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We've locked in low prices to help you save big storewide. Look for the locked in low prices tags and enjoy extra savings throughout the store. Ralph's fresh for everyone. Radical Personal Finance episode 52. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast for today, Tuesday, September the 2nd, 2014. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host, your guide, your confidante.

I can't think of any other adjectives. I'm your host, and today's show is going to be an interview with Craig Mathias from createmyindependence.com. I probably should be able to figure out some better adjectives and better terms and what not to describe myself. I'll work on that. Note to self.

Mental note to self. Thank you for being here after a long holiday weekend. I hope you had a great weekend. I did. Had a nice time with my family and friends and really had an enjoyable time. My wife and I went out to celebrate yesterday. We went out and celebrated by eating some sugar.

We've been doing this thing to try to cut back, so we've been eating sugar once a month. So every month at the end of the month, we go out. We got all the sugar out of the house and stopped adding sugar to everything and decided to stop eating sweets.

But every month at the end of the month, then we are going out and enjoying some sugary indulgence. So last month was cheesecake factory. Yesterday was Dairy Queen. I thought yesterday was the last day of the month. I didn't even realize it was a holiday weekend until Saturday. I think it was when we realized we figured out it was going to be a holiday weekend.

So we wound up having a great holiday weekend. I took it off and decided to cancel the show that I had planned for yesterday and had a good time with my family. I hope you did too. Today, however, we're back on the saddle. I'm going to be working hard here in the month of September to bring you some really great content.

Today's show is going to be an interview with a man named Craig Matthias, who is a blogger at createmyindependence.com. Craig is a really neat guy. I actually met Craig when I was out at the Podcast Movement Conference in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. We wound up having a really great time together.

I enjoyed meeting with him, enjoyed getting to know him. In talking with him, he blogs about some financial topics and then also about business. You'll hear that in his story. But I was so impressed just with his story and with listening to him and learning from him as far as where he is.

I want to be explicit with how I say this. It's important to me to bring you access to people that are at every stage of the journey. What I loved about Craig's story is that in many ways, and I hope this is not meant to... I want to build him up because I really think he's an awesome guy.

This is not meant to diminish him as a person, but he's just an average guy. He's an everyman. To me, this is what was really amazing about his story when he was telling me at the conference. He's just a really neat guy, a normal guy with a neat personality who had some good ideas as far as how to set out and follow his financial plan.

He wasn't earning an excessive amount of money, but he's building a business now and you'll hear in the interview. He started off deeply in debt and over a period of a few years was able to pay off his debt, recover from some financial mistakes, accumulate some savings and launch out and start an entrepreneurial venture.

The tips and strategies and ideas that he shares in the interview are accessible to anybody. There's nothing necessarily special about his story other than that he set a plan and followed it out. I really had an enjoyable time with this interview. I hope you like it. I hope that you're able to learn something from it.

Craig, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you being with us today. Definitely. Thanks for having me. What I'd like to start with, share with us a little bit about your background, especially as it relates to money so we can know where you're coming from personally. I'm about 30 years old and when I was growing up, I really like to talk about the two financial influences that I had.

They were my dad and my grandpa. My dad was this real frugal guy that, from my standpoint, it just looked like he was a cheapskate and it looked like he was no fun because he never would get us the cool things that all of the kids in school had and their parents had.

Then there was my grandpa who liked to have all these fancy toys. He bought all these fancy cars and trucks and lawnmowers because he was a farmer in his early life. He had all these cool toys that he liked to take care of and polish up. I gravitated towards his type of thinking about money, which was buying cool things with it.

Shocking. Yeah. I really was kind of rebelled against my dad's way of doing things because to me that seemed like, I don't know, it took away from fun. It took away from, "Hey, it would be cool to have all these cool things because then people think that you're doing well." You know what I mean?

It's kind of a status thing in society. A lot of things we couldn't have because of that growing up. So I rebelled against my dad's way of thinking. But then it really started changing around college and after college. My dad passed away actually when I was 17. So that influence kind of shut down around that time and so did my grandpa actually.

I became an adult at the same time that I didn't have these influences anymore in my life. My mom was always kind of someone that would give us what we wanted. So my brother, I saw him getting a little bit spoiled. He had a car sitting in the driveway before he was even 16.

Whereas I had to buy my own car, at least at that point, my dad would say, "Hey, you're going to buy your own car. We're not giving you a car." But then once he passed away, my mom just gave me the car. Did your dad do a good lot of financial planning?

Did he have insurance? Is that why she was feeling flush? Exactly. My dad did. He had a lot of life insurance. He set my family up really well. Great. My mom had the money to take care of us. What a legacy. That's great. It was a legacy, but it also spoiled us in those days and it could have turned out pretty dangerous.

So in college years, my mom bought me that. She gave me that first car. Then she co-signed a loan for a second car and ended up paying for most of it. So I got that second car, which was way nicer than I could have ever bought myself for really not very much money at all.

Then I went to college. My mom really helped me with that. All throughout college, I really didn't know what it was like to have to actually pay for things. Then when I got out of college, I got my first job. Then I was kind of on my own as far as not really relying on my mom anymore.

About nine months later, I took a road trip with a friend and my brother all the way down to California from Minnesota. We took my car, the paid-for car that my mom helped me pay for. I didn't really realize the value of it. Well, that car broke down in California and it needed about $2,000 worth of repairs.

Being young and stupid, I was easily talked into just dumping it and buying a new one. Over a repair bill? Yeah, because they said, "Hey, you know that $2,000 bill will make a great down payment for a new one." Wow. You say that to a 22-year-old and boom. It's compelling.

Sure. Understood. It doesn't take long to decide to buy a new car. I decided to buy a new car, one that I couldn't afford. About two weeks into it, well, let's just say that long story short, I bought a car down there, brought it back, didn't like it. I traded it up for a better one even yet.

I had a $20,000 car, 100% financed with a $30,000 a year salary. It's just ridiculous. You're nowhere near my 1/10 rule. No, not at all. That's what started it. I got back here and I knew how big of damage that car was going to give me because I calculated how long it would take me to pay that thing off.

Even if I threw every dollar I could towards it. It was going to be years. Given my small salary, it just really changed things because I never really liked debt. I guess I got that from my dad. I didn't like the feeling of having debt. I knew that, wow, this is a big debt here, $20,000.

That changed things. After that, I started looking around, "Hey, what can I do to get out of this?" I found Dave Ramsey. I started saving money. That was around the same time. How did you find Dave? Just turning around on the radio or did a friend help you out or how did you find Dave?

I think I found him either through the bookshelves at the bookstore or he, at the time, had a TV show on, I think it was Fox. Fox Business. He had a Dave Ramsey show as a TV show. I found it as a TV show, I think, and then I found his radio show.

That's great. I started listening that way. My story is kind of long. It's pretty ridiculous here, but it's throughout a bunch of years here. Once I bought that car, I started paying it down. That was right in 2008 when I bought that, so we all know what was coming up next, the recession.

The company I worked for had to lay off some people early 2009. I had like $500 in the bank to my name, $20,000 in debt, and I was pretty freaked out. That really got me thinking about finance, so I started shopping the bookshelves and stuff. I found Dave Ramsey, and his message really resonated with me because it was really a message that I got from my dad when I was younger, which was, "Don't borrow money." That's the way I was raised, really.

I had that kind of internal way of thinking that, "Yeah, debt is not a good idea." When I heard Dave and saw his stance on that, I was like, "You're exactly right, Dave. I need to get out of this." I stumbled around a little bit trying to save money in quotes like a normal person would, trying to cut on this and that.

But then I got slammed in early 2010. I had to have a double root canal done on my mouth. That was like $2,000. I didn't have insurance, and then I had to put new tires on my car, and I scheduled a vacation in, being dumb. When you're broke, you shouldn't take vacations.

Basically, I had a month where I spent like $5,000, and I only made like $2,500. I was going to say, how much were you earning at that time? Not very much, $35,000 maybe. At the end of the month, I looked back. I was trying to save money, and then I got set back like $2,500 in one month.

I blew a gasket, basically. I was like, "This is ridiculous. I'm never going to get out of this." That means I'm never going to be able to--at the time, I was thinking the American dream. I'm never going to be able to buy a house. I'm never going to be able to support a family, which I don't consider that part of the American dream.

That's something that I really want to be able to do is support a family someday. When I realized I wasn't on track to be able to do those things, I said, "That's it. None of these things are more important than that." I'm willing to sever anything that's not going to get me there.

I sat down, wrote down all my expenses, and basically started just putting lines through things. I cut my expenses down big time. That's really where the turning point of my entire financial path was. It was Memorial Day weekend, 2010. Wow, so recently. Yeah, it was four years ago. Wow, so how much do you remember what you were spending prior to that experience and what you wound up after that experience?

Yeah, I would say maybe $20--I was probably spending $26,000, $27,000, $2,800 a month before that. I don't think it necessarily happened all on that weekend, but I got down to, after that, probably averaging $1,700 a month in expenses. Probably cut close to $1,000 out of my budget. That's a major change percentage-wise.

It doesn't sound like much if you just look at the dollar figures, but percentage-wise, that's a huge, huge difference. Yeah, I just started getting extreme. No more eating out. I was sitting at home in the middle of the summer, and it was painful, but I needed to get myself out of debt.

It helped me. I was listening to Dave Ramsey's show every day after work for three hours. Right. The only way I could get motivated was to hear--I needed to get inspiration and motivation constantly to feed that. Yeah, when I was getting out of debt in college, a similar story for me.

My brother gave me a copy of Dave Ramsey's book, Total Money Makeover. I had always been kind of this financial nerd, and I always loved reading books, but I was very much into the school of thought that, "Well, that is a tool. That is a financial tool." My brother gave me a copy of his book, Total Money Makeover, and I read it.

Then I read it again. I was like, "This guy's dumb." Then I read it again, and I read it three times. Finally, the third time, it just hit me that the major takeaway that I said was--that I took away from that was to hear the phrase, "If you had no payments, how much money would you have every month?" Just saying it that way, "If you have no payments, how much money would you have every month?" It just brings such a sense of peace, just that thought.

I worked an entire year to pay off my student loans, which I went back and found the other day. I had thought there were more, but I wound up--I think there were about $12,000 that I had borrowed on student loans. My senior year of college, I paid for my classes, which I had to come out of pocket for classes.

Then I saved up and was able to write a check two weeks before I graduated to pay off my $12,000 of student loans. That was, for me, quite an accomplishment because I was working 40 hours a week. I was taking 19 hours of class each semester and studying for my senior capstone business courses.

One of the things that kept me going through, though, is exactly like you said. I would listen to The Dave Ramsey Show and I would download it. I did his membership site so I could get all three hours on the podcast without any commercials. I would listen to it three hours every day.

That was a huge thing. It's like a trusted friend being there encouraging you and saying, "You can do it. You can do it." You can do it in a world where we don't usually talk to people about money. I can empathize with your story. Nice job on that, by the way.

Thank you. Killed it. It was a real learning experience, but it opened my eyes. The key thing, it opened my eyes to a couple of things. It opened my eyes to seeing how if I sat down and made a plan--because what I had to do is I had to sit down and figure out-- A, I had to set a goal.

When I set the goal, I said, "You know what? I wonder if I can be out of debt before I graduate from college." I had some credit card debt, too. I forgot. I had borrowed something like $3,000 or $4,000 on credit cards to get myself through school. I was putting gas and all this stuff on my credit cards, and I was broke.

I forgot. It was like $12,000 of that plus $3,000 of credit card plus cash flowing what I didn't have covered with scholarships and college. I remember sitting down and just saying, "I wonder if I could do this by the time I graduated." I didn't really for sure know that I could, but I said, "Why don't I just shoot for this?" I set this really extreme goal, and then I had to sit down.

I went to my boss at the time, and I said, "I'm thinking about going back to school." I'll cut a long story short, but basically I had to make a budget. I sat down, and I said, "I'd like to continue working for you guys, but I need to work it around my class schedule." I got very organized, and I sat down, and I put out all my classes that I needed to get done, set out my class schedule.

I had taken a semester off, and so I was behind where I needed to be. I needed to go to summer school and take classes during summer school. I charted out every hour of my week, the 168 hours, and I made a budget for my time. I knew exactly where I was going to be and exactly what I was going to do every single hour of the week.

It wasn't necessarily fun in this sense. I remember there were several times, because I gave myself Friday evenings and Saturday evenings off, and then I gave myself Saturday afternoon for rest and relaxation, and then Sunday morning for church. I gave myself until about 2.30 p.m., and then at 2.30 p.m., I had to start doing homework.

I remember being so bitter sometimes on Sunday afternoons. Where I went to school was right on the intercoastal in West Palm Beach, and I would go down to the seawall, sit on the water with my textbooks, and I would be like, "I cannot wait until I don't have to study on a Sunday afternoon." But even to this day, I hate to do anything work-related on a Sunday because of that, because it went so deep.

But it just showed me the power. I got better grades. I got straight A's that year, and I learned more. What I found was, instead of in my earlier years in college, where I felt like I was smarter than the professors, all of a sudden, when I was doing my homework, I found out how smart my professors were all the time.

It was a real turning point in my life. It was a real turning point. Wow. I'm interviewing you, and there I derailed it. So my point was that I appreciate--I can empathize a lot with your story of how nice it was to have the voice of an encourager. Exactly.

We're both kind of the same mold there. We just need that to be able to be inspired on a daily basis, because this stuff takes quite a while to get through. So how long did it take you? Once you got focused, how long did it take you to get out of that?

Actually, not very long. I had made some progress by that point. The car was bought. I came out of college with about $6,000 in student loans. I know that's not much, but let me give you a couple reasons there. One, I didn't have good enough grades in high school to get into a good school straight out of high school, so I ended up having to go to a community college.

I "had" to, in quotes, go to a community college, which ended up saving me huge. The tuition was like $1,500 a semester. Nothing. So that's one of the reasons. I got lucky, kind of, by having to go to a community college. And then I had help, because my dad set my mom up well, and that was something that was planned, the financial aspect of it.

I was taken care of, and I know that. I was blessed to come out of college with only $6,000 in loans. So I had the $6,000 out of college in 2007, and then I got myself into $20,000 in 2008. So I was $25,000 in about the summer of 2008.

And then I paid off probably, I don't know, maybe $5,000 to $10,000 throughout that year. I guess this would have been two years later. I don't remember exactly where I was at around that time of May 2010, but I don't know, maybe $15,000 left in debt, probably. I paid off my last debt by the end of December 2010.

So it was only about seven months later I was out of debt. Awesome. Seven months after I made that huge commitment to get out. And I told everybody, I said, "I'm planning to be out of debt this year, by the end of the year." And they said, "What? How is that even possible?" But I did it.

Right. And I love that, you know, even just following the Dave Rangsley plan, he's very clear. If you're going to get out of debt, you need a plan that gets you out in one to two years. Now, there can be exceptions, but that one to two years is a good amount of time where you can really focus and stay committed and take whatever action is necessary to get there, and it applies that real focus.

And so that's a -- I mean, it really is, it seems to me to be a real key to success. Yeah, so -- So from there you started saving 15% of your income in gross stock mutual funds, you know, split evenly between aggressive growth, international growth in income, and growth mutual funds, right?

Started saving 15%, you fully funded your six-month emergency fund, and you worked very hard on getting rich and giving it all away, right? And so now you're continuing to -- right? You're following the Dave Rangley plan, right? No, I basically stopped right there with the Dave Rangley plan. That's funny.

