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, and today on the podcast, I want to give you some dining etiquette, help you save a little bit of money when you go out to eat.

But first, we begin with a story. So I get invited via my homegirl to go to this girl's dinner. I don't know her like that. I think I met her once through my homegirl a while ago, but I was like, "You know what? I'm going to go because you're inviting me." So I go, I get the girl a little gift or whatever.

When I pull up, the first thing I realize is, first of all, everybody's on time. And second of all, a lot of people showed up for this girl's birthday dinner. It was over 12 people, probably over 15. I never seen this many people at a birthday dinner at a restaurant in my life.

As the night's going, people are buying their drinks and things like that. But what I started noticing is people's orders. I'm a very observant person, so I started noticing people's orders. And people, they was ordering two and three appetizers, three and four drinks, the best, biggest T-bone steaks with the gold on it, and this, and truffle fries, and this, and this.

Everybody was doing their thing. So something, I don't know what it was, at some point of the night after people was finishing up their plates and ordering their last drinks and stuff like that, I had to go to the bathroom. But something hit me on my way to the bathroom, like, "You know, just stop and pay for your meal.

Just stop by the bar, pay for your meal, tip out, do that." That's what I did. So by the time I go to the bathroom, pay for my bill, tip out, stuff like that, the waiter is coming around to the table wanting to know how we're going to do the bill because the bill can only get split two ways.

And he made that very clear. The bill can only get split two ways. So the girl looks down at the other end of the table where we're sitting and she says, "Oh, well, two of the guests, they can put it on their card and everybody can cash at them.

And they can deal with the bill because I'm not worried about that. I'm the birthday girl." I heard it, but everybody around at the table act like they didn't. And I was completely not worried because again, my bill is paid for, tipped and everything. I'm just kind of waiting on my home girl.

So after time has gone past, nobody's putting up the card. Nobody even touched the check. So finally, a dude that was there, he opened it being funny and it was over $3,500. That's how much the bill was. It was over $3,500. When he said that, I just busted out laughing.

I don't know why I find it to be so funny. I think it's because I knew it was about to be a shit show. So the person comes back around and notice that nobody's touching the bill and it's like, "Hey, what are we doing about the bill?" So she looked down towards our end again, which I don't know why she kept looking down towards our end.

So finally, she's like, "All right, well, who's going to put down on the bill?" So I don't say nothing. My home girl, she don't say nothing. And then so finally, another girl in the group was like, "Well, my home girl, well, can we put it on your card and everybody just pay you back?" My home girl, she say, "No." Like, "No, I'm not really comfortable with that." So things are starting to get heated now.

There's a back and forth going between the restaurant, who's going to be paying, things like that. A lot of people are getting frustrated. Things are getting heated. So what do I do? I say, "I'm going to excuse myself." Because first of all, I'm not about to be sitting in a food, restaurant, public setting and embarrass myself because y'all don't have your shit together, right?

I don't do that. I don't play that. My is already taken care of. My bill is taken care of, tipped out, tipped beautifully. My bill came up to a hundred, and I'll never forget, it was $115 without tip, right? So I was like, "I'm going to excuse myself." Get up, leave, call the Uber and all.

My home girl, because this is her friend. So she's staying, trying to figure things out, stuff like that, arguing, things like that with people. I'm not doing that. So I excuse myself and I leave because y'all need to figure this out. As I'm getting up to leave, "Well, what are you doing?

How are you leaving? You need to help pay for this bill," things like that. The waiter, before I can even say that, the waiter's like, "His bill's already taken care of. He paid his bill and tipped out almost 45 minutes ago." Everybody's shocked, looking like, "I'm hitting the door by now.

I'm gone. I'm out." By the time I get home, about an hour, I would say, later, I get a long text message from my home girl. "I think that it was real rude what you did at my home girl's birthday dinner. I don't know where that kind of etiquette came from." I texted her back a simple, "IDC." So how's that for a story?

I don't know who to attribute that story to. I just heard it online and I couldn't find the original guy who was recording it. But it's one of those things that if it hasn't happened to you, I promise it will happen to you. I thought this is an important topic.

Dining etiquette is an important topic for us to talk about. I want to talk about it because it applies differently at different stages of life. I want to give you some tools that I have developed over many years that have helped me to be able to navigate this a little bit more simply.

First, this show will probably be most helpful to younger listeners. So if you've got teens or if you're a young man or young woman, I hope that this show will help you because it takes a little while to figure these things out. Once you go through the school of hard knocks and you have some weird checks that don't quite split the way they do and you navigate some awkward situations, then things get a little different.

So I'll just share with you a little bit of what I have learned in terms of appropriate etiquette, because the etiquette does change depending on the stage of life you're in. I remember when I first started dining out was a teenager in high school, and I was in various after-school activities, evening activities, and you go out with your friends and go out to the local restaurant.

And the dining etiquette in that circumstance is pretty straightforward. You pay for what you order. However, as you start to get older, then the dining etiquette changes and you get into splitting checks, you get into picking up the tab as your wealth increases. And then I've found even with having a large family, the dining etiquette changes quite a lot, that now there's a different expectation.

So let's talk through these things and share with you some ideas. The first thing that you want to do in order to avoid difficult situations is you want to communicate clearly and you want to know upfront what you're getting into. One of the things that is often difficult for young people to do is to practice assertiveness with regard to money.

And assertiveness means simply being open, honest, and forthright about what you are able to afford and what you are not able to afford. Every single time that I myself have gotten into a financial jam over a meal, and of course, here we're talking about a restaurant meal, it's because I didn't clarify it in advance.

And there are a couple of levels of clarification to pay attention to. First, before you accept an invitation to dinner, it's a good idea to have a sense of what you're getting into. There's a big difference between you're going out to dinner at the local diner where your maximum check might be, I don't know, $20 with everything included, as compared to going out to a luxury restaurant where your maximum check can be hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of dollars.

In general, you're going to have an idea of what kind of restaurant you're eating at just based upon what you're accustomed to. If you're in small town USA versus downtown Manhattan, you're going to have a different set of prices. So you're going to have a good idea based upon general knowledge, but it's always a good idea to check the menu.

And in today's world, that has gotten a lot easier to do. So what I'll usually do is before accepting a restaurant invitation, if I'm uncertain about it, I'll check the menu either on the website of the restaurant or Google and Apple Maps, both of these and other platforms as well, Yelp as well, will have a quick estimate on prices.

And so you can check a few Google reviews, a few Yelp reviews on a restaurant, get an idea of what your price is likely to be. And you should have in your mind a good general sense of what you're trying to spend on a meal. And then you'll multiply that by, of course, the number of people in your party.

This is one of those things where I have found, as my family has grown, this has become more important to me because it makes a bigger difference in the size of my check. If you are a single individual going out to dinner, the difference between, say, a $20 check and a $40 check is only $20.

It's not that big of a deal. If you're a family of seven going out to dinner, then the difference between a $20 check and a $40 check winds up being a difference of, say, about $150. And so it can be a much bigger impact on your budget if you are unprepared for it.

So whenever possible, it's a good idea to get a good sense of what the menu price is going to be for your food. And if the menu price is out of your league, it's unaffordable for you, then simply say something. Generally speaking, when you're going out to dinner with people where there's a little negotiation about where we're going to go, if you just say something, it will fix the problem.

And a lot of times we don't like to say something because we don't want to be the person who is somehow broke. We don't want to be the person who says, "I can't afford it. I don't have any money." That harms our self-image in some way. But what I want to encourage you is to simply recognize that even if you're with somebody who is very wealthy, most people who are wealthy have become wealthy themselves, at least in the U.S.-American context where intergenerational wealth is much less common.

Many people who are mega millionaires and billionaires remember what it was like when they were working for minimum wage jobs. And so it's not a sign of weakness to say, "That's not in my budget," or "I don't have the money for that," or "Can we choose a place that is less expensive?" It's purely a sign of confidence that simply say where you're at.

And the point of going out to dinner with somebody, generally speaking, is to find a solution to your meal where you're going to have a great experience. And if you're fretting about the bill the entire time that you're sitting there, you're not going to have a great experience. And so it's good to speak up.

And if you speak up in advance and you communicate, then in many cases, somebody will say, "Hey, it's my treat. It's no problem." And I think that if you find yourself as the person with more money, I think one of the best things that you can do is make this accessible for people.

More on that in a moment. So first of all, you want to take a look at the menu, but you also then need to recognize that the price on the menu is not your final price. If you're young and you haven't dined out a lot, or maybe you're newly moving to a place like the United States where service charges are not generally included in the bill, taxes are generally not included in the bill, you find yourself surprised by a meal that costs 30 to 40 percent more than the number that's written on the menu.

So you should think about that and be aware of that. For my European listeners, or basically from everywhere except the United States and Canada, what you need to understand is that if you are dining out in North America, generally speaking, there's going to be a tax that is added to your bill.

That tax will vary based upon the city and the state. It's going to include a sales tax. But in many cases, a 10 percent increase is kind of fairly normal. Again, it may be 6 percent, it may be 8 percent, but by the time you put it all together, 10 percent is a very normal amount of tax.

So if your entree is $15, plan on it actually costing with tax $16.50. Then you need to plan on your service charge. And some restaurants will include a service charge, but they'll often include a service charge if there's a large group. But the expectation in the North American culture is that your service charge is that you pay your tip, and that that is something that you decide on the ultimate amount as long as it's 20 percent.

You can tip less, but generally speaking, in today's world, tipping 20 percent is a normal tip. We could talk separately about how tipping culture in the United States has gotten out of hand, how crazy it is, but it is what it is. We're not going to change it. And it's my basic worldview that if something is culturally expected, I want to be a gracious member of the culture.

I don't want to be a rude iconoclast. It's fine to be an iconoclast if I can do it without harming other people, but I want to be a gracious person in the culture, fit in well, encourage my fellow citizens. And so if I'm going to go out to dinner at a place that has a tipping charge included, then I'm going to make sure that I plan for that and prepare for that.

Which leads me to the next piece of advice. If you, in thinking about the details prior to going out to dinner, find yourself looking at a charge or a menu that is beyond your reach, one of the first things that you can do is pull back on the location and choose a place that doesn't include a service charge.

This is something that I myself will do some, not frequently, but I do get so annoyed with the tipping culture and the expectations because I feel like I'm caught between a rock and a hard place that either I tip a full amount and generously, and since I'm not willing to not be a generous tipper, I will often choose places that don't include a tipping culture.

And so that's one thing that you can often do. If you find yourself looking at a menu and you recognize that the taxes and the tip are going to make this particular dining experience out of your reach, then go ahead and just choose a different venue. Choose a restaurant where you don't have table service.

Choose a restaurant that doesn't impose those charges. And there are plenty of restaurants available today that don't impose table service charges, either, again, through just simple tips, that will give you a great experience. I love Chipotle. I find Chipotle, as an example, to be one of those restaurants that has broadly universal appeal, is widely available, and has something to please most people.

There are a lot of other versions of these, places that are salad restaurants or salad bowl restaurants, people kind of riffing on this. And I think these work really well because they split the categories of dining. They're certainly not fine dining. And so if you are in the mood to go out for a fine dining experience, then don't choose one of these places.

But they work really well for social events because each person can do what he or she wants at the restaurant, order his or her own food exactly as desired, take care of your own bill. All these things can be done separately, and you don't have to intermingle them all the way that you do when you're in a table service environment.

So what I would suggest is be thoughtful about the places that you commit to going, and be assertive. If a place is suggested to you that is beyond your financial reach, just simply say so, and choose a different place. There are an abundance of options available for all people that will allow you to enjoy a dining experience with others that isn't going to bust your budget.

Next, prior to going out to eat, do your best to determine how the bill itself is actually going to be paid. Now, there's a little bit of social grace here that is necessary, because in many dining situations, you will go out to eat with somebody, and you don't want to pre-negotiate who's going to pay the bill because your dining partner may wish to be generous and say, "Hey, I've got the bill," but he doesn't want to do it in advance.

He wants to do it at the end of the meal. And so in many cases, that's what you should expect. However, if there is uncertainty in your ability to go out to eat, then I think it's wise for you to pre-negotiate how the bill is going to be settled.

And I want to give you a couple of suggestions on how to do that. But first, let's talk about how to handle it if everything is normal, you're going out to dinner in a restaurant where everyone is together, as, say, a mature man. In general, I think there are two acceptable ways, socially acceptable ways, to split the check.

The first is for one person to pay the entire check. The second is for it to be split evenly. As a man, those are basically the only two acceptable ways to split a bill. The negotiation and the careful calculations that you do in high school and college and when you're young and somewhat broke, those things need to pretty quickly disappear in most social cultures.

There may be exceptions. I don't know what the dining culture is like in your homeland. Perhaps there are exceptions. So I'm just speaking broadly to middle-class U.S. American culture, which is the culture that I myself know. But in middle-class U.S. American culture, basically, either you pick up the bill for everyone at the table and you don't worry about any nickel and dime calculations, or each person tosses in evenly for the check.

The check is 100 bucks and there's four people. Each person kicks in $25 and it's just split. There are exceptions to this in some other parts of the world, depending on how the restaurants actually do the point-of-service terminals. And forgive me for all the international discussion, but I think it's helpful because I have a large international audience that sometimes goes to the United States and then vice versa, because I think this is where things will go in the United States.

In the United States, the way that bills are normally managed is that the server will bring the check to your table and you have two choices. Either you pay with a card or you pay with cash. And when you pay with cash, you can get change, but customarily, you often just leave enough cash to cover the tip.

You stand up and you walk out. And then if you're going to pay with a card, frequently, the server will take the card back to the kitchen and charge it there or at the central pay station where all the cards are processed. This is different than in many other places in the world.

In most places in the world, at least that I have been, that are outside of the United States and Canada, the server will bring now the card terminal to your table and you'll actually run your card at the table. This is a superior model because it protects against the theft of your card.

One way that somebody can steal your financial information is if they're in possession of your physical credit card, they can just simply run the magnetic strip through a reader, save that information, clone the card, and then steal your credit card information. There are a lot of thefts that can happen this way.

