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That's FijiAirways.com. You deserve this. Go from here to happiness. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Have you ever wanted to say goodbye to the normal work life? Buy a sailboat, set off into the sunset with your wife or your husband, sit romantically on the deck with a cold drink in your hand in some far-off exotic harbor, and then felt like perhaps you were a little bit limited because you had kids that were not yet grown?

Well, what if you could do it even with your kids? Today we talk with a man who did exactly that, spent three and a half years traveling the world in a sailboat with his six children. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I thank you for being here. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host.

Today is Episode 62 for Tuesday, September 16, 2014. Today we have an interview with Eric Hemingway, host of the Family Adventure Podcast. And like I said, six kids, three and a half years, 25 countries and 15,000 nautical miles. I don't know about you, but I often think, "Man, it would be fun to live on a sailboat." And then I often think, "Man, that would be a lot of work." And then I often think, "How on earth would I keep my son from dumping over the side and falling in the water?" And today I'm going to introduce you to someone who's going to help us with some of that information.

Today we are going to talk with the host of one of my favorite podcasts, which is the Family Adventure Podcast. Is it Family Adventure or Family Adventure Travel? It doesn't matter. Familyadventurepodcast.com is the website. And I think it's just the Family Adventure Podcast. And this is a man named Eric Hemingway.

And he and his wife, Rachel, I met them at the Podcast Movement Conference. And my wife and I really had enjoyed listening to their podcast. And what they talk about is the integration of life and family and adventure. And I'm sure you've picked up by now, but this is a subject that is near and dear to my heart.

And we have a lot to learn in today's show. I hope you enjoy. So, Mr. Eric, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I'm thrilled that you're with us today. Thanks, Joshua. Thanks for having me on the show. So we met at the Podcast Movement Conference. And I just want to give you a plug.

I had listened to your show called The Family Adventure Podcast. And in meeting you, I had heard podcasters talk about the thrill of hearing somebody's voice and feeling like, "Ah, I know that person." But you have such a distinctive voice that I was standing behind you watching a presentation, and I heard your voice, and I said, "I know that guy.

I know that person." But I didn't know who--I couldn't place it until you turned around and introduced yourself, and you said, "Family Adventure Podcast." And then it was like meeting one of my heroes. And I said, "Ah, we love your show. My wife and I really love listening to your show." So thank you for the work that you're doing with your show.

Oh, thank you very much. Yeah, I, like most people, don't like the sound of my voice, recorded voice either. So when you said that, it was pretty cool. I've told the story a few times myself because that was the first time that's ever happened to me for sure. Right, right.

So what I'd like to do is I've got a few things on my agenda for us to talk through, and I think this is going to be one of the most well-loved interviews on my show so far. Where I'd like to start, though, is before we talk about finance or anything, I'd like to start with just giving you an opportunity.

Share your personal financial story from as far back as you would like to go, as you think is meaningful. Share that story, some of the things that you've done well and some of the things you've done poorly, and especially how it relates to adventure. Okay, perfect. So I'm 43, and my wife and I, Rachel, we were married in 1990.

I was 19, she was 18, and basically high school sweethearts met and said, "Why wait? Let's get on with our life." We wanted to get married young. We wanted to grow up together, so we did. I was doing a couple of classes at a community college, and that lasted about a year and a half.

Rachel was working at a school, and I thought, "I need to get working. It just doesn't feel right going to school while she was working." So we were in a small apartment, $300 a month, just doing our thing, and then we moved to another small house. This is early '90s, '91, and this was when the RTC, Resolution Trust Corporation, all the savings and loan mess of the late '80s, early '90s was happening.

Fast forward a little bit, my brother and I had bought a chimney cleaning business. We were doing this part-time, and on my route one day, I saw this house, weeds up to the waste, and shingles were peeling off, paint was peeled off, and the house was for sale. I called the realtor, and he said, "Yeah, this is an RTC home, and this is one that the government's taken back, and they're trying to basically get rid of all these houses." I said, "Well, what are they asking for?" He says, "They're asking $65,000." It's a brick, three-bedroom, two-bath, had a swimming pool, which was green.

I said, "Okay, well, maybe we'd like to make an offer on it." Rachel and I talked about it, and he said, "Yeah, typically, it's not like a HUD home where they just take the highest bidder. They'll take the first bidder and negotiate with them, usually. If you come in low, then they'll counter back, and so on and so forth." I put in an offer.

We wanted to pay for our mortgage what we had been paying in rent, which was $275,000. That made our mortgage, our offer $35,000 on a $65,000 house. The realtor's like, "Well, maybe you misunderstood. Usually, you come close to the price, and then they counter." He said, "They're never going to go for this." I said, "Well, that's what we can afford.

That's what we feel comfortable with. Let's start there and see what happens." He said, "Okay, I'll turn it in." Well, they were so backlogged. It actually sat on somebody's desk for six months, seven months. We just basically forgot about it. Every month, we would call them and, "Hey, have you heard anything?" "No, I haven't heard anything." We were just going on living.

After about six months or so, we thought, "Well, let's put this to bed. Let's close this thing one way or the other. Either we're going to get it or not." There's somebody down there I can talk to, and he said, "Yeah, I'll just give you the phone to wrap in calling." I called, and I said, "Hey, we put in an offer six months ago on this house, and here's the address.

Any idea if this is anywhere to be found?" I don't know what happened, but she said, "Yeah, I'll look into it," and then thought, "Of course, never going to hear from them." We bought the house for $35,000. We were 21 years old and just thought, "Wait a minute." This was a revelation for us, being that young and going into a house with equity.

That was our first trip into real estate or whatever. From there, we lived there for several years. Then we moved up to northern Arizona and kept the house as a rental. In northern Arizona, I got into construction. I didn't know anything about construction. I just started sweeping up jobs and digging ditches and just a laborer, cleaning up job sites.

I stayed at that job for six or seven years and eventually became a superintendent and started becoming a project manager and building homes. Through that job and through our experience from the house we had in Phoenix, it really was like a crash course or an in-depth college-level education into real estate, real estate investing, and all that kind of thing.

But after several years at that job, it was high stress. I was making great money. I worked for a great friend, a great guy, still a friend, but it was just a lot of stress. By this time, we had two kids and a third on the way, and we thought, "We want to do something more.

We could just keep on this path and probably be fine, but we felt like we wanted to do something adventurous with our kids and really meaningful." I don't know if that gets you in the right direction. That's a good start. With construction, did you take any formal training or did you just have mentors that taught you and you applied yourself on the job?

Was it that type of thing? It was that type of thing, exactly. Definitely, my boss was my mentor, and he actually had a mentor that was helping him, and I was just catching overflow. He had a guy that was an investor and really coaching him along, building spec houses, developing property.

I was just catching little bits and pieces, and it was just a fantastic education. I was really, really grateful, still am, that it was that kind of situation where you get paid to learn, basically. I just tried to stay alert and just try to soak up as much as I could about the whole business, the whole entire real estate thing as a business, I guess, not just necessarily the nuts and bolts of putting together a house, but really how to invest and return on your investment and all those kinds of things.

That was just fascinating to me. Then at some point, did you go ahead and start your own project, buy a house, fix it up, build something? When did you start doing something for yourself? I did. It was in 2000, and our third child had just been born. I'm sorry, it was 2001.

I had a talk with my boss and said, "Yeah, I need to do something else." I mean, this stress, it's just, I want to try it on my own, I guess. We have this dream, one day we'd like to live on a sailboat, and this was 2001. Of course, it sounds ridiculous.

He probably thought it was, and I guess in the back of my mind, I thought it was. I just at least threw it out there and said, "Who knows what we want to do? We just want to do something different and maybe something adventurous. We don't know." I started my own business, and we had found a book called One Year Off.

It was about a guy who had sold his house and cars and traveled with his family. They had three kids, and they traveled around the world, kind of around the world air tickets. That was pretty impacting to me. It was a real game changer. I thought, because we had three kids at the time, I thought, "Here's a guy doing it.

This may be not exactly what he did, but something. We need to do something." My personality, if I could see the horizon and I could see the path, I'm going to be on the same path for 10, 15 years, I feel like I'm just withering up and dying. I need to be challenged and stimulated and all those kind of things.

This was a goal that we could do. This was actually attainable, and it really gave me a new hope, I guess is the word. We had that on the back of our mind when we started our business. We thought, "Maybe this will give us the flexibility to be able to do something like that." We ran a business, a construction company, for the next four or five years.

At times, it felt like we were going backwards on our big goal because we're investing in more property and building another spec house and had another baby. It's like, "Is the dream of travel even going to ever happen, or are we just on a different treadmill now?" That was the early 2000s for us.

Then, I guess it was 2007. We had come to the point, we were getting ready to buy another car. This was the catalyst. We were sitting there on eBay and looking at Suburbans. Should we spend $15,000 on a used Suburban, $18,000, $21,000 for a newer one? We're looking at all these things.

I don't know what it was about the Suburban. It was just the icon, I suppose. Rach and I looked at each other and said, "What are we thinking? This is just going to prolong. What happened to our travel thing? This is going to be another five years of paying this car off or four years or whatever.

Yes, we can buy it. Yes, it'll be bigger and more comfortable and all the practical things. We're like, "Before we buy a car, let's do it. Maybe this is the time to do our dream." We had been approached by a friend of mine in Arizona who had bought some property in Costa Rica.

He said, "I'm selling property and I'd like you to come down and build, do construction in Costa Rica." I thought, "Maybe this is the answer. Maybe this is what we want to do. We want to take our family down there and try it and see how it is living out of the US.

Just take a leap of faith and see what happens." That's what we did. We pretty much made a decision fairly quickly. We had been mulling it over, but the suburban thing came up and we thought, "This is it. Let's jump at this opportunity for Costa Rica." We did. We started selling things on Craigslist, started wrapping up the construction company.

We still had a couple of projects going. I had a fantastic superintendent that was working for me that we felt very comfortable with leaving at the helm. While he finished up the last few projects, we started making plans to move. We dropped the bomb on our family and friends and just said, "Hey, we're just going to go for it.

We don't know what's going to happen or if we're going to fail miserably and come back with our tail between our legs or if it's going to be a success. We have to try." It was what we felt like. In spring of 2008, we moved to Costa Rica and moved down there with our five kids and 20 suitcases and homeschool books.

We'd always homeschooled our kids as they had been growing up. We just took along the books. There were as many as we could fit and just kind of went for it. That really was a pretty pivotal thing out of our box and out of our comfort zone. What part of Costa Rica did you live in?

We lived in the mountains near a lake called Lake Arenal. It's right near a volcano. The volcano is at one end of the lake and we were at the other end of the lake. Someday, when we're not broadcasting, ask me the story and I'll tell you about the time I rolled a rental car driving around Lake Arenal on the way from the town there called La Fortuna up to the volcano.

Then, the tow truck got stuck and I had to help the Costa Rican guys get the tow truck out of the ditch while looking up at the Arenal volcano spewing red lava out its top. This was back when it was more active than it is now. Someday, I'll tell you that story.

Yes, that sounds like a whole episode right there. Let's do that one over a cold drink and not on the public airwaves even though I've just told it all away. That is pretty hilarious. I know that area and it wasn't hard to do to roll a car off that road.

It was on the road from La Fortuna up to the observatory. I know exactly where that was. So, we wound up in Costa Rica for what ended up to be almost a year and a half. This was, of course, in 2008 when everything was crashing down in the economy and the real estate here.

A lot of people were like, "How did you know? You guys were so smart. You got out at the right time," and all these kind of things. It was not that way at all. It was just blind luck, really. Had you sold your properties or all your properties? We sold everything we could.

We sold quite a few properties. We had some commercial real estate that we still owned and had rented out. Two commercial buildings in Arizona. We kept those and had tenants and stuff in there. So, we moved down there with that. Did you have an idea that things were in a bubble or did you just think, "Well, we want to go to Costa Rica"?

Did you have any inclination that real estate was in a bubble? I guess the way to best describe it is that the fun had worn off for me in building. A lot of people all of a sudden were in the real estate game at that point. Everything was a competition, developing properties.

It just got a lot less fun is the best way I can describe it. I guess we kind of thought, "This can't go on forever." Never dreamed it was going to get as bad as it did. We thought, "This is probably as good a time as any. Maybe we're going to miss out on more money the next few years." It's the same kind of thing.

We could just keep staying here and building specs and on and on and on. But for what? To make a bunch of money with no purpose. I never have gotten too excited about it. Just because for me, the money is a tool is the way I look at it.

You can invest it. There's different ways to invest it. That was what we came to the conclusion of is let's invest differently. Not measurable returns, not ROIs and all this kind of thing. But let's invest in our family. I think it would speak volumes to our kids if we dropped everything and went for this opportunity.

If that makes sense. Was the Costa Rica project a success? Was it a failure? Was it all you thought it would be? Was it fun? It was a mix of all of that. It was very emotional. It was not what we thought it was going to be. Looking back, of course, it was a stepping stone to what we eventually did.

It made it easier to make the next transition. While we were building there, we had 18 to 20 Costa Rican employees. I did not speak Spanish fluently when we went down there. It was just jumping into the fire and relearning construction all over again. They do everything differently. You're learning a new language and you're trying to cope with a new culture.

The kids and Rachel were shopping. I do not know if I would say it was hard, but it was challenging. Let's put it that way. We were exhausted the first couple of months. We went from Arizona to a hyper-oxygenated environment. Learning all these new things. Everything was new. We were dead tired by 7 o'clock at night.

We collapsed in bed, basically. As the U.S. real estate market was going downhill quickly, Costa Rica followed. The development that we were to be building in were not selling lots like they had hoped. We probably were doing projects for a year. I built three different projects there. An office building and a house.

That kind of thing. It was pretty much dried up by then. We were there and thinking, "Now what? Do we go back to the U.S.? Nothing is going on there that we're not going to miss out on." By this time, it was early 2009. It was obvious that there was no point in going back to try to build again.

A lot of people I knew in the business were folding up and getting out of the business. Everybody was just scrambling to survive at that point. We were very fortunate. While we had moved down there, an investor came and wanted to buy the two little commercial buildings we had.

We said, "Yeah, let's sell them. Why not?" We had a little nest egg that we had made from those buildings. Here we were without work in Costa Rica, just figuring out our next move. It was just one day we thought, "What about the sailboat?" We had talked about a sailboat seven years earlier.

Again, we weren't sailors. We're from Arizona. When we first got exposed to this family travel idea, one of the books we read was "Adventuring with Children." It was a couple, a man and a wife, who were schoolteachers. In the summer, they would take their kids on a sail trip through the Bahamas, close to Florida, maybe down to the Virgin Islands or whatever.

They were talking about how great it was because your house is there. It's familiar for the kids, their beds, their toys. You get to eat on the boat and save a lot of money. You're not buying airplane tickets. So many pros about traveling that way. I thought, "That's perfect." Even with an RV, you have to pay for fuel.

Here's a boat you can sail, live on, sleep on, and eat on, and all these kinds of things. I thought that would be cool, even though we have no idea about sailing. One thing led to another. While we spent our time in Costa Rica, we actually had a little 24-foot day sailboat that we would sail around on Lake Arnall.

That was how we learned a little bit about sailing, how to move the boat, how to tack, and just basically what everything's called on a boat and how to make it move. We really enjoyed that. It was just a day trip. It barely fit our family just for the day, much less sleeping out there and all that.

But we really enjoyed it. It was really relaxing. It's a gorgeous lake. It's about 50 square miles, and no one is ever on it. It's just a big, beautiful lake surrounded by these gorgeous mountains. We really enjoyed that, and it was a fun thing for us to do. We said, "Why don't we dust off this idea of living on a sailboat full-time?" We started getting on the Internet.

We found one in Greece. I made a trip over there, flew over to Greece, and looked at the boat to see if it would even-- Again, not much of a sailor, and not really sure what I was looking at. So we hired a surveyor, which is basically an inspection to make sure it's all what it's advertised as.

I was just basically counting beds to see if we would fit on the boat, and if there's a kitchen, and how it was outfitted. Actually, we were going to visit some family in the States, so we were up in the States in April of 2009. I had just come back from Greece, and we were kind of regrouping at my sister-in-law's house and my brother-in-law's, and the survey came back from the people that inspected the boat and said, "Everything looks fine.

There's a couple of little cosmetic things, but it's a sound boat." Then that was easily the scariest moment of our lives up to that point. It was, "Okay, we're out of excuses." We have the money. The boat was $80,000, 80,000 US, I think 60,000 euros. We have the money.

The boat checks out. There's nothing holding us down anywhere. Do we do it or not? When we sent the deposit over, we just did a wire transfer from the bank there. It was terrifying, to say the least. It's scarier than crossing an ocean or anything, just because it was for real.

Everything was sink or swim, basically. Again, we went back to this idea that this is an investment in our family. Our original thought was, "We're going to buy this boat. We're going to figure out how to sail it. We're going to go very slowly, one island to the next in Greece for a year, and then we'll sell the boat.

Hopefully, by then, the economy will be back in the United States, and we'll come back to the United States and start over." That was our original thought. I like the concept you keep bringing up about investing in your family. I look at that, and having done a fair bit of estate planning, one of the issues of estate planning is I want to leave my children an inheritance.

A lot of times, that inheritance is a financial inheritance. I look at that concept, and I say, "I can see why that appeals to certain people." It doesn't appeal to me now, but I'm also aware of the fact that I'm 30 years old, and I'm not in the situation where I'm that in touch with my own mortality and my desire to leave a financial legacy.

I've learned to keep my mouth shut about that, so it doesn't appeal to me. I look at it, and I say, "Here's my interpretation on that for me. Don't send flowers to my funeral, and don't send flowers to my wife at my funeral if I die, and don't spend your time writing a fancy eulogy when I'm dead.

I'm dead. I'm gone. Send me flowers now, and come tell me how you feel about me now, and that way, we actually can enjoy this instead of you saying wonderful things about me at my funeral." I feel the same way with an investment in the family. It doesn't make sense to me—and I'm not going to try to put this on anyone else—but it doesn't make sense to me to save a bunch of money so that I can give my kids a bunch of money when I die.

Why don't I spend that money on them and on building those close experiences while I'm alive while I can enjoy it? Then, instead of destroying their lives with a bunch of money, and they didn't have a relationship with their rich old dad, maybe they'll actually have a relationship with their dad and actually be close enough, and I can spend the money now while I enjoy it.

I love that concept that you're talking about. Yeah, exactly what you just said. You put it way better than I did, but that's exactly the thing I was thinking. You probably, being a financial planner, you study the statistics on what an inheritance of a large amount of money does to a 24, 27-year-old or even a 35-year-old when they get this windfall of cash and, unfortunately, never really got the tools to how to handle it.

It just kind of—typically, it doesn't end well. Yeah, if the statistics are clear. Now, you have to divide between did the parent do a good job of training their child because for somebody who is stable and who is well-trained, a large financial inheritance can be a blessing, but the parent has to spend a tremendous amount of time working and training the children.

If they just leave it and the children are not trained, then, yeah, it's a disaster. So it's not that—I mean if you've got $100 million, it's unlikely that you're ever going to be able to spend that. So it's likely that you're going to spend—you're going to leave a good amount of money to your kids.

But you need to make sure the key when you get into estate planning, you start working with some of the trust company. I have some friends that I spend time with who are advisors at some of the large trust companies here on Palm Beach. And what they spend a lot of time emphasizing is that the building of the family vision and the building of the family character.

So there is a unique subset of the population where you have to deal with that. But for many people, it's—many "average" people don't spend the time training their children in how to handle the money and how to handle the responsibility that goes with it. And it really just becomes a disaster.

Great point. Yeah. And that—I guess not that cut and dried, but that was a thought in our head. Yeah, it's true. And we thought, "Let's take this money and yes, we could put a great down payment on another house and get back on the treadmill and maybe our time in Costa Rica is done.

We can just sit down in Costa Rica and eat bananas and just wait for the next thing to happen." But I'm not much of a sitter or a waiter. So it was—we just felt like, "Let's do it." And we were all very excited about it. A lot of communication with the kