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Your best bet every day you want to play. Bovada.LV, ready for everything. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, and today I want to kick off a new series where I'm going to talk to you about financial goal setting. Mostly, I'm going to be sharing with you a menu of ideas for your goals that you may be interested in choosing among. Things that might inspire you, and you might say, "Hey, that goal makes sense to me.

I'm going to choose it for myself." Here at the beginning of today's show, I want to talk about the importance of goal setting for a moment, and then get into the first most important goal that will impact your life over the long term. First, I want to talk about goals.

Many years ago, when I was working as a practicing financial planner, I would jump out of the bushes and talk to people about their money every day. We called that doing, well, you would do an approach, and then you would do a fact finder. Basically, you walk into somebody's office that you got referred to.

You say, "Hey, my name is Joshua. Let me give you 60 seconds on who I am and what I do." Then all of a sudden, I start asking people about their goals, their life, their money, and I do a financial fact finder. A financial fact finder is a fairly structured interview where you discuss finances, you discuss what people are working towards, you discuss what they've done towards those goals, then you try to help give them advice and suggestions that would help them to achieve their goals.

At a certain point in the fact finder, I would always transition to retirement planning. I would consistently ask two basic questions. The first question would be something as simple and innocuous as, "Is there a point in your life at which you'd like to retire?" Or if you didn't want to use the R word, sometimes I would ask, "Is there a point in time in your life that you'd like to work because you want to, not because you have to?" Of course, everybody says yes, yes, to both of those questions.

The next question is, "Well, when would that be? What age would you like to be able to retire?" About 20% of the time, the response would be a relatively immediate, "Well, today would be great. Let's do today." And of course, we share a nice chuckle and then I say, "But really, at what point in time would you like to be able to not work if you didn't want to?" And about of the remaining, at least 80% of the people who after the initial joke, at least 80% of people would respond with 65 or 67.

About 20% of the time, people would say something else, 55 or 70 or 50 or 45, something like that. But at least 80% of the time, the answer was 65. And then the next question that I would always ask would be simply, "Why? Why 65?" And upon thinking about it, some people quickly said, "Well, that's the Social Security retirement age, right?" And we go into the details and I'm not going to go through the play-by-play of every branch this conversation goes down.

But what I learned is that most people had a retirement goal to retire at 65. And the only reason they had it was because that was the age that was drilled into their head because of the knowledge of Social Security having a standard retirement age of 65 for many years.

And of course, it isn't that way anymore, but that is deep in the U.S. American culture. And I realized, "Wow, that's powerful." And me being me, I would usually say, "Well, why not 60? Why not 50?" And try to put a little bit of a fine point on it to say, "What is so magical about this age 65?" I understand that, of course, being able to receive a Social Security income is useful and that will help your financial planning.

But at its core, why 65? Why not 55? Why not 75? Why? And most people didn't have an answer beyond just, "Well, that was what was said to me." As the years went by, I've observed this in many aspects of life and financial planning. I've realized that most of us achieve the goals that are set for us, and that's it.

And if you think about most life decisions, very rarely do we ever come up with something creative and unique in terms of our own goal. Even those of us who pride ourselves on living an unconventional lifestyle, in reality, very rarely do we come up with our own goals. What happens is, those of us who live somewhat unconventionally just stumble across unconventional people who live by a different set of goals.

And we listen to that and we say, "Oh, that's great." But then we quickly adopt those people's goals for ourselves. None of us are sitting around in an isolated sensory deprivation tank, meditating, completely cut off from all external influence and just imagining the goals to which we aspire. And they're just popping organically into our minds, and we're establishing this vision without regard to external influences.

That's silly. All of us have external influences. Those influences inspire us, and we set our goals based upon the things that we hear of other people doing. What's really interesting about this is, it's enormously powerful, both on an individual level as well as on a collective level. A simple personal example is my wife's story with going to college.