So if you're dealing with an unethical criminal who's working in a restaurant, that criminal can quickly get a hold of a lot of credit card information, which can then be used for fraudulent purchases. So it's better for you to maintain access to the physical credit card itself. And the way that's done is if the POS terminal, the point of service terminal, the pay machine is brought to your table.

Now, one innovation that has happened, and by the way, I think within a decade, that'll be the common thing in the United States as well. And the reason is due to the broad spreading of Apple Pay and Google Pay. Now that Apple Pay and Google Pay and contactless credit cards are becoming ubiquitous in the United States, as they have been in many places in the world, now that that is the case, then increasingly the server is bringing the terminal to the table in the United States.

And I'm already seeing that change happen in the country, and I think it's an inevitable change because logically it makes sense and it allows people to use their contactless payment systems. However, it's not yet universal. So there is still this culture of sending the card back. The reason this matters is that traditionally it's difficult and annoying for a server to split credit card transactions across many cards.

And so because of the strong cash culture in the United States, then there were rules about, "Oh, we'll only accept a certain number of cards." That's what you heard in the story that I played for you. "We'll take two credit cards for this $3,500 bill. We'll split it two ways.

You just tell us how much you want on the card." And that's hard when you have a table where you have a dozen people all ordering different amounts, you have bringing bottles of wine for the table, and all the transactions are starting to get mixed and mingled. That's difficult.

But what I'm seeing more and more is that as restaurants around the world are using an electronic ordering system, that it's really nicely integrated with the payment system. And this works really beautifully. You'll go out to a restaurant, and frequently I was out to dinner with half a dozen guys, and each one wanted to pay for our bill.

And so all the waiter did was take the long list of things, flip it from one side of the tablet to the other, and then hit process. And at the end of it, the whole list of orders for the whole table was handled individually with individual card transactions. And that, I think, is where a lot of these terminals will eventually go.

But it's not ubiquitous yet. So you still have this kind of awkwardness that's associated with it. So you need to plan ahead and be prepared for this. So if you're going to be going to a restaurant where splitting the bill evenly is going to be difficult for you, in many cases, you should just clarify quickly how the bill is going to be settled.

And if you can do that in advance, it will increase your confidence of going out. So you would say something, somebody invites you to dinner, and you would say, "Hey, that's great. Do you have any sense of how much it is?" If you don't know, and the person will say, "Oh, no, no, I got it.

It's my treat." And then you'll know going in that you're going to be treated to dinner. What you don't want to do is get yourself in a situation where you don't enjoy the meal because you're worried about how the bill is going to be settled at the end of it because of this social awkwardness because you weren't willing to clarify things in advance.

Now, if you are hosting, one of the things that you can do is try to make things simpler by clarifying in advance as the host. So if I'm going to invite someone to a meal, generally speaking, I will do my best to make it clear that either I'm going to treat or you're going to pay.

And what I do, and there may be more elegant ways, but if I am going to treat someone to dinner, then I'm going to specifically say, "Hey, it's my treat. I would love for you guys to come. It'll be my treat. I'd love to treat you." That way, someone can come with a free heart, not have to go back and think about, "Can I afford this or can I not afford this?" If I'm not going to treat someone, then I'll try to give them an indication of how much the bill will cost.

And of course, this is something that you'll do based upon some knowledge of a person's finances. If you are inviting someone that you know is wealthy, always eating out, has plenty of money to spend on discretionary expenses like that, then I don't think you need to do that. But if I'm inviting somebody out for a meal and I'm not willing to treat them for a meal, but I want to have a dining experience with them, then I'll just give them an indication of the budget and say, "Hey, does that work for you?" So it would go something like, "My family and I are going to go and have lunch after church.

We're going to go to this restaurant. Would you guys like to join us? We'd love for you to join us. We really love this restaurant. It has this kind of food. I find that the cost is, say, it winds up coming out at 15 bucks a person," something like that.

"Does that work for you or do you want to pick somewhere else?" And so something like that, where you try to express the social grace of allowing somebody to choose based upon food preferences or money, I think works really well. So you want to give someone a gracious way out.

So they don't have to say, "No, I can't afford $15." You can say, "You know what? I would prefer a different kind of food." Great. Here are some options and kind of work those things out. But by being clear about the cost up front, you're making it evident that we're going to go out to the meal together and you're going to be expected to pay for your family.

I'll pay for my family. We're going to split the checks. So that's an important thing to do in advance if possible, just to alleviate any pressure for somebody who may not be as wealthy as you are if you're not going to treat them. The other time to do this is simply when you get to the restaurant.

And if you know that we're going to a restaurant and my budget is not going to allow me to pay for the table, then your assertiveness needs to come in by simply saying at the beginning to the waiter, "Hey, I'd like to have separate checks, please. I'm going to cover this person, this person, this person, this person.

I'm going to order for everyone." And get your separate checks set up in advance. When you do it in advance, generally that's pretty simple for the server to have multiple checks set up and it solves problems with, "Oh, I can't take so many credit cards." So do that also.

And if you do it, it makes it clear to everyone at the table that I'm not treating you, but I'm also not a burden on you. And then if somebody was planning on treating, then he can kick in and say, "No, I got it. I got it." And you can go ahead and have your negotiation right then and there.

That's a helpful technique. And if you will exercise it, you'll find it useful. On the flip side, one of the things that you can do if it's socially uncomfortable to do any of those things, then you just simply need to come prepared for the meal. And I think that the best way to do that is to always travel with cash in your pocket, physical currency.

The annoyances with settling the bill often come in related to cards. So we all love to spend on our cards. We love that it makes it easy and simple for us. And we're all grateful that, "Hey, you can Venmo me this. You can cash out me that much." But the problem is that it turns into an enormous math problem at the table for people to sit down and negotiate their amounts.

And if you've got to have a card in the mix, then there's a good chance that you're going to come out in someplace different than you should be. So I remember this happened all the time. When I was in high school, I started to face this. And I was fairly frugal because I didn't have any money.

And the simple things where I'd go out to dinner, and at that time, socially, in your lifespan, socially speaking, it's appropriate for you to split the check based upon actual consumption. And so I would go out, and I wouldn't order the dessert, and I wouldn't order the drink. I would just get a simple entree, an inexpensive entree that was what I could afford.

And yet I would always wind up overpaying because it would just never work out. And so I developed the habit of always having cash in my pocket, because it solves the situation beautifully. And that is still something that I do today. If I'm going to go out to dinner with a large group of people, and I was invited, but it was not obvious that I was being treated, that someone else was paying the bill, then when I show up at dinner, I'm going to have cash in my pocket to pay for the dinner.

And also importantly, I'm going to have cash in my pocket that's not going to require me to come with precise change, with an exact... I don't need to get change. And so I'll have a selection of 50s, 100s, 20s, 10s, whatever is necessary, and 5s, so that I can tabulate my own cost of the check, and plus tip, plus service charge, all of that, add in a little extra, so that there's no question.

I can lay my cash on the table and sit back and let other people work it out. Where you don't want to be is in the situation that guy was in in the story, is you don't want to be in a situation where you're arguing and negotiating with people, and whose credit card is it going to go on.

Because if you haven't learned that the hard way, there are people who you'll wind up in a mixed group with out to dinner with 8 or 10 or 12 people, you don't know three of the other people, and all of a sudden you'll have a bill on your credit card that you can't afford and wasn't in your budget.

And so what is always appropriate and always protects you is simply to have physical currency, because that allows you to always pay for your bill, to pay for what you paid for, but you don't have to be involved in the bottles of wine that they ordered. You don't have to be involved in the extravagant purchases that they made, but so you've solved your ethical obligation to pay the bill as well as your just practical consideration.

You don't have to say, "Well, put it on my card," and the server says, "We only take two cards." Well, no problem. Here's cash. You're good to go. So make that as a habit. If you don't customarily carry physical currency, then I would suggest to you this is reason number 1463 as to why physical currency is useful, and always have enough physical currency with you in the appropriate denominations that you can settle the bill.

By the way, this is also something that I find very useful when traveling, is that whenever I'm traveling, I'm always worried that my bank is going to shut off my credit cards, and they're just not going to work, and yet I don't always want to get local currency, and so I always will travel with a variety of U.S.

dollars, because I can pay a bill in any country in the world with U.S. dollars as long as I round up a little bit, and the rounding up that you do to pay with U.S. dollars is always going to be cheaper than dealing with the change fees and the leftover currency if you wind up in a situation.

So develop the habit of carrying cash with you. Then as you progress in life, you'll need to move on to the next stage of finances. So far, I've been thinking about somebody who doesn't have much money, somebody who's building their assets, and you want to engage in financial considerations, but now how do you move on to being the one to basically having an adult financial life, where now you're the one, when you make an invitation, you can treat other people?

And it's not so much about the specifics of settling the bill, but it's again where these same principles come into play. First of all, I think that those of us who are older, we should help younger people to understand these etiquette rules through practice, and one of the ways that we can help younger generations enormously is simply to do small things like paying for their food.

I recently was out to a meal with a friend of mine who was a lifelong friend. I met him when I was a very young teenager, and this man must have treated me to a restaurant 100 or 200 times, been a good friend of mine for a very long time.

And every time I see him, I try to affirm to him how much I appreciate his generosity towards me, because it made a big difference in my life as a young man, as a teenager, college student, all through, because he would take me to places that I wouldn't have been able to afford, and I would show up and drink water, but he would be happy to pay the bill.

And it was incredibly generous of him, and he really invested into my life, and he was a valuable mentor for me because of that. And I want to be the man who pays it forward to other generations as well. And so, I think that these same principles apply, that when you're choosing a place to go out to eat, you should choose a place in which you can treat people, and look for an opportunity where it's comfortable for you to treat other people, if at all possible, and take away some of these social challenges for them.

Paying for the pleasure of people's company is a very good use of money, in my opinion. It's the thing that I would rather spend money on more than almost anything. If I can spend money and get a time of socializing out of it, to me, that's a really worthy investment, and it's worth spending money.

A couple of thoughts for you, if you're in the situation. Just a quick story as we transition here. When I was a financial advisor, I did quite a lot of eating out, did quite a lot of entertaining. I don't think that that's always a good business move, but I had to learn the hard way how to do it.

And it can be quite financially difficult to do a lot of hosting, especially when the money is coming out of your pocket. If you've got a corporate expense account that's allocated for client meals and entertainment, and you know the budget amount, great. I didn't. I had Joshua's bank account that was allocated for meals and entertainment, and I had to figure out how do I make money with this in the long run.

And I found it very uncomfortable, because meals are usually a social experience. They're not necessarily a money-making experience, and they're clearly important, but they're also not – there's not a direct response. It's not a "I'm going to get the deal because I take this guy out for lunch." And there was a time in my career in which I would often host people three meals a day.

In some cases, I had two lunch appointments, an early one and a late one, and a breakfast appointment, and all of these things. I later dumped a lot of that stuff, and I realized that I was taking prospective clients to meals because I was uncomfortable getting straight to business.

And I learned that as I grew in my maturity that it was actually better for me just to get straight to business. And then after a business relationship developed, then we would go ahead and add a social relationship in, because the flip side was a very expensive way of sometimes, only sometimes, getting to business.

But all of that entertaining meant that in order for me to fit my budget, I had to find some options. And let me explain to you what I ultimately settled on that I think is a good solution. First, you are never going to have the world's biggest client expense account.

And so, your goal in hosting people or treating people to a meal is not to spend the most money. In fact, just because you could spend the most money doesn't even make it a socially appropriate thing. It's kind of gauche. It's kind of icky just to show off that, "Look, I can spend more money than anyone else can." Of course, in many circumstances, people enjoy it when a deep-pocketed patron can host them for a lovely event that they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford.

But it's not necessary in many cases. And so, I found that when I was a financial advisor, first, my rule was I have to pay because I'm inviting people for lunch. I'm going to pay. So, how do I figure this out? If we've got a hundred-dollar lunch and I've got one of those in the morning and another one in the early afternoon, and all of a sudden, I've got huge amounts of money going out, that's not appropriate.

So, what I've always looked for is I've always looked for a non-category-conforming experience that you can have with people. And if you'll look for this, I think this can, in many ways, be a good fit for you. So, my favorite place that I found was I found this amazing Mexican burrito joint in my city.

And it was a client who introduced me to it. It was right behind the fancy plaza with all the nice places and all of the $40 meal places that would be kind of normal. But right behind there on the industrial alleyway was this little tiny hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint that basically exclusively had construction workers in it.

And all the patrons were Mexican guys and construction workers in high-vis clothing. And yet, they made amazing burritos. It was a really, really great spot. And so, that became my go-to lunch spot because it was different. It was an experience that was different than a lot of people would ever have.

And I would invite fancy people in fancy clothes. We would go in there and toss our jackets off and roll up our sleeves and loosen our ties and really enjoy amazing food that solved the problem of having a really great meal, but without breaking the bank. And what you should do is, if you're going to do a lot of entertaining, you should look for a variety of options.

And if you're going to do a lot of entertaining and you're trying to manage your budget, is look for a variety of options that fit that. Look for something that's not the category shifter. I would pay at the burrito joint, I would pay the same amount of money as you would pay for a fast food meal at a big fast food franchise.

But the experience was something that people loved because it was very different. And you can do this in any number of ways. And so, if you are taking girls out on dates, or if you're taking clients out to lunch, or you're treating people for dinner, look for circumstances and ways that allow you to get the essence of what you want, which is a meal together, but also allows you to provide those additional benefits, a fun time, an out of the ordinary experience, and doesn't do it in an expensive way that's going to cause you to be stressed about money.

Spending a lot of money on somebody, whether it's a date, whether it's a business prospect, whether it's a friend, spending a lot of money is the most mundane and tiresome thing that someone can do. And yeah, it's appreciated, sure. But giving somebody an experience is something that really stands out.

And this is a skill that you can develop. You don't need to spend lots of money on people to impress them. To the extent that you impress them, you often create freeloaders. And they'll be your professional dinner companion as long as you pay. But if you give people an experience that's different, that's out of the ordinary, but that's genuinely really nice, then you can have a much better situation.

And this is useful at every stage. When my wife and I, before we were engaged, before we were married, we did this a lot. And I looked for chances for us to spend time together in memorable ways, create interesting memories. And when you put constraints on your money, you often create better memories.

When you are going out with business clients, same thing as I'm describing to you, find something that you really like that's out of the ordinary and create an experience that you can treat people for that's not just a matter of spending lots of money. And then as you move into the family stage of meals and events, a similar thing happens.

I've found it interesting how the etiquette of dining and the money involved has changed as I have had more children. There were various people who used to treat me when it was me and my wife, and we had one or two children. There were people in our lives who would treat us.

But now, it's kind of funny, they'll take us out to dinner and it's like they have a dollar amount that they're not willing to go over. And so it creates this weird environment where somehow their idea of a good time is to invite Joshua and his family out to dinner.

And yet the idea is that they're a family of three and they're going to pay for a family of three and pay for, say, one or two extra meals. "Hey, I'll treat you with X amount of dollars." And then Joshua needs to pay for all seven of his family members.

And it creates this unique socially weird situation where there's an expectation that the person with a large family should say yes. But again, and I don't fault anybody for it, it just means it's another thing where you have to figure out how to navigate your way through it with grace and ease to make everyone comfortable, and yet for things to work.

I take my family out to dinner, far more than almost anybody that I know, but I often don't enjoy it. It's not a great environment. And so once again, you can find a creative solution. And so I would imagine most people with many children, they do kind of what I do, where you say, "Hey, listen, let's do this.

Instead of going out to the restaurant, I'll go pick up a bunch of subs for everyone and we'll meet in the local park where we can visit together there. Or let's go to the pond. Let's go to a place that we can play." And what you'll find is, once again, I can easily cover most people's expenses in a much easier way without going out to a restaurant and yet have a better experience for everyone involved, more freedom, more time of connection, more enjoyment together.

The last comment on this simple experiences discussion is, remember that as the number of people in a dinner party grows, the economies of scale change significantly. So let's use number of people example. If you and I are going to go out to dinner or go out to lunch or go out to dinner, the two of us, it's almost certainly best for us to simply go to a restaurant, spend time at the restaurant, enjoy each other's company, pay for our restaurant meal and leave.

Because the margins, especially if we're talking about food, restaurants don't have a lot of margin on food. And so the value per calorie or the value per minute or whatever you want to calculate it, of that experience is very, very high. One person to go out to a restaurant is a really great move.

The numbers work really well and it just makes a lot of sense. However, if we are a party of eight people and we're going to go out to a restaurant, then all of a sudden now all of the financial calculations change. The cost of going out to the restaurant increases substantially and the value is the same as what it was in terms of the value per minute.

But now with that higher dollar amount, we can adjust into different settings. Lest that be too ethereal, let's use some examples. If I'm going to go out with my family, we go out, we're seven people, for the price of us going out to a restaurant where we're going to order seven entrees plus extras, which in some cases means we're going to go to a mid-level mediocre restaurant that's not a great dining experience, we can feed a group three times as big as ours all out of our own pocket with steak and lobster for the same price because of the economies of scale of doing it ourselves.

And so if you have a large group, as in your family or other large group mechanisms, then what I think makes the most sense is for you to start to bring the experience that you get in a restaurant into your home. And so instead of spending constantly huge amounts of money, taking lots of other people out to restaurants, which is mundane and kind of normal, not very memorable, a lot of times annoying, can't control it, rather use your home to control the environment so that you can have a more memorable experience for people.

And you can do this at the very modest financial cost, or you can do this at a higher end cost and create a very memorable experience. So if you're a family with modest resources, just develop a few basic recipes, a few basic menus that you enjoy using when you're entertaining, and develop a simple but welcoming atmosphere, have people into your home, have a few meals that you really enjoy that are crowd pleasers, and treat everyone in that context.

We've, in our current world, it seems as though very few of us open up our homes to other people. And it means we go out to these restaurants and have everything that's associated with that, but we don't get the genuine connection that can come when you're in the context of someone's home.

And so you can develop this with your own, and do it really nicely with all of the money that you would spend on a restaurant and provide a much better experience. You can have a multiple course dinner. Some things that we've enjoyed doing is develop something like a simple crowd pleaser for a little snack.

Maybe you do a little charcuterie board, some crackers and cheese, some kind of special thing that you do. You might develop a couple of cocktails that you create. If you have a home bar and you like to make cocktails, develop a couple of signature cocktails that you really enjoy making, offer those to your guests, or something that is unique to your area, a special local drink or a special local flavor, and offer those to your guests, have a nice dinner, develop, finish it off with a nice dessert.

And a lot of people are really starved for that kind of in-home experience. And then train your children as you're able to, to provide a good experience. You'll have a lot better success teaching social skills in your own home, where your children learn to interact with your guests, they get to listen to the stories of your guests, and you don't have all the hustle and bustle of a restaurant.

Now, at the higher end, if you're going to host a dinner party of eight or 10 people, consider just hosting and hiring a private chef to cook for you. Consider doing, I don't have any more examples, just have a private chef. Hire a chef to come in and cook for you in your home for the evening, maybe hire a bartender or whatever you need to do, so that you can have a really elevated experience.

What has happened in our modern world, as we are all awash with cash, is we've lost the skill of spending our cash on things that are actually interesting, things that are actually memorable. So we spend it really foolishly. And I was listening this week to one of the online currents of things going around, and there was this lady who was talking about the fact that she and her husband have $3,000 a month of car payments.

And evidently, she drives something like a Tahoe, a new Tahoe, and he drives something like a pickup truck. And they've got $150,000 of car debt, and she's got a $1,400 a month payment, and he's got a $1,600 a month payment on his truck. And I was laughing at them, because the woman is just describing a stupid expenditure of money.

They drive mediocre vehicles that don't give any actual different experience, because they're unskilled with spending money. Swap out one of those vehicles for something that does... Drive something that does something really well. Instead of just driving a random $80,000 pickup truck, why don't you drive something that's actually cool?

And you define cool. Drive something that's really fast, or really big, or really good, or really small. Instead of driving just another random SUV, go get a Porsche SUV. Go get something that's interesting. And this is what oftentimes, I think, is reflective of our culture. People spend huge amounts of money on boring, mundane stuff that's just the same as everything else.

And they do this with their houses, they do this with their cars, they do this with their experiences. They go to the same place, and the same thing, and swipe their credit card and have another mediocre experience that they repeat year after year after year. And you ask them to tell you about their vacation, and they say, "Oh, yeah, we went to Myrtle Beach.

It was just like it was last year." And hey, listen, you do you. Spend your money however you want. But as far as I'm concerned, I want to actually remember my life, which means that if I've got to drive a car, and I'm not just going to drive an Econobox, then let me drive something that I actually like, that gives me something unique and an experience that I can't get otherwise.

If I'm going to go on vacation, why just go down to the same place, have the same experience year after year? I want to remember a vacation. So let's go somewhere really cold, or let's go somewhere really luxurious. Let's go somewhere really basic. Let's insert variety into life. And then the same thing with dining experiences.

Going out to Olive Garden, or Fridays, or Morton's Steakhouse, just because that's what we always do, is super boring. And you can take the same amount of money that you spend and create, custom create, craft an experience that all your guests will remember. So have a dinner party in your home, and bring in a private chef to cook for you.

