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Tap to learn more, or visit us at asuonline.asu.edu. It's Friday, and on Friday we do Q&A. Well, at least we're supposed to do Q&A. There in November, December, these Q&As were a little bit, shall we say, non-existent. But that changes today. Basically how it works, you get to call in and speak to me before we get to the phone lines, though.

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Start your search again, radicalpersonalfinance.com/P-A-L-A-D-I-N. I just did my whole intro with my mic muted. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the 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 I'm your host. It's Friday, and on Friday, we do Q&A. Basically, the way this works is for patrons of this show, one of the benefits of being a patron supporter of this show, I open up the phone lines to answer Q&A. We can talk about anything that anybody wants to talk to.

I don't restrict you on what you can talk to. I don't screen the calls other than taking a quick moment and finding out what people want to talk to. So if you've got a problem with me and you want to tell me about it, this is the place to do it.

Or if you want to come on and talk about, ask me a question, this is the way to do it. This is one of the best ways for you to actually be able to connect with me and to actually be able to answer me a question. I love doing these.

I use the patron system as a way of just simply making the calls manageable for myself. So if you'd like to get on one of these Q&A calls, sign up and become a supporting patron of the show. Basically, that's a way of your saying, "Hey, Joshua, we appreciate the work that you're doing.

We want to support you. We want to make sure that you know that we find value in it." So you can sign up for that at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. I've got three calls lined up, and let me see. Who do I want to go to first? I think let's go -- all right.

Let's go to Joshua in Oklahoma first. Joshua, welcome to the show. Let me know how I can serve you today, please. Sorry, I didn't unmute myself. Thank you for taking the call. I greatly appreciate everything that you have done over these past couple of years. I've been a long-time listener, so I'm glad I could help support you.

I passed the CFP exam back in -- last July, but I don't have the work requirement. And then so I've done -- I've tried to do a couple things, but I guess the hardest thing is what route I should take in terms of getting the experience so I would have the actual designation.

Why do you want to have the CFP designation? You know, I personally love following financial planning. I love financial planning. I would love to help other people with their finances and just be that sounding board to help people improve their financial lives. Do you want to do it as a business, or is this just something that you want to do as a way of serving your community?

Oh, that's a great question. I would say -- well, I've gone as a business. Because obviously there's a big difference between that, and it's going to indicate it. Yeah, definitely there is a huge difference. What is your professional background such that you went and sat and passed the CFP?

Because you're a weirdo. Like, that's not an easy thing to do. That's not like, "Hey, I'm going to go get a budget coaching designation." That's great to get a budget coaching designation, but that and the CFP are very different beasts. Yeah, so it stands from -- my college degree was in financial services, and then I ended up becoming an accountant, a corporate accountant.

So then I went back, and I was a relationship manager for a year. So I do have technically a year of experience. And then I do tax preparation during the spring tax filing season. So I have a little bit of a background to begin with. So you're working in -- the tax prep is like your own private, just on-the-side accounting business?

No, no. No, I actually work for -- I work for H&R Block. Okay. Okay. And not during tax season, are you working as a corporate accountant, or are you involved still on the personal finance side? I'm not doing anything right now. Okay, so you're working seasonally with H&R Block during tax season as a tax preparer and an accountant, but you'd like to adjust and bring in more financial planning into your area of work.

Is that an accurate statement? Correct. Accurate statement. Okay. Do you want to keep doing tax in the long term? Yeah, yeah, I like it. Yeah, I think it keeps me sharp. I think it's really useful. Does the CFP board not recognize -- do they recognize at all your work in tax for their experience requirements?

You know, that's a good question. I actually called someone this past week to find that out, and I have not heard back from her yet. But I know she was out on vacation, so that one I'll hopefully find out by tomorrow. So that would be the first question I would ask.

I don't remember the answer to that question. But if we were to -- and I'll look for a moment while we're speaking here and just see if I can answer it for you in a couple of minutes. But the first thing that I would look to answer is to understand if your accounting work actually would qualify you for the benefit as experience.

A lot of times this can actually work fine where accounting will satisfy your experience requirements in the area of tax. I've known a lot of accountants who've gone ahead and gotten a CFP designation, and they haven't necessarily gone and tried to work for a financial planning firm. They've just used some of their accounting work as that.

So I think that would be an important thing. I just pulled up here -- okay, so here's what they say on their website. Meet the experience requirement. "If a CFP certification indicates to the public your ability to provide financial planning without supervision, the CFP board requires you to have experience in the financial planning process.

Three years of full-time, relevant, personal financial planning experience or two years of apprenticeship experience that meets additional requirements is required." So qualifying experience includes activities involving the delivery of financial planning services. Experience can be gained in a number of ways, including personal delivery, supervision, and teaching. So all I did there was read a paragraph that didn't answer our question.

I don't know whether accounting would say. My guess is that it would account for your experience or it would partially account for your experience. If memory is right, you kind of submit, "Here's the work that I do. Here are the different aspects, and here's how it applies," and you do have to list that out.

So to me, the bigger question would be what kind of practice do you want to have because the reason the CFP board restricts the CFP designation to people with experience is simply because they want to make sure that people actually know what they're doing. And it doesn't sound like it's all that important to you to wave around your CFP designation.

It sounds like your main question is how do I figure out how to -- what kind of business to build. The major way that I would do that is I would take an apprenticeship role or an internship role. If you already are working and doing okay in terms of your plans working on a seasonal basis, working for H&R Block during the season, when that's done, you're relatively available, there's no reason why you can't do a six-month apprenticeship or internship program with a financial planning office.

And there's no reason why you can't actually do that with multiple offices. Depending on your income requirements, let me just ask, can you live on your H&R Block income that comes in just during season or do you also need to work during the other parts of the year in order to create enough income?

I will need to work the other parts of the year. Okay. Do you need to earn a lot or do you need to earn some? Just some. Because somebody like you can come in and having the experience as a -- having the knowledge as a certified financial planner, you can easily be a tremendous asset to an active, practicing financial advisor.

You can work in their office as a back office para-planner. You can help them. And that can certainly be a paid occupation. It's very nice if you can offer your services for free. And I think you should consider that as a way of opening up your mindset a little bit.

So think about this. If you look around your town and you say, "What are the financial planning firms here in my town that I admire and that I think are doing a really good job?" You can just simply walk into any of those firms, introduce yourself, say, "Hey, my name is Joshua.

I am looking for an internship. I work most of the time -- I work during season as a tax preparer. I'd like to transition over into financial planning. I have a CFP designation. I have a degree in financial services. But I'm testing out a few different businesses and business models.

Would you be open to having me here as an intern to help you?" And when you use a word like that, you can open up any door anywhere, and you'll get a reception. So that's how I would start. Now, there's plenty of money to pay for good quality help.

So you can earn an income. Intern doesn't have to mean unpaid. That should mentally be a way where you think about doing it on an unpaid basis so that you can open the door. And that allows you to go to any firm and feel like you can go in and get an inside view.

In those interviews and in those discussions, I would use it as twofold. Number one, I would use that as an information-gathering interview where you are talking to financial advisors. And let's say that I were a financial advisor and you're in my office making me that proposition. I would immediately start asking you some questions.

And I would say, "Well, what kind of work do you want to do? Who do you want to practice with? Do you want to focus and specialize in a certain area?" And you would tell me more about that. And then you would say, "Well, if I didn't want to hire you or bring you into my office or didn't have any opportunities," then you would ask me, you would say, "Do you know anyone who does?" And that's going to be your best source of referrals in your local areas from financial advisors.

So I would say to you, "Well, I don't particularly do that. I don't need anybody right now. My practice doesn't really fit what you're looking for. But my friend Joe Smith over here, Joe Smith has an estate planning practice, and he could really use somebody with some knowledge to work on the estate plans." Or, "What about you go and meet my friend, Attorney Sally Jones, and she does this type of work, and she would like to have a financial planner in her office to work with her clients." Or, "Here's my friend who runs the accounting firm," because there are tons of accounting firms that have in-house financial planners, and they want to add a financial services department.

So I would use that process of information gathering, interviews, and just kind of marketing your services as a way of finding the best firm. Ultimately, it's going to come down to your getting some exposure, some information, and some experience on the different firms that are there in your town and on your choosing what type of financial planning work you would want to do.

You can volunteer your time and your experience working for a low-income financial consulting company if that's what you want to do. You can also go and work with a local estate planning specialist. You can work with a traditional wire house financial advisor. You can start your own part-time financial planning practice.

We have a number of accountants in the audience. You message me later if you want me to put you in touch with one or two of them, who even just largely through the influence of radical personal finance, have gone from accounting and added in a financial planning role to their business.

So those would be my thoughts. That's how I would approach it. I would get clearer on where I wanted to go, and I would use an internship type of approach as a way of--or an apprenticeship type of approach as a way of gaining the experience. So even if your accounting work doesn't fit the experience requirement, and my guess is that some of it will, at least some of it will, you can still, with two years of apprenticeship experience, you can qualify for the use of the certified financial planner designation.

All right. Nice. Thank you. You're welcome. Anything else? Any other follow-up questions on that before I go to the next caller? No, no, that's it. I appreciate it. Okay. Very good. Well, thanks for calling in. Let me know if I can help you any more in the future. Let's go--Erica, welcome to the show.

Let me know how I can serve you today, please. Hi, Josh. Thanks so much for coming back with the Q&As. I'm calling because my parents, a couple years ago, got themselves into a reverse mortgage in the family home that we were really hoping to be able to hold on to, especially thanks to property tax issues in California and being able to inherit at their base rate.

I don't know how much of a chance we might have to unwind it. We have no problem putting some money to work to support them in the meantime in order to meet the financial needs that they had and that they didn't share when they put the reverse mortgage into place.

But I just was curious what information you have, and maybe if you have some other questions, we can elaborate from there. What type of reverse mortgage did they take? Are they taking a lifetime stream of payments? Did they take a lump sum amount? They took a lump sum fixed rate.

So my guess--and I'm not an expert in here, so I invite anybody, if I say anything wrong here, I invite members of the audience to come by and please comment and correct me so that Erica can know. But my guess would be that you can just pay it back.

A reverse mortgage is not, in my understanding, is not an unwindable thing. It's a mortgage, and you can pay it back. So do you know how much money they took for the reverse mortgage? I believe they either took or it's currently outstanding at about $500,000. And I don't--the house is worth--they've had unsolicited offers at $1.2 or $1.3.

And could you and your family, in the fullness of time with planning and dedication, could you come up with the money to pay that loan back? We would be able to--we could pay it off at some point, but at this point, the way that it's accruing, unless for unfortunate reasons determined soon, it's accruing a very large amount of interest because when you add in the four and three quarters percent interest rate and the one and a quarter percent mortgage insurance on it, that's a 6% rate that is accruing onto the mortgage.

Have you read the documents, the mortgage documents that they have? No, we're in the process of getting them, and if we can't, then at some point anyway. Right, right. So I would start there, and I'm going to be hesitant to go any farther with my actual advice on those technical details.

I would start by reading the documents because the documents are going to tell you what your options are. And I've never worked in that type of transaction. My knowledge of reverse mortgages is general and cursory. So I would start by getting the documents and reading. My guess is that in the document, it'll explain the specific payoff procedures if it's available.

And I see no reason why, especially if they received a lump sum, I see no reason why that type of transaction couldn't be unwound. And so you'll have to figure out how to do that if you want to and if there's an advantageous way to do it. So I can't help you on the specifics any more than just to say read the document and find out what the document says.

But in terms of planning, why was the family so interested in keeping the house? Because it's a house that we love and is in an amazing location and is in an area where we'd like to be again in the future. So it's something that having the opportunity to have that one.

And it's also in California. So being able to have 1.2 or whichever it is million dollar a year, a million dollar house at a tax rate of $7,000 a year is definitely appealing. But the appealing is to spend a little bit more money to keep that in the family beyond all of the emotional reasons.

Of course. Of course. Did your parents, did they not realize that you guys wanted the house? Did they just did it because they needed the money? What were they thinking when they did this? They didn't want to share the burden with us and so they didn't want to discuss it with us.

And so I'm actually rather concerned that they weren't actually correctly advised because within the government sponsored reverse mortgage program which they use, it requires an independent review and I'm not sure how it could be considered that they actually followed through with any fiduciary responsibility to give them this loan at that rate based on what they owed.

And the advice that they were given that they'd be able to take more money out in the future when within about another year they'll have completely closed that window because regardless of the property value, the max is at $625,000. So I don't know if there's any way to get back and look into that.

I guess we need the documents to see who was their "independent advisor." But I don't know if there's anything that could be done with elder abuse laws or anything taking advantage of elderly people if they were taking advantage of getting into this loan. Read the documents. Go through the files.

I know that there are many concerning things in the reverse mortgage marketplace. It's definitely a place to tread carefully and I've seen a couple of places myself where there was abuse. I don't know the standards of proving that. It's one thing to say, "Oh, this was not a great fit," versus, "I don't know what the standards are." But I think that obviously the starting place would be to read the documents and then if you need to call a bank and find out about it, keep the paper trail.

Try to understand any information that you can and see if it can be unwound. Certainly getting a $1.2 million property for $7,000 a year of property taxes in California could be helpful. Only a couple of things I would just point out and probably as a lesson for the audience that this story that you're sharing here is not uncommon in terms of my own experience.

It's not uncommon that mom and dad don't want to talk about money with their children and so they wind up making their own decisions which may or may not be helpful and useful. It's very difficult because mom and dad have the best of intentions but in hindsight, they don't know what all the other options are.

So my cautionary tale would be to other listeners and you can affirm this from your experience, Erica, in just a second. My cautionary tale would be do everything you can to speak about money as openly as family circumstances would warrant because the earlier you can get involved, the better.

Not easy. I face the same challenges that all of you face with doing that but it's worth pursuing that. Right, Erica? Absolutely and I'll take that one step farther. Parents should talk to their kids about money so that it's open both ways as well. Agreed. Yeah, if you're the parent and you have children, you can make it really easy on your children just by being the one to open up and to share what's going on.

If you don't know what somebody wants to do, then you can't make good planning decisions. I mean as a financial advisor, if the parent – and this is where advice comes in – if I know that, hey, a parent needs money or if we know that a parent needs money and the children want the house, then we have a very clear problem to solve.

And it would be very simple to – I mean the simplest thing to do in that situation is if you can qualify for the loan, just take out another mortgage. Take out a traditional mortgage, refinance the house, let the children make the payments. You can structure it in some way like that.

Then you have a great low fixed rate interest. You have the children making the payments on it and you have a lump sum out for the parents. You don't have to do the reverse mortgage approach or we could pursue other things. We could figure out how to do it depending on the nature of the assets.

But if you don't talk to anybody, you can't get good advice. I'm sorry I don't have any better information for you than that, Erika. Just a couple of quick tips. Number one would be talk to your parents. Record that conversation so that you can go back and listen to it later.

Also record the calls of you with your parents, with the bank representative. A simple, easy way to do that is there's a great app that I use on the iPhone marketplace. Do you have iPhone or Android device? I'm an iPhone. iPhone. So there's a great app called Tape a Call.

Tape a Call Pro. It costs $10 a year. But the way that it works – and there are other ones too. That's just the one that I use. So if you're making calls with your parents or with the bank, etc., download that app onto your phone. It's very, very simple.

You will want to be on the phone with them. But the way it works is it works by – it gives you a custom number that you call into this custom number. And as soon as the call is connected to that number, it will record the call. So you can call them, call your parents, and you can start the call recording.

And then you call your parents because they'll need to authorize and be on the phone for the conversation. Conference them in and then call the bank. And then you merge all those calls together. And that way you'll have an easy recorded phone call of your interactions with the bank.

And so you can use that. You need to think like an investigative reporter or an investigative forensic – an attorney going through and kind of conducting an investigation. So you want to keep this good data for yourself. Very, very simple and easy to do. Check the wiretapping laws in your state.

You may or may not need to inform them that you're recording the call. It's very simple to do. You just say, "Hey, FYI, I'm recording the call." They do it to you all the time. You should do it to them. So that will help you to be able to keep things straight, keep notes straight.

Just, I don't know, one little tip for you. And I'm sorry I can't serve you any better than that right now. That advice itself is incredibly helpful. And knowing that you don't have more makes me feel a little bit better that I couldn't figure anything out myself. So thank you so much, Joshua.

Read the documents and go from there, and that will be the place to start. All right. Let's go to John. John, go ahead and let me know what your question is, and let's see how I can serve you today, please. Hi, Joshua. Yeah, thanks for taking the call. My question is basically a matter of just needing some advice on a meaningful goal setting, but the context and situation surrounding it, I guess, is a little bit meaningful to discuss.

So I had a really stressful time and stressful episode at work. I guess it was sometime back in October. It led directly to me resigning from my job. After a very brief conversation with my wife, she said, "Yeah, this is what we should do." And we had various options, some financial cushion and options for her going back to work.

But what ended up happening, I kind of expected to happen anyways. It sort of just forced their hand to do something that I've been asking them to do for quite a while, which is my role wasn't really a good fit for me. And that's what actually happened. They called me back in the office about an hour later and said, "Hey, would you consider staying on in a different role?" And I said, "Yeah, sure." I didn't really have another backup plan.

It wasn't really like a ploy for more money or anything like that. It was very transparent. So we're working through that. The transition hasn't happened yet, so it's still kind of a stressful time. But at least it's kind of like there's light at the end of the tunnel. But what that triggered in me was to really try to find out maybe the deeper points of my discontentment, especially when it relates to work over the years.

In the end, I like the people I work with. I like where I work, the location. There's a lot of good things about it. I just don't find any real deep meaning in it, nor do I particularly enjoy the day-to-day work, even though I enjoy the people I work with and where it is.

And it's not terrible. It's just not something I jump out of bed to do every morning. So that led me to think, "Okay, my bigger problem is really just kind of like self-knowledge and having meaningful goals to myself and finding a position that lines up with those goals." So I kind of got into that a bit, and I found out that really probably is more true than other things I found out about myself because other ventures that I had, other side ventures and other mistakes I've made in other financial parts of my life, they all come down to really having conflicting goals, I guess, or things that worked against the success of the other.

They were just kind of scattershot and probably a bit of shiny object syndrome to send me in different directions, and they weren't really focused to work with each other. So I'm pretty interested now in thinking that – I don't know. Maybe this is just another shiny object, but I feel like having some good tools to have some self-discovery and set up some meaningful goals would be probably the best thing I can do both for my financial life and for my mental sanity.

So I was just wondering if you had any resources on that or thoughts about that. It's probably the type of situation that more people – I don't know how to ascribe a number to it, but many, many people would be able to relate to that. Oftentimes, the problem is not that things are bad.

The problem is that things are fine and you just – it's OK. It's not great, but it's not OK. What's so in my mind deadly about that is when things are not great but they're OK, it causes you just to putter and that puttering or kind of muddling along takes a lot of the joy out of life.

And I think back in a lot of ways that the time that I can relate to this in a lot of my past businesses. I relate to when I was in the marketing business after college. It was fine. It was OK. Everything worked OK. But in hindsight, I had been planning to leave when I got laid off.

I had been planning to leave – I'm questioning the dates in my head. I don't know, six months later, a year later. But I hadn't followed through on that. And then in hindsight, I got laid off. Well, after I got laid off, I turned back and I looked at that and I realized what a huge blessing it had been for me to be laid off because my hand had been forced.

And because my hand was forced, I was in a situation where I didn't have a choice. And looking back, I don't know if I would have had the guts to go from something that was OK if I hadn't had my hand forced. Other areas as well are similar, and this is a common thing that many people experience.

So a few things occur to me. One is obviously self-knowledge and self-awareness is going to be a big deal. And there are a few different ways to get it. The first tack I would take is to do the best job you can to isolate what you think and what you – to figure out how well you know yourself and do the best you can to get that out on paper.

Have you ever sat down and done kind of organized journaling, organized goal-setting, prompts, things like that on your own in the past? Once before I went, I did successfully finish a series of those to get some goals out. And it was kind of one of those situations where I was a little early on on the personal development thing, and I got a bit overambitious with what I wrote down, so it wasn't really realistic or meaningful.

But I had done it once, and I know all the benefits of daily journaling. It's one of those habits I've never been able to really stick with, maybe just because, again, the puttering along leads to a lack of true motivation, I guess, or need. It's more like a want instead of a need.

And just like you said, the general thing of having – I don't know, maybe reword it – having options actually is a deficit because it's not an actual crisis of real need until it hit me mentally and I ended up quitting my job. Yeah, I've had a little practice with it, yeah.

So that's a good way to start because it doesn't cost you anything. You don't have to do anything different. You just got to start. And here would be a couple off the top of my head. Go back in the archives and find the episode that I did on journaling, and in that I gave about a half a dozen examples of good journaling questions.

But the two that are my favorite is, number one, to start with Dan Sullivan's magic question. And the question is this. It's very, very simple. But pretend that we're sitting here three years from today. So as we record this, it's January 2017, so that would put you in January 2020.

Pretend that we're sitting here three years from today. Now, looking back over the last three years, what has to have happened for you personally, professionally, and financially for you to feel satisfied and happy with your progress? That's a really useful question. And the thing I like about that question, I mean, Dan Sullivan is a master at that type of thing.

But the thing I like about that question is it's very open-ended, and you can learn to trust kind of what are the first few things that you come up with. That was the very first question I used to ever ask every financial planning client was started with that question.

And the results of that question are going to be directionally appropriate. A second thing that you can do, my second favorite journaling question, takes more time, but it involves walking through your perfect day. And so you can set this up. I'll set it up for you with a little bit of drama so you can go back and listen to this and kind of do it.

But take a moment and think to yourself this. It's a brand new day. It's a Tuesday. You wake up out of bed. You wake up, and you open your eyes while you're lying in bed. Everything that you can think of and that you can imagine is exactly how you want it to be.

Now, take a moment and look around the room and just kind of think, what does the room look like? Look around. What do you do? And then from minute by minute, walk through that perfect, what you think of as a perfect daily schedule. So for some people with this type of -- and go through it in detail.

You can do it. Use the voice memo recorder on your phone and sit down and systematically just record it. Write it out if you are a writer. Take time. Go away by yourself for an afternoon, and with as much detail as possible, walk through that. Some people, when they wake up, they look around and they see a room filled with sunlight.

And what that means to them is, well, I didn't go to work at 4 in the morning. Some people, when they wake up, they are overlooking an ocean view or a beach view or they're right in the middle of downtown New York City or whatever it is. And you can picture the morning routine.

Walk yourself through your morning routine. And at every stage, go through what you think an ideal day would look like. Where do you go? What do you do? Who's in your life? Who do you visit with? What does your work look like? Now, there's no right or wrong answer.

For me, what I've often found is that I can relate to that and I can put it together very clearly. And this always sounds like bragging, but it's not. What I do now is almost exactly what I pictured when I pictured my ideal day, say, 3, 4, 5 years ago.

I do exactly what I pictured back then. Because for me, the bulk of what I pictured was not necessarily, you know, I don't care about living on the ocean. I don't care about living in a mansion. Some people do. I don't care about driving a Ferrari. Some people do.

What I care about is sitting at my desk. It's, number one, the people around my breakfast table. It's the environment and the ambiance and the tone that's in my house, the peaceful, loving environment that it is filled with, and the work that I do sitting at my desk where I'm able to be free of meetings.

I'm able to be free of calendar appointments. I'm able just simply to focus on things that I think will be helpful and to do the very best job I can to create something that I think would be helpful. So I find that exercise to be really, really useful. So a couple of journaling exercises.

Go back through and find the episode that I did on journaling. Just go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/archive. Search the page for journal, and I think that episode will pull up for you, and I'll try to find it here in a moment. Second thing is take some time and do some personality profiles and assessments.

Last year, I was working on creating and featuring, and I had big goals. I struggled to get them done, but one of the things that I've wanted to do is to take and create – by the way, the episode is 185, I think. It's called "Effective Journaling." It might be that one there.

That should help you. Check that one out and see if it answers the question. What I've wanted to do is to try to help and serve. One of the resources I found is I don't want to create anything that someone else has already done. So the first thing that needs to be done in order to create a better financial life is to build a better career.

The person who's the very best at that that I'm aware of is Dan Miller. Dan Miller has done a tremendous job with creating good career advice, creating good career information. If you don't listen to his 48 Days podcast, go and listen to it. He's been doing it forever, and he's just got a great podcast.

He's written great books, et cetera. But one of the things that I was doing in preparing for teaching a 48 Days seminar that he had done was I went and I did his personality profile that people do. Not the DISC personality profile, another one. I've been looking while you've been talking for a link for it, and I can't find it right at the moment.

But I did this personality profile. And what was so crazy to me was when I got to the end of the personality profile, the results featured exactly who I am. It told me almost exactly the type of business that I would be great at, and it's exactly what I'm doing now.

Now, I've worked really, really hard over the years of trying to figure out what I do well, what I don't do well, et cetera. And I've been able to figure out those results. But when I took his personality profile, I immediately found that if I had just started with that, it would have saved me a lot of time.

So it may be his DISC profile. It might be that. Go and take some personality profiles. There are various ones available. He's selling right now on his site his classic DISC profile for $28.50. And do some of those personality profiles and see what the results are because they give you areas of career that you can answer and that you can get to know yourself a little bit better.

Super, super valuable. In fact, it must have been the DISC personality profile. Okay, I paused for a moment. I was able to find mine. It was too important to not to. So, John, I know you're a longtime listener, other listeners who have listened to me for a long time.

Here, I was able to find it. So it is, in fact, the DISC, Dan Profile's DISC personality system, D-I-S-C. He sells it on his website. And the DISC stands for these four letters. D is dominant or driver. I is influencing or inspiring. S is steady or stable. And C is correct or compliant.

And so they have their different styles for this. And it talks about who, what the different behaviors are. So for me, my very highest personality profile here is an I. I'm a very high I. I guess that would be how you would say it. So I is influencing. So that means that with my personality type here, just on the dimensions, what I seek is I seek recognition.

What my strengths are, persuading, enthusiasm, and entertaining. My challenges are lack of detail, short attention span, and low follow-through. My dislikes are routines and complexity. And my decisions are spontaneous. I cannot think of better words to describe me. And as I look back on the last 20 years of my life, 20 is too much, 10 to 15 years of my life, those types of things, those words almost perfectly describe me.

I like to persuade. I have a lot of enthusiasm. I like to be entertaining. These are strengths of mine. But my challenge is that I don't like to get bogged down in all the details. I have a very short attention span. I get bored easily. That was what really hurt me in financial planning is I found it very difficult to buckle down.

And do the same thing again and again, day after day, month after month, year in, year out. And I had low follow-through. I have tons of great ideas, but it's very difficult for me to follow through on them. So, that's just a simple example here of the description of me in terms of my understanding my style.

This is just what jumped out. Joshua's style is identified by the key word communicator. Joshua, as a communicator style, is enthusiastic and optimistic, preferring to accomplish goals through people. Communicators love being around people. They create a party wherever they are by means of an outgoing personality. Joshua does not like to work alone, but would rather be with people when working on progress.

A communicator's focus and attention span is not as great as they would like. So, they prefer high-energy projects that allow rapid movement from one thing to the next without delay. Communicators are articulate in their communication skills. In fact, this is probably one of the strengths for which they are most noted.

Joshua has the ability to motivate and encourage with their words, and is probably known as an inspirational individual. When pressure is applied to focus strictly on tasks, communicators may tend to become inaccurate and even somewhat disorganized. They will do what is necessary to complete a task and to look good since they have a strong desire to please.

Since communicators have a strong aversion to rejection, they aim for social recognition and fear the loss of that acceptance. They make friends easily and seek favorable environments in which to function. They may need a manager or supervisor to provide clear timeframes on projects, and they prefer a participative management style that is built around a strong relationship.

Inspiring and stimulating, communicators use their enthusiasm to generate an environment that is friendly and team-oriented. They tend to be the one who both feels and displays emotion, and many of their decisions may be driven by emotions. This may cause them to appear inconsistent in their beliefs and decisions. A communicator has the ability to use their positive people skills to bring unity to groups and between people.

Joshua is inspiring and tends to look for the collective good instead of the obstacles. Joshua prefers to work through problems by analyzing things that worked in the past. This is someone who is able to lead if necessary, but usually prefers to wait and see if another person volunteers first.

Joshua is willing to follow another person's lead if they display adequate ability and if Joshua has confidence in their ability. An extremely outgoing and social person, Joshua tends to make friends easily and likes to have fun with others. This person wants to make commitments even when unable to keep them.

This comes from their strong desire to please, not because of any intent to deceive. Joshua tends to be very spontaneous, easily becoming bored with routine tasks. Others see Joshua as a versatile person whom they rely upon to break up monotonous or routine situations. Sometimes preferring to do things outside of the team, this person tends to be individualistic.

Joshua may even be perceived as restless and tends to move quickly from one thing to the next. Not afraid to take a bold approach, Joshua is willing to challenge the status quo. Original and creative, this individual acts with confidence when implementing new solutions. Joshua will tend to use a balance of intuition and facts when making decisions.

Once they have made a decision, they will not be afraid to act upon it. Enthusiastic, trusting, optimistic, persuasive, talkative, impulsive, emotional. General characteristics, flattery, praise, popularity and acceptance, a friendly environment, freedom from many rules and regulations, other people available to handle details. Motivated by practical procedures, few conflicts and arguments, freedom from controls and details, and a forum to express ideas.

Historical characters, William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, goes on, and I'll just give the communicator. When communicating with Joshua, a communicator, so here's how to communicate with me, and I'm doing this in detail because you who are listening, you guys know me. You know who I am, and so I want to show you how accurate this is.

I was stunned when I finally did this and I read this. Communicating with a communicator style. Remember, a communicator may want social esteem and acceptance, freedom from details and control, people to talk to, positive working conditions, recognition for abilities, and the opportunity to motivate and influence others. A communicator's greatest fear is rejection.

When communicating with Joshua, a communicator, do build a favorable, friendly environment. Give opportunity for them to verbalize about ideas, people, and their intuition. Assist them in developing ways to transfer talk into action. Allow time for stimulating sociable activities. Submit details in writing. Create incentives for following through on tasks.

When communicating with Joshua, a communicator, do not eliminate social time, do all the talking, ignore their ideas or accomplishments, tell them what to do. And I'll stop with that. That's enough. So the point is, I hope that when you hear that, I mean, John, you know me pretty well, you've listened a lot, does that resonate in terms of what you know about me?

Yeah, yeah, a lot of it pretty much stands for what I've got to say. Right, right, because you've heard me a lot, so I express all those, even in what I said. You can hear in the example I used, I said, here was something that I wanted to do.

I had this great idea for doing this 48 days class. I wanted to do it. I designed everything exactly how it would work, but I had difficulty getting it done. So the most important thing is it gives a career match on here, not most important, very important. It gives a career match.

And it gives here a career match and some ideas of careers that would be appropriate for me. Now, I'm going to read some of these and I'll tell you which of these were on. Remember, I've said in the past I used to keep a list of jobs and things that I thought were interesting just through observing.

I'll tell you which of these things were on my job list. Number one, actor. I acted when I was in school. I enjoyed it. I decided there was no point to it, but I did like acting and I did acting. Administrator, I don't know what that means. I don't want to do that.

Advertising agent. In the past, I've sold advertising. When I was in college, I was selling advertising for political campaigns. Done it. Arbitrator. I didn't know that. I mean, I never thought of that as a career, but as an arbitrator, I like to bring people together. I'm a peacemaker. I like to do that.

That's a skill that I could develop and I could happily work as a mediator or as an arbitrator. Artist. I view what I'm doing as art. I've always been jealous of the fact that I have very poor drawing skills. And one of these days, hopefully when my kids are learning to draw, I can learn to draw with them.

Attorney or lawyer. I seriously thought about law school. To this day, I think about putting myself through law school just with study abroad. I don't want a legal license. I just want to read all the books and understand it. Auctioneer. I was always fascinated by that, and if I thought there was a future in it, I would thoroughly enjoy being an auctioneer.

Broadcaster. I'm a broadcaster. Coach. I'm a coach. Comedian. I want to enhance. I don't think of myself as a funny person, but I want to enhance my skills. Court reporter. Computer consultant. And I'll be quick. Entertainer. Entrepreneur. Fashion designer. I was always interested in fashion. So the point is host, hostess, hotel/restaurant manager.

I thought it would be fun to work at Panera or Starbucks or to work in a hotel. These were all things. Instructor. Trainer in education or business. I almost took a job working as a corporate trainer. Insurance agent. I've been an insurance agent. Interior decorator. I don't want to do that as a job, but I like interior decoration.

I like style. I like things like that. Interpreter or translator. I've been an interpreter or translator. Recruiter. I thought about -- I was recruited for a job. I almost took a job as a recruiter. Journalist. I was just with a journalist friend of mine, and I was jealous of the fact.

I was like, "Man, I'm in the wrong career. I should go be a journalist. That sounds really fun to me." So Peace Corps worker. Public speaker. Real estate sales. Reporter. Salesperson. Teacher. Telephone marketing and sales. Training and development. Travel agent. Wedding consultant. Writer. Editor, et cetera. So of these list of -- it looks like, I don't know, 40, 35 careers that this thing spat out for me, probably 20 of them I've done and 5 to 10 of them I have wanted to do.

So that was a very long way of, I hope, conveying to you and also to the listening audience that when I got this personality profile, I sat here and I said, "Joshua, why didn't you take one of these 10 years ago?" Because that was 10 years of hard work to come up with the results that I probably could have had if I had just sat down and taken the personality profile.

So recommendation number two is take this personality profile. This is the disc that Dan Miller sells on his site, 48days.com. You can see it linked there. He's selling it for 30 bucks right now. You can take this disc profile. He uses this and recommends using this in an organization.

So the idea is you need to understand who you're talking to so that you can speak to them in the right language. If you were my manager, you would need to know these things about me to know how to manage me effectively, et cetera. But take some personality profiles.

And then my final third suggestion for you, John, is this. Go out and if you're having trouble coming up with something that motivates you, it probably means your experience is very, very small. Don't want to be insulting. This is not meant as insulting. I don't conceive of not having things that I'm excited about.

Like that doesn't resonate with me because I'm always going out and trying to find new things. I'm always trying to go out and have new experiences. So I feel like my life is short and I can't fit all the things I want to do into my lifetime. Not everybody's like that.

We have unique personalities. But if you are struggling to say, "What is this compelling future that I'm trying to create?" Then cause yourself and force yourself to get out of the circles that you're in and go and do something different. Whether that means go and travel, whether it means start taking a new person to lunch every week, whether it means read more broadly, challenge yourself with different genres, go to the magazine rack at the big bookstore, buy magazines from different things, subscribe to some podcasts that challenge everything that you think.

Just expose yourself to new information and new ideas. It's so easy for us to get locked into the same old existence. We live in the same house, in the same town, where we know how everything works. The people around us all think just about like we do. They're of the same religious persuasion.

They're of the same political persuasion. Their lives, they earn the same amount of income as we do. They go on the same type of vacations that we do. They kind of just do everything the same. And we get into this habit over the years and then it continues and continues.

So unless you intentionally challenge yourself and intentionally say, "Hey, I'm a conservative. Let me go and figure out how to make friends with a liberal," or, "Hey, I'm a liberal. Let me go and figure out how to make friends with a libertarian or a conservative," or, "I'm used to going on vacation to Florida, but this year let's go on vacation to Alaska," or, "We always vacation in the United States.

Let's go to France or to Central America," and break yourself out and make a habit of being uncomfortable, and then you'll start to find yourself drawn to new ideas, new things, new opportunities that I think can help you to build powerful goals. So those are my three answers for you that I hope will serve you.

One, do the best you can with journaling exercises. Two, take some personality profiles. Start with a disc. I couldn't believe how great it was, and there are many others out there. And number three, intentionally expose yourself to new things, new people, and pay attention to your reactions to those new things and those new people.

That helpful, John? John: Yeah, all that's very helpful, specifically. Well, I like the idea of plotting out the perfect day. I've done that in the past, and maybe I need to get back to doing that or redo it with a fresh view. I like what you said. It's a good reminder of what you said about having a limited scope of a set of experiences.

I do get very excited about certain things. I think what limits me once I expose myself to those things is a nervousness about, I don't know, maybe spending too much time on something that may be a dead end, but maybe that's not--shouldn't be considered a waste. There's definitely things I've found that I would like to do, but they take certain skill development that I don't have.

Once again, it comes down to, is it just another shiny object syndrome, or is it something I'll really like, and I should invest the time to develop that skill. I come up with a little bit of paralysis when I'm--even when I do find things I'm excited about, because I don't want to waste my time or time I could be focusing elsewhere with my family or something.

I waffle too much about those things. I really do like that idea of going back to the perfect day and having that vision to encourage me to expose myself to other things, and maybe not dawdle so much when it comes down to going for it, I guess. Yeah, very good stuff.

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Hopefully it helps other people as well. I think it will. Otherwise, we wouldn't have spent so much time on it. The perfect day is really valuable because, for me, by starting with a visualization--I'm a visual person. I see in my head what I'm trying to do.

By starting with visualization, you can picture yourself there. We've all seen enough movies that when I describe to you a scene of waking up in the morning, sunshine screaming in, throwing open the drapes and looking down over the ocean, you've seen that picture in a movie. You can put yourself there.

Or walking out on the balcony with a steaming cup of coffee and looking up at the snow-covered mountains. You've seen that. We can put ourselves in those pictures. Depending on what your style would go through, you can look around in your mind's eye at your ideal house. For some people, it's a modern minimalism.

For some people, it's industrial minimalism. For some people, it's gaudy. It's glittery. It's gold. You can see those things in your mind. So I find those really, really helpful in terms of being able to think. And I don't think that these exercises are anything that should be done one time and then think that they're going to change.

They should change because you'll learn more and you'll grow more. And one of the most important things is to always have significant goals that are pulling you forward into the future. And that will never end. A major mistake people make is they think, "Well, if only I reach this perspective, then everything will be perfect." It's one thing I don't like about retirement, this idea that, "Well, it's going to be all done." I say, "Build something that takes you in and through." And you need to constantly say, "How do I get a little bit better?

What is the bigger thing that I'm going to do?" Because the fun is not found in the achievement. The fun is found in the process, in the achieving. That's where some of the joy is. And there's a balance. You have to have enough time to enjoy the process. But it's not about just reaching this and then everything's perfect.

So you'll have to continually change that. You'll continually update it. And these should be regular, regular occurrences. So keep at it. And the last thing is, back to your question about wasting time. I don't know how much of this is personality. Maybe it's just for me. I guess I'm an I.

So with my personality, it might be important. We always have to be careful about giving advice to other people. What I've learned from me is it's important not to censor my ideas too soon. There's no reason in the world why everything I need to do needs to be productive.

I don't need to follow through and become a master at everything. I don't need to follow everything through. I enjoy just kind of bouncing from one thing to the next and learning a few things here and learning a few things there. And so if you have an interest in something, just figure out a simple way to pursue it.

Just see if it goes anywhere. And it's important to always make the time in our space, make the time in our day, make the time in our finances, make the time in our mental capacity to try new things. Otherwise, you'll stop learning. And when you stop learning, you're going to be dead soon.

So build the time in and you don't have to master everything. Some things you will, some things you won't. Now, I've also learned how to temper that. So I know enough to give myself space to explore things, but I also know not to put too much behind them too quickly because it's very easy for me to go 100 percent and that can be expensive and it can be expensive.

So there's a balance there that I think you can find. So keep at it, John. It's not easy, but I think that you can definitely do it with time. And let me know how it goes. Yeah, I appreciate that. That last statement really resonates. That's where my fear comes from is I've jumped into things and then since I jumped into them so fully, I keep them going much longer than I probably should.

So that's where my hesitation comes by on some of those things. And yeah, you're right. I really need to go back to that perfect day thing. The only reason I dropped it the first time I tried it was my perfect day, I needed about 72 hours per day. Maybe it's just a matter of not having too little interest but needing to focus more on which ones really count.

Absolutely. Well, I think we've all been there. I think we've all done that, whether it's needing a 72-hour day or whether it's needing multiple lifetimes in order to be able to accomplish everything that's on our list. I think we have all been there. Well, awesome. Thank you all so much for calling in to the Friday Q&A show.

I hope that you, the audience, really benefited and enjoyed this. If you'd like to call in, and again, we can have a discussion here. You can ask questions. You can just make comments. If you'd like to call in and join for a future show, make sure to become a patron of the show, radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron.

Under that option, you'll be able to have access to these calls, and I would welcome you to that. I really enjoy doing them. I plan to do them weekly, every Friday, this type of call. A couple of things as we go. I mentioned yesterday the survey. If you could do me a favor, please do it.

It's literally a 20-second demographic survey. Just ask, "Are you a man or are you a woman? How old are you, and are you white or black or brown or something else?" That's about it. It takes about 20 seconds. You can do it right on your phone. That's found at radicalpersonalfinance.com/survey, radicalpersonalfinance.com/survey.

Check that out. Also, one quick announcement as we go. I am planning to -- a lot of things. At the moment, I'm planning to do, from time to time, I'm planning to do a little weekend roundup where I want to answer some of your questions that you have on the shows.

Now, I get tons of e-mail questions, and I've set all those e-mails aside in order to -- set all those e-mails aside to respond to. But oftentimes, I don't make the time to get to them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start releasing just a quick Saturday morning thing where I basically sit down with a cup of coffee and I answer your comments.

So I'm no longer accepting commentary or feedback on past shows via e-mail. If you send it to me, I'm not going to answer it there. And please do me a favor. Just comment on the show page. So whenever you have a comment or a question or a clarification, just go right to that podcast episode show page.

Make the comment right there on the page. And then in order to encourage you to do that, and also I think it will serve some valuable follow-up from time to time, I'm going to -- for a time here, I'm going to start doing just some Saturday morning shows where we sit down and I'll answer your questions.

Lots of times you guys send me e-mails telling me additional information, arguing with me, wanting clarification, et cetera. So if you have comments or questions on specific shows and show topics, do that. I'll only be taking them basically for the last week. I'll sit down on Saturday morning and I'll say, well, what are the comments that came in from the last week, and those are the ones I'll answer.

Be back with you soon. That will start tomorrow. Hey, Cricket customers. Max with ads is included with your Cricket $60 unlimited plan at no additional cost. Max is the streaming platform where you can watch Scoob, Meg 2, The Trench, The Nightmare on Elm Street Collection, and so much more.

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