One of the things that is interesting about her experience is, she never really had any interest in going to college. She never really had any particular academic subject that she was super enthusiastic about. But if you were asking her, "Why did you go to college?" Her dad said, "You're going to go to college, so pick a degree and go to college." So she picked a degree, went to college, graduated in three years, and was done with it.

But it didn't come from an internal motivation. It was just something that her dad said, "This is what you're going to do," and so, therefore, she went and did it. And most of us go through life a lot like that. Somebody else tells us, "This is what you're going to do," and we go and do it.

And the cool thing about it is, if the person who is doing that to us, the person who is programming us, the person who is imposing on us a structure and a set of requirements is positive, meaning is wanting to help us, is genuinely on our side, then all we basically have to do is do what we're told.

And as long as that person is not wielding a wrong or evil-minded influence, we're going to wind up in a pretty great place. After all, having a college degree is generally always better than not having a college degree. So it's a good standard pathway to be on. And so I've thought about this a lot, and I've thought, "What specific goals are we setting for ourselves, and can we choose those intelligently?" Just one more personal story of when I realized this.

When I was in college, I didn't really have any financial goals. I'd been reading financial books, but basically the standard bookstore personal finance books came down to the idea of save 15% of your money for retirement. And so that's kind of what I did. I opened a Roth IRA on my 18th birthday, started putting 10% or 15% of my very meager income into it, and I thought, "This is great.

I'm doing great here." Then my freshman year, I didn't borrow any money for college. I worked three jobs, paid my way through. My sophomore year, I decided I was being a dumb-dumb because I discovered I could just borrow money and life would be easy. I didn't have to work all the time.

So I started borrowing money on student loans my sophomore year, my junior year. Junior year, I dropped out of college. And when I came back after quitting in the middle of my junior year, after some unnecessary experiences that I had, my brother gave me a copy of Dave Ramsey's book, The Total Money Makeover.

And in The Total Money Makeover, first I argued with Dave about he was totally wrong about being debt-free. Then I read the book again, and I read the book a third time, and finally I decided, "You know what? This guy's right." And what got me was just simply, "If you had no debt, how free would you be?

Or if you had no debt, no payments, how much money would you have?" And he persuaded me to get out of debt. So I started following the Dave Ramsey baby steps. I saved $1,000. I started working, paying off my debt. And the fact that he inspired me that I could and should become debt-free motivated me to action.

And I went into discipline mode, crazy mode, worked hard. I got a job. I went back to college. I worked 40 hours a week. And two weeks before I graduated, I paid off all my student loans and graduated from college debt-free, which was an amazing feeling. And I never would have accomplished it if somebody hadn't come along and said, "Hey, here's a goal that's worth having.

You can do this. You should do this." And I did it. And I'm glad I did it. And I'm glad he gave me the goal because I wouldn't have come up with that goal myself. It wasn't something that was important to me. So my question is, how could we harness this?

How could we intentionally manipulate ourselves and those around us, again, with positive intention? But how could we manipulate ourselves and those around us with goal setting so that people could have an idea of what's possible? And then by having an idea of what's possible, they're more motivated to go after it.

And I see this same need expanding around our society. We need this kind of work not only in our own individual lives and individual families, but we need to do this as a society. I remember for years I thought about -- I just absorbed. I can't identify any particular influence other than the culture that I grew up in.

My parents never said to me, "You have to go to college." College was considered generally a positive thing. And no one ever said to me, "You have to get married." But I remember in my mind I had the checklist. As a young man, I had the checklist to say I should go to college.

At the time, basically the reason I went to college was, in my opinion, only losers didn't go to college. And I'm not a loser, so I'll go to college. I'll go to college. I'll get married. I'll get a dog. I'll buy a house. I'll get a job. And that's my checklist.

That's what I do. And I did all those things. And I remember when I did the last one of those, I felt like, "Wow, I did the checklist. This was great." Now, it wasn't ultimately fulfilling because there was still more. Things could change. But I'm really glad I did those things.

They moved me in a dramatically better direction because there was this cultural expectation of the checklist as compared to friends of mine who skipped various of those steps. And today I'm grateful that I had that basic cultural checklist as a young man to get a job, go to college, get married, have a child, get a dog, do all the stuff.

And I think that it's a really good default set of choices, a good default set of options. Now, I've not been one who has wanted to impose those goals on other people. I've always been one who wants to affirm, "Hey, listen, man. You do you. Let's talk about the individuality and the uniqueness of your life." But what I've realized is most of us aren't cut out for that kind of thinking.

Most of us aren't cut out for that individuality. And so I now believe that there's a good way to hold this, meaning let's hold a vision that is probably a good move for most people. I think for most people, graduate from high school, get a job, go to college, buy a house, get married, have a baby, that's a really good default plan.

Now, it's certainly also true that for this particular man here or this particular woman here, that's not a good plan. And so if so-and-so starts to articulate the reasons that, "You know what? I'm not going to go down this path. I'm going to drop out of college because I'm going to go and start a company," all right, well, there's a good path for that.

Or, "I'm not going to get married. I'm going to go overseas and risk my life fighting as a foreign mercenary or being a missionary," or something like that. Okay, well, that's a reasonable pathway to go down for whatever reason. But a number of years ago, I realized I've spent so much of my time thinking about the 20% of the 20% that need a customized plan and a customized everything is unique that I've missed out on the 80%.

I've missed out on the value of the 80% for most people. And so I've spent time for years now thinking about what would be those basic actions that are certainly going to be appropriate for the 80% and those things that I think everybody should do and you will not regret doing them.

If you do them, you're not going to regret it because even if you change your plan down the road and you want to do something different, then you're going to be in pretty good shape. And this means that we need to avoid extremism because a lot of times extremism commits us to a pathway that can't be changed in the future.

But we still want to bring in some aggression. We don't want to just be totally mundane and totally vanilla because that's not inspiring. So I think what I'm trying to do is create ideas that are inspiring, meaning they're aggressive, there's power behind them, but not to commit people to things that can't be changed.

I'm not intending these things to be crazy. I'm intending these things to be real, achievable and real. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to break these goals apart into a fairly long running series. I'm going to articulate the concept. I'm going to make the argument for it and try to do it fairly straightforwardly.

And then my hope is that you'll take just that one idea and you'll think about it. And perhaps you'll talk about it with others. You might talk about it with your children or with your brother or something like that. And then choose among these goals the things that are useful to you.

The first few are going to be a little bit normal and mundane, but I don't want to – I like completeness and so I think of the youngest of people. I think of the 16-year-old listening to my show. And I want to talk about even the basic things, even though they're not going to be inspiring.

So there will be more of the aggressive things down the road. But I want to begin today with step number one. The single most important goal that you can set, that you can achieve early in your life, that will have the biggest long-term impact on your lifetime of finances is to get a job.

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Now, later I'll talk about options of the kinds of jobs that you should look for. But if you are currently unemployed, the first most important thing for you to change your financial life is to create income. And the most straightforward way to create income is to get a job, to go and work for someone else, to go and create an arrangement whereby you show up, you do what your boss tells you to do, and he gives you money in exchange for that arrangement.

It's a great way to get rich. It's a great way to be able to eat food today, to be able to have a house to live in. Sounds silly. It's not. And getting a job, the whole process of getting a job, is going to involve a whole bunch of other sub-skills that need to be mastered and need to be fairly comfortable for you in the long run.

If somebody has an income, an income that comes from working, I can fix everything else in your financial plan. There is not a situation in the world, financial situation, there is not a financial problem, a financial planning situation in the world that I cannot solve if you have an income.

You say, "Joshua, that can't possibly be true. After all, my business just failed, I owe the small business administration a bazillion dollars for my SBA loan, I have all this credit card debt accumulated, I owe everyone in my life tons of money, and everything is falling apart. A job doesn't solve my problem." Yes, it actually does.

Because even in extreme hardship, like that silly scenario, that real, but extravagant, excuse me, extreme example that I just articulated, it still applies. If you have a job, you can eat. There is no job in the world that pays such a non-existent wage that you can't literally eat. And that's the most important thing.

If you have a job, almost certainly, you can find a place to live. Now that place might be a tent, in a park, certainly normally it's more than that, but we can fix everything with a job. We go through a system and sometimes you declare bankruptcy, sometimes you don't pay your creditors until you can fix it.

But step number one of getting yourself out of a mess, no matter how big, is always a job. And yet getting a job is often not easy for people. It can be very difficult to get a job. And so you should develop the skills of going and getting a job.

And that should happen as young as possible. Ideally, when I say this, when I mean getting a job, I mean you getting a job, not someone getting a job for you, not your dad getting a job, not your mom getting a job, you saying, "Hey, there is a job.

I'm going to go and I'm going to get it. I'm going to go and apply for it and they're going to hire me." Now all of the skills associated with achieving this goal will be skills that will stay with you for life. In order for you to get a job, you have to be motivated to go get a job.

You have to have a desire to get a job. And motivation is usually the key factor in the long-term outcome that we receive with really any part of our life. If you want something, generally you can go out and figure out a way to do it. If you don't want anything, you're not motivated, generally you don't wind up doing anything.

You can learn how to do things when you have a sufficient level of motivation. But if you have no motivation, no matter how much advice and good information is given to you, it doesn't really make much of a difference in the long run if you don't have motivation. So in order for you to go get a job, you have to exercise motivation in order to do it.

You have to go and look for a job. Jobs don't just necessarily drop themselves in front of you. If they do, say yes to them and get one. But ordinarily you have to go and look for a job. And the process of looking for a job generally results in you having to think about what am I qualified for?

What would I like to do? You have to do a little bit of introspection. There are many jobs available, more than ever before in human history. So now you have to think about the kinds of jobs that you would be well-suited for and the kinds of things that you would like to do, that you would enjoy doing.

Then in that process, you're probably going to go a step further and you're going to recognize, well, there's a lot of jobs out there that are really great, but I'm not necessarily well-suited for them. And that sends you down a pathway that can ultimately open up your earnings for you because you become well-suited for better jobs.

But then you recognize, well, here's a job that's just available to anybody, so let me go and get it. At the very beginning of income generation, normally what you do is you trade your simple physical labor for wages. All of us begin life as unskilled laborers. So our first jobs generally involve us just showing up and doing something.

Traditionally, we've talked about digging a ditch, and it's a good metaphor even though no one ever gets hired as a ditch digger today. But the idea is you show up, boss hands you a shovel, says dig, and with a couple of minutes of instruction on digging and digging technique, you're off and you can be productive for the day.

Now, again, no one's digging ditches today, but there are jobs that have this basic characteristic. You show up, and you're going to work in an ice cream shop, and so I'm going to teach you how to scoop out this ice cream, or I'm going to teach you how to assemble a sandwich.

And in 10 or 15 minutes of training, I can teach you how to scoop an ice cream cone and how to assemble a sandwich. But then from there, we go on and we start to accumulate more skills. And so now I'm going to teach you how to run a cash register.

I'm going to teach you how to provide customer service. I'm going to teach you how to smile, how to sell, and then you're off to the races. Right now, you're accumulating skills, and those skills can be transferable. You may go and start working in a pizza shop, and at the beginning, you're pushing a mop, but then pretty soon, you're making pizzas.

Well, once you have the skill of throwing beautiful circles of dough around in the air, well, now you can go and demonstrate that you can do this and you can make a living anywhere in the world because you have this skill of throwing dough in the air that was acquired and you can quickly assemble pizzas.

And life goes on and you start to build actual skills. But in the beginning, you have to just trade your physical presence and your physical body and your physical labor for income. And the skills that are necessary to get that are pretty basic, but they're still important. So again, back to what I said, you have to go look for a job, then you have to apply for a job.

Ordinarily, this is going to involve some kind of interview process. So here, yet again, we have the most basic of skills. Some jobs, you could be hired without the ability to read and write, but at least in most of our economies, the ability to fill in a job application with some basic biographical details is the bare standard of getting a job.

So if you can't do that, you have to build and develop the ability to do that, to fill in an application. Then you have an interview skill. So you have to have some basic ability to speak to another human being, to articulate who you are, what your background is.

You need to have something of a reasonably clean background. So being a criminal generally makes it very hard to be hired. Being accused of certain kinds of crimes makes it very hard to get hired. And so there's a basic level of social skills that you need to develop and practice, and a basic level of self-confidence that needs to be developed and exercised.

Again, I know it sounds silly and ridiculous, but it's important and it's real. And so you can be a teenager or a young 20s or whatever it is, and the act of going and getting your first job is something that will represent the foundation of all of the skills that you need for your entire lifetime.

Now, a couple of additional points to just give a little texture to this simplest and most basic of financial goals that every person should have. First, for those of you who are older and yet trying to figure out how to adjust your financial situation, if you don't today have a job and if you need money, your first goal should be to get a job rather than focusing on getting the perfect job.

A little bit of texture here. Many times the best jobs, the highest paying jobs, take a very long time to find and create. If you just got laid off as the CEO of a Fortune 100 company, it's very unlikely that tomorrow you can go and get hired again as the CEO of another Fortune 100 company.

That's very unlikely. Usually, as you go up higher in corporations and you get bigger and fancier jobs, it becomes much more difficult to get that level of job back. Think about it. Let's say you get the job of President of the United States and then you get fired after four years.

It's not so easy to go and get that job back again. It takes quite a little time and there's a pretty decent chance you're not going to get it back again at all. It takes time to find those really great jobs. If you're a day laborer and you're just working with your physical body and you get fired today, you could probably show up on another job site with a different boss tomorrow and start over again and probably get hired with a day's test.

When you're at the lower end of the employment scale, you can get hired pretty quickly. If you lost a big fancy job and you've got money in the bank and you've got plenty of runway, I'm not saying just go and take whatever job. No, be intelligent. What I am saying though is if you need money, it's almost always easier for you to get hired from an okay job to a better job than to get hired from no job to a better job.

Not always. There could be strategic reasons that doesn't work where people ask questions and wait a second, you're doing what? But even if you have to conceal the job that you're doing right now, the fact that you're working in some random thing for which you're not particularly well suited right now, the mental state that you will be in from working and having some income and having an outlet for your work and for your labor so you're not sitting around worried all the time is going to put you in a better frame of mind so you're going to interview better for the better job.

Unemployment as a lifestyle is catastrophic. It destroys people. Welfare systems where able-bodied people who are capable of working can sit around and get paid to not work are enormously destructive of the human character. Man must work in order to be healthy. If you do not have work, it's very hard for you to feel like a normal functional human being and without work, it's very easy for you to slip into a ditch.

So focus on just getting a job and if you don't know what else to do and you're in a mess financially and everything's falling apart, step one, go get a job. Any job will do. It's always easier to go from whatever job you have now to a better job when you find it than to go from nothing to fanciness.

If you are younger, just to put a few finer points on it for younger people, go get a job and ideally it should be something that you choose. One of the things that's really amazing and empowering about having income is that income helps you to develop independence. If you have an independent source of income, you now have choices in your life.

You have agency. You have the ability to control your future. That's a valuable thing to develop. So if you're young, go and find your job. If you're a parent, I think you should encourage independence in the choice and selection of a job. Seems pretty obvious to me that if a teenager goes out and finds his own job, even if it's not the best long-term job and you'd like to give all kinds of advice about, "Hey, here's this other strategic job," probably better that he just goes and chooses his own job than that he takes the job that you choose for him and potentially face the conflict of, "Now I have to do this work that I don't even want to do." So I do think it's reasonable for us to require people to get a job, to require young people to get a job.

But I think we should be cautious about manipulating exactly the kinds of jobs that are chosen. It's good to give good advice. I try to give good advice about long-term opportunities and futures, as I will do in perhaps the next episode of this series. But at the end of the day, what you're looking to encourage is motivation and autonomy.

Basically, what you're looking to encourage when someone is getting a job is that you're going to go and you're going to get a job and you're going to do it. And when somebody gets used to doing what he or she wants to do, that can feed the motivation muscle.

And motivation is a skill. It's a muscle that can be strengthened. It's a skill that can be increased, just like everything else. Motivation is not an innate trait that some people are born motivated and some people are born unmotivated. Nonsense. Motivation is a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to get strong.

It's a skill that needs to be developed in order to be powerful. So you want to encourage as much autonomy as possible. Rules are certainly good. We don't want to be involved with work that is immoral. The only thing that is worse than no job is an immoral job.

An immoral job is something that is harmful to society rather than helpful. So you should not work in jobs or for businesses or for companies of anything that is harmful to society, anything that is deleterious to society, anything that is injuring your neighbor. Beyond that, any work that you can do is honorable.

It doesn't matter how fancy it is or not fancy. It doesn't matter how much education you need or don't need. I will honor you for doing honest work that is productive and helpful to society. And you can find meaning in that. So we want to encourage teens to go and get a job.

We want to encourage them to do it themselves and to exercise agency over the specific choices that they make. And we want to provide good coaching as to, "Hey, certain jobs would provide these strategic benefits. Other jobs would provide those strategic benefits." But we want to encourage motivation and actually going through the process yourself.

You want to take and drop your child off for his interview. You don't want to walk in and hold his hand through the interview. You want to encourage motivation and actually going and doing it. That's more important as a basic skill that needs to be developed than any particular thing that comes from any particular job.

One more piece of advice. Just because you have a job doesn't mean you need to keep having that job. There was a day and age in the American society that I know well in which people spent a lot of time thinking about keeping a job for a significant amount of time.

And that was probably a good thing because we wanted to encourage steadiness and consistency and we didn't want to encourage shiftiness or shiftlessness of people just changing all the time. But most of that world is dead and gone. You still want to be thoughtful that you're not just a constant job changer.

If somebody brings you a resume and every three months for the last 12 years this 30-year-old man has changed jobs, that's probably a signal that you should dig into more. But if you're a teenager or if you're a young man or woman who is working the first things that you're doing, there is nothing wrong with taking a job, working at it for a month, and then leaving.

There's nothing wrong with taking a job, working at it for six months, and then leaving. And if you're 30 years old and you've been in a job for a couple years and you realize, or a couple months doesn't matter, but you realize, "Hey, this is probably not going to be for me for the long term," that's fine.

You can leave. Don't think that what you're doing now is what you have to do forever. Some of my own best and most important experiences of my life in work have come from jobs that were very short-lived. You don't need a long amount of time in certain jobs to learn a lot from them.

So don't be scared to change. And it's perfectly fine if you're 16 years old and you've got a summer job and you're a month into it, and this summer job isn't working out, well, go get another job. Totally fine. And a summer job is a great time horizon to have.

You don't need to plan to be for five years in this thing that you just got a job in. It's fine. And in fact, for the purposes here, the ability to go and get multiple jobs increases the benefits of everything that I'm saying about getting a job. You want to have the confidence that comes from having gotten yourself hired multiple times to know that I can go and get myself hired in the future multiple times if I need to.

That's something that's really valuable. And it's something that if you just had one job that you had when you were 15 and you had that job for seven years and you're 22 and now you're stuck because that company closed, you're going to have not very much confidence. But if you've gotten yourself hired eight times from 15 to 22, you're going to have much more confidence about your ability to go and get a job anywhere in the world, anytime, in various industries, and you're going to learn things along the way from all of those experiences.

It's extremely valuable. Also, when you are analyzing your life and your lifestyle, there are certain times in your life that having a job is genuinely limiting on other of your activities. For example, earlier in the show, I recounted my own experience when I was in college and I had three jobs my freshman year.

Looking back on it, strategically, I would not do that over again. What I would have done is gotten more scholarships so I didn't have to have a job, so I could take advantage of other opportunities, of unpaid work, of internships, and everything associated with that so that I could have advanced strategically in a career rather than just doing random jobs to make money to pay for tuition.

There are times like that where strategically it makes sense for you to really focus in on your academics or really focus in on a project, but don't be too quick to jump that way. What I've observed, especially for the young, and young here is a term I'm using very inclusively, there's a tendency to think that the job is the problem when in reality the job can easily be managed with everything else.

Remember this, you have 168 hours in your week. In general, I think you should always prioritize sleeping as much as your body is physically capable of sleeping. That's important for good health, for growing, etc. Let's assume that you're sleeping 8 hours a night, that would be 56 hours per week, or 10 hours a night would be 70 hours per week.

If you're sleeping 8 hours a night, that leaves you with 112 waking hours to allocate each and every week. 112 hours. If you're sleeping 10 hours per night, that leaves you with 98 hours every single week of wake time that you can allocate. When you compare 98 or 112 hours to the amount of time taken by most jobs, what you realize is you probably can do the job and everything else in your life that you want to.

If you've got 112 waking hours to allocate, and you work 40 hours a week, that leaves you with 72 hours left over to allocate. Let's say you take a day off a week and have a Sabbath rest. That still leaves you with 72 minus 16 would be 56. By the way, I'm really good at math.

I just feel this enormous pressure when I have to do it in front of people and my brain freezes up. I need to practice it in the future, but that's why I always mess up on simple and obvious things. You have huge amounts of time available to you. Huge amounts of time.

Take advantage of it. You can do all of the above generally if you are good at budgeting your time, and this is one of the big benefits of having a job. A job gives you a structure to your life, and it helps you to start to create a time budget to allocate your time.

I'm not making this all about me, but I'm sharing from my personal experience. Earlier, I shared my story of deciding to get out of debt. The way that I got out of debt was I got a job. At first, at that period of time, what had happened is I got in a fight with my dean of my business school because I wanted to study abroad for three semesters, and he said no.

I dropped out of school, and at the time, I got a job, and I was working on a tree farm. I was basically managing a tree farm where we grew trees and sold them. It was a good job for the time because it was a job I got with a phone call.

I needed work. I dropped out of school. I needed work. I picked up the phone, called a former boss of mine, and had a job by the end of the day. I did it for a couple of months. The problem was I was up at 5 o'clock in the morning, which was difficult for me as a 20-year-old guy who was going to bed too late.

I think we worked from 7 to 5 every day, so maybe I was getting up at 6. 7 to 5 was kind of our standard day, 6 days a week, and I wasn't making very much per hour. I felt like I was working all the time and not making very much per hour, but I was making progress, but it just didn't leave a lot of extra time.

Along the way, somebody told me about a better job, and I went and interviewed for the better job. Basically, I could increase my income by a significant amount. I don't remember, but a good amount more for way less time. I told my boss, and he said, "Joshua, you obviously should go and make more money for less time." So, I went and got a job making more money for less time, and then ultimately I went back to school.

For my senior year, I asked my company. I was working a standard 9 to 5 office hour schedule, but I asked my boss. I said, "Listen, can I change my work hours, and I'll come in on varied work hours for classes so I can work around my classes." I sat down with the course calendar, and I tried to create the most compacted course schedule that I could.

I would, for example, schedule my classes between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, go to the office at 1.30, and then on Tuesday and Thursday, I would schedule them from, say, 2 o'clock to 6 o'clock so that I could be in the office every day, but be in the office on just differing times.

