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Don't miss out on the ultimate thrifting experience at our Pix Exchange parking lot anniversary sale at our Torrance location. Visit pixexchangehh.org for more details. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.

My name is Joshua, and today we're going to kick off National Preparedness Month, September 2018. Let me read to you a couple of paragraphs from the recent presidential proclamation on National Preparedness Month 2018. It goes like this, issued on August 31, 2018. National Preparedness Month is a time to focus our attention on the importance of preparing our families, homes, businesses, and communities for disasters that threaten our lives, property, and homeland.

During this time, we also honor the brave men and women who selflessly respond to crises and disasters, rendering aid to those in need, blah blah blah. And that is signed, of course, by President Donald J. Trump. He has set his hand, or as the quote would go, "In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this 31st day of August in the year of our Lord 2018, and of the independence of the United States of America, the 243rd Donald J.

Trump." Presidential proclamations are funny because it's such a formal language that we don't use much in day-to-day discourse. But September is indeed the National Preparedness Month by virtue of presidential proclamation. And I'm just going to use this as a rough outline for a various series of shows which I'll be sharing with you here in the month because I am convinced there is a deep connection between the term or the word preparedness and all of its associated concepts and financial planning.

Preparedness is basically the root of good financial planning. Now in the traditional sense of financial planning, we usually think of financial products such as insurance policies and investment accounts. And these products fundamentally are a component of preparedness. What do you want to do to prepare for your death? Well, you prepare by making an estate plan, furnishing adequate wills and trusts.

You also put in place appropriate insurance policies which will remunerate your family or your business for the associated risks. And you do all of these things in advance. You prepare. What do you do to prepare for sickness? Well, you make sure that you have adequate savings to cover your personal expenses.

You put in place health insurance policies to pay for your medical bills, perhaps disability insurance policies to provide you with income in case of an extended disability. This is all part of preparedness. So preparedness is basically at the core of all good financial planning. But I think we often ignore some of the other extensions of the word preparedness.

And especially those of us who work in the financial planning industry are guilty of ignoring these things because we don't personally sell products to them. I have learned that when you don't have products to sell, you tend to analyze the problem more comprehensively and to see the value of those products.

For example, I was often, when I was actively working as a financial planner, I was often consulted on some of the non-traditional components of financial planning. But when I was working with client, excuse me, I was consulted frequently by other financial advisors. I remember when people would have a client who said, "I'm really worried about hyperinflation.

I think I'm going to buy gold coins." They would say, "Well, call Joshua and ask him or let's ask Joshua for his opinions." And I remember writing an email one time when a fellow advisor consulted and I said, "Here are the types of gold coins you should buy. Here's what you should buy it for.

Here's when you should sell," and et cetera. But what often happens is people pit these ideas against each other. For example, frequently I read knowledgeable perceived experts who will make fun of some of the products that are advertised on right-wing talk radio. Things like food insurance, which is basically the idea of buying significant amounts of food so that in case of an emergency you have food to pull, to fall back on.

Frequently these types of approaches are criticized as being foolish or scare, fear-mongering of some kind. That's never made sense to me. I think that's a really short-sighted and silly way to approach life because if you don't have food, it's hard to think about the value of anything else. As I've previously discussed extensively, I'd a whole lot rather have food and no health insurance than have health insurance and no food.

One is a very significant need. The other deals in the abstract. If I have major medical bills, I declare bankruptcy. The financial system protects me from the claims of those creditors and I go on to rebuild my life. If I don't have food, I can't get up and go to work tomorrow.

If you've never lived at the bottom of society or if you've never tried to work with people at the bottom of society, what you find is those who don't have the resources to maintain their daily life, people who don't have food or a place to sleep, it's very hard.

They can't get ahead. They can't even get a hand up. I encourage you, spend some time talking with homeless people in your town or if you don't want to do that, spend some time online listening to people. There's a great YouTube channel called Invisible People where the host of that channel or the hosts of that channel go and interview people with a video camera who are homeless.

And what you see again and again is they're stuck. Well, why are they stuck? It's not because they're stupid. Certainly they may be ignorant, but there may be many reasons and I'm not here to opine on homelessness. But the point is when you're missing these basic things of life, the basic needs of life, it's very hard to be able to rebuild.

But if you have the basic needs of life, if you have a bed to sleep in, if you have a roof over your head, if you have food in your stomach, if your family is secure and you're not fearful that your things are going to be stolen, you're going to be physically attacked on a moment by moment, day to day basis, then you can afford the longer term thinking of building something more significant.

Most of us live at a level of affluence that provides us with the luxury of never even thinking about those things, those basic needs. We should be grateful that we live in such affluence. But for all of us, those basic needs can, in a moment, through a storm, through a medical emergency, those basic needs can all of a sudden become very, very important.

I had some experiences in my life that I never really guessed that I would have. And I guess I knew intellectually that it could happen, but it wasn't until I could see them with my own eyes that I realized how important these things were. And what you see is that if you're not prepared for the basic needs, the things that can't be solved necessarily with the financial system, no matter how vast your resources, you can quickly become desperate.

A couple of years ago, there was a hurricane headed for where I live in West Palm Beach, Florida. So those of you who live in Hurricane Alley or hurricane regions know the drill. Everyone waits to see what the hurricane's going to do. And then when the hurricane starts heading your way, then people go out and they start buying water and flashlights and gasoline.

And all of a sudden, everything disappears. And it's always amazing how you don't even have water. But I remember I went to Costco and I decided to go out. And part of it was to buy some stuff. But part of it was to just to kind of see. I've always had this interest in disasters.

I've always enjoyed being one of the volunteer responders and being involved in them. I'm a sucker for information flows. My wife would make fun of me when there's a disaster. The most recent one that I remember doing this was the Houston floods. And I was just entranced by the Houston floods.

I had four screens going with all these different web feeds of different video feeds from the local TV cameras. And I've really been interested in that topic for whatever reason. So I went out to Costco to pick up some additional supplies for my own family. And also just because I like to be out in that.

It's kind of a different season. And in this case, Costco had been closed over the weekend due to a holiday. And it was a Monday morning and the storm was expected on something like Thursday. And I went there. I was there about 20 minutes early and the line was hundreds of people deep.

And this panic set in where all of a sudden everyone felt like, well, there's more people and the store is not open yet. And there's people pulling in, in expensive cars and then just running across the parking lot to get in line. I don't know what Costco is like where you live, but where I live, I don't see a lot of poor people in Costco.

The Costco where I live is very filled with a lot of affluent people. You get all these elderly retirees that have loads of money and they go into Costco and buy three or four things. And it's just very, it's very obvious from the cars that people drive that the clothes they wear and the age of the face is present, that it's a very affluent community that shops at my local Costco.

And I looked around and I, nobody, I'm not exaggerating. Nobody was ready to pick a fight. But you could just feel this tension in the air, this tension among people that if things were a little bit worse, they would have been ready to fight over cases of bottled water.

And I realized how close we live to the edge in society. Now there are a number of other experiences that I've heard, but they're immaterial for the moment. Excuse me, other experiences I've had. But by watching some of these things and some of the things on TV where you see, you realize that all of a sudden things can happen.

And this is really important. It's a really important part of financial planning to be prepared for things that can't perfectly be covered by the insurance policies that we all have and should have. And that's one of the changes that I've experienced since I left the world of product sales.

I realized that in order to do good financial planning, we always need to take a more holistic approach. Now, don't get me wrong. Money and insurance is a component of good planning. Money should always be your first thing that you go for. Stacking up money, which is why I seek to emphasize it to you again and again and again, pile up money.

Money is the most marketable commodity in the world. And if you have money, you can solve most problems. If we dump you out of an airplane in the middle of a war zone and your skin is a completely different color than everyone that's fighting and they're all hunting for you, if you have enough money, though you don't have food, you don't have water, you don't have contacts, if you have enough money, you can probably buy your way out of the problem.

So money is always your first step. But often money is a very expensive step. And if you'll spend a little bit of money now, you can avoid spending a lot of money later. So I'm going to riff on this preparedness theme during the month of September with a number of different shows on a diverse range of topics, because I really think that by my sharing with you some ideas, I can stimulate your thinking to look at your own situation and to apply good financial planning to the topics that you're not usually thinking about.

If we do that, you'll build a more robust and resilient life and have a whole lot more money available for your longer term financial goals. Just consider the logic of a few examples. I think you should have disability insurance. But doesn't it make a lot of sense for you to think carefully about what you eat and how you move and the toxins that are in your environment so that you can avoid the need to draw on the insurance policy?

Or doesn't it make sense for you to wear your seatbelt and drive a safe car at a safe rate of speed so that you lower your risk of being involved in an automobile accident? Or with your home insurance? Yes, your home insurance will compensate you if your house burns down, but doesn't it make sense to make sure that your house has wiring that's up to code and has properly functioning smoke detectors and fire extinguishers that can come to hand easily, rather than going through all the hassle of having your house burn down and dealing with an insurance policy?

A $5 fire extinguisher that is in the cabinet beside your stove might put out the fire before it burns the house down. But if you don't buy the $5 fire extinguisher and you just buy the homeowner's insurance policy, you've done incomplete planning. Now the inverse is also true. If you have a bunch of fire extinguishers, but you don't have a homeowner's insurance policy, then you've also done incomplete planning.

Because although you may be very careful, a fire may sweep in from your neighbor's house and light yours on fire, or it may sweep up the valley through the trees and light your entire development on fire. The volcano underneath your community might ooze lava out that bursts your home on fire.

So both of these are important. But I hear a lot of people focusing on homeowner's insurance and not a lot of people talking about fire extinguishers. My hope is to bring these together for you. There's a much more efficient planning process if you start with root causes. And by the way, all of this applies to accumulation goals as well.

I've repeatedly emphasized in my work that before you try to save millions of dollars for retirement, you should build a life and a work that you don't want to retire from. Because you may or may not successfully save millions of dollars for retirement, but you're going to be working to get there.

So why not embrace that work along the way and build a life that you don't want to retire from while you're on your way to building enough reserves and investments that you could retire any day you want. Doesn't that make more sense to you? Or with college savings, this is probably one of my personal pet peeves, but I've done so much college planning over the years, but college planning is a really short-sighted thing to do if your definition of college planning is simply, "How can I save money in some kind of tax-advantaged fund so that my children can go to college?" There are far too many of us who are parents who just haphazardly throw money at the problem thinking that's going to make our children's lives better.

Well, I'm here to advocate for a little bit more of a thoughtful approach and say, "No, that doesn't necessarily make your children's lives better." First, college may not be right for them. Frequently, college is not a good solution or a good option for many students. Now you've heard all these arguments, but there's a high percentage of degrees that many of my compatriots in my peer group have found are entirely financially worthless.

They don't result in any skills that are valuable in the labor market. I have so many friends who are embittered about their college decision because they came out the other side with a diploma and no job prospects. College may be a very damaging thing to your son or daughter.

It certainly has been damaging to many of my friends. College can lead you into a lifestyle that is so morally debauched that it leads to a lifetime of personal injury. One of my major concerns is excessive drunkenness on college campuses. You may save all the money in the world so that you can send your son and daughter into this environment.

And the excessive drunkenness leads to, of course at the most extreme, death or disability in some way due to alcohol poisoning. But more frequently, it just leads to a whole series of life decisions that impact people for years. DUI infractions, killing people while they're drunk behind the wheel, high rates of sexual activity and sexual promiscuity, sexual assault.

So frequently, that decision to encourage your son or daughter to go into a morally debauched environment filled with excessive drunkenness leads to your son or daughter being sexually assaulted, which leads to lifelong problems. And if you've ever been involved with marriage counseling or talking with somebody who's been sexually assaulted, that has the impact of generations.

Somebody who has never healed from a sexual assault that they experienced during their college years, and all of a sudden they're married 15 years and yet they are still experiencing major emotional, psychological problems from that. And yet it may have been avoided by a more careful decision related to college.

Back to the financial aspects, let's say that college is a good decision and you can account for the social pressure, you can account for the morally debauched environment, you can account for the theory that's being taught and all of the worldview that's going to be foisted upon your child.

Well, now back to the finances. There's no reason in the world why a young person should need outside funding for college in today's world. There is so much money available for college for students who have high academic results. There's so much money available for college for students that demonstrate character proficiency.

There's so much money available for college that no student who is academically qualified for college should ever need to borrow money or ever need to be provided for by parents. But yet it's those decisions years before that result in a high school student demonstrating academic competence or an elementary school student developing the character qualities that will lead them to the ability to perform well in high school and to perform well in college.

So shouldn't we spend 80% of our time talking about those things that prepare a young man or woman for college and perhaps 20% of our time talking about thinking, figuring out which particular type of college savings account we're going to use or not use? But the financial planning industry, because we in the industry are very effective at selling those solutions and not so good at sitting down and having a difficult conversation with you about the academic readiness of your child or their personal character.

We just sell the solution that we can make money on. We sell the 529 account because we can do it easily and it makes us a little bit of money and increases the amount of money we earn in investment fees. I don't for a moment think that the average financial planner is competent to discuss with you or me what we're doing to prepare our five-year-olds to have the necessary character they'll need to stand strong and focus on their academic studies when they're 22 and not go and indulge themselves in excessive drunkenness.

It would be a little bit weird for that to be a component of the CFP curriculum. But I do think that you and me as parents should be spending about 80% of our time thinking about that and 20% of our time talking with the CFP practitioner about which particular state's 529 plan would be appropriate for us.

See, the financial system can work really, really well in many circumstances. But you have little control over the financial system. You have a lot of control over those other things. And if you'll focus on these other things, whether it's seeking to instill a strong character and moral fabric in your child's life, or whether it's making sure that your kitchen has fire extinguishers, these things are much more tangible than trying to understand the day-to-day vagaries of the stock market.

I don't know if the stock market will continue its record-setting success or not. How do I know? But I do know that a fire extinguisher in your kitchen is a very cheap piece of insurance to buy to make sure that you can put out that grease fire. Of course, I would be remiss in not pointing out that a fire blanket or a large pot that you know where it is mixed with a small fire extinguisher would probably be a better solution for the grease fire.

Or what is it, salt that you can put on it and will also put the fire out? Anyway, a fire blanket and a small extinguisher has always been, in my mind, the simplest thing. You have a huge degree of control over these things, and safety and prevention are a huge deal.

We are fortunate to live in a very orderly world that's governed by the laws of cause and effect. And if you'll think in advance and prepare for the circumstances down the road, then I think you'll get better results. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time mowing lawns and I didn't wear ear protection.

I think I still have pretty decent hearing, but I'm sure that impacted me. But I'm going to make sure that my 8-year-old, when he's out mowing the lawn, is wearing proper hearing protection. Because a set of earmuffs can cost $5, but a set of hearing aids at 50 years old will cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Some of these things seem to be relatively inevitable as you age. It seems to be inevitable that you'll lose some of your acuity of hearing and you'll wind up purchasing some form of hearing aid. But you can forestall that to a much later age if you think ahead now and don't listen to music at very high volume in your earbuds and you make sure that you're always wearing appropriate hearing protection.

Health is a big deal. In a moment, I'm going to go through a number of the health-related factors that lead to early death and are some of the top leading causes of death. But you can either spend more money on higher quality food, it seems to me, or you can spend more money on medications.

Well, I'm happy that we've got high quality efficacious medications, but I'd a whole lot rather feel better and not need the medicine and spend a little bit more money on food. So I hope you'll consider some of these ideas and that they will stimulate you. Some of them are very important in terms of their likelihood, their statistical likelihood.

Some of them are just going to be just a little bit fun because I think they're interesting topics. But I'm going to start today by discussing some of the leading causes of early death. And it's important that we always keep a firm grasp on the actual data, the actual likelihood of certain things happening.

We need to maintain a sense of perspective and be firmly grounded in reality. Although we may have a vigorous national debate on the subject of gun violence, and we should have that debate, you are many, many, many times more likely to die from slipping and falling in your home.

So you would probably be better served to leave your 12-gauge shotgun loaded, cocked and locked, ready to go, and leaning in the corner of the room and make sure that you pick up your throw rugs and make sure that your house has good handrails in the shower so you don't slip and fall and kill yourself in the shower.

And make sure that you don't slip and fall on the step outside. Statistically, there's a very low chance of your experiencing even an accidental discharge of a firearm than of your falling. Falling is one of the leading causes of early death, as we'll go through not today. It's the number one cause, the number one category of preventable injuries in the United States.

So the obvious, you should immediately recognize the logical fallacy in what I've just said. It's not either/or. I don't think you should leave your loaded 12-gauge cocked and locked in the corner of the dining room. I think that should be properly secured and set aside. But the risk to you is much higher of falling than is the risk of being injured by a firearm, whether during an actual assault or not.

So let's today just talk through some of the leading causes of death. Because of course, it's hard to imagine a circumstance that is more difficult financially to plan for and also just from the reality of life than death. Here is the data on the leading causes of death in the United States.

And today's data is all coming from the Injury Facts Report, which is published by the National Safety Council, which is a government-run organization where they take the data and collate it. So I'm reading here to you all leading causes of death in the United States for the year 2016.

And the total number of the total cases of death in this particular data set is $2,744,000. The number one leading cause of death is heart disease by a strong, strong margin. 635,000 of those 2.7 million deaths are due to heart disease. And number two, following closely behind with almost 600,000 deaths is cancer.

Cancer and heart disease are the leading causes of death by a wide, wide margin. Now the number three category is preventable injury, which is where we can spend a significant amount of time. But I want you to recognize clearly that the medical risks are much more significant than the physical risks.

Number one is heart disease. Number two is cancer by a wide margin. And number three, following along with only 161,000 deaths is preventable injury. Number four is chronic lower respiratory diseases. Five is stroke. Six is Alzheimer's disease. Seven is diabetes. Eight is influenza and pneumonia. Nine is nephritis. And ten is suicide.

Now maybe you are much more competent with medical terms than I am. I didn't know what nephritis was. According to Wikipedia, nephritis is inflammation of the kidneys and may involve the glomeruli, tubules or interstitial tissues surrounding the glomeruli and tubules and their various medical conditions. So I'm just going to call it kidney problems because I'm not entirely clear on what nephritis is.

But it's a big deal, obviously, because it shows up with a significant factor in the data set. Now the point I'd like to draw your attention to and my own is of these top ten leading causes of death, either eight or nine of them, depending on how you personally characterize suicide are medical conditions.

Only one of them, preventable injury, has anything to do with physical situations that you'll be in. Heart disease and cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, diabetes mellitus, if that particular modification of the word diabetes makes a difference, I don't know, influenza and pneumonia, nephritis, and then suicide is number ten.

And depending on how you desire to treat the topic of suicide, that will determine whether you include that and how you include that in your personal planning. So the point here is figuring out a plan for physical health, for strong physical health and the avoidance of disease, this should be very high on my and your, on our priorities.

And it should be very high on the amount of time that we spend thinking about these topics, studying them, and trying to figure out how to maintain long, healthy, disease-free lives. How to avoid these particular medical conditions that we may suffer from. And my caveat here, as I give you a few things to consider, is I would not consider myself a medical expert.

The problem with medical experts, in my analysis, after listening to a lot of them and reading a lot of them, is you can't seem to find any that really agree, and it's very hard for those of us who are non-medical experts to figure out who's telling the truth and who's not.

So I'm going to proceed forward with giving you just a few ideas that make sense to me, because I think we have swallowed a lie, which is to always revert to experts and the idea of expertise instead of using a little bit of common sense. I find this particular topic of health and figuring out how to maintain health to be very personally frustrating, because no matter how much research I do, no matter how much reading I do, no matter how much listening I do, it seems like there's always one more person who disagrees with the person I just heard and has more compelling data.

And perhaps those who are more competent and have more experience can identify the problems in one person's argument and another person's data sets, but I struggle to do that. I struggle to figure out who's right. So I've taken a fairly simple approach to this, and I hope it helps you.

Without advocating for any one particular approach or one viewpoint, here are the three things that make sense to me that we should focus a lot of our time and attention. If we're going to engage in a fight against these particular diseases and these particular health conditions, which have a very strong probability of ending our lives early, I think there are probably three core ones and perhaps some more connected ones as well.

Number one, quality nutrition and adequate hydration. Quality nutrition and adequate hydration. Number two, maintaining and living in low toxicity environments. Number three, assuring that we get adequate physical movement throughout all of our lives seems to be extremely important. Now, I think there might be some other factors. For example, I'm sensitive to an argument that somebody like a chiropractor would make towards the value of making sure that your skeletal alignment is optimum, but I think these three are good enough for us to focus on.

Number one, quality nutrition and adequate hydration. Here's my layman's understanding of this topic. Your body is made up of the physical substances that you put into it. There's nothing else that your body can work with to generate new cells, generate new tissues, and heal itself than the physical substances that you ingest.

Now, those physical substances, of course, come through your mouth, the food that you eat and the water that you drink. So making sure that the quality of those substances is very high seems to me to be a very important topic. Now, that term quality is very subjective and open to interpretation.

Different people have different ideas about what quality food really is, and there are some very strongly held opinions and beliefs about this. Now, I don't know who's right, but I'll tell you what I think seems to be a bit of consensus on the topic. People frequently argue and debate about whether you should eat a diet that is high in fat and low in carbohydrates, high in carbohydrates, low in meat, low in fat, high in carbohydrates.

There's all these various debates. But I don't think there's anybody that I've ever read that advocates for eating a lot of processed, packaged foods. So one of the first movements towards making sure that there is quality nutrition going into your body seems to be making sure that we approach the topic of food and very clearly understand that highly processed, highly packaged foods are probably not going to be a cornerstone of good nutrition.

I think that if I were to do a survey of researchers who advocate for a vegetarian diet and I ask them, "Would you rather somebody eat vegetables and meat from time to time, or would you rather somebody eat vegetables and packs of processed foods, Oreos, Twinkies, I don't even know the names, Kellogg's cereal for breakfast, which would you rather somebody eat?" I think most of them would probably say, "Well, we'd rather somebody eat vegetables and some meat." And this seems to me in some of the diets that I have read to be one of the big challenges is figuring out what your control group is.

If your control group is people who engage in the standard American diet and the standard American lifestyle, it seems like when measured against that control group, almost anybody who adopts almost any diet will have some improvement. I've seen analyses in some books written where people talk about certain foods, getting rid of certain foods, adding on certain foods, adding in pasta, getting rid of meat, getting rid of pasta, adding in meat, adding more vegetables.

There are people who advocate for a diet that simply involves changing the amount of sleep that you get. But what seems to be the case is by the control group usually seems to be the people who are involved in the standard American diet and standard American lifestyle. And I personally think that almost any diet works to some extent because it forces people to pay attention to what they're eating.

And if you just look at your food and it kind of seems really bright orange or it seems dead or it came out of a package or it's the kind of thing that you realize that usually fat people eat this stuff and you start paying attention to what you eat, that seems to be sufficient to cause some significant changes in many people.

So I think most people would agree on avoiding the standard American diet and especially on avoiding processed foods, junk foods, etc. Now, the good news here is financially those are your most expensive foods because they are value added foods to use the nomenclature of the food industry. See, if you take wheat and you sell wheat berries, you have to sell it pretty cheap because that's pretty close to what the farmer is selling.

And if the farmer is selling wheat for $20 a bushel and the person who's reselling the wheat into your grocery store is reselling it for $30 a bushel, that farmer is going to figure out a way to sell it directly to you for $25 a bushel. So there's not much of an ability for the food maker to mark up that particular bushel of wheat that they're trying to sell you.

But if you take wheat and you start to process it, now it starts to go beyond the farmer's ability. The farmer sells the wheat and the wheat gets turned into flour. Well now the price can go up pretty significantly because the farmer doesn't have an operation to create flour, the farmer has an operation to produce wheat.

So the price of flour is higher than the price of wheat. Well, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on what kind of flour you buy, you've probably degraded the nutritional value of the wheat. I'd a whole lot rather eat some bread that was made from flour that was freshly ground and was whole wheat than bread that was made from a highly refined processed flour that had some of the nutrients stripped out.

And I think most people would seem to agree. We may have a good debate about gluten and wheat and et cetera, but I think there's just something where most of us would look at a loaf of freshly baked whole wheat bread and recognize, "Hey, that's probably going to have more nutritional value for us than a loaf of bread that is made out of a bunch of bleached enriched wheat.

And it's probably also going to have fewer toxins." Now back to the value add and then I'll come back to the making of bread. If that particular reseller can then take flour and turn it into bread and sell you bread, they can charge you a whole lot more money for the bread than they could charge you for the raw flour.

And things would continue of course, because a lot of people can make bread. But if they can take that wheat and they can add some corn syrup and some hydrogenated blah, blah, blah, the names I don't know, then all of a sudden they can turn that wheat flour that they turned and turn it into Oreo cookies.

Now the price per unit is very, very high and you're going to pay a lot of money for the Oreo cookies and the farmer can't make Oreo cookies. The farmer just makes the wheat. So it seems to me that one of the most intelligent things to do for your health and also for your pocketbook is to work back in the food chain towards those more basic, simple, elemental factors.

And I think this is doable on many different levels. If you have a choice between buying whole wheat bread in the grocery store and buying, I hate to pick on Oreos, but crackers or something like that, you're going to get a lot more value for your dollar buying a loaf of bread than a box of crackers.

And you're going to get a lot more nutritional value from buying a loaf of bread than a box of Oreos. Now you may consider working back another time. You may get more value for your dollar by purchasing the flour from the grocery store and making your own bread. Doesn't cost very much, will save you a good amount of money, and I think it'll be healthier.

Because to make the bread that they put on the grocery store shelves, if you read the ingredients, then all of a sudden you have to finally have preservatives and stabilizers and color stabilizers, et cetera, to make that bread sit there, even though it's only sitting there for a few days.

But if you buy the flour and the yeast and the oil and the water and honey and you make the bread yourself, even if you're buying flour, then you can go ahead and make sure that some of those preservatives have been pulled from the mix. And I think you're getting fewer toxins, which you get to a low toxicity environment in a moment, and you'd think you'd get a little bit more nutrition.

I can't prove that. I don't have all the data. This just seems to be my common sense approach. You judge it for yourself. And then finally, of course, if you want to have the lowest cost financially, and I think probably the highest nutritional benefit of the highest quality nutrition, then buy a bucket of wheat and a wheat grinder, grind the wheat and make the bread.

Now I think it's worth our trying to figure out if our wheat bellies are large because we're eating wheat or not. I don't know. I'm not competent to know that. I don't know about gluten. I read people who make the arguments about gluten. I know if you're intolerant, you should need it, of course.

But of course, some people say that everyone's intolerant. I don't know how to judge that. But I think you get better results if you go closer to the elements and simpler, and you also save a lot of money. When I was younger, that was one of the things my mom did.

My family didn't have a lot of money. We had a lot of kids and a basic income. And growing up, I always remember her making bread and she would buy buckets of wheat. She had a wheat grinder. She would grind the wheat and make the bread. And it was, well, delicious and nutritious.

Now, take that and apply it to other things. You can apply this to almost any kind of food group. I think if you were to ask most low-carbers, most paleoprimal people, I guess low-carbers would be better. Let's say if somebody is pursuing a low glycemic index diet and you were asking a nutrition consultant, I think generally if you said, "Would you rather I eat baked potatoes," which of course have a very high glycemic index or very high on the glycemic index and stimulate a lot of insulin production in your body, "Would you rather I eat a lot of baked potatoes or would you rather I eat a lot of potato chips?" Think they're going to say, "You should probably go for the baked potatoes." Just seems a lot better.

Potatoes have a lot of nutritional quality and they may mess up your blood sugar, but depending on your approach on that, it's just all around it's going to be better than the potato chips. The good news is eating the potatoes instead of the potato chips is really good also for your budget.

Now, I think it's really good for your food budget now and I also think it's really good for your medication budget later. Think if you eat a lot more potato chips now, you're going to spend a lot more money on medications later. But if you eat more baked potatoes now, I think you're going to spend less money on medications later.

Now from here, you're on your own. This is my best guess at the principle, but the principle is look for quality nutrition and minimal processing. Now the next category is low toxicity environments and here I want to talk about another group of food. I think that when you're analyzing your foods and you're trying to figure out what do I eat, although I appreciate the debates among people about should I eat meat or should I eat grain or what?

Here's what I think. First, everyone agrees you should eat vegetables. I've never read somebody that doesn't think you should eat vegetables, but I think you got to look and say, "What's in those vegetables?" Now it makes all the sense in the world to me to recognize that a biodiverse environment, growing environment, has a stronger chance of leading to a biodiverse vegetable product.

I just don't see how, since the vegetable is also a component of its growing environment, just like our bodies are created by the food that we intake, I just don't see how a vegetable or a fruit that's grown in an environment that doesn't have a lot of biodiversity is going to have as much nutritional value for your body and mine as a vegetable that's grown in a high biodiversity environment.

So let me touch briefly for a moment on the organic question or my best guess at it. It doesn't make sense to me to shop primarily for organic if organic doesn't mean biodynamically alive. Just because something is grown without pesticides and fertilizers, I think that might be fine, and I might prefer to have fewer pesticides and fertilizers, but I'd probably rather eat some carrots that are grown in a rich black earth that you know, you can just see.

You can see the earthworms wriggling in it. You can pick it up and you can smell it, smell all the smells, and you know, "Hey, this soil is alive." I'd rather eat a carrot that came from that soil that also had been sprayed with insecticide than a carrot that came out of a biodynamically dead field where the insects were killed, well, herbicide.

So there was herbicide on the carrot versus a biodynamically dead field where the carrots were weeded by flamethrowers. Just seems to make sense to me. Now, if we can avoid the insecticide or the pesticide, that sounds great to me, you know, to avoid it. But I think a lot of our focus on the organic is just misplaced, and our actual question should be biodynamic.

How much nutrition does this vegetable have? Now, some of that can probably be measured by how it looks. Is it rich? Is it vibrant? Some of it I think is only going to be measured by trying to figure out how do you go to the farm where it's grown so that you can see the soil?

Because when my vegetables are grown in Chile and flown in on an airplane, I can't go there. But I can go to the farmer's market around the corner, or I can go to the local farmer and I can look at their farm and I can see how are they doing and what's the soil look like?

In my mind, that should be the question. Now, back to toxins, and let's talk on another one. I think a big focus should also be on a discussion of meats. And I think figuring out how to get high-quality meat would seem to be in a more important discussion than figuring out whether to avoid or not to have meat.

A lot of times you get into the debates over vegetarianism and meat eating, but I think if the parallels between somebody who's a vegetarian and they eat lots of high-quality vegetables and high-quality fruits that are packed with nutrients because they're grown in a biodynamically alive environment, and you were to compare them to somebody who eats a whole lot of meat, but all of that meat comes from sick animals who are raised in very unhealthy environments.

And the only way that meat can be cleaned up is to add all kinds of chemicals and bleach and chlorine and whatnot to make it safe. I'll take the vegetarianism. But if on the other hand, you're comparing somebody who eats vegetables and meat that are from pretty clean sources and the meat is really carefully raised and it's really carefully treated and it's made by healthy animals versus the vegetarian who just eats those depleted vegetables and stuffs their face with potato chips all day long, that just doesn't seem to me to strike very good.

It doesn't seem like it's going to work out really well. So I think the quality is a big, big deal. So one was quality nutrition and adequate hydration, of course. A lot of people lose weight and live longer just by drinking more water. But that seems to be number one, quality nutrition and adequate hydration.

You develop those concepts in whatever way makes you feel best. But I think if we focused on that word quality and tried to understand different applications of it to our vegetables and our grains and our meat, I think we'd get a long way. I think that, in my opinion, is the 20% that gets at 80% of the results.

And I'll let the scientists debate the rest of this stuff. Quality nutrition, adequate hydration. Number two, of course, is low toxicity environments. Now toxins seem to me to be bad things because your body has to filter out those toxins. It's got to figure out how to make those things better.

Now here, the toxins can be many, many things. We usually think about the toxins that come in from our foods, maybe. Those toxins, of course, could be many things. It could be from the toxins of the preservatives that are put in the food to make it sit for two years on the shelf and not fall apart.

But it could also be the toxin from the E. coli that's living on the surface of the thing that you didn't get rid of when you washed or prepared the food, or salmonella, or improper cooking or improper care for food. So those are both toxins, in my opinion. But toxins are not only those things that are absorbed in our food.

They're also those things that are absorbed in our water. Whether it's the water that we drink, perhaps your water has chlorine in it or fluoride, I think those things should be taken out. Or whether it's the toxins that we bathe in, the chlorine in the water that is absorbed through our skin.

It just doesn't strike me to be a very good thing. I don't think my body is meant to absorb chlorine constantly. Unfortunately, though, the discussion about toxins isn't as simple as simply the food or the water and trying to figure those things out. Toxins are everywhere. Whether it's the candle on the table that's just pumping out a bunch of junk and chemicals that you're then inhaling, that's a concern.

Most of us don't think about that. Whether it's the air freshener that's sprayed in the bathroom or the fragrance that's in the soap, some people are super sensitive to that stuff. Some people aren't, but still, at the end of the day, it just seems like a toxin. Whether it's the electromagnetic radiation that, you know, if I sleep next to the router, the wireless router that's just pumping out electrical energy all night, that doesn't seem like a good plan to me.

You know, hanging out, living with my cell phone to my ear eight hours a day, regardless of what the current study that I can put my hand on, it doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Electromagnetic radiation or whatever that stuff is. You know, of course, there's some people that are very sensitive and some people aren't, but to me that also makes sense.

It makes sense that some people's bodies are going to be weak and not able to fend those things off, and some people's bodies are going to be strong. But figuring out how to limit toxins in our environment seems to me like a pretty good idea. Now, how you apply that, I don't know, but anything that goes into your body that your body can't use for positive food to build itself, it's got to be removed.

And if your body's spending all kinds of time removing things, it's going to do that well, but at some point it seems like to me like it could get tired and it could just get overloaded. So I don't know where the range is where asbestos causes one thing and electromagnetic radiation causes another, but I do think we probably should just take a careful look at eliminating toxins and have a healthy skepticism about most of those things and figure out how to minimize the toxins and the things that attack us.

Finally, number three, adequate physical movement. Seems pretty clear to me that getting a lot of movement is a good thing, but I think either extreme is probably damaging, but damaging in a different way. Most of us, of course, are far too sedentary and just about everything associated with a sedentary lifestyle seems to be destructive.

It doesn't seem like the human body is designed for sitting constantly. So most of us probably just need to figure out how to move more. Now on the other end, it seems to me like there's a little bit of excess from those who move a lot in some really repetitive ways.

I've known a number of Ironman triathletes and it seems like they all got a bunch of injuries. Now, is that required? Probably not. Could you do it safely? No, but anything that's super extreme also seems like we should be careful. But from there, you're on your own. Now if I'm wrong and you have information, I would actually invite you to talk to me and I'll be happy to bring you on and discuss this with you.

But of course, there's such a plethora of discussions on these topics already. I don't know that that particular area is a good way for me to focus right now. But I will say this, financially I struggle to figure out where to invest my money in health. I've heard anecdotes.

I remember Joel Salatin gave some percentages one time in one of his talks or books that I read. I can't cite the exact data, so hold it something like this. And he said something, 150 years ago, the average US American spent, and again, these aren't the exact numbers. This is directionally appropriate enough to drive the point home.

The average US American spent 25% of their budget on food and 5% of their budget on health expenses. Today the average American spends 5% of their budget on food and 25% of their budget on health expenses. So we don't spend any less money on our health, we just spend it in the wrong way.

Spend it on healthcare or sick care instead of food. That makes sense to me. I can see that. I think that's right. Whatever the data actually is, I think that's directionally right. What I find difficult to figure out is where your dollars are best spent. On food, that is of course one of a big category that we face that changes on a monthly basis.

Many financial categories such as your housing expense, your rent, or your mortgage payment, those are fixed by big decisions that you've made. You can change them, but once you change them, then they're going to become fixed again. But food changes every week, every month. It's a fresh decision every time.

You're standing in the grocery store saying, "Should I buy the organic carrots or the conventional carrots? Should I buy the butter from grass-fed cows or butter from grain-fed cows?" Standing in the meat department, "Should I buy the grass-fed bison or should I buy the conventional factory-raised chicken?" Looking at your eggs, "Should I buy the cage-free eggs?

I don't even know what that means. Or should I buy the conventional?" It's maddening to me because I find it a very frustrating decision tree because I don't know what makes the biggest difference. I don't know. I want to spend more money on food because I think that'll make a bigger health, but I don't know what to spend it on.

So if you have any ideas on this subject, here's the specific question that I'd be happy to hear from you on. You can email me, use the contact form on the website at joshuatradicalpersonalfinance.com. You can comment on today's show, but let me know how you would describe these things, especially if you have a background in medical expertise.

I'd love to hear your opinion. If you were going to increase, let's say that your family spends, I'll use my numbers, your family spends, well, depending on the month, $400 to $500 a month on food. Let's say that you're going to change your food budget and you're going to go intentionally from $500 to $1,000, let's double it.

Let's say you're going to double your food budget, $500 to $1,000 a month. And you're doing that for the purpose of good health. My question to you is this, what would you spend that money on? Would you spend an extra $100 a month on vitamins, supplements, green concoctions, extra nutritional stuff?

Would you switch all your vegetables from conventional to organic? Would you move all your meat purchases from farm-raised to wild sources? Would you buy a grass-fed beef cow? Would you quit eating meat so you could eat more grains? What would you do? I'd love to hear from you. There's a problem I've struggled with for a long time and it's, in my mind, a maddening problem.

But I hope you consider your own situation and hope in conclusion of today's show that these simple ideas are helpful for you for health-related factors. My ideas are this. One, quality nutrition and adequate hydration is essential. And by focusing on the word quality, I think that you and I are equipped to make reasonable, common sense decisions without having to try to consult the 37 new medical studies that were published this month.

Just look at something and say, "Is this quality? Is this of high quality?" Number two, seeking to live in a low-toxicity environment, pulling out toxins, whatever those toxins are, taking a look at the cleaners under your sink. What's in that? What is the chemical in that? Taking a look at the stuff that's in the air.

What's in that? What do I smell? What's coming off of my walls? What's coming out of that candle on the table? What's coming in the window from the factory next door? And then number three, making sure that we get adequate and significant physical movement that seems to be in line with the way that humans are designed to move.

Take those ideas. I hope they help you because at the end of the day, the major leading causes of death are all related to health. So if you want to protect your finances, make sure that your insurance policy was a waste of money, kind of figure out what to do about those lifestyle diseases.

If you want to make sure that your family is continuing to enjoy your presence, kind of figure out what to do about those lifestyle diseases. They're far more important than worrying about getting shot by a gun or worrying about getting in a car accident. We'll cover those another time.

Thank you for listening. I hope this information has been helpful. Big Boy's Comedy Kings is coming to Yamava Resort and Casino Saturday, December 9th with D.L. Hughley. That sweater so tight, look like a snot between the legs. Cedric the Entertainer. Once we stop running, I'll find out what it was.

I'll find out what it was. I'll find out what it was. I'll find out what it was. I'll find out what it was. I'll find out what it was. I'll find out what it was. Once we stop running, I'll find out what it was we was running about. And Paul Rodriguez.

What is it about old Mexican men? They could be missing a leg, they still want to get into a fight. Hosted by my man Eric Blake and a special performance by Mario. Big Boy's Comedy Kings, December 9th at Yamava Resort and Casino. Tickets can be purchased at AXS.com. This is a 21 and over event.