So what then? And I'm cheating because I know, because we met at Podcast Movement Conference. So how's that for a soft fall? After you got out of debt, then what? Well, I actually did try to continue with his plan throughout what I thought at the time was baby step 3B.

So he basically says, "Get out." I think Dave Ramsey's the best for getting it -- helping you get out of debt. I don't think there's anybody out there better than him. I really believe that. So I think he's great for that. And now you'll find that everybody's going to bash him on the investment side of things.

I say, "Whatever, you know, just go do your own thing." Like, there's no reason to bash him on that. Maybe he's not -- that's not his strength. His strength is getting out of debt. So he's got a step after you get out of debt that's called baby step 3B.

And that's basically where you don't start saving for retirement right away or anything. What you do is you take that money that you were piling all towards debt, and you save it up for a down payment for a house. So at the time I thought, "Hey, I think a house is next." And I was so against debt at the time that I was thinking, "Hey, I'm going to try to save up and pay cash for a house." I had this crazy idea that I could do that.

And so I started piling all this money away for that reason. But then things started changing as far as -- well, let's say I think about a year went by where I was doing that. I was going to pile it away probably for a house. A lot of things happened that year.

That was 2011. One, I started making a lot more money at work. The income rose by $20,000 I think that year. Why? What did you do? I just rocked it for the company I was working for. It was a small company. We were growing throughout the recession. We grew from about -- from 2007 when I started we had about four employees, about $200,000 in revenue.

When I left in 2013 we had about $3.5 million in revenue. So we like over 10X'd it. Okay. And were you involved in sales? Like were you involved in contributing to that revenue? Yeah, I was. I wasn't involved a ton in sales, but I was involved in sales. I was involved in our relationships with industry partners.

I was involved with -- I was a team leader. I became the COO of the company actually. So I was basically internal operations. I ran most of the internal operations. And things were just going well. My boss just started dumping money at me throughout that year. Awesome. It was awesome.

And another thing, my grandma passed away, and I ended up getting a little bit of an inheritance. It wasn't huge, but it was I think around $10,000. And so a bunch of things, you know, more money from the company, I got this inheritance, and I was out of debt all at the same time.

So when you're out of debt, just like Dave Ramsey says, when you don't have payments, all of a sudden you have all this extra money. So throughout that year all this money started collecting. I'm talking, you know, thousands every month or whatever. It just started collecting. And I just threw it over to the savings account.

I didn't know what to do with it. I thought I was saving for a house. So by the end of the year, that's about when I started my blog, was the end of 2011. So it was a year after I got out of debt. I believe -- I don't know.

I probably had like $30,000 or $40,000 in my savings account. And I was, you know, debt-free. So that changed a lot. It changed my life quite a bit. But then throughout that next year, probably 2012, is when I kind of realized, hey, maybe I don't want to buy a house.

And I got into this -- I don't know. You know, there's a lot of stuff out there I started reading about, I don't know, early retirement and freedom and all this stuff about just being able to do what you want with your life. There's a lot of articles out there that talk about the downsides of home ownership, which I really never thought about until that time when I actually had the money to buy a house.

I paused a little bit and decided, hey, you know what? This apartment is actually working out pretty well for me. What do I need to go rush in to buy a house for? I don't have a family yet. It's just me. You know, this money doesn't need to be spent.

Right. And so I just decided not to spend it. And at the end of 2012, I decided to invest it in the stock market instead of buying a house with it. I did. I got in at a good time. I wish I would have gotten in earlier, but throughout the next year, I made like another $15,000 or $17,000 in the stock market.

So basically, those few years, I completely was out of debt. I stopped blowing my money on stupid stuff. I never did raise my lifestyle again after 2010. Even when I was out of debt and I started making $20,000, $25,000 a year more, I didn't raise my lifestyle. I left it down there at about $1,800 a month.

And so after about, what was it, three years, three years after that, so we're talking about spring or early summer 2013, I had made it up to five years worth of living expenses saved because it just all piled up. That's awesome. You know, I was $2,000 a month or so I was transferring over to my savings account or investments.

Awesome. Good for you. And then I got to a point where entrepreneurship was always my dream and I wanted to do it. And I got to a point now where just in 2013 where I just didn't see any reason why it wasn't time to give it a shot. I had the money.

I definitely had a good enough savings cushion. I had five years worth of -- if I stopped earning any money, I could go five years without defaulting on any of my bills, without going into debt. It gives you an amazing -- I was going to say it gives you an amazing buffer when starting a business.

Yeah, so I had that buffer. And at the same time, the whole success at my job just started -- basically it went away. It just -- you know, things just happen and there's like a -- there's just time. Everything has its time. And I feel like, hey, even though during 2011 I was doing so well in the company and me and my boss had such a good relationship, you know, he was giving me raises like every couple of months, that -- it all ends.

It doesn't all last forever. So, you know, maybe you love your job now but maybe in five years you won't. And in 2013 I started -- I was miserable at my job. So I had to leave. And that's -- I pulled all these things together. The fact that I wanted to become an entrepreneur, I had started a platform, I had an online platform and built a ton of relationships and stuff.

And I had all this money so I just decided it was time and I -- that's when I decided to leave my full-time job and go full-time -- just dive headfirst into entrepreneurship. And many people would probably call me stupid for doing that but I just think I just had to do it, you know.

How long ago was that now? It was just over a year ago. July of 2013. Okay. And what's your business? Well, I've been figuring that out. Right away I really didn't have one. But I knew it was possible that I could figure out what -- I could figure out ways to generate income streams.

Because here's my goal. I want to create a location-independent business that brings in enough income to support me and my future family. And I want to be able to work on my terms, work with people I want to work with on things I want to work on when I want to work.

And I don't really care what my business is. I could have five businesses as long as they're all things that I enjoy. And, you know, that allows me the freedom to do what I want with my life. And so at first I didn't really have a lot of ideas.

I thought, hey, maybe I'll sell something on my blog. That'll give me a stepping stone to the next thing. Maybe I'll start something else. You know, I have all these entrepreneurial ideas and I knew I could figure something out. So over the last year I've been through an entire -- a big, long journey.

It's been quite the year. But at this point I've started earlier in this year, 2014, I started a service business based around WordPress development for entrepreneurs. And I named the business Matthias Media. And I just started doing WordPress development, building websites, building blogs, helping entrepreneurs build their platforms. And I also got into helping entrepreneurs create membership sites.

There's a whole group of entrepreneurs out there right now that are looking to monetize their online platforms with membership sites, whether it's an online course or it's a mastermind group or some kind of an inner kind of site that's password protected where they sell access to. Huge deal right now out there in the online entrepreneur space.

I've dabbled into starting to create those membership sites for people. And I've gotten pretty darn good at it. And over this last year now, let's see, what is it? Today is September 2nd and I've generated over $20,000 in revenue this year so far. That's fantastic. So it's coming to a point where it's not going to be a heck of a lot farther where I'm going to be able to actually cash flow everything.

That's fantastic. My life and my business. Congratulations, Craig. That's awesome. Yeah, thanks. So the cool thing about this is that I can work on my terms. I get to work with who I want to, when I want to, from where I want to. So I see a future full of freedom and the ability to spend time with my family, travel.

This is cool stuff. I'm really excited about it. Did you, when you first started, like did you find yourself, I mean when you first quit, excuse me, I'm asking the wrong question. When you first quit, did you find yourself just wanting to sit around? Did you find yourself getting bored and needing to work or wanting to work?

Or how did you approach that whole, "Hey, I'm sick and tired of working. Let me just sit around and watch TV all day," versus, "I want to do something productive." You know, I don't think I was ever to the point where I'm sick and tired of working. But let me give you an insight into the reasons why I quit my job and why I didn't go get another one.

I would go into work every day and I would have to listen to whatever they wanted me to work on. So it's, "Hey, it's your job." And one day we had a meeting and it said values, company values. And they were like, "We want you to spend 40 plus hours at the office every week." You know, it's not just 40, it's 50 and all this.

Like they, basically they want you to spend your entire life at the office. And I'm missing out on really good summer days and just beautiful days. And I could be spending time with my family, but I have to be there all the time. And there was also other things that were going on.

Like I wasn't feeling respected. Sometimes the company culture gets to a point where they write people off for certain things. Like, "Oh, that guy, he failed on that project, so I'm not going to give him another one." So basically there's like this feeling that you are, you're kind of written off.

Or you have qualities that aren't ideal. And your faults just come to, people tend to focus on your faults, I feel like. And you go to work with the same, you're kind of dependent on the same group of people, the same boss that maybe doesn't respect you anymore. And basically you get to points at these jobs where they can really beat down your sense of worth.

And your excitement, your motivation, you don't have it anymore. You just want the day to be over. And that's what I was doing. I was going to work feeling like I didn't want to be there. Feeling like I had more value than I was offering there. And so I knew that that was, it was time to go because every day was making me feel worse and less valuable as a person.

And why didn't I go get another job? Well because I wanted to be an entrepreneur my entire life. That's been my dream. I mowed lawns as a kid. And as a teenager I had my own little business. And I just loved it. And I compared that to when I was, when I got my first job at 16, I was working at Walmart.

And how do I, the clock in and clock out. And people were always, you know I had to be there at certain times every day. And even on the nice days, on the weekends I'd have to be working. You know, it's just, the whole thing just sounded terrible to me.

And I really haven't enjoyed having somebody have that much control over me my entire life. So I forget where I was even going with this. It's an interesting point because one of the things that I have, I just gave this morning, early this morning I gave a speech at a Rotary Club over on Palm Beach.

And I was invited to speak. And I talked about, I talked about retirement. And the general point of the speech was that retirement is a broken concept. And I was invited, and this particular group of Rotarians, not all Rotarians are this way, but this particular group of Rotarians was in the, I would say the upper age band of society.

Most of them were established. Most of them, I would say the average age in the room was about 50s, mid-50s. And the person who invited me to speak said, you know, we always love, we love to hear from younger people, a younger perspective. And one of the things that I've observed in a lot of the business literature that I read and a lot of, and working with a lot of people that I, that I work with and that I talk to, there's a real challenge, a cultural challenge, because everything that you just said is, I don't want to use the word stereotypical, but it is, I'll use the word typical.

Typical of how many, you know, Gen Y and millennials think is exactly the way that you said. And it seems to me, I frankly do not know how companies can, are going to be able to assimilate the culture. I read, I've read some articles from human resource people, and they're talking about how to assimilate this culture.

I don't see how they can do it. The only way I can see it is either the company is the type of company that is a very self-directed culture, where you're given more responsibility, nobody cares what time you come, what time you go. That's why a lot of these startups, a lot of the big tech companies that in order to recruit, you know, attract people, that's what they've gone to, and it's, you know, it's infamous.

Google is infamous for their work culture. So either the company has the culture or it doesn't. And, but everything that you just said, just for those who are employers listening, everything that you just said is something I have heard dozens and dozens and dozens of times from millennial financial planning clients.

And it's not so much that you don't want to be productive, or that you don't want to work, or that you don't want to do something, or even that you dislike the work. It's largely about the environment. Agreed. And that's where I was at. I didn't, I was miserable there.

It's not that I didn't want to work. I do. Sure. I did want to work. It was that every time I tried something, I got bashed down for it. And coupled with the fact that I just don't like to have to go clock in at this time, and I don't like the reason, the fact that if it's a nice afternoon, I can't just leave, especially if there's nothing important to work on.

It's just that you got to sit there and look busy. I just hate that. I hate having to look busy when I could be doing something else instead. There was a book, have you ever heard of a book called "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It?" No, but I've heard of it.

I found this book, it was written back in, I would say, 2006, 2007. And the authors of the book, I need to, I just made a note, I wanted to get them on the show just to interview them. I was interested in this, but I thought this book was going to be the ultimate answer to this problem that we're describing.

And in the book, there were two authors, I don't remember their names, I think they were both, I think it was two ladies, if I remember, and they were human resource consultants. But they were talking about essentially transforming company cultures to what they called a results-only work environment, R-O-W-E for the acronym, results-only work environment.

And their major success story was going to be the Best Buy corporate culture. And at Best Buy, they had changed, they had come in as consultants, evidently, and had completely worked on the Best Buy corporate side. And they said, "Listen, coming into the office at 7 a.m. is not coming in early, and leaving the office at 3 p.m.

is not considered leaving early." And they tried to do away with all of that and said, "Each person has," they had one of their things, and you'd have to read the book to see how it integrates in, but it sounds crazy, but one of their statements, their course guiding statements on their manifesto was, "All meetings are optional." Nobody is required ever to come to a meeting.

Your job is to get your work done. Now, if your work involves you going to a meeting with somebody, you better make sure that you get the results. But we're not going to hold you accountable because Suzy has decided she has to have a meeting, and you didn't show up for Suzy's meeting.

We're going to hold you accountable to get the project done, and Suzy accountable to get the project done. But I was really disappointed because I was excited and said, "Maybe Best Buy will do really well." I haven't read a follow-up, but from what I've heard, I know that Best Buy, I believe, if my memory of the news is correct, a year or two ago, Best Buy completely revoked that, and I've not heard of another company pursuing that.

It's a real topic of interest for me. I'd like to speak to the book authors and see if they have any insight on what worked and what didn't. Because just what you describe is exactly what--I think that it doesn't have to be done in an entrepreneurial environment. You don't just have to work for yourself to get that, but you do have to have the type of job where it is time-flexible, and then you have to have the type of corporate culture where you are held responsible for your output and for your results.

Yeah, and I had that. I had that at my job probably from 2008 to 2011, and I really loved it. I'll be the first to say that I loved my job, but things change. Just because you found a job that's this way doesn't mean it's going to stay that way, because things change.

My boss was very growth-oriented, and he wanted to grow the business. So while we were 5 to 10 employees, 5 to 15 employees, I feel like we had this where I just loved going to work. It was very flexible. We could basically do whatever we want, and we were all really a part of the team.

We wanted to help grow the business. But then once you get to a certain point, then you've got to implement all these policies, because people aren't coming to work, people are calling in sick all the time, people are slacking off. So now you've got to implement all these policies, and I feel like that's kind of what happens with bigger organizations.

You've got so much bureaucracy that it just kills everybody's motivation. Right, and there can be multiple reasons. For example, if you're an entrepreneur, there's a certain locus of control. There's a certain number of people to whom you can effectively relate. So one person could effectively relate with 5 to 7 people and know what everyone's working on, whether or not they see them or not.

But now if you're supervising 25 people, you're probably beyond your ability to really understand whether everyone's working or not. So you have to have some sort of measuring, tracking device. And then the second is, if you're an entrepreneur and you're growing a business to sell it, one of the things that you want to look at when you are building the value of a business intentionally so that it's worth more money is having the business systematized.

And it's a real liability for a company if they are very dependent on an employee. So if I were consulting with a business owner, then I would say, "Hey, we've got Craig. He's our star guy." Okay, that's good. You need to keep Craig, but you need to have Craig write down everything he does.

You need to systematize it so if Craig leaves, we can just grab another one and plug and play, plug another employee into that slot and give them the manual. But you know what? That's a terrible thing. So great, that's a great thing for a business owner, but that's a terrible thing for an employee.

Exactly. Because you've been replaced. You've been systematized. You're replaceable. That means they can boot you out. They don't have to pay you very much because they can throw somebody else in, give them the manual and train them. And that's why there's a constant tension between what's good for employees as the business owner and what's good for the employee.

And that's also why wages are pressed down. Because when you can, in my opinion, but I've just observed this to be the case, if you can plug and play an employee, then you're not too dependent on, as an employer, then you're not too dependent on that employee. So if that employee says, "I'm going to organize a strike," okay, done, move, gone, next one.

Exactly. But, yeah, so as an employee, and then I'll give you the floor because I want to hear from you. As an employee, that's the reason why you have to develop those unique skills and make yourself less replaceable in order to command a higher wage. Yeah, that's the linchpin, right, from Seth Godin, the book "Linchpin." He talks about this exact topic.

I've not read that. You know, this exact concept, Joshua, is probably what made my life miserable at the end of my career with my last job. Because what I did was I was a pretty high-level guy in the company where my boss just said, "Hey, you know, do these things.

Develop this team." And I went off and read the book by Seth Godin called "Linchpin" where he says these exact same things. He says, "Hey, yeah, systematizing everything is good for the business." If you go read "The E-Myth Revisited" by Michael E. Gerber, you're going to see he tells you that as a business owner, you need to systematize the entire thing, okay?

Then you go read "Linchpin" by Seth Godin, and he flips that completely on-- he completely flips that around and says, "That's going to cause your employees not to be motivated." And so he says as a business, what you want to do is you want to give your employees opportunities to be linchpins.

You want to give them--you want to motivate them. You want to put them in positions where they can actually use their brain. They're going to be better employees that way. They're going to be more--they're going to be happier. They're going to be more motivated. I took that approach and I said, "Yeah, okay, we could systematize everything, or we could set up our team in a way that gives our team some motivation.

We give them opportunities to grow in their role and all that." I really restructured a lot on our team to give our employees--even if they weren't maybe the perfect fit for a specific role, I gave them the opportunity to learn how to be better at that. So I gave them a wider range of opportunities, a wider range of roles, of things to do and things to grow into.

And that motivated our team a lot. But my boss saw that. He said, "What? Why is such and such working on this? They're supposed to be just doing this." And basically it caused a big problem, and I fought back, and I said, "Well, I believe that this is what motivates them.

We're giving them opportunity to learn growth. They have all this opportunity and stuff." And my boss said, "No, I don't want them to have opportunity. I want them to just do their job." And basically there was this clash because I wanted to do things the Seth Godin way. He wanted to do things where we just put people in their little box and have them churn out their results without any growth opportunity.

I didn't agree with that. And basically I got myself in some hot water there where my boss said, "You know what? I'm not even going to deal with Craig. He just goes off and does these things, and I don't agree with him." So basically I had to leave. So it's funny how those things are at odds with each other in ways big enough that you can get yourself in big trouble by executing on them.

Majorly. Have you read Daniel Pink's book, Drive? No, I haven't. So you might enjoy that. I haven't read Lynchpin. I just added it to my list. But I remember there's an author named Daniel Pink who wrote a book called Drive. And the subtitle was "The Surprising Truth About What Really Motivates Us." Or something like that.

"The Surprising Truth About Motivation." Something along those lines. But one of the things that he really clarified, he did a lot of research into what motivates people, especially and including employees. And he found-- Hang on, my computer's ringing. One of the things that you find is that these-- with employees, employers often think that employees just want more money.

But what he found is that the primary drivers of what people want is autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose. And if people can achieve autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose, then they're able to be motivated. And the external wage is less of a factor. It's not that it's not a factor, but it's much less of a factor than is a sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

And I think it applies directly to what you're saying, is that you have that constant hustle. And I don't know how to resolve it for businesses. It's something I think about it a lot, but I haven't been able to wrap my mind around it as far as how you can possibly do it.

I do think that maybe there's a way to combine them if you--through the use of technology in some way. So, for example, applying the concept of systematizing everything and finding a technological way to make those systems efficient and documented, and then providing employees with-- or employees with a greater degree of autonomy and mastery and a sense of purpose.

But I don't know. I can't figure it out. Yeah, I don't know either. It's something I do think about, but I've applied it to retirement. It's interesting because I really don't think-- I mean, yes, there are those who do want to retire, but what I hear in your story is it's not so much about retiring and sitting around and doing nothing.

It's more about having a sense of autonomy and a decision, the ability-- The example that stands out to me that I remember from, you know, "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It" was they used the example of Saturday morning. The way that we approach Saturday morning, where most of us, we have things we want to get done on a Saturday morning, and some of them are fun and some of them are work, things we need to get done.

But if we're sitting down eating blueberry pancakes on Saturday morning, we're adults. We get to choose whether or not I want to sit down and continue eating these blueberry pancakes and do my work later or if I want to play in the morning and work in the afternoon or if I want to work first and play later.

We get to choose. But in many ways, the corporate environment seems to hamper that choice. Exactly. And, you know, I-- That's exactly the reason why I chose to-- I choose entrepreneurship in my life. I believe these things can exist in corporate environments and everything. I just don't want to-- That's not going to be my path anymore.

I know that they'll exist on my own, so that's why I'm doing this. You know? And I'm not saying entrepreneurship is for everyone. It's not. And you can probably accomplish these things by being an employee too. It's just that I'm taking this other route. You know what I mean?

All right. So how does-- So you're primarily doing WordPress development then. How does all your financial blog and your financial podcast fit into that? You know, I'm still trying to figure that out. I guess I started it mostly as a hobby to be transparent about what I was doing and share my success with others and build a community, and I've done that.

And I continue to build that community. And I am struggling on how to kind of merge that in. Because what I've found is that that platform-- It's very-- People really like it, but they're not necessarily in the market to buy anything from me. And I don't necessarily have anything to sell them that's going to be really valuable in that-- or that they're going to be willing to pay a lot for in that space.

Right. So it's been kind of a side kind of deal. It does help me create and build my network, which is the foundation of where I've been able to build all this. The only reason I've been able to build my own business is because of that blog and podcast network that I've built.

Because a business takes-- You need to have customers. You need to have a network of people. You can't exist in a vacuum and make money in a business. You have to-- It's people. Business is dealing with people. You're selling things to people. And that's how I find my people is through my activities, through the blog, podcast, and all that.

It's an interesting story to me because it aligns with one of the mental models that I have in my mind is that everybody should have some kind of online presence, mainly as a portfolio. And if you have some kind of online presence, then that allows you to discover opportunity even if the opportunity isn't where you anticipate it to be.

And the financial-- Maybe the financial blogging world-- It seems to me that the financial media creation world is a way that some people could make a business, but it's a very tough business to build. I agree. And that's not the primary benefit of-- Everyone making a million dollars with ads on their financial blog, on their get-out-of-debt blog, is probably not the primary thing.

But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. Exposure creates opportunity. So it's interesting to hear you say that. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't have done this without that. But it doesn't necessarily pay my bills by itself now. It gave me all the skills. So I'm talking about WordPress development and all this.

Everything that I've used to generate over $20,000 in revenue so far this year is because I learned all that, because I went out and started my own blog and my own podcast and started building things. It was all that I-- I learned all these from that. So even if it's not going to generate-- Even if your project that you go out and create isn't going to generate money by itself, it's going to teach you lessons that you can then use to go monetize.

One of the criticisms a lot of times in the financial independence early retirement community-- One of the criticisms is that young 20-something-year-old males often have this idea that somehow they can live on these tiny budgets forever. And they figure out and say, "Well, look, I can live on $1,700 a month, so therefore the 4% rule says, 'Well, if I can live on $1,700 a month, I only need--'" In that case, it'd be $500,000.

But let's say, "I only need $100,000 of savings, and I'm set. I'm financially independent for the rest of my life." And a lot of older people will kind of shake their head and say, "Well, you don't quite know what's around the corner." But you took the leap, and you said, "Well, that's okay.

I've got money." What have you learned as far as taking that leap? And at the beginning, were you specifically saying, "Well, that's it. I'm financially independent. I'm not going to work"? Or were you just saying, "It's okay if I spend some money while I figure something new out"? Yeah, the second one.

And by the way, I never claimed to be financially independent because I only had five years' worth of living expenses saved up. And the 4% rule or whatever would say that you need 25 years of living expenses saved up or investments and withdrawing at 4% a year. So I only had a fifth of what I actually would have needed to be financially independent for the rest of my life.

Yeah, I never claimed to not be spending down. I was open about it when I did it. I said, "Yeah, this is going to cost me money. I'm going to have to pull it out of savings. I'm going to have to live off savings for a while. But I'm going to figure this out, and my goal isn't to not work.

My goal is to work independently, earning my income independent of any job or employer." So my goal was to build up independent income sources equal to that of my expenses so that I wouldn't have to dip into savings anymore. I could leave my money in investments, and I would cash flow my life through independent income sources.

And so, yeah, I did have those expectations. "Hey, this may take a year. This may take two years." So I kind of said, "Okay, well, that's going to burn through, you know, whatever, $20,000. And this $20,000 I'm going to set aside to fund my life with while I build this business." I feel the reason I pulled that out, because you did mention that earlier, but I feel like this is a theme that--I don't know what to call it, but I spoke about it even just this morning in my speech.

And one of the things that--I'm not a fan of having all the money tucked away in retirement accounts. Because-- Agreed. Do you--have you invested heavily in your retirement accounts? Is all your money in your 401(k)? Is all your money out of your 401(k)? How do you have your money saved right now?

I don't have a dollar in any retirement account. Interesting. So I like that in many ways. And sometimes I worry about getting the reputation as, like, the anti-IRA guy, because I'm not anti-IRA. But the problem is that if you have access to capital, and that capital could take various forms, but if you have access to capital, then you can develop other options.

And just the ability to get your hands on your money when you need it, without having to bend over backwards and go through all this rigmarole of doing some backdoor account distribution, which is perfectly legitimate. I have no problem with it. But it's got to work in the situation.

It's got to be in your financial plan to do that. But so many young people sometimes--I've worked with clients, and even this was--I made this mistake myself in starting my new business. I screwed up. And I--at the time that--so A, I saved heavily in retirement accounts and in various deferred investments.

Then B, I bought a house. And when I bought a house, I was very--I made my choice very carefully. I knew exactly what I wanted. But I wrote a check for $50,000 into the house, and that wiped out a good amount of my savings that I had saved. Well, then all of a sudden, I wound up in this-- kind of this--a year ago, wound up with this very mixed up-- planned all of a sudden to start a business, and a different business, and close a lucrative financial planning practice.

And that really hurt me because I had to decide, well, I could pull money from retirement accounts. I've got a certain amount of savings, but I didn't have enough savings to be really comfortable with just living on savings. And so I had to go and figure out a new plan, because I wasn't willing to give up on the plan, but I had to go and figure out other sources of income that were going to pay my bills.

And I'll tell you, if I had known that my life was going to take the turn that it was, then I sure would prefer to have my $50,000 back in my checking account, because it gives you options. And the thing about it is that--what I like about it is that if one of the financial planning concepts--I won't call it retirement planning-- because one of the financial planning concepts that I think we should develop more heavily is just that if we have access to capital throughout our lifetime, then that capital can be the account that funds our activities, and we can work at a job, fund the capital account, use the capital account to launch a business.

It's taken you--let's say it takes you a year and a half, two years to be cash flow positive. Then in the third year, you start to be able to save money again, increase that capital account. But then, assuming that business goes well, you can change in another few years and change to something else.

And just having money makes you flexible, and it's a concept I think that we've lost. And I've cringed, because I've made this mistake with financial planning clients. I've screwed it up, and I've encouraged them in the past-- now, thankfully, this was a number of years ago that I can more easily admit it-- but I had everything in retirement accounts.

And I look back at it now, and I put too much in retirement accounts myself. I funded my Roth IRAs diligently, and I've had to learn the hard way and say, "You know what? I wish I had some of that cash. Now, I could go get it, and I could pull the money out of the Roth, but I often wish that I didn't have so much in retirement accounts and that I had more liquid money." Yeah, and that's the exact approach I took for the exact reasons.

And I think it just comes down to preference. There are a lot of people that will probably listen to this and say, "Those guys are nuts," and, "Craig, that's just absolutely stupid. Why wouldn't you put money into this or that?" Well, I look at all of that as--it's just controls that are being put on my money.

And yeah, there is an expense for not putting my money into retirement accounts. That expense is coming in the form of taxes. But I'm okay with that. I made that decision a while back. Hey, what should I do with this money? I've got $50,000 or $10,000 sitting here. Should I put this into retirement accounts, or should I not?

And I decided not to because I wanted to use that money. I wanted that money to be there so I could start a business. If I needed to use it to fund my lifestyle for a year or two, I wanted that money to be there for wherever my life took me and that I needed it for, I wanted it to be there.

And I know that, just like you said, if you put it into your 401(k), you put it into your IRA, well, then you've got controls put on it. You've got to work around their schedule on getting it out. You've got to wait until you're 59 1/2, whatever. All of a sudden, you put controls on your money.

And yeah, you get a tax break, but you've got controls. It's not just--it's a give and take. You're giving up control of your money, and in return, you're getting no taxes on it. You know what I mean? I think we talked about this down in Dallas a couple weeks ago.

There's just no one way to do this, and I think that's what irritates both of us so much about this is that everybody says you have to put money in your retirement accounts. And I think it just depends. It depends on what's more important to you-- saving on taxes or freedom, having freedom of that cash.

Right. Do you have any idea how much financially, absent living expenses-- have you invested in yourself to build your business? Have you bought books? Have you bought courses? Have you gone to school? How much have you invested in starting your business? This year alone, I've spent $8,000 in business expenses.

Okay, wow. So probably $10,000, $10,000, $10,000, $12,000 total. So the key here--and there's no easy way to make an accurate calculation of this because at the end of the day, we're combining two things that are not necessarily comparable. We're combining passive investments, doing something like buying a mutual fund and the return that you could get there or the return on equity with buying shares in a company, and then the return on your personal equity and the return on your sweat equity.

But if we were going to accurately compare them, then one of the things that we would do is we would compare the cost of the tax on not using those other deferred accounts and then the rate of return that you could earn and then the rate of return that you can earn on your skills on investing in your own business.

Do you feel comfortable that your rate of return that you can earn on your own business might be higher than what you could earn on a diversified index fund of publicly traded securities? Yeah, I think so, but that's not really how I'm thinking about this right now. It's more, "Hey, if I earn $1,000 more putting this money in the market versus my business," that's not really what it's about for me.

What it's about for me is that I get to have it there, peace of mind. I get to have it there if I need it, which is great. I like to have my money. There's just a certain peace of mind. When you have cash in the bank, it gives you a peace of mind.

The way I think about it is I just want to move my business-- what's important to me is moving my business forward. And that's not necessarily-- everything doesn't become about this, about making-- it doesn't all become about money. Sometimes what you're doing with your life and your purpose and your peace of mind is more important than money.

And so I don't tend to focus. I can tell you right now, I don't have any money, even in the stock market right now. All my money is sitting in my savings account. And I know that's-- there's more people that would say, "Hey, Craig, you're stupid. What are you doing?" I'm not sure what I want to do with my money right now.

I'm not stressing out about, "Oh, it's not making money in the stock market." Because it's there for my peace of mind, for my-- I feel good knowing that my income is not steady right now. I know that I would freak out if the market took a tank and half my money went with it.

I would freak out. And this is not the time for that kind of freak out. So money's sitting in savings where it can't be dwindled away from the stock market. And yeah, I'm missing out on some returns, but it's peace of mind. I feel comfortable and safe knowing that my assets are safe right now.

They're not going to stay in my savings account for the rest of my life. But right now, as I get my business started, get my cash flow built up, the big opportunity right now is not to make 10% in the market this year. The big opportunity is to take my business from $20,000 to $50,000 this year.

Right. The market's not going to make me $30,000 this year. I mean, it could, but it most likely wouldn't-- won't. That's like a really small chance. But to make $30,000 in my business is very possible. So I need to focus on that and not on-- you know what I mean?

I think there's more opportunity. And I don't know if this is the question you asked, but I believe there's more opportunity to make money through a business, at least if you don't have a ton of money. If you've got $500,000, maybe it's easier for you to invest it and make-- but who has $500,000 sitting around?

Not me. Right. If you do, go put it in the market, kick back, and go retire. But if you don't, then I believe it's probably-- it's a good idea to just go generate income through a business. And I think that's even a better opportunity than maybe making 10% off your money in the market.

Right. When you run the numbers, and if you run conservative numbers, there's never been-- I don't want to make an absolute statement. I want to make an accurate statement. Business is what ultimately creates wealth. Yep. But business is what ultimately creates wealth. And let's just use publicly traded companies instead of talking about privately traded companies, because there are many opportunities in private business as well.

It's for investment. But in publicly traded companies, the big returns have usually already been made. And that's why there's an initial public offering. So the initial public offering is the way for the-- generally, and this is a generalization. There are many other reasons. But an initial public offering of the shares of a publicly traded company is made so that the founder of the company can cash out.

You know, like Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook guy. He cashed out on his IPO, and so now he's been able to diversify his risk. But he's never going to make as much money as he made building Facebook in the first place. And so that doesn't mean-- however, if you don't want to build business, then coming in and working in the publicly traded securities market is going to be a tremendous opportunity for you.

But in general, I think it's better to view that as a way to preserve capital and accumulate capital that's passive capital versus active capital. And the difficult thing is models are valuable. You can come up with a model. But models all break down unless they're applied individually. So I would love to see people-- if they're going to invest money, I'd love to see them make some distinction between passive capital, money that other people are going to be using by investing in a business of someone else, and their own active capital.

I'd like to see a distinction between speculative capital and safe capital. Because sometimes, you know, to roll the dice on a speculative-- on a speculation, it may pay off big. It doesn't mean you're going to put all your money into speculation. But we had a guest on the podcast last week.

He was a poker player, and he made a substantial amount of income on Bitcoin. He saw it. He said, "I think this is a good speculation." He speculated on it, and his timing was good. Not a real great investment strategy for the long term, but it's certainly a good thing to do, and in the short term, that can be a really good option.

So we need to explore and develop some better models for how to view these things. And there's nothing wrong with publicly traded securities, but they're not going to get you rich. They're going to preserve the capital that you've built through your own business or through your own employment. Exactly, and that's kind of how I view them, too.

You know, I think it's preservation of capital. You know, like, I will put the money that I have made, either through my job or through my business, I do plan to invest that, probably a good amount of that, over the long term in the stock market. But as far as when it comes to earning my money, I plan to earn it through my business.

Right. And I just feel like that's a good way to earn money, because you have control over things. That's one of my biggest reasons why I have control over the income I make in my own business. I don't have control. I'm not running these publicly traded companies. You don't have any control.

You have zero control. When you're investing in the stock, you don't have any control. Right. Whereas I have control over everything that happens in my own business. Right. Excellent points all. Anything else you want to add here, specifically? And then I'll ask you to pimp your site, so we'll see if we can get you some listeners to your podcast and your blog.

Anything else that you want to add, though? No, I think we covered a good chunk of it. I just think that, like we talked about in Dallas, there's not only one way to build wealth. There's not only one way to live your life. We're always taught, just go to college, get a good job, then invest in-- stay out of debt, invest 15% into retirement accounts, and go about living your life.

There's not one way to do it. And as you can see, I'm choosing a different way to do things. I'm not doing any of those traditional things. I'm not staying in a job. I'm not investing in retirement accounts, and when I was saving money, which I will be saving again soon, I don't stop at 15%.

I go all the way up to as much savings as I can. If I can save 60, I save 60. And whereas this last year, I saved zero. In fact, I've burned through some of my savings. So there's just not one way to do it. It's just what works for you.

Just make sure that you do what's true to yourself, and don't just follow other people's rules for your life. The only wrong way to do something is-- the only wrong strategy or plan is a strategy or plan that you can't defend. That would be my thought. It's kind of a clumsy way to say it, but what I mean is that I often-- when I was a younger financial advisor, I would have told you--I said, "Craig, are you crazy?

"You have all this money. "You got to get this money out of your checking account. "It's just sitting here, and it's beating away at inflation." Because that was what I was taught, and that was what I took on. But then I did--I learned, I grew, and I recognized that my primary job was a lot of times just to--as a--just try to poke people and see if they--see if they had a plan.

And if a client had a plan, whatever that plan was, then that's fine. So there's a big difference between having $100,000 sitting in the bank, losing pace to inflation, earning .0 nothing percent rate of interest. There's a big difference between having that there because you just simply haven't found the right investment opportunity, and having it sit there because you're just lazy and haven't wanted to think about it.

And so the key is having a plan that makes sense, and there are many plans that make sense as long as they're thought through and the best plan at any time. And the plan will change as time goes on. So you make a valid point, and I agree. If we can teach people-- if we cannot just tell people-- we'll steal the fish analogy.

If we can't just tell people, "Do this," but rather we can explain to them, "Here's why you do this," then instead of having to follow a guru who is by definition limited because they're talking to everybody, then we can teach people how to become their own guru through self-development, and that's really the message that I love.

Yep, exactly. Website address for your businesses and for your financial blogs. What are your website addresses? CreateMyIndependence.com. That's my blog and my podcast, and I talk about creating independence, so I mix personal finance in with business. It was initially a lot more personal finance-related as I built up my savings and built up my financial independence, even if it was only partial financial independence, but now it's steering much more towards business as it relates to creating independent income so that you can take your life in the direction that you want to take it in.

That's CreateMyIndependence.com, and then I've also got Matthias Media, M-A-T-H-I-A-S. It's not a heck of a lot there, but that's my business website. You can go learn more there. Awesome. Craig, thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. It's been fun.

And that's the interview. Told you it would be good, right? Told you that we would learn something. Craig, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed speaking with you, and I learned a lot just from our conversation, more than I had even learned when we were talking there in Dallas at the Podcast Movement Conference.

I want to take just a moment and highlight a couple of things that I learned from his story, and I'll try to do this from time to time with these interviews to illustrate some of the themes that I observe, but here are some of the themes that I observed in Craig's story that seemed to me to be fairly constant when listening to people and their financial journeys.

Number one, he had a moment of dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is a good thing. It really is. It's a signal. It's feedback. It's feedback that something should change. So he had that dissatisfaction about where he was at and the money that he owed, and he just owed money on one car.

In many ways, not that big a deal, a fairly normal thing to do, but for him, it was a big deal. Number two, he found some resources and set out a plan, and that's what's so awesome about what Dave Ramsey does with getting out of debt. I mean, he does such an amazing job at giving such a clear, simple, straightforward plan to get out of debt.

He says, "Do it this way. If you don't do it this way, you're wrong, and you're stupid." Some people, I try not. Some people, though, that helps, and I tell you, more people have been helped by that than anything else. And so he found some resources, and he followed a plan.

Number three is that he took constant encouragement in while he was following that plan. Look at all of the great behavior change organizations of any kind, whether that's in building wealth and paying off debt, whether that's in losing weight or in avoiding-- whether it's Alcoholics Anonymous or Weight Watchers or--I don't know.

I'm blanking on other examples. But all of these organizations that are successful in helping people accomplish some change, there's always constant, constant encouragement. Any time that we're setting out to accomplish something, I think we've got to set ourselves up with constant encouragement. That's what I hope this show can become to you, is constant encouragement.

I really want to provide, in the same way that I was helped so much by--as Craig and I discussed in the interview-- by listening to Dave Ramsey's show every day. It would be my dream that someday somebody could come back and say, "Joshua, I was so encouraged every day by listening to your show." In fact, it's an achieved dream.

I've had people say that, and it just--it makes my day. It's such a rewarding, humbling feeling. Number four, while he was working and doing that plan, that didn't exclude him from starting to build a platform to build his blog. I personally think in today's world, everybody needs a platform.

I know that Michael Hyatt has branded that word like crazy, but it's a good word. Everyone needs something that's outside of their daily job. You need a plan B. And what was so interesting to me is that what he set out starting to build it on actually didn't wind up continuing on.

That isn't exactly what he planned on. He started off with saying, "Okay, I'm going to talk about finance," and then it grew into so much more. So just get started and learn something. Learn something. Next, he kept his expenses low. This is how financial planning interacts, and this is how the technical details of financial planning interact.

He kept his expenses low, and he built savings. So he had something to go on, and he didn't inflate his life. And because he didn't inflate his lifestyle, that puts very little pressure on a business. Now, if you already need $25,000 a month to maintain your lifestyle, that's fine.

We can still figure something out. But if you only need $2,000 a month to live on, because you're a single guy like he is and you kept your lifestyle fairly moderate, that's what an amazing-- it just sets you up. So he kept his expenses low. He built his savings, and that allowed him-- he launched when the time was right.

So as his job shut down and he got into a difficult situation, he left. And then once he left, he continued focusing on his skills and his learning. And that was what I was so impressed with about meeting Craig at the Podcast Movement Conference is that he was already earning a good amount of money from his consulting work.

He was able to help me with a couple of things just while we were sitting there talking at the conference. Oh, and here's how cool it is when you can get these things integrated. So he went to Dallas for the Podcast Movement Conference. He had a client in Dallas, a web client that he consults for from up in Minneapolis-- or not Minneapolis.

He lives in Minnesota somewhere. So from up in Minnesota, he was consulting with his client in Dallas. He was able to stay with the client, I think, if my memory is correct, which saved him money while he was there in Dallas, writes off the trip to Dallas as a business expense, writes off the cost of the conference as a business expense, and writes off 'cause he's there visiting his client, helping his client out with some work there.

And that's how you can use the tax planning stuff and the business stuff and integrate that into what I'm sure was an enjoyable trip for him that he enjoyed. Business conferences are not all humdrum and boring, even when they're legitimate. They're not all humdrum and boring. I'm not talking about taking some silly cruise where you do ten minutes of learning and try to write that off.

That doesn't fly. But, I mean, a legitimate conference. Craig went to that conference, and we were just standing around talking. We were standing there talking, I think, at the FinCon table. Philip Taylor, who writes at the blog PT Money, part-time money, he had a table there 'cause he lives in Dallas, and he had a table there advertising the FinCon conference.

That gave those of us who were at the Podcast Movement conference a cool opportunity just to have a place to-- who were in the financial world, who were there at the Podcast Movement conference-- a cool place to congregate and talk. So I think Philip Taylor introduced me to Craig.

We got to talking. We hit it off, and we had a good 30, 45-minute, 60-minute talk. I skipped the sessions and sat there and chatted with him. Well, the cool thing is that, A, I made a new friend. B, I found an interviewee for my show. C, I found someone who knows what he's doing with the financial stuff and with the WordPress stuff, and so we're going to try to work together.

We were talking after we hung up the call, and we were talking, and we were going to try to-- he's going to try to help me out. So I need some help on the technical aspects of this show. I'm not a techie as far as web stuff, and he's pretty good at that, and that's what his business is.

So we're going to try to see if we can start working together and helping each other to grow. So he's got a new client out of it, and we'll see as far as how our business relationship develops. But who knows? He could make back the cost of his conference many-fold just from one relationship, and I know that a lot of other business came out of that for him as well.

So that's why things like conferences can be such a win-win, which is why they're part of that 1,000% formula. I think--oh, last--oh, I was going to say, that's all I wanted to share on the Craig interview. I do have one more thing real quick, and then I'm going to give you just a quick update on the show, what you can expect for the month of September, and then we're out of here for today.

After we were talking, after we hung up from the Skype call, then was talking with Craig, and he was saying, "Oh, man, I forgot we should have set up something." So we talked and we figured it out, and we decided to set up something just for you, the audience, for him coming on.

Craig runs at his site, which is www.createmyindependence.com. At his site, he has a blog, he has a podcast, and he's got some courses that he does. He's got some resources and some webinars about building his site. And so what he decided to do is to offer a webinar for the Radical Personal Finance audience.

It's going to be a live webinar. He sent me the date. He's going to do it on Monday, September 8th, in the evening at 9 Eastern, 8 Central, if you're in the United States. Go to www.createmyindependence.com/rpf. www.createmy--he told me you've got to get the www in there. createmyindependence.com/rpf for Radical Personal Finance.

And he's going to be doing a webinar called "The 7 Steps to Creating and Growing a Business from Your Blog." And so this is some of his learnings. You can see what he's done. He's created and grown a business from his blog. And I spent some time talking with him.

He's done a lot of studies, done a lot of research, and I think that would be a really great opportunity. And he's developed a course from it. He showed me what he will present in the webinar, sent me a copy of it. I think it's going to be an awesome information for free.

And he's got a course at the end of it that he sells as well that will have more information. So if you're interested in that webinar, make sure to check it out. It's at www.createmyindependence.com/rpf. It really looks like a good offering. He sent me the info to the course here to check it out and see what his course is that he sells.

I'm going to check that out myself and see if I can get some tips out of there. So that's it for the interview. Last thing, update on the show. I want to thank you guys for listening. It was an awesome month last month. We doubled the listenership from the first month of the show here, which was July.

So last month, August, we wound up with 42,838 downloads of the show. And that was just awesome. And last week we've averaged almost 2,000 downloads a day, which is tremendous. I have gotten so much good feedback from you guys. I have e-mails, the reviews, things like that. Like I told you last week, we wound up--we were able to hit the front page of iTunes, which was a really cool--I never could have dreamed of that.

So I thank each and every one of you who is listening. I thank each and every one of you who has told a friend. I would ask you, if you've enjoyed this, tell a friend. That would be how we can continue to grow the show. And that's my dream is to grow the show and help people.

And the more we can grow it, the more we can figure out some way that it can free me up to spend more time tightening things up, doing a better job editing the shows, doing a better job being very concise. And it's just been so far so good. It's been awesome.

And so I just want to thank you for that. Here in the month of September, I'm going to be traveling for the last two weeks of September. So normal shows this week and next week I'll be in town with normal shows. I've got a bunch of interviews lined up.

And then I will be gone from the 15th through the end of the month. I'm going to do my best to leave you some shows during that time. I'll be going out to New Orleans for FinCon, FinCon '14 in New Orleans, which is formerly the Financial Bloggers Conference. It will be really interesting.

I'm looking forward to that. And then the week after that, I will be up in Pennsylvania at the American College where I will be finishing--this is the final requirement for my master's degree in financial planning, which is something I've been wanting to finish up. But I've got to go up there for a residency requirement, and then I will be back.

I will do my best to leave you with shows during that time. What I expect to do is I expect to leave you with some interview shows that hopefully I'll be able to record between now and the time I leave for New Orleans. And then I will also leave you with some other shows that will be prerecorded and also including hopefully some book reviews.

I'm going to do some book reviews for you guys of some of my books that I really like, books that I didn't, and leave that for you. And they'll probably be shorter, maybe so, maybe not. I haven't recorded them yet. But that will give you something to listen to while I'm gone for those two weeks in September.

And I just want to say, again, thank you. Appreciate each and every one of you. Cheers. Now go create your independence. 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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