In order to do that, I had to sit down with a calendar, and I laid out all my classes, and I laid out my working hours, and I had to come up with a schedule that allowed me to go to class. I had to come up with a schedule that allowed me to work 40 hours a week, and I had to come up with a schedule that allowed me to have homework time for each of my classes, and then I had to come up with a schedule where there was fun time, and I called it "scheduled spontaneity." On Friday night, from this time to this time, then you're going to have scheduled spontaneity, and it worked.

It changed my life. It showed me what I was capable of, and so that senior year was, for me, the biggest confidence boost of my life as a young man. I took 19 hours of class each semester to finish my degree because I'd gotten a little bit behind. I took summer classes in the 19 hours per semester to finish my degree and graduate on time after four years.

I worked 40 hours a week. I had more time scheduled for homework than ever before, got straight A's, and I achieved my goal of graduating debt-free. So the process of achieving the goal transformed me, and it taught me how much time I was wasting before, and this is one of the big benefits of having a job.

A job gives you a schedule, and there's a quote that we say. I don't hear it much anymore, but it's really true, is that if you want something done, find a busy man and give it to him. Some of the least productive people in the world are the ones who don't have a job, and they go through their days, and they're like, "How am I going to get anything done?" It's all a mental attitude.

It's a mental attitude of just hanging out, and the time is no big deal, but when you have a job and you know, "I've got to get this project done. I've got to get this homework assignment done before I get to work," or, "I've got to get to work, and then I've got to get back, and I've got to get..." You get the point.

So having a job is really powerful for your overall productivity. So if you're sitting down and looking at your goals, recognize that having an income is generally going to be a foundational benefit for your life, and we're going to talk in a future episode about living on your income, but most people who become poor get that way because they don't have an income, and people who just simply have an income, usually through having a job, generally wind up doing just fine, paying their bills, and ultimately getting rich, all based upon this simple thing of having a job.

I promise you, as a financial planner, whenever I get into somebody who gets into a financial mess, "Oh, I'm deeply in debt. I don't have any money," almost always the root cause was not having a job. Sometimes for circumstances outside of a person's control, sometimes based upon personal decisions that that person makes, doesn't matter the cause.

What I'm trying to drill deeply into your brain is this. If you want to avoid financial problems in your life, the single most important thing that you can do is have a job, have an income. It provides the basic foundation that is necessary for all financial planning and all financial success.

This is one reason, as I've traveled the world actually, that I love the United States of America. I'm completely open to the idea that child labor laws are a reasonable restriction. I don't know anybody that wants to go and put an eight-year-old into a coal mine. None of us want to do that.

I do find them very inconvenient, meaning child labor laws. I do find them very inconvenient because I think that it's useful for people to have the opportunity of work. But it seems fine to me. I'll happily send an eight-year-old or a ten-year-old to a friend to do casual labor, but it seems I'm okay with child labor laws.

What I'm not okay with is laws that restrict people who are teens from having a job. There's one thing that I appreciate about the United States because it's not the same in many parts of the world. In the United States, you reach about 13. You can pretty well get most jobs with some basic restrictions around school hours, things like that.

Those seem like reasonable restrictions to me. When you get to about 14, 15, 16, you're fully employable. It's one of the best things about the American culture. Not only is it legally possible for you to get a job in your teenage years, but it's culturally normal and culturally encouraged.

It's a wonderful aspect of the American culture. If you're an American listener, be grateful for that. If you're an American parent, be grateful for that. If you're not an American and you face other things, be grateful for the Internet, where you can get a lot of jobs and get around the wage laws.

Just recognize, getting a job, that is the foundational thing for your long-term success. Go get one. Get good at getting jobs. Get good at getting hired. It's a powerful cornerstone of your skill base that will see you through for the long term. If you're in a mess and there's a specific reason why you can't get a job, you've got to find a solution to that.

If you need to wear long sleeves to cover up your gang tattoos, or if you need to work on your social skills and practice role-playing so you don't freeze up when you're interviewing, do whatever is necessary to solve the things that are impeding you from getting a job. Thank you for listening.

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