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With no hidden fees and a 100% purchase guarantee, you can feel confident when you book your premium LA tickets with Sweet Hop. Visit suitehop.com today. 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 Sheets. Today, I want to talk to you about the skill of prioritization and about the skill of filtering information based upon priority. I share a lot of ideas. I share a lot of advice, a lot of encouragement, etc. And one of the things that I worry about and I'm worrying about, which is why I'm creating this show, is that you may not be effectively filtering the advice and the information based upon where you are in your life right at this very moment.

And because of that, I worry that you might be making poor decisions because you haven't properly filtered the advice that you've given. Many years ago, I did a podcast called the Filtering Advice, basically Financial Advice Through the Lens of Scale. And I explained how you need to understand that one of the reasons why many people disagree on the right financial advice is that they're misjudging where somebody is in his or her life, and they're not applying the appropriate lens of scale.

There are many pieces of advice, both financial advice and otherwise, that are absolutely great advice at one time in your life that are terrible advice at another time in your life. There are things that you should do as a 16 year old that you should not do as a 46 year old.

There are things that you should do when you are flat broken in debt that you should not do when you have a lot of money. And you have to look at these things and consume the advice and differentiate it based upon where I am. And you need to be able to prioritize certain things in your life.

You need to be able to say, hey, look, this is the thing that is the most important right now. And once I solve this problem, then I can move on to the other problems. Let me share with you a very quick story. This week, I was working with a consulting client who had hired me for a conversation talking about his financial situation, and it was an excellent and productive consultation.

This particular client of mine has been listening to the podcast for about four or five months and was consuming many of the different ideas and seeking to apply them to his own life and wound up scheduling a call with me to go over some of the details. Now, when we began the call, this particular client started asking me and talking about some internationalization options, thinking about maybe I shouldn't be living in the United States, maybe I should move abroad because after all, there is a high tax burden in the United States.

But upon further investigation, some more and important details became clear. This particular client, along with his family, is a refugee from the nation of Venezuela. A number of years ago, he and his wife, there was a political change there, and he and his wife looked at each other and said, "We've got to go." And they fled from Venezuela together with their children.

In the beginning, they moved to Mexico. They lived in Mexico, working for a number of years, and then he got a job offer in the United States and was able to move to the United States with his family on a temporary working visa. Now, unfortunately, what has since happened is this particular client has his documents, all of his Venezuelan passports for him and his family members have expired.

And what is happening right now all around the world is because the nation of Venezuela is in such absolute chaos, the nation of Venezuela is no longer able to issue passports in a timely and productive manner all around the world. They're not entirely impossible to get, but they are extremely difficult to get.

The diplomatic outposts of Venezuela are fewer than they once were, and those diplomatic outposts, the consulates, don't have the ability to create documents or to provide documents for most ordinary Venezuelans. Some Venezuelans living in Venezuela are able to still apply for and get a passport, but frequently they have to pay extra money in order to be able to get an official to pay attention to their file and print the passport.

And so maybe, you know, officially the passport should cost them $50 or $100 like most of our passports do, but in order for them to actually get it created, they have to pay $500 or $1,000 in order to bring the file to the attention of somebody and get the document created.

If the document can even be created at all. So this is creating tremendous problems for Venezuelans all around the world whose documents are expiring and without a valid travel document, they can't move. Countries don't allow them to enter. There is some consideration being granted because people know how bad the Venezuela crisis is, and many countries are seeking to help and basically provide a form of relief for these Venezuelan refugees.

But it's still extremely difficult because the documents themselves are no longer valid. And so I was talking with this particular client of mine, and he was talking about the high tax burden in the United States, and maybe things would be better if he went somewhere else. And I fairly quickly tried to confront him.

And I said, you do not have a tax problem. You simply do not have a tax problem. And even if you did have a tax problem for someone in your situation, the United States is by far the best place for you to be. And if you could become a US citizen, it would be an unparalleled good for you and your entire family to become US citizens rather than being Venezuelan citizens only and being in this in-between scenario.

Now, the fact that I gave this particular man that advice does not invalidate other advice or other shows that I have given. It doesn't mean that the United States is all of a sudden the world's greatest tax haven that every person should go to. What it means is you have to be able to prioritize financial advice and recognize that there is financial advice that is right for someone else in a different situation.

And if you were like that other person and in that different situation, it might also be right for you. But that same advice is not right for you because of these things in your own situation. We were talking about tax planning and he was thinking about, and I suggested to him, kind of a plan A, plan B, plan C.

And I said very clearly, I said, for you, the first most important thing that you should do is see if you can get a more permanent work visa and residence visa in the United States, which, of course, he was working on, and become a US citizen. Because that is by far the best thing that you could do right now that would transform everything.

And in talking about taxes, he was thinking about whether maybe he should go back to Mexico or stay in the United States. And the answer in his situation as an employee is very obvious, at least it seemed obvious to me, but it wasn't obvious to him at the time.

No fault to him. This is why I'm creating this podcast, to help you learn to think about things. The specific advice I said to him was, I said, listen, you are better off in the United States. Why? Than Mexico. Why? Well, number one, you will make more money in the United States than you will in Mexico, because wages in the United States are much higher than they are in Mexico.

In addition, you have the opportunity to make much more money on top of your salary in the United States than Mexico, because you have a vastly stronger and more robust economy that is filled with opportunities for you to take your surplus and invest it very profitably in the United States.

And you can invest it very profitably into additional streams of income. Number two, taxes in the United States are vastly lower in the United States than they are in Mexico. The social taxes and income taxes are lower on wages in the United States than they are in Mexico. And the cost of living in the United States is significantly lower than it is in Mexico on virtually everything except perhaps housing.

Housing can be expensive in Mexico City and some other places, but the cost of living overall for a family is lower in the United States than Mexico. If you can make even more money in the United States and you can pay lower taxes in the United States on wages and you can pay lower cost of living in the United States, then clearly, financially, your best bet is to be in the United States rather than in Mexico.

So why do I like Mexico? Well, because I personally am in a vastly different scenario. Mexico can be the exact opposite of all those things as compared to the United States. I don't want to go into the specifics. I want to point out to you that you have to be able to filter advice and information through the lens of where you are at this point in time or through the lens of your specific scenario.

I worked with another client. This was some time back. But this other client was not an immigrant from Venezuela. This other client was an immigrant to the United States from Italy. This client was not on a temporary working visa, but rather had a green card. And this client was married to a dual Italian and US American citizen and had dual citizen children, both Italian and US American.

And this other client was thinking about, well, should I consider getting a US citizenship? And in that particular scenario, my advice to that client was, no, I don't think you should. The US citizenship in his case didn't do anything for him, but it did bring additional complications. This client was very well established, earning a high income.

And for him, the opportunity in the future for him to cancel a green card was going to be much simpler and a better long term plan than for him to become a citizen and then maybe in the future, if he wanted to leave, not be a citizen. And he didn't care about the right to vote.

There wasn't anything that he was unlikely to be. It wasn't like he was unlikely to be granted access to the United States due to some kind of freeze on green card holders or something like that. There were almost no benefits to his becoming a US citizen versus the previous guy.

Now, let me give you a third situation. Right. Imagine, if you will, the exact same fact pattern that I just gave you, but now tack on several zeros to the end of a successful person's net worth. Well, now all of a sudden, there can be many compelling reasons for that Italian living in the United States to actually become a US citizen because we move into a world of something like estate planning.

And estate planning is much more complicated and difficult when you have a US citizen married to a non US citizen. It's not obvious that the answer, without looking at the specific fact pattern. It's not obvious that the answer to this problem is that the individual in question should become a citizen.

But it is a very good solution to resolving some of the disparities in estate tax rules between a couple with estate tax obligation and liability who is a citizen and a non citizen. So when you hear me talk about something like a citizenship question or a tax question or really any financial question, your brain should not immediately say, oh, that applies to me.

I should do that. Rather, your brain should say to you, wow, that's interesting. In what circumstances would that particular piece of advice be useful? Under what situations would that be the right thing to do? Now, let me take that little bit of advice or insight that I have received and let me look at it and ask myself, is there a way that I could apply this in a manner that is appropriate to me and where I'm at in my journey right now?

You must carefully interpret advice. You must interpret that advice based upon your unique situation. I can't do that for you. And what I have learned over the years to do is not to try. I used to try more. What I mean is I used to say, hey, let me talk about the situation.

And if you think about it this way, this is where that applies. If you think about it that way, this is where that applies. And I would give you all of these angles. Right. Imagine a circle. Imagine a pebble sitting in the middle of a courtyard. And in my podcasts, I would walk around the courtyard describing the pebble from every different angle.

But that makes for more awkward content than I would like. And it makes my shows less commercially viable than I would like. And so I made a number of years ago, I made a conscious decision to simplify and to seek to express things more clearly with fewer caveats, fewer clarifications, and simply speak them and then let you choose.

But in order for that to work, you have to develop the skills of consciously choosing. You have to develop those skills of coming into a situation, hearing a piece of advice, and not just simply saying, oh, that automatically applies to me. But first asking yourself those screening questions. Does this apply to me?

How can I apply this to myself in my situation? And if it's useful for you, that's when you take action. If it's not useful for you, file it away into the category of ideas that someday may be useful but are not useful currently, and then move on until you find something that is useful and practical for you.

This is essential at every stage of wealth building and in all of life. You must learn and practice the skill of hearing information, thinking about where, when, how, and to whom it might apply, and not becoming personally engaged with it unless it applies to you now in your current situation.

I hope that helps you, and I hope that is clear. Remember that if you would like to get my advice for your personal situation, and by the way, this is what I am really, really good at, and this is why I think that you should be willing to pay me quite a bit of money for personalized advice.

The thing that I am very good at is applying the right information and the right concept with the right priorities now. And if you do that, you can save yourself massive amounts of time. You can save yourself massive amounts of work, and you can short circuit the entire process of learning.

And when you realize that time is an asset that increases in value, and money is something that decreases in value, he is no fool who gives up what decreases in value in order to save that which increases in value. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult if you think I might be of service to you.

RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult.