Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways, and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. Would you be interested in learning everything you can from a man who started with an eight dollar an hour job after college, parlayed that job into a career as a commodities trader, retired at the age of 30, and has proceeded to spend the next 10 years traveling the world with his family?

Welcome to episode 50. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast for today, Thursday, August 28, 2014. I thank you for being here. This is an episode that I have been wanting to bring you for a while. Today we're going to speak with Pat Schulte, who is the writer and adventurer found at bumfuzzle.com.

Sailor and RVer, a vanner or a van dweller, I guess would be the term, commodities trader, man of international mystery and intrigue. Perhaps that's a little bit grandiose, but as you'll see in today's show, I really don't think it is too grandiose. I've been looking forward to bringing you this interview.

Before I play the interview for you, I'm just going to share with you a little bit about the background. This is a blog. I've mentioned it a couple of times on the show. It's a blog that I've read for a couple of years and I've thoroughly enjoyed. It's a wonderful blog.

I would highly encourage you to check it out at bumfuzzle.com. But to pique your interest before the interview, Pat Schulte is a really intriguing guy. Today was my first time talking with him on the phone and I really enjoyed that. He's somebody who in many ways seems to have cracked the code on the American dream.

Like I mentioned prior to starting the music, he started out of college with an $8 an hour job working on a Minneapolis exchange. He sold his pickup truck for $5,000 to start his stake for trading. Worked as an independent trader for the next coming years, ultimately moved to Chicago so he could trade on the commodities board there in Chicago.

I assume the mercantile exchange, but I'm not an expert on what board or what exchange he was trading on. Traded primarily soybeans futures. At the age of about 30, he and his wife decided to quit. They had done well, made a lot of money and decided to quit and go sail around the world.

So they flew down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They bought a sailboat, spent the next four years sailing around the world on the 35-foot catamaran, then came back to the US, sold their boat, did an across the country race called the Great Race in their 1965 Porsche 356, decided to take another road trip, bought a 1958 Volkswagen bus, and then proceeded to do a 60,000 mile road trip in that, visiting, let's see, I think it was something like 25 countries.

So yeah, 28 countries, 60,000 miles, 525 days on the road. And they had visited about 45 countries on their original sailboat. Got pregnant, moved to Mexico, had a baby, bought another sailboat, lived on that sailboat in Mexico and around Mexico and California for a few years, had another baby, then came back to, sold the boat, came back to the States and bought a 1966 Dodge Travco RV and have been traveling around the country for the last 11 years.

So hopefully that'll pique your interest. And Pat has written a couple of books, one about a sailing adventure and one about trading. He currently earns his income trading stocks, excuse me, trading options, as he clarifies in the interview, he doesn't trade stocks very much anymore. So trades options and that's how he funds, mostly funds his lifestyle.

And I assume a little bit of income here and there from the books and perhaps other things as well. So I've been looking forward to bringing you this interview. I am sure you're going to enjoy it. Oh, and I forgot to mention, I screwed up at the beginning of the show and I didn't hit the record button on the interview.

And then I actually did it twice. The first time Pat was a minute into his talk and I thought I'd hit the record button, but I have to hit it twice and I didn't hit it the second time. And then I said, "Hey, sorry, I stopped him." And then we started again.

And then I realized that I thought I'd hit it and I didn't hit it. So I screwed it up. So you're missing the first about 10 seconds of the show, but hopefully that's not a big deal. Here's the interview. So the first time, just a moment ago, I had hit record and then I didn't do it.

So I apologize. I screwed up the recording, but I do want to thank you for being with us. And a personal thank you just for all the work that you've done on your site and the intro of shared people, just your site and your books. But I appreciate all of the work that you've done over the years of building a comprehensive website and putting together the books that you've written.

So thank you for all the hard work that you've done. Yeah, of course. Thanks. Where I'd like to start, if you're willing, is just share with us a little bit about your story, maybe over about the last 10 or 20 years or so. Sure. Yeah. Well, my wife and I met back in high school and so we've always kind of had each other and we're able to take challenges on.

And early on, I'd always wanted to be a trader. Watching the guys in the New York Stock Exchange on TV and everything, I always thought, "Wow, that looks like the job for me." And it turned out there was a small exchange in Minneapolis, the Commodities Exchange. So right out of college, I kind of started in on the ground floor there and just kind of worked my way up as a clerk and everything.

And then as a broker and learned as much as I could from the smartest guys there that I could find. And then eventually I went out on my own in Chicago. I was trading soybean options and all sorts of different agricultural products and just focusing on options though. And things went well, fortunately.

And all our friends kind of started to head off into the suburbs and started having kids. And my wife and I, we just kind of realized, "Oh, we're not quite ready to do that. We're looking to do something just kind of crazy and different and kind of run while we got the money and make something fun happen." And so we decided one night over beers to go sail around the world.

It sounded about as crazy as we could come up with. And just a few months later, we were on a boat for the first time, our own boat, and just setting off. Mad Fientist Had you ever sailed before that? Or did you know anyone who sailed? Or where did the idea actually come from?

Mike You know, as a commodities trader, I was off. The markets closed early every day. So I was home by like 1.30. And so I'd be on the internet looking for... I got into the whole... I got a travel bug. I wasn't really a traveler or adventurer, but I got into that bug.

And so I was always searching things out. And at the time, there wasn't a whole lot out there. I mean, this was like 2002 or 2003. But I found one blog about these people sailing around the world. And I thought, "That sounds pretty awesome." And they didn't seem to really know too much about what they were doing.

So I figured, "What the heck?" Mad Fientist So you sailed around the world. And how long were you guys gone? Mike Yeah, we did that for four years. And we were about halfway through when we realized, "You know what? I don't think we're going to go back to Chicago." And we had always planned, "I'll just go back to Chicago and just pick up where we left off." But about halfway through, we thought, "There's a better life out here than just working to make money, to make more money, to keep working." Just the cycle.

And so we've just kind of continued travels. Mad Fientist It's interesting to me about just that exposure, because it seems to me – and let me just, instead of saying it, let me ask you this question. Did your perspective of what kind of lifestyle was okay to choose change over the years as you got out and traveled and expanded your horizons?

Mike Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, when we first took off, we just told Tam and, "Hey, this is just a break from life. We're going to go do this thing, and it'll be an adventure, and it'll be a great story for our kids someday," kind of thing. But like I said, somewhere along the way, things just kind of changed, and that became our life.

And the idea of going back to our previous life just wasn't appealing anymore. Suddenly, we were like, "Wow, we really don't need much of anything. We can live. We can travel the world on a fraction of pretty much what we're spending just to live downtown Chicago and go to work every day." Mad Fientist Do you have the money just to do that for the rest of your life, or do you see it running out at some point?

Are you going to need to go back to work? Mike Yeah, well, that's part of the thing, too, is I kind of became a big proponent of mini-retirements. I guess that phrase has been coined at some point. I think it was in the four-hour work week or something. But I kind of figured, do stuff while you can, and you can always work.

You might not always be able to make as much money as you once were. You might not be able to step right back into the same thing you were doing. But there's always work, and there's always options out there for smart people willing to work hard. Excuse me one second.

What is it? I know I'm on the phone. Sorry. Mad Fientist My little one's not walking yet, but I'm sure that in the future, sometimes in the background of my show, you can hear him crying as he lies down or something. I'm sure in the future, he's going to walk in and interrupt my shows in the future.

I think that's how it should be. Mike Well, that's my four-year-old. She's so amazed to hear me on the phone that she had to come see what the heck was going on. She's like, "I heard you talking to somebody. What's going on?" Mad Fientist Yeah, I thought you made a good point of that in your book about the mini-retirements.

It's one of the themes I especially admire. You have a four-year-old, and your son is three, four and three. It seems to me, and I've said on the show, and I'm curious if you agree, it seems to me like the whole way that we approach life is so twisted.

You probably don't know. I come from the background of a financial planner. I worked six years as a professional financial advisor and financial planner. The whole deal that is preached in the financial planning world that I grew up reading personal finance books is you're supposed to save for retirement, save for retirement.

The way I figured it out is you're supposed to go to college, graduate from college, work really hard, have kids, buy a house, get a mortgage, work really hard during those years to establish your career to earn money. Then you're supposed to save, save, save, save, save, so you can hit this magical point of 60 or 65 years old, having enough money to retire, which takes a huge amount of money.

It's a massive amount of money if you're just going to say, "I'm not going to work." Then the other thing is we're not supposed to count on Social Security, so therefore you've got to save it all yourself. All during this time, you miss your kid's childhood. Right about the time you hit maybe 50, you hit your stride, you're in the peak of your career, you can afford to pull back a little.

You turn around and your kids are gone. Then you hit 60 and you hit early retirement. Your kids are doing exactly the same thing you're doing. Now all you have to do is go to Florida and golf and drive your Mercedes around West Palm Beach, Florida, where I live.

It just seems like a stupid way to live to me, but that's what our society is built on. Yeah, it's just a cycle. One of the things that always drives me nuts is the whole thing, you work until 65 and then everybody tells you you have to have like 80% of your last year's earnings to retire or something.

I always think, "Really? When you're like that old, you need 80% of your maximum earnings? What do you need all that money for then?" I don't know. Our lifestyle has shown us that we really don't need that much. I certainly don't need 80% of this huge number to be earning that much in my investments and everything else at 65.

I can live a real fulfilling and fun and exciting life unless. I don't know. It's just a different way and we've managed to find it. I ran your numbers one time off your budget. It's got to be one of the most visited pages on your website. You put on there your budgets for your sailing trip, your driving the Americas, your Mexico sailing trip, and now your current costs for your RVing.

I went through one time and I ran the numbers. I'm doing this off the top of my head, so if you know the averages, let me know. One thing that's clear from your writing is you're not exactly a penny pincher. You seem to spend freely on anything that comes in a plastic bag that you can eat and anything that comes in a bottle.

I say that tongue in cheek, but with a chuckling thing. You don't have any problem spending on food or spending on things that you want to do. You don't seem to try to worry too much about stressing about a specific budget, but it's hard to spend that much money when you don't have a lot of place to put stuff and you don't own a car and don't own a cell phone.

I went through your budget even for your sailing trip. The way it comes across in your writing, you went down and you bought an almost brand new boat. You paid almost $160,000 for that. You sailed it for four years, was it? Yeah. Four years all around the world, down to Australia, New Zealand, all through Africa, the Mediterranean, back to the US.

You had massive boat problems. You sank, what was it, 30,000, 40,000 bucks into fixing the boat in New Zealand? Yeah. So then I took it and I pulled out your ending, what you sold the boat for, and I calculated that your total monthly budget, including depreciation on the boat and repairs, came to something like $4,000 a month, right?

Yeah, I think so. That's about it. And that included the flights, that included everything. It was somewhere between $4,000 a month, including depreciation on the almost brand new boat and your massive repairs, because the boatmaker screwed you. Yeah. Basically, I ran the numbers once too, and I don't have them in front of me, but without the big repair bills, the number is more like $2,800 a month.

It depends on how you look at it. It's either high or low to live on, but it's also, at that time, especially on that trip, we were planning most of the time just to go back to work and save money. So it was like we were really free spending.

So we were spending as much money as we wanted, and we're still only spending $2,800 a month. And that was to see, I mean, we went to, I don't know, 45 countries or 50 countries. I mean, it was like, that was a massive trip. I don't know. It was four years.

And we managed to do it on $2,800 without a month, without even trying. Right. I mean, without any effort, we were able to spend under $3,000. Do you remember what you sold that boat for when you finally sold it? Or I think you listed it publicly. If you didn't, let me know.

Yeah, I think it was $140. Yeah, it was $140. So we bought the boat for $157, sold it for $140. And if we hadn't had all those problems. And that was the other thing is that I think, so I've never sailed. I'm intimidated by sailing. But I think, how could you spend $160,000, $157,000 on a boat?

And I mean, you basically went and did it in a weekend. But when you come back with a sailboat, you had $17,000 of depreciation plus the 30 grand of repairs. So you wound up with $47,000 of costs spread out over four months. Right, about $1,000 a month, right? Right, exactly.

And I couldn't believe it. And then so then your next adventure after your trip across the country, you bought the Volkswagen, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you bought this fancy, epic looking Volkswagen van. And you spent, let's see, I'm looking here at your page, 60,000 miles, 525 days on the road.

And you probably averaged about $2,500 a month of expenses for that, right? Yeah, that's about right. Somewhere in that. And then your next sailboat, you got wiser. Oh, yeah, let's not forget on the VW bus. So we paid $22,000 for that. Fully restored, you know, really nice. And then we sold it in England for 15,000 pounds.

So basically, it was roughly the exact same price. So it cost us, we drove it 60,000 miles, beat the crap out of it, and then sold it. You and your wife certainly have a penchance for old fashioned vehicles that keep you up underneath them, though, don't you? Yeah, we love it, man.

You like style. Yeah, we do. It's fun. So I won't go through, I mean, every number, but just for the sake of time, but it's certainly, I would point people towards the budgets, because the key is, and it took a while for me to figure it out, living a standard lifestyle is expensive, and you're locked in.

But living a non-traditional lifestyle, if you can eliminate the expenses of the standard lifestyle, going on vacation in the United States is expensive, because you have all your current costs, but then you have your vacation costs on top of them. But if you can adjust to an adventure, then it can really cut your costs.

Yeah, for sure. Most people, when they take a week vacation, they'll spend what we do for two months of steady traveling. So I didn't mean to steal the limelight. I want to go back to getting started in trading. In the end of your book, Live on the Margin, you told the story, you said that you got started, you were making basically minimum wage, something like that, and you got your bank set up by selling a pickup truck and using that money for trading.

Is that true? Yeah, that's totally true. I started out as a pit reporter. Basically, I watched the traders make a trade, and then I called it into my little headphone, and then I got punched into the computer, and blah, blah, blah. And that was eight bucks an hour for four hours a day.

That was like, I'm a college graduate with two degrees, and that's what I'm working for. But yeah, you got to start at the bottom sometimes to get your foot in the door. And then I caught the attention of one of the brokers, one of the big brokers there, just for being a guy that looked like I gave a crap.

And then I worked my way up from there. He was a mentor to me. And after about a year or two of learning, just following everything, and reading books, and being taught as much as I could, my wife and I, we sold my pickup, put $5,000 into a trading account, and she said, "All right, here's your shot." She'd been supporting us, essentially.

I'm making no money. And so she's like, "Okay, here's your shot." And it just went up. It always went up from there. I never put any more money into it. And you were trading your own money. So when you went to Chicago, you weren't working for somebody, you were trading your own account.

Correct, yeah. So is that still possible to do? Because I never even knew that was possible. Sure, yeah, it's possible. It's rare. It was even rare in my day, 10 years ago. But yeah, you can lease a seat. At the time, I think my lease was like $300 a month, to lease a commodities badge, and get in the pit and trade options.

I think I had $50,000 to put in an account when I got to Chicago. I was able to trade in Minneapolis with a very small account to start, because I worked for a clearing firm. And they were kind of like, "All right, we'll let you slide on some of this margin, because while you work for us, we'll just keep your money." Right.

Indenture servitude. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, you needed a little bit of bankroll before you got to Chicago and played with the big boys there. But yeah, it's totally possible. So how did you learn? Was it reading books? Was it mentors? Was it all of the above? Because I'm very interested.

So I've never traded at all. And I want to talk through some of your book and some of the trading. I've always come from more of the investment background and primarily just working in financial planning, which has nothing to do with portfolio management. But I'm interested in trading. How did you learn from the beginning?

If you were going to go back and redo it, how would you learn again to become a skillful trader? Well, definitely, I think the way I did learn was the best way. I mean, started from the bottom, worked my way up. There was about three guys on that trading floor who I thought were especially smart, especially successful.

And I really tried to become friends with them and learn as much as I could from them. And I was also fortunate, because like I said, my boss was a mentor to me. And I mean, like on day one, he handed me this big, thick book. It's from Sheldon Natenberg, and it's called Options, Volatility, and Pricing, I believe.

And it's a textbook, really. But it's all about options. And I mean, if you need to learn anything about options, it's in there. And I devoured it. And he quizzed me every day. And he just constantly quizzed me for, I don't know, for a year. I mean, we'd just look up at the screen, and he'd say, "Okay, what are the $6 calls worth?" or whatever it was.

And he'd say, "Okay, what's going to happen if the futures drop a buck?" or whatever. I mean, he would just constantly give me these little scenarios and ask me what would happen. And I just learned that way. Is that something that becomes second nature over time, just by doing it?

Like you kind of internalize the formulas? Yeah, I think so, definitely. I mean, options are all I trade now. I don't trade much anymore. But I do trade, and I still trade successfully. But I trade stock options now, solely options. And for me, it's just, I mean, I don't even think about it anymore.

It's like riding a bike. It's just, it's options. But for a lot of people, just that word is enough to turn them off, because they just can't seem to grasp it. But I think if you break options down into the real basics, and you just kind of keep hammering away at it, it's something that you really can learn.

I think a lot of traders could take advantage from trading options. So Pat, I don't believe you, because the markets are efficient, and there's not anything you can do to find an inefficient market. You need to just simply buy an index fund. So I think you're lying to me.

What do you say to that? Well, I don't know. I don't think they're quite as efficient as people would like to believe. I mean, there is, there's manipulation out there. You have to kind of decide, I don't know what your, I don't know how to say it exactly, but how much risk you're willing to take on, and how much you can ride out sometimes.

You know, you kind of have to be, sometimes you do have to be good at kind of seeing where something is acting. It's just not acting the way it should, you know. A stock might go down, and you're just like, well, that doesn't make any sense. You know, there's nothing, based on reality, there's no reason this should be happening.

And in truth, I think that is true, that that can happen. So it is, it's something that you have to be able to ride out. I don't know. Do you track your performance in an academic way of some kind? No, I don't. No, I wish I did. But do you feel like, I mean, an honest feeling, I think you have the ability to be intellectually honest on an honest feeling.

Do you have any sense of what your personal returns have been? Have they been in excess of the market returns? Oh, I think they've been very similar to market returns. I don't think I've ever really underperformed too badly, maybe a couple percent. But I've also had some really good years that are, that far outperformed the market.

But if they've been similar to the market returns, then why bother with all the work of trading? Why not just sit tight and collect market returns? Well, I think that's, yeah, well, that's a good point. I mean, like I said, I've had some years that are significantly, and when I say significantly, I don't mean like the market made 10% and I made 12.

I mean like the market made 10% and I made 80, that sort of thing. You know, sometimes, especially with me trading options, you can hit a big winner. And if you trade it right, you let it ride, maybe you can add on as you're making, as the trade's going up, instead of taking profits every time.

Which is a hard thing to learn, because everybody's saying, "Okay, take profits, take profits." But sometimes you've got to realize the trend is still up, and you can buy more, and you can buy more, and you can ride it. I don't know. I mean, I have a hard time trying to teach trading.

Because, you know, for me, a lot of it is just kind of, I don't know, I don't want to say gut feeling, because that really sounds ridiculous. But I don't know. I mean, I kind of put so many different variables together in my own mind. It's not just laying things down on paper and saying, "Here, here, here, and this is what I'm going to do." I don't know, it's hard to explain.

But when I was in the pits, especially, I was what's called a short volatility trader. And when you're doing that, like, I'm basically short a bunch of options, and I want futures to essentially do nothing, would be my best scenario. But as futures would take off, if they go higher, at that point, I was supposed to buy in order to stay hedged.

This might be too technical. But if I bought up high, and then the market tanked again, well, then I was supposed to sell down low my future. So then you end up chopping yourself, you know, you're making some money on your options, but now you're losing it all because you're hedging so badly.

And I think part of my thing was that I was able to kind of sit tight a lot and not make those bad decisions. I was able to ride things out a little better. And again, part of that was my situation, especially back then, where I really didn't have anything.

And it was just me and my wife. And if we lost everything, you just start again, right? And nowadays, I guess my risk tolerance is slightly lower, but it's still kind of along the same lines. And I don't know. So I don't always advocating that everybody jump in and trade, but I am advocating that everybody learn how to trade.

Because I think if nothing else, you're taking some control and learning something that's definitely valuable. I mean, everybody should know how to manage their own money and how to trade that money. It's interesting because in your book, you talk about exactly what you said as far as taking control of your money.

And I'm no longer a financial advisor, but I come from that background. And I've struggled with this over the years. I reached the conclusion when I was managing portfolios that the only rational thing that a financial advisor can do as far as managing portfolios is help clients control their emotions.

And if you're going to hire a portfolio manager, you have to trust your portfolio manager to do the trading. And so my job as the in-between between clients was to help them manage their emotions. But I also came to the conclusion and basically buy and hold and commit to holding no matter what happens.

But that's exactly the opposite. You lampoon that in your book. But I've come to the conclusion, and feel free to disagree with me. I'm asking the question because I invite your comment. I've come to the conclusion that it very much depends on what type of person you are. And the type of person who's going to be a successful trader is the kind of person that's going to more likely to listen to everyone say, "You can't beat the market.

You just got to buy and hold. You can't beat the market." It's going to say, "Forget that. I think I can and I want to do it and be gutsy enough to go off and do it." And I don't know how to control for that because I think that in some ways, the advice to trade is great advice for certain personality types and it's horrible advice for other people.

And it very much depends on the personality type. What do you think? Am I wrong or am I right? No, I think you're exactly right. I think there are certain people that no matter how much they learn about trading, they're never going to be good traders. I mean, that just goes without saying.

They're emotional people who are just, you know, the second that market starts ticking down, they're in full panic mode and then it gets down a little bit more and they just sell everything. And then of course, it just reverses and goes back up. And they're the ones that, like I said, they chop themselves up.

They're selling low, they're buying high because they can't ride anything out. They just have that fear. And again, I still think everybody needs to learn how to trade. Even those people, I think, should learn how to trade. I just think it's a valuable thing to know. And plus, we should all learn things that we're that are uncomfortable with.

I think everybody should be learning all the time. But those people also shouldn't be putting all their money in trading everything. You can definitely learn how to trade without putting a lot of money at risk. Go ahead. How would you pursue if someone wanted to learn how to trade in addition to buying your book?

Would you recommend they go out and buy options, volatility, and pricing? Or how would you teach someone to trade? Just an average person listening to this show that says, "Hey, I want to live in an RV and travel full time for the last 10 years and be with my kids and make money in stocks." How would you encourage someone to learn how to trade today?

Yeah. Well, I think the easiest way, for the average person that's never made a trade, that they've got a 401(k) or whatever and might have had to pick a couple of different mutual funds or something over the years, but that's about it. Those people, I think, they should open a small account, something they're comfortable with putting at risk, and trade stocks.

I don't think everybody should just immediately start trading options. I think you need to just learn how to actually make trades, how to navigate your way around the website, whichever broker you choose to use, and just learn to make a few small trades. I also think, when I say that, I don't mean pick some wild penny stock that you've never heard of before or some company that you know nothing about, but a friend of a friend told you about it.

I think it's important for people to pick a few, I say pick 10 to 20 stocks, things that you use every day, things that you're happy with, brands that you're happy with. I'll throw this out. If you eat at McDonald's every day for lunch, there must be a reason for that.

You must like them, and you must be happy with the service or whatever it is. I don't know exactly, but you must be happy about that company and also, so great, so buy a little bit. But then you're also able to watch and see how things change over time.

If all of a sudden, you're looking at it and you're like, "Wow, this menu isn't changing. They're not adding such and such and doing this or that," you're able to see things and make decisions based on your real actual world experience versus trying to play catch up by doing research online, following the news on some company that you really have just, you can't even conceive of how they are actually making money, some semiconductor business or something.

What does the average Joe really know about any of these companies or how they work? You don't. So you choose a few companies that you're comfortable with and that you use on a daily basis, and you get into it that way, I think is the easiest way. It seems like we're doing a lot of just thinking lately about why we don't learn to trust ourselves.

It's a big subject, but it seems like in our society, we're taught not to have any confidence in our own ability to make decisions or to do anything. I felt this myself. I'm intimidated by sailing. I'm intimidated by mechanical things because I've never been effective. I've never felt confident with my ability to fix stuff, but somehow we're taught in our society and we're essentially conditioned not to trust yourself, but you have to look to an expert.

I am increasingly coming to the opinion that there's a place and a role for experts, but it's probably better to learn to trust yourself and learn something about it. A good place to start would be to invest in what you know. Yeah. I don't know if I've always been that kind of person that's willing to just jump into things.

I guess I have been, but you learn all these things and then you're able to put them into practice. I'm visiting my mother right now and her central vacuum had stopped working. She's like, "Oh, the vacuum's broken. That's it. We're screwed." I went down in her basement and I looked at this big contraption and I took it apart.

I was like, "Okay, I guess here's a motor. I'll take that out." I ended up putting a new motor in it and it works again. Why would I have ever known to do that? We're so ingrained to just, "Oh, that's broke. I couldn't possibly. What do I know about that?

I couldn't do anything," instead of just learning how to do it or just jumping in and figuring it out. I think the same thing like we were talking about with the stocks. If you pick something that you know, then you can be confident in your own decisions. Whereas, if you pick a company you have no idea about, you don't know anything about it, then any decision you do make is going to be based solely on other people.

A lot of people like that. They want to be told. If you go online these days and you type in any stock, you're going to get wild opinions for bullish and you're going to get wild opinions for bearish on every stock. How do you choose? You have to know.

I think, and I regret some of my own conditioning. When I was younger and I was studying, no one came alongside me and told me, "Josh, be self-confident. Why don't you pick some?" Just start having some fun with some companies that you individually think are going to be good.

I was so brainwashed by personal finance books that I can't possibly have an opinion. I can't possibly have an idea that would be helpful. I'm not smart enough to do this. If the mutual fund managers can't beat the market, why are you doing it? You should go and just focus on something else.

When I look back at it, now clearly, we remember the things that we would have gotten well and it's easy to have survivorship bias and confirmation bias. Seriously. I look back and there have been a number of times when I have felt very strongly, "This is a company." I think Chipotle, for example.

Chipotle was something that the instant I went to Chipotle for the first time and I heard all of my friends raving about it, I said, "This is a company that's going to be incredibly successful. My wife and I go out of our way to eat there whenever we can.

That should tell me something." But I didn't have the confidence to act on it and to move on it. That's a perfect example of what I'm saying. The company that you go, "Wow, this is great. I love this company. I want to invest in it." And then if all of a sudden you're like, "Wow, every bite of meat you're getting is all fatty and gross or something," you're going, "Okay, something's changed.

Our quality control is off. I'm going to get out of this. Something's not the same as it was back then." But otherwise, you're just riding it up because you're like, "This is still a great company." I've been thinking about how I can teach my son. I have a son who's almost one year old and I've been thinking, "Okay, how am I going to teach him to invest?" I've been exactly what you're saying, trying to think through what are the companies that he's likely to know from an early age?

What are the brands that he's likely to be aware of? Then I'm going to buy him some stock. We're going to talk about that. We're going to use that as a teaching tool to say, "You need to pay attention to these companies that you're doing business with from a few years old on to help him think like an investor." It's a great idea.

Your book title, the book that you wrote with your friend Nick Kelly, what do you mean by "live on the margin"? In the book, we talk about going out and living your dreams, doing these mini-retirements, whether that's flying off to Bali to surf for a year or sail around the world or something much less ambitious.

Everybody's got these things that they want to do and everybody's putting them off to 65, which then causes them to never happen. We're saying, "Yeah, you can do it. You can go out there. You can live on the margin." When we say, "Live on the margin," we mean we're talking about this is also a trading book.

We're saying you can trade a little bit of that money that you're using and maybe you can extend your burn a little bit. We're saying you're spending X amount a month to live this dream. You've got Y. You've got this many months to basically do this. What if you traded a little bit of that money during this adventure, which is basically what I do.

I don't trade all the time. I'm off doing all these different things, traveling all over the world and living all over the world and doing all these things. I'm only trading very rarely. I trade when I see opportunities that I think are interesting and also when I have time to feel like taking time away to actually do the trading.

I'm not making enough necessarily all the time to cover all my expenses, but I'm making enough to extend my time out there. Now, instead of going back to work at 35, now I'm 40. Maybe I can go a few more years yet. If I keep trading and making a little bit of money here and make a little bit of money there, then I'm 45 and I'm still going.

Tom: Running out of money is not the end of the world because if you look at the variety of experience that you've gained from doing things that are maybe non-traditional, there are always options. Once you've done it once, it's almost like you've cracked the code and you can pursue something else.

If you look at people who are successful entrepreneurs, they usually have a string of failures in their wake and it takes them time. I personally feel sometimes like I'm on a mission against retirement, but it wasn't until I read a book. I worked as a financial planner and I couldn't figure out why isn't retirement working because I thought, "Well, retirement's easy." After all, I read Automatic Millionaire.

All I need to do is just set aside 15%, cut out my latte factor, plunk it all into mutual funds, and I'm going to be set. Tom: You'll be done, man. Steven: I'm ready to go. I consumed all of these books and I just started looking at it and I said, "But it's not working for people." It really bothered me and I could never figure out why.

Why is it not working? I read a book called Out of Print. I went back and I started researching the history of retirement. There's actually a book called The History of Retirement. If you're interested, I did a show on it. What I learned is that retirement was invented as a political solution to an unemployment problem.

That's the whole basis of it. Tom: I'm sorry. Steven: Go ahead. Tom: Because people were already retiring earlier, weren't they? Steven: Throughout history, people have never retired. Retirement was always seen as something that was a negative thing. So the idea of being put out to pasture and not working was not an idea that most people wanted.

And if you looked at what happened, and people worked from the time that they were born through death. They just simply pulled back as they got older. But primarily you can trace it back, and usually the person who's attributed to it is Bismarck, Chancellor Bismarck in Germany. And what was happening in that day, depending on what historical account, I still can't figure out what's the truth.

I've heard conflicting accounts, and I haven't found any source that's academically rigorous to convince me of what it actually was. But it was either he was trying to eliminate some of his political competition, or he was trying to stave off extra socialism coming into Germany. And so he instituted a system of retirement in Germany.

But in the U.S., if you trace back the history of retirement, it goes largely back to the Great Depression, where you had a period of high unemployment, and it was generally thought that that unemployment was going to be a systemic problem going forward. And so how do we lower the unemployment numbers?

Well, we take workers out of the numerator or the denominator, whatever it is. And that way we can lower the percentages. But the people didn't buy it. And so then as productivity increased from, again, these are some of the academic research, and I'm not 100% confident on this, yes, but you could get more work per hour out of the workers, but you couldn't get it out of the older workers.

So then mandatory retirement came in at 65, and people protested and protested and protested. And it wasn't until about the 1950s when the idea of marketing retirement as a golden age of leisure came about. And this whole societal transformation has happened since about the 1950s, when Florida, going down and playing golf at Florida in about the 1950s became a doable thing.

So throughout history, retirement was seen as a curse, and now it's seen as the ultimate goal. And so then everybody feels guilty about, "I have to be saving for retirement. If I'm not saving for retirement, I feel guilty." And then all the money's locked away in qualified accounts. And it just seems like the perfect storm of, some people are perfectly happy, but many people are completely miserable, and they don't trust themselves enough to change, because I'm going to fall behind on retirement.

And it doesn't seem like the joy of life is quite there. And that's just been my observation. In your book, you said, I'm quoting, "The fact of the matter is this, you can always make more money, but you can't make more time." Right. It's true, isn't it? It is.

Yeah. I'm really trying to live those words. I lived my entire 30s just traveling, having fun, doing amazing things, writing. I would have never written two books. I would have never written dozens of magazine articles. I would have never done any of that. So I learned an entirely new skill.

I met countless amazing people. And another great thing about traveling is you meet all these different people that are doing the same thing, and you're like, "Oh, geez, how do they do it?" You learn all these different ways of making it in the world that you would have never been exposed to just going to your job every day and being around the same people every day.

But yeah, I completely erased my 30s without actually working a job. And I love it because I'm like, "I can always make more money." When I'm 60, whatever, however old I am, I can work. I might not make a ton of money, but I can work and I can get by.

I don't know. Things will be okay. They will. And two quotes I want to read from your work. One was from your book, Bum Puzzle, and you may have put it in a blog post, but I just wrote it down when I was reading the book. You said, "It's too bad everyone waits until old age to go sailing." Tell me about your battle with the cruising community.

Well, I don't know. I was younger then. I was a little more cheeky. Yeah, I've sensed that over the years. I mean, the cruising community is largely much older. It's the people that I'm kind of saying right now. I'm saying, "You're doing it wrong," but that's how they all did it.

And I don't know. But that's one of those things, sailing around the world. It's not easy. It's physically challenging all the time. It's mentally challenging. And you're walking through these countries. You're really putting yourself out there. And it's like, man, it's so much easier as a 30-year-old or whatever to be doing this than it is to be doing this at 65.

You're stronger and you're more vibrant. I don't know. So I was always like, "Gosh, it's too bad more people don't do this at 30 than at 65." Right. And you made a comment about in your book Live on the Margin, spearfishing at 90. When was the last time you saw an active 90-year-old out spearfishing?

And then I want to read one paragraph. You said, "We certainly aren't ageist or think that as we age, we become less capable. We don't believe that at all. But if we had a dollar for every time one of these older cruising couples said to us, 'You guys are doing it right.

We wish we had done this at your age,' we would be eating a lot more steak and a lot less hamburger. Let's listen to our elders. If they say, 'Go when you are young,' then let's believe them." Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how many of those people are like, "Well, yeah, not one person ever said, 'You're doing it wrong.' Like, wow, that's stupid.

Why would you do such a thing when you're young? I mean, that's just silly. Not one person out there ever said that." The people back home that were plugging away, still on the treadmill, sure. I'm sure a lot of them thought that. They're like, "Boy, you're making a mistake.

You're not going to be able to retire when you're 55 now." But the people that are actually out there doing it, they're like, "Man, that's right. That's the way to do it." I think some of the most valuable literature we don't read enough of is what are the people who are old and about to die, what do they say?

It's certainly striking when you see that how little of a place most of the things that we, when we're younger, are obsessed with have in what they say and how much it's all about not regretting, living without regrets. Yeah. Yeah. And again, going back to the ageist thing, I hate this conversation often.

It starts to sound like we're ageist, but the numbers are there. I mean, how many people, I don't know exact numbers, but it's like 75% of us are even going to live to 65. And of those 75%, how many are actually going to be physically capable still to do these adventurous things, their lifelong dreams?

There's only a fraction of those that are going to be able to. So, I mean, your odds, if you wait to 65 to do the things that you always wanted to do, the odds of that happening are slim. And it's not because I'm just saying that. It's because that's the way life is.

That's the real numbers. That's our bodies. That's life. Statistically, yeah, it is. You have lived on a sailboat in a Volkswagen van and in an apartment and in an RV. Which have you enjoyed the most? Sailing, RVing, the van? What have you enjoyed the most? Yeah. Well, I don't know.

It's easy to say the land-based RV, the VW, and now we've got a 27-foot vintage RV that we travel around in, too. It's easy to say that because it's less of a challenge as far as boats, man. There's just no way to describe how much work boats are. Constant work.

Engines and everything else. After we sailed around the world, I said, "Oh, never again. We're done with boats." And then a couple of years later, when we were pregnant with our daughter, we were like, "Well, that was a pretty good life for kids. You're on the water all the time.

You're always outdoors. It's great." So we bought another boat and we did that for another three years or so, three or four years. We just recently sold that back to the RV. So I don't know. They both had their pluses and minuses for sure. But I don't know. We're having fun.

We're having fun with the RV now. In a few years, that might change and we might get another boat. Who knows? It seems, I think at some point, we'll end up trying the boating thing. But I'm scared of just being bored. It seems really boring to me. Correct me, but I've never sailed.

But it just seems like hours and hours and hours of boredom punctuated by a couple of minutes here and there of excitement and a minute or two of sheer terror. Yeah, it is. And that's part of the reason for me, boats are for going somewhere. Otherwise, they do get boring.

We ended up on this last boat staying in Mexico for about three years. And then that's why we ended up selling it at the end. It was like, "You know what? We don't really have a plan for a big sailing adventure now. We weren't really interested in going around the world again or anything on a boat." And so it just wasn't doing it for us.

We ended up stuck in one place for a while, longer than we would have liked to. Whereas on land, it's like, "Okay, if you get bored at all, you just up and move. It's time you just go." So there is that. It does seem like if you want to travel a lot of miles and go for a long adventure, it's depending on what the cost of the boat is.

It's hard to travel as many miles as cheaply as on a boat. I mean, if you want to go around the world, if you can sail, it seems like it would be the cheapest way to do it on the lowest budget if you are a boat person and can sail.

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I mean, you can get yourself on a good, solid monohull, ready to go around the world for, I don't know, $50,000, which is considerably less than what we did on our first boat. But yeah, it's definitely possible. And if you don't run into major, major repairs, which you probably won't on an older boat, you can live pretty cheap out there.

Right. One other question on the money that I want to switch to and ask you about how you think about risk and fear. And we'll kind of finish up on that unless there's anything else that you want to talk about. Question is this. You and your wife found yourselves expecting a baby and didn't have any health insurance.

Now, I've read a little bit of your report, but share with us what you did and some of the numbers involved as far as how to have a baby in an affordable way without health insurance. Yeah. Well, yeah, we kind of knew we weren't going to have health insurance.

I mean, we'd been traveling forever, so we obviously didn't have health insurance in the States. It really wouldn't have done us any good. So yeah, when we got pregnant, we were in Argentina. And by the end, we were in, I think we were in France when we had the first ultrasound and we just walked into the clinic, paid $50 and an ultrasound, walked out.

And then we ended up flying back to the States and we went and saw one doctor. And it was just outrageous. I mean, the price they wanted for everything, cash was just insane. So we said, you know what? We're off to Mexico. So we just loaded up our car and we just drove down to Mexico and had the baby down there.

Yeah, it costs $3,000 for everything. That was all in, $3,000. And the quality down there was exceptional. We loved the experience so much that when it was time to have our second child, we went straight back. Same doctor, same everything. So yeah. >> That was $3,000 for a C-section, right?

>> Yeah, for a C-section. Yeah. And a couple days in the hospital and everything, doctors, everything, the whole works, that was everything. That was for the couple months beforehand doing all these different tests and everything else. I mean, it's definitely affordable and it's doable down there. >> It just seems like to me, that's one of the, in my experience, I think a lot about how to help people get over fear.

And I don't think everybody wants to live in an RV. I have a desire to do that. So I'm attracted to a lot of people who do that. But I don't think everybody wants to live in an RV. I don't think everybody wants to sail. But I think many people have certain things that they would like to pursue, but they don't.

And I try to figure out why. And to the best of my knowledge, I currently have a list of three things that are key. Number one is people fear, what am I going to do about health insurance? Number two, they fear, what am I going to do about my kids and their schooling?

And then number three, what am I going to do about my savings and retirement? And what am I going to do with that? And those three things to me seem so simple. Forget about the idea of traditional retirement. If you get old and broke, the government will support you anyway.

So don't worry about that. I'll come back and I'm going to actually ask you if you have an opinion on school, but I think school is the worst place you can put your kids. So anything you do is better than putting them in school, because if you want to destroy them, put them in school.

That's my opinion. And then health, there's so many options around the world. The rest of the world doesn't have the same problem we have. And I just was thinking, in the US, if you're having a baby and it's a C-section and I don't have health insurance, well, guess what?

You got a problem. But there are other options. Yeah. No, we could have easily just gone bankrupt having a baby up here. Easily. But yeah, there's other options. And everybody's fearful of, not everybody, but a lot of people are just fearful of going to other places, going to other countries.

I mean, we went down there. We don't really speak the language. We kind of do, but not great. And we were kind of on our way down to go to Mexico City. We thought, OK, we'll go to Mexico City. We like that. It's a cool city. I'm sure they've got great health care.

They've got big hospitals. So what the heck? And then somewhere along the way, we ended up in Puerto Vallarta instead. And we thought, eh, we kind of like the beach better, so we'll stay here. And yeah, it was really not that difficult. Health insurance has never been a concern of ours as far as getting things done down there.

If something catastrophic happens, yeah, well, I don't know. I don't know exactly what the situation will become then. Well, you deal with it when it comes. And yeah, you deal with it when it comes. And it's not that prudent planning is important, but sometimes I have a tendency to take prudent planning to the extreme where it binds you up.

Yeah. Yeah. It can tie you down. Being overly prudent, it will just strap you right down. If you try to plan for every single contingency, you just won't go anywhere. You won't do anything because you can't. You can't prepare for everything. Do you have any plans for schooling your kids?

Yeah. Yeah. We talked just recently. We kind of started talking about it more. We've been getting the question since day one, but what are you going to do? But yeah, no, we're not doing traditional school. That's a certainty. Yeah. We'll be homeschooling, doing some sort of program or whatever, but I'm not sure exactly.

Unschooling, schooling, homeschooling, we'll be doing something, but it'll be us, and we'll be teaching our kids and showing them the world as much as we possibly can. I'm thrilled to hear that. Any option is better than putting them into the government school system. Yeah. I can't imagine giving our kids what we've given them and then saying, "All right, well, it's time to move back to the States, and I'm putting you in this school, and you're going to sit there for eight hours a day, and you are going to sit and not talk and not run around and not play, and that's it." I couldn't do that to them.

It destroys your ability to live any kind of lifestyle that is affordable, because it's affordable in the sense of it immediately locks you into the US cost of living. It immediately locks you into traveling on holidays when prices are the highest. It immediately locks you into short-term travel instead of longer-term travel.

It immediately locks you into needing a car to get them there and then needing a car to go to soccer practice, and it just locks you in. It's so simple to me, and I won't go deep in education, but when you start researching the history of education, you start understanding why the school system exists, and it has nothing to do with the great learning opportunities, then it's an easy one to get free of.

Yeah. I think it goes back again to trusting yourself. We talked about it with stocks and with trading, but it goes back to you can apply that to your kids as well. Why do we trust somebody else to do this for us? Why can't we do it ourselves? Do you think you're an idiot?

You don't think you're smart enough? Or you just don't want to? Or what is it? I don't know. Right. It seems like if you are in control, you can take advantage of some of the most amazing educational opportunities that have nothing to do with school, whether that's putting your daughter in preschool like you did in Mexico, whether that's going to...

I'm interested in one summer and going up to New York and going to some of the Chautauqua conferences that they have, or going to the conferences and seminars where there's real educational opportunities. But once you're free of it, you can do it yourself. And an interesting idea on the schooling, and then we'll flip to the last thing and wrap up.

But you ever notice that you can sue... If you have an attorney that fails you, you can sue that attorney for breach of contract. If you have a doctor that messes things up, you can sue that doctor for malpractice. But you can't sue your child's teachers for screwing up your kid.

True. So true. That's anecdotal, but to me, there's something about it. Right. How do you think about risk, fear, and uncertainty? How do you balance those things? Well, sometimes I think I'm a bad person to ask that. Personally, I've always been able to take on risk and live with it without my heart racing, without my palms sweating.

I've just been able to do that. And I know that everybody can. So it's really, I guess, about managing that risk and only taking on small bites. Like we said with trading, you start out small, you just learn the basics. You're learning and you're teaching yourself something and you're probably going to lose some money along the way.

And that's probably not such a bad thing. But you need to learn to manage that risk and then to just kind of add on a little more and a little more and a little more, I think. Risk is how you're going to make real money. That's how you're going to outperform the market.

So I don't know. I don't know exactly what the answer is with that, but start taking some on. Don't try to avoid all the risk. It might be the biggest thing. So it may be easier for an outsider to see sometimes how people think. So I'll share what I see in reading your writing and just reading your writing, basically.

And I'm interested in it if you agree with it. But I don't think that you take on a lot of risk because I think with a trader's mentality, you're always thinking about how do I manage risk? And it seems to me that this is one of the great – we only have one word.

It's called risk. And it drives me nuts because are we talking about standard deviation risk or are we talking about – like in looking at a portfolio. People have one word, risk. But to somebody who's comfortable with the actual factors going on, risk means many things. In investing, there are many kinds of risks.

And I think, for example, entrepreneurs, people often view entrepreneurship as risky. I have never met an entrepreneur who isn't very risk-averse. I'm sure they exist. But the entrepreneur thinks about risk differently and they manage it in a different way. And I think that the same thing. I mean, to me, with no sailing experience, sailing a boat across the ocean seems risky, especially being out in the middle of the ocean seems risky.

But every person I've ever met who is a sailor says that being out in the middle of the ocean is the safest place you can be. I experienced this when flying. When I'm flying in an airplane, a commercial airline, I get nervous and I'm listening to everything and I'm thinking, "Oh, this plane is going to fall out of the sky." But if I go flying in a private airplane, I have a brother-in-law who's a pilot, and I have an uncle who's a pilot, and a father-in-law who's a pilot, and they're very comfortable with the plane being on its side or going down or going up because they know where the margin is.

So what I view as very risky, that unknown thunk, they're not scared by because they know exactly what's going on. >> Yeah. For me, I think a lot of it, I've always been a guy that thinks in terms of probabilities. I'm thinking of statistically. I don't know, for instance, when we were sailing through the Red Sea area, that's a pirate area, the Gulf of Aden there.

But I knew that the year before, some 500 boats had gone through there, and of those, only five had been pirated in some way, just robbed or whatever. So I'm thinking, "Okay, that's a 1% chance of something bad happening." For me, at the time, especially with no kids, 1%, yeah, I can roll that dice.

I think I mentioned on my blog at that time, I was like, "You know what? If somebody gave me an opportunity, they said, 'This has got a 99% chance of being successful,' I would dump everything into that. So why would I be afraid of sailing through that area?" And it's the same thing for flying in an airplane.

Statistically, it's just obscene to think that you're going to crash. And you can apply that to so many things, just sailing around the world. It sounds scary and dangerous, but the reality is, statistically, you're going to make it. Even if your boat does sink, statistically, you're still going to make it.

The odds just don't support the fear. YARO: And even if the worst case happens, you could rebuild. I think you are friends, or at least read the ... I think you're friends with them, because I think you said that on your blog, with the Rebel Heart boat. And I didn't ever read their writing until they lost their boat.

But I've been fascinated by just reading and looking at what they've done. And the reality is, here's the worst case scenario that I think I could imagine. You're out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You're a thousand-something miles away from land, and everything goes wrong with your boat.

Everything goes wrong with your communication system, and you've got a sick baby. And the worst case scenario happens. You lose the boat. They lost their boat. But thank God, they're all fine and their baby is fine. And he was ... I don't remember his name. Do you remember his name?

ERIK: That's Erik. STEVE: Erik. Okay. So he was prudent. He was prudent. He had the necessary things that he needed, and their lives were saved. And at this point in time, it seems like, yeah, they lost their boat. And I'm sure that wiped them out. But you can just tell they're going to rebuild, and they're going to rebuild a lot faster.

And you can make a great ... Yes, I'm sure it's incredibly disheartening that their whole dream was lost on the bottom of the sea. But it doesn't mean their dreams are over and doesn't mean that their life is over. Yeah, absolutely not. I mean, you can see, if you know them, read all their blog, you know that they're happy.

They're thriving. They've got jobs again. Their kids are healthy and happy. But they're also ... They're living a very small life. They're living as small as they can to rebuild and get back to the point that they were so they can sail off again. And yeah, it was a dramatic, terrible thing.

But again, it's not the end of the world. But they picked themselves up, and they're on their way again. Right. And in some ways, I just love hearing stories like that, because that's so much more meaningful than the people who just seem to have it all handed to them, and everything goes perfect.

Yeah. Because life doesn't go perfect. Yeah. And I always talk about that, too. When people say, talk about ... Just keep referring to sailing around the world or whatever, or even just going and living on a boat, I always tell people, do it. And what's really the worst thing that's going to happen?

You're going to decide, well, this isn't for us, or we don't like it. And great, okay, so you're going to sell that boat, and you're going to go back to doing whatever else you wanted to do. And you're going to be out of a little money, but you're not going to be broke.

You're not going to be destitute. It's not going to be the end of the world for you. You'll be able to pick yourself up again, and you'll be fine. Right. And even if you are broke and destitute, you can still rebuild, because you still have your skills. And barring the loss of your physical health or your physical life, you can rebuild.

Which is what's going to happen when you're older, much older. So do it now while you've still got all those opportunities. Right. I'll lob you one softball, and then we'll wrap, and then we're done. If you could redesign the American dream, and if you could speak to someone, like I'm sure you do when you meet a reader or a friend or someone, if you could speak to a young couple, a young family, something like that, what words of encouragement would you give them?

And what would you tell them to do? And what would be your anthem of the American dream? The American dream. Basically, what I would tell people to do is save up some money, take that first mini-retirement, go out for a year, two years, three years, as long as you could, and go back to work and do it again.

And every time, I think every cycle that you do that, all these different dreams and all these different cycles that you're going to go through, that you're going to need less as time goes on, but you're going to be richer. Maybe not exactly financially every time, but definitely through your life experiences, your connections with other people, your friendships, everything in your life is going to be so much better.

And it's just go out and do these things, but don't just fall into this trap that we have to do things a certain way. It just doesn't have to be that way. Your website is bumfuzzle.com. Your books, one of them is Bumfuzzle, which is about your sailing adventures. Your other book is Live on the Margin, which is an introduction to the finance of living a slacker lifestyle and also an introduction to technical trading.

And let's see, Twitter is Bumfuzzle, right? It is, yeah. Anywhere else online that you want people to find you? Oh, geez, I don't know. I'm on Facebook. It's @patschulte or Bumfuzzle. You can type in either one. I'm sure you'll find me. But yeah, check us out on Bumfuzzle.com. That's where we share our life and our experiences.

It's all out there. Yeah. And I would encourage someone. It's one of the most beautiful sites on the internet. And just as far as you take great pictures, and there's tons of pictures. And there are 10 years of archives going from your original post where you decided over beer and pizza to sail around the world.

And then you flew down to Fort Lauderdale, bought a boat coming up to current day in Portland. Yeah, it's all there. It'll take a long time to catch up, but you'll get there. Yeah. Pat, thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Joshua.

I appreciate it. And that's the interview. Pat, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I know it's challenging. It's challenging for you to find a time when you know where you're going to be enough to do Wi-Fi. We've been working on that interview for a long time, but I appreciate you're making the effort.

I really do. It was awesome. I'm going to close this show. And I just want to take a moment just to point out some things that I've learned from Pat's story. And sometimes it's easier to see other people than it is to see ourselves. Even at the end, it's hard to self-analyze.

And in our society, we're kind of taught that we're not supposed to necessarily look at ourselves too much. But here are some things that I've observed as general trends among people like Pat. And I just feel like many people would--not everybody, but many people would enjoy the type of lifestyle that he lives.

Number one, he did have an idea of what he wanted to do from an early age. He said he wanted to be a trader. He would see them on TV and say that I wanted to do it, be a trader. That's great. If you have an idea of something that you'd like to do, don't suppress that.

Don't say, "Oh, I could never do that." Follow it. Pursue it. See where it leads you. Next, he got a job at eight bucks an hour, but he didn't get a job because he needed a job during the money. I'm sure that he'd worked at many jobs younger in his life.

He got a job which would be close to something that he wanted to do to get his foot in the door to learn something. If there's a company you want to work at, go get any job at that company and prove how great you are and get promoted 16 spaces up, you know, 16 levels up.

But get a job close to something that you can learn about. So if you're going to work for a job, as many of us are going to need to do, at least stay in a job where you can learn something that's going to be useful for you. If you're working in a restaurant, view working in the restaurant as giving you the knowledge that you need to run your restaurant someday.

Next, he built a stake. Now in his situation, that was a fairly modest stake. He sold a pickup truck for five grand. That was what he started with, trading off of. But he built a stake of cash. If you don't have cash, you got to get some. Now again, he had a truck that he could sell, he could build from, but if not, you got to figure out a way to save cash.

That's why when I did that Walmart show on how to become a multimillionaire on a minimum wage, if you don't save money on a minimum wage, you have to, or there's no chance of getting ahead. You can't say, "Oh, I only make minimum wage, so I can't save money." No, you got to say, "I only make minimum wage, so I've got to save money." He took managed risks.

And that's what all about trading, especially if you get into options trading. We didn't get into the technical details today, A, because he's written an entire book on it, and B, it's challenging to get into the technical details unless you even start with what are options. So I'd like to do some shows.

It's not high on the priority list, but at some point I will do some shows on what are options. In the meantime, go read his book. But options trading is a way of controlling and managing your risks. He learned and studied a lot. Anybody who's going to sit down and read options, volatility, and pricing is a serious, dedicated student, and you can hear that.

I guarantee he's read dozens and dozens of books from other people, and he was getting close to people and learning. So you have to learn and become excellent. You have to control expenses. And this is one of the things that I think investors often do better than most other people, or traders or investors, whatever.

You have to differentiate the term, but in this case, it doesn't matter. If you're going to build a stake, you can't go and take that stake and blow it on a BMW. Now, if you made a million bucks this year and you want to buy a $50,000 BMW, fine.

But if you've got $200,000, you can't afford to destroy your portfolio by going and taking a BMW. So it's very clear when you read his writing about his story, then it's clear that he controlled his cash, and they didn't necessarily -- they weren't super frugal. They weren't penny pinchers.

They weren't extreme couponers, but they just didn't spend a ton of money. Next, notice that they followed their dreams. They didn't wait. They pulled the trigger and followed those dreams, not knowing where they would lead. And guess what? They led to different places than they thought they would lead.

And now they have a multidimensional experience, multidimensional skill set. And over the last 10 years -- it's funny, we didn't talk much about what do you do if you run out of money. In some ways, in the beginning, to pique your interest, I said he retired at 30. Who knows whether he's going to stay not working or whether he's going to need to work.

But the key is today. He spent the last 10 years, if nothing else, he spent the last 10 years building up a huge website. He's got followers of his website that will enjoy meeting up with him all over the world. That allows him to save money. When he was working on his bus this last summer, he had a listener or a reader of the show that offered him the use of his garage for all the winter up in, I guess, Minnesota, I think it was, to work on his garage.

That's something that would cost somebody money. But he's built up other kinds of equity beyond just financial equity. He's built social equity. And if he put out a note on his blog saying, "I'm considering taking a job of some kind," not a doubt in my mind he'd have multiple, multiple six-figure jobs offers to him within the week.

And I bet you some of those six-figure job offers would be multiple six-figure job offers. Because what he's done is he's expanded his influence. He's put together a portfolio showing, "Here's what I did and here's what I can do." So even though he's spent the last, what is it, 10 years playing, so to speak, he's actually built a portfolio and built an incredible base that if he wanted a job, I mean, I guarantee you he could have a job offer for multiple six figures within a week.

Other kinds of equity. And finally, it's clear from his writing that he holds the future loosely. I struggle with this one because I'm so much of a planner. I'm very much one of those people that wants to have everything figured out. And I'm learning just to hold the future loosely and see life as an adventure.

Excitement comes from change. This is one of the things that seems to be missing. Excitement comes from change. It's more fun and more exciting to pursue multiple careers in multiple fields because guess what? Every one of them you can learn from. And it's way more exciting to have a new career that you're learning something in and being challenged in than to do the same old humdrum thing you've always done no matter how much, no matter how good you are at it.

I want to close with reading two paragraphs from his book. This is from the first chapter of his book, Bumfuzzle. And again, strongly recommend, go and buy his books and read them. "On my last day of Friday, I walked into the pits and told a couple of friends that I wouldn't be there on Monday.

I was done, and Ali and I were going sailing. Nobody really believed me, but the talk soon circulated around the pits and before long everybody knew. The trading floor is really a different world compared to an office job. Here the news was met almost universally by whispering behind my back, most trying to determine how much money I had really made on such and such trade and the others predicting my demise at sea.

There were no pats on the back or high fives. When the final bell rang, I tore up my remaining trading cards and dropped them on the floor for the last time. As the pit emptied out and I was left standing there staring up at the blinking price quotes circling the walls, one of the largest brokers in the building walked up to me.

He was a nice guy whom I had stood five feet away from for three years and made thousands of trades with, but with whom I'd never really just had a talk with. It was well known by the traders that he was worth north of twenty million dollars, lived in the ritziest neighborhood, owned a bunch of outside businesses, and drove six-figure cars.

In these circles he was a god. He stood alongside of me, put his arm over my shoulder, and said, "I wish I had done the same thing when I was your age. Now it's too late, so I just come in here and hang out with all of you every day, day after day." We stood there talking for a few more minutes, and I realized that this guy, whom everybody held up on a pedestal, was actually filled with regrets.

While everyone else was busy wishing they lived his life, he suddenly wished he could go back in time and live mine. There's a time and a place for everything. There's a time to buckle down and work, sacrifice, work overtime and study. There's a time and a place to pull off and relax and spend.

There really is. There's a time and a place for everything. So just consider where you are and make sure you don't let fear and indecision keep you from pursuing something, if you know clearly that it's what you want to pursue. Thank you all for listening today. I want to finish today's show just with a special thank you.

I pulled up iTunes just a few minutes ago just for fun. I check this about once a week or so and check to see how the show is doing. I was thrilled and humbled to find that we are currently listed at number eight in the new and noteworthy section for the business section.

That is amazing to me. That's a very competitive section on iTunes to be in the business section. That's so humbling to me. That gives us a lot of exposure for the show. I want to thank you. It was through your reviews and your subscribing and your telling other people that that has happened.

That's so valuable. iTunes is not everything, but the way this works is that when you launch your show, you can have up to eight weeks in the new and noteworthy, from my understanding. That can give you a lot of exposure. I have heard from several listeners who have found the show through the new and noteworthy.

Thank you. I was even more thrilled to pull up the investing section and find that we are listed as number one in the investing section. That is awesome and super, super thrilling. Then I was also super humbled to pull up just the podcast section. Right now, the show is number 18, if I counted right, in all of the new and noteworthy for all shows from all genres.

I want to thank you. I never would have dreamed that I could make it. I was hoping that we could get the show into the new and noteworthy for the investing section. I was hoping that it would be maybe potentially for the business section. I never would have dreamed we could be there for all podcasts.

I want to just say thank you to you and ask you for your help. We're currently listed at number 18. I would love to have a stretch goal of being able to get over into that first screen on new and noteworthy. That happens because of your reviews, your reviews and your subscribing.

If you haven't left a review yet, I know I ask every day. It just pays me back so much. I want to read you a couple of these reviews and just tell you how meaningful they have been to me. Last time I read you, there was an interview called So Informative, a five-star review from India by Jason.

For an in-depth look of how to get your financial life in order, you got to listen to this. Five-star review from the US, excellent, by Jay Rosen. This is a very detailed and thorough podcast about personal finance. It has helped me to improve my financial game tremendously. That means the world to me.

Five-star review from, looks like, Seco, Florida. Action may be the most humane thing we do with the ideas in our head. Joshua Sheets' show provides the inspiration and practice to engage in action. Ideas are meant to be acted on and not just thought about. Look forward to the next episode.

Hugely helpful. Five-star review by Tutu. Joshua does a great job preparing for and delivering insightful financial information without going too deep. Great podcast. Thank you. This one was super meaningful to me, and I want to read it to you. It's a US five-star review from Anesh. I have a meaning to write a review as I have obsessively digested this content over the previous three weeks.

My life truly is different in three weeks. I've always been curious about lifestyle design, and I love how the host is able to look at finance from so many creative angles with the ultimate goal of freedom. Josh feels like a positive friend you wish you had, keeping you motivated to get your life in order.

I especially appreciated the show on spin farming, as it gave me an idea I can immediately implement from my home. Now the trick is to convince the wife of all these amazing ideas. I've combined this content with early retirement extreme, mad scientist, and get rich slowly to feel very informed.

And then, Josh, I appreciate your obsessive desire to continue to make the show better, but I reassure you the show is amazing. Please do not dedicate any more shows to explaining your philosophy of podcasting, because you already have so many disciples. You do not need to justify your approach any longer.

Keep up the excellent work. I missed your daily shows during the conferences. The daily shows in the past kept me going." Anesh, that is so heartwarming, and I just want to thank you personally for that review. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. Podcasting is a very intimate communication, and every day when I do this, I just feel like, "How would I speak to my best friend, and how could I encourage today?" I love how you are taking the ideas that I'm sharing and combining them with other ideas that you have learned from other places.

That's how creativity works, is take the ideas that I share. They're just my journey as far as me learning from other places that I have learned, and apply them in your situation. All financial planning has to ultimately be personal. And thanks also for the reminder to quit explaining philosophy of podcasting.

You're right. I'm not going to do it anymore. It's clear that many of you are enjoying the show and appreciating it, and it's doing exactly what I hope to do. I'm not going to apologize anymore for the show, and if I do, you hold me accountable. So many emails say, "Joshua, quit." It's challenging because it's a growth of confidence.

I've never done a podcast before, so it's hard for me because I don't feel like I'm very good at it. So then when you do that, you're quick to pull back and just talk about how you're not very good at it. But I'm done. I'm not going to do it anymore.

Thank you for the reminder. Five-star review from Abby in the U.S. This is a great podcast. I appreciate the advice. Five-star show from GDURHUXHXH. The show is packed with great information. I wish it would have existed 20 years ago. You and me both, if it had existed 20 years ago, I would have been listening to it for the last 20 years, and I would have been 20 years ahead of where I am.

Five-star review from Chris. Great show to learn personal finance. Joshua presents many things that most other bloggers and podcasters aren't talking about in an accessible way for most to understand, especially find the emphasis on tax planning beneficial. Thank you, Chris. Yes, we're going to do a ton more on tax planning because that's one of the biggest expenses that we all face, and there are a lot of ideas.

We've just set the basis, and I've got dozens more shows planned on that. Ian Farmer in Canada. Inspiring and informative podcast about the economics of life. I enjoy this show for the unique take on personal finance. I don't make a lot of money and haven't thought too much about saving or wealth in the past, so this is good for me to get introduced to personal finance.

Enjoy the interviews with people on unique and creative paths to meeting their goals. Ian, thank you. I hope that you can continue to enjoy the creative approach and to design your own approach to finance. BJ, five-star review in the US. Best financial podcast. This is by far the best financial podcast out there.

I look forward to Joshua's podcast every day and strangely don't mind my commute home. I've listened to almost every episode, and there are so many financial behavioral tidbits in each episode. I've recommended this podcast to many people and can't wait to follow the progression. BJ, thank you. That's what I'm hoping, is that every day this show will be here for you and to encourage you and keep you going forward on your goals.

Finally, new one from Ivan in the US. Five-star review. Original personal finance content from an amateur. Great podcast. Original and intriguing. Thank you, Ivan. Just a special excuse me. Just a special request. This feedback, and thank you to all of you who've emailed me as well. This feedback is what I love it.

It's just so thrilling to me. If you would, I would be really beholden to you. If you'd take a moment and leave a review on the show, it would help so much. We're almost about to be kicked out of the New and Noteworthy. It would be so thrilling to be on that first page of New and Noteworthy for all podcasts.

We're at number 18 right now. If each of you would just leave a review and a rating, that would be super huge. Tell someone else about the show. I would so appreciate it. We'll be back tomorrow. I'm going to be doing a Q&A show. I've got some questions to go through.

If you've got questions for me, feel free to shoot me an email. I still am trying to make the time to get the speak pipe installed on the site. Also, I got to fix the commenting system. If any of you are techie people and know how to do this stuff, I could sure use some help.

I got to figure out how to go from live fire back to the WordPress without losing all of your great comments. I've just discovered that the comments aren't showing up. I got to fix that. If any of you guys have...I don't know. I guess I'm asking for help, but I don't know how to do it.

I just am stretched with all the techie stuff. Thank you so much for listening. Come back tomorrow for some awesome Q&A and some interesting tidbits to send you into the weekend. If you enjoyed today's interview, I would love to do more interviews like this. If you have a favorite blogger, podcaster, or friend, if you have an interesting story, shoot me an email, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.

I would be thrilled to bring you on the show. We can all learn from one another. The thing about the show is wherever people are at in the process, if you're making minimum wage, it's hard to learn a ton from somebody who's making 10 million bucks. I want to have people on the show that are making just more than minimum wage, but on the other hand, I want to have people making 10 million bucks so we can all learn.

That's my vision. I'm just so thrilled that many of you are getting it and along for the ride. We've got good things in store. Have a great day, everybody. When you download the Ralphs app, you have easy access to savings every day. Get the most out of weekly sales and receive personalized coupons to save on your favorite items, all while earning one fuel point for every dollar spent.

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