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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua. I am your host. Today, we're going to talk about how stocks always go up. Radical Personal Finance listener Benjamin writes in the Radical Personal Finance Facebook group. A few months back, Joshua stated something along the lines of, quote, "If the Fed and Congress can dump an insane amount of money and save this sinking ship one last time, that would be awesome.

It would also mean I would triple down on my bet against the future of XYZ." That seemed to have happened. I don't see how it's at all sustainable and actually reflects the real economic state the United States is in, but the market is indeed at an all-time high, again, despite the apparent dismal economic future that looms.

I took a strong cash position in late March. It seemed wise at the time. Six months later, I personally know many people who are out of work, whose companies in the corporate event space have completely collapsed, yet the market carries onward and upward, as if the realities of many of my colleagues have absolutely no bearing on the economic state.

No regrets, no grudges. My family's social wealth and mental health are higher than ever. This post is a small challenge to Radical Personal Finance to address this fact. The bet on the U.S. stock market feels like it is an almost guaranteed bet at this point, based on what the Fed has done.

What do you do with this information, knowing that it is not sustainable? As for me, I will continue to bet on me. I'll continue to increase my flows of income, double down on my time investments in Toastmasters, et cetera. I thought this was a very, let's dust off a $10 word, perspicacious question that was worth addressing, and I want to do so in today's show.

I think that Benjamin is exactly right. I don't remember exactly what the quote was that I said. I didn't go back and look for it. I'll assume that Benjamin is right, that I said, "If the Fed and Congress can dump an insane amount of money and save this sinking ship one last time, that would be awesome.

It would also mean I would triple down on my bet against the future of XYZ." And so I'm just going to assume that that's what I said. It sounds like something that I would say, and I believe that he probably quoted me accurately there. But what I want to point out is that Benjamin's planning worked.

And my ambition is not to make the world's most accurate prognostications on the future direction of stocks. My ambition is to see to the security, the financial security, the comfort, the loving, safe environment of my family through all circumstances and through all situations. And I think that it'll help if I talk about this reality that seems like stocks always go up, that seems like stocks have gone up quickly, massive recoveries very, very quickly.

We'll talk briefly about that, but I want to emphasize that that conversation is not the center of focus for most of us. I have tried during my career here at Radical Personal Finance to communicate in a thoughtful way, but to be willing to articulate nuance. What I've learned is that nuance doesn't translate particularly well to public commentary.

I've learned that no matter how hard I try to be precise with my words, thoughtful in my delivery, no matter that I try to be broad in my discussion of various scenarios and the factors that could go into them, I'm continually confronted by the fact that many people don't hear nuance well.

And I find that a little frustrating, but it's just a fact of life, right? There are many people who don't hear humor well. There are many people who don't do many things well. And sometimes I hear my words repeated back to me as though this is what Joshua believes, and I think, "But I don't believe that." And I've learned this throughout my life.

And I've tried to compensate it by explaining things more clearly, but ironically, that ends up backfiring. You take more time to say something clearly, and then fewer people tune in for the entirety of it, and then it just doesn't work. A while ago, I was reading a discussion about me in an online personal finance forum, and somebody was asking the question, "Has anybody listened to Joshua Sheets and Radical Personal Finance?" I noticed it, of course, and I poked my head in.

And some people said, "Yes," some people said, "No." They've gone back and forth about what they like, what they don't like, blah, blah, blah. But one guy popped in and he said, "Is that the guy who's always talking about buying gold and moving to a no-income tax state?" And I chuckled to myself because I thought, "Well, I guess I'm probably more friendly towards the ownership of gold than what I would say the majority of mainstream financial advisors are, but I don't think of myself as a gold bug, and I'm trying to think of any...

I don't know that I've ever actually done an entire show on buying gold, but I guess this is the reputation that this guy has of me or that I have with this guy." And then moving to a no-income tax state, yeah, I've advocated for that and did a whole show on it, but I don't hammer everyone.

And I thought, "This is what comes through?" Now, it's totally fine, right? We all have freedom to absorb our own perspectives and it's my job to try to be a good communicator. But what I've learned is that nuance often doesn't come through. And I want to focus on what I think does work for financial planning because as concerned as I get at times about many things and as clearly as I try to warn about things that I think are real legitimate threats to your lifestyle, to your wealth, et cetera, I don't think of myself as much of an extremist.

And I don't actually think that the extremist viewpoint is the best viewpoint. You know, as an example, right about the time that I would have said that quote, I was asked by one of my relatives, an elderly lady who's one of my relatives, who reached out to me for some financial advice right in the middle.

And this was when everything was uncertain, the stock market was dumping off massive numbers very, very quickly, the world was just shutting down. This would have been a back and about, I guess, March, and everything looked black on every side. And my relative, my aunt, one of my aunts, my aunt reached out to me and said, "Joshua, I'd like to talk to you about what I should do with my money." And I said, "Sure, I'd be happy to." And through the context of that conversation, she was considering whether or not she should get out of the market, whether she should sell her mutual funds and get out, and she has a financial advisor.

And I walked through it with her. And my end result, end advice, after reviewing her situation, my advice to her was, "No, you shouldn't sell anything, you should just sit tight." Now I'll explain in a minute why I got there, but I didn't say to her that she's just got to get out, everything's going to fall apart and the market's going down and you got to get out, you got to get out, you got to get out.

I didn't do that. And the reason I didn't do it is what I'm going to articulate in this show, namely, that good financial planning is done for personal reasons and to some extent, possibly even to a great extent, can ignore the markets. I think that if you grasp that and implement it, it can help you to sleep well at night, it can help you to make wiser financial decisions and to be more confident in your decisions.

I do not know how to predict the future of the stock market. I am baffled, genuinely baffled by much of what the reality is that is reflected in the stock markets. And that probably shouldn't be a surprise. After all, we use the term stock market, but it actually doesn't exist in the sense that the stock market is not one thing.

We use the term to refer to the buying and selling of securities, buying and selling of shares of ownership in companies. But what the stock market reflects is simply the individual's decisions of hundreds of millions of people on a global basis. And to think that you can accurately predict on a broad basis the individual decisions of hundreds of millions of people, to me, seems futile from the start.

I mean, just think about this. Think about the amount of work that goes into the business of predicting the actions of anywhere from thousands to tens of thousands to millions to, in some cases, tens of millions of people over something as finite and binary as a political election. Think about it.

Think about right now. The presidential election in the United States is coming up in a couple of months. Who's going to win? President Trump or Joe Biden? Who's going to win? You have a simple binary decision, right? One of those two men will win. And yet how difficult is that to predict?

Now how much more difficult is it to predict whether an individual company's value will go up or an individual company's value will go down? And then how much more difficult is it to predict that the net results of hundreds and hundreds, in many cases thousands of companies on a global basis, all of who are in different markets?

That's a very, very difficult thing to do. I don't believe it's impossible. I believe that you can find one corner of the market that you know well. You can choose a handful of companies that you follow closely. You can develop a trading strategy. You can study something and make some guesses to some degree of accuracy.

But the idea that any of us normal people could speak accurately about the stock market is very hard to believe. It's a very difficult task. But you don't have to speak accurately about the stock market if you'll do good financial planning. So back to Benjamin's question. What I would point out is that Benjamin did the right thing.

How do I know he did the right thing? Because he said, "I'm happy with it. No regrets, no grudges." What did he do? He said, "I took a strong cash position in late March." I don't know what that means. I don't know if he sold stocks, if he didn't sell stocks.

Who knows what that means. Maybe he just started saving more money. But he took a strong cash position and it seemed wise at the time. I would say it was wise at the time. I advocated very loudly for you to take a strong cash position, to be conservative, to be thoughtful, to be defensive.

I said that you should keep cash reserves on hand. I even said you should keep physical currency reserves on hand. And I don't regret any of that commentary. In my opinion, that was the wise and prudent thing to do. Thankfully, we have thus far, and I think on this particular scenario, we have avoided all of the worst case scenarios.

All of the worst case scenarios have been avoided. There have been a number of cities in Spain and in Italy, maybe New York City, where the hospital started to get full, but the worst case scenarios didn't exist in this particular pandemic. But it was still wise and prudent of you to be thoughtful and to be careful.

And I think one of the things that would make my commentary different than some other people is I believe that the prudent approach, I believe the smart approach, prudent brings with it a value judgment. I just think it's just flat out smart. The prudent, there I go with it again, prudent and smart approach to danger and to risk is to react quickly, and I say it's even logical to overreact early.

Give you, I guess, an example, okay? The mask debate. At this point in time, I am totally comfortable going anywhere in the world without a mask, at this point in time, knowing what I know about coronavirus. This point in time, I don't have much fear of getting the disease.

I assume that at some point I'll probably get it, and so I don't intend to get a vaccine for it. I'd rather get the disease and deal with that than deal with the vaccine, at least the way things look right now, at least the way that the data that is available at now.

Of course, I reserve my right to change my mind. I figure that this particular strain of coronavirus is going to be with us for a long time. It's infected the whole world. I'll probably get coronavirus at some point in time. I don't want to. I'm not going to go out of my way.

I've got a friend of mine who's got coronavirus right now. I'm not going to his house to try to have a coronavirus party to get the disease and get it out of the way with, but I'm not concerned about it at this point in time due to my medical profile and due to my family, et cetera.

I figure I'll probably get it at some point in time. I don't want to get sick. I figure I probably will. So I'm totally comfortable with the concept and the thought of getting coronavirus right now, totally comfortable with the idea of going around without a mask on. Okay, I get it.

That happens. I was not comfortable with that in March. In March, I wasn't going anywhere. In March, if I did leave my house, I was very thoroughly masked up with a mask, a face shield, et cetera. I was very stringent and careful about my decision making, minimized exposure, didn't go to anything indoors that could be expected.

I was very, very careful in March. And given the chance, I'd do exactly the same thing again because the data wasn't available. The data was too confusing. The data was too strange. You had lies from the Chinese government. You had coverups. You had suppression of information. You couldn't get a straight answer from anybody on anything.

You had extreme positions that didn't seem to be well-founded. You had some people predicting the death of hundreds of millions of people. You had some people saying, "Oh, it's nothing." It was not possible at that point in time to make a really well-informed decision, in my opinion. I could not understand why.

Back in the—I don't know if you guys remember this with all the mask debates going on globally, but I was wearing a mask everywhere in March, and when I left once every couple of weeks to go to the store, I was wearing a mask everywhere when the CDC in the United States was advising against mask wearing.

And Dr. Anthony Fauci was in public saying, "You should not wear masks. Masks don't do any good." I thought, "That's crazy. Masks might not ultimately do any good, but they'd probably do something. It just makes sense that they would probably do something." And of course, we find out, as was expected, it was a lie.

It was a knowledgeable misleading of the public because the government overlords decided that they were the ones who were going to be thoughtful and careful with the information to manipulate the public to their will. It's stupid. Why you never believe government people when they say anything? They have to lie.

They have to lie because they believe it's the morally right thing to lie. And so you should just always assume that all government representatives are lying because they believe that lying is the morally right thing to do. So forgive me, I didn't mean to engage in so much hyperbole there.

It's not hyperbole. I didn't mean to become so emotional. The point was that the data at that point in time was not clear, was not available. And so what do you do when you have a potentially significant risk? You protect against it. You stockpile cash. With my business owner clients, private clients that I work with, I advocated very hardcore protection.

You have to wait and see what works out. And some clients said, "Okay, we think this business is going to be okay, but it may not be." And across the board, though you might be doing fine, there are lots of other people who are not. And though you might not be doing fine, there are lots of other people who are doing totally fine.

The data wasn't available. So the intelligent approach was overreact early and then adjust as needed. I lean on hurricane metaphors because it's the best example that I know of, of dealing with risk. It's something that being a native Floridian, I'm intimately familiar with. Hurricanes are very serious threats. They claim lives every year.

They destroy millions of dollars of property every single year. But they are notoriously fickle threats. They're very hard to predict, although we're much better at predicting them than we once were, but they're still notoriously difficult to predict. And even to the last minute, you don't know whether one is going to hit you.

And so you have a choice to make. The choice is, am I going to be the kind of person who prepares for hurricanes or am I going to be the kind of person who doesn't? There are millions of people along the coastlines of the Carolinas and Florida and Texas and Louisiana who don't prepare for hurricanes.

They don't have a flashlight in their house. They don't have plywood for their windows or shutters or anything. And there are millions of people who will go their entire life and never be negatively impacted by a hurricane. And so they look at it and say, "Ha, look, I didn't need to do anything because I've never been impacted by a hurricane." On the other hand, many of us will eventually be impacted by a hurricane and your experience of the hurricane will be dramatically different based upon the amount of forethought that you've put into the situation.

Use a few examples. When a hurricane is predicted for your area, ideally you should have almost nothing to do except possibly top off the car's gas tanks. The hurricane lines in stores are terrible. Oftentimes you can't get what you want. Thankfully, just like with a lot of financial risks and pandemic risks, et cetera, it's a lot better now than it was 20 years ago.

I am so impressed these days by grocery stores and their ability to handle major disasters. It is awesome what they're able to do. Companies like HEB or Publix or Costco or Sam's Club, it is incredible to see how good their supply chain managers are at redirecting supplies and quickly getting the appropriate supplies to a place that's in need.

It is awesome. I have tremendous concerns about just-in-time inventory management. I think it's a major threat to your life. I am amazed at how good we are now, those stores are, at supplying needs. But even so, going last-minute hurricane shopping is a pain. If you're going to do things like board up your house, going out at the last minute trying to get plywood at Home Depot is a real pain.

It stinks. I don't think that's any way to live. I think the proper thing to do if you're going to live in hurricane country is buy a house that's well-built. If you can afford to, then you go ahead and just buy a house that's built for hurricanes. The house is hurricane rated, everything is properly done.

You buy a house that has storm windows so you don't even have to cover the windows. Then you make sure you keep all the time proper supplies in the home, store of water, battery system for electrical power, generator, fuel storage, etc. You keep a standard maintenance contract with your yard maintenance crew to keep the yard trimmed.

Then if a hurricane is coming your way, maybe you spend an hour or so going out on the back deck, bringing in your deck chairs, putting them in the garage, putting up the braces on the garage door for the wind load. It's pretty simple, not that big a deal.

Now maybe you can't do that, so you go ahead and buy shutters. Those people who buy shutters in advance can be prudent. If the hurricane is coming their way, they just go ahead and close the shutters. Takes 15 minutes, you go around the house, slide close the accordion shutters, lock them all up, you're done.

I have some friends that do this, it's great. Go to the house, 15 minutes, the shutters are all closed. You don't even have to think about should I close the shutters. It's not as crazy, should I go to the store and get plywood. Some people buy the shutters that take a lot of work.

They're more likely to procrastinate. So they wait and then they go out at the last minute, put up the panels, take several hours, but at least that's better than plywood. And so your goal and your ambition living in hurricane country should be that about the only thing you need to do when there's actually a hurricane watch issued for your county is fill up your gas tank.

Life is easy when you take those preparations. Now not everybody can do that, certainly. Not everybody can live in that kind of house, not everybody can afford the bill for the hurricane shutters. That's not a prudent use of money for some people, but it's really great to live like that way, life that way.

And so from the perspective of financial planning, preparing for a disaster should be the same thing. There should never be a need to freak out because the market's dropping and here's this big new thing. There should never be a need to do that. Most of us, of course, we don't keep six months of rice and beans in our house.

Most of us don't. And so you say, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and get a couple extra months of rice and beans or whatever your version of that is. But the goal, the idea, the ideal is to live a prepared lifestyle. The goal is to have your portfolio values squared away because you know they're right if times get tough or if they don't, if they're not tough, in good markets and in down markets.

Now if your strategy involves you specifically taking advantage of some buys, maybe you have a buy list, you have some companies that you're watching, you've done, maybe you're a value investor and you've done a valuation and you see markets are dropping, then you just go to your buy list and you say, here are some companies that I think are worth a lot of money.

Oh, these are good prices. Let me start buying. On the other hand, maybe you find yourself caught unaware. You're usually sitting on a large stockpile of cash. You're usually well insulated, well insured, but you recently stretched to make a new investment and all of a sudden you find yourself with less cash and the storm clouds are gathering.

You might need to just go ahead and divert money to cash for a little bit of time. But in a properly run life, in a properly run financial life, those variations should be modest. I took cash out of the bank, extra cash out of the bank back in March because I was concerned about the ability to get cash.

I was concerned about bank runs. I didn't predict the national coin shortage. That's weird, but I was concerned about the ability to get cash out of the bank. I would have been fine if I'd never taken cash out of the bank because I always keep cash on hand. I'm proud of the fact that I said you should get cash out of the bank and I got some listeners to go and get $3,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 because that's prudent planning for all times.

Same things. What I want you to focus on is you should be well prepared for situations at all times. It's not a bad idea to use the emotion of an impending event, that sense of dread that you have, to go ahead and do what you know you need to do.

I remember a number of years ago, I knew I needed to store more fuel. I knew I needed to buy a battery and an inverter for my hurricane plans. I didn't do it. You always feel like, "I don't need to go do this right now. I don't really want to go and spend all this money right now." Then the hurricane came.

Okay, I'll go do it. I went ahead, stocked up on the fuel, purchased the battery and the inverter and got it done. You can use the fear of the moment. If this caused you to recognize that you should keep an emergency fund on hand, great. You should use the fear of the moment to get you to do what you know you need to do.

And then when the worst case scenario doesn't happen, as long as you were thoughtful and prudent and you didn't overreact in a stupid way. I'm okay with overreaction, but not stupid overreaction. As long as you were prudent and you didn't do anything you would regret, you have no worries.

You have nothing to fear about. That's the philosophy that I hold to. I believe that it's logically correct. I believe that it's emotionally correct. I believe that it leads to a peaceful life. I don't regret having a lot of cash because it allows me to feel totally at rest and totally at peace.

That's what Benjamin mentioned. Can you put a price tag on it? Yeah, you can compare what would my portfolio values be if that cash were invested versus what would my emotions be. I don't regret it myself. If you regret it, then make a different choice. Now let's talk about the stock market.

What did I get wrong? What did you get wrong? I don't know. It's pretty astonishing how fast the stock market recovered. Pretty astonishing. I did not expect basically a five-month turnaround. I'm skeptical that that was the end of it, but at the end of the day, how can I know?

How can I predict hundreds of millions of people and their individual actions? That's very, very hard to predict. I think there's good reason to believe that many sectors of stocks are overvalued. I think there's good reason to believe that many stocks are overvalued. I guess probably the most interesting one would be a company like Tesla.

A few weeks ago, the market cap of Tesla was $450 billion, something like that. I saw somebody made the comparison. I wish I'd checked the numbers myself. I just saw it made, so if this isn't accurate, you let me know. You could either buy all of Tesla for $450 billion-ish, or you could buy all of Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, and Nissan and still have $100 billion left over.

That's pretty staggering, pretty stunning to see that one company with modest sales figures is valued more than Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, and Nissan. I saw the headlines from today that after being excluded from the S&P 500 listing, Tesla lost more value than General Motors and Ford combined. The stock dumped off 20-something percent in a day, and it lost more value than GM and Ford's entire market value combined.

Tesla has been a winner for a lot of people. Would you buy it? Would you buy it at the current price? That's the kind of question you have to answer. I wouldn't. I cannot conceive of a world in which Tesla is worth more than GM, Ford, and Nissan, and Toyota.

I can't see anything particularly all that unique about their technology, any particular strength that they have, but maybe I don't know the market. Maybe I'm wrong. Here's what's so fascinating. I think we live in an era, a new era with regard to financial markets. How do you know what the numbers even should be?

Let me throw a couple other interesting tidbits at you from a financial newsletter that I read. Here are just some interesting market extremities of recent days. Amazon is now 43% of the S&P 500 Consumer Discretionary Index. One company is now 43% of the S&P 500 Consumer Discretionary Index. Nearly two-thirds of the market is underperforming so far this year.

Only one in three stocks are actually in the green for the year to date. One in five stocks are down 50% or more from their all-time highs. The five largest stocks in the S&P 500 have a combined market cap that equals the smallest 389 stocks. I repeat, the five largest stocks in the S&P 500 have a combined market cap that equals the smallest 389 stocks.

Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, four companies, have a combined market cap over $6 trillion that is greater than the GDP of every country in the world save the United States and China. And Tesla, prior to today, Tesla has become the ninth largest stock in the United States having surpassed Walmart with one-twentieth of the revenue.

So you know, for my bullish friends, you say, they say, "Well, none of this matters." Maybe it doesn't, right? Maybe it doesn't matter. But to say it rather blithely to me, it's just, it seems strange to say it, again, blithely. When you look at the price to earnings ratios and you look at some of where we are, it's historic.

It's absolutely historic. But what should you do about it? I don't know. You should focus on your individual financial plan. So if you need more cash, you should sell stocks, not because the market is overvalued, but because you need cash. Why did I not tell my aunt to sell stocks?

The reason was I did an analysis of her financial plan, not of her portfolio value. I did an analysis of her financial plan. And what did her financial plan say? She lives in a paid-for house. She has no debt. She has a steady pension income that's guaranteed to come in.

She has very low expenses. She could actually, with a little bit of belt tightening, which she was happy to do, she could live on her pension income without touching her stocks. She grows a garden in her backyard. She has food in her pantry. And so in her situation, why should she sell stocks and get out of the stock market?

Now would I run my financial life the same way that she does? No. She's not me. She's not going to go and buy a rental property. She's not going to go and invest in condos on the beach in Nicaragua. She's not going to buy gold coins and put them in a coffee can.

For her, a well-diversified portfolio across broad financial asset classes is an excellent solution. And I didn't tell her to sell. I told her to sit tight. But the reason she could do that was because she had a good financial plan. And that's my message. You can control your financial plan.

You can't control the stock market. You can't control the US economy. You can't control the US government spending. You can control your individual plans. Now, let's talk about catastrophe for a moment. Well, in my opinion, catastrophe is possible at any point in time. And history is filled with catastrophes.

Sudden massive catastrophes are on a broad scale are very unlikely. The worst case predictions seem to very, very rarely play out. And you need to be careful that you don't depend on doomsday movies or post-apocalyptic books for your accurate understanding of reality. A doomsday movie is fun. A post-apocalyptic book is great.

I love them. They're fun. They're not reality though. And reality is generally much more tame than those narratives. And so we need to always begin by recognizing that catastrophic predictions very, very rarely play out on a broad scale. Why? Why not? Why don't they usually play out? I think there are many reasons.

First of all, the risks are often overly emphasized. In addition, they don't play out because human beings are smart. What do you think we would see all around the world if the coronavirus pandemic were 10 times more lethal than it has proved to be? What do you think we would see if instead of something like a 0.4% infection fatality rate, you had a 5% infection fatality rate?

There would be no debate about masks. There would be no debate about lockdowns. There would be no debate about people getting back to work and opening up their businesses. We would all be sitting in our houses, sending money to vaccine companies to develop a vaccine and voluntarily supporting them and doing internet sleuthing on every drug known to man to try to come up with a new therapeutic cure.

Because human beings are smart. They can accurately assess risk for themselves and they can accurately assess information. Why do you see so much pushback all around the world? Just yesterday I saw in Spain some police officers were trying to arrest a woman for not wearing a mask and all the bystanders accosted the police officers, pulled them off of the woman and got the woman free.

It was great. It was great to see that, that pushback after watching people arrested all over the world, people in Australia and all over the world arrested for not wearing a mask. It was great to see the bystanders say, "No, you're not arresting this person." I think we'll see a lot more of that.

I think you see it the strongest in the United States, a culture that's deeply rebellious at its core, but you'll see it around the world. Why? Because people look at it and say, "It's not that big a threat. You're killing me with this stuff. I'm not going to do it.

I'm not going to comply." Because they're smart. People understand that the risks are not what we previously feared. And so in the midst of catastrophe, people quickly adjust, companies adjust, people react quickly and this is so often what is unknown to prognosticators. Prognosticators assume that everything is going to continue as it is and thus disaster is inevitable.

The most striking example of this would be if you were to go back to the 1970s and look at all the predictions about overpopulation and global famine and whatnot. Many smart people looked at that and said, "Wow, this is really catastrophic and this is really, really bad and this is the population bomb is going to explode and everyone's going to die." It didn't happen.

Why not? Reason is because the prognosticators didn't account for human ingenuity and human changing. They didn't account for massive plummeting of birth rates. They didn't account for massive increases in productivity from an agricultural perspective, etc. Which is why I don't take most disaster predictions, I shouldn't say I don't take them seriously.

I don't think the worst case scenario is likely. You see something like global warming, right? The world is going to fall apart because of global warming. I don't think so. I don't think so. Will there be changes? Sure. I have no reason why I'm opposed to the concept of global warming, but I don't think it's going to be a disaster catastrophic prediction because people will change.

What are going to be the solutions to whatever problems end up resulting? I don't know, but I guarantee you they'll be developed and there will be no catastrophe. You see it again and again. You see that people are the world's greatest resource. They're resilient, they're smart, they're thoughtful. So when you try to figure out what's going to happen to the United States or the US economy or the US markets or the US fiscal situation, although I find it very easy to say there's going to be a major problem, I don't mean that in a doomsday scenario.

And I think being outside of the United States gives me far more appreciation of the United States than many other people have. First we always need to look and say, why have all the previous bears been wrong? People have been predicting the implosion of the United States due to overspending since the 1970s, maybe earlier, I don't know.

The government debt is at $1 trillion. So what? Government debt is at $5 trillion. So what? In this case, running a what? We don't know the numbers for sure yet, but a couple, trillions of dollars of deficit. The answer could be, so what? I think it's a very serious problem.

I think it's a problem that will be very difficult. But is it an end of the world as we know it scenario? Is it a catastrophe? Probably not. And the reason is you're dealing with a country and a people of tremendous resources. Let me give you two examples that affected me.

I want you to think about two major, major disasters, one of which happened in Haiti, the earthquake of 2010, the other of which happened in Japan, the earthquake and subsequent tsunami of 2011. If I took you to Haiti today, you would see major signs of the earthquake and major dysfunction.

I don't know this for sure, but I would bet, and any of my Japanese resident listeners, let me know, I would bet that if we went to Japan, with the exception of the zones that may be forbidden with the nuclear reactors and whatnot, I would bet that it would be difficult at this point in time for a layman observer to see the results of the tsunami in Japan.

Why? I was in Haiti in 2012 and I was just stunned at how it was more than two years after the earthquake and I saw UN vehicles and Red Cross people and whatnot, but I was just stunned at how nothing was happening. At that time, the presidential mansion was still not in ruins, but there were major problems.

There were entire towns that were in ruins. I was stunned. Whereas in Japan, if you go back and you look at the reports from Japan two years, three years after the tsunami, in many cases, at least through the limits of a photographer's lens, in many cases you couldn't see it, or at least all the stuff was cleaned up.

At least all of the trash was cleaned up. The airports were working again. The roads were rebuilt in many cases, very, very quickly. And I thought this is a really good example of how incredibly durable countries that have resources are compared to countries that aren't. Japan has had financial problems for decades.

They have a population crisis. They have economic problems. But life in Japan can be great. It's not a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Haiti, on the other hand, is very much like a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's a very difficult place, very difficult for anybody to make progress. And so when you look at the United States, for all of its dysfunction and for all of its problems, don't take the perspective that it's just going to collapse.

It's not going to collapse. Doesn't mean it won't be crises, won't be difficult things. It's not going to collapse. Similar things like with the US dollar. Does the US dollar have problems? Sure. It's a better option than many other places. And so what you need to evaluate is you need to evaluate where are you in the world and see it seriously.

This is where I think it's so hard for Americans especially, because as US Americans, we're so used to thinking of ourselves at the center of the world, and we see the problems in our own lives that we don't see what we're comparing to. Example, Lebanon. Lebanon has been quite literally and metaphorically leveled.

Lebanon was already dealing with a tremendous financial crisis, was already dealing with hyperinflation. Then they have this catastrophic explosion. Lebanon will not recover quickly. And so if you're living in Lebanon, you're living in a country that doesn't have the resources to recover quickly. It's a devastating situation. It was already a financially devastating situation.

But for a wealthy Lebanese businessman who had his financial accounts in the United States, he's insulated. And maybe his primary home was in Beirut, but if he had a secondary home out in the countryside that he could go to, try to keep his business going, or maybe fold up shop, or have some diversification into business operations, he can be okay.

It's going to be a long, difficult recovery, but all the stuff we talk about, all the stuff you do to prepare for things works. It works. And if that Lebanese businessman had moved some money from stocks into cash to prepare for the global pandemic, he probably was able to pick up some deals during the local hyperinflation that was happening there, and probably is now grateful that he has cash, because he figures out how can I rebuild my businesses and rebuild my community in the wake of this devastation.

But Lebanon and the United States are not the same. If you leveled Washington DC to the ground, if you dumped 10 nuclear missiles into the heart of Washington DC, psychologically it would be a major impact. Functionally, financially for the country, it would be a modest blip. Think about something like 9/11.

9/11 leveled to, I guess, how many, what? A bunch of really important buildings in the heart of New York City. It's hard to imagine devastation worse than 9/11. Psychologically, massive influence. Financially, a blip, a blip. If you had enough cash in your account so you didn't have to sell stocks for a few years, you were fine.

Could it have been worse? I guess. And I think it's important to look at threats and try to understand the severity of threats. Why was I so concerned about a pandemic? I was just talking with a friend of mine about disaster planning. Okay? And we were talking, I don't know why, I never intended to become like the disaster expert, but I guess it is a unique thing that I understand and pay attention to that most people don't.

But we were talking about disasters and we were talking about nuclear war. And for me, this was the cornerstone in my thinking when I realized that nuclear war I had thought nuclear war was this just unsurvivable thing. That if nuclear warheads went off in Seattle, Washington, I would be dead in Florida.

Right? It's silly, but you have this idea that nuclear war just makes a post-apocalyptic world everywhere. Then I started studying it and I realized how incredibly survivable nuclear war actually is. Now the threat of nuclear war is a serious, legitimate, very real threat. For you to go back to during the cold war, there were a couple of times during the cold war where basically the world was one man's decision away from actually launching a hot nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States of America.

And it would have been bad. It wouldn't have been, however, unsurvivable. When I realized that, it made me realize how even this thing that seems totally catastrophic and genuinely is really a catastrophe, it would be fairly localized, fairly isolated, and it's eminently survivable. Other ones, right? Remember one of the disaster movies or disaster books that really hit me hard was the Lights Out book.

Phenomenal book. So well written. It just puts me to tears to read that book. But it's all about the threat of electromagnetic pulse and has become the basis of many preppers' concerns and I think rightly so. If the electricity goes out for the long term, it would be a major, major cause of death in any country in the world, but especially in a modern advanced technologically dependent country.

But when you actually look at it and you think about what happens in electromagnetic pulse, I think the risk that is drawn by a novel like that is wildly overstated. Shielding and modern equipment is much better than it once was. It's getting better all the time. The actual logistics of detonating a successful electromagnetic pulse attack over a large area are vanishingly difficult.

Could a terrorist set off a localized small nuclear bomb at ground level and with that wipe out a city's electrical grid? Sure. Wipe out a state on the other hand or a country? Very, very difficult and wouldn't be 100% killing of all of the electrical issues in my opinion.

But what is the issue? What is the most lethal? The answer is it's a pandemic. Actually in my opinion, anybody who didn't take the threat of a pandemic seriously, especially back in the beginning of 2020 when the data was very strange to cover, was foolish at best and stupid at worst.

A pandemic, a global pandemic, disease pandemic is one of the very few genuinely global events. If you have the right combination of a lethal disease that kills a lot of people but not too many so it can still replicate, our modern world is sitting wide open for a pandemic and the follow on economic effects of it are catastrophic, which is why the lockdowns have been so catastrophic.

Now were the lockdowns the right move or not? At this point they sure seem to not be, but were they the right move back then? If I were emperor of the world, I wouldn't have said it. I wouldn't have imposed lockdowns. I wouldn't have closed businesses because I believe that's a fundamental violation of my responsibilities as the emperor of the world, but I understand why they did.

I'm not too mad about it. But a pandemic is genuinely that terrible. And so it's nice to do some quarterbacking, but man I'm glad that things are not as bad as they would have been. And that was my realization through it. As I worked my way through it I realized this is not romantic, this is not fun, this is terrible.

And I didn't want it of course, I'm not that immature, but still you always wonder well what's it going to be like? It's terrible as we all know now, it's terrible. So where do we go from here economically, in the markets, the fiscal situation? I don't have any regrets about what I said with regard to preparing, being heavy on cash.

If I had perfect foreknowledge and I knew that five months later the stock market would be totally recovered I would give exactly the same advice again. Zero regrets about that whatsoever. In many cases, for many people, possibly even for you, having access to things like cash is setting things up for you to have bargains and opportunities, which is always the way that you want to profit off of a crisis.

Why do I advocate for people to not have every dollar invested? Part of it is defensive, part of it is offensive. I try to teach this at the basic levels of personal finance. Why do I recommend to a young person that before they go and they start obsessing like I did, which I now consider a mistake, why do I recommend that a young person accumulate $10,000 in cash before they start buying stocks in their IRA?

Which by the way, it's totally fine with me if your $10,000 is in cash in a Roth IRA, that's a great way to split the difference, but why do I want them to have that? Well, if you think about a young person and you think about what can be had if you have $10,000 of cash and you need a car and there's a guy that's selling a lovely, very sexy Toyota Corolla, four years old, and if you can give him cash today, he'll give it to you for six grand instead of its blue book value of 12 grand.

Those kinds of deals make a big, big difference. Cash is not just defensive, cash is an opportunity fund. What about that same guy though, the defensive side? A young person has $10,000 of cash is effectively bulletproof from getting laid off. They don't like their work, they just cut that career short and say, "That's it, I'm leaving." They don't have to sit around and go through what most of us have gone through, "I got to go find another job." They can just leave because when you can live on $800 a month, that $10,000 makes you effectively bulletproof.

You can leave any job where you're mistreated and you can cut all the time-wasting stuff short and make much faster progress in your career. So I don't regret the advice, I think it was prudent advice given the time. And if you saw that the market dropped by 40% and you looked around and said, "I don't need this cash," I hope you bought.

I hope you looked down and said, "Hey, I've been watching XYZ Company and I'm going to buy some of this." And that's where fortunes are made. What's going to happen from here in the stock market? No idea about the stock market. Stock market to me is driven by a number of interesting benefits and a number of interesting problems.

Some of the problems would be things like mass participation. I'm convinced that many people, if they were professional stock investors, would not buy into many companies and into the stock market at its valuations if they knew what they were doing. But the reality is most stock purchases are made totally automatically.

You get a paycheck, you get paid $10,000 a month and you put $1,000 a month into your 401(k), well there's automatic stock purchases. How do we measure the impact of that on the market overall? I don't know, but I think that the numbers that we face are new. There's such an overwhelming victory of the stick with it, dollar cost average in, by passive investments.

There's such an overwhelming victory in the marketplace that I think that makes for a much more resilient market than many other scenarios, but I'm not close enough to it to know. I don't know what's going to happen with the stock market. What's going to happen to the economy in the United States?

Well it's taken a beating, but the people who are being affected by the economy, and this is where things are so tricky with the stock market too, are often not that important to the economy. This is what's so difficult about the way that the markets are set up. Your brother-in-law who got laid off from his job as a restaurant manager, how much does he actually contribute to the economy?

Not that much. Not all that much. Makes $60,000 a year, not that much. It's not that big a thing. Whereas how much does a company like Amazon contribute? Well, a lot. There's a lot of economic activity associated with Amazon. This is where when you look at things, it's so hard to figure out where people started buying less.

Well yeah, on the local basis, restaurants are getting hammered. Everybody who works in the restaurant segment is getting hammered, but are those people who got laid off of restaurants still buying stuff on Amazon? They do, right? They're spending their stimulus checks and their savings on that and their credit card debt on Amazon Prime and books and games and all that stuff.

They're still active there. And so figuring out where these things go, I don't know. I don't see any kind of catastrophe for the economy. What I see is changes. That's always what happens. You almost never have catastrophe where everything falls apart and it goes back to the old way.

What you see is massive changes. And so are major segments of the economy falling apart? Yeah. Commercial real estate in a big city, New York City, yes. Lots of companies canceling their big expansion plans. But is that bad on the other side? I don't think it's bad on the whole.

It's just going to mean growth and change. And so your job is not to worry about the economy, but your job is to look and say, what's happening in the economies that I can track? If you're a commercial landlord in New York City, it's not as rosy of a future as it was.

If you were a taxicab medallion investor and you got decimated, totally decimated, you're bankrupt right now. On the other hand, if you're a real estate agent in South Florida, you're doing better than ever. I've been amazed to see how strong the real estate market is. All across the country, you hear reports of people saying, man, real estate market here is so fast.

And so that's where we've got to be is you've got to say, what are the trends? What's happening in the economy? What are people doing? And then put yourself in the way of some of that money with a trade, with a business, with some way to capitalize on where things are going right now.

What's going to happen with the fiscal situation? I don't know. I didn't mean to sound so dumb. I don't know. I don't know. But the point is that I don't have the competence to make long-term predictions. I say that and I'm going to make one. Obviously, the US government will default on its debt.

But I think that default, number one, is not necessarily directly related to the economy and the stock market. Just like the economy and the stock market are not fundamentally intertwined necessarily, or your local economy is not fundamentally intertwined with the stock market, I think that the fiscal situation is not fundamentally intertwined with the economy and the stock market.

Just because the US government defaults on its debt doesn't mean that the stock market doesn't go up. I don't know. But it won't be paid. So how will it be defaulted on? I think just a series of changes. They'll change the laws. They'll add means testing to Social Security.

They'll change the retirement ages. They'll adjust this, adjust that. And it can go on for far longer. I think that one of the things that should be very clear is that anybody who makes a prediction that this has to end by this date, it's hard to find anyone who has made those predictions accurately.

So the absolute numbers are hard. There's no absolute valuation of the price to earnings ratio that is right. There's no absolute valuation of the price of gold that is right. You're always investing and comparing your investments and the use of your dollars to what alternative investments are available. And so why, for example, is the US stock market doing so well?

I don't know, but I think probably one reason would be it's the best place available for many investors to put their money, even on a global scale. What else are you going to do with your money? What else are you going to invest in? It's so easy to invest in.

It's so strong. Companies are so strong, globally diversified, powerhouses, et cetera. So there's all these factors that are just outside of your control. I want to focus now as I wind down is how do you get ready? What did I mean when I said if the Fed and Congress can dump an insane amount of money and save this sinking ship one last time, that would be awesome.

It would also mean I would triple down on my bet against the future of XYZ. What I meant when I said that was I don't want my future to be tied to any one thing. I don't want my future to be tied to any one market. I don't want my future to be tied to any one industry.

I don't want my future to be tied to any one country. I want to be diversified. I don't want to just have stocks. I want to have stocks and real estate and a business that's creating cash flow. I don't want just a business creating cash flow. I want all the others.

I want to be diversified. I don't want to just own paper assets. I want to own real assets and I want to own business assets. I want to be diversified. And I don't want to be dependent on one economy, one, you know, the American economy as strong as it is.

I don't want to be dependent on it. I want to be, I don't want to be independent. Sorry, I don't want to be dependent on one currency. I don't want to be dependent on one location. I want to be ready. But the reality is there are different versions of that.

There's the best case scenario and then there's the worst case scenario. On the best case scenario, I'd like to have a handful of businesses all paying me millions of dollars a year. I'd like to have investments all around the world in all different asset classes in all different situations.

It's going to take me some time to build that. On the worst case scenario though, I just want to have some safe places to go, some protection and some insulation against bad things happening. And what I think you can see from even this current economic crisis, which is, we don't know the full extent or the full length of it, but very, very severe, likely to be continue for a time, is you see how the basic fundamentals, the personal finance 101 works.

It works. Right? My aunt, no debt, paid for house, modest fixed expenses, able to live on her social security check and has an investment portfolio that's healthy as well to give her discretionary money. It worked. And a garden in the backyard. It works. She's not suffered. She doesn't need anything.

She didn't need some fancy plan. She didn't need... It works. The basics work. So engage in the basic common sense prudent financial management. Debt. Handle debt carefully. Strive for no debt, if that's appropriate for you. Being debt free, you have all the options in the world. If you're a business owner and your businesses were shut down by the government, if you have no debt, you lay off all your employees, you pay the basic fixed costs that you need to keep the lights on so your building doesn't grow mold and do the very basics and you wait until you can reopen.

And you're not bankrupt because of it. Why are all these big brands going bankrupt? Why does J.Crew go bankrupt and Hertz car rental, et cetera? It's because they have debt. Massive massive amounts of debt due to the financial engineering of the financial class. So in your situation, if you avoid debt, you'll have a rock stable business.

Dave Ramsey's not hurting. He's doing fine. So no debt, worth having. If you have debt, making sure that it's carefully segmented, making sure that the debt is located on these assets over here, but these other assets over here are okay. So in a worst case scenario, call the creditors, sorry guys, can't pay, take the assets and you just simply carve off that portion of your asset base, but everything else is still safe.

Or carefully negotiated debt. If you had all your debt, right, I have the credit card course, the credit card course that I teach. If all of your debt was unsecured debt, just simply credit card, and you lost your job back in March and you couldn't pay your credit cards, your life would not have changed in the last six months.

Nothing was taken from you. Nothing disappeared. You just couldn't pay your credit cards. The credit card companies understand. You tell them, listen, when I get a job, I'll pay you. When you get a job, you're going to go back and pay them. Obviously your credit rating is going to be hurt, but your life is okay.

Which is why it's so important to think about the kinds of debt that you accept and how you negotiate that debt. At its core, you always have a bankruptcy plan. You always make sure that if I go bankrupt, what do I come out the other side with? And make sure that you think about that with everything that you do.

That's 101, prudent financial management. What else? Insurance. Being properly insured against common risks. If you have health insurance and you got COVID and you got all these hospital bills, health insurance take care of it. If you got car insurance, you probably got discounts because you're not driving, but all the nuts and bolts, house insurance, all the stuff still works.

Investments. If your investments were thoughtfully diversified in advance of the crisis and they're properly chosen for you based upon your financial needs, everything has worked. You know, some of the old things about don't invest money you can't afford to lose. If you didn't ignore that, you were fine when the markets were down 30%.

Little things like don't invest money in stocks that you need within five years. If you paid attention to that, you've been fine because your market value's recovered. Cash management. Making sure you have the ability to protect yourself and you have emergency funds. Three to six months emergency fund goes a long way for many people.

One year emergency fund, great. Whatever your particular approach is. It worked. It works. It's still working and it worked. I've hammered the need to keep an income. I've said it again and again. If you can keep your job through a crisis, you're going to be fine. Well, if you can keep your job through a crisis, you're fine.

Is unemployment up? Yes. But why do we work so hard? Why in my radical personal finance guide to career and income planning, why in that course do I work so hard on making sure that you have a network, a place that you can go? Why do I focus on having everything squared away?

It's because if you lost your job and you had a network, you could have another job quickly. There's been plenty of things that you can do. It's so important that you not ignore that stuff because if you could just simply keep your job, you've been fine. You've been totally fine.

You got to be a high performer. You got to have economically valuable skills so you can directly trace your production and your productivity to your income so you're not just dead weight at your company. And you need to maintain backup plans, backup careers, backup jobs, et cetera. It worked.

It's still working. It works. What about a prudent relocation plan? The ability to leave a problem area and go to where there are fewer problems. Right now, there are people all around the place whose cities are being rocked by violence who are using their relocation plans. If you're living in a downtown corridor where people, protesters are burning down buildings on your block, et cetera, you have the ability to relocate.

And it's simple. It's calling your cousin who lives a couple of counties away and saying, "I'm going to send the kids out for a couple of weeks at the farm. Just wanted to let you know the city's not working for us right now." I've talked in my preparedness courses and whatnot, I've talked about the importance and value of even just a simple strategy.

I have this thing about even if you don't have anything at the basic level, having a little cargo trailer with a nice tent in it and some food and some electricity stuff and some basic tools and whatnot that you could just hook up your cargo trailer and go camping.

If you were locked down in New York City and you couldn't go anywhere, couldn't do anything, you could just hook up your cargo trailer if you had a car and go upstate, go out on some government land or go to a campground and you can live well. You can fish every day, go to the lake, you can do great.

Or you go out anywhere and that stuff works. Maybe you've implemented a little bit more. You have your vacation house. Where did all the New Yorkers go? They went to their second homes. It's perfect. Having a second house can be simply, "Oh, we've got the cabin on the lake." Or, "We like to go out in the summertime to our country cousin's farmhouse." Or maybe you just have a little flat in a far off city, a little apartment that you maintain.

It's not much, but it's something. South Florida, you keep a little apartment in Miami. Well, you just go down to your apartment in Miami and then you weren't locked down like New York City was. You had the ability to go. Maybe you maintain a beach house on a Caribbean island and you simply go to your beach house.

In our current world, that stuff has worked great. You're still working from remotely. Now instead of being locked down, you can go to the beach, you can take the sun, you're not stuck in the middle of a city somewhere, not able to go anywhere with kids driving you crazy.

You're fine. Now, I recommend, this hasn't generally been necessary for most people, but making sure that you think about physically supplies. So security. It feels good to have a security plan. If you've got crowds of angry people coming through your front yard, it's nice to have a security plan in those situations.

Food, water, energy, medical supplies, none of that has been necessary for this crisis, but it all still makes sense. When you realize how inexpensively the average person can provide for those basic needs and be totally bulletproofed, it's a no brainer. So in a worst case scenario, you're totally fine.

I mean, this is the stuff that I teach in my How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis course. I talk a lot about international relocation, but it really works. It really works. The United States, if you had a second passport from a little Caribbean country and you kept a little piece of real estate there that you could go to, you could get to the country, you could get in, do your little quarantine, and be fine.

There have been many places around the world that have been totally open for a while when Europe was shut down and when the United States was shut down. You're fine. If your jobs have disappeared in your city and you can move to another city, or I talk about even just being able to move to another country and get a job, it all works.

Hope I haven't been a broken record in this, but my point is that the reason you prepare for disaster is so that you can go through it easily and comfortably, so it's not disruptive to you. I think it's possible to over-prepare for disasters. Some people, it's just fun for them.

It becomes their hobby, and they're total catastrophists. But I'm not going to waste my life preparing excessively for something that probably won't happen. But a little bit of preparation makes life good in the middle of catastrophe. In the same way that having a generator, having storm-proof windows, and just making it a habit that you keep some water and food in your house and some gas for the generator for your Florida beach house, in the same way that that makes most hurricane warnings relatively a non-event, and if your house gets blown down, you have proper insurance and you decided to leave or you had some kind of storm shelter in the middle of it, makes it mostly an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe, the same thing applies to good financial planning.

You do good financial planning so that you can be minimally affected. I have a friend of mine who runs an education business, and it's in a foreign country, and his business collapsed because he had to send all his students home, and his business collapsed because the foreign country closed the borders, and so no international students were allowed to come in.

He laid off some of his staff members completely, cut everyone's pay to 50%, but he's not worried, even though business revenues are zero, he's not worried and hasn't been worried for the past six months because he has money, he has cash, doing a little bit of work from home, but when the borders open up, he'll be back at it.

Might take a few years to recover, but it's not the end of the world. The end of the world is the guy who doesn't have reserves, who got too far out over the tip of his skis. That's the problem. So there's nothing wrong with being prudent, there's nothing wrong with preparing.

It works. I have tried to stay away from making market prognostications. I think it's fine for that to be done, but I think that the value of the stock market in most individuals' people's financial lives is vastly overrated. There is abundant information and abundant noise about the gyrations of the market.

I think that the value of good financial planning is underrated, and people underestimate how valuable it is to be able to think about your personal life in a holistic way and then properly protect it. Stocks are great. The American stock market is awesome. It is very useful. I have no problem of people being involved.

I'm not saying run for the hills and buy gold. I think you should own some gold, but not all. All your money should not be in gold. If you get this stuff right, then you're insulated from the markets enough that you can let them run. That's always been the power.

When I was a financial advisor, managing portfolios, selling stocks, I always said, "My job is to keep you invested. If I do my job right on the financial planning side, I'll be able to talk you into staying in the market so you don't bail out and destroy your portfolio." I still believe that.

The markets are wildly unpredictable. 30% declines are normal business. 50% declines happen regularly. You should expect it. This is how you prepare for it so that it doesn't cause you major harm and major damage. I want to take a moment as I go and I want to emphasize to you that there's always been a method to my madness in the courses that I sell.

There are three courses right now on the website, radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. Those three courses are all related to this theme. I've mentioned them in the show. The first was career and income planning. My headline that I wrote on the ad, "Increase your income and enjoy a richer life now by finding or developing work you love." What I've focused on is if you have an income and you maintain it through a recession, you can ignore most recessions and in fact, they become for you an opportunity, the ability to buy things at discounted value.

But you've got to build a solid income plan. That income plan should give you a life that you love now while you're working and it should throw off so much money that you have the money to invest in case in the future you don't want to work for money anymore.

Radical Personal Finance, Guide to Career and Income Planning available. Number two, how to survive and thrive during the coming economic crisis, a rational modern approach. In that course, I lay out that economic crisis is inevitable. Most of those crises will simply be on an individual level. Some of them will be large scale.

Can they be global? We're in the middle of it. But I lay out some strategies in that course that work. Half the strategies in the course are about being prepared to be a resilient person. If you're debt free, if you have solar panels on your roof that are providing for your electricity needs, if you have some food stored or you have a little garden in your backyard, if you have some income sources, you're totally fine.

In addition, you should be prepared to relocate. I talk a lot about international relocation and you can see the value of that right now. I talk about getting residency in foreign countries, second passports, etc. Americans have a hard time going many places in the world. If you square this away in advance, you go ahead and get yourself another passport.

Right now, you can travel the world on a St. Kitts and Nevis passport. It works great. American passport, not so much. If you're an Italian citizen, you can get into Italy right now and once you're in Italy, you can get into the EU. You're fine. You've got to square that stuff away.

If you open the world up to you, I talk in that situation about a simple example, about having a ... I talk about a bug out location. Your bug out location can be simple. It doesn't have to be a cabin in the woods unless you want one. It can be a little apartment in downtown Paris or downtown Sofia or downtown wherever you're interested in going.

A little apartment in another place allows you to leave a place where it's bad. If you were living in Italy and you kept a little apartment in Huntsville, Alabama, then you were fine when everything in Italy was going bad. If you're living in Huntsville, Alabama and you keep a little apartment in Trento, Italy, then you're fine when you go.

How to survive and thrive during the coming economic crisis is on the site. Then finally, how to borrow money safely and never pay interest using credit cards. In that course, I talk about the value of credit cards and I talk about how if you build a credit card portfolio before you need it, it gives you a very safe, very low cost way of borrowing money.

Right now, you see the value of that. If your debt is structured as unsecured debt and the whole world goes crazy, you're fine. That's why you think about the security of your debt. If you structured your credit card portfolio in advance so that you have $100,000 of credit available to you and you lost your job and you needed to borrow $10,000 or $15,000, you're fine if you've planned in advance.

You're not fine if you had one credit card with a $10,000 credit limit available to you and you needed to borrow $10,000 or $15,000 and you're not doing that cheaply. You got to build it before you need it and that's available for you on the website as well, how to borrow money safely and never pay interest using credit cards.

Go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store to purchase those courses, radicalpersonalfinance.com/store and I'll be back with you soon. Welcome to AutoZone. What are you working on today? I think my battery's dead. With free battery testing and charging, we can help you get back on the road. So what if I need a new one?

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