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♪ Got to sort of tell 'em ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. ♪ Radical Personal Finance, episode 33. Today's show, what can we learn from dumpster divers, freegans, vagabonds, and hobos? ♪ Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast for today, Friday, August the 1st, 2014.

I'm thrilled you're here with us. I'm your host, Joshua Sheets, and today's show is going to be properly radical. I hope, a show befitting the name of the podcast. We're going to talk about living life for free. Stay with us. ♪ Now, when I originally started the show, I was sitting down and writing out a description of what the show was going to be about.

And it's the kind of thing you have to do that before you submit your podcast to iTunes. And I was just sitting down, and I was trying to figure out, what is the stuff that I enjoy? And I put in the podcast, we're going to explore everything from the financial strategies of the bums and the homeless people, everything up to the financial strategies of the multi-billionaires.

And I kind of just put it in there jokingly, knowing that I'm actually interested in those types of extremes. From a personal perspective. And I kind of put it in there jokingly, and then I realized, no, that's actually a serious thing. We really are going to do that. I am as equally interested in Mitt Romney's $100 million trust, which, by the way, I promise we'll go through that someday.

That was all the big deal in the last presidential election cycle. And the man either is brilliant or had some brilliant financial advisors. And I'll talk about how he set that $100 million IRA and his trusts up. He set up a defective grantor trust for his kids. And we'll talk about that at some point in time, because I think those are useful lessons which you can take and apply to your own financial planning life.

And then today we're going to talk about the financial strategies of homeless bums. And I love this stuff. This is what I love talking about. This is why I'm creating the show as a creative outlet for myself. And I really do believe in learning from all of these sources.

Maybe that surprises you about why is the Mr. CFP going to talk about the financial strategies of bums, but I just think this is so valuable. And one of the freeing things about doing a podcast versus working as a financial advisor in the past is when you're working as a financial advisor, you have to sit face to face looking at somebody.

And that means that you have to fit into their cultural stereotypes in some ways as far as what's acceptable. So if I were sitting and talking with a client who is broke and trying to figure out how to not be broke anymore, if I were to say, you know, I'm sitting in my office with a suit and tie, if I were to sit there and say, "Have you thought about dumpster diving?" then that pretty much violates all cultural norms and all culturally appropriate points of conversation.

So I couldn't really do that. I have to talk about other things. And I would do it if I could sense that the person were receptive. It's just that generally people aren't receptive to that type of far out crazy, crazy thing. But for me to do a podcast is very freeing because I can sit here and I can talk about all my wacky ideas and it's up to you whether you want to listen or not.

And I really do wish that all of us were a little bit more wacky and a little bit more radical and a little bit more interested just in life. One of my observations about financial planning is just, you know, we need creative solutions. We need creative opportunities. And so today I'm going to talk about some of the creative solutions and things that I've been thinking about recently and that I have been researching.

This show is largely coming just from some recent reading I've been doing. I've been reading a few books recently. There are actually four of them that I just finished in the last -- literally one of mine just finished today. And the books were -- and I'll put links in the show notes -- but the books were The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving, Possum Living, Rough Living, and How to Travel the World for Free.

So you may get the gist from these titles that these are nonconventional strategies. And I was really struck by just some of the information that I read in these books. And so The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving -- I'll probably talk the most about that one because that was the one I spent the most time reading -- but is basically a manifesto for the joys and the benefits of dumpster diving.

Now, I've never gone dumpster diving, but, man, am I motivated to do it now. My wife and I are actually -- we are actually brilliant at finding stuff on the side of the road. And I hope you get my tongue in cheek. We're actually -- we're pretty good at that.

I'm having a little fun. But we're actually really good at finding stuff on the side of the road and rescuing things from trash piles on the side of the road. But I've never actually dived. I've never stuck my head and arms down into a dumpster and stuck my legs in the air diving in a dumpster.

But after reading this book, I'm sure motivated to try. I think it would be so, so interesting, and I'll talk about that. My guess is that it's probably not going to be a good use of time for me to spend time doing that, but I think it's a neat strategy for people.

The book Possum Living is a relatively famous book. I was reminded of it when I was talking with Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme a couple weeks ago, and I just was reminded that I had downloaded it online but I hadn't read it. It's a fairly famous book -- well, I mean, not famous, famous in certain circles.

It was from the late '70s about this daughter and her father who basically tried to figure out how to live with no money and live on about $700 a year back in those days. Rough Living was a book that I was reading, which was basically -- it's called Rough Living, an urban survival manual.

It was fascinating to me because this is written by a guy who is essentially homeless, kind of a vagabond. And then How to Travel the World for Free was actually a brand-new book that I got from the library, which was written by a guy named Michael Wiggy, who is a journalist.

He actually wound up traveling from -- I think it was Berlin. He started in Europe and Germany. I'm pretty sure it was in Berlin, all the way to Antarctica without any money. And he chronicles his adventures in doing that. The title of the -- the subtitle of the book is "One Man, 150 Days, 11 Countries and No Money." And so as I'm reading these books, I just was struck by how many financial planning lessons I can apply to my situation and to my circumstances.

And also I want to share some of them with you all to -- so that you can appreciate them and maybe have some ideas. And the thing -- the overarching theme that I want to start with, the overarching theme of these books that I picked up was just the theme of creativity.

I mean the creativity of these people was amazing. And just the ability to look at the world through a different set of lenses. And this is something that I've always struggled with because I was raised in a fairly middle class, you know, caring, loving family and fairly traditional in many ways, traditional household.

Like I said, I've never gone dumpster diving. But I was just struck by how my own creativity seems to be so limited when I compared it to the creativity of some of the writers of these stories. And I was just struck at how for much of my life I've looked at the world through this very limited lens, this very limited scope of simply saying, "Well, this is the path that you have to do.

You need to work. You need to get a job. You need to work hard at it." Now I've always -- and I've always been -- I've never been stuck in the mental paradigm of, you know, you have to do a job that -- and it's just -- it's impossible to get ahead.

And here's the job you've got to do. You know, my dad worked in the mill, so I've got to go work in the mill. I've never been stuck in that mental paradigm, although I can see how impactful that may be on many people. But I have always been kind of mentally stuck in the paradigm of you need to enhance yourself.

You need to get an education. You need to get a job. You need to have a reasonable living circumstances. You need to save money and need to be a responsible member of society. Now I've branched out of that with entrepreneurship. And I don't come from a family background of entrepreneurship, so most of my love of entrepreneurship has come from learning from other entrepreneurs.

And when I was younger, researching the ways to build wealth, and I became convinced that entrepreneurship was the key. That was the -- almost the universal key. And I remain convinced of that. I remain convinced that entrepreneurship is the surest path to financial freedom for anybody. But, you know, I never -- and when I compare my background to many of my contemporaries' backgrounds, I'm far more of a free thinker and far more of a world -- just an optimistic person based upon some of the things that I've been able to do.

And this is not a -- I'm not saying these things to brag. This is just simply -- I've just seen some of the world through a different lens. So, for example, I've been privileged to travel quite a bit in my lifetime. And my parents traveled quite a bit for various reasons, for work, for living.

They lived abroad for a time. And that affects their -- that has affected their world view. And so then those effects come down to me. But so coming from a family background of people who aren't scared to travel, I was always, you know, worked hard to travel. And I've got to go check the list.

I think -- you know, I've said -- I think I was able to go to about 25 countries by the time I was 25 years old. But I'm not sure. I need to go someday and make that list and see. But it was -- I traveled to at least a couple dozen countries.

Maybe a little bit -- I don't exactly remember. But I was pretty -- I was always blessed to be able to do that. And I viewed that as a real benefit growing up. And I just -- I remember one circumstance specifically that I've referenced of how I got laid off -- I think it was I got laid off from a job.

No, I graduated from college. Anyway, something happened in my life, and I was able to jump on an airplane and go to Columbia. And I found my budget the other day for that trip. And I was reminded of just how affordably I had done that trip. I had -- kind of on a whim.

Again, I can't remember when this was. I think I had graduated from college. I had either graduated from college or I had left a job. And I decided just on a spur of the moment that I wanted to take a trip, and I was just Googling around for cheap airfares.

And I figured out that I could either go to -- from Florida where I lived to either Haiti or to Columbia for a cheap price. And I just decided, well, I'll go to Columbia. And at the time, there were some travel advisories for Haiti, and I didn't wind up going there.

So I actually wound up going to Haiti a couple years ago, and that was pretty cool. But -- so I decided to go to Columbia. And I didn't have much money, but I was able to go to Columbia. I went by myself for a week, and I total -- I found my budget here.

I spent a total of $555.07 all inclusive for a one-week vacation to Columbia, including the plane ticket. And let's see here. The plane ticket was $235. The transportation, buses and taxis in country were $39.14. I spent $87.15 on food and drink. I spent $64.53 on entertainment. I spent $36.47 on hostels and hotels.

I spent $83.32 on gifts and souvenirs, and I spent $9.10 on miscellaneous stuff like paying to go to the bathroom and a shoe shine and an Internet cafe. And I thought, man, that was -- that's pretty good. And I had actually -- had splurged a little on that trip, and I had gotten some -- I had gotten some -- had some really nice expensive lunches.

I had purchased an expensive Harley-Davidson souvenir T-shirt, and I realized I could have had a -- I was looking at my expenses after the trip, and I was recognizing that I could have had a great time on about $400 for the whole week traveling by myself. And that trip was -- I didn't do any special travel hacking.

I didn't have any special mileage points or rewards or anything like that. And -- but those were my actual expenses and -- on the whole trip. And I was struck by that, that, you know, even looking now, $36.47 on lodging. I stayed in some hostels that were about $8 a night, I think, and then I stayed -- my notes say I stayed one night free with a friend, although I must have stayed more than one night.

But I met someone down there, and I wound up staying with them. And so, you know, having a great experience for a week on $555.07, to me, it opened my eyes. And it opened my eyes to how I could just take a quick trip on a spur of the moment if I had time freedom, if I had the time freedom that then I could live on less.

Because the reality is that tickets out of -- I don't know where -- Fort Lauderdale, I think it was. Tickets out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Columbia will vary dramatically depending on the season. And so if I were stuck in a job, working in a job where I didn't have the ability to just jump on an airplane all of a sudden, then it wouldn't really work.

But so that experience was a real neat -- I guess a contributing experience for me that really opened my eyes to what was possible. And this is one of the things that I find so valuable in life, is that if we understand what's possible, then we can figure out -- our eyes are expanded.

You know, we got to start by figuring out what's possible. So these books that I was reading, I was just struck by the creative approaches to life. And let me read an excerpt here as an interesting introduction. And I'm going to read this excerpt here from -- I'm going to read the first couple of pages here from this book called "Rough Living," which I think is a really interesting introduction.

And you just think about this creative approach to life. "The Art of Rough Living." "I am living like a prince. That's what I'm doing at the moment. It's great. Let me tell you what the life of a prince is like. I slept as late as I wanted. I played tennis until late last night with my new friends from tennis class.

It wasn't cold because I'm in the tropics. Hawaii, actually. So anyway, I slept a little late. I slept a little late. I woke up at about 10. After using one of my bathrooms to shave and brush my teeth, I went for a little breakfast. French toast, coffee, and Dutch apple pie.

It's great to be a prince. I took a brief walk through one of the gardens to my main library. I've been studying Japanese and wanted to look up a phrase I hadn't understood. While I was there, I used the Internet to check on the news, stocks, and of course, my horoscope.

I wanted to spend most of the day working on a novel I am writing, but I also wanted to take a drive. So I drove to my other library on the other side of the island. After eating one of my favorite sandwiches for lunch, kimchi and tuna fish, in the garden, and drinking some watermelon nectar, I settled down in the library and began the arduous task of self-editing.

Ouch. Sounds pretty good, right? It is. The thing is, though, I'm no prince. I'm homeless. I'm just pretty good at living. Let me translate. Last night I played tennis in a public park. I paid $25 for six group lessons and in the process made a lot of friends. Plus, if you live in your car, the hardest thing sometimes is figuring out what to do at night.

Tennis is a great option. My racket was $3 at the Salvation Army. After tennis, I drove my car to one of my favorite parking spots. It's another park that allows all-night parking. Lots of scuba divers go there for night dives. I slept on the floor of the van I bought for $175.

That blew me away, buying a van for $175. I was near Waikiki for a couple of reasons. One, my tennis lessons were there, and two, I bought a ticket to Hawaii a while back because it's a great place to be homeless. Another cool thing about Waikiki is Burger King.

Right now they have those free food scratch-off coupons on fry cartons and large drinks. Lots of folks don't even peel them off. That's how I got the free French toast sticks and apple pie. The coffee cost me 87 cents. After breakfast, I walked through the Capital District, the State Library.

I study Japanese in my car and in the parks. Why? Well, it's good to have something productive to do. I choose not to work. It doesn't mean I don't want to learn. I have a library card, so I get to use the internet for free. I drove across the island because I keep my laptop and my novel in a storage unit on this side.

It's cheaper for storage here. That way, if someone breaks into my car, they don't get the laptop. I can't afford to get a new one. I got this one by trading a Volkswagen bus I bought for $100 for it. Not bad, huh? The gardens I stroll through are really public parks, and I make my own lunches.

So what did the life of a prince cost me today, including gas? About $3. It's all in how you look at it. Trust me, there are times that this lifestyle stinks. When I really want to have a shower and don't have one to just jump in, it stinks. When I get sick and want to lie in bed all day, it stinks.

When I meet a beautiful woman that is only interested in the money she thinks I have and I break it to her that I live in my car, it stinks. But most of the time, it's not that bad. The key is really in what you do with your time.

If you are a millionaire or a bum, you're probably going to be pretty miserable if you spend all of your time drinking or drugging. Tennis is fun, whether you have a home or not. Learning is fun. And he goes on, and that's just the first couple of pages to his book.

So I just was struck by the creativity of the lifestyle. And here's somebody--you clearly learn from his book--that he is not unintelligent. He's not stupid. He knows exactly what he's doing, and he's just making a different lifestyle choice. And he's choosing to be a homeless bum, and he's choosing to live off of the waste that he can find at society and really have, in many ways, an admirable lifestyle--a really neat lifestyle--without any money.

Now, I'm not sure that I necessarily want to live that lifestyle, but I think it's pretty awesome that he can live it, and I think there are some ideas that you could use--or that I can use--from his writings that can help us enhance our lifestyles. And I was struck by how, in many ways, he's got a neat--he's got a pretty neat-- I guess he's got a lot of advantages.

Now, one of the interesting things that, right in the front of the book, I'll talk about-- and this is why I'm using this as an example of creative thinking-- is about writing--first of all, here's a homeless guy who's written a book, and he's selling it online, and I assume he's made a little bit of money off of it.

And I actually did some sleuthing and figured out that this is somebody who he's actually gone on, and he runs a whole website, and his website is vagobond.com--V-A-G-O-B-O-N-D.com. And I haven't spent much time on his website yet, but it just seems like a neat source of resources for people.

