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I am your host, Dennis Tubergen. Everything Financial Radio is brought to you each week by PLP Services. Each week we talk to a guest expert on the program and we talk about what's going on out there in the markets and in the economy that will affect you and your money.

This week, returning to the Everything Financial Radio program is Mr. Carl Denninger. I have him on the line with me now. Carl is a blogger, an economic commentator, an all-around bright guy. You can read his work at market-ticker.org. He's also the author of "Leverage, "How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World." And Carl, welcome back to the program.

Thank you very much for having me, Dennis. Carl, let's give the listeners maybe that aren't aware a bit of a background or a bit of an overview as to the role of federal spending on medical care as compared to the rest of the budget and just kind of outline the topic for the listeners.

Sure. Medical spending is divided into two main parts in the federal budget. Medicare, which is for old people, and Medicaid, which is for people that don't have any money or at least very little money. And those two parts are the major elements. You hear a lot about things like VA, which of course is for veterans, but the truth is that the VA spending on veterans' medical costs is extremely small.

You can't find it in the budget in terms of percentages. Between Medicare and Medicaid, that is, last fiscal year was about 37% of all of the money that the federal government spends. When people in the political sphere talk about entitlements, they always put together Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

And they do this for a reason, because first off, it makes the number much bigger and looks more difficult. And secondly, it ties a program that has a temporary funding problem, but which was anticipated by the people that wrote the law, which is why you pay a 13% payroll tax approximately, that's Social Security.

They knew that there would be a large group of people that would eventually go through the system, and therefore the system had to run a surplus for a period of time to cover that, but that those people would eventually all pass away because we all die. So they always conflate that with the other two parts of the program.

Medicare has a very small tax, so about 2.5%. Medicaid, of course, has no tax. It's a straight handout. So when you take those programs and you put them together, you take one that has temporary issues but is solvent because there is enough money that has been put aside in the form of Treasury bonds to cover this, with two others that there is no solution to at present growth rates, and then you say, "We can't fix it "because you'll end up having to throw granny down the stairs." This is a lie, and yet it is the way our federal government has operated for the last 30 years, and nobody on either side of the political aisle, nor any of the current candidates, will take this issue on.

The reality is that Medicare and Medicaid in the last two years have been growing in expense at a rate of about 9%. There was a very short-lived low in that about four years ago in that growth rate, which led a whole lot of political pundits to claim that the problem had been solved and that basically we were saved and everything was going to be fine.

But this year, we are back on that track, and through June, which is the last month that we have numbers for at this point, numbers of 8.8, I believe, 8.7 or 8.8, which is indistinguishably, you know, the same statistically as 9. At this rate, the spending on that program will go from $1,300 billion, that's $1.3 trillion, which was last fiscal year, to $1,800 billion before the next president's term ends, first term.

At that point, we will be blowing a $400 billion a year additional hole in the federal budget because the growth of revenue last fiscal year was only 1.68%. - So, Carl, a lot of our listeners are gonna be familiar with the law of 72, so at 9% growth, I'm just throwing some numbers out there, that means spending will double in eight years if that trajectory continues.

So in eight years, presumably, this takes up 70-some percent of the federal budget? That just can't happen. - In 10 years, it takes up more than all of the federal budget. And no, that can't happen. - So what are we gonna see from here? I mean, are we headed for more money printing, more quantitative easing?

Are we headed for a major economic reset? What's the end game here? What are the possibilities? - Well, money printing does not solve the problem because you can print money, but you can't print value. Okay, so what has to be understood here is what you're doing here is transferring value from one person to another.

The people to whom the value is being transferred is the medical and insurance complex. People love to rail about, for example, the Aetna situation where they attempted to buy Humana. The government came after them and said, "No, that will tend to lessen competition." And then they said, "Well, we're losing all the Obamacare exchanges." And they had warned the government they were going to do this.

The problem is that Aetna and Humana together, it's $110 billion worth of revenue between both of those companies. So if you have a $1,300 billion annual expense line item, and you have two companies that have a combined operating margin that's in the 9%, 10%, 12% area, but their revenue, the total amount of money they take in is only $100 billion.

This is absolute nonsense to claim that this is somehow responsible for the issue. And yet these are two of the larger health insurance companies in the United States. The problem isn't there. The problem is that we have firms like Mylan that take a product that costs $20 over the counter in France, and turn it into a $300 product in the United States because they have no competition.

And they do that by getting laws passed that prevent you from flying to France, filling up your suitcase full of these things, and bringing them back and selling them for $30, which would be a 50% profit. But if you try to do that, you go to prison. And there is a body of law that's over 100 years old, 15 United States Code, that says that any act that is undertaken by persons with the intent of restraining trade, fixing prices, or creating monopolies, is a federal felony.

It's not a fine. It's 10 years in jail. But we have never, never in the history that I can find, indicted a drug or pharmaceutical or hospital management or a healthcare manager or a health insurance executive on these charges. - Well, if you're just joining us, we are chatting today with Mr.

Carl Denninger. Carl is the prolific author. You can read his work at market-ticker.org. His latest book is also "Leverage, How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World." So Carl, it seems to me that being a free market capitalist, I often joke I'm a libertarian capitalist, there's probably four of us left on the planet now.

It seems to me that just some free markets probably fixes this problem. - Free markets fixes the problem immediately, because if you could fly to France and fill your, for that matter, any other country than you, where you can buy Epipens without a prescription, they're over the counter. If you could do that and go to France and fill your suitcase full of them and come back, you could sell them at a tidy profit, and Mylan would sell exactly zero of them for $300 when anyone could buy one from you for 30.

The pricing disparities that exist across all of medicine, it's not just pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals happens to be the really easy one to go after, but it's not just there, it's everywhere, is an outrage, and the only reason it exists is because laws and regulations have been put in place at the behest of this industry to prevent you from doing exactly that.

So if we solve this problem, if we just said, "Okay, look, if you guys can either cut this out "and voluntarily agree that these are all going to go away, "and if you don't, we're going to start "putting people in prison," then the cost of medical care in this country would come down by anywhere between 50 and 80%.

50% if we went to a socialist system, because that's about what they spend as a percentage of GDP in socialist countries, but capitalism is more efficient than socialism because you have competition. So if we were to actually bring competition back into the game, we'd see a decrease of about 80%, and if you take bills that you can find, and I have a few of them people sent me, for things that people had done in hospitals 30 years ago, 40 years ago, for example, birth of a baby, you would find, and you inflate that by the CPI, you would find that you could go to a hospital and have a baby for, eh, $900, and today, it's 10 times that much.

So the 80% reduction is not fanciful at all. It's probably about where you actually see things end up. - Well, Carl, we've got just a couple minutes left in this segment. Do you think this will ever happen? I mean, when you look at where the political contributions come from, it comes from big banks and financial institutions, one, and it comes from pharmaceutical companies, number two.

So I would assume that it is not a surprise that that's the fact. - Well, that's the fact, but there's nowhere in those laws that says that these actions are exempt from the antitrust statutes. So of course, go ahead and suggest to anyone in the political sphere that some indictments ought to be issued tomorrow, and you're gonna be met with guffaws and all sorts of things like this.

The problem is, from a political point of view and from an economic point of view, if we don't do this, the federal government's budget will collapse, and when you take what the Federal Reserve has done with tampering with interest rates and you add on to that the impact on bond ladders and pension funds and other defined benefit plans, not only will the federal government's budget collapse, but the pensions of every firefighter, teacher, and police officer, all state employees, are going to go with it within the next 10 years.

So we either do this, or you're going to have literal destruction of a huge swath of the people in this country. - Well, our guest today is Mr. Carl Denninger. He is a prolific writer. You can read his work at market-ticker.org. His book, Leverage, How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World, will be the topic of conversation in the next segment with Carl when Everything Financial Radio returns.

Stay with us. ♪ That's the way you do it ♪ Money for nothing and your chance to breathe - Welcome back to the Everything Financial Radio program, brought to you by PLP Services. My guest today is Mr. Carl Denninger. Carl's book, Leverage, How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World, his blog, you can read at market-ticker.org.

Carl, I want to pick it up in this segment where we left it off in the last segment. You had talked about the fact that within the next 10 years, if we don't fix this problem, pensions will collapse. It'll affect many, many public workers. I mean, we've already seen the beginning of that.

To what extent, as you mentioned briefly, has Fed policy with low, artificially low interest rates, with quantitative easing programs, driven this problem, and in what way? - The Federal Reserve has exacerbated the problem. They, of course, have nothing to do with antitrust law and whether or not it's enforced, but what they have done is destroyed the return that bond investors can earn in reasonably safe securities, especially on the longer duration paper.

And why this becomes important to people, and even though the majority of the people that listen to your program probably have absolutely nothing to do with buying these kinds of instruments on their own, is that by law, and just by common sense, any company that has an actuarial kind of exposure, in other words, a pension company, you retire at 65, the actuaries say you live to be about 85, so they have about a 20-year exposure where they have to pay benefits to you.

And in order to match that duration of expected expense, they build a portfolio of laddered bonds. So one piece of them, 120 of them, comes to maturity. This year, another 20th comes to maturity. Next year, and on and on throughout the expected duration. When the Fed tampers with interest rates, as they have done, and depresses them, what happens is that in the first year, 5% of your portfolio gets replaced with bonds that yield much less than they should.

And that doesn't look so bad, 'cause it's only 5% of your portfolio, but the yield on those certificates might be cut in half from what it otherwise would have been. So you say, well, you know, okay, so we go from a 6% yield to a 3% yield, and that's pretty bad, that's a 50% cut, but it's only 5% of the portfolio, so it's a tiny little piece, it's a 20th, okay?

And it doesn't really hurt all that much, it's a few percentage points. Unfortunately, what you've just done is built a loss, a permanent reduction over the next 20 years into your cash flow, because if the Fed was to stop doing this tomorrow, all of those bonds that had been bought over the last seven, eight, nine years would still be in the portfolio.

And because you could buy a new bond at a higher yield, what that means is that the trading price with existing ones immediately falls to compensate for that forward projection. So the pension manager can't sell the old ones and replace them, because they just crystallize to the loss. He's stuck with the next, you know, however long his maturity is, if he's got a 20 year duration, he's stuck with it for another, you know, 14 years, where he's going to be earning this sub-return that is less than what he projected and less than what he needs.

The longer this goes on, the worse it gets. And we are now about halfway through most of these fund managers' duration ladder in terms of the distortion that the Fed has put on. This is not something that was just a one or two year thing for an emergency, they've now been doing it for, I guess, since 2007.

And so we are in a situation today where pension fund managers have a critical and growing funding problem into the back of a ramping cost that is running in excess of 9%. Now how are you going to make those two numbers match? You're not. - Well, if you're just joining us, we're chatting with Carl Denninger today.

Carl is the author of "Leverage, "How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World." And Carl, we've got about three and a half minutes left in this segment. Moving ahead, what do you expect Fed policy will be? Are they in a situation where they're going to continue to raise interest rates, or is that just a bunch of talk?

- I don't know. You know, there's this old problem about taking pain now to avoid worse pain later. Nobody wants to do it. The impact on pension funds is easily projectable and predictable, and it's a function of arithmetic. The impact on the budget, however, is tomorrow. If the Fed was to lift rates materially, the interest on the $17 trillion in national debt, most of which has been rolled down into the short end, which is a horrible thing for the government to have done, but it's what they did, is going to spike.

And the relatively small amount of interest expense that we have today will double or triple. So in order to avoid a calamity, you'd have to somehow find a way to get rid of the federal budget deficit at the same time. And again, the only way to do that, the only place that there's enough money to do it is to go after the medical side.

So will the Fed lift rates? They should have done it a long time ago. I think they're going to be forced to do it eventually, but my fear is that they're gonna sit on this decision for another few years until it gets to the point that we have a fiscal crisis, not just at the government level, which is potentially manageable, but throughout the private sector as well at a degree that nobody's going to be able to cover.

- So Carl, what does all this mean for currencies around the world? Every currency around the world now is a fiat currency, and certainly, when you look at what's going on in Venezuela, look what's going on in many parts of the world. You know, there's certainly a lot of stress on currencies and a lot of price inflation.

Are we gonna see the same thing here? - I don't know. The thing that I think is always so interesting is everyone gets all amped up about currency differentials and such, but at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter how many dollars you have in your pocket.

What matters is what they buy. And so what people really ought to be talking about is value, not dollars or pesos or francs or euros or yen, and yet everyone wants to try to play this beggar thy neighbor devaluation game to attempt to tip the trade balance in their favor, and yet what no one ever wants to deal with is the fact that this is a zero-sum game.

That which you get in one place has to come from somewhere else. So we're focusing in the wrong place as a society and at a policy level, but this is just the discourse that we have within the political and economic sphere today. I don't see an end to it anytime soon, but what I am very concerned about is that if you see something get out of control in the United States, you could very easily see a quarter of the wealth that people have vaporized in the space of a couple of years.

That wouldn't be hard to imagine happening at all. - Well, we're gonna have to leave it there. Our guest today has been Mr. Carl Denninger. His book, "Leverage, How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World." I'd encourage you to pick it up. Carl, thank you for joining us. - Anytime, thank you.

- We'll be back after these words. ♪ Give me your money ♪ ♪ Money, money, money ♪ ♪ Always sunny ♪ ♪ In the rich man's world ♪ - You are listening to the Everything Financial radio program brought to you by PLP Services. You know, we offer a number of resources to help you make good decisions about what to do with your money.

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I'm pleased to have joining me on the Everything Financial radio program returning guest Joshua Sheets. Joshua is the host of the very popular podcast Radical Personal Finance. And Joshua, welcome back to the program. - Awesome to be back with you, Dan. - Well Joshua, let's start by talking a bit about a topic that you discussed on your podcast of late which caught my interest.

And it's how to live a rich life now. And the subhead was most material riches are easily accessible to you today. Now that's a very compelling and provocative topic. So let's spend a little time discussing it. And maybe to get started, define if you would, rich life. I think that maybe has a little bit different definition for just about anybody that hears it.

- Yeah, it definitely does. And that's actually one of the major points that I try to bring out in my podcast is to get people to define it for themselves. So I have some definitions that are important to me. And I have some definitions that I think are worth other people considering.

But I want people to think, what does a rich life mean to me? And what I'm confronting is, especially for you and me, is in the mainstream financial planning culture, we have this tendency to talk about riches and living a rich life as something that happens a long time in the future when we're old and gray and retired and when we have millions of dollars.

But I look around and I recognize that it's a lot easier to get there now than it is to wait until we're old and retired. And I think oftentimes we miss the aspects of riches. One of the things that many of my listeners and many of my clients when I was working as a financial advisor would talk about was the aspect of financial freedom.

And one of the things that I learned was that financial freedom to most people isn't best represented by a brand new Mercedes in the driveway or a big, fancy luxury home on the water. Financial freedom is usually represented by choices. And I came to the conclusion that you could get there, meaning you could get to a place of having control over your choices much faster than you could get to the position of being a multimillionaire.

You just make different life choices. So I break living a rich life down into material aspects and immaterial aspects. But just as an example, I think most listeners of your radio show or my podcast are already living a richer life today than the richest person in the world 75 years ago.

Just think about it. Number one, climate controlled. Almost all of our listeners right now are listening to us in a climate that's perfectly suited to their ideal body temperature. Whether it's cooled or heated, they're already enjoying that. Think about how hot it would have been for the richest person in the world 75 years ago or how cold it would have been in some places and how much easier we have it.

And yet when's the last time you heard somebody express appreciation for the simple comfort and convenience of a climate controlled environment or think about the access to information and education and entertainment. Today, every one of our listeners has a smartphone in their pocket or sitting on their car dashboard that has access to entertainment, unlimited amounts of entertainment for essentially free right on YouTube from all around the world.

That's a luxury that the richest person in the world didn't have access to even 50 years ago. And yet today we take it for granted and we grumble about the fact that our car isn't brand new while we have access to some of the riches that you couldn't even achieve 50 years ago.

- So when you mention financial freedom and define that by saying control over choices, could you expand on that a bit? - Sure. I think that, and on my show I've done, I did the immaterial aspects of riches and the material aspects. And I like to disconnect them because we are so stuckered in to a losing game by the advertising media on all sides that causes us to think that we somehow need a lot of material things to be rich.

But if you actually think about it, the feelings of richness are often evoked by your choice. I can live a rich life by having an afternoon free from work that I don't wanna do to sit and read a book or watch a movie or do something that I do wanna do.

And so what I think people want from being rich is control. They want control over their day. They want control over their time. They want control over the choice of their activities. Well, that can be achieved without yet becoming a multimillionaire. If you want control over your day, then transition from a job or a career that doesn't allow you that control to something that does allow you that control.

I'm 31 years old and my birthday was just a couple weeks ago. And I consider myself at this point in time financially free. Why? Because I'm a multimillionaire? No, I'm not there yet. I'm working towards it, but I'm not there yet. But I consider myself financially free because I left a career and job that had a tremendous amount of control and I started my own business that gives me full control over my day.

I can start my day at any time that I want. I can do the work that I've chosen to do. I don't accept a lot of external calendar appointments on my schedule, so I have control over when I do my work. And that gives me a tremendous amount of freedom.

Now, it's not the freedom that's ultimately best enjoyed by having a stream of dividend income from publicly traded companies that's much higher than my expenses that I can just sit back and do nothing. I still need to work. But having that control to choose work that's meaningful makes me feel financially free.

At the end of the day, we all know that life is composed primarily of our experiences and not so much our things. When we're dead and gone, our things are gonna stay here with us. We can't use them anymore. And most people, when they get to the end of their life, they're gonna be much more concerned with their experiences, the richness of their relationships, the diversity of their experience, the richness of life that's not just measured by material things.

- So essentially, Joshua, financial freedom is somewhat time freedom. And in your case, as I was listening to you explain or describe your personal transition going from a job to a business, that's probably something that many of our listeners envy very much. Can you talk about how you would go about planning such a transition?

- Absolutely. The key thing is to first recognize that it's something that you actually want. Many people have ideas and dreams about how great running their own business is. And then those ideas and dreams can be shattered by actual experience. I think every business owner has had the opportunity, has had the thought at some point in their entrepreneurship game, man, I wish I could just go back to the world of employment.

I don't recommend that everybody become an entrepreneur. It's tough, it's challenging. So be sure that it's something that you want. The next thing is to recognize there are gonna be some benefits from it and there are going to be some costs and some drawbacks. So you need to list those benefits out and you need to recognize what you're giving up.

But the transition to entrepreneurship is relatively simple. You find something that the marketplace is going to value that you want to provide, and then you build a business model behind it that'll work. You can also and should also pay very careful attention to some of the formal technical financial planning techniques that we teach in order to make it a good transition.

You can go out and start a business when you're completely broke and deeply in debt. It's really stressful. Now, if you're in that situation, I recommend you still consider doing it, but it's also very wise to get yourself on a solid foundation. I think the best way for most people to approach transition is to do it on a part-time basis.

Work a full-time job, start a business on the side on a part-time basis. That way you're not putting too much risk on the side gig. And then when you get to the point in time where you can see some clear and measurable things that you could do to increase the business to a point where it's able to support yourself, then go ahead and start pursuing that transition to a full-time business.

- So when we talk about entrepreneurship, Joshua, this becomes a pretty important topic given where the economy is today. I interviewed Mr. Gerald Salente of Trends Research Institute and during our interview, he pointed out that actual real income is down for the average American over the last 18 years.

And even according to the US Department of Labor and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, median household income is down over the last five years. So this is becoming really almost a necessity for some people. So if someone has this as an idea, but they don't really have any skills in the area of becoming an entrepreneur, what advice would you give them to go acquire those skills?

- The key advice that people in that situation need is a change of mindset. You're right about the trends in our economy and it's only gonna get worse in the future. We've been done a disservice as a society wherein we've primarily been taught the concept that if you just get a good job, everything will be fine.

But there are a number of pressures and stresses that are collaborating to make that no longer the case. If you notice how many of the unemployment roll, how many of the employment, the jobs, did many of them disappeared after the 2008 recession, many of those jobs have not come back and will not come back and the pressure is only gonna get more and more intense.

I pay a lot of attention to the developments of automation. And frankly, I feel very, very bad. I feel bad for many of the people who are working hard, for example, the fast food industry, striking and trying to pressure for what they call a living wage, increases in the minimum wage.

The problem with that type of approach, the problem with striking for more money is that employers are consistently looking to remove your job and to transfer that to some sort of automated system. And I would guess within about five years, most of us will be completely accustomed and comfortable with ordering our food through a computer instead of through a person.

So the key mindset is not looking to say, what can I get? That's the mindset that leads to me striking and advocating and trying to get people to give me more money. I'm looking for what I can get. The mindset of an entrepreneur is looking to, what can I give?

What service can I provide? And so the first thing to do is to look around where you are and try to see what is something that I have the capability to offer to somebody else that they might be willing to pay me for. That's the fundamental transformation of entrepreneurship.

Now, if you don't know, just look around and see what other people are doing and ask yourself, can I do what other people do? And you can do this at any level. For example, a couple of neighborhood kids in my neighborhood, they've been off on summer vacation over the last few months.

And they started a car washing business. And there's three young men, eight years old, one, nine years old, the other, and 10 years old, the third. And they came by my house, knocked on my door, and asked me if I wanted my car washed. They had a bucket ready to go.

They're using my hose, their bucket, their soap, and they're washing my car for me. Well, they've gone and they've created a little tiny business simply based on going around and asking people, would you like me to wash your car? That's the fundamental basis of entrepreneurship of every kind. You're just looking for something that people might be willing to pay you for and then asking them, would you be willing to pay me?

Now, the good way to start is with something that you have the skills and capabilities of doing. An eight-year-old young man is probably not going to have the capacity to do comprehensive financial planning like I do. But his business is no different than mine. And if you find an area where you think you might have a product or a service that somebody might be willing to buy, you offer that.

You put that out in the marketplace and you see if there's any interest. Then you go back and you try to develop additional business and some services behind it. Car washing business, I kind of took these young guys under my wing and I'm trying to counsel them and give them some additional ideas.

Here are some additional products that you can offer. You're offering a basic wash, but what about a basic wash and a vacuum? Well, we don't have a vacuum. So you need to go out and get a vacuum, acquire the tools, build the skills. That skill is pretty simple. What about some other skills you can offer?

Can you wax cars? We don't know how to do that. Well, go learn the skills. I'm using a simple example because I think it's something that we can all relate to. And today, if I lost all of my money, if I lost all of my business, I would go and now consider starting a car washing business.

Because that's something that I can go and I can sell. I can go door to door. I can ask people if they'd like their car washed. And I could build a business on it. There are tons and tons and tons of these all throughout our society. And if you just start paying attention to what's something I can provide to the marketplace, then your mindset will open up the opportunities to you.

Well, we are chatting today with Joshua Sheets. Joshua is the host of the popular podcast, Radical Personal Finance. I'll continue my conversation with Joshua. When everything financial radio continues, stay with us. (SINGING) Money, money, money, money, money, money. This is the Everything Financial radio program, brought to you by PLP Services.

Today, we are listening to an interview that I conducted with Mr. Joshua Sheets a while ago. This aired back about two months ago. But Joshua's got such a great perspective, I thought I would share it with you once again. So I'll get back to that interview now. I have the pleasure of chatting today with Joshua Sheets.

Joshua is the host of the podcast, Radical Personal Finance. I would encourage you to check it out. And we're chatting today with Joshua about how to live a rich life now. And on your podcast, Joshua, you talked about the fact that it's possible to build a plan to achieve financial freedom in 10 years.

So the floor is yours. Our listeners, I'm sure, would love to hear that. This show, I just finished this series of three shows on Radical Personal Finance. And it came because I've done over 350 episodes of the podcast. And the tagline of my show is how to live a rich life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

And I've done hundreds of shows. I never had fully explained that. So that was where I came into this series. But I'm convinced that you don't have to wait for a 40-year retirement plan in order to live a lifestyle of financial freedom and that there are many paths to financial freedom.

Now, notice I'm being careful with my words. I'm using the word "freedom." I didn't say 10 years-- how to be a multimillionaire in 10 years or less, although I believe that is possible for many people. I didn't necessarily even say how to be financially independent-- independent of the need to work in 10 years or less, although I believe that is possible for many people.

I talked about financial freedom. And the reason is that in my work as a financial planner, I noticed that so many people get so focused on only being financially free when they're 65 years old and have a million and a half dollars. But guess what? You don't have to wait until then to experience financial freedom.

And if you put all of your focus and hope on that future experience, you miss out on some of the aspects of financial freedom today. So I cover the basic aspect of financial freedom. For example, having your income higher than your expenses. If you have your income higher than your expenses, then to a great degree, you are financially free, just simply because you have more money coming in than you need to spend.

Now, even better, if you could have that income coming in in a way that's ideally suited for you through a job that's appropriate to you or through a business that's appropriate to you, now you've got an even higher degree of freedom. If you look at the wealthy, notice the fact that the mega rich don't ever retire.

Donald Trump's running for president. He wants the hardest and worst job in the world, even though he doesn't need it. He wants it. Well, why is he trying to get one of the hardest jobs in the world when he doesn't need it? Because it's something more than money. And if you look at all of the wealthy, you almost never see that they retire.

Why? Because they've found an occupation that fits them and they're financially free, even though they're still working. People don't wait to be a billionaire. Just find that occupation now. Another aspect, being debt free. If you're debt free, that gives you a huge degree of financial freedom, gives you choices over your life.

And then I also go in and I explain that in 10 years or less, you probably can build a plan for financial freedom, complete financial freedom. It's as simple as if you're an employee, if you live on about 30% of your income and save 70% of your income, you can be financially independent in about a decade.

Well, that's easy? No, but many people can do that and are doing that. And you can make a plan in a decade to dramatically increase your income, to decrease your expenses and save a lot of money. There are thousands of people all around the US that are doing that.

If you don't believe me, I'll send you to the forums where they're all interacting. Or you can build a plan to build a business. If you need to have that multimillion dollar approach, you can build a plan to build a business and sell it out in under a decade.

Now, is that guaranteed? No, that's difficult. Most businesses fail. But is it possible? It sure is. And so, depending on your financial plan, you'll set out different goals, depending on what you're trying to accomplish, and you'll be able to accomplish them. But I don't believe you have to wait until you're 65 years old and have $2 million in your 401(k) to enjoy the fruit of a rich life now or financial freedom.

You can achieve it far faster. >> And Joshua, you made just a very basic point. In fact, I wrote a book called "Finding Financial Freedom" and I made the same point in that book. The first thing you have to do is get to a point that your income is higher than your expenses.

And it might be interesting to talk about the fact that sometimes it's easier to increase income than it is to reduce expenses. >> Absolutely. I think they both have their place. Expenses, for many people, are so loose and sloppy that that's easier to cut. But for many people, they're already being very careful, and all they need to do is adjust their income.

I remember years ago, I heard, I think it was Zig Ziglar tell a story. And Zig told the story about how they had done a test and they put a newspaper ad for a job in two different newspapers in two different major metropolitan areas. The ad was identical qualifications, description of the job.

The only thing that was different was that in one ad they offered something like $40,000 a year. In the other ad, they offered some six-figure numbers, say $120,000 per year. And they got five times the respondents for the $40,000 a year job than the $120,000 a year job. Why?

Was there any difference in qualifications? No, the ad was the same. It was just the number. And so many people have not investigated how to earn more income, and thus they're walking away from all kinds of opportunities that are available to them in their current job or transitioning to a different job or starting a different business.

And there's so many opportunities for people to increase their income. >> Well, we're going to have to leave it there. Our guest today has been Mr. Joshua Sheets. He's host of the podcast, "Radical Personal Finance." And Joshua, thank you for joining us today. We hope you'll come back. >> I'd love to.

>> Well, before I close today, let me remind you that we do have a couple of free Social Security maximization workshops coming up here in the Grand Rapids area. These meetings begin at 6 p.m. and conclude at 7.30 p.m. with a free dinner. The meeting is free, the information is free, and dinner is free.

If you're between the ages of 55 and 69 and would like another perspective on the best way to collect your Social Security benefits, I would encourage you to attend. You can get more information by visiting the website socialsecurityradio.com. The website, once again, is socialsecurityradio.com. On September the 8th, which is a Thursday, you will find us at Stonewater Country Club out in Caledonia Township.

On Tuesday, September 13, you'll find us at Boulder Creek Golf Club in Belmont. Again, both meetings begin at 6 p.m. and conclude at 7.30 p.m. with a complimentary dinner. To get more information or register, once again, the website is socialsecurityradio.com. If you'd like to go back and listen to any of the interviews that I do with the guest experts here on the Everything Financial Radio program, you can visit the website everythingfinancialradio.com and you'll find them listed there.

That's our show for this week. Hope you got something you can use. Bye. - 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.