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My name is Joshua. I'm your host. And on today's podcast, I want to continue our Financial Goals That Everyone Should Set series with goal number seven, which is to own a dwelling place free and clear. Own a dwelling place free and clear. In this podcast series, I'm giving you goals that I think should be universal, that if everyone had this goal and was working towards achieving it and/or achieved it, our world would be better off.

There's nothing here that wouldn't make your life better. And this one here really, really matters. Own a dwelling place free and clear. Now, the first question that will be obvious is, why is Joshua using that funny phrase, dwelling place, instead of the more obvious home, right? Own a home free and clear, or the also obvious house, own a house free and clear.

And the reason is I want to expand your mind beyond it. I don't want you just to stay in the same tired groove to say, "Well, I'm going to need to own a house free and clear," and automatically picture a nice three-bedroom, two-bath house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, and that instantly be your goal.

That's a worthy goal, and I think a great place for you to live. And if that's your dwelling place, wonderful, go for it. You're going to be great. However, I want to expand the concept beyond this in order to make it more accessible to more people at more stages of life.

As I proceed through this podcast, I will discuss how and why I think everyone probably, in the fullness of time, can own a house free and clear, and that would be great. But it's not the house itself that is the basic need, but rather the housing. It's not owning a freestanding, single-family home that is the key factor.

It's having a roof over your head so you can be secure, not be worried about having your stuff stolen while you're staying in some shelter somewhere, not be worried about violence because some roommate is trying to break into your room and commit violence against you, not be worried about getting kicked out and living on the streets because something happened and you lost your job.

Everyone should own a dwelling place free and clear, and that word "dwelling place" can be expanded in many ways. I want you to think about having a place that you can go where you can be safe, where you can be warm, where you can be comfortable, where you can recuperate, where your family can be sheltered.

In the modern world, we're so embarrassingly rich that we automatically assume that it's our basic birthright to own a home, to own a house, to own this big structure that's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that somehow our economy is failing us if we can't get it or if we can't get it quite yet.

We forget about how rich we are in the grand scheme of history as well as the grand scheme of the globe today as it stands. There's a podcast title that I've had on this subject for a while and I've never done it, but I'm always amazed at historical references to wealth and poverty.

One of my favorite examples of this, one of the oldest that I know of, comes from the Bible and the book of Deuteronomy, where it's talking about, specifically the one I'm thinking of, is where you take someone's coat as pledge for a loan, collateral for a loan. Let me read you the whole passage because it's all fascinating.

It comes from Deuteronomy chapter 24. "When you make a loan of any kind to your neighbor, do not go into their house to get what is offered to you as a pledge. Stay outside and let the neighbor to whom you are making the loan bring the pledge out to you.

If the neighbor is poor, do not go to sleep with their pledge in your possession. Return their cloak by sunset so that your neighbor may sleep in it. Then they will thank you and it will be regarded as a righteous act in the sight of the Lord your God.

Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is a fellow Israelite or a foreigner residing in one of your towns. Pay them their wages each day before sunset because they are poor and counting on it. Otherwise, they may cry to the Lord against you and you will be guilty of sin." I've always thought about the idea, let's say that you need to lend somebody money and that person brings you his cloak, his coat as collateral for the loan that you're making to him.

The ancient culture of the Israelites was so poor that a poor man might literally have nothing else to keep him warm other than his cloak. That was what kept him warm. He may have had no house, he may have had just a cloak to shelter him with. And yet, that's not particularly historically abnormal.

That's the definition of poverty throughout much of human history and that's the definition of poverty still today all around the world. All around the world, there are entire families that are living under a piece of tin in some slum somewhere. All around the world, there are entire families who literally don't have a roof over their head.

So, we're so embarrassingly rich that we automatically take our minds directly to our nice, comfortable suburban house with central air conditioning and central heating and that's what we think should be the goal. And yet, if you just drive down the streets of your town, you'll find homeless people who all of a sudden find themselves, "Hey, I can't make it anymore.

I need a roof over my head." And if you start working with people who've had life smack them in the face, then you quickly find out that having a roof over your head is actually really important. So, I think all people should set a goal to own a dwelling place from the earliest age of life all the way to the end of life.

And that dwelling place should be something that you own, that you own free and clear so that you will never be in such a vulnerable position as to be curled up on the side of the road with nothing but a cloak over your head. The dwelling place, what would be some examples?

Well, it can be anything and the specific example would change based upon who you are, where you're from, what's available to you, the city that you're in, things like that. I'm open to anything from a simple tent that you could set up in a park or in the local woods and live in that would keep you the rain off of your head.

I'm open to all kinds of vehicles. We can do van life, we can have an RV, we can have a sailboat, we can have a little cabin in the woods that's kind of a backup plan. I'm open to simple homes, small apartments, small condos in different places. I'm open to even, again, big homes and just normal sized financial life.

Anything is valuable. But the goal is that you have a place that you could retreat to and/or just live in that is a dwelling place that is free and clear. When you think about the basic building blocks of life, this is fundamental. Your health, your ability to do work because of good health, that's what allows you to do work.

That's what allows you to generate income. And as we talked about in goal number one, get a job, once you have a job, you can fix most of your financial problems. Now, the next thing is having a roof over your head. Having a roof over your head keeps you alive, keeps you from being frozen in the cold or destroyed in the heat, keeps you out of the rain.

And these things basically allow you to live. And we can be thankful that most of us live in societies where there's resources for people who are homeless and people want to help us. But having your own place that you own free and clear that provides you with a place that you can dwell is really, really important.

If you will exercise this also as a strategy to control your expenses, it can add up enormously. I know when I was younger, I didn't think about living any kind of weird alternative lifestyle. I just thought about renting an apartment and buying a house. That was the extent of my ideas.

I didn't consider other alternative ideas. I had a friend of mine who would talk about, "I'm going to buy a sailboat and I'm going to anchor it for free out in the harbor, and I'm going to live on that." I never considered doing that, even though all around the world and all across the United States, people do that.

But I never considered doing it. I was pretty conventional in my thinking. And so because of that conventionality, I spent all kinds of money that, in hindsight, I didn't have to spend. I just didn't think of doing anything else. If you have a place that you can live rent-free, you can pile up money really quickly.

The median cost of renting in the United States right now, across all markets, seems to be about $2,000. Now, that's going to include, of course, bigger places, littler places, but the median cost of rent in the United States seems to be about $2,000, maybe different in your area. But just use that.

That adds up quickly. $2,000, $24,000 a year, that's a significant amount of money. Even at $1,000 a month, $12,000 a year, each and every year, every year that you're renting, that's quite a lot of money going out the door into someone else's pocket. What would it be like financially if you actually owned your dwelling place?

And what would it be like financially if you did that from the very beginning of your financial life? I believe that this approach is possible and should be a priority for all people, that you should focus on always owning a dwelling place free and clear. I'm not advising that all people should go out and build a tiny house or live in a van.

I'm not recommending that. But many people should do that. And at the very least, you should have a tiny house or have a tent or have a van that you could move into if you had to, if life went sideways, so that you could at least have a roof over your head and not genuinely be homeless.

So I'm going to talk... I've hopefully have underscored it. Understand, I'm going to give texture and I'm going to tell you why I think that there are many situations where you won't actually do these strategies. But being able to do the strategy will open your mind much more readily to when it's the right move and when it's not the right move with regard to your specific applications in life.

And it's my ambition, as it has been for a long time, to see even teenagers set up with their own dwelling place so that they're not entirely dependent on a system that makes it hard for them to get ahead. What are some of the options for a home, for a dwelling place?

Well, the obvious things are things like buying a house or buying an apartment to live in, buying a condo, something like that. These are all perfectly reasonable ways and are probably the ways that most people will ultimately wind up living. Most people who have money are not going to choose to live in a vehicle just for fun.

Houses are nice, they're comfortable, they're built for our comfort, so they're obviously good solutions for meeting our housing needs. But that's not the only option. There are all kinds of alternative dwellings that would provide the same basic function at a fraction of the cost, and yet allow you to quickly save money and get ahead.

Here on Radical Personal Finance in the archives, I've interviewed people who lived in pickup trucks. And today, it's just so much easier than when I started the podcast. Today, you can go on YouTube and you can find all kinds of people. And there's tons of people that live in the back of a pickup truck, live in a van, live in a car, live in a tent, live on a boat, live in pretty much anything, live in a bicycle camper, live nowhere, live in hotels.

You can find all kinds of people who have figured out various ways of making things work. And in many cases, they can stockpile money like crazy. Number of years ago, there was a YouTube guy who was a firefighter, and he lived in the back of his pickup truck. So he was earning all of his firefighter salary, was saving basically every dollar of it.

When he was on duty, of course, he was staying at the firehouse. When he wasn't on duty, he was staying in his pickup truck. And he was saving all of his money, and he was very quickly able to build a nest egg. I'm not sure what he has gone on to do with it, or if he's even talked about it.

But just imagine you're earning a healthy six-figure salary as a fireman, and you're saving all of it. Well, in two or three, four years, you're free of the system. You've got it stacked up. A number of years ago, I had a client of mine, listener of Radical Personal Finance, that did a similar thing.

He was working as a lineman, and he was living in his car. It's not the car I would live in, kind of joked about it, but he was living in a Honda Accord, big tall guy. He was working as a lineman, and he was basically putting every single dollar of his paycheck directly into Bitcoin.

Today, he's a Bitcoin bazillionaire with all of his money. His Bitcoin play worked out, and his entire pathway was the fact that he was living in his car. Now, why don't more of us do that? Why don't more of us go and live in our cars? Why don't more of us go and do something?

Well, a couple of reasons. My reason for not doing it, was that I never had the idea. I just didn't conceive of it. It didn't seem like something I would do. It wasn't kind of my social class. That wasn't the kinds of things that people like me really did.

Today, after years of hearing other people, I would think more carefully about that, and consider going and doing some of those things. For many people, I think we're just held captive to our luxury lifestyle and to our wealth. Because again, most people would acknowledge that it's more comfortable to live in a traditional house than it is to live in a vehicle.

It's usually not until people get desperate enough or life kind of knocks them in the face where they go and do something different. I've read a lot of, a guy will get divorced, and he loses his house, he loses his money, he doesn't know what to do, and he goes and gets a box truck, and buys this old couple thousand dollar box truck, and basically moves into it with an air mattress, and he's got a dwelling place.

And all of a sudden then he discovers, "Hey, this is actually pretty cool. I kind of like this." And now he can live in this truck and create a comfortable scenario around him. And if you actually think about the amount of space that we actually exist in, it's pretty modest.

You could take a 16-foot box truck, and as many people will show you with their renovation work, you can make a luxury apartment in a 16-foot box truck. But you can basically park it in any parking space and have your own space. If you go back historically and you look at the size of a cabin that a guy would live in with his entire family, it's not much bigger than a box truck is.

And yet you have this thing that you can buy for a few thousand dollars that you can live in, that can be yours, that you can own, and you can live in rent-free. And again, many variations on this, a truck, a trailer, a boat, an RV, a van, those are all kind of road-mobile versions of it, sea-going versions of it, a shanty boat on a river, a houseboat, a sailboat for deep-water cruising.

There's all kinds of water-based options for this. If you're going back to the land, you can build a cabin, buy yourself a little scrap of land somewhere, build a cabin, have a tent, something that gives you the ability to live, but yet does it cheaply, is available to anybody.

And these lifestyles, while they're not as comfortable for many people as living in an apartment, they're not necessarily uncomfortable. With the miracles of modern technology, it's more comfortable to live in a tent or live in a boat than it ever was. If you were to go back, and let's say you were going to go to someplace where there's a strong history of this, narrowboating in the United Kingdom, for example, and you were to go and live in a narrowboat 50 years ago, you wouldn't have very many modern conveniences.

You would have a coal stove to keep you warm. You would have a kerosene stove to cook on. It just wasn't nearly as comfortable as it is today. Today, you would, of course, get yourself a nice battery bank system that you could charge from various places. This allows you to run all your electronics, run lights, things like that super easily.

You have all kinds of ways to cook, all kinds of fuels, all kinds of things that make cooking pretty simple, all kinds of ways to have entertainment, communications. Everything is pretty easy today with all of these modern technologies. So why don't we do more of them? Again, ideas, or we're just captive to our wealth and luxury, or to other people's opinions of us.

This would be, as someone who's influenced by other people's opinions of me, probably unduly so, this would also be something that would affect me. I would say, "Well, I don't want to be like that because I don't want to be unconventional," which is really silly. But in today's world, one of the benefits is I see a lot of people who've come up with various unconventional ways to do it, but yet make it really cool and classy, and make it really attractive.

If you put the right filter on your tent or your van life, you can have a monster following because you show the good side of it, and then just ignore the not-so-good side of it in your public postings. I'm glad that people are finding this and people are discovering this, and I want to encourage this.

So the idea for you, or for me, or for our 15-year-old nephew, would be to say, "What would it look like in your context for you to own a dwelling place free and clear?" I would love it for us to do more of that in the conventional space. In the archives of Radical Personal Finance, I've interviewed home builders, people who teach people how to build homes using simple technologies.

Once again, we live in a time of embarrassment of riches. If you live in a place where you're not restricted by building codes, pretty simple for you to go and build a structure for yourself. All kinds of neat technologies using very sustainable building practices to just build a structure, and you can do this for a few thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.

In some places, you can do things like shed conversions. A lot of people have done this really successfully. They'll go and buy a pre-manufactured shed that you can save some thousands of dollars for, maybe tens of thousands, bring that in, that can work within your local coding regulations, and then you just go ahead and finish it off, insulate it nicely, make it comfortable, bring in that mixture of technologies that I described that make life really doable.

And if you can deal again with occupancy permits and find a little place to put it, you can have your own dwelling that will keep the roof off of your head and allow you to build from using something like a shed conversion. You can also then look at the vehicle place.

I've seen teenagers who have worked with their parents and done something like build their own tiny house on a trailer. And the idea is on a trailer, Junior can tow this thing to college and he has his house to live in. Some people will do this with a vehicle.

If it were me, if I were a single guy, I would myself live full-time in a truck camper. It's the best kind of lifestyle that I know of that I like. I would have a truck camper. Whenever you want it off the truck, you just take it off, you set it in a friend's yard or rent a little space behind someone's house and give you a livable, basically a hard-sided tent that you can live in on the ground.

Or whenever you want to move it, you pop it on the truck and you have that. You want to do stealth camping, you can do stealth camping. You have all the modern amenities, everything is ready for you. And you can get into that lifestyle for some, again, under five figures for an older used model that's sufficient, or of course, some tens of thousands of dollars for newer, more modern gear.

All of that's available. I like that setup more than I like van camping, although I acknowledge that they all have an option. And so if you work with your teens and you help them develop some kind of housing solution, it could be a boat. I don't need to keep repeating all these options.

They could have something for them and they would have some kind of backup. I even think this matters just in terms of choosing a car. I recently was advising a young person on buying a vehicle and this person was wanting to upgrade. She wanted to upgrade from a car that she had that she felt was too small and she wanted to get a midsize SUV.

And I pleaded with her. I said, "Listen, what's the point of the midsize SUV? Why don't you want a minivan?" And I said, "The minivan would give you, of course, all these other benefits. And one of them is that you now have something that you can sleep in, that you could travel in.

It's super comfortable." I've spent at least two weeks, not months, but at least a couple of weeks living in a minivan. Kind of just the standard issue minivan is super comfortable way to camp in. You can fit, without any modifications, without building anything, you can fit a twin-size mattress in a minivan.

And the great thing about it, it's heated, it's cooled. If you need to run the engine overnight, it costs probably $15 or $20 of gas to run the engine overnight for cooling or for heating. It's simple, it's easy, it's straightforward. It just is a wonderful way to travel having a mattress in the back of your minivan.

It's not quite as sexy in your pictures as our friends who have a beautiful 1957 Vanagon Volkswagen camper, but it's the same basic idea. Just toss a bed in the back of a van and boom, you're on the road. You've got it. If I had a college-bound daughter and she wanted a bigger vehicle, I would try to get her a minivan because at the end of the day, if you need a roof over your head and you need a place to sleep comfortably, you can sleep comfortably in the minivan.

It provides you with all of these benefits. One time I did this for a trip. I had a super fast trip that I needed and there weren't a lot of great hotel options and I was going to be driving a ton. I flew into a city. I rented a minivan.

Specifically in that case, because I didn't have storage space, I rented a Dodge Grand Caravan. The important thing there is that it's called Chrysler now. Anyway, it was whatever the version of. The important thing about that vehicle is simply that they have their stow-and-go seats. All the seats go flat so you can get a rental car and then you just fold all the seats down and you've got a completely flat floor.

Drove to Walmart, bought an air mattress, bought a carbon monoxide detector. I think I bought a sleeping bag and I stayed in the van for three days, did my enormous amount of driving and it was so much better than a hotel because I didn't have to plan ahead of where I was going to stay.

So I could just pull over, stay at the rest area, shower up at a truck stop and then move on and I didn't have to plan my schedule out all around where I could find a Holiday Inn Express in the middle of nowhere. And so it's totally doable. And you could do it in smaller cars, obviously.

I've done it in a Prius. I really like a Prius, but it's totally fine to do it. It's nice to do it in something like a minivan. I think though we probably should aim higher than just a vehicle. I think it's perfectly fine for people to have a vehicle and it's worth considering, but it's probably going to make more sense to have a bigger vehicle with more capacity, more comfort.

And here again, if we can find the right solution, it can really work out well. Years ago, I used to read a blog by a guy named Tynan, T-Y-N-A-N. He still blogs, but for years he lived in an RV. And he was one of the early guys of living in this relatively small RV that he had completely remodeled inside, made it super attractive.

And he lived right in the middle of a city, a very expensive city. And he just rented a parking space for his RV, lived right in the middle of everything, but was able to do it exceedingly inexpensively and yet do it in extreme comfort. And so having some form of an RV or a sailboat on the dock or something like that, I think is probably a better thing to aim for, for many people.

Obviously, we want to quickly as possible move up to bigger dwelling places. So I think that ideally the goal should be to purchase a house, purchase a home, a specific sticks and bricks house that you pay for and that you own. I intend in a separate podcast in this series to talk about owning a paid-for house.

And I think that this goal of owning a paid-for house is accessible for more people than think it's accessible for. More of us can do it, we just don't have someone telling us we should do it. And I think it's accessible for young people to buy houses, but I also am aware that it's not universally popular...

Sorry, not universally possible. It's not possible everywhere to own free and clear a dwelling, not for everyone. More possible for more people in more places than you might imagine, but it's certainly not the case for all people. There's a big difference between buying your own house free and clear in South Bend, Indiana versus Miami, Florida.

Those are two very different places. And so it's not accessible for everyone, but it should still be a goal. And even if you are living a conventional lifestyle, you have a traditional home that you live in, you have a mortgage, and that's what's working for your family, you're not going to change out of that anytime soon.

Even if that's you, and you're living that kind of conventional lifestyle, totally fine, you should still have some kind of dwelling place that you own free and clear, so that if your current lifestyle collapsed on you, you'd have something to fall back on. My kind of standard suggestions, the simplest for this is a genuine livable tent, something like a wall tent.

Think in your mind of what they use out in the mountain west of the United States, a nice canvas wall tent that you would see at elk camp, something like that, that you paid a few thousand dollars for, that you have available to you. If your life fell apart, you keep it inside, keep it in storage.

If your life fell apart and you had to move out, it's a lot easier to go to a friend and say, "Hey, listen, things are bad right now. Could I set up my tent in your backyard or on the back part of your farm or on some vacant land that you have?

Could I set up my tent and be there for a couple of months while I figure out the next step?" That's an easier plan for your friend to say yes to versus, "Hey, can my children and I move into your living room and sleep on your couches?" That's harder to say yes to.

But if you have your own dwelling that provides you with that, then you've got a place to go that you could retreat to. With the combination of all the stuff that we use, you can shower at the gym, you can get water from your friend's garden hose, you've got your Jackery power bank or whatever it is that you gav for electricity to run your cell phone charger and run your Starlink internet connection, you'll be able to stay out of debt, you'll be able to not face rental costs, you'll be able to put your family back together because you own a dwelling place.

You can move up from there. You might have an RV, but make sure that you own your RV. Don't just buy it on payments. Own your RV. I've worked with families over the years, had significant financial problems, find out they got an RV, great. Move into the RV. Sell the house, get a job, fix the problems, go traveling for a bit.

You could live pretty inexpensively in an RV. And if you've got a good place to park it, it can provide a valuable backup situation for you. That's why I love RVs so much. You could do this with simply purchasing an apartment or a house in another place. There are lots of places around the world, maybe not where you live right now, but there's lots of places around the world where you could purchase a house there, or you could purchase a home there.

Sorry, an apartment there, that's what I was trying to say. You could purchase an apartment there and have it as a backup. All across the United States, once you got out of the major downtown markets, you can purchase homes, cabins, apartments very inexpensively for five figures, low five figures in some cases.

And so you may not want to live in that particular little town in the Midwest or that particular little town in upstate New York all the time, but having a place that you could go to if you had to, that would really be beautiful. You can go to Italy and purchase yourself one of these one-euro homes that's available and put eight or 10,000 or 20 or $30,000 into renovating it.

You may not want to live there all the time, but having that home that you own could be really valuable to you. You might get an IKEA house in Japan, one of those free and super cheap, empty, vacant houses that they're giving away with Japanese depopulation out in the countryside of Japan.

Or you might just keep the trailer that your grandmother left to you and have it. You figure out the individual application of it. My point is you're going to be better off if you have a dwelling place that you can live now and you can eliminate the cost of renting and you can provide a roof over your family's home.

And if it doesn't work in any creative way for you to live in an alternative dwelling place now, and you have to live in a conventional lifestyle with a mortgage, with debt, it'll be valuable peace of mind for you to have some kind of dwelling place that you could retreat to if your life fell apart.

You don't need to live an unconventional lifestyle forever, but if you'll live an unconventional lifestyle for a few years, you'll probably be decades ahead. That's one of the themes of what I'm trying to talk to you about. I talked about this most on live on half your income, spend half, save half.

If you can do that for a few years, you'll be a few years behind your friends in terms of their consumption patterns, but you'll be decades ahead of them. And these tools that I'm describing in this show about own a dwelling place free and clear, this is similar. You may be a few years behind your friends who automatically move into big rental apartments with beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows that they spend thousands of dollars a month to maintain, and then they wake up at 10 years later and wonder, "Why am I not getting ahead?" But if you'll be the guy when it's easy for you to live in the truck camper parked behind someone's house for two or three years and bank 100% of your pay because you eat at the job site and everything else is provided for you, then you can waltz right into the downtown area in the town that you really want to live in and go ahead and stroke a check and pay cash for the really great family home that will then be your next instantiation of owning a dwelling place free and clear.

I don't want anybody to be forced into homelessness. True homelessness is brutal, makes it very difficult to be productive, to keep a job, any of that stuff. So you've got to plan ahead and recognize, "I could be forced into that. So how can I not get forced into it?

Well, I need to own a home or a dwelling place free and clear." Thanks for listening to today's podcast. I hope it's stimulating, hope it's enjoyable, and I hope that you've gained something from it. Don't keep yourself locked into a conventional financial system-only mindset. Nothing wrong with the conventional path, but sometimes it pays to be unconventional or, dare I say it, radical.

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