When you're in winter's favorite town, the snow-covered mountains surround you, a historic Main Street charms you, and every day brings a new adventure. Welcome to Park City, Utah, naturally winter's favorite town. Join the experience at visitparkcity.com. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insights, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, I'm your host, and today we're gonna deal with one of those topics that is absolutely a core component of financial freedom, as we continue our podcast series called Financial Goals That Everybody Should Set. And today I wanna try to persuade you to set a goal to buy a debt-free house.

And ideally, to buy your first house debt-free, meaning with cash. Now, for many of my listeners, it'll be too late for that, because you've already bought a house, and you bought a house with a mortgage, and that's fine. We can talk at another time about the value of paying off a mortgage.

But if you have children, or if you have grandchildren, or you have nieces and nephews, or if you have young people that you like, I wanna persuade you to try to talk to them to set a goal of paying cash for their first house. In the previous podcast episode in this series, we talked about the value of buying a house, and how buying a house can so many times form a foundation to your financial life that is enormously powerful, and it can be an incredibly valuable financial asset for you to own.

And I'm not saying that nobody should ever take out a mortgage. I think that buying a house with a mortgage is better than not buying a house at all. But the spirit of this podcast series is to say that a lot of times we can achieve the goals that we set for ourselves.

But one of the reasons we don't achieve more goals is because we don't have the creativity or the vision to set goals that we believe in, yet goals that are ambitious and take us to a higher level. And I believe this is one of those goals. And so I wanna persuade you, especially if you are young, I wanna persuade you to set this goal.

Now, this is not a goal that I had when I was younger, but I wish I had. And this is a goal that I wish to impart to my children because I believe it can provide a powerful foundation for a phenomenal life that really balances the needs of life, the experience of life, and building a positive lifestyle for yourself and for your family with long-term financial accumulation.

Years ago, I read a book by an author named Steve Maxwell, and the book was called "Buying a House Debt-Free." I interviewed Steven Maxwell on the podcast. So I will look up that podcast episode and link you back to the previous episode if you'd like to listen to the interview with him.

It was an okay interview. If my memory serves, it wound up being more personal rather than action-oriented, which is what I wanted to cover and what I still wanna cover. But in the book, "Buying a House Debt-Free," Maxwell describes the story from his family of how he inspired and taught his children to save money towards the purchase of a house.

And in fact, all of his sons, I think he has four sons, all of his sons during their 20s, before they were married, were able to pay cash for their first house. Some of them bought a house very early, some as young as 19 or 21. I think the latest of them bought a house at about age 29, and the price range of the houses varied from a little under $100,000 to one being somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 if my memory serves correctly.

And when I read that book, I realized that, wait a second, this is actually not that difficult of a formula, that many young people, if they were inspired and motivated and had a guide and a mentor to show them how, absolutely could save money and pay cash for their first house.

Let's go through a little bit of math so you understand it. Maxwell's basic formula that he taught his children was, number one, to work during school. They were a homeschooling family, they homeschooled all their children all the way through high school. And as part of their homeschooling, they would do their coursework probably in the morning, and then they encouraged all of their children to get jobs or to build businesses in the afternoon.

And by the way, as a homeschooling advocate, this has been one of my favorite reasons to homeschool. I think that the use of the extended school day is often enormously inefficient for young people, and we want to get some of that time back. And it's not hard at all to finish a standard school curriculum for a normal student in about three to four hours a day of actual work.

What happens is that most students spend eight hours of their day, and only three or four hours is actually, excuse me, most students who are going to school have eight hours of their day sucked up by their school obligations, but only about, say, three or four hours of it is actually productive.

When you're homeschooling, you can just do the productive three or four hours, and you can be done by noon. When I was younger, in my own family, we were homeschooled from 8 a.m. till noon, had some homework in the afternoon on occasion, but four hours a day of a focused student is pretty doable.

Now, if you're finished with school every day by noon, and you're an active young teenager, especially one who's able and willing to go and get a job or start a business, all of a sudden now you have a dramatically higher earning potential than many other students who have their entire day taken over by school obligations.

So let's figure out what the earning potential of a teenager might be, even if a teenager is earning a relatively basic wage. Now, I don't know exactly what number you want to choose for this, but I'm gonna use an average hourly earnings of about $15 an hour. I think that if you think of many "teenager jobs," someone manning an ice cream shop or working at a fast food restaurant, perhaps the starting wage might be $12 or $13 an hour in some areas.

Perhaps in some areas it may be $10 an hour. I doubt that in your area it's that. I would guess that in most cases, $15 an hour would be a fairly reasonable number to use. At any rate, I'm not going to increase to account for cost of living increases and inflation or skill advancement or promotions.

I'm just gonna use a flat earnings figure of $15 an hour. Let's assume that a student is able to work during school. Let's pretend that you homeschooled and your student was done by 12 or one o'clock. And let's assume that your student could do four hours a day of work every afternoon from say one o'clock p.m.

to five o'clock p.m. Well, four hours a day, five days a week, that's 20 hours per week. If someone is earning $15 an hour at 20 hours per week, that's a gross income of $300 per week. If that continues 52 weeks per year with no vacations, that would be $15,600 per year.

So at four hours a day, five days a week, weekends totally free, we're at $15,600 per year. Take off a week or two of vacation, assume that there's no paid vacation. Let's just round that to $15,000 per year. Now, what if you did that all during high school? Well, assuming again, no increases, $15,000 per year, over the course of four years would be a total earnings of $60,000 during high school.

Let's assume we continue that during high school years and the first four years after high school, college years. Well, now we're at about $120,000 of income earned from work, that is quite a lot of money. Now, what are the necessary expenses of this person? Well, here's where things can go very differently depending on the vision of the young person.

If the young person has a vision for staying at home, living rent-free with mom and dad, keeping expenses very modest, spending only the necessary amount of money to live a reasonable lifestyle, then it's not unreasonable for a student who may be 20, 22 years old to have a hundred and something thousand dollars saved, even with just basic earnings.

What does a teenager need to spend money on? He might need to purchase a little bit of clothing for himself, assuming that his parents aren't giving him the money for that. Obviously, different people have different clothing budgets. I would think that somewhere between 500 and $1,000 a year would be a very reasonable budget for a young person to be spending on clothing.

The teen is undoubtedly gonna have some expenses for social activities. When I was in college, my budget was about $200 a month for social activities. So let's call it two to $3,000 a year for social activities for a frugal teen. Let's assume that the teen needs some transportation. Ideally, he or she should wait and not buy a car if it can be avoided, if he can arrange his lifestyle so that he doesn't need a car, that would be ideal.

But if you need some wheels, four or $5,000 for a reasonable vehicle, I think would be fine. There's gonna be some driving expenses, the insurance expenses, and then we move to things like educational expenses, which I'm gonna deal with separately. The point is that even a student who's working a modest amount, if he has a vision to save money towards a specific goal, a big goal that will motivate him to accumulate money and continue to express frugality, then accumulating $100,000 is not that difficult, even just on 20 hours per week.

Now, let's assume that we wanted to increase it a little bit or adjust the numbers a little bit. Let's assume that this teen were willing to work more than what I've described. Let's keep four hours a day during the school year and a full 10-hour day on Saturday as our work schedule.

I don't think this is unreasonable, by the way. At one point, when I was in college for a year and a half, about a year, during the school year, I had three different jobs and I did a schedule something like this. My first job was an on-campus work-study job where I just had some random bird brain job on campus where I worked for a few hours a day and did that about four days a week.

Then on Thursday nights, Friday nights, and Saturday nights, I had a job running a bicycle rickshaw where I was pedaling a bicycle taxi in the downtown area where I went to school. Thursday nights, I would go out from about six o'clock till 10 or 11 o'clock. Friday nights, I would work from about five or 6 p.m.

till about 2 a.m., and then Saturday night, same thing, about five or 6 a.m. till about 2 a.m. And then on Saturdays during the day at that season of life, I had a construction job where I would work from about 8 a.m. till about 4 p.m. Then I would take a shower, change, and go to my next job on Saturday night.

And I did that during the school year for pretty much an entire school year. So I've done it. I had Sundays off. That was when I did homework on Sunday afternoons, went to church on Sunday mornings, had plenty of time, other time during the week to do some homework on Mondays through Wednesdays, and it worked.

It was okay, it was fine. So my point is I don't think that working 30 hours a week is an unreasonable number to use. So let's assume that our young student works 30 hours a week during the school year. School year is normally about 40 weeks per year, earning $15 an hour.

During the summer, let's assume that he kicks it up and works 45 hours a week, either five nine-hour days or some eight-hour days during the weekend and some Saturday work, and again, earning $15 an hour. So his total annual earnings in that scenario would be $26,100. Do that over four years, you're at about $104,400.

Do it over eight years, you're at $208,800. So I think it's perfectly reasonable that over the course of about eight years, a motivated, focused young man or woman could attend to his or her studies, could work, and still accumulate $100,000 or $200,000 to purchase some form of a starter house.

It's a totally doable thing. I haven't in any way made an unreasonable calculation. I think that this is the most basic reasonable thing that I could do. For example, I didn't take any creative license or teach any courses on how to get paid a lot more than $15 an hour.

But I think that many, if not most, motivated young people with a little bit of coaching could certainly earn more than $15 an hour. If you develop some academic skill in an area and you start tutoring, I think easily you could earn double $15 an hour even as a high school student or a college student doing tutoring.

I haven't focused on any skill acquisition to where you actually develop and build skills. And over the course of an eight-year calculation, I think that's a little ridiculous. I haven't shown you earning any kinds of certifications. One thing that Maxwell's children did really well was they focused a lot on computer certifications, IT certifications.

And so his children developed skills taking IT certifications. And then they actually turned around and the young people themselves developed their own academy, teaching the necessary knowledge so that their students could earn their own IT certifications. One of Maxwell's daughters became an accomplished author and wrote quite a number of children's books that were marketed through their family's overall plan, their overall business and their brand.

So there are quite a lot of things that young people can do that I haven't taken into account. And by the way, I didn't take into account even starting earlier. I assume that we're dealing here with a ninth grader, but I don't see any reason why seventh and eighth graders shouldn't have age appropriate jobs, especially that can lead towards them developing advanced skills.

So if a teenager has a goal of accumulating a significant amount of money, a hundred or $200,000 to buy a house, it's very reasonable that that goal could be accomplished within six, eight, 10 years, even if he's not earning an extravagant amount of money. So why don't most teens accomplish this?

Quite simply, in my experience, they don't have the goal. Instead, they look around and they see cool things to buy and they start spending money on cool things. They see fancy sneakers that are gonna give them social status and they buy them. They see cool hobbies that often wind up sucking significant amounts of money out of their budget.

They buy fancy stuff that's not necessary, fancy cars, fancy gear, engage in all kinds of things that suck money out of the bank account. And then often, because teenagers don't have a big goal, if they have a choice between working for money they don't need and hanging out, doing something fun and interesting, then it's easy to choose the thing that is fun and interesting rather than the thing that is hard, namely work.

So understand this clearly. If a teenager has a clear and compelling goal that has a big price tag, a price tag such as paying cash for a house, then he has a reason now to earn more money and to spend less money. And as a parent, you can support him in that process by helping him to develop his income, helping him to live very low cost by providing food and shelter for him.

And you can be the catalyst for his establishing himself in a strong position as a young man or for your daughters as young women. Now, why might somebody want to actually achieve and accomplish this goal? Well, first and foremost, I think that it's transformative in terms of changing how somebody views his or her capacities in life.

When you set a big goal and you achieve it, it transforms fundamentally who you are. Longtime listeners of "Radical Personal Finance" have heard me many times tell the story of how I paid off my student loans before I graduated from college. I feel a little ashamed to keep telling the story, but you can tell that it was a transformative experience in my life.

I read Dave Ramsey's book. After a few readings, I said, you know what? Dave's right, I'm gonna pay off my debt. And so I set a goal. I had no clue how I would accomplish it, but I said, I wanna see if I can pay off my student loans before I graduate.

I still had a year and a half of college to pay for, so I needed to prioritize finishing my expensive tuition payments, but I wanted to save money and pay off my school loans. So I set a goal and I did it. Two weeks before I graduated, I paid off my student loans.

That experience transformed my life. It taught me so much about my capacity, lessons that to this day I still hearken back to in my own thinking and in my own planning. Having the big goal gave me the reasons to organize my schedule, organize my time, and it started to cause things to happen for me.

For example, I switched from a low paying job that consumed a lot of hours to a higher paying job that consumed fewer hours of my time and paid me more money. That put me on the pathway towards achieving that goal. When I set the goal, then I had to figure out how to go to class and keep my job.

I had a 40 hour a week job. And so I went to my boss and I said, would you be willing to allow me to work flexible hours? And he said, well, show me how you can do that. Show me how you could go to school, take your classes and accomplish your work that I'm paying you for.

So I had to sit down and create a time budget and I made a spreadsheet and I accounted for every hour of my weekly schedule. And what I found out was when I made a weekly schedule that included my classes, homework time for each class, driving back and forth, time for social activities, time for work, all of the stuff that I needed to do, there was plenty of time for me to do all of those things without any problems.

So I worked 40 hours a week. I took 19 hours of class. I got straight A's. I saw my family. I went to church. I had socializing time built in on Friday night and Saturday night. And I studied on Sunday afternoons and it all was fine. And to this day, that is a lesson that I cannot get away from.

In addition, things started to happen because I had a clear goal that really helped. My boss gave me just free money, wrote me a scholarship and said, "Hey, here's extra," I can't remember if it was three or $4,000, "and here's some extra money to help you in your pursuit of your goals." And so things started to happen.

It was a transformative experience because it was the first time I set a big goal and accomplished it. Now imagine you going through that. Imagine your son, your daughter going through that at a young age. And imagine now the confidence that comes from knowing, yeah, I got this. I got this, even at a young age.

See, young people, we spend all of our time focused on academics, which I'm hugely in favor of, but not to the exclusion of finances. I think the finances can be really transformative. Now, in addition, imagine the security and the options that having this money opens up for your child while he or she is saving the money on the pathway to buying a house.

Instead of being flat broke in high school, your child or you or whomever you're engaged with is accustomed to having thousands or tens of thousands of dollars accumulated. That completely transforms the psychology of a teenager to know that I did this. I earned and saved these tens of thousands of dollars.

Imagine, as a young man or a young woman, you got $100,000 in your bank account. You're 21 years old, 23 years old, 25 years old. You're now in the top quartile, top 40% or 30, I don't know the number off the top of my head. You're in the top part of society.

Imagine the other things that are available to you that weren't before. Now, if you want to move to take a better job, you don't have to go and borrow money from dad to move. Now, if there's a really great school that you want to go to, but you don't quite have all the money, you've saved the money.

Now, if there's an experience that you think is worth it and it requires you to buy some plane tickets or whatever it is, you've got it. Now, if you wanna start a business, you've got the money. Saving for a house doesn't mean that you actually have to be the one to buy the house in the year planned.

The pathway towards the accomplishment of financial goals often has a lot of twists and turns. So maybe your 19-year-old is earning $15 an hour, but he realizes, you know what? If I bought my own truck and my own equipment, I could start this little part-time business here. And my hourly wage doing that would be 30 bucks.

And I could double my income by just spending $7,000 on gear and equipment. There's a great investment. Or imagine that your teen comes across something really cheap. Maybe it's an antique that she finds at a local store. Maybe it's vintage clothing that she rustles up in a local shop or finds at yard sales.

Maybe he's flipping cars and gets a car dealer license and buys cheap cars and starts flipping them. Now we can start to grow the money through investment because he has investment capital saved. And he's not just now entirely dependent on a job to accomplish it. What I'm trying to demonstrate with the income earning numbers is that it's a reasonable to set a goal to save 100 or $200,000 for a house.

That's a reasonable goal to set, even for a teenager. It's a big goal, but it's a reasonable goal because it can be done on earnings. But ideally, as your teen accumulates that capital, now he has a reason to learn about the management of capital, how to make it grow, how to invest it.

Now let's move now to the actual accomplishment of the house, purchasing the house. One of the things that I, is my favorite thing about Steve Maxwell's book, "Buying a House Debt-Free" is that his sons were able to buy a house before getting married. Now imagine how joy-filled you would be as a parent to know that your son has purchased a home that he can bring his bride into and that their marriage starts on a financially stable foundation.

When you're old and rich, having a mortgage on the house doesn't matter all that much. You've got the money, you can pay for it, you have other assets. But when you're young and just getting started and you're building a family, there's so much uncertainty in that time. And there's often so much stress that is incurred by having a lot of bills.

But I can't imagine a young person or a young couple who, if they didn't have rent and they didn't have a mortgage payment, I can't imagine anyone who can't make it in that circumstance because paying for housing is usually our biggest budget category. So now you have opportunity, you can do things you otherwise wouldn't do, and you have stability.

And that's what we want. I personally think that young people should have a goal to get married young. I think early 20s is ideal. Somewhere between 20, 22, 23, hopefully before 25. I think early 20s is the ideal time to get married. And so, and also I think that's a great time to start having children.

The current plan we're on of waiting until 33 to marry and then planning to have a baby at 37 just ain't working for most people. And that's a very painful reality. So when you listen to young people and you say, why aren't you having children? Why aren't you married?

Again and again and again, they say money. Now, as you've heard from past podcast episodes, I don't believe that money is a legitimate objection to getting married or having children. I think that, but I understand that people say that it is. So let's get rid of that problem and let's buy a house.

Let's make sure that a young man is able to have a paid off house that he can bring his bride home to. And he can do it at 19 or he can do it at 21 or he can do it at 24. It's a doable goal. And that's something that will build the non-financial side of life in a really powerful way, much more so than just the financial side of life.

I want to pivot now to a couple of additional points and provisos that I think need to be heard. Don't get too bogged down in the actual dollars and cents calculations. I'm giving you a simple example to try to demonstrate to a teenager in a way that I will with my own children, say you can make this happen.

Now in your area, there may not be any $100,000 houses available. Your child may wind up going and living in San Francisco and that's fine. One of the reasons you start working towards a goal is because the clarity that comes with it can often make things happen serendipitously. I can well imagine a young man who saved $130,000, but who needs $250,000 to buy a reasonable house, being given a gift straight up of cash by his grandfather who says, "John, I've been watching you work and work towards this goal for eight years.

Here's 70,000, here's $100,000 to get you moved into that house." That's fantastic. I can also well imagine a young couple saying, "You know what, we've saved $150,000 and it just doesn't seem like we should be living in a $150,000 house, but there's this nice 250 or $300,000 house over here.

Let's go ahead and make a big giant down payment and get that thing and then pay it off really aggressively." That would be fine. In addition, I think it's also reasonable that this money could be used for other purposes, but having a goal, a goal that is clear and simple, not something fuzzy like, "Hey, someday you'll be 22 years old and you'll want to start a business." No, for young people especially, the goal is buy a house.

It's simple, clear. And when you get to buy a house debt-free, excuse me, buy a house debt-free, it's simple and clear. That means that it's probably gonna be able to be executed on. And then when you get to 24 years old or 27 years old and you're trying to make those decisions, you can enter into a fresh counseling process to decide what should we actually do at this point in time.

Having a big goal allows you to save the money that opens up other things in your life. Now, as I wrap up this show, I want to give one more caution or warning. I have a concern that the clarity and power of this particular goal may be so compelling that it may keep some students from pursuing things that have a longer term, higher payoff.

I can well imagine one of my children latching on to the power and the beauty of this particular goal and saying, "I'm gonna do it. After all, no one does it, I'm gonna do it." And I can well imagine one of my children becoming obsessed with earning as much money now at the age of 15 as possible.

That happens frequently. The problem is that things that a 15-year-old often does to earn money may keep the 15-year-old from doing the things that could result in earning a lot of money down the road. I pay a lot of attention to the teenagers in my life, and I like to see a teenager working a job.

I think that's great. I think there are things that you learn about life and about yourself, working a job that you don't learn in other ways. And I think it's especially important that teenagers go out and get their own jobs and that they're the ones who choose the jobs that they're doing with parental permission and that they earn their own money.

That's a really transformative experience in a young man or woman's life. However, I get really concerned if a teenager is working a low-level dead-end job for a long time. Now, I don't mean to be insulting. I mean to be practical and honest with what I'm saying. Recently, I was talking to a 17-year-old, and for almost a year, she had been working at a Chick-fil-A just as a front-counter service order-taker, and she was really enjoying her work.

It was a great social outlet for her. She was making some money. Great. Then the Chick-fil-A closed for renovations, and she went and got a job at Dunkin' Donuts. And I opened my mouth and said, "Listen, I'm glad you've been working "at this job for a year. "I think that's wonderful.

"I'm gonna be really sad if, for the next year, "you're still working in fast food." Why? Because she has enormous potential in academics and in the development of a career and high-value skills that would be totally wasted if she works in a fast food restaurant for the coming years.

Now, the good thing is, I think, I hope, that she has learned that, that by interacting with some of her coworkers who are in a different social circle and a different social class than her, she's realizing that this might not be where I wanna be for 10 years, even though I can make 13.25 an hour, that, really, I wanna be somewhere different.

And, by the way, also wonderfully, she got the job, made thousands of dollars, lost it all through frivolous living, and now has the pain of being broke. So that's a really good lesson for a teenager to learn. All of that is good. So I don't wanna say don't work a fast food restaurant job, but I wanna always caution against an excessive focus on making money now as compared to seeing the long-term, seeing the big picture.

I believe that a motivated teenager with academic ability who focuses on his or her academics will go much, much farther, much, much faster than someone who goes out and gets a job to start making some basic wage. And this would be where I significantly disagree with Steve Maxwell and his book.

Maxwell focuses a lot on homeschooling, on helping your children to be self-employed, and actively discourages his children, in the book, from attending college. I respect that position, but I think it's probably not the right one for most people. It worked out well for his sons. They all developed independent businesses, they became self-employed, they all met wonderful women, they all married and had children, but it didn't work out exactly the same for his daughters.

They're all very accomplished. One is an author, others are in business. At least one has bought her own house. But two of his daughters, a few years ago, went ahead and went to college later in their 20s. And as far as I can tell from their public family blog, his three daughters, though they have money, remain unmarried.

And I would guess that they would probably all desire to be married. And so we just need to be thoughtful and we need to make certain that we don't stay doggedly on one course just for this one goal. I can envision a super motivated teenager, working, working, working, working, 23 years old, buys a house, working, working, working, but now all of a sudden didn't get the academic credentials that really would have really been helpful.

Or I can see the same young man or woman may have been so focused on saving money for a house that he or she didn't wanna spend money on college and now missed out on some of the social connections or other life experiences that would have been really useful.

So set the goal, but be open to counsel and be open to insight. As for me, with my children, I want them to set the goal, but I want them to never turn away from academic accomplishment if they're academically oriented. Not all people are academically oriented. And so that doesn't need to be universal.

But if a young man or woman is academically oriented, then I think that should be a primary focus, even if it means a slower path towards accumulating money for a house. So I hope this gentle caution comes through in an appropriate way. Set a goal of saving money for a house, but don't work, work, work at a fast food job and not study for a math test, when in reality you could be a world-class mathematician.

And by the way, there's math competitions out there where literally they'll pay you $100,000 for winning them. At least in many, some of them are tens of thousands, but they're out there. So you can earn money on academics. There's competitions for every science, for every skill. If you're a great writer, submit your work to essay contests.

You can make money on your academics. And that's to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of dollars you can gain in college scholarships by being highly qualified with your academics or with your athletics or with some other area of talent. And don't be the guy who, and if you go through many years of school and you emerge in your mid or late 20s and you've got a medical degree or you've got a law degree and you only have $43,000 saved in your bank account, because, and you never had the money to pay cash for the house, guess what?

It's gonna be fine. You're going to be able to quickly buy your house when you are working as a doctor, as a lawyer, as an engineer, as a highly qualified high income earner. So be thoughtful about it in the fullness of time. Set the goal, inspire young people to do it, do the math with them, help them do it because that big goal will have a transformative effect on their life.

But recognize that some of these kinds of goals really need a little bit of thoughtfulness with it. I guess I'll give one more analogy here to try to emphasize this point. I would say that you should hold this goal similar to how you might hold a goal of getting married.

If a son or daughter of mine comes and says, "Dad, I wanna get married by 23 years old." I'm gonna say, "Absolutely, that's fantastic." But I don't want a 22 year old coming and saying, "Hey dad, I didn't find anyone who was really great, so here's just some random person that I'm gonna marry because the most important thing is me being married by 23." I would say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

It's fine to have a goal because if you have a goal of being married by 23, wonderful, that can be a transformative thing in your life. It causes you to say, "Well, how can I develop the qualities needed to attract a really high quality spouse? What characteristics do I need?

How do I need to present myself? Where am I gonna find said prospective spouse? I'm gonna do the work to meet that person. I'm gonna do the work to be prepared for marriage, to be mature, to be strong, to be attractive." All that stuff. The goal is fundamentally helpful and a good thing to set, but you don't get to 22 years and six months and just randomly go out and pick the first one that'll have you because that'll have a long-term negative impact on your life.

It's fine to sacrifice the goal of getting married at 23 if you're 22 and there's no good quality candidate. Much better to wait until you're 39 or 72 to marry and marry a really great spouse than to marry poorly at 22. So I would say by analogy, kind of a similar thing here.

Teach a young person to set the goal of paying cash for a house because it's a doable goal and it's a goal that will require a focus for a sustained focus and sustained effort for a long period of time, for five, 10, 15 years of work. But don't hold so doggedly to the goal that you just say, "I'm not gonna take this $100,000 out of my bank account and pay for law school when I really know that going to law school is a good idea for me because I have to buy the house." No, go to law school, get your legal certifications, then buy a house a few years later and take out a mortgage.

Hope that little caution there doesn't unravel everything that I said in the first part of the show, but I believe it is important that especially with something that is so significant as what I've described, that we just have a little carefulness in our application. Thank you for listening to today's podcast.

I'll be back with you soon. Hi, Derek Van Noolen from Freeway Honda. With over 200 Hondas available, we're dealing and get 2.9% APR limited term financing on select new 24 models. Had past credit problems? No problem. Come to Freeway Honda in the Santa Ana Auto Mall. ♪ Freeway Honda ♪