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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. (upbeat music) And now the survival show that won't survive contemplating where the dollar in my pocket has been. In this episode, we sit down with your buddy, Joshua Sheets of Radical Personal Finance. We discuss money, the one thing a lot of preppers forget about.

Howdy and welcome to the Rabbit Holes Urban Survival Podcast. This is episode number 272. I'm your host Aaron, and you are in the rabbit hole. Safe and sound. (upbeat music) Here's the thing, you are about to listen to two guys on the interwebs talk about money. So this is your big warning.

Do your own homework, invest in things at your own risk. This is for entertainment purposes only. We are not giving you financial advice. I am not responsible for the shenanigans you get up to. In fact, I might not even be wearing pants. Again, two guys on the internet talking about things.

You've been warned. Now with that super airtight legal disclaimer, Joshua, welcome back in the rabbit hole, man. Thank you for having me. This is going to be a lot of fun, and I think we're going to talk about something that is going to be talked about more in this season, but doesn't get spoken about often enough in the prepper community, and it is a huge issue, which is money and personal finance.

But before we get to that, I want to hear about this RV life thing you're doing. Tell us quickly about that. You've absconded with your family and are running around the country. What's going on there? Indeed, I loaded up, we loaded up a truck, we loaded up a trailer, and I am traveling around the country full time.

I've got three children under five and two dogs. So I've got my wife, me, three children, and two dogs, and we're traveling around the country full time at the moment, living the vagabond RV lifestyle, trying to figure out how to live comfortably on the road, trying to figure out how to work on the road.

It's been quite the adventure. How is it working out so far? I mean, I guess separate it. How is working remotely? How's that working out? I would say working remotely has been the hardest thing of this particular trip. Yeah, everything else has been working really mostly well, but working remotely has been really tough.

Now, it's not that it has to be tough, but for the unique situation that I'm in, it certainly has been tough. So the first biggest challenge has been figuring out a place to work. Where do I actually work? And when we first started the trip, my plan was to work out under a pine tree, just from whatever random picnic table, or I carry a table and a chair with me.

And I've done a lot of this working out in the field. I have a battery that I use. I can set up my laptop. I have a mobile work setup, so I can be very mobile. So I thought it would be easy to work out underneath a tree. What I didn't factor in was the difficulty of fighting the environment and how tough it was to actually get good work done in different environments.

And finally, after we traveled about a month and a half, I had a pivotal moment. We were in a park, and we had arrived there, and I'd gotten the camper set up, gotten the children down for their naps, and I scrambled over to a nice, quiet picnic table to sit down and record my show.

And so I set up all my gear, and I'm just starting to record, doing my intro, and all of a sudden, the sprinkler system comes on at 3 in the afternoon. I start getting sprayed with the sprinklers. And I've got $3,000 worth of electronic gear sitting on the picnic table here.

So it's a mad scramble to tuck it all away and run away from the water. And I just said, "Something has got to change." So what I wound up doing was I bought another camper. I bought a pop-up truck camper, and that's what I have on top of my pickup truck now.

So that gives me the opportunity to--I work in the truck camper. It gives me an office, and then my family's in the RV, and that gives me some stability over in my environment, and that's been a big help. - That's a really interesting system of doing that. It's quite a clever solution.

Now, how has it been on a personal side of that, with three kids, two dogs, and a wife? I mean, that's got to be a mad house, just traveling around. But I mean, I'm making assumptions. How has that been? - Oh, it's definitely challenging, no question about it. And I won't go into all the background of the trip, but it wasn't a long-planned idea of, "Hey, I want to travel with young children." It just seemed to be the right thing to do at the time.

So the challenge of traveling with young children, you've just got to go slower. I can drive easily. I can do 1,000 miles in a day if it's just me. That's no problem. I'm good at keeping my butt planted in the seat and keeping the pedal down. But with children, we try to limit things to 150 miles or so as kind of our maximum range, and try to travel much more slowly.

And it's gone really well. It's been quite the adventure. I would just say, my plan was always to travel with eight, nine, 10, 11, 12-year-olds. So if it weren't for some of the other unique circumstances of our life, I would recommend that if people are planning to travel, that it's better to wait until children are older, so they'll get more out of it, you'll have an easier time out of it.

But we're thankful to do it. And frankly, I'm just thankful to be living in 2018, where these types of decisions are even available or even possible. It's been such a wonderful thing to be able to experience. And it's something that we couldn't have done 30 years ago. Yeah, definitely.

I think with the advent of hotspots and mobile hotspots and everything else, that has freed up so many instances and so many scenarios where you can do what you're doing. So that's really cool. So this was just something that y'all decided, like, "Hey, we want to see the country.

Let's see what this is all about." Or was this a money-saving thing? Or what was this? We were at a transition point in our life where we kind of needed to move, but I couldn't really see the next place to move in terms of even just a house or an apartment to live in.

We weren't sure if we wanted to stay in Florida or move somewhere else. We wanted to visit family and friends, and it's tough to buy plane tickets, five plane tickets, just to go across the country for a weekend. That's easy to do when it's one plane ticket. It's a little harder when it's five.

So we'd had some family and friends that we wanted to visit. I have listeners all around the country, people I've wanted to see, interviews I've wanted to do, meetups and things like that that I've wanted to host. And so when it all came together, it just seemed like, "Well, this will work out." And so we stored all of our big things on Craigslist, meaning got rid of them all and loaded up the truck and hit the road.

And it's been quite the adventure. Well, very cool. So let's kick off the money thing with something fun. What do you do when you hear people say, "Your money will be worthless in the zombie platypus apocalypse"? I'm just going to store up, insert prepper item X here. I laugh, because if you actually study the history, and I am one who is happy to consider how to survive the zombie platypus apocalypse, and that's the first time I've heard it called the platypus apocalypse, but I think it's well worth considering.

The zombie apocalypse is well worth considering. But if you actually look at every single real documented piece of history that we have, the money is never actually worthless. It's an extreme, extreme case when the money actually becomes worthless. And to go there again is certainly possible. I'm in favor of planning for that.

But it's a very short-sighted perspective. And this is one of my biggest pet peeves with the prepper world, because I come from a background of a financial planner. I come from a professional finance background. And again, I, unlike many people, I'm happy to think about the zombie apocalypse. But what I have observed is most people discount the value of money.

And it's often because, in my opinion, they don't understand the true definition of money. And there are many ways that you could approach this. We could talk about hard money. We could talk about fiat currency. We could talk about all of these things. But I like this simple definition as an operating principle to work from.

Money is the most marketable commodity in the world. Money is the most marketable commodity in the world. As the most marketable commodity, it's something that people will take for any kind of good or service in the world. And you see that happen all over the world today. So people often underappreciate and undervalue what the money actually is.

When in reality, if you wanted to think about what is the most valuable thing that you could have, that you could carry, that you could possess, that you can turn into literally anything that you need, it's money. Money is what does that. Now, the form of money varies depending on the application.

Sometimes the form of money is a plastic credit card. I'll tell you what, a black Amex can open up all kinds of doors for you all around the world. Sometimes that money is a $20 bill. Sometimes that money is expressed in different things. But if you start from the definition that money is the most marketable commodity in the world, and you recognize that you can turn money into almost anything else that you need, it changes your appreciation of money.

Yeah. I think in the mini course that I have on the website, one of the days I have in there is one on money, and one of the ways I like to put it in perspective for people is money is an omni tool. It is a tool that can be turned into any other resource you need in most instances, barring the really extreme stuff.

Right. And the extreme stuff, there is a time, and I want to start with this for clarity. There is a time when money doesn't work. And when money doesn't work, when you can't actually buy the thing that you need with your $100 bills or with your plastic credit card, then there is no substitute for that physical preparation.

And let's start with, I'll start with a subject near and dear to your heart. Let's talk about guns. In reality, money will buy you far more safety than a gun. If we actually look at the situation objectively, if you can have enough money so that you can live in a relatively safe neighborhood, you don't live in the hood.

And if you just simply avoid going out at night to dangerous parts of the world and you don't do stupid things with stupid people in stupid places, statistically, you're more likely to get hit in the head by some kind of space dust than you are to get into a gunfight.

You can avoid, by having money to live in a safe neighborhood and to avoid all those unsafe and unsavory places, you can avoid the vast majority of physically dangerous situations that you would ever be in. And money will buy you out of those physically dangerous situations. Now, on the other hand, if you are actually face to face with an aggressor, somebody who is attacking you, and they're there to cause you harm, you can no longer buy your way out of that situation.

And so that's when you need, in my opinion, a good gun and a good pair of running shoes. Those are the two things that you really need to make sure are in good place. But the money will help you to avoid 99.9% of those situations, and the gun and the running shoes will fill in the other side.

So money works the best in almost any preparation scenario until it doesn't work anymore. And that's when the other aspects of preparation come in. What do you – you brought up guns, so this is kind of a loaded question, unintended. What do you think the biggest thing where you see other preppers dumping the most money needlessly, or wasting the most money needlessly?

It's funny. Probably guns. I mean, obviously. And I would say there are two aspects to it. First of all, I love guns as much as anybody else. I think they're fun. I think they're great. But from the perspective of preparation, they're probably not the first place to start. You know, let's say that the zombie apocalypse comes, right, and there's zombies in the street.

I'm going down to the airport, and I'm buying a plane ticket out of the country with me and my entire family, and we are running. We're not going to go head to head with the zombies. The most effective way to get out of a dangerous situation, whether it's an economic collapse, whether it's a physical catastrophe, is to leave, to run.

And you get away, and you can have a lot better – you can have a lot more fun. It is way more fun if the hurricanes roll through your town, and you're in hurricane country just like I am. It's way better if the hurricanes are rolling through for you to load up your family and either drive or fly to a nice resort and spend your time while the hurricane is blowing through town, to spend your time sipping cold drinks by the pool while your children play on the splash pad.

That's way more fun than sweating through no electricity when it's 100 degrees outside and 100% humidity. And the same thing with the zombie apocalypse. If there is an economic collapse in the United States, let's talk about that, the U.S. dollar becomes worthless. I don't want to be in the United States in that circumstance.

I want to be in some other place with enough money to be able to have a place to live and to avoid most of that suffering and pain. So I don't want to go face to face with the zombies in the street unless I absolutely have to. So that's the first thing.

People prioritize things like guns over other things that are much more practical. The second big waste of money is people often don't think about the things that they're doing as part of a complete system. So I know all kinds of people who have five or eight or a dozen or a couple dozen guns sitting.

I'll pick on a buddy of mine. He has plenty of guns. He's probably got 15, 20 long guns. And he likes handguns. So he's got 30 or 40 different handguns that he's bought over the years. He's a gun collector. His gun safe is full, but he's got maybe 300 or 400 rounds of ammo.

And he has no systems to make those guns work. And this is the other thing that gun people do. They buy a gun and then they buy another gun, another gun instead of buying a gun and buying good optics and making sure that they have a complete sling and web gear and sufficient ammo and good training for it.

I'd rather have one gun and a complete system around it, especially including training, ammunition and all of the appropriate gear that enhances that gun's effectiveness versus a closet full of guns and no web gear, no ammo, no night vision, etc. That's another big financial mistake that people make. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually hear that from particularly a lot of trainers that a pet peeve and a pain point for a lot of trainers that I've spoken to over the years is they'll say, you know, I'll have somebody that follows me online or whatever, and they're always talking about coming to my next class.

And then I put up the next class and they don't come and I say, why aren't you coming? Oh, well, you know, I just bought this new 1911. I can't afford to come. And it's like, well, you don't even know how to use what you have. Why aren't you here learning?

So the misappropriation often of things and improper perspective and course of action. Yeah. Yeah. That's I think for a lot of people who've been in the community for a long time, start to see those failings of just acquiring stuff and not a learning how to use it or be really thinking like, hey, do I need this much of this thing?

Unless it's something that you just get pleasure out of, then OK, fine. Right. And I think we all do. It's a lot more fun to be able to look at a new gun and enjoy that ownership experience than it is to have something intangible like skills. And for many of us, especially, you know, I live in a very urban area.

You know, you can't run the gun as much as you'd like. I get jealous of these guys that live out where they can go shoot off their back porch. But it's a real hassle for me to go and shoot. It's a it's a it's a real hassle. And so it's a lot easier just to spend money and buy stuff sometimes than to develop skills.

Yes, yes, it is. Yes, it is. And a lot less blisters and scraped knees and things like that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. What you mentioned, some of the resources that people should be focusing on over over guns or over whatever. What what are there some of those resources, in your opinion, be it skills or things?

Well, I want to let me just twist on that just a little bit and just talk about money instead of resources. So, again, I absolutely encourage and think that purchasing tangible goods is is well worth considering. And it's easy to pick on guns because it's obvious that that having water when you need it is going to be much more important than having a gun in terms of likelihood of needing something or needing extra food and all of that stuff.

But my point is just simply that money should actually be one of the highest priorities. And let me back up and talk first about income. Many people are trying to get prepared. Right. They're they're trying to stock up and they're trying to figure out how do I move my family into a more prepared situation?

One of the best ways to do it is to earn more money. And if you want to have gear, one of the best things you can do is earn enough money so that you can buy fancy gear. Another one of the best ways to do it is to earn enough money so that you can move to a safer place.

Many of the many of the problems that people are concerned about can be avoided by simply moving from the lowest part of New Orleans to a high neighborhood that's out of the floodplain in New Orleans. Or it could be avoided by moving from an unsafe inner city environment to a safer suburbs or moving from a densely packed, unsafe state to a less more lightly populated, unsafe state.

Money and income can solve those problems very effectively. And if we were talking about hardcore survivalism and hardcore prepping and we were to ask you the question, Aaron, you're an expert in this. Let's say if you were going to assess all of the different risks and you were going to compare two people and one person lives in downtown New York City and right in Manhattan and they earn one hundred thousand dollars a year and they spend one hundred thousand dollars a year living in downtown Manhattan.

And you were going to compare that to another person living in Omaha, Nebraska, earning or, you know, a smaller town, Nebraska or a smaller town in Kansas or Idaho or something like that. And you were to say that same person, but earning less money, which would be more likely to survive and thrive through the majority of scenarios that people could face?

The person living in downtown New York City or the person living in a more lightly populated environment? Yeah, the person in, I think you said Oklahoma or was it? Well, it doesn't matter. But the person in the less populated area, one, they're going to be happier. Like, it's funny you brought this up.

I have a friend living in Manhattan right now. And for the last four months we've been talking about he's like, I think I need to get out of here. This place is crazy. And if there was a financial meltdown, I'd be screwed. And in general, he's like, I'm just not happy here.

It's just relentless. And there's just people around you and in your business constantly. He and I were joking. He's like, I haven't had a private conversation in three years. Because he's like, I cannot. He's like, even if I'm in my apartment, somebody can hear me next door talking on the phone.

He's like, it's ridiculous. And I get it. Hey, there's some people who enjoy that. Like I am an urban guy. I like the city, but I have my limits, too. So, yeah. Right. Right. And even if you even if you like the urban guy, I mean, my understanding you live in Austin.

If you or at least that's where you say you live, of course, Houston. OK, so even if you live in Houston, it's a whole lot easier for you to get out of Houston two hours out of the city when you need to. Then it is for you to get out of Manhattan.

Yeah. Two hours out of the city. Your plan to get out in Houston is relatively simple and straightforward. Your plan to get out of Manhattan is far more complicated and far more expensive. And so my point in using that scenario is you can materially improve your level of preparedness with something as simple as a move.

And many people don't don't consider that perhaps a better example would be somebody like Fernando Aguirre. Right. For a foul where he moved from Argentina to Europe. Now, Fernando was a hardcore prepper guy. He likes his guns. He likes his knives. He's all prepared into that. But the best solution for him in terms of that massively improved his level of survivability for him and his family was to move from Argentina to Spain.

And that brought him bought him a much better lifestyle, even though he didn't buy any stuff. So money can serve those goals very effectively. Now, when you pile on things like moving things, like earning more money, you can see that that preparedness can be enhanced with a focus first on money versus trying to figure out.

How do I put together a 20 dollar bug out bag from Walmart? Probably better to build enough income that you don't have to live on a 20 dollar bug out bag from Walmart. What you know, there's going to be people who are going to argue with the point of, oh, sure.

Simple to say, improve your income. What and there are a lot of people who get stuck in a position and that's their answer is, well, yeah, sure. It's easy to say this. So what are some what are some practical thoughts you have on maybe helping people break out of the mindset or perspective that they're in to what they could do to improve their income?

Well, I happen to it's not currently available for enrollment, but I happen to have about a 20 hour course on how to improve your career and your income. But I'll just give one short example. If you look at money and this is my favorite go to scenario, if you look at how to increase your income, I teach on radical personal finance.

I teach a very simple five point ten word checklist, which involves everything you can do about money. I'll give it to you very simply. Number one is increase income. If you want to improve your financial situation, one of the most important things you can do is increase income. Number two is decrease expenses.

If you want to improve your financial situation, all is being equal to lower your expenses, the better. Number three is invest wisely. The better you can invest, the more wisely you can invest, the better. Number four is avoid catastrophe. Avoid catastrophe is where a lot of this stuff that we come into.

And I want to talk about insurance. I want to talk about money. I want to talk about prepping. All those things come in with regard to avoid catastrophe. And then number five is optimize lifestyle. These are the only five things that I know of that you can do to materially improve your financial situation.

But every piece of financial planning advice I've ever heard or have ever given, I can hang into this framework. And so you can look at this framework and then you can isolate your mind and you can say, well, what could I do today, this week, this month to increase my income?

Or what could I do today, this week, this month to brainstorm how I can avoid catastrophe? And avoiding catastrophe involves everything from saying, hey, it's hurricane season. How do I make sure that I'm prepared for a hurricane so that my family will survive and my young children will not sweat to death if the hurricane comes through and kills our power?

It can also reflect the idea that, hey, I'm on this board of directors. This exposes me to potential liability. I need to check into buying liability insurance for directors of companies to make sure that I'm protected from this potential liability that I have. Both of those are risks, depending on where you are in life, and they all fall under the rubric of avoid catastrophe.

So now, down to increase income. There are only three ways that you can possibly increase your income, and they are, number one, work more hours. All else being equal, if you'll increase the number of hours that you work, you'll make more money. Now, this is, of course, the most direct for people who earn an hourly wage.

But if somebody is earning $15 an hour and they're working 40 hours per week, then their paycheck, ignoring taxes, is going to be $600. If they'll increase their work from 40 hours to 60 hours per week, then their paycheck will be $900, again, ignoring taxes and overtime. That's a 50% increase in pay for a 50% increase in work.

So, for most people, the most effective way to earn more money is to work more hours. The number two way to increase your income is to produce more work per hour. If you can produce a higher volume of work for each hour that you work, you will increase your income.

The number three way to increase your income is to produce more valuable work. How do I go from work that's $15 an hour to work that's $50 an hour? For most people, if you look at this and you try to analyze where they are in life, you can apply this rubric and try to figure out what would be the most sensible thing for them to do.

The problem is, the results will pay off at different levels. The quickest gain will come from working more hours. That will be reflected very quickly in your paycheck. The longest gain will come from increasing the value of the work that you produce. But that one is the one that's the most sustainable over time.

If you actually analyze the income-earning marketplace and you apply these three things, you can see how they make a difference in how much money people earn. A surgeon earns a far higher hourly work than a truck driver because they've invested into increasing the value of the work that they produce.

You and I always have to do the same thing. If we want short-term gain, we work more hours. That creates a higher income. We work at producing more work per hour, more output per hour, by becoming more efficient, more skilled with our tools, more competent. That creates more value for us in the marketplace.

Ultimately, we focus heavily on transitioning from lower-paid work to higher-paid work because that builds the longest scenario. But most of this stuff has more to do with the mindset of a person and somebody's actual focus on this particular area of life than it does with any inside technique. I'm convinced most people spend more time planning their annual vacation than they do planning their income.

And yet it makes no sense, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny you said that because that actually came up recently. My wife was working on something together and she spent all this time in an electric. I said, "If only I could get you to spend that much time working with me on the bills and our personal finance stuff so that you'd be aware of what's going on." And she's like, "This is a lot more fun." Indeed.

Let me pivot us back to – I want to get some of these things off my chest in kind of the prepping. Yeah, let us have it. All right. Good. So back to money. Yeah. So the first thing that really people should do is figure out a plan to have money available.

I see all kinds of people that put their EDC online. And you know what's usually missing? Money. Money. Yes. It's like, come on. If you as an adult don't have easy and immediate access to, I recommend, a thousand bucks, I think that's a mistake. You should have a thousand bucks available to you at any point in time.

And I don't buy this nonsense of, "Oh, if you can't afford it." Every single person out there can afford it. Every single person out there can afford it. They just don't prioritize it. But you talk to a man and you're like, "I consider myself a competent man and yet I don't have a thousand bucks available?" Come on.

A thousand bucks of cash, secreted and concealed and secured on your person, will buy you out of almost any scenario I can think of. And if you actually want to go to disasters, you see that this is one of the most important things, whether it's the blackout of New York City or whether it's 9/11 and you're stuck across the country.

A thousand bucks in cash will buy your way home. You don't need a bug-out bag with a $400 knife in it. You need a thousand bucks so you can move quickly, buy a bus ticket, buy a plane ticket, rent a car, go and buy a cheap car. Something to actually physically move you across the country.

So, one of the first preparations to be -- and of course, these are not mutually exclusive. You can put a Bic lighter in your pocket while you also save money. But one of the first preparations to be should be people carrying cash. And any person who considers themselves a prepper, who doesn't have immediate access, availability of cash on their person, I think should very seriously reconsider their priorities because that cash will solve many, many situations that a $200 knife simply will not solve.

Yeah, it's funny. I'm glad you brought that up because that is a pet peeve of mine, too. I'll see people with all this stuff for an EDC kit. I know the person is in an urban environment and traversing to and from home every day. And they have all this -- and not that it's bad to have, but they have all this wilderness stuff in there, yet they're in an urban environment and they're going from point A to point B and there's no cash in there.

And I'm just like, what is it you think is going to -- like you're preparing for the least likely thing before you're preparing for the most mundane thing, the easiest thing to prepare for. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. And in many ways, people are usually -- when it comes to cash, people are usually worried about security.

I get it if we're talking about my great-grandma and her purse. But I don't get it when you're talking about a dude who has never been robbed in his life, who carries two guns, two knives, and a bottle of pepper spray to protect himself, and he's worried about being mugged.

Like, come on. The chances of that happening are very, very low where most of us live. And if it's high, you should move. Like, you should not live in a place where you're likely to be mugged. But that cash is super, super important. So, having cash available. Having cash available in a multitude of denominations so that you have $1 bills, $5 bills, $10 bills, $20 bills.

And there are dozens and dozens of ways that you can conceal and secure such cash on your person so that it is available to you, but yet it is securely held so it's not likely to be lost. And that's super, super important. Another big one, though, is in terms of somebody's accessibility to serious money.

So, obviously, the simplest and best thing to do here is to have a credit card or multiple credit cards. But there have been so many times I've traveled around the world, and all of a sudden, this credit card doesn't work and you need another one. There's no reason why, in your EDC planning, you shouldn't have the ability to secret around your person and secure around your person a couple of different methods of buying things using credit cards.

And those credit cards should have high credit limits so that you could actually, if necessary, make your way home or, if necessary, get out of the country. Any one of us should be able to go down to the airport, buy at the airport counter a ticket for us and our family out of the danger zone into a safe place.

And we should be able to do that with what we have on our person. - Agreed. - So, let me give a few more on this in terms of cash. One of the big things that I observe, and I observe this personally, is in addition to physical access to cash, most people don't seem to have the ability to place their hands on anything more significant than a couple hundred dollars.

And then they say, "Well, I'm going to go down to the ATM and I'm going to get out cash." When's the last time you've gone down to the ATM and tried to get out $10,000 of cash in one day? It doesn't work for most people unless you've made prior planning.

So, first, you should have at your-- you should have accessible to you significant amounts of cash beyond what you physically carry on your person. Now, it would be unwise to put this all in one place, but it should be accessible to you. So, whether that means in your gun safe or in your secret compartment in your car or at your grandmother's house or in a safety deposit box or in your storage unit or something, you need to give serious thought to security and concealment.

Because the problem with cash is, once it's gone, you can't get it back. So, you face a serious theft risk. But you should have available to you at least several thousand dollars. I don't understand why I talk to somebody who says, "I make $100,000 a year. I'm a prepper.

I've got all this stuff, but I don't have $10,000 set aside." What are you going to do if you get a call from a buddy in the night tipping you off that, "Hey, they're coming for you and you don't have cash"? So, you go down to the ATM and you're trying to pull money out.

$400, you hit your ATM withdrawal limit. You're screwed. You're absolutely screwed. Another point of suggestion that I recommend is, talk to your bank and increase the ATM limits on your ATM cards. With many banks, if you will talk to them, you can get the ATM limits raised, and you can get those raises either temporary or permanent.

With my bank, I have it set up so that I have sets for the maximum ATM withdrawal number. I think my limit is $5,000 or $6,000 in a day, instead of $500 in a day. By talking to your bank, and then, of course, thinking now about your financial preparedness, making sure that you have multiple bank accounts, so you have multiple ATM cards.

If you need to get out cash, then it's a lot better for you to have three or four different bank accounts with three or four different banks, all of which will allow you to get out $5,000 from an ATM. You make a circuit of 10 ATMs over the course of two hours, and you can come home with $20,000 in your pocket.

That's a lot more useful than somebody standing there at the ATM card cursing the ATM because it only gives you $400. Chris: That's interesting to know. I didn't know you could request that limit raise. Long story, I don't use ATMs, but I knew that that limit was there. That's part of the reason why I don't use them, but that's good to know that you can actually request it be raised to something truly useful.

Why don't you use ATMs? I keep cash on hand. Nice. You just cash checks and get physical cash from the bank when you need it, or you don't participate in the banking system at all? No, I participate in the banking system, but I always keep two piles of cash ferreted away, and those levels are always maintained.

If they're used, they're immediately replaced. Good. I like it. Absolutely. I think just even on this basis, many in the prepping community share, many of us share a suspicion and a general level of distrust about the government interference in many aspects of our lives. I always scratch my head a little bit when I hear people express that distrust, which I share, and yet every single dollar that you spend is using forms of currency that are easily tracked, easily manipulated, easily recorded, and are recorded for posterity.

If you want to do one thing to enhance your financial privacy, whether that's from somebody who -- and this is where we start to get into overlapping circles of financial planning -- things like asset protection or things like divorce planning or things like all of these different levels of concern, just start spending cash.

Not only will you spend less money -- been proven over and over again -- you'll actually lower your expenses by spending less money, but you'll dramatically improve your safety and your security and your privacy by simply spending cash. Now, I grew up in the era -- I'm a millennial -- I grew up only ever spending digital money.

When I switched from spending digital money to always spending physical currency, it made a dramatic impact on my life. And so I'd recommend that to you and to any of you listening. If you ever have the choice, just always spend cash. There's no way to lose. Yeah, that's a pretty good one.

I've known several people that went through some sort of issue, and it was one of the first major changes they made in their financial well-being, seemingly a simple one, and they all said the same thing. One, it feels very different handing someone a piece of plastic than it does handing someone cash.

It's much more painful to hand over cash, therefore you're less likely to do it, is the short version of that psychological part. And then the other part is just you tend, because of that, you tend to stay more aware of what you're spending on. Yeah. If you go out for a day of shopping and you go to five stores and you swipe a card, be it a credit card or a debit card, if I, at the end of your five-store circuit, ask you, "How much money did you spend?" Most of us will have a hard time answering that question, because you spent $200 at Costco, $100 at the sporting goods store, $150 buying some more ammo, whatever.

It's hard to track all that number at the end of the day. But if you go out with 10 $100 bills in your pocket, you will consciously register each time you hand over one of those $100 bills, and you're much more likely to be within $100 of your actual spending for that day than you are if you'd swiped your credit card at each location.

This is a personal pet peeve of mine, Aaron, just because I don't get it. I go to the gun show, and I see somebody sitting there buying a new gun. And this is the same person that's ranting and raving online about how Bank of America and Chase won't do business with gun dealers, and yet here they are swiping a credit card to buy a new gun.

Come on! Just hand over $100 bills. You went through all the work. Let's say you're buying a private party firearm to avoid all the pesky forms. You're doing all this work. Why not just complete that and do it right by using physical currency? It's a real annoyance of mine.

I sound like such a curmudgeon, don't I? Aaron Powell (00:50:00): It only gets worse with more age. Kyle Brennan: Oh, dear. I'm sunk. I would recommend to people, have cash available. Just think about a sensible way to do that for you and your situation. Now, there are many ways you can do it.

You have to think about security, and you have to think about privacy of that. You certainly don't want people knowing that you carry significant amounts of cash. Don't do what I'm doing right now, which is advocating for a position in public that puts you in a personal vulnerability. But it's very, very important to do.

I think that, in and of itself, can solve a lot of problems. If you go and you look at most disasters, be it a natural disaster, be it somebody's facing legal costs, whatever, cash will improve your life in those situations. Think about how to make sure that you maintain a diverse stockpile of it.

Let's talk about the zombie apocalypse. If you see that the zombie apocalypse is coming, you're probably going to Costco. But your ability to go to Costco or wherever and stock up on all the things that you knew you should have stocked up before at the 11th hour, even in that situation, the money is one of your most valuable prepping tools.

What are some other areas that people can focus on financially? You've brought up insurance. We've brought up asset protection. Where do we go next with this? So let's move to insurance. And here's where I really think we, especially what I often read in the prepping world, we often there's a lot of ignorance around the topics of insurance.

Insurance is one of the most valuable tools ever created for somebody who's concerned about personal preparedness. It's a lot easier to sit and watch your house get blown down if you know that you're well insured than it is if you don't. And especially when you're talking about the insurance for the stuff that you own, many people have significant, valuable stockpiles and stores of things.

Insurance is a major, major deal. So property insurance is, of course, fairly obvious. And most people have the most familiarity with property insurance. But having your car properly insured, having your house properly insured, those things make a big, big difference. I had a truck that was stolen recently. And it was actually right before we were leaving on our trip.

Literally, we were planning to leave on Friday. And on Monday, my truck was stolen. And having that truck properly and well insured made a huge difference in that personal disaster. I had gotten that truck ready for months, getting everything ready for a trip. We were planning to leave on Friday.

We moved out of our apartment, moved into our trailer, and yet I've got nothing to pull it with. And the insurance made all the difference in the world. And being well and properly insured made a big, big difference in my ability to quickly replace the asset, the physical item, with a minimum of stress.

The second thing, also, was, of course, having liquid money. By having liquid money, it took me an extra week to find another good truck. But by having liquid money, I could move quickly, buy another truck without worrying about financing and debt, while also negotiating with the insurance company until I could get the insurance claims squared away.

That allowed me to get through a micro-disaster and to stay very close to my original timeline for leaving. Now, I'm going to skip past property insurance because that's where most of us are the most familiar. But don't discount the value of property insurance. The biggest holes that I see are insurances related to health and life insurance.

The No. 1 biggest weakness in most people's scenarios is they don't have disability income insurance. And disability income insurance, if I could only own one kind of insurance, I would own disability income insurance over any other kind of insurance. And here's why. If you think about the disasters that people face in life, the most likely disaster is going to be some kind of health-related disaster, whether that is the biggest percentage likelihood, such as heart disease or cancer, or whether it's an acute situation -- I fell and I broke my leg and I can't go to work.

Disability income insurance helps you in those situations. If you can't work and if you can't create income, you have a very serious problem. And yet that happens to people all day, every day. Now, in that situation, if you can't work and create income, your stockpiles of food, your stockpiles of medical supplies, your stockpiles of cash will all help you to weather that.

But if you can just simply have insurance that pays you income while you are sick or hurt and unable to work, that will solve most of your problems. And the reason I say I would prefer disability income insurance versus other kinds of insurance is this. Let's compare it to life insurance and then health insurance.

Many people buy life insurance, and that's good. Life insurance, especially term life insurance, is so cheap, you should have a lot of it. So that's really good. But if I die and I leave my wife, a widow, with three small children, but I'm dead and gone, she's got problems.

But those problems are surmountable. She can find babysitters and lean on family to care for the children. She can go and get a job to provide income for herself. At least I'm dead and I'm gone. But if I'm sick or hurt and I'm a vegetable in the back room or chronically ill and I'm sitting in the back room, she's got a problem.

Because not only now does she have to arrange care for the children, not only does she have to go and get a job, but now she has to arrange care for me and she has to figure out how does she handle all of my medical problems. So if I get sick or hurt and can't work, I'm a much bigger burden to her than if I'm dead.

So between those two, the disability income insurance is more useful than the life insurance. Also, the statistical likelihood of me being sick or hurt and unable to work at an early age is far higher than the statistical likelihood of my dying at an early age. So disability income insurance should be the first purchase before even life insurance.

Now, let's compare it to something like health insurance. Let's say I'm sick or hurt and I have health insurance, but I have no disability income insurance. Well, my health insurance policy will pay my hospital bills while my family is evicted from our apartment by our landlord and goes hungry.

Now, flip it around. Let's say I have no health insurance. For the most part, I'll still be able to get pretty decent medical care because of the fact that the hospitals are required to provide at least some level of medical care for me. But if I have disability income insurance, my family will still be able to pay their rent, buy their food, et cetera, and stay in our apartment.

Now, let's say I rack up a million dollars of medical bills from not having health insurance, but by going through heart attack treatment. A friend of mine had a heart attack. He wound up with basically, it was a serious case, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills.

What do I do? I declare bankruptcy or I just don't pay. But my insurance payments from my disability income policy will allow my family to buy rent, to buy food, to buy water, to buy lights. And that insurance payment is not attachable by my creditors. So all the debt can either just be ignored because I don't have any money to pay it or I can file bankruptcy and be relieved of that debt while still maintaining my disability income insurance income.

So if I had to choose between disability income insurance, life insurance or disability income insurance and health insurance, if I had to choose, it makes far more sense, in my opinion, to choose disability income insurance than those others. Now, most of us haven't plenty of money. We can be properly insured.

But I try to start with that. If I had to choose to try to emphasize the importance of something as simple as disability income insurance. Is disability is inexpensive as as as term? No, much more expensive, much more expensive. And so here's a quick mini course on disability income insurance.

There are simplistically two kinds of disability income insurance. There's what's called short term disability insurance and longer term disability insurance. And these these definitions are somewhat fuzzy. But short term disability insurance will pay you a payment if you can't work for anywhere from a few days to usually about three months, but possibly as long as one year.

So the most common types of products in this marketplace that most of us would see would be things like disability insurance purchasable through Aflac, people in their menu of benefits that they get from a company like Aflac. So they'll pay you income for 90 days. Those can be very useful.

And they're very useful for people who are financially broke, because often that 90 days can make a big, big difference. And the statistical likelihood of your or my being disabled for 90 days or 30 days or 60 days is very high. Most of us have had the flu for a couple of weeks or a car accident and you can't work.

And so those things statistically are very likely to happen. But that makes as compared to the percentage of the premium versus the potential benefit that makes short term disability insurance very expensive. Now, it's cheap in dollar form, but it's expensive when compared to the total amount of coverage. And let me explain.

Let's say that you earn $3,000 per month. Well, three months of coverage would be $9,000. And so for somebody who is an entry level laborer on a construction site, that's helpful because that $9,000 makes a huge difference in their life if they wreck their back and can't go to work.

But the cost of that $9,000 is not that much of a liability to the insurance company. Now, the other type of insurance is long term disability insurance. And long term disability insurance usually kicks in after anywhere from 45, 60, 90 or 180 days. And that can pay out for two years, five years or most frequently, especially for those who are in white collar professions up till age 65 or even age 70.

So, long term disability insurance kicks in later, but it goes for longer. So, if you compare the total payout, let's say that same person is earning $3,000 per year, but now they have long term disability insurance and they're a 30 year old male and they become totally disabled for the rest of their life.

Well, if their policy pays them out through age 70, that's 40 years. $3,000 per month comes out to $36,000 per year times 40 years is a total potential insurance benefit of $1,444,000. So, the risk and the liability for the insurance company for a long term disability policy is much, much higher than for a short term disability policy.

So, the premium is also higher. Now, statistically, if you compare disability insurance to life insurance, depending on the age, depending on the occupation, etc., a young person, male or female, especially male, males are more likely to die sooner than women, but women are more likely to become disabled than men.

So, the rates change whether people are men or women. But if you start at a young age and you say, the 30 year old, the disability insurance will usually cost a couple hundred dollars a month, whereas a term life insurance policy may cost $30 or $50 per month. Now, those rates will change depending on the policy.

Disability insurance is a very flexible insurance product. But all of that to say that the long term disability coverage is the most important coverage, more important than short term disability, but it does cost significantly more than term life insurance. In insurance, life insurance, disability income insurance, and long term care insurance, in these worlds of insurance, the premium is very, very reflective of the value of the policy and is very reflective of the actual risk of the company.

So, most people look at insurance, and I understand this, I don't like insurance anymore than anyone else does, but most people look at insurance and they say, ah, it's too expensive. But realistically, the premium is carefully calculated by the actuaries to match the risk of being hurt or disabled, etc.

And so, this is why it costs you more money to insure a house on the coast than it does to insure a house on the interior, because there's a higher likelihood of it getting blown away in a hurricane. Well, for whom is the insurance more important? For the person who lives on the coast or the person who lives in the interior?

And this is the problem with insurance. So, if you look at insurance and you actually get a quote and you say, man, my premium is really, really high. Well, unfortunately for you, that means you're very, very likely to need the insurance coverage. And so, if it's expensive, this should actually be an indicator to you that you probably need it more than someone else does.

It is much, much more expensive for you to get disability insurance as a roofer than as an estate planning attorney. But who is more likely to not be able to work and do their job, the roofer or the estate planning attorney? Yeah, that roofer, that's a long way down.

Indeed. Yeah. And so, that's the problem with insurance. People often look at it and they say, oh, the insurance is expensive, therefore I'm not going to get it. Well, the insurance is expensive because you're much more likely to use it and collect on it than the other person for whom is cheaper.

Now, all of this has to be affordable. I don't even have an insurance license anymore. I don't sell insurance. So, you have to sit down and do a personal analysis and say, what can I afford? What's sensible? Can I get the best product, the best company, the best rates, et cetera?

But conceptually, we should look at insurance as one of our primary tools of defense in good financial planning, which includes good prepping. I would simply say that my kind of big push is this. I came from the world of professional financial planning. And one of the things that annoyed me about most mainstream advisors is in public, they weren't willing to concede the concerns that many people had.

So, for example, in public, you'll rarely find a financial advisor who is willing to say, well, tell you what, if the dollar became worthless, then all your dollar denominated assets. Yeah, they'll be fine. Like they say, of course, the dollar is not going to become worthless. Now, what I observe happening is people usually latch on to one or another of an extreme position.

They either say, of course, the dollar could never become worthless. The dollar is the world's reserve currency, and it's a phenomenal thing. And so you shouldn't even consider that the dollar might become worthless. Or they take the other standpoint and they say the dollar is totally worthless. It's just a paperback currency.

It's not connected to anything that matters. And then you should get out of dollars as soon as you can. To me, either of those extreme positions seems really short-sighted. We should acknowledge that the dollar is a fiat currency, while also simultaneously acknowledging that the dollar is the world's reserve currency because the U.S.

economy is the strongest economy in the world. So you should consider what would happen in a world where the dollar becomes worth less. But you should also consider how to profit and how to use the dollar. Because, you know, if you're trying to get out of Venezuela today, those dollars will buy you out.

And they'll probably buy you out more cheaply than gold coins. Now, gold coins are great, but they're a lot more expensive and filled with friction to use than dollars. So one of the things I would like to see is don't pit these things against one another. If you're sitting with your state farm agent and you're doing a review of your car insurance and your homeowner's insurance and you're thinking about what happens in the next hurricane, you are prepping.

But you're also prepping when you buy, you know, storage food and make sure that you have storage food because these things work beautifully together. And the best way through this is to physically prepare for the circumstances that money isn't going to work. It is a lot cheaper for you to buy food that you could rely on now.

And you buy it on sale, you get discounts, and you set up stored food. It's a lot cheaper for you to buy food that you could rely on than buying disability income insurance in case you lose your job. But the disability income insurance is also important because that sees you through when the food runs out, or that's what pays your rent.

So these things work holistically together. Having savings, having a diversity of savings, having that savings stored in safe places. All of these things work together. And then when you start looking at other things, and that's where I think we're too short on time today. But let's say you tackle a topic like asset protection planning.

If you actually think about what asset protection planning is, and let's say you're doing well financially, parts of your asset protection planning fit really seamlessly with insurance, with official type of normal plans, and also unofficial plans. Let me just give you one example. Your asset protection, your asset planning, and somebody is suing you.

Well, let's ignore for a moment your legal obligations to disclose to somebody when required the amount of money that you have, such as in a divorce settlement or something like that. Let's just ignore that for a moment. How is anybody going to know how much cash you have? That asset is completely hidden from the claim of a creditor.

They don't know. They don't know what you have. They don't know what you've spent. They don't know where it is. How is somebody going to know the value of your gun collection? How do they know? How would they even prove it? Because you wouldn't be so dumb as to have everything in one safe.

You would have things diversified, and you would have your storage of your firearms diversified. How would anybody know what those assets are? Those assets that are prepping assets, the value of food. If you're being sued, and you have three years' worth of food, and you have all this stuff set aside, your creditors aren't going to come and start hauling away your buckets of wheat.

That's absurd. But they'll certainly attach the money that's in your bank account. These prepping type of things work really, really well to protect your assets. What about professional financial planning? Your $401K are ironclad protection from the claims of your creditors. You are well-served to use those $401K as a component of your asset protection planning.

If you have no money in your checking accounts, you have very minimal assets in terms of physically observable, tangible property, such as houses, and you're doing a good job of carefully adjusting your ownership of those properties and things like that, you don't have any money in a bank account, but you have money in a 401K, and you have a year's worth of food, and you have cash, you've actually accomplished something really cool.

You've created a good amount of asset protection planning, but you've also prepared for the zombie apocalypse, and you've prepared for the most likely eventuality, which is everything goes well, you become rich, and you retire, and you spend the money on your 401K. To start rounding things out a little bit, and we'll keep this short, since we've been talking about money, there's a lot of rumblings on an impending financial crash.

I know Ron Paul's talked about it, Jim Rogers comes out once a month and talks about it, so I guess he's just rolling the dice that at some point he'll hit it right, the broken clock and all. What are your thoughts on what's going on with our financial system and the issues?

Because I know a lot of people are pointing at, "Hey, we never cleared out the detritus by the way we handled the 2008 crash. We never cleared out the detritus in the financial system." So the devil's about to call it in. What are your thoughts on the state of the financial system?

At some point in time, it seems apparent to me that the accounting will become due. I agree with the perspective that the dead weight wasn't cleared out in 2008. There is nothing that's gotten better since then. The debt continues to pile up, and the deficits, we're spending money like crazy.

At some point in time, that has to be accounted for. Now, I don't know when or how, so here's what I say. Be prepared for it at all times, and try to ride the good economy. If you want a job, there are many illusions in economic forecasting. But if you want a job and you're not well-employed today, you're doing something wrong.

There are help-wanted signs everywhere. Wages are high. Competition is good. This is the time to be employed. Make sure that you position yourself and you take advantage of times of good employment. This is the time to be earning and to be stocking away money. Position your finances so that whether or not there's an economic collapse -- and I hate that word, because what do you mean?

Do you mean a decline in the stock market? Do you mean that you're going to get laid off from your job? You have to be specific. None of us can prepare for an economic collapse. But we can prepare and say, "Let's say I lose my job and I can't find one for a year." That's a really good point of preparation that you can do.

We can prepare our portfolios. What happens if the stock market declines by 30%? That's going to happen at some point in the next five to 10 years, if history is any indication. We can prepare for these specific things. Just start checking off the specific things. A very short version, the ways to prepare for economic collapse.

Number one, make sure that you keep your job. Be well-employed and have a diverse range of skills and contacts so that if you get fired, you can get employed again quickly. I have a whole series on my show, which I can send you, Aaron, later, which is called "How to Prepare to Be Laid Off." I have a three-part series on what to do if you get laid off and how to prepare for it today, how to prepare for it if it just happened, and all of the action points so that if you get laid off.

The most important thing to keep is your income. If you have income, you can adjust everything else to fit that income. But if you don't have income, everything falls apart. Income planning should be thing number one. Number two is getting rid of debt, making sure that you have no debt, and then making sure that you have savings and a diverse array of savings and assets in different categories.

That's what helps you get through an economic collapse. Very good. We've given everybody a lot to think about today. For people who've listened to this, and maybe this is the first time they've heard you on the show, or maybe the second time, and they're like, "You know what? I want to go.

This Joshua guy is my brand of wacky." Tell us about your show for a second and what you're doing over there. I host a show called Radical Personal Finance. I was a longtime financial advisor, and I got frustrated that people weren't explaining things more clearly and integrating some of these concepts, even as we've discussed today.

The show is Radical Personal Finance. The tagline is "How to Live a Rich Life Now While Building a Plan for Financial Freedom in 10 Years or Less." That's what I try to do. We talk about a diverse array. I try to keep the show interesting. We cover everything from complex estate planning to life insurance to dumpster diving.

I did a show on how to buy your first AR-15. I try to keep things unique. The best way, if anyone's interested, just whatever podcast player you prefer, search for Radical Personal Finance or tell Siri or Google just to play Radical Personal Finance. That's the best way to listen to the show.

You're also doing a whole bunch of work to redo your site and stuff like that and shift your focus a little bit. Tell us a little bit about that. Kretzmann: When I created Radical Personal Finance, I thought that the secret to success was going to be my taking information and making it freely available to help people.

My dream was, I pictured a 13-year-old kid in the hood with his $40 Android, and I pictured him coming across my show and saying, "Wow, this can help!" And me taking him through a master's degree understanding of wealth and money, etc. I did a survey a number of years ago, and I found out that although I have a number of 15-year-old young men and women listening to my show, the majority of my listeners have college degrees, have master's degrees.

They're earning $150,000, $200,000 a year. They lead companies, and they're in executive positions. I had spent years building my brand on prolific content that was available for free. People who have money generally appreciate good content, but they have more money and less time. So, I'm adjusting what I do.

Instead of giving tons and tons of free content, I am creating new courses and products that help people to make better use of their time and to get better information. I'm just finishing up today a course called "How to Borrow Money Cheaply and Safely Using Credit Cards." For most people, credit cards are probably the number one tool of financing that should be used for anything that needs to be financed.

Better than car loans, better than all kinds of other forms of financing. They're wonderful tools, but most people don't know they're also very, very dangerous. So, I have systems to protect from the danger while also using the benefits of credit cards. Well, very cool. So, what is that website address one more time?

RadicalPersonalFinance.com Awesome. Joshua, thank you so much for coming on today and tickling some of my shared pet peeves as well. Anytime, Aaron. Thank you so much for having me. Show notes, links to Joshua's show, Radical Personal Finance, and other resources can be found by going to InTheRabbitHole.com/e272. Get more survival goodness and help support the show.

Visit ITReach.net to become part of the Roving Horde Armada. It's members just like you who really do help keep the lights on. Again, visit ITReach.net. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to do all that YouTube stuff. Like this video, subscribe, and slap that bell around because bananas are yellow.

With that, we wrap up episode number 272 from the Lone Star State. Till next time, stay safe and sound. Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable Kids Day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways, and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones.