psychology applies is let's celebrate what we can do and let's focus on what we can do and let's be super focused on building these things as muscles, as skills.

I do talk to my children about this. I don't allow things like toys at the desk and my comment to them is that I teach them your basic superpower in the fullness of time as an adult is going to be your ability to do deep work, your ability to focus on hard tasks for extended periods of time.

That's what we're developing but we're not going to get there in a month or even a year. It's going to be multiple years but we're not going to sabotage ourselves. So we don't have to do an hour of deep work at this stage. What we do need to do though is keep the toys off the desk and then celebrate what we can do.

So don't take the structure – recognize that schooling in a school system and homeschooling or home education, better said, are very different things. The reason schools need schoolteachers is that teaching a classroom of 30 young people is a very specialized skill set where you need specialized training in classroom management and psychological control and you have to build all these systems to keep a classroom of 30 students on task.

But in your home, you don't need any of those things. You need an engaged adult who is able to look where the child is and bring the child to appropriate educational resources and provide some structure to it and you can make enormous advances in that context and it doesn't need to be painful.

So anytime you get up against that level of pain, drop back a little bit, reassess and then come back and three months now, six months from now, you'll find that probably the pain is gone. Lucas in New Jersey, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today? Hey Joshua, I had a question for you, a fairly simple one.

How would you think about what services to outsource for someone who struggles to ask for help in general but also I'm a new business owner, I have a W2 job and that's all part of the plan but time is getting really short. So any tips on what to outsource, things like house cleaning, accounting, lawn care, is there a philosophy here that you maintain?

Have you done a personalized time study, a time diary, a time journal for yourself? No, I haven't. So I think before you ask that bigger question, you need to collect some data for yourself and so I would commend to you a personalized time diary where you actually just track everything that you do, ideally for a week and get a sense of what you're doing.

There are a variety of apps for it, the one I use is called Timelines for iOS, I really like it, it's the best, I've tried half a dozen of them but the one called Timelines for iOS is really good and I'm looking at my tracking right now that says recording podcast and so I can go back and look at my week's data, I can go back and look at exactly how many minutes I have saved and that is a really helpful idea to get a sense of where your time is currently going because before you decide what tasks to outsource, you want to begin with where is the time actually going.

Then I think there is a really phenomenal, let me just refer you to this resource, there is a fabulous new YouTube channel by this guy, forget his name but the YouTube channel is called Spoon Fed Study, Spoon Fed Study. The dude's really, really sharp and he's a doctor, went to Harvard, then did his residency at Yale and went back to Harvard, I don't know, Ivy League guy, super smart and he just released a study or a video that inspired me this week where he gave his formula for increasing, I can't remember what he titled his video but if you look up Spoon Fed Study, you'll see it as the most recent one.

But the basic formula that he described is start with a time journal, number one is a time journal, number two is assign a dollar value to all of the activities that are in your time diary. Some activities are fairly easily calculated. Your job, your W2 job is probably the easiest one.

You might say I have 40 hours and you know based upon your annual income and maybe you put in your commuting time, etc., my hourly rate is $50, okay, great, now you know that. Your side hustle, your business, you might look at that and say my hourly rate here is $80.

But you would also want to include into your hourly rate, the other things that he recommends and this was the novel twist that I really appreciated, is you want to assign positive dollar values and negative dollar values to other things that you do. So you might include exercise, you would say well my exercise time is $250 an hour because after all if I can stay healthy, this is going to be of an enormous payoff for me.

However my drinking beer time is minus $300 or my TikTok time is minus $300, this is a negative activity. And then what he focused on is then you create a daily score and the way that you score yourself is you try to get your daily money score up to the highest level and there are three levels to that.

Number one, you eliminate. Number two, you add in. But then number three, you compound so you outsource and you go through and you start thinking what could I outsource and if you find, but you need that data to do that. Now I confess I'm not great at this, I'm a pretty bad outsourcer, I'm a pretty bad manager, I don't enjoy that process, I never have.

I'm building the skills and I want to be better at it because it's an enormous limiting factor in my life so I'm speaking honestly that I'd like to get better at it but I can't tell you how to do it well, I only know that you need the data and then figure out what would make sense to you.

And in general, don't be scared of outsourcing household stuff if it's straightforward. You might find that in your area you can just order in meals and you can have a private chef that brings you every three days your meals for the next three days and that might be an amazing use of money for you.

I recently had interaction or some time back I had interaction with an entrepreneur on Twitter and he had a laundry service and he had calculated the value of the laundry service where every few days or every week somebody would come to his home, pick up his laundry, they would take it all, they would wash it, they would fold it, they would bring everything back and he had all the numbers calculated and it was an amazing value for his life.

I think you're going to have to try different things and see what works. There's some outsourcing that can work really well with big compound effect in a business. If you can find the right partner, the right vendor who can really increase your leverage in a business then that can work really well.

Sometimes though it's harder to do those big wins and it might be easier to just outsource the simple tasks. But I can't provide any better guidance than I just refer you to Spoonfed Study, great channel, very smart guy and I really enjoy his approach to things. Yeah, I'll definitely take a look.

Thank you for the recommendation. My pleasure. And then hopefully over the next year because I am committed, I have to grow substantially beyond my own personal capacity. Hopefully I can share better in a future time from actual experience of things that have worked. A lot of the stuff that I've outsourced hasn't worked and it hasn't worked great for a significant period of time and I'm probably the problem in a lot of that.

So I'm working on it as well. Thomas in California, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Joshua, thanks for taking the call. I just had a question. I think maybe a month ago or so you mentioned something about reading a book on the Rothschilds and you said a couple other biographies that you might have been digging into surrounding kind of like family culture and family dynasty.

I was just wondering what book were you reading and if you had other recommendations on that? Sure. The one that I'm still reading it because I read many of the time. Right now I'm reading a book by Ben Hubbard called MBS about the ruler of Saudi Arabia and it is super interesting.

Saudi Arabia is changing massively right now and if we compare Saudi Arabia of today to Saudi Arabia of five years ago, it's just night and day different. We've heard some of this stuff publicly but we know about the killing of the journalist – I can't know the name, Jirogi, I'm sorry, I can't summon his name.

And then also when all the Saudi princes were locked up in the Hilton for a long period of time. So I'm super interested in that and I'm really enjoying this biography by Ben Hubbard of MBS. The book that I'm still reading on Rothschilds is called The House of Rothschild by Neil Ferguson and it's a big, I mean it's a 25-hour biography, I'm listening to it and it's enormous, it's a very, very thick book.

But it's an in-depth look at the Rothschild family and so it's called The House of Rothschild by Neil Ferguson. I find it, I'm also finding it very interesting and working my way through that. Other biographies that I'm reading right now, those are the two biographies that I have going right now.

I have about six or seven other books going as well, but those are the two biographies. And then on that note, have you ever considered or donated reading into like a family constitution and any thoughts on that? Sort of, I haven't been able to take it much beyond that.

So these are, earlier in the show, I think before you jumped on the line, I was talking about my interest in charity and this is the other, you're bringing up the other subject. So this is episode 999 of Radical Personal Finance and when I started the show, I committed to a thousand episodes and I thought that those thousand episodes were going to be really focused on, you know, just, I don't know what I thought.

But anyway, I'm getting into a thousand episodes and so I've reassessed and really thought like what are my interests? What do I really want to keep on talking about? And one of the, so I have a few, but two of them have come up in today's podcast. Number one is the charity stuff.

Number two is this question of family dynamics and family fortunes and family wealth. Forgive me, that's my phone, what a rookie mistake. You'd think that with 999 episodes of the podcast I would have my phone on, do not disturb. Forgive me. One of them, one of the things that I'm super interested in is this concept of family wealth and I realized that it's an enormous hole in modern American financial planning because modern American financial planning assumes individuality as its core principle.

Americans are very likely to say things like, "Oh, my son's got to make it on his own. 18 years old, you know, boot him out the door." Americans are very likely to say, "Well, you've got to do it on your own. You know, you don't need, no concept of family wealth, no concept of family inheritance." I used to think that was the right pathway because that was the culture I was raised in and the values that were instilled in me.

Then over time, I really started to question that and it started when I considered the biblical accounts of inheritances and the concept of wealth being passed down within, you know, the patriarchal families in the Bible and things like that. I started to question a lot of my assumptions and then I looked around the world and I still see this.

So, I'm fascinated by this question because basically every culture has some version of, in English we say, "shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations" and it seems like every culture has some variation of this, but I don't think it has to be that way. And so, I'm trying to figure out what are those things that are core and really make the difference.

I'm pretty obsessed with this question as well. So, the concept of a family constitution is something that I can get behind, but I don't know how to do it or to implement it or to make it practical and I don't know what it means, but I'm immediately positive in my feelings towards it, but I have no idea what to do with it.

So, if you can teach me what you've been learning about, I would be very grateful. It's something that I'm still studying as well and I'm going to do a lot of reading into it. So, I'm just trying to obtain more sources before I leave. Is there anything that you've found really helpful so far, any book or essay or anything like that?

Yeah, there's a couple. So, one book that I thought was particularly good called Stewardship in Your Family Enterprise by Dennis T. Jaffe, A-F-F-E, the Ph.D. in the subject, I've been meaning to read some of the other works. There was another one I read recently, it was called, I believe it was The Myth of the Silver Spoon.

Okay. Myth of the Silver Spoon? It kind of addresses the whole shirts, sleeves, just shirts, sleeves and myth of the silver spoon. Yeah. Those are, I think, the main two that addresses that I've read recently. I'm fascinated by the subject as well. I'm grateful for the recommendations. I will get those and read those because I have not read either of those yet.

I have a list. I don't remember if they're on them, if either of those is on it, but I have a list of this that I'm going to start digging more into. Especially as my children start to grow out of just baby years – I mean, we've been under the tidal wave of baby stuff for a decade – but especially as we get to the fun years of integration of a lot of these things, I want to see – not only do I want to be able to do it myself – I want to build an effective, useful, influential family dynasty, but I also want to equip others to do it.

I think that the American model that we've naturally imbibed from our culture is wrong. It's not that it's all wrong or all useless, but it's broadly wrong. I'm not sure if it's intentionally wrong, meaning there's a vast conspiracy by the wealthy to not talk about how they manage their family fortunes.

I don't think there is, but who knows? Maybe there is. I think it's just that we've taken our individualism and our individualistic culture to an enormous extreme, and we've made unwarranted jumps in that process. Then in some cases, we've had forebears who were men of vision, but in many cases, because of the egalitarian nature of our society, it seems that a lot of people who get rich get accidentally rich, and they don't wind up knowing what to do with it in an effective way.

It seems like in American financial planning and the way that we think about personal finance, there are a couple of archetypes that are very common. The most common archetype in formal financial planning is that of the career man who builds up his wealth in his retirement account, and the basic idea is you work, work, work so that you can save money so that you can retire, and as soon as you have enough money to retire, you retire so you can live the good life.

That was what I spent an enormous amount of time thinking was the appropriate structure of life. Well, that's a question that's all answered in the context of financial planning, because it's just a numbers calculation. You're not trying to leave significant wealth behind to your children. It's okay with half a million for each child, fine, but it's just money, it's just cash.

Then the second archetype that often happens is that of the unexpectedly successful businessman, the guy who starts a business, grows really big, but it grows really big really fast. I guess being a product of the '90s myself where we had the tech boom, it seems like so many of the wealthy in our society were suddenly wealthy, and so this archetype often results in just people not having a vision.

Maybe there's a set of advisors who know how to advise on this effectively, but I haven't found them yet. I'm going to go look for them, but I haven't found them yet, and I don't know what they say. Now, we have dynastic families in the United States, but some of them, a lot of them are just failures.

I read a book on the Rockefellers last year, and you see how quickly their fortune was squandered. Similarly, you look at the – well, anyway, we have this entire structure of these enormous not-for-profit entities. We have a lot of the institutions that our society has built, it seems like they always abandon their founding principles, and their founders themselves would be rolling over in their graves.

When I look at this, I don't see a lot of shining light examples, but yet I think we desperately need those shining light examples. So we need to find out where are the success stories. We hear stories of some of them around the world of the 1600-year-old Japanese company, but I want to find where are the success stories, what are the principles, what are the things that could work out, because I think that we're building a generation of men, perhaps like you and I, who are looking for a vision that goes beyond just retirement and are looking for a vision that goes beyond just consumption and hedonism, et cetera, but are looking to build something.

But we don't seem to have that many fathers who can lay out how it's done and integrating moral character development, family culture development, with financial development as well. And I hope that we can make progress in the next decade on this area, because to me, this is a very inspiring vision, and I think it would be inspiring to a lot more men if we could articulate some of the principles, and it's something that we need as a society.

I wholeheartedly agree. And I think the undertone of, I guess, the American culture that you can't pass on wealth and it's going to ruin your children anyway, so don't even try, is bogus. And I really think that there is a better way to do it. And as you mentioned, passing on the moral and character values as well, having that all ingrained and entwined with the financial responsibility of stewardship, I'm hoping that the gears are turning and we're going to start to see, start to happen.

I think we are. I think the baby boomers, and I'm not imputing any specific baby boomers, but on the whole, I think you don't sound like a baby boomer to me. You sound like someone who's probably similar in my own age to some degree. I think our, if I'm right about that, our generation of men, I think we look at a lot of the baby boomers and I feel a great sense of scorn for a lot of the baby boomers because many of their lives, not all, I'm generalizing clearly, but many of their lives just seem utterly shallow and meaningless and they possess enormous wealth and enormous influence and they seem hell-bent on spending it as fast as they can and not doing anything that's going to last.

And so it seems like, on the whole, it seems like a generation that profited from one of the most incredible times in economic history, and yet what do we have to show from their culture? And it feels to a lot of men in my generation, perhaps yours as well, like we were handed a broken, failing culture with problems on every side, and the men who should have been visionaries to lay out the solutions and pave them for us didn't do that.

And so, and all they want to do is go and golf every day and drink up their money and now they're all potheads. So it's, you know, I don't know, maybe this is just the fourth turning and this is always what happens, who knows, but it really annoys me and I don't want to be much like that, like those baby boomers that I see.

I'd like to be a different old man. So we'll press on and we'll find some solutions. We'll press on. If you have more solutions or resources to share, then, you know, into hearing about them and look in the research as well. I anticipate doing that. So just know that this is one of my top few priorities in the coming years, that these are the subjects that interest me.

This is what I'm going to be digging into to try to understand and doing my best to learn. I'm still in the reporter phase. I don't have much to offer. I'm a learner and I want to learn, but I got to find the examples, find the people who have written what they've done and then learn from them and then I'll do my best to share those as we go.

Thank you for the question. And with that, we wrap up today's Q&A call. I hope I wasn't excessively negative there at the end. That's not my goal to be negative, but we do need to be honest. And again, there's always exceptions and we want to honor the exceptions. But I think we want our money to provide for ourselves, provide for those that we love, provide the luxuries, the enjoyment, the consumption, but we have been gifted a legacy by those who've come before us and we have a responsibility to enhance that legacy for those who come behind us.

And it's not enough to do it exclusively with money, but it's also not enough to do it exclusively with ideas. Money and ideas need to go together and that's what I see. Thank you for listening to today's podcast. If you'd like to be with me next week, I would urge you to go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance.

Sign up for – I thought I could do it in 100 miles an hour. Sign up to support the show at patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance and I look forward to welcoming you next week.