Or have a, not a potluck, because, well, I guess in my culture we do a lot of potlucks, and potluck is fine, but have an experience where everybody brings an ingredient, or everybody brings a dish from your own country. And because you can control the environment, you can elevate the entire experience to a much higher level, so that coming to your house is actually memorable.

And people want to come to your parties because they're different, they're memorable. That's what we're all looking for, is memories in our life to some degree. So I think that concludes most of what I have to share with you. The big points that I want to drive home to you are that if you want to avoid the difficulty of, or the weird social awkwardness of splitting a check, you avoid that by being assertive.

Before you say yes to an invitation, just make sure you understand, clarify the details of the bill, clarify whatever you need to clarify. When you're out, recognize that what is socially appropriate is going to change throughout your life. If you're in your teens and early 20s, and you go out with your friends, go out with cash in your pocket and just pay for what you ordered.

As you move into an adult phase of life, then either you pick up the entire check, someone else picks up the entire check, or you just split it straight up the middle. And you don't do this nickel and dime stuff anymore. That's excruciatingly annoying. And if you do that, you'll find that your dinner invitations will decline significantly.

I stepped over that comment, so let me just clarify it as I wrap up. The reason you don't want to be the cheap guy who goes out and says, "Well, I just ordered a water and a $12 appetizer, so here's my $14 and y'all can figure it out," is simply you are not respecting the social lubricant, the social dynamics of the group.

And in a group, it is expected that the group does group things. So when you go out to dinner with five of your friends, and you're the guy who says, "Well, my entree was $12, so here's $14," you're violating the expectation of camaraderie. You're violating the expectation of being in the group.

That can happen for a little while, but very quickly, that kind of violation of social norms creates a significant level of discomfort for other people in the group. And this is not always a bad thing. It can be a positive thing. For example, let's say that you go out with your pothead drunkard friends, and all five of them are drunkards, and they order mountains of alcohol, and you abstain.

Well, certainly, you don't have an obligation to split the bill with them. But what's going to happen is pretty quickly, you're not going to be getting the invitations because you cause them to be uncomfortable. Is that a bad thing? No. If they're a bunch of drunkards and you're not, then you're better off not hanging out with drunkards.

Just go and find a group that reflects you. But when you find a group that reflects you, maybe you go and join the athletes, and the athletes all go for a 40-mile mountain bike ride after dinner, excuse me, on Friday evening or Saturday morning. You all go for a big, long bike ride together, and then you meet up at the local cafe.

And none of them drink alcohol because they know it's bad for their performance. Well, now you found your group. So now split with your group. But if you are always the... And similarly, if you find... Let's say you care a lot about frugality. Well, you'll find your frugal group.

And if in your frugal group, everyone goes out to dinner and they order the $12 entree and they pay a $2 tip and everyone's done, then you'll do what's expected. But when you get into a different group, then that kind of isolationist behavior breaks the concept of camaraderie. So that's why it's important that, especially as you pass forward to adulthood, why is it only appropriate either one person pays the check or everybody splits evenly?

Because it's a minor, small expression of group camaraderie in the group. That you had a glass of wine, they had three. But just because they had three doesn't mean you're the guy who's not gonna pay for more than your share. We're all giving creatures. And that concept of giving to others, even if you're the least consumer, is something that builds social cohesion in the group.

So as you get to an adult level, either participate, and when you participate, participate in the way that I've described, or don't participate. And then finally, if the money is uncomfortable to you, don't walk away and isolate yourself because you don't have the money. Rather, look for creative ways to connect with other people in a way that solves those desires, solves those needs and those desires that we have for connection.

So if you can't afford to go out to dinner, then don't go out to dinner. But be diligent about inviting people into your home or meeting up with people at the local park and arranging a picnic in the local park. Be diligent about these things so that you can still build those relationships.

A couple of final stories, just to indicate to you what I'm talking about. Because on the whole, I really want to encourage you to be more social. All of the psychological data that we have collected across most of our societies indicates that loneliness is at an all-time high. Many, many people are experiencing lots more loneliness.

And this is one of those problems that is very solvable. And we can do it. And I think we should solve the problems that we can take, and loneliness is one of them. There are many reasons for loneliness. The fracturing of family relationships, splintering of societies, changes of lifestyle, social isolation due to fake connectedness.

"Hey, I saw your Instagram photos. That's all the same as seeing you in person." But we can fix loneliness with a little bit of effort. And so that's what I want to inspire you to do. And I don't want money to stand in your way. So I just want to close with a couple of stories that come from my experience.

First of all, just a brief story to people. In 2018, my family and I – to Christian people especially – in 2018, my family and I went RVing across the United States. And we – on that trip, we were visiting with some friends in some places, but much more the trip, we were just by ourselves.

And I got very lonely in that experience just because I'm used and accustomed to more social interaction. And so one of the things that we would do while we travel is we would go each Sunday to a different church meeting. And I resolved not to follow my personal biases on doctrinal or distinctives or anything like that.

What I did is I pulled out my phone, popped open a Maps app, and I just typed "church" and whatever was the closest church, we went there. And I didn't filter it based upon my own personal convictions and beliefs. And so we went to a different church meeting every week.

And on that – in that experience, what I discovered was that most U.S. American Christians are socially incompetent for the actual needs and desires that people have. We would – not all. There were some places where we were extremely warmly received. But what would happen is we were a fairly obvious family.

We'd walk in on a Sunday morning, and always there was a wonderful team of people to say, "Hi, welcome." And we would – "What are you doing?" And I would tell them our story, and I would make it clear that we're traveling, we've been on the road for a long time, we're at this campground just down the road, and here we are.

And what I found is that so many people welcomed us to a church meeting, but nothing happened beyond that. And I discovered that I didn't really care about the church meeting, because it was all the same, but what I really wanted was somebody to talk to. I really wanted someone to spend time with.

And you go to a church meeting, and great, we can sing some songs, and some preacher will preach a sermon, and hey, it's wonderful, it's fine, no problem. But then at the end of it, everyone waved to each other and walk out, and nobody would engage with us. And I understand.

Nobody would invite us to lunch, nobody would do anything. And I understand why that's the case. After all, our houses are a mess, we don't have any food in the refrigerator, it's uncomfortable to have hosts, to have people over, we don't want to show where we live, and all this stuff.

But friend, this has to end. And so after months of this, I was desperate for fellowship, just desperate for relationship. And it was the first time in my life where I had ever experienced that loneliness, because I grew up in a strong community of people with strong family and social bonds.

I was in the town where I lived. I never wanted for people to hang out with. And yet so many people live their lives in an experience like I lived on that trip that it really opened my eyes to what it was like to be lonely. And what's crazy is that I was never looking or expecting any kind of anything.

I'm not expecting to be served steak and lobster, I just wanted to hang out. And so if anybody had said, "Hey, you know what? Our house is a mess, and we have no food. But you guys are in town, you got three children, and tell you what, there's a park down the road.

Why don't you guys go to the park, let the children get some wiggles out. We'll run down to the grocery store, grab a loaf of bread and a bottle of peanut butter and jelly, and we'll meet you there at the park in 20 minutes." I would have said, "Absolutely, let's do it.

This is fantastic." And it would have been amazing to connect with people. But in the U.S. American context, that only happened in a few places. And so I want to describe to you that the reason I want us to be more conscious of these social graces is not only to save money, but we need to master these things and make it comfortable for people to spend time with us because people are lonely and we need to do that.

So for any, you know, Christians in the audience, I beg you, it's much more important what you do after church than what you do in the church meeting itself. And we have to change this culture of weirdness around money and isolation in order to engage with people. And so I made a vow that I will never see a stranger in a church meeting again and not invite them to lunch just because of how meaningful it was to me.

And for the most part, as far as I know, I have kept that vow. Now, there's been one or two times where I had to get the family home and I consciously didn't notice the stranger that I saw in the peripheral vision. It's not a perfect, I haven't done it perfectly, but it's something that we really need to do.

We really need to engage with people and inviting people out is a really important thing that we can do. And it really engages with people. The second aspect of loneliness, and to be clear, I'm telling these stories because I can and I've experienced them. I'm not asking for pity in any way, shape, or form.

I'm trying to explain just some stories that I've experienced in a way that will help you. The second thing that has happened is that when you have children, and especially when you have more than about two children, you wind up being extremely socially isolated as a family because most people don't know how to deal with children.

And this has not always been that way, but it is something that now exists. And we need to work on it as a culture if we're going to properly replace ourselves, naive, and possibly expand our civilization, which is one thing that's really important. I never realized this when I was growing up.

I was the youngest of seven children, and I never realized when I was growing up how few invitations we received. Today, I look at it and it's blindingly obvious that our home was open every single week. My parents would have an open night at least every week, and there was usually another, somebody else at our home for dinner every week.

And that was because we had a lot of children, and so we could host. And we really very rarely got invitations to other people's houses. What's been interesting is that my own family has grown, the same thing has happened. And I understand it. If you have one child, you don't even have enough chairs in your home for us.

And I get it. And nobody is, I don't judge anybody, no one is being critical. But one of the things that we can do is we can work on solving some of this social isolation that we experience by implementing some of these techniques that I have described. And it makes a big difference.

That's why we don't always just have to go to a restaurant and pay money at the restaurant. There are other ways, and we need to embrace those things. Today, I only have five children. And while my children are young, they're fairly well-mannered. I work really hard on teaching them to sit at a table.

We try not to destroy stuff, and there's exceptions, but we work really hard on that stuff. But the social isolation that happens is pretty intense. The first change that happens is once you, so when you're single, you go out with all your single friends, and that's totally normal. Once you're married, you go out with your single, and you're married, and you're coupled friends, and that's okay.

Once you have children, however, then the schedule changes. And so just simply because you can't go out to dinner at eight o'clock on Friday night, your invitations start to decrease. And so you start hanging out with other families with children. But that's really hard. It's hard, I'm sure, for single people who wish to still have their friends that are now on children's schedules, but it's also hard on married people's social lives.

And right now, all across the United States, virtually all of my friends who have children, they find it very challenging to engage in social relationships because of the way that children are excluded from our society. And most of the things that we do are pretty uncomfortable for children. They're not really welcomed.

They're, I'm not complaining, it sounds too complainy pants. That's not my goal. My point is to say that most people are pretty socially isolated. And it's very challenging for parents with two or three children to call a babysitter and go out to dinner with you. It's challenging. Not impossible, but it's challenging.

And then because they're in an intense phase financially with lots of bills, and braces, and speech therapy, and private education, all the other things, that their budgets get squeezed. And so going out to dinner is challenging. So what can you do? Well, if you want to support people to have children, and you have money, then use your money to facilitate it.

So first of all, you could be one who invites other people out and makes it clear and recognize that if this dad and mom over here have three children, that anytime they are going to go out to eat, they're going to go out to eat and they have to pay for five meals.

For you, however, who is, say, a middle-aged or older couple of two, you can easily pick up those five meals, but for them it's hard. So if necessary, just downgrade the class of restaurant you go to. Go to Olive Garden or wherever you think is kind of a low-class place and downgrade it.

Or just throw them a, find out what would be really fun for them. And so you be the one to cater the picnic in the park and recognize that it may be totally normal for you to get together with your friends, but your friends that are parents, it's not normal for them.

And as they have more children, they become more and more socially isolated. I'm not intending to, yeah, I don't think any, this is not, in the last couple of years, I can count on a couple of fingers the number of dinner invitations that my family gets. I'm not asking for sympathy.

I'm not complaining. I understand it. It's totally understandable. And I make up for it. I invite people over to my house and that just, that's how I handle it. But just recognize that your friends with children, they don't get invited over. And so if you do, it will make an enormous difference for them and they will love it because even though they have children, they're starving for adult conversations and you can facilitate that.

That's something that you can do. And if we want to grow our society, we need to encourage and help parents. Parenting is something that takes a village in a very real sense. And you and I can be part of that village. We can help others in a very real and practical way.

When we do this, we don't have to give anything up. Just by way of example, recently this summer, or I guess it was last sometime, a few months ago, my wife and I and our children, we were visiting some friends in France and these particular friends have, I think, seven children.

And so it's, what's totally normal is we have five, they have seven. It's totally normal and understandable where that we're not going to go to a expensive restaurant and try to sit everyone down and line them all up and order an entree for each one of us. So what's neat about it though is you can take a fifth of the money and provide a five times greater experience for everyone by planning a really great picnic.

And so that's what we did is we went out for a really great picnic on the mountainside and we had all kinds of charcuterie, all kinds of cheeses, all kinds of fancy breads, wine, all the stuff. And we had a much more memorable experience. And the pictures that, my wife makes basically yearbooks for our children, and the pictures that are in the yearbooks for the children from that experience of the picnic out on the mountainside, those are the ones that are vivid.

Those are the ones that are real, not just the ones in, "Hey, it's another restaurant with a tablecloth," because of the full orbed experience. And this is something that we can do so many times when we apply it, is we can get better experiences that are more memorable in our minds and include a good expenditure of money on relationships and on experiences.

And the closing charge I want to make is, to repeat, one of the best things you can do is spend your money on buying friendships. There's this very strange parable in the New Testament that Jesus relates. It's very strange because the application is very hard to understand. But paraphrasing it loosely, there's a steward that is taking care of the king, and the steward is an unfaithful steward; he's not doing his job properly for the king.

And so, he realizes, "You know what? My stewardship," meaning my job, my position, "is pretty quickly going to end. This king is going to punish me because I'm not doing a great job." So, he calls in all of the people that owe the king money, and he says, "Quick, listen, mark down your debts.

You owe the king 10 units of money. Well, let's mark that down to two." And he starts canceling all these debts. So, the king finds out about it, and he says, "Well, you may not be a great steward, but you're very shrewd, and I respect that. After all," you know, what does the verse say?

Something like, "If you use your unrighteous mammon," meaning money, "to buy friends for yourself on earth." And to me, that, while again, I can't elucidate all of the meanings of the parables, I just think that's one of the best mindsets to have around money. Use your unrighteous mammon, use the money that you have, and use it to buy friends for yourself on earth.

And he is no fool who spends his money and is surrounded by friends in an appropriate way. That's a good use of money. So, if you can be one, like my friend and mentor was for me for so many years, who is taking a young high school student and a young college student on experiences that I never would have been able to afford, those experiences are so valuable for me today.

They were different from the experiences I could have in other parts of my life, and this is something that we need to encourage for young people. It's a diversity of experience. Be that guy, be that gal who takes your nieces and your nephews and your friends and acquaintances on different experiences.

Help their parents in that way by showing them the world or showing them a side of things that they wouldn't otherwise experience. Be that person who takes your money and invites the family out to dinner. And yes, you may have to save for a couple months to be able to feed all their children at the fancy restaurant, but they're going to be very grateful, and they're going to really appreciate that, and that's a really good use of money.

Be that person who opens your home up to other people so that you can consistently entertain others and consistently help to facilitate human relationships. At its core, this is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and we have to work on it. We have to do better, and we can use our money to solve a significant amount of the social isolation.

What's amazing is once you spend a little bit of money, spend a little bit of time with people, that's when the real problems come out, and that's when the real relationship starts. That's when you can really get at the heart of the matter and really understand what's going on in someone's life, and quite literally, you can save a life.

Somebody in your network right now is thinking about committing suicide right now, and he's sitting there asking himself, "Does anybody even care?" and you can be the one who does it. I haven't touched on – just a quick brief suggestion in passing – I haven't touched on cocktail parties, things like that.

There's a really great book that an acquaintance of mine named Nick Gray wrote recently that I have read, and I really like it. It's called The Two-Hour Cocktail Party, How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings. This is on my required reading list for my children because while we certainly host a lot, and I think that my children will absorb that, I think that one of the best things that you can do when you are young, single, or just in that scenario is learn how to throw a great cocktail party.

This is something that was very common in many cultures in the United States in times past, is still common to some degree today, but is not nearly as common as it once was. And so this book by Nick Gray, again, is called The Two-Hour Cocktail Party, How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings.

If you will take half of your dining out budget that you spend on restaurants and invest it instead into hosting regular cocktail parties in your home, I think you will get a 10x return on the money spent. It's a really, really great way for you to connect with people.

And so I recommend that book to you. It's wonderful. I've learned a lot about building relationships, making friends, using money and social occasions to do that, even in moving to a new city. But if I move to a new city, then today, the first thing I'm going to do is start hosting a regular cocktail party, probably monthly, but even if it's more occasional than that, it's a phenomenal way for you to build relationships and a really good use of money.

No matter where you are, people are doing it. And I want to reaffirm, this is so important, which is why I'm emphasizing it three times over. Nobody cares how fancy your house is. Nobody cares how expensive your rent is. What people care about is relationship. So if you're someone who, like me, suffers from some kind of inferiority complex that you don't have a $10,000 couch, get rid of that idea and start having people over with your side of the road couch, because all your friends are desperate for somebody to start creating opportunities for them.

And so having a cocktail party is a really, really great way to approach it. There are other books that I have appreciated in terms of how to host a great party. I think that as you host cocktail parties using the framework that Nick Gray teaches in his book, I think you can move on to dinner parties in a really beautiful way.

And I think that having dinner parties is a phenomenal way to spend your money. As I described, even if you need to bring in caterers or outside chefs, it's so easy in the United States with all the to-go food and all the catering food that we have. You don't even need a private chef.

But go ahead and use your home regularly for those kinds of events. People really appreciate it. And learn how to have a multi-phased dinner party, because this mixing and mingling of people is a really phenomenal way to improve your events. You should have pre-dinner cocktails, and you'll have some guests that come for pre-dinner cocktails and then leave.

Then you'll have your dinner party, and then you'll have your after-dinner drinks, your after-dinner cigars, whatever it is, however you like to fit that into your evening's events. And have people come in and out, and your friends will love you for it. And if you want to build a wide network of relationships, then develop the skills of becoming a super connector, and your friends will really value you.

I'm getting beyond my script here, as is probably obvious, but becoming a super connector and a facilitator of relationships is really important. It's a really important component of your own life on many levels. You want to be the guy that if you need a job, you pick up the phone, you make three phone calls, and you've got a job.

That should be your goal and your ambition. But in order for that to work, as we can take from the great book by Harvey McKay, you need to dig your well before you're thirsty. You always dig your well before you're thirsty. And so you need to invest in relationships much long before you ever need them, in order to have a robust set of connections.

And so start with the two-hour cocktail party and go from there. For anybody who is touched by what I said about American churches and American Christianity, I would urge you to read a book by Alexander Strauch, S-T-R-A-U-C-H, called The Hospitality Commands. This is a very theological... that was the wrong word.

This is a very Christian book, and it doesn't give any specifics like how to host a cocktail party, but it is a very excellent book, and it shows why Christians should be the most hospitable people out there. And it brings me great shame to know that this is not the case right now, but we can change it.

It just begins with us. So check out the book by Alexander Strauch called The Hospitality Commands, and I promise you that that's what we need more of. We need much more of that in our culture. And the final comment I want to make is simply remember the podcast episode that I did on why purchasing a second home may be your best investment.

This week I've been with my family in Florida, and I'm just reminded at the moment my family, my large extended family, we don't have a great party house at the moment. And I don't see an alternative pathway, but I recognize the need for it. What I mean is that I don't think that my parents should have the party house right now, but I'm reminded that it would be really great if they did.

So if you are wealthier, then do as I strongly encouraged both in this episode and also in that previous episode where I talked about it. Spend your money to buy a really great house. And what you're looking for is you're looking for a house that is conducive to interaction and is conducive to activities.

What you'll find is that, of course, if you are an adult, then you're perfectly happy to sit down and spend all your time just sitting and talking around a table. Our children look at us and they're mystified by the way that we live our lives. But if you have children or teenagers, then choose a house that's going to be conducive to those activities.

Choose a house that has an appropriate venue for entertaining. Choose a house that has appropriate activities. Look for a lake house with a boat and set of skis and wakeboards, a couple of jet skis, some canoes, whatever it is. Look for a house that has a big field for sports activities and a volleyball game and physical things.

Look for a beach house where you've got various beach activities and you can get out the surfboards or the kite boards or whatever is appropriate for where you are. Look for a house with a great game room or build a house with a great game room and lots of activities.

Spend the money on this stuff and then fill your house up with love. Fill your house up with people. And this is a really good use of your money. If you don't have the house, then just develop the equipment for it. And you can learn how to cook in the local park.

You can host, be a great host, even if you don't have the infrastructure for this. I've proven it. Years ago, my wife and I sold our house, moved into a small apartment. I realized we're going to have a harder time entertaining. And so I went and I bought one of the Camp Chef three-burner stoves, got a nice carrying bag for it.

I bought a Camp Chef griddle, 36-inch griddle that goes in that, super portable, but great griddle. I invested in just kind of a simple cooking infrastructure, a couple of totes with cooking stuff. And I hosted parties at the local park where I fed 50 to 100 people without too much difficulty.

And that really works as well. There is something that you can do. There is some way that you can spend money to buy friends for yourself here on earth. And as your official financial advisor, I hereby endorse that practice very highly. Anything you can do to spend money on people is going to be a great use of your money.

Thank you for listening. I'll be back with you very soon.