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It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Next week, I am starting a live webinar series, and I want to tell you a little bit about what I'm going to do and invite you to join me for that series.

But before I do, I want to begin with a story. About an hour ago, I received this email from a listener. The writer writes in and says, "Hey Joshua, just wanted to say thank you for all you've published in preparedness over the last years. It got me interested in taking care of my family and having a plan for emergency situations.

That has come in handy since, in the last week, the city I live in has had confirmed cases of the coronavirus and has shut down the roads into the city, greatly disrupting food supplies. Further, they've recommended everyone stay indoors for two weeks. Thanks to you, I have stored up 40 liters of bottled water, two independent water filtration systems, 100 pounds of rice, 30 pounds of flour, 15 pounds of sugar, 5 pounds of salt, 30 liters of oil, a bunch of canned foods, peanut butter, jelly, etc.

I actually had just started prepping. A goal this year is to build up a three-month supply, so those reserves are insufficient in a variety of ways I need to fix. But I'm thankful that, due to your teaching, I had already started prepping, and so now, in a very unexpected situation, I have no worries whatsoever that my family will be fine, even if the two-week suggested self-isolation turns into a month-long quarantine.

So, thank you. You might have literally saved my family's life. Thanks again. Well, I don't know if I've saved your family's life, but certainly it is possible. I guess I would just say that you've... It is possible that you've saved your family's life, and I hope that I've just been an inspiration to that.

But I thought this email was, of course, deeply encouraging to me and so timely, because this is the kind of thing that I take great satisfaction... This is the kind of change that I take great satisfaction of having been able to catalyze, to help people just think ahead and recognize that, if I do this action, if I take this action, then I can have a certain result.

And it's so superior to be in a situation like that versus constantly being behind and constantly being stuck with everything that you're doing. Now, about saving somebody's life. Would this listener and his family have starved if they had to stay in their apartment for two weeks? Nah, of course not.

You're not going to starve for two weeks. It's probably good for you to have an extended fast. But you might be pretty miserable. And depending on your personal situation, there might be varying levels of misery. If you're a single man in a little apartment and you've got a good supply of books laid in, or you've got an internet connection, you've got important work to do, and you just can't eat for two weeks, your stomach will growl.

But after about the third day, the hunger pains go away and you don't have to worry so much about that. You're basically just going to be bored with not being able to eat. And you can focus on your work. But I've got four small children. If I'm locked in a little apartment in Asia with my four little children and we can't go out, we just got one little balcony that we can go out and look out and maybe speak encouraging things to our neighbors across the way, we're going to go a little crazy.

First, of course, there's the natural cabin fever. But if I didn't have food for my children, they're going to get hungry and children don't process hunger the same way that adults do. It's pretty devastating. One of the most devastating positions you can be in as a parent is to have hungry children who are whining and complaining simply because they don't really know how to do anything else.

They're hungry, their bodies hurt, and not be able to do that. It's devastating. I mean, my compassion levels of people who are starving increased so massively once I became a parent and started to experience it. It's one of the worst feelings in the world to not be able to provide for your children.

Similarly, if I don't have entertainment and I've got four small children running around just acting like crazy hooligans, I mean, whether we're alive or not, I'm sure my wife and I are going to at least consider strangling one or two of them to appease the others, but it'd be crazy to be in that situation and not be prepared.

And so a lot of times the difference between surviving barely and really thriving during an emergency is prior preparation. Human beings are pretty stinking resilient. They really know how to survive a lot of things. A lot of things that are often just simply ignored by others. People die. People are going to die today.

Fathers of families are going to die today. And when they die today, they're going to die without any life insurance. And as they die without life insurance, they're going to be in a situation, people figure it out when they have to. Today, people are going to get disabled, never be able to work again the rest of their life.

They and their families will figure it out. They'll figure it out. Because when you have to figure things out, you wind up figuring them out no matter what. People are resilient. They know what they have to do. Difficult circumstances and trials have a way sometimes of bringing out the best in people.

And you're a smart person. You're listening to a financial podcast. You would probably survive in that situation. It might not be uncomfortable, but you would probably survive. Now there is, however, the interesting other way of looking at it though, because what often happens is when people are in a situation, they make one small thing that could have been avoided, but often leads to death.

So in this situation, if you're prepared and you know that I don't have to rush out and buy supplies the last moment, you can minimize your contact with other people who might be contagious. That could be the thing that keeps you from getting sick. You don't know. And how could you ever prove that?

But if a lot of people around you are contagious and you're going out, rushing out trying to figure out how to buy supplies the last minute, that could be the thing that causes you to become sick. And maybe you then sicken the rest of your family and somebody in your family winds up dying because of it.

Well, if you can just simply stay at home and avoid that circumstance entirely, you have a much better probability for survival because you're minimizing your contact with other people. Similarly, you might avoid problems such as a riot or other things. Just simply avoiding those situations that often wind up being dangerous is one of the best ways to increase your survivability in life.

So you don't know, but if you have the ability to stay at home and relax and not rush out last minute to try to go get supplies, you may minimize the risk of you and your family becoming sick, which could actually save your life. That's one of the reasons why it's so important to prepare.

So prepare in advance for anything. Prepare in advance so that you can have a very different experience of a catastrophe. Catastrophes are hard enough when you're prepared, but when you are unprepared, they become that much harder. And if you care about yourself, you care about your family, you don't want to see them go through any greater difficulty than is absolutely necessary.

And it certainly is not fun to know, "I could have done something else, but I didn't." That's a really bad feeling. Regret? Regret stinks. If you've done all you can and the situation is more than you can handle, fine. You did all you can and you just figure it out when you're in the middle of it.

But if you know that you ignored, you were ignorant, you were ignorant, you ignored the things that you could do just because you were lazy or some other reason, that's a hard situation to be in. So I want to tell you a little bit more now about what I'm doing.

When I recorded yesterday's show, I didn't have a lot of details because I just decided to do it the day before. I just topped up a quick registration page and had many of you already sign up for that. So thank you. More details coming out right now. So number one, what am I doing?

I'm recording a live webinar series on how to prepare for disasters. Practical preparedness, practical prepping. As far as the exact scope of that, I'm not sure. I'm guessing it's going to be four to five webinars based upon the outline, the amount of things that I could talk about. I think that's appropriate.

But I'll be recording it and producing it as a live webinar series. I'll also be doing it and using your input as a way of shaping that series, both with a number of surveys in advance of specifically the topics that you're most interested in and also even a live Q&A.

The biggest challenge that I face as a digital teacher is greatly delayed feedback from a classroom. It's actually the same thing with public speaking. I've done a fair amount of public speaking in my life. Public speaking is challenging for a lot of people. But podcasting or creating videos or something like that is far more challenging than public speaking.

Because in public speaking, you can read the response of your audience. What happens is as you become more confident and more skilled as a speaker, you'll attune yourself to the needs of your audience. If you speak too long about something or you're starting to speak in a boring way, you notice your audience drifting and you cut that short or you move on to the next thing and you respond or you interrupt the flow, you tell a joke or you tell a story or you do something that's going to re-engage the attention of your audience and you have that immediate feedback.

So you can tell if you're speaking in a boring way. You can tell if something that you said was offensive or you've said something that was offensive and you can immediately clarify a point based upon the shocked look in your audience's eyes. Say, "No, no. What I meant was this." And you simply clarify your point.

So in my experience, as difficult as public speaking can be, it's easier than doing something like podcasting. When you podcast, you give a speech but you don't get any immediate feedback. So you can listen to what you're saying through the ears of your imagined listener but you don't actually know how it's being received.

You don't actually know when you're lingering too long on a point. You don't actually know when you've said something that was confusing. You don't actually know when you've said something that was boring because you don't know when people are tuning out. You don't actually know when you've said something offensive that you would like to clarify but you don't know until days later when all of a sudden you get a rash of emails and then you go ahead and clarify those points.

It's one thing that makes it extremely challenging. Well, the same thing really comes in when it comes to teaching. And so I've recorded and released a number of courses. And I've done it both ways. I've recorded them live and then delivered them live and I've also recorded them pre-recorded and just simply delivered them in pre-recorded sessions and then followed it up with Q&A.

And one of the big challenges is simply knowing, am I hitting the mark? Am I communicating things that are practical that are useful? Is it too much information? Is it too little information? And so I really like the format or the idea of the format of recording things in a live Q&A session.

Sorry, a live webinar format. I haven't been able to do that over the last few years because I haven't been in a stable location with a stable internet signal, etc. to be able to do that in the way that needs to be done. But I now have that. I have backups.

I keep two internet networks in my house. So the idea of having backup supplies and everything, I can't run the risk of my business being down. And so I have multiple internet networks. I guess a third backup would be if I count the idea of tethering to a phone.

So in theory, I've got three levels of backups. I've got an emergency generator in case I lose power. So I do everything I can to try to make sure that everything goes off without a hitch because it's important. So the point is, live webinar series will allow me to teach to a live audience and then to make sure that I'm answering the best questions.

I love doing Q&A. Q&A shows are my favorite question and answer shows. They're my favorite shows to create because you can make sure that you're giving something really useful. So what am I going to give to you in this live webinar series? I'm going to give you a comprehensive, basically Joshua's comprehensive course on practical preparedness.

How to be prepared in case the financial systems fall apart. I believe and I have repeatedly emphasized that frankly money is one of your best preparations. As long as everything is working simply in the economic systems, money is almost always your best preparation. And financial instruments are almost always your best preparation.

But when something goes wacky in the markets, when all of a sudden there's a fear about a new flu virus and then the stores are emptied out of respirator masks and you can't find bleach on the shelves anywhere, which I would guess right now is probably going to be the case, if not already in many parts of the world.

It depends on what happens with the virus in the coming days as information emerges. Hopefully it's nothing and it was all a bunch of concern over nothing. But if it actually turns into something significant, you won't be able to find bleach, you won't be able to find nitrile gloves, you won't be able to find respirator masks, you won't be able to find any of that stuff because it's quickly taken up.

And one of the biggest dangers in the modern world is supply chain management. With the just-in-time inventory system, which leads to very profitable companies and a really good system, for most situation it collapses during times of panic and times of hoarding where people rush out and buy everything. And I think we all do it.

I went to the store yesterday and I bought a bunch more masks. Did I need them? Define need. Did I have some? Yeah. But if I can see that there are a couple dozen on the shelf there and I can just go ahead and buy them, and the worst case scenario is I've wasted $20, but the best case scenario is I've got masks for me and all my family members to wear that keeps us from being infected by a flu virus, that seems like a pretty decent use of $20.

But what does that do? That wipes out things for the next guy. Next guy comes along and sees that all of a sudden all of the N95 masks are gone from the shelf and now he starts to worry. And so he goes to the next store over and says, "Oh, they have some." And so he grabs them.

And the panic just builds and builds and builds. It's a contagion of sorts, a contagion of emotion, a contagion of panic that happens when all of a sudden you start making excessive purchases and the supply chain, the supply chains don't respond very well to that. They especially don't respond well if you're dealing with a very widespread scenario.

So here's where a regional event is much safer. So let's use Florida and a hurricane. Hurricane starts coming towards Florida. It could be Carolinas, anywhere. Same thing happens all the time. Hurricane starts coming towards Florida. Everyone says, "I need to go out and get bottled water." And so people rush out and get bottled water.

And then the stores start to be emptied of bottled water. But quickly, the supply chain management systems, they start to react. And so Costco will put trucks that are entirely devoted to bottled water and they'll start shipping trucks in from Georgia, from Alabama, from Mississippi. And they'll send basically all the bottled water in the country to Florida.

And so the shortage is more and more only temporary. All the big stores, the big grocery stores in Texas and in Florida and in the Carolinas, et cetera, they know how to respond when there are hurricane warnings issued. They go into protocols and they've gotten much better over the last 10 years, just like cell phone systems have gotten much better over the last decade.

I'm sure the same thing happens in the winter storm areas where they respond to the need and they can react to it. But the key thing is, where are those supplies coming from? Usually what they'll do is they'll divert the supplies from another state that's not being threatened. Well, one of the major dangers of something like a flu pandemic, why it can be so severe is it's probably not contained to a region.

If you truly had a big scale pandemic, it can become quickly a national and international thing. And so right now, people who are going out and buying up respirator masks, N95 and greater respirator masks right now, they're doing it regardless of location. And so Home Depots are being wiped out, Amazon being sold out.

And there's not a place to quickly get the resupply from. It can come quickly from the factories or the warehouses if they are there, but it can't be sent on a regional basis. And so if something like this coronavirus emerges even stronger, then it drives the panic and the resupply is not available.

So all the materials, the gloves, the masks, the bleach, those kinds of things start to get wiped out. Very, very severe. Sorry, I shouldn't say very severe. Has the potential to be very, very severe if the sickness turns into something very, very significant. So of course, we don't know.

I'm just using it as an example to say, think about this and prepare. So back to what I'll be teaching you. Practical preparedness is what works when the financial system breaks down. If you have money, you can go and buy the things that you need. But if the economic system is breaking down due to problems with supply and demand or due to problems with economic issues, then all of a sudden now that's where practical preparedness comes in.

Doesn't matter how much money you have if there simply isn't bottled water or respirator masks available. And so the only way to be prepared for that is to in advance have stockpiles of those things so that you're not caught flat-footed during the time of the emergency. The only way to be prepared in advance is to have supplies of food and to have supplies of water and have supplies of a water filter and to have gasoline, etc.

for your generator, things like that, so that when the supply chain itself gets disrupted, that you're not personally disrupted. The next thing that I'll talk about in the series is, as I go through practical preparations, is I will adjust everything for impact. One of the most important things to consider when you're making decisions is what's going to impact my life the most?

What's going to make the biggest difference? Because an 80/20 Pareto analysis can be applied to almost anything. With food, with energy, with almost anything, where am I going to get the most bang for my buck? One of the real challenges with prepping is you have to think about it in terms of stages.

Otherwise, you will go crazy. You have to think about it in terms of stages. You could spend today, if you decided, "I want to be a well-prepared prepper," you could go out and you could spend $100,000 today and still not feel well-prepared if you give in to an extreme form of preparedness.

I'm not exaggerating with that number. You could do it and still not feel well-prepared because you can come up with scenarios that are so extreme and you can just say, "Wow, everything would fall apart," and you can make buying lists and gear lists and skills lists and action lists that are so extensive that it's almost impossible to do them.

But realistically speaking, that's probably not necessary. Only a tiny percentage of people would ever go into some kind of extreme scenario like that. What you want to focus on is you want to focus on where am I going to get the most results? What 20% of actions or items or supplies are going to give me 80% of the results, the protection?

Those things exist. I want to teach you how to think about it first so that you can make good decisions. In addition, you have to think about cost and you have to practically consider where am I going to get the most benefit for the money that I spend? You may have or intend to spend a lot of money in the fullness of time, but you still want to be thoughtful in how you approach it.

I still like buying white flour and oil and sugar and salt and peanut butter and jelly because it's insanely cheap and yet gives you massive amounts of calories. It's easy to provide and it fits the needs. If you eat rice and beans, rice and beans. There's a reason why these are time-tested staples.

Now, you can also get a lot of bang for your buck with something like buying wheat and actual wheat itself, but then there's a whole other set of costs associated with it. For example, you have to have a wheat grinder. Well, a good wheat grinder is several hundred dollars.

Really, that's a substantial commitment to your prepping versus a couple hundred dollars. I'd rather if you're getting started, you go out and buy 30 pounds or 50 pounds or 100 pounds of white flour and just throw it away in three or four or five years and do it again than buy a bunch of wheat and not take the step of buying a wheat grinder.

Things like that exist all throughout preparedness. You've got to think carefully about the budget and you've got to do those things that are going to give you a lot of return for your dollars invested. In addition, you have to think about things like your practical situation. It's very different if you are a college student living in a college dorm versus if you are a very stable adult living out on a family farm.

You've got a world of different things that you can do in either one of those situations, but there's a lot of stuff that a college student can do or an inner city dweller, somebody living in a small studio apartment in the middle of the city. There's a lot of things that you can do that really will pay off big time for you in your preparation if you plan and think in advance.

You've got to adjust everything to the size of your scale. These are some of the areas where I have some real unique insight and some lessons to share with you because I've gone from living in a tiny studio apartment, figuring out how to be prepared there. I've gone on to owning a big house, then downsizing to an apartment, then downsizing to a bunch of suitcases and now I live in a large house again.

When you're going through those kinds of changes, what happens is a lot of times people who are into preparedness get so fixated on stuff, they actually become a slave to their stuff. They got so much stuff they can't be nimble. Here's where I think I have some unique ideas to offer of how you can be nimble and get results that are pretty good and some preparedness, but without having to commit yourself to a 50-acre farm in the middle of nowhere.

I'd love to have a 50-acre farm in the middle of nowhere with barns full of stuff. I probably would, but I'm not there and I'm not willing to go there at this point in my life. If I were convinced that World War III was going to kick off next week, would I do that?

Maybe, but I'm not convinced World War III is going to kick off next week. There's a lot more practicality to be concerned with. What's the size of property that you have and the size and amount of storage that you have? You can prepare effectively on any budget. You can prepare effectively on any size of property.

You can prepare effectively in any of these circumstances if you will think and be strategic. The most important thing for you to develop is knowledge and skills, because with knowledge and skills you can do well with stuff and without stuff. But without knowledge and skills, the stuff isn't really going to be as useful.

I believe that I have something unique to offer to help you triage all the different decisions that you could make and help you make good decisions. The concern that a lot of people who teach prepping have is that people see something that scares them. It could be the coronavirus.

It could be the idea of an economic collapse, hyperinflation. It could be the idea of nuclear war. But people see something that scares them and all of a sudden they go hardcore, but they don't have an intelligent plan. So they buy pallets of food for Y2K that they just wind up sitting around cluttering up their life and finally get disgusted a few years later and throw it all away.

They feel stupid because they wasted $20,000 on pallets of food and nothing bad happened. Or they ran out and they spent $1,000 on medical supplies and then the coronavirus didn't turn out to be anything. And there are a lot of people who, because of this preparation, have this weird fixation on almost hoping things happen.

Now I think I'm not immune to that. I think most people who do something do hope at some point. You don't want to admit it, but you probably hope that you're vindicated in all of your planning and your preparation. But any thoughtful person of course realizes that's silly. Well, one of the ways that you avoid that problem of hoping that everything goes wrong is just by simply doing stuff sensibly and thoughtfully and carefully.

So that's what you can expect if you sign up for my live webinar classes. So I want to just give you a special invitation. We're kicking it off on Monday, February 3. I'm surveying the students today to see what's the best time of day, whether you want an evening class, you want a daytime class.

My guess it'll be an evening class during Eastern time zone. But I will survey the students and go with whatever is the most popular. So if you would like to sign up, I would encourage you to do that. Go to radicalpreparedness.com. And that will forward you through to the purchase page.

You can sign up for my live webinar series, 29 bucks. Deal of a lifetime. I'm doing an experiment with this, offering a low-priced course. I generally don't like to do a lot of low-priced stuff because it often just doesn't feel as motivating to me as doing something higher priced.

But I'm doing it as an experiment. So if 10,000 of you sign up for that, then maybe I'll do more low-priced stuff. But I'd love for you to join me. Go to radicalpreparedness.com and sign up today. Radicalpreparedness.com. Thank you. With Kroger brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season because Kroger brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.

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