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At Wine Enthusiast, we bring wine to life. Go. Hi, this is Miles and I'm really old and I love race cars and Family Adventure Podcast. Goodbye. This is Family Adventure Podcast. Inspiring families to dream, travel, and accomplish epic adventures. And now your host, Eric Hemingway. Hey everybody, welcome to Family Adventure Podcast.

Thanks for joining us this week. This week on our show, we are joined by Joshua Sheets from the podcast Radical Personal Finance. And the reason I wanted to bring Joshua on the show, we met in Dallas at the podcast movement and we just really hit it off. We had a great time hanging out, swapping stories and talking podcasts and, you know, nerds, standard nerd stuff.

But I wanted to bring him on the show to talk about personal finance because for family travel and family adventure travel, long-term nomadic travel, the kind of stuff that we're into, the money side, the budget, and how to start planning for something of this magnitude is really a big hurdle for a lot of people.

It was a big hurdle for us when we planned our adventure. And I know it's the first question that most people come to when they start thinking about, "Yeah, it'd be great to go travel around the world with my family, but how am I supposed to get that kind of money together?

And how am I supposed to live while we're traveling? And it's going to just sap all of our savings and we're going to be broke and penniless, but with some cool stories." So actually, that's not going to be the case, but we are going to talk to Joshua today and get his take.

He's got so many letters after his name, so many degrees and specialty finance certificates that he's been able to accomplish that he definitely knows his stuff, so we're honored to have him. Joshua, welcome to the show. I'm excited to be here. I feel like we just talked, though, because my wife and I just drove across Florida this weekend and we listened to your show all the way across the state, so I feel like we've been talking.

Awesome. That's cool. Which episode did you hear? I was listening to the interview that you and Rachel gave with your friend, I think it was Eric or something like that. Derek. Derek Olson. Yeah, he was in Dallas as well. Did you meet him? I did not. I don't remember meeting him.

I may have. That was a lot of fun. He emailed and said he came up with this idea. He goes, "I love your show. I know all the questions. Let me turn the tables and interview you guys." I said, "All right. Hey, that sounds like fun." Yeah, it was great.

It was great. My wife and I enjoyed it immensely. Yeah, good. So Joshua, we met in Dallas and it was a great time hanging out and stuff, so let's talk a little bit about your podcast, Radical Personal Finance. Give us a little rundown. What's it all about? My show is all about helping people to actually understand how money works and understand how finance works.

I've always been a fan of personal finance information. I've always enjoyed personal finance. I come from, because of my enjoyment of personal finance, I went into the world of professional financial advice. I spent six years working as a professional financial advisor. So my area of expertise is in the technical side of financial planning.

But I noticed that there wasn't much of a niche being filled as far as teaching people how to take their goals from these ideas and actually implementing a financial plan to fund those ideas. I observed that every goal that people have really involves finance to some degree. Maybe there are exceptions.

I know that's a strong statement, but I do feel it's true. Because even if I have a goal of maybe building a stronger relationship with my son, I have a one-year-old son so far, and if I have a goal of building a stronger relationship with him or with my wife, that's going to involve something, whether it's spending time together, going to the library, getting books, playing games.

So I need freedom over my time. Well, I don't have freedom over my time if I can't figure out my money. And what happens is that there is a plethora of financial advice available for people who are interested in the so-called traditional plan. So go to school, go to college, graduate, get a job, work 40 years, retire at 65.

That's what the whole world of financial advice is geared around. But that model is increasingly broken and increasingly unattractive to many people. So people are looking for alternative models. So what my show is all about is trying to illustrate alternative models. And what I'm trying to do – I'll leave it up to other people to judge whether it's successful or not – is teach people the technical side of financial planning so that they can integrate all of the tools that are available to them to actually follow through and hit their goals, whatever they be, no matter what their alternative life plan is.

I love it. I mean, that is a huge undertaking, first of all. But what a fantastic niche, because I couldn't agree more that – you know, you made a comment about the current system or the way people think about money being broken. I mean, I think it's at least one or two generations back where you trust the company to take care of all your needs and pension and all that, and it's just not that way anymore.

I mean, you really have to take control of yourself. Right. No one else is certainly going to do it for you. And I also love the point you made about whatever goals you have or whatever you want to accomplish in life, it does magically seem to come down to money.

You can be idealized and just say it's all going to work out and smile on your brother, but unfortunately when it's time to pay the piper, it's got to come from somewhere. Right. It really does. And I'm not so sure actually that the older model ever actually worked. Maybe not.

I really haven't. I've done a lot of research on it, and I struggle to be able to prove this, but I increasingly get a feeling. So this is not proven. I've read a few books on the subject to try to find out what actually happened. But even the old-fashioned idea of I'm going to work until 65, then I'm going to retire, and this is going to be a golden life, based upon my research, it seems as though that's never actually been what many people wanted.

When retirement was first invented, there were two basic areas that retirement came about. The first one where it's the most commonly referred to was by Chancellor Otto Bismarck in Germany, and he invented the idea of the state-funded pension as a political tool. What happened is that the socialists were coming into his country, and he wanted to retain control, and he was worried about the socialists taking over.

So his way to avoid them taking over was for him to become more socialist than they were and offer a guaranteed government pension to his subjects or citizens, whatever you want to call them. So it was a political tool that he employed. In this country, the best I can find is that primarily retirement really came about with a couple of primary changes in the U.S., and one of those primary changes was the institution-- it was during the Great Depression where there was a high unemployment rate in the United States, and retirement was viewed by the politicians at the time--mandatory retirement, age 65 retirement, that type of thing--was viewed as a political tool to be able to lower the unemployment rate.

So because the unemployment rate was high and they felt that it was going to be a structurally high problem where it wasn't going to change as time went on, they needed to get people out of the workforce. So that was why they encouraged early retirement. The second aspect of it, Social Security, was similarly a political tool.

When Social Security was established, it was actually established partly in response to various proposals that were going on, I believe if my memory is correct, from California. So Social Security was established as a contributory system where the individuals have to contribute to it through their Social Security taxes because I think it was FDR was staving off a political attack from people who were saying, "We're just going to fund it without a contributory system." And then the last aspect to it was with retirement.

And these are just some of the threads that I've been trying to pull together, and I can't pull them together comprehensively, so don't quote this as, "This is exactly what happened." The last thread was that mandatory retirement, the idea of you've got to retire at 65, really was developed due to changes in technology.

So it used to be that the standard work week was six days a week and a much longer work day. Well, this led to a more natural kind of work-life balance where you worked, but you didn't work at this frenzied pace. But as technology came around, and the best threads that I've seen this traced in the academic literature is in the printing industry.

With the advent of more advanced technological printing machines, the workers had to work harder to keep the machines at full output, and the older workers couldn't really keep up. So one of the things they did was they shortened the work day because the work became so much more intense.

They shortened the work day for the workers into a more compressed period of time under the auspices of, "This is going to be better." But what they actually did was they amped up the vigor that was required by the worker to run the machines. Well, then the older workers were holding back the younger workers, so you started to have mandatory retirement programs.

But when they were first instituted, people protested violently against them, and nobody wanted to retire. And it wasn't until, by the best information I've been able to find, it wasn't until around the 1950s that the idea of promoting retirement as what Todd Tresseter calls the "pro-leisure circuit" --Todd Tresseter, who writes at Financial Mentor, he coined this term, best I know, calls it the "pro-leisure circuit" where we're going to retire to Florida and we're going to play golf every day.

That was instituted in about the '50s. And so then with the advent of modern advertising, that was able to be advertised, and then retirement came from something that people didn't want to do to something that people wanted to do. But now that's all changing. So the younger generations see the fact of like, "What's this ridiculous, like I'm going to go and sell my soul to a corporation for 40 years, and then when I'm old and broken down, then I'm going to get a pension?" And so now you see this almost violent reversal, especially among some of the younger generations, saying, "I want meaning.

I want a sense of meaning and control and autonomy over my work." And so there are these major culture clashes that are happening faster and faster in our society. Fascinating. I love it. I mean, I love the study of that. And it's funny how things that "are normal," it's just continuously evolving.

200 years ago, unheard of. Even 100 years ago, unheard of. And then all of a sudden, by our generation, people growing up in the '80s, '90s, it's expected. And you start planning your life around the fact that, "Am I going to retire at 63 or 65?" When two or three generations earlier never even crossed their mind.

And I guess it's all just part of whatever circumstances you grow up around. Both of my grandparents did the traditional way, worked for a company for 30, 40 years. One retired from a bank. One retired from Kaiser Steel in California. Had a pension, had a health care tool until they died, and that whole thing.

So it's just fascinating how that never appealed to me, and it never was something I really wanted. So it wasn't like this life choice or anything. So it's just a fascinating study for sure. Yeah, it seems like there's almost two different types of people when it comes to retirement.

When you look at the generations that are now retiring and some of the generations prior. Some people, because you have to look at the statistics, and what's challenging is when we go based upon the people that we know. So you had grandparents that were able to do that. And my grandparents, I think, were able to do that, but they had a very different story.

One of my grandfathers was a farmer, and farmers never retire. They just work until they die. They just pull back a little bit. And so he worked until he died at 93. But work was much lighter. It's more drive out to the farm and drive around a little bit to feel like he was still involved.

And he was still doing the business deals, but he wasn't out doing hard work. But until the day he died, he was thinking about how can I buy land, how can I build a wind farm. He had all these entrepreneurial ideas. My other grandfather was a teacher, and he worked until he was, I think it was 83 or 84 in his mid-80s.

And what was startling about that was that when he was in his mid-80s, he really loved his work. He had been a college professor, then he pulled back to being a tutor, and he was basically just a part-time tutor. But he loved the meaning that he got from it, and he collected a paycheck for it.

And he was a very young man in his mid-80s. But then it became unsafe for him to drive, and so he wasn't able to drive and commute to his job anymore. So he retired for, I think, the third time. And at that time, he got old in a couple of years, and it was really startling.

And he lived until he was 95, but it was a very different kind of lifestyle. So the challenge is it's easy to draw from my anecdotal experience and say people never retire. And your anecdotal experience is to say, "Well, my grandparents did it." When you look at the statistics, though, the statistics show that the vast number of people approaching that retirement age will never be able to retire in that traditional sense that maybe your grandparents did.

There's just simply no money. And so they're going to have to work things out in some different way. And so our challenge in the financial planning community is to figure out how do we help each individual design their own plan. And it has to be customized to what they actually have and what they actually need to do.

And we're developing new approaches to that, and it's a much more integrated approach than it formerly was. With this idea that you turn 65 and the pension's going to take care of you, it doesn't really exist anymore. A very small percentage of people still exist under that system. So it's a real challenging time to be a financial planner and help people through these transitions.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, challenging, but exciting as well, because there's so many new different things coming out and ideas and so forth. I mean, that's what I love about your show, your podcast. It's so out of the box that anything is up for discussion, and anything can be evaluated and analyzed and see if it makes sense.

So congratulations for that. All right. Good. All right. Well, let's change gears a little bit and talk about travel. You've done quite a bit of traveling yourself abroad. Talk about some of your travel experiences. I've been fortunate. I've been very fortunate from an early age. So I'm almost 30.

I'm 29 years old. And I can't remember the exact number. The other day I was going to go and sit down and tally it up, but I told somebody one time, and I think it's pretty close to the truth, although I need to fact check myself because I may have been a little bit overzealous with it.

But I was fortunate to be able to go to about 25 countries by the time I was 25 years old. And that was pretty exciting just when I sat down and figured that out. And so I was fortunate. I think our parents and our exposure to different people makes a big difference.

My parents grew up in Colorado, but they actually lived for seven years in the Philippines as missionaries. And so because they had done a good amount of travel, my father, after he left the mission field, he went into the liquid natural gas business, which took him all around the world on business.

And so if your parents are accustomed to the idea of travel, then it makes it far easier for the children to actually be able to say, "Yeah, I'm going to go and take this trip to this place," and not have the parents freak out and say, "Oh, you're going to go and do that?

What are you thinking?" Exactly. Exactly. And that's a big impediment to a lot of young people who want to travel, is if their parents are not comfortable with it. Many people who haven't traveled have this idea that, well, the rest of the world is this crazy, unfriendly, horrible, dangerous place, and you can't go to Mexico, you can't go to Colombia.

Everyone has machetes, and you step off the plane, and they're going to whack your head off. And it's so totally... It's funny because in terms of what we're comfortable with as individuals, we know what we're comfortable with. And if we don't have experience of something, we're often uncomfortable with it.

In every country I've ever traveled to, if I've been traveling to another place, I've had people give me severe warnings about that other place, about how dangerous it is and how I have to be careful there and how awful everything is. And you do need to be prudent. It's very important to be prudent when you're traveling and pay attention to what people say, because the locals know what's actually going on.

But I live in West Palm Beach, Florida, and there are parts of West Palm Beach that I don't go through. And if I go through them, I'm driving straight through during the day. I do not drive through at night. And so that's the same in every part of the world.

But I mean, two striking ones that I can remember, because I went to both countries on the same... I went to multiple countries on each of these trips. One, I was living in... I spent a semester abroad in Costa Rica. And when you're traveling to Nicaragua, the Costa Ricans and the Nicaraguans have all this tension.

And they say, "Oh, don't go to Nicaragua. It's so dangerous. The people there are..." "They're going to kill you. They're going to rob you." Exactly. Exactly. And I go to Nicaragua, and it's one of the greatest places I've been. I really enjoyed it. Same thing, my wife and I, we honeymooned in the Dominican Republic and in Haiti.

And the Dominican Republic and... or what do they call them? I don't remember. The Dominican Republicans, whatever they're... however you say that in English, they have this relationship of tension, many of them, with Haitians. And there's a lot of tension between those two countries because of their history. So we told people we were going to travel to Haiti.

And everyone's like, "Oh, you can't go there. It's so dangerous. It's so horrible." We went there, and it's certainly a unique place to travel, but we had a great trip in many ways. And it was... we didn't fear for our lives. It wasn't as though people were on the street with machetes.

It's just... there's this lack of experience that leads people, I think, to be overly fearful of the unknown. I guess that's what it comes down to. You know, fear of the unknown. And you just assume... I guess maybe it's human nature. We just assume the worst, that it's going to be worse than we think.

I don't know where that comes from. But I guess, you know, for me, I like to think of it optimistically. I think it's probably going to be better than I think. And, you know, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. But, you know, it seems to be a better way to go.

So you've been around the block, so to speak, several times, it sounds like. And, you know, that's fantastic. And it gives you such a broad appreciation for the world, I find, travel. It really does. It really does. It just opens your horizons. And the cool thing is it gives you a lot of confidence.

When you're traveling... So what I spend a lot of time on my show doing is trying to open people's eyes to alternative ways of living. And depending on how you want this conversation to go, I can talk about that after a bit as far as financial planning. Different feasible financial plans that can be implemented, all of which can make a difference.

But one of the things I've noticed is that oftentimes people have a lack of imagination. Because oftentimes we only associate what are the possible... We don't usually think of all of the potential opportunities. We think of the opportunities we've been exposed to. So my example of this would be if you look at what children often do and children often choose as a career.

It's very common that children will be in a career that is either similar to their parents' career. So maybe your dad was a coal... This is less appropriate now, but your dad was a coal miner so you become a coal miner. Or they go in a career that their parents are accustomed to or familiar with.

But very few people sit down and say, "Out of all of the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of jobs that I could build or businesses that I could build, what would be most suited to me?" So it's uncommon that someone takes that approach. We usually do what we're familiar with.

Same thing with traveling. Most many people are comfortable with the few states around them. And they look at somebody who's gone across the country from a US perspective or other countries as well. Wow, that's so... I wouldn't think of doing that. And then when one of their friends first goes on an international trip and comes back and says, "Hey, this was so great," it expands their imagination.

Well, the thing I love about getting out of the country is being exposed to people from all over the world. So then you start to see that, wow, we as Americans, we travel for two weeks and we spend $10,000. But there's this German couple and they've been traveling for three and a half months.

On $3,000. And they don't have any money. They only had $2,000 and they're still on the road. The latter is probably more towards our audience. And you'd mentioned about which direction to take the conversation. I'd love to get your opinion on what you're, as a financial--let's call you a guru--a financial guru.

How people take steps and think out of the box. I mean, you can't just help tell somebody to think out of the box. But to help show them where does a family start or where does somebody start with some of these alternative lifestyles and how do you plan financially for that?

Is that a can of worms? Good question. So, yeah, yeah, this would be good. I'm excited because I was thinking about this conversation in advance and I prepared a few thoughts that hopefully will be helpful to people. The key place I would say to start is the Internet. And here's the thing.

When I listened to your and your wife's story, you shared about the book that you read of the man who took the year abroad and how inspirational that was to you. And I remember back when I was in college, I found books at the library about sabbaticals. And I said, "Oh, wow.

How cool would it be to do a sabbatical?" The wonderful thing about the type of work that you're doing and that I'm doing and the wonderful thing about YouTube and the wonderful thing about blogs and just this amazing connectivity that we have is we can be much more easily exposed to people who are doing some really wacky, as it seems to us, things and wacky lifestyles.

And so the first thing is that builds imagination. And when I was growing -- when I was younger, I didn't ever have an idea that, well, how could I structure my life -- if I was in high school and I was 15 years old, I never had an idea of saying, "How could I be financially independent by the time I'm 25 years old?" I never had that idea.

It never even occurred to me. Because all I read was I read personal finance books that said, "Well, if you save 10 or 15 percent of your income from 18 to 65 and you put it in mutual funds, you'll have a lot of money and you'll be a millionaire." So that's what I did because that was the extent of my ideas.

Now, when I talk with high school students, I send them some of the stories that I'm curating on my show of, "Look at this person who was financially independent at the age of 30 or at 25 or at 33," or, "Look how this 35-year-old person was completely broke and by 45, they were financially independent." And I demonstrate how those things are possible.

So I say the first thing is imagination because imagination is what leads to the idea of, "Oh, I could do this." And in the story that you shared in the interview with you and your wife, you talked about the idea of sailing across the ocean. You said, "I never even considered doing that." But then one of your friends said, "What are you going to cross?" And just the idea says, "Wow, how could I?

How could I do that?" And many times, we're limited -- our imagination is limited to our experience. And it's not until we see somebody who's maybe an extreme example that we think of something different. I've heard many 50-year-olds say, "I'm too old to do this physical activity goal." And then I saw the other day -- I can't remember where, so I'm a little fuzzy on the number -- but it was something like a 93-year-old guy who was out running marathons.

And you say, "What? How is that possible?" Well, maybe at 50, I'm not over the hump. Maybe I can go ahead and accomplish this transition. So I encourage people to get a broad exposure to really feed their imagination. Because I think it's Tony Robbins that says, "If you ask a better question, you'll get a better answer." And so if you ask and say, "Well, I can't get that because I can't afford it," well, that puts your mind in the sense of, "I can't afford it." But if you ask a question like, "What could I do to be able to afford it?" That's a question that you could start to brainstorm answers to.

And it's not magic. It doesn't automatically just say, "Oh, I've got all this money rolling in." No. But it opens up the door to be able to say, "Let me be open to possibilities of things I could do that might allow me to achieve this goal." Maybe that's a great start.

What would I do if I was financially independent? What would my life look like? And how would that feel? And what other possibilities would suddenly open up if I wasn't tied to one city, one job, one time clock or whatever? And I guess people more and more are asking that question, but for a long time have not.

Or maybe our default setting is we just don't ask those kind of questions. We're like, "How can I make the most out of what's right in front of me?" Instead of, "How can I change what's right in front of me to be what I want?" I guess it's a paradigm shift.

Right. Asking a good question like that, I love that question. And I have spent a lot of time asking people about their goals. That's what we do as financial planners. We ask people about what their goals are. Then we ask them about where they are. And then we try to brainstorm ideas and plans that are going to efficiently help them to get from where they are to where they want to be.

Now that sounds kind of airy-fairy, but that's it. That's what financial planning is. We build plans toward goals. Now the problem is that financial planning often gets associated with certain aspects of finance that you can more easily sell a product to. So you can sell an investment product or an insurance product.

That's a problem with the financial planning profession. But fundamentally, financial planning is simply saying, "What do I want? Where am I? What do I need to do to get from here to there?" And I think starting with that big picture idea, starting with that big picture goal, I call it -- the one that I use is the $10 million question.

It's simply saying, "Okay, if I had $10 million bucks, and if I had $10 million bucks that was given to me tax-free, and I had it tossed in the bank, and let's say that I go and I spend a year doing all the stuff that I think I want to do.

I buy a fancy car. I buy a fancy house. I go here. I go there, and I blow a bunch of money. Now, a year later, after I've gotten all that nonsense out of my system, what would I do on Monday morning? What would I want my Monday morning to look like?" And for me, that's always been the most helpful question in my life because what I've found is that I could answer that question.

And the cool thing was I don't need $10 million to get there. Exactly. Yes, that's a great point. Yeah, you realize what you really do want. I mean, if you boil it down, chances are it's not really a money issue. Right. And many people -- see, what happens is that, again, back to imagination.

Who sets our reality? Because we all have this set point. And what happens is over time, because we live in such a marketing-centric culture, many of us associate our financial goals with consumption goals. If you look at TV, if you watch TV, and you look at the advertisements that come on, and you look at what is being advertised, you'll find that a lot of it is associated with either consumption or with fixing a problem, a shortfall, a shortcoming.

So you'll have a car commercial, and you'll have an upset stomach commercial. So you've got a medicine to fix a problem that's wrong with you in a car. What happens is as you get exposed to these things, you start to want them. So if I -- I used to subscribe, for example, to a men's magazine that I really enjoyed.

But what I found was that as I read it, it was filled with all this gear and these gadgets. And I would look at this gear and these gadgets, and it would really create a desire within me for this gear and these gadgets. Once I just unsubscribed from the magazine and quit reading it, all of my gadget lust, much of my gadget lust went away.

And so it takes time to readjust your circumstance. I'll give you one more example that I've experienced. When I was younger, I was kind of a car nut, and I would subscribe to all these 4x4 magazines and all these car magazines and these hot rod magazines, and I loved that stuff when I was a kid.

So I would spend all my time obsessing over cars. Well, then I lived abroad. I went to Costa Rica for a semester when I was in school, and I didn't have a car. And then it was very difficult for people to have a car, and this completely changed my set point.

And when I got back to the country, when I got back to the U.S., all of that lust for cars had switched to where instead of saying, "I've got to have this big, fancy, lifted-up 4x4 truck," it just simply been, "Man, I'd be happy to have a car, any kind of car." So the key is, the key to designing things is to recognize that we can adjust our--we can even adjust what our goals are because what you feed, the appetites that you feed in your life, they grow.

So if you feed an appetite for a new BMW 5 Series and how cool that is and how you're going to get a new M5 or whatever their current version of that is, that appetite will grow. But if you feed an appetite for spending time with your family, which is one of my values, then that appetite will grow and you'll adjust things accordingly.

And now I happily drive a $5,000 minivan, and I'm thrilled with it because I see the rest of the stuff I used to be obsessed with is so utterly stupid because it doesn't serve my goals. So the key is we can adjust that. So you have to be very careful about what's the vision that we do and not be manipulated by the external circumstances, but rather manipulate the external circumstances to feed our vision for where we want to go.

I love it. I love it. That's why I wanted to have this conversation because I knew it wouldn't have a little bit to do with finance but more about shifting life thoughts and planning things and just thinking out of the box, which is fantastic. So great. So people are--and that's a lot of what--that's why we want to keep this podcast in front of people is to keep them motivated about family travel, kind of show them what's possible.

None of our guests--we've had 40-some people on the show now--none of them are rich. Nobody's independently wealthy. They're all choosing a different lifestyle. And another side note is they're all amazed at how little it takes money-wise to achieve the lifestyle that they want. So that's been--it's a big revelation to a lot of people that go traveling is it costs so much less than they actually thought for the reasons we've talked about already.

So it's great. I think people will spend on travel and on life-- people will spend as much as they have. And there are plenty of examples of completely broke people traveling the world full-time and whether they're doing that from occasional employment. So for example, they go and they get a job bartending at some random beachfront bar making a tiny amount of money but they can live on nothing and they can go further.

Or you even look at the way that somebody travels. One person may walk around the world. There was a guy on my show named Ken Ilgunas, and he was famous for--semi-famous for writing a book called Walden on Wheels where he actually--he had borrowed a bunch of money for his undergraduate degree, paid it off through hard work, wanted to go and graduate--wanted to go to grad school, didn't have the money--he didn't want to borrow money.

He went to Duke. And so what he did was he had enough money for tuition, and he lived in a van in the parking lot so that he could graduate debt-free. And he later wrote a book about it. But he went on to do a--and he's a kind of interesting guy, hitchhikes all over, really unconventional guy.

And he wrote a book--he did an adventure where he hiked the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline. And the interesting thing about that was he hiked all through the backcountry just carrying what he carried. But there are many people who have done this--go walking across the country, go ride a bike across the country.

That doesn't cost that much to have some food and go walking around the world. There are people who have done it. Now, I don't--that doesn't really appeal to me. I don't particularly want to go walk across the country. And I would be surprised if you wanted to take your kids and say, "Hey, kids, we're going to go walk across the country." That's not what appeals to me.

But the cool thing is is that the key that was--the differentiator is if you want to go travel, all it takes is to go out your front door, toss a little bit of food and some water and a backpack, and start walking, and you are technically traveling. Now, on the flip side is I love to see these guys that are traveling the world in these $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 big fancy overland trucks, basically, big fancy RVs with four-wheel drive.

And they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And that's cool for them because they like it and they can afford it. But both of those people are traveling, and both of them can have adventures. But money is not the object--excuse me, money is not the obstacle. Rather, we just simply have to say, "What's the plan that works for me based upon my vision?" And so for many people, they just simply wouldn't enjoy walking across the country.

And so they'll need to go and figure out another plan. But some people do enjoy that. But most people don't even consider it. So I don't see money as an obstacle for travel. I see rather that money is something that you've got to figure out, and you've got to primarily figure it out to say, "What is the key as far as how I'm going to live for my family?" Do you think--what is more important?

I mean, the money to do the thing, to do whatever your goals are, or your attitude about money? I think they're intertwined because what can happen is a lot of times attitude makes a big difference, but that's very frustrating to people because there's so much kind of new-age mumbo-jumbo around the attitude around money.

And a lot of it is nonsense. And it's just this idea that, "Well, if I just envision the money, the money will appear." If I affirm the money, then the money will appear. So I'm going to affirm that I'm a millionaire. Nonsense. I'm comfortable receiving large amounts of money.

You start checking your bank account to see if it's there yet. Right, right. And there's a place for adjusting concepts around money. But I always love what Jim Rohn used to say. He used to say, "Don't lie to yourself. If you're broke, the best place to start is to say, 'I'm broke.'" It really is.

The best place to start is to say, "I'm broke." But I'll give you an example. So I recently was bestowed by one of my listeners an honorary dirtbag degree. And I had forgotten about this word. And I'd forgotten about this word, "dirtbag." But it's a friendly, not-so-friendly term, I guess, like the rock climbers maybe know of for these guys who just don't care about doing anything except scaling rocks.

And I took a trip across the country. And it was just me traveling. And I did a show on what you can learn from homeless people. And I'm doing all these wacky experiments to adjust my personal comfort level. So I decided to try and see what it would be like to live in a car for a couple of weeks.

And I made a rule that if I needed to get out, I would just stay at a hotel. I was doing some business travel. But I decided this would be a fun thing to do if I could do it. So I borrowed a Prius, actually a Toyota Prius, and I took that across the country.

Well, I'd read online of this--I think it was Cheap RV Living was a site that I found it on-- about this lady who traveled in her Prius. And what she did was she had turned it into a mini motorhome. And the ability of her to travel and get 40 or 50 miles per gallon instead of 15 allowed her to spend more time on the road.

And the cool thing about the Prius is that you can flip the back seat forward and the front seat backwards and have a basically flat floor if you stretch from the back end of the car to the front of the car. You can basically have a floor that you can toss down like a Therm-a-Rest or a mattress on.

It's pretty comfortable. And then the coolest thing about the Prius is that you can leave it on all night with the AC if you're in a hot environment. And because of the hybrid design, the car will automatically cycle itself on and off to charge the battery overnight. So you can spend just this tiny amount of fuel and keep the air conditioning on all night, which can be very comfortable.

So I read about this online and I said, "Wow, how cool would that be?" So I decided to test it, and I did it. I did it for two weeks, and it was so fun. It was really fun. And what wound up happening is that I did a two-week road trip of over 3,000 miles, and I think I spent like $500 or $600 on this trip.

Now, this was business--associated business trips. And I came back and I told the story on my show, and the guy said, "You got an honorary dirtbag degree." But I recognized and I said, "Who thinks of doing that?" I wouldn't have had the idea of trying that if I hadn't read about the lady online.

But if I were going back--and I wouldn't do this with my family because, I mean, we couldn't fit in a Prius. That would not work for us based upon our current comfort level. But if I were single again, if I were in the situation where I were doing single travel, man, I'd go off and I'd take six months and I'd make $6,000, and I'd have a six-week stretch for six months or a year just traveling around the U.S.

by switching and adjusting something. So you've really got to look and say, "What's important to me?" So affirm what you want to do and then make the money fit. The Prius doesn't go if it doesn't have gas in it, so I've got to have the gas in it. But I can really adjust what my vision is, and I can always find a way to do something different and do something better.

Love it. That is a crazy experiment. I'm sure it was quite--I mean, where did you park the car? Just anywhere? A parking garage? Well, yeah, so I did--it was two different things, and it would have been pretty easy-- it's pretty easy to park a car in many places and stay in the car.

But the big trick was that I was in downtown New Orleans for a financial conference. And when you're in the downtown of a big city, it's a lot harder. So I actually, for that, I parked in the casino parking garage. And to avoid the--I wanted to--it's funny, because we have such this social construct around what's appropriate and what's inappropriate, and socially this is completely inappropriate.

So I'm constantly giving all these disclaimers to kind of still try to remain socially acceptable about it. But you could still justify it because it was an experiment. Right, exactly. That's how I have to do it to be socially acceptable, so it was an experiment, and it was. But so what I did was I parked at a casino parking garage.

And instead--to avoid basically the $35, $30 to $40 a day daily parking fees, the casino had a deal where if I played slots for 30 minutes, then 30 minutes a day, then I could avoid the cost. So I played penny slots, listened to podcasts, played penny slots, spent a buck or two over the course of an hour, and was able to get free parking in the casino parking garage overnight.

So that was the toughest thing, but I figured out a way to do it. And then when I was in the other place, I drove up to Pennsylvania, that was easy because there's always neat, quiet, shady places to park. And I had planned to camp out of it and stay at a campground or something like that as well, but that just didn't work out.

Right. Wow, that's great. Good for you. Congratulations. That's pretty cool. So that's one more thing where it just broadens your mind to what's actually possible. Right. And what it does is it makes you comfortable. And I don't know who--I'm sure there--I think the first place that I became aware of it is there's a philosophy that's currently commonly known as kind of the stoic philosophy.

And I first saw this popularized years ago when I read Tim Ferriss' book called "The Four-Hour Workweek." And he talks in that book about practicing being uncomfortable. Because the way he expressed it in the book made a big deal for me. And the stoics had a philosophy of saying, "Yes, you may be wealthy, but every now and then practice living as though you're not." And what happens--so I've tried to do that, is I've tried to say, "What would I do and how would I live a great life if I suddenly--everything I had was taken away from me?" And there could be many reasons why that can happen, but I only get one life.

So, the external circumstances--the key is if I'm resilient and I can be happy no matter the external circumstances, then I'm more willing to take the risks and the jumps that I may need to do because I'm okay with the downside. And so, practicing being poor--practicing being broke, I guess I should say, 'cause a lot of people like to differentiate between those two things--practicing being broke and going through it either in reality or in just a mental exercise is really valuable.

So, my wife and I sometimes do this and say, "Well, how can we have an awesome date and not spend a dime?" Or, "How can we have an awesome date?" One time for Valentine's Day, I didn't have a lot of money and this was before we were married. I didn't have a lot of money and I said--we went on a Valentine's Day date.

And I said, "Let's figure out how we can have an awesome Valentine's Day date for--I think it was $10 or $20. I don't remember exactly. But we figured out a way. I went and borrowed a couple of bicycles from a friend of mine. I borrowed his pickup truck to toss them in.

We went to the store and as part of the Valentine's Day date, I said, "Here's the deal." I said, "We've got $10 or $20," whichever the budget was. I said, "We've got to create a meal off of this $10 or $20 for our Valentine's Day meal." So, we went around and we figured out a cool picnic plan that would allow us to do that.

Well, that added to the fun of it. So, a lot of people are horrified by that and say, "Well, you've got to have a great Valentine's Day date. You've got to go out and spend $1,000 at a fancy restaurant." No, you don't. The key is you've got to have a great experience.

And then the last thing, and I'll shut up on this theme, but I remember significantly-- and I don't remember what book it was that I read it in-- but I remember somebody had gone to an event with Ross Perot, who is a Texas billionaire, Ross Perot. And they were talking about wealth.

And the anecdote that they shared is the person knew they were going to be talking with him and asked him a few questions. And they said, "Ross, are you happy?" And he said, "Yes, I am happy. I'm very happy. But I'm no happier than what I was when I was in the military and my wife and I were living in on-base housing in the military." He said, "I was happy then and I'm happy now." Because being wealthy brings with it a whole set of challenges that not being wealthy doesn't.

So the point is that you can be happy no matter the circumstances, but you have to cultivate the skill of being happy no matter the circumstances. You can travel the world in a multi-million dollar overland vehicle and be incredibly happy. And you can be a dirtbag living out of a car and travel the world and be incredibly happy.

So we do have control over how we feel. I love it. I love it. It fits perfectly with family travel. So it goes hand in hand. Okay, one last thing I want to tackle. And if we have time, there's a bonus round. But let's talk about a four-letter word that is just a wall for anybody to start thinking down this road and this path, and that is debt.

Where do people start the process of digging out of debt or changing their mind frame about debt? And with your experience as a financial planner, what's the first steps people take to get past that mountain? Good question. So I would say the first thing is to not place -- so I'm going to reverse the question sometimes, just first, and then flip it back.

Is that sometimes people perceive debt to be a bigger problem than what it actually is. So debt is not necessarily always a massive problem. There can be many reasons for debt. And that's one of the keys that you have to look at that's not commonly talked about. But there can be many reasons for debt.

And you've kind of got to dig in and say, what are the actual reasons here? And why do I need to get out of debt? I would like to start, however, with saying -- with the reason why. And years ago -- I used to be a big Dave Ramsey fan who was like the biggest anti-debt guru possible.

But I heard years ago in a class he taught, he went through a scenario where he was talking about people's ability to save money. And the example that he used -- and I've used this so many times with clients, and it's been so helpful. And I try to always give him credit because he came up with it best I know.

But he said -- he would ask people, he'd say, you know, this year, could you save $15,000 this year? And the key is to always do it in a level that's appropriate for the person. That's a stretch where they wouldn't necessarily be able to do it easily. And he would say, could you save $15,000 this year?

And they would say no. Then he'd say, well, let me paint a scenario. Let's pretend that you just found out that your son or daughter was diagnosed with this incredibly horrible disease. And one year from today, they will die a horrible, excruciating debt. But the good news is that a cure and a vaccine has been created for them.

And this vaccine is guaranteed to work 100%. But the problem is it costs a ton of money. And your health insurance won't pay for it, and you can't borrow money for it. So how do I come up with $15,000 one year from today to save your son or daughter's life?

Question. Could you do it? And every single time I've asked a client that question, they've always said, of course I could. And what it illustrates is that debt is not a money thing. It's a -- excuse me, financial goals is not a money thing. It's very much a mindset thing.

And that's not airy-fairy. That's real. Because what it does is just like my earlier quote from Tony Robbins, which is ask a better question, it changes your mindset. And if you had to come up with $15,000 a year from now, you would come up with it some way or the other.

Now, you may rob a bank. We have movies about that. I wouldn't recommend that. But you would do it, right? We've all enjoyed movies where, you know, to save the person's son, they go rob a bank. The key -- most people don't go to robbing a bank. I throw it in for just kind of a joke.

Most of us say, I'd get another job. I'd work two jobs. Okay. Well, you could do that now. And the key about debt is it's very much a mindset and a motivation thing and a kind of an adjustment of the set point of what's normal for you instead of just simply what's the tool or the tactic or the practical thing.

I think there's a lot of value in being extreme sometimes. Now, depending on the personality, some personality types are attracted to being extreme and some people aren't. But I give people various exercises, and this is where it's tough to give generalized advice. So I'm going to give a few different options, and I'll let the listener decide what helps them.

But sometimes if you set an outlandish goal, it will completely change your thinking, and you'll be able to do something outlandish. A good example that I would give is there's a great blog. I think it's called nomoreharvarddebt.com. And the writer of that blog was a young man in his 20s, and he had gone and gotten an MBA from Harvard.

And he set himself a goal. I don't remember if it was one year or two years. I think it was one year to pay off all of his debt from his MBA degree. And the problem was is that he owed more money than was his salary. So he was making maybe something like $75,000 a year, and he owed $90,000 on his debt.

But he said, "I want to get this thing paid off in one year." And he then said about it. And you can read his journey on his blog, a lot of fits and starts. But basically he did a bunch of things. He cut his expenses to the bone in ways that he thought he never would be willing to do because he was kind of a high-living guy, and he enjoyed a high lifestyle.

He started taking--I mean he was a partier. He started doing the most socially awkward thing he could think of, which was taking a flask with him out to the clubs instead of buying drinks at the clubs because he was on a diet--excuse me, on a debt plan. He sold an extra fancy car.

He sold a motorcycle. He sold a bicycle. He sold everything he could find around the house. He worked like crazy at his job, and he got a really big promotion. On the weekends, he started working a landscaping job. He tried a couple of different things like being a bike taxi messenger, and then he had a couple of windfalls that happened for him that just kind of came out of the blue.

And it was something like, if my memory is right, eight months later that he was able to completely get his debt paid off, and he beat the year. So he had no idea how he was going to do it, but the commitment to doing it allowed him to do it.

And it's an amazing story, and you can read him kind of write his story through it, and it fundamentally changed him. And even I experienced this in my life. When I was in college, I went to college, and I'm the youngest of seven kids, and the deal that my dad always had with us was, "Listen, if you want to go to college, that'd be great, and I'll support you in that, but I'm not paying for it.

So you better study hard and get good grades and get scholarships if you want to go to college." So I put my way through college, and the first year I worked my way through because I didn't want to borrow money. So I worked about three different jobs, part-time jobs, and I worked my way through.

My sophomore year, I decided I was working too hard, and I just wasn't enjoying life, so I decided to pull back and party. So I started taking out student loans. I didn't work. I cut my course load back, and I kind of had a lot of fun, but I didn't get very good grades.

My junior year, I studied abroad, came back from studying abroad and was completely conflicted and said, "What am I doing?" Then I read Dave Ramsey's book, Total Money Makeover, a couple of times, and it really radically changed my mind, and I said, "Wow, I want to get out of debt." And so I set a goal for myself of getting out of debt before I graduated college, and I didn't know how to do it.

But what wound up happening is I wound up switching around a couple different jobs, but I had a job that I was working. The job allowed me to – I went and asked them. I said, "Listen, I want to go back and finish my degree. Can I figure out a flexible schedule?" And I was able to – they said, "Sure." So my entire senior year, I went and took summer classes, then fall, then spring, so I could graduate on time with a four-year degree.

And I worked 40 hours a week. I took 19 hours of class my senior year, and I saved like crazy. I paid cash for my senior year of college. I went on a trip. I spent a few extra thousand bucks to go on a trip for one of the classes to the Czech Republic.

And then I – two weeks before I graduated, I saved my money. I paid off some credit card debt I had accumulated. Two weeks before I graduated, I wrote a check to Sally Mae, and I paid off all of my student loans, and I graduated from college completely debt-free.

And that experience of just opening up what was possible really affected my thinking. And I've come to say if you have enough motivation and enough of a burning desire, whether that's to save 15,000 bucks to save the life of your kid, or whether that is to save 15,000 bucks to go and travel to south – around Central and South America for a year, if you have a burning desire, you can and you will figure out a way to do it.

If you've got a – and I think this is a useful way to check in on your goals to see if it's something that is really, really valuable or not. As far as it's something I'm really committed to or not, to see am I actually doing what I want to do.

If not, go back and amp up the desire, and then the plan will present itself. So that's kind of the big picture idea. That wasn't very tactical. I'd be happy to go into a couple of tactics if you want. But that's – but I think if you have enough of a desire, you can figure out the tactics on your own.

If you just have tactics, then there's just some tactics that sit there, and because of the lack of desire, everyone knows what they should do, but they don't ever do it. Okay, we're going to cut it off right there and finish the rest next week. And I've got to tell you, there is some awesome information that Joshua gets into, more of the practical stuff, how to set up a budget, how to grab a hold of your finances and start laying the groundwork for preparing for this kind of adventure.

Great stuff. Absolutely fantastic. Thank you again, Joshua, for coming on the show. And I look forward to wrapping it up next week. So also, folks, if you like what you're hearing, we would really love it if you would go to iTunes and give us a rating and a review.

It really helps us get higher in the iTunes ranks and get seen by more people, and, of course, that's what we want to inspire more people. So we would love it if you would – if you like what you're hearing, please take some time, take a couple minutes, go over there to iTunes, leave us a rating or a review.

We'd love it. And, of course, pass it on to your friends. We'd love to hear more new listeners join the show, and so that would be a big help as well. So thanks again for listening this week, and we will talk to you next week. Cheers. Thank you for listening to A Vet Family's Adventure Podcast.

Do big things with your family and see you next week. 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.