I'll read his author--and I'll go back to his book in a second-- but I'll read his author profile here from Amazon, which I thought is very interesting. "Vago D'Amitio is an author, father, husband, and editor-in-chief of vagobond.com. In 2000, he jumped ship from a sinking dot-com and decided to reclaim his most valuable commodity--time.

He bought a Volkswagen bus for $100, moved into it, and set out on a journey to show the world that it was possible to live life on your own terms. That journey took him from waking up under icy blankets in the Pacific Northwest to waking up under palm trees in Southeast Asia.

Three years later, his first book, Rough Living--Tips and Tales of a Vagabond, was published. After an anthropology honors degree from the University of Hawaii with undeclared minors in film and surf, he hit the road again in 2008. Since that time, he's lived primarily in Morocco and Turkey, married a Moroccan girl he couch-surfed with, and became a proud father.

He's been to more than 40 countries, founded a successful online travel magazine, and still doesn't have a boss. Life is good." So there's just his little bio from Amazon. I was struck by the creativity. In his book here, listen to this creative approach and the integration of life planning with strategies for substituting skills for the need to spend money.

He talks about what assets that you have. He says, "What do you have to work with?" He says, "Grab a sheet of paper and divide it into three columns. To get what you want from life, you have the three A's--abilities, accumulations, and access. Abilities are what you can do.

Accumulations is your stuff. Access is the most important thing you have in our society, and the ability to get into various places." So he made a list of his abilities, accumulation, and access. Listen to some of the different ideas and the creativity of these ideas for how he can live.

He writes down all the abilities. His abilities--writing, speaking, computers, driving, guiding, kayaking, cooking, hiking, traveling, digging, etc. Accumulation--a 1989 minivan, $4.86, a camp stove, a laptop, books, sleep pad, website, camera, telephone, hibachi, etc. Access--public library, public parks, restrooms, coffee shops, bars, beaches, hotels, dollar movie theaters, internet, friends' houses, streets, etc.

Imagine if any person--that's his list. Imagine if any person who has lost a job or is trying to figure out how to improve their life would sit down and write down, "What are my abilities? What are the accumulated things I have? What access do I have?" I'm going to read one page from his book here.

You get the point, right? Let's go crazy and say I want to have a steak dinner with corn and a big glass of milk. Easy, right? I go to the grocery store, go to the reduced-price meat section--more on this later--pick up a steak, an ear of corn, and a pint of milk.

Then I go to the park, fire up the barbecue using hardwood sticks to get coals--you don't have to get charcoal from the store--and I make my meal. I can almost hear you, though. What if you don't have the $4.86 to get the groceries? It's still easy. You may not get the immediate gratification of a steak dinner, but you can do it.

Look at your list and see what you have to work with. Two quick examples should suffice. Example 1. I go to the library and post on Craigslist that I am offering rides from one part of town to another for $5 round trip. I make sure that it doesn't cost me too much in gas, of course, and wait for my phone to ring.

My phone rings immediately. Hold on one moment. That's an odd bit of synchronicity. I say, "Wait for my phone to ring," and my own phone rings, and I forgot to turn it off. So I wait for my phone to ring. Example 2. I make a sign that says "Historic Walking Tours of Such-and-Such Area." I go to the library, do a little research into some history of wherever I am living, learn a few facts, and I either go to a place where tourists gather--rest area, beach, park, etc.--and share a part of my local scene with a visitor.

I can either get a fee or set a fee or wait for tips. If I choose to wait for tips, it's always a good idea to mention that I am working for free and that I live on my tips. In all three cases, it is me using my abilities, accumulations, and access to get a steak dinner with corn on the cob and a big glass of milk.

I'm tempted to go on, but the fact of the matter is my list is different than your list. Give it a try with your list. How do you get that steak dinner? Three different ways. You want to make sure that you weigh the value of what you seek by the cost of what you desire.

For example, it wouldn't be worth it for me to use $8 in gas to get a $5 meal. Aim for the easiest, most convenient, and most fun way to get where you want to go. Instead of saying, "I apply for a job, go through a lengthy interview process, get hired, work for two weeks, get my first check, cash it, and then go out for my dinner at Sizzler," I went with something more convenient, more fun, and more easy.

So flip your piece of paper over and write down a few things that you want. Leave plenty of room underneath so you can explore different ways to get it. Don't limit yourself to the physical side of things. There are plenty of other things we all want. We all want to be safe.

We want to explore, to search, to assimilate, and to experiment. How can you do some of that with what you have? So what a fascinating introduction to a book, at least to me. And how true. Sit down and look at what are your abilities, what do you have, what assets do you have, and then looking for alternative ways of doing things.

Just the idea of going on Craigslist and saying, "I'll do this for $5," or even better, go to Fiverr.com. If you're not familiar with it, just people go to F-I-V-E-R-R.com, and people go up there and they post what they're willing to do for five bucks, or for a Fiverr.

I think, I don't know if it's a British thing or if it's a U.S. thing. I don't remember. But here's, you know, there's one way, go get a job. Another way is go post on an online job board, "Here's what I'll do for five bucks," or "Here's what I'll do on Craigslist for five bucks." And this creative, alternative way of looking at the world, to me, would show me, just from taking a brief look at this guy, D'Amitio is his last name, just looking at, taking a brief look at his website, it shows me that he's figured out a way to live a life on his terms.

Now, is it always easy? It certainly doesn't sound like it. He talks about, one nice thing, the good thing, he talks about the problems of living in a car, and he talks about the difficult parts of it. He's very, he's not overly romantic about it. It's easy, I think, to, I'm prone to over-romancing things and trying to ignore the details of things.

But he's not overly romantic about it. He talks about the difficult things. But, you know, is it more difficult to figure out what to do in the evening, or is it more difficult to go and spend all day working at a job that you don't like? Now, not everyone is working at a job they don't like, and I think that's fine.

We can still apply these types of creative ideas to our own situation. We don't need to sit around and wait for something to happen. We can go out and make it happen. I want to read another part from this book where he talks about cash, and he talks about how to come up with cash.

And I hope you enjoy this little excerpt. "For most of my life, I've had jobs. I've had lots of jobs. When I was in the fourth grade, I had a paper route. When I was in middle school and high school, my parents paid me for chores. When I was 14, I got my first job at a restaurant.

Since then, I've washed dishes, bussed tables, waited, bartended, cooked, and hosted in dozens of restaurants. I've dug ditches, built houses, painted houses, and cleaned all the stuff money can buy out of people's garages. I've filed papers, run meetings, cold-called, door-knocked, and answered phones. I've been a DJ and done craft services on a movie set.

I've been a stand-in, a radio producer, a band manager, and an air traffic controller. I've managed buildings, served as a marine, and shoveled manure. I've tried to find my calling in so many different career paths that I've nearly run out of choices. The problem with all of them is that I like my time.

I was born with all of it, and I don't see why I should give it to someone else unless it's really what I want to be doing. I've found jobs that were based around things I like doing, things like skiing, kayaking, and hanging out in bars. The problem is that if somebody is paying me, my time quits being mine and becomes his or hers.

Employment is slavery. As soon as someone starts paying me for my time, I realize how much it's worth to me. And the problem is, my time is worth a lot more than $60,000 a year, let alone $6.50 an hour. Don't get me wrong, I've had "good" jobs, jobs where I was treated right, the pay was decent, and the "benefits" were comprehensive.

I just knew that my time belonged to someone else. Since I don't know when I will die, that was still unacceptable. I've never had a wage-slave mentality. I refuse to get a minimum wage job at Walmart. I'd rather eat cat food from dumpsters. The guys at the top aren't working.

They just encourage us to fill our garages and our stomachs with things we never would have thought of were it not for their nonstop television, radio, and print campaigns. The advertising companies work for the factories that churn out more and more useless "necessities" every day. They encourage us to consume, consume, and spend, spend, spend.

The bottom line is you gotta do what you gotta do to get the money to survive. I've broken up concrete driveways for Irish gypsies in England, moved tons of rocks in Hawaii, and taught conversational English to schoolchildren in Indonesia. Working while you're on the road is generally more fun than having a real job because you know that you are going to be leaving.

If having a career works for you, more power to you. But so far, it hasn't worked for me. Here is some of what I've used to get by. So he goes in and talks about some of the different tools and the different ways that he has made the income that he needed to make.

Then I have one other section from his book that I'm going to read about. It's about a page and a half. And this is one of the things that to me is also interesting about creativity. Now, you can decide for yourself on the ethics of this. I'm not a fan of it.

But I just thought it was interesting and it shows to me the art of creativity. Because when I've talked with people who are out of work and they're feeling depressed and they don't have a job and they can't figure out how to earn an income, I'm always struck by – I always just think, "Why don't you do this?

Why don't you do that? Why don't you do the third thing?" And I've never – you're going to see in a moment he fabricated a resume. I've never fabricated a resume myself. But then again, if I were hungry and I needed to feed my family, certainly as a – I can certainly understand why somebody would.

And I think – I haven't gone and looked for articles and information on this, but it's clear to me that I'm sure that other people do this. So this is interesting. And it just shows the importance of creativity and the fact that it's not so much – just skills.

I'll stop and I'll read. So creating a resume. Despite my lack of money, I know how to get a job. The first step is to have a dynamic resume. Put your name in bold letters across the top. Put the address where you can get your mail. Put your cell number and email address.

Then make up whatever they want to hear. Read the ad, look at what they're asking for, and then figure out how to change your experience so that you are exactly what they want. Here's an example for you. I saw this ad in the Honolulu Advertiser about three months ago when I got back from the Philippines with almost no money and was couch surfing at my passive-aggressive friend's house.

Assistant manager wanted an upscale Waikiki restaurant. At least two years of restaurant management experience required. Strong references. I needed a job, so I made a resume that said I'd worked at four restaurants on the mainland during the past ten years, even though I hadn't. Here are a few things employers don't want to see.

1. A long list of short-term jobs. Instead, list one or two jobs that lasted a couple of years. Pick places that you know went out of business. If you get asked for a reference, use a friend and prep them ahead of time. Dot-coms are great for this. 2. Think of reasons employers can feel good about why you left your last jobs.

Not personality conflict or personal reason. 3. A work history that has you scattered all over the globe. It's interesting, but they want an employee who will be their wage slave for years to come. So there was my made-up resume. I turned it in and then, very important, I followed up with a personal visit two days later.

I was dressed nicely. I knew the manager's name because I had asked for it when I handed my resume to the hostess. I asked for him, and when they asked me why I wanted to see him, I told them that he wanted to see me about the assistant manager position.

The bartender looked at me and thought, "This guy might be my next boss," and he went and got the manager, who then came out and greeted me with a confused handshake. I told him that I had dropped off my resume a couple of days ago and wanted to make sure that he had gotten it.

He told me it was on his desk, and I asked if he could please check as there had been a lot going on when I gave it to the hostess. He went and checked, and that forced him to look at my made-up credentials. He was impressed and asked me to sit for an immediate interview where he asked me lots of questions about the work I had done at my phony restaurants.

I had done my homework and answered his questions with the right answers. Two days later, he called me for a second interview. He had checked my phony references, and apparently I passed. A week later, he offered me the job. I turned it down. I'm not really sure why. It's because I hate working for some company that makes more money off of my work than I do.

For some reason, I took the timeshare job. If you want a job, that's how you get it. Tell them what they want to hear. So, that's it. I'm not going to read any more from this book. It's just an interesting book. It enlarged my ways of thinking. It enlarged my creativity.

I found that really, really fascinating. I started to think, "How could you live if you wanted to live in a different way and weren't willing to trade your time for money?" This was a number of ideas. Oftentimes, I feel an intense lack of creativity. That's why I read things like this, to try to enhance my creativity.

I'm always blown away by people who have these far-out ideas that work. If I had those ideas, I feel sometimes like I would think of the idea, and I'd say, "Oh, that's stupid. I'm not going to do that." I'd go back to the normal. Two examples come to mind that I've seen through my wanderings over the years.

There was a website. I think it was called Million Dollar Homepage or something like that. This was many years ago. This young guy had a desire to earn a million dollars. He tried to figure out, "How can I do this?" He had the idea to start a website with a million pixels on it.

I think it was a million. I'll look it up after the show and put a link in the show notes. He had an idea to set up a website with a million pixels on it and then sell advertising for a dollar for each pixel. He did that, made up this website, got all kinds of attention for it, and then sold it.

He sold each of the pixels for a dollar and made a million bucks off of it. I think the site is still alive. Again, I'll go look it up after the show. When I first read that story, I said, "That's nuts. Why can't I think of something like that?" I have to enhance my creative abilities.

I would encourage you to enhance your creative abilities and look for a way to win that. It's a lot simpler if you have an idea to pursue that. What did it cost him? A few bucks for a domain registration and a simple website to put up? Not much. He's not out much if it failed.

It wound up making him a million bucks. There's another guy that I've seen. I think his name was Jason. He had a website called IWearYourShirt.com. He sold his last name a couple of times. He literally sold his shirts. He would wear shirts and get social attention for people. They would pay him to wear their shirt with a logo on it.

Then he sold his last name. For a while, he was JasonHeadsets.com. Now, I think he's JasonSurferApp.com. He officially went and changed his last name. You see him always listed as JasonSurferApp. There's an application for surfers, for their phones to log their sessions on surfers, JasonSurferApp.com. I had seen him a couple of years ago, JasonHeadsets.com.

I had seen the story about him online. Then I couldn't believe it. I actually have a friend of mine who started the surfer app, who built the surfer app, from right here in Florida. Then I found out that they had purchased his last name for publicity. What a better way to make money, in my opinion, than going and having a job.

I've never thought about selling my last name. I love reading stories like that. I'm going to boogie on here to the Dumpster Diving book and just share a few of the lessons that I learned in the Dumpster Diving book. This is the art and science of dumpster diving. The author here is a man named John Hoffman.

He evidently wrote a follow-up book to this, the advanced art of dumpster diving or something like that. I've never read the follow-up. I'll read just a couple of interesting passages from this. Then I'll talk about this book. This is a 160-page book about dumpster diving. It's a fascinating book.

Here's the introductory passage to the book. "Some weeks ago I finished a nice hot shower, which happened to include dumpster salvaged soap, dumpster salvaged shampoo, a dumpster salvaged towel, and a dumpster salvaged bath mat. I slapped on my wife's favorite cologne, which came from, yes, a dumpster. And then, naturally, I shaved.

My job at the hospital requires meticulous grooming and cleanliness. Now, it's true I purchased the razors, but the shaving cream came from a dumpster. I also purchased the deodorant, but in the past I've salvaged deodorant from trash bins. That's right, deodorant from trash bins. Checking my watch, a freebie from the dumpster, I hurried into the kitchen and sat down at the table.

The dinner table was also a freebie, as well as the chairs. We sold the table we had before this one for $25 and paid the electric bill with the money. I noted that my wife had her food science textbook on the kitchen counter. She has a degree in biology, but food science was an elective she studied at our private college.

I also have a college degree. "Something special?" I asked. "Wait and see," she smiled. While waiting, I watered our half dozen or so plants. All but one came from dumpsters. I sat at the table again, and my wife set a steaming plate down in front of me. I noted that she was wearing the 1920s sterling silver butterfly pin that I had dumpster-dived a week earlier, nearly 200 yards from our apartment.

And that wasn't all I found that time. "Looks great, honey," I said, meaning the food. My wife, Tina, had prepared steamed artichokes, vegetable beef stir-fry, rice, and fresh-baked bread from instant dough. For dessert, an assortment of fruit. Only the beef and the stir-fry did not originate in the dumpster.

Oh, yes, and the soy sauce. My wife always grabs several packets of soy sauce whenever we have the egg roll special at the local mall. The dinner plates were a wedding present, but the silverware came from a dumpster. "What do you want to drink?" Tina asked. "Milk? Orange juice?

Iced tea?" "Just water," I answered. "All this food is making me so fat." Both the milk and the orange juice originated in the dumpster. The tea, however, came from the hospital cafeteria. I never eat there, but whenever I escort a patient, I grab several bags of tea. "Don't forget to take those magazines to the hospital," my wife said.

"I'm still reading The Rolling Stone," I answered. "That reminds me," Tina said. It goes on and talks about how somebody that was a pop star had dumpster-dived when she was a young artist to help her get her career started. Yes, her talent and her brains made her a star, but dumpster-diving gave her a vital Darwinian advantage.

How many other young, talented men and women have shared apartments, worked in hamburger joints, pounded the streets day and night in pursuit of their elusive life's dream? Instead of success, most encounter only closed doors, rip-offs, poverty, and hunger. As long as possible, they struggle for their dreams. They keep believing in themselves.

Why? Why do people fight and fight and fight for their dreams? It's a rhetorical question. You know the answer, because it's your dream. It's your life. The universe as you know it revolves around your eyeballs. The things in life that matter are the things that matter to you. You have, so far as we know for certain, one life.

You have one opportunity to do, to be, to experience, to create. However, you're in competition with a lot of other highly motivated individuals. Like you, these people are intensely goal-oriented, utterly devoted to their own dreams, careers, or families. The world is like the jungle, the woods, the sea. In our society's economic ecosystem, very little drops to the ground or washes up on shore without becoming food or fertilizer for something.

And that something is right there, waiting, mouth open. Look around you. Try seeing economic activity in terms of nature. For every opportunity, every windfall, every resource, every niche, something is already sitting there, making a living, getting a cut, earning interest, drawing a percentage, running the action. Only the leanest, the hungriest, the smartest, and the most motivated in calculating and utterly devoted will achieve their dreams.

Only the most able deserve their dreams. It has been said that all the world is a stage. Well, most people never get beyond the cattle call or the casting couch. Most of the time, when the world offers you a big break, it is, in fact, offering to screw you and never return your phone calls.

You need an edge. Consider the hungry, highly motivated pop star to be. Do you imagine that while seeking stardom, she lived under bridges and in homeless shelters, slept in a cardboard box, wore a baggy overcoat and army boots, that she smelled bad, that she washed her hair in public restrooms, that she ate out of a dumpster?

Dumpster diving is no longer the action of last resort. Dumpster diving, in fact, can be your edge, your vital Darwinian advantage. Dumpster diving, an activity pioneered by bag ladies and homeless ex-mental patients, is becoming more and more practical and profitable. So profitable, in fact, that it can make the vital difference between attaining your dreams or returning home on a borrowed bus ticket to work at Daddy's hamburger stand.

And he goes on. So basically, I probably should have skipped those philosophical paragraphs, but the book is full of philosophy. And it's just interesting because he goes through and he talks about dumpsters. And so his history, he grew up--the author of this book actually grew up dumpster diving. It was kind of a family occupation.

And it's absolutely amazing when he lays out all of the different things that he has found, all of the different items that they have recovered, and just the ways that they've used things. And I was struck by how--and again, I've never gone in a dumpster, but I was just struck at the resourcefulness of looking and finding these items everywhere.

And I was struck at how he is able to substitute skills for the need to spend money and to substitute some work of jumping in a dumpster for the need to spend money. Now, it's quick and easy to discard this stuff. And I don't care if you ever jump in a dumpster or not.

I don't know if I ever will or not. I'm interested in this wacky stuff, but who knows? I really doubt that this is the best use of my time, is to go driving around and jumping into dumpsters. But you never know. Maybe it is. If you go online--and I'll put some links in the show notes-- it's fascinating the whole communities that exist around dumpster diving.

And if you wish to believe the videos that people post online of their finds and the pictures, it seems like it certainly can be worth the time and worth the effort for people to do. But I don't know. Maybe--who knows? We all like to trumpet from the housetops about our finds, but the reality is if it takes many, many hours of work to find them, then maybe it may not be worth it.

I don't have any idea. I don't really care what you do about this stuff. I was struck by the economic thinking here, of the idea of just the ability to diminish the expenses in one area so that you can apply--so you have excess money to spend in another area.

And this is something--in most Western cultures, it seems like we just discard completely the benefits of frugality and the benefits of minimization and using things. But the reality is that in life we have this constant tradeoff of opportunity costs. And we constantly--the ability, for example, to-- I've seen some of the pictures that I've found online of people's--of the food that they've found.

They find hundreds of dollars a month worth of food. And that hundreds of dollars a month, if you want to save that for financial independence, awesome. Or if you just want to save it and go buy a fancy new computer from the Apple store, then that's awesome, too. And the fact is that instead of just simply trotting down-- and to me it seems smarter that instead of just trotting down to the Apple store for a brand new Mac and swiping a card or store credit or however they do things and then paying interest payments on that, if somebody's able to go out and spend some time in some dumpsters pulling their food for a few months from there, what a much better way to approach it.

And what a much better way to save and to allocate their limited resources toward things. And so this book, for me, was just packed with lessons. And some of the biggest lessons that I learned were lessons on reusing things. He talks about--he talks a lot in the book about--well, there's a whole section in the book about what to do with different articles that you find from the dumpster.

So how do you creatively repurpose spoiled milk? If you find milk and it's spoiled, how do you creatively repurpose that into something useful? Or how do you creatively repurpose melted ice cream? That one is--I can remember off the top of my head and share that. I was impressed with that.

His point was sometimes you'll find cartons and cartons of ice cream that have been tossed out, and if they're in the dumpster, they're probably fully melted. And if you refreeze them, they're all hygienic. They're sealed in their carton. If you refreeze them, they just turn into ice crystals. So he said the best use of ice cream is to turn them into milkshakes.

So toss some ice in, put it into a blender, and turn it into milkshakes. I was impressed by that. I thought, man, I wouldn't have thought of that, but what a great--so true. Use the ice cream as a milkshake base. Or what to do with fruit. So, for example, one of the ones that I remember is if you have fruit that is--if you find a lot of fruit and it's a little bit bruised--you know, most of us don't love eating bruised fruit brand new, but if you cook the fruit, you never have any idea that it was actually bruised.

So if you find some bruised and slightly mushy strawberries, cut the tops off and make a fruit cobbler, or make a fruit--a strawberry crunch or something like that. And it's true, right? Everything goes soft when you freeze it. There's nothing wrong with it. They're just soft, and so we don't love to eat soft--I don't love to eat soft strawberries.

But here is a creative way of repurposing things. And what a great way to make things stretch. What a fabulous--what fabulous ideas to be more efficient with the money that we do spend. Whether that's money that--things that are in my refrigerator, and how to not throw them away when they are right at their edge, and how to repurpose them and reuse them.

Or whether it's things you find in a dumpster or in a trash or in a refrigerator somewhere that someone's throwing out, how to repurpose them. And to me, this is something that seems so lost in our society and is so valuable to recollect. Many times people like to scoff at frugality.

And you especially read this if you read books on money, and people just scoff at frugality. That's just marketing. Frugality is so important. Now, the scale of frugality--again, I'm likely not to spend--if I could--I don't know what the number would be for me. Let's say that if I could spend, I don't know, three hours a week, and if I could get $500 a week worth of food from three hours of dumpster diving, I would probably consider it.

But if I had to spend 10 hours a week dumpster diving and I could only get $100 worth of stuff, then I probably wouldn't consider it. I just made those numbers off the top of my head. That number is going to be different for every person. But even if I make a million dollars a year, I still need to be frugal and careful with that million dollars on my larger expenditures.

And this is the key, is that, remember, with the cash flow statement, there's inflows and outflows. And yes, if you have more outflows, you can either choose to spend higher outflows, but you still need to do it in a method that is appropriate. I don't know any wealthy people who are actually wealthy that aren't frugal.

It's just that the scale of frugality will start to change. The loss of depreciation on a car--one of the things I think a lot about-- if you're a young person and you're buying a new car, and you go down and you trot down at 20, 22 years old, and you trot down to the car dealership and you buy a $30,000 car, and let's say you're making $30,000 a year and you're working hard to save money.

Well, that $30,000 car--let's assume that it depreciates at 15% a year. Let's ignore the first-year depreciation, which is higher than that. That $30,000 car is going to depreciate in value by $4,500 in the first year. So when you're sitting there working hard to put an extra $200 a month into an IRA, and you're kissing $450 a month goodbye in depreciation costs, it's really hard to make a financial plan make up for that.

So it's pretty stupid for 22-year-old people who are making $30,000 a year to buy $30,000 cars, but they do it every day. Now flip that around and say that you've got a million bucks in the bank, and that million bucks is paying you-- let's just assume a 5% dividend and flow of returns off of it.

Well, off of that money, off of a million-dollar portfolio at 5%, that's $50,000 a year. $50,000 a year is roughly $4,000 a month. It's $4,200 or something like that. Anyway, it's a little more than $4,000 a month. Well, now when you've got a million dollars in the bank and you've got $4,000 a month of passive cash flow, of passive income, you don't need to worry quite so much about the $400 of depreciation from the $30,000 car.

So it's not that buying new cars or buying used cars is important or not. It's just that young people screw their lives over, their financial lives, if you buy an expensive depreciating asset before you've built assets. But then once you build assets, it's fine to spend the money because your financial plan can accommodate it.

Sorry for the rant, but the point was is that--I can't remember what the point was. I guess the point was that there are so many options that if you apply this way of thinking of repurposing things-- I'll give you two other examples that come to mind, one from my life and one from something else.

I found a blog this week or last week from this lady who-- she writes a blog about repurposing things from the thrift store. So she goes to the thrift store and finds these hideous, disgustingly ugly dresses and skirts and things like that, and she brings them home, and she sews them and adjusts them and turns them into fashionable and chic articles of clothing, and she posts a blog about her finds.

What an awesome approach to fashion. She's having a useful hobby that makes money, and she's having a useful hobby that saves her an incredible amount of money so that she can then repurpose that money towards other things. So this idea of repurposing and reusing and extending the life of things is such a valuable idea for us to become expert at.

My wife and I try to do this with our food sometimes, and we're not expert at this. We're learning, but we try to do this with our food. We were at Whole Foods a couple weeks--a month or so ago, and we bought one of the fancy chickens. I would like to buy all food that is locally grown and organic and non-industrial food.

I would prefer it if all of my food came from outside of the non-industrial food supply. But I haven't found any local producers. I was starting to raise chickens, and then I got cracked down on, so I can't do that anymore. But I'd like to find a local chicken supplier, but I haven't been able to find one to buy any kind of pastured chicken.

But we were at Whole Foods, and they were having a sale on a fancy chicken-- a fancy and organic, GMO-free, fancy organic chicken. And usually those things are super expensive, and it's hard to-- if you're eating a chicken every day, it's hard to-- we don't eat a chicken every day, but it gets expensive to buy the fancy ones.

But I'd rather buy the fancy ones than the non-fancy ones just because it supports my personal values with food. But how could we support our values with the food and still be able to buy the fancy ones? Well, the way that we figured out how to do it is to stretch the meal.

And I feel like a dum-dum, having to figure this stuff out. And this is how everyone lived probably 80 years ago. But in today's world, I've never seen anybody do this. My mom was always very thrifty, but when I was a kid, I kind of despised her thriftiness, and I wasn't--I didn't learn the lessons I should have learned.

But here's how you can go ahead and how we support our values to buy a fancy chicken but still try to make it stretch. So first of all, you buy your fancy chicken, and you do a roast chicken. And then let's say you eat half of it for one meal and half of it for a second meal.

And then you go ahead and take it, and what we do is turn the bones into chicken soup. So you can make a big pot of chicken soup with a chicken carcass, and the chicken soup is relatively inexpensive, and you have a lot of vegetables in that meal where you don't need much meat.

And you get all the meat off of it, and then you get the nutrition from the bones. In the years past, people would always make bone broth and get some of the minerals and nutrition from the chicken bones by boiling them for a long period of time. And then what we do with the bones afterwards, because they're now well-boiled, then you don't have any of the fears of poultry bones being splinters for our dogs.

And then we go ahead and feed the poultry bones to the dogs as an additive to their food. So we're able to use the full chicken. And so you can turn one expensive chicken into--I mean, I don't know how many meals we turn it into, but it's a lot by the time you add our family of three and have a couple meals out of the meat and then have several meals out of the soup, and then the dogs get the bones, and you get lots of nutrition from it, and you can stretch it.

So just a little example of how we're trying to implement some of these things into our own life. And then by freeing up that money, that allows us to spend it on other things that we value. I just was doing an electrical project this week in my house, putting in a lot of fancy LED lights.

Man, those things are expensive. And I tried to save money. I decided to go ahead and spend the money, but I couldn't spend money on the fancy LED hi-hat lights for my life if we didn't save the money in another area. So I want to read one more passage from the "Dumpster Diver" book here.

And in this book--it's a comprehensive book, and it's really cool. I would encourage you to get it and read it. I thought it was really interesting, some of the ideas that came from it. I learned a lot from it, and I really enjoyed it. But the thought that I had through it--and I'm going to read one paragraph that says that is more than an example--but I thought--one of the thoughts that I had from reading this book was, "What a security blanket this guy has." And even if he wanted to stop dumpster diving, the fact that he always knew he could go and find all the stuff that he needed in a dumpster--what a security blanket that so many people don't have.

If you just have a job and you have no other source of income, and then you lose that job and you wind up broke because the expenses are still so high, well, this guy's got an amazing security blanket. And these things could really make a dramatic difference in your lifestyle if you lost a job.

It could make a dramatic difference in your ability, because by saving money on food and toiletries and other things by dumpster diving, it could make a dramatic difference in a family's ability to still make the mortgage payment. And so if you integrate these certain things together--and let's say that someone gets fired from their job and they become unemployed--well, the unemployment is usually not enough to live high on the hog.

But it may be enough to keep the mortgage paid and the lights on, and then by the ability to go out and jump in a few dumpsters and find other necessities of life--what an amazing backup plan. So I want to read this couple of paragraphs here that I just thought were a really fascinating way to substitute skills for spending money.

"Being a proficient dumpster diver provides me with a priceless sense of security and confidence. As a teenager, I would ride my bike all over the Midwest, not bothering to bring food or money. I knew very well I could take care of myself." I'm going to interrupt myself. That's an amazing paragraph.

And you read in there, this guy dumpster dived through college. He dumpster dived after college. He dumpster dived as a kid. All the stuff they found in their family, even though his parents were considered to be poor, they always had an excellent family life and had way more than they ever needed because dumpster diving made up what they didn't have in income.

So continuing on. "Recently, I found a coupon for a free oil change. It appeared that somebody had been cleaning out their desk before Christmas vacation and the coupon was discarded amid a lot of other papers. I was lucky to spot it. You develop diver's eye with practice. The coupon, as it turned out, would expire the next day, December 31, so I had a small window of opportunity.

I finished my route and drove approximately one mile to the service station. The deal on the coupon applied to only members of a particular group, but I managed to finesse my way through that part with the manager. My clean-cut appearance and sincere attitude helped quite a bit. Besides, most managers don't care.

Freebies are for the purpose of showing off a product or service, getting you as a regular customer, and convincing you to buy extras. The stores are usually compensated by the home office and would gladly give makeovers to winos if compensated at a slight profit. The service station manager agreed to squeeze me in sometime in the next two hours, then bored me for about five minutes with a presentation about some "miracle oil additive." I played along by asking a few questions, grinned right through the "hard sell," expressed regret, but gave a firm "no." I placed my ignition key on the counter and told him I was so happy he could squeeze me in.

I figured I could kill two hours dumpster diving in this unfamiliar neighborhood. It sure beats window shopping, though I like to combine the two. Looking through a store's dumpster after browsing the store is like seeing your favorite actress without her makeup, wearing torn blue jeans and eating fast food.

Dumpster diving is a brutally real way of examining the world. The first three dumpsters I checked were interesting, amusing little bins, but basically dry wells. However, the fourth dumpster, outside a sprawling apartment residence, was warm. Somebody had received one of those gourmet goodie baskets, you know, the kind with fake grass and nicely arranged meats, cheeses, etc.

Here she had eaten all the meats but had ignored half a dozen individually wrapped cheeses, a small box of Melba toast, and a little jar of apple jelly. I didn't have room for the basket in my dumpster-dived Adidas bag, so I decided to just grab the food and throw the basket back.

That was when I noticed nearly half a dozen current magazines, mostly women's magazines. "My wife will like those," I thought. As I grabbed, one of the magazines slid out of reach behind a discarded Christmas tree. "Darn," I thought. "What is that? A J.C. Penney catalog?" I pulled several pieces of plastic-wrapped candy off the tree and sucked on one of them, thoughtfully.

Experience has taught me to double-check my dumpster assumptions. However, I didn't want to rummage amid that dried-up pine tree for a lousy catalog, and I had neglected to bring my dive stick, a collapsible six-foot antenna off of a portable Citizens Band radio. Looking around, I spotted a broken pool cue.

I grabbed the cue and probed at the catalog. Flipping it over, I saw it wasn't a catalog, but a magazine I was very interested in reading. I grabbed the magazine. As I brushed pine needles off myself, I noticed that a utility building near the dumpster was adorned by signs and stickers reading "No Trespassing," "This property protected by a 38 Special," "Nevermind Dog, Beware of Owner," and other macho nonsense.

I decided, however, not to test my luck. About this time, I was getting thirsty, so I walked over to the Diamond Shamrock convenience store. I wondered if I should break down and purchase a bottle of Coke to wash down the cheese and Melba toast. Nah, I decided, I'll scavenge a nice clean container, scare up some ice inside the store, find a faucet, and drink water instead.

As I rummaged through the Shamrock dumpster for one of their plastic jumbo beverage cups, my eyes popped out of my head. Amid torn maps, tourist brochures, and empty candy wrappers, somebody had discarded two cans of Pepsi, still attached by a plastic ring. If you dumpster dive for any length of time, you'll understand my excitement.

I find books of blank checks and magazines more often than I find sealed cans of cola. This was a rare treat. "Thrill me," I breathed and grabbed the cans. Perhaps the colas were warm and icky when discarded, but that cool, shady dumpster had chilled them perfectly. I retired to the shadow of a large evergreen to drink my soda, eat my cheese, and check out the magazine.

As I crossed the intersection, I noticed a homeless man holding up a sign. "Hungry," read the sign. "Please help." Sampling my gourmet cheeses and checking out the magazine, I reflected on the past few hours. I had acquired a free oil change, including oil filter, air filter, fluid check, and a vacuumed interior, retail value $21.99.

I had obtained lunch and reading material, and I had done it all on my own terms, as I pleased. I watched the man in the intersection beg passing drivers for coins. "Who was he?" I wondered. "Did he once have a family, an apartment, credit cards? Did he ever dumpster dive in this neighborhood?" I couldn't help but think that he should have learned how to dumpster dive before he was hungry and homeless.

Maybe if he'd saved $20 on an oil change, $5 on lunch, a few bucks on a magazine, well, maybe he wouldn't be out in the intersection humiliating himself. Dumpster diving of your own free will isn't icky or humiliating. It's invigorating. When you make a great find, you tell yourself, "I can survive and thrive any place." So he goes on, and that's it for what I'm going to read, except he talks about the psychological issues of dumpster diving.

I guarantee you that the first reaction that many people would have, even to this episode, is, "I'm dumpster diving? Ugh! That's gross." But he talks about how that opens up the options of-- by being able to go across that psychological hurdle that many people have, it opens up options for you.

I just was struck at how a simple strategy like this could be such a useful strategy for helping me and others achieve our goals, achieve their goals. And I've worked a lot of-- I don't have the strong feelings about working a job that the guy who wrote that "Rough Living" book seems to have.

I don't particularly think it's the worst thing in the world, but I have often told my wife that it would take a lot for me to go back and just work an hourly job. I would much rather start a little business on the side, and I'd probably rather dumpster dive and sell things at a flea market.

One of the things is, these guys are-- there's all kinds of ways to repurpose things and barter for other things that you need and sell things. I'd probably rather do some of those kinds of businesses and dumpster dive and sell things at a flea market and buy and sell things on Craigslist before I would want to go back and just work an hourly job, unless I was at the job to learn something.

To me, that's one of the biggest reasons to work at a job, is that I can learn something, learn a skill. So, for example, if I were going to open a restaurant, I'd sure want to go and spend some significant time working at a restaurant in various positions, whether that's at the front door or the waiter or whatever, before I'd go and open a restaurant.

And just about any business, I'd actually--before I would want to open most businesses, I would prefer to go and work at the business for a straight hourly wage for six months, and I guaranteed learn a lot more from doing that than from just about anything else. So that is a good reason to work.

But beyond that, you know, I'd rather go and do this kind of stuff than go and be stuck in an hourly wage. And so I think that's about it for what I have for today, I think. But consider just some of these alternative strategies for yourself. And if you're working a job that maybe provides just enough to make it, but not enough to really have a lot of money for savings, consider is there some other alternative strategy that you can implement that will really help you to make up the difference.

Neither you nor I need to necessarily follow this one strategy. Again, I don't know. I would love to find someone to take me dumpster diving. Frankly, I'm a little bit scared about it, about the idea of getting caught or someone seeing me, that kind of thing. But who knows?

If I'm scared of something, I usually try to force myself to do it, so maybe that'll be the deal. Maybe someday for fun I'll call it "Reporting for the Podcast," and I'll go dumpster dive for a couple hours and see. The biggest issue I've found--I have actually driven past dumpsters, and I've always wanted to find the grocery store once, but it seems like all the ones around me, the grocery stores, they have these compactor things, and they're all locked up, and the trash goes immediately from the back of the store to directly into the dumpster, and you can't actually get it because of these big, giant trash compactors.

But anyway, if you dumpster dive and you're around Palm Beach County, Florida, let me know, and you can take me out, and I'll go with you, and we'll call it "Reporting for the Podcast." I would enjoy the adventure of it. There's all kinds of things that you can do without actually going into dumpsters.

One more story, and I apologize. Today is a little bit rambling, but hopefully it's been interesting. I did just sell something on Craigslist last week. I had found a large extension ladder on an abandoned lot, and it was just sitting on the side of the road, and I grabbed it and brought it home and used it for a little while, but it was too big for what I needed, and so I sold it on Craigslist and made $75 off of it.

So there are things like this everywhere, if you can find a waste stream and then repurpose it. So I don't know what the strategy would be for you, but just consider if there's some kind of alternative strategy that you could apply to yourself. For a family that's just getting by and not able to make significant progress on saving money or not able to make a significant progress on paying off debt, I would bet that you could make more money doing stuff like-- I mean, it certainly seems from the people I see online that brag about it, that you can make more money out dumpster diving than working a minimum wage night job to pay off debt.

And the making more money, by the way, is not necessarily what you're going to sell the stuff for, but it's the savings in your budget and the fact that every item that you find that you don't have to buy that allows you to bypass the tax system. That's money that you don't have to pay income taxes on.

That's money that you can cut out the government on, and you don't have to increase your income and pay a higher marginal bracket. You just have the ability to do this, to repurpose things. I think that's all about all I want to talk about. I know today's been a little bit rambling, but I just was inspired.

Use this about the creative ideas and the ability to implement skills for the necessity of spending money. Check out these books. I think you may enjoy them. They certainly have expanded my creative juices and gotten me looking at the world through different eyes, and I love that. And I think that's so valuable to expand all of our creative juices because that's what I love about the world we live in.

With the Internet--I mean, we could do this with books. This dumpster diving book was published--I don't know--80s, I think, 1980s, or something like that. Let me check. Let's see. Okay, 1993. This dumpster diving book was published in 1993. Some of it's a little bit dated. Maybe some of it's different.

I don't have any idea. But the point is that by looking at these ideas from across the board, you can figure out what you actually want to implement in your own life, and you can figure out some ideas for creative ways of achieving your goals. So as this weekend comes up, recognize that it's an opportunity.

So I hope that, first of all, you enjoy the weekend that's coming, and I hope that you're able to spend it with people that you love and doing things that you enjoy doing. If any of you are dumpster divers, let me know. I'd love to hear from you. And I hope you enjoy the Friday show.

A little bit more freewheeling today. We'll get back to some financial planning stuff next week, and I'll walk through some of the technical stuff. But frankly, like I've said before, I would be bored silly if I had to talk about tax law every day. So this is the stuff that gets me going, and it's my podcast.

I can change it if I want to. So enjoy your weekend, everybody. I want to thank you for listening. By the way, I'm going to stop the music here, actually. I'm going to stop the music, and I want to tell you again before we go. Thank you for listening.

We've just finished--today is August 1st, and I've just finished the first month doing this show. And what an amazing month it has been. And I told you guys I'm committed to doing this, and I'm committed to bringing awesome, interesting content from an outside-the-box perspective that you want to enjoy hearing.

And the response I've gotten has been great. We wound up the month of July with over 20,000 downloads of the show, 20,638 to be precise. That is so awesome, and it's so humbling, the idea that many of you have listened to the ideas that I've shared with you, and it's really humbling.

20,000 downloads is just so humbling. And right now we're averaging about 1,000 a day, which is actually a little bit more. It depends on how you figure the average, but I'm humbled by the response. And my commitment to you is I will do everything I can to bring you this show.

I thank those of you who have left me iTunes reviews. That's so helpful. That helps so much in the iTunes rankings, and it's so encouraging to me. And I see the reviews come in. It's just so encouraging to know that--I guess that you're getting what I'm trying to produce for you is interesting, alternative content that's not the same old boring stuff that you hear every day.

And I'm figuring out--and I thank you for kind of bearing with me as I figure out what works and what doesn't. I'm figuring out--as I was looking back at some of the shows from last month, I think some of them were too long. Some of them I just tried to--maybe it was like drinking from a fire hose.

I was thinking back on the show I did about the basic steps of the CFP overview of financial planning, and I realized after the fact--I was like, "That was like drinking from a hot fire hose. It probably should have been three shows." But, you know, so I'm learning. So I've tried to break things down into some smaller shows and not necessarily shorter.

I don't really worry about the time. I figure you can listen to me on 2x speed or you can listen to me on-- I listen to all the podcasts I listen to on 2x speed, so that should--that turns an hour show into a half hour show. And so I'm not necessarily worried about that, but I want these things to be actionable and to be useful.

So I'm trying to make a balance between bringing technical content, between interviews, between just creative, thought-provoking things. As I've said before, I don't know what you should do or anybody should do with their lives. It's your life, but I just want to give you ideas and inspiration, and then you can figure out how to implement those ideas in your life.

I don't have any idea what anybody else should do until I know all their personal situation. So I'm convinced we need more personalization. I mean, everybody needs a financial planner, is my opinion, because a financial planner should be an incredible trusted confidant to make the money fit our goals.

And I won't go off on that rant today, but-- So I'm just trying to give ideas, and I hope that they are interesting to you. And I want to give content on topics that you are interested in. So let me know what those topics are. I've gotten a lot of good feedback.

And for those of you who have reached out to me with topics and ideas, I have those implemented into a list, and I'm figuring it out as I go. And hopefully after I do a thousand of these shows, I'll get good at it. But I'm still kind of working to get good at it right now, but hopefully I will get good at it over time.

But thank you for listening. It's very humbling, and I appreciate it. I really do. It means a lot. And I'm thrilled that I'm getting a good response, because it's heartwarming. It's really heartwarming to get the response. So I thank you very much. If you like the show, let me know.

Drop me an email. That's so encouraging. Shoot a note on Twitter. That's so encouraging as well. I'd be thrilled if you haven't had the chance. Send me an iTunes review. That is super helpful. And let me know how you found the show, so I can figure out what's working as far as the marketing that I'm doing.

Let me know what topics you'd like to hear about, and I will work hard to bring them to you. And if you have people that you think would be interesting interviews, I don't want to just interview the same big people that you can find everywhere on the Internet. I'm much more interested in interviewing a dumpster diver than I am in interviewing a big-- I'm interested in interviewing everybody.

So if you've got interviewing suggestions, I've got a couple from listeners this last week, and I want to thank you for those. I'm going to reach out to those people. And I've got a long list of people I want to reach out to, just challenging as far as keeping these things all going with all the other things that I've got in life going on right now.

So I'll stop rambling. Today's show was a little bit more freewheeling, but I hope you enjoyed it. So thank you for listening. Maybe you can go trash picking this weekend. I know my wife and I, we found lots of stuff on the weekend when we had our baby. We found all kinds of free stuff.

We love to do trash picking. And check out some of the links that I put in the show notes. I'll put some links to some interesting dumpster diving people that I've found, an interesting blog for People Chronicle. There's a Reddit thread on dumpster diving, and lots of interesting info that people are doing.

Oh, I forgot to go over this Travel the World for Free book for another day. I had an excerpt I wanted to read from this book about how this guy traveled from Berlin to Antarctica, literally, without any money. And it was a bit different, totally different than this other dumpster diving stuff that I've done.

So that's for another day. Gives you a reason to come back, right? Have a happy weekend, everybody. Enjoy your time. Happy weekend, everybody. The holidays start here at Ralph's, with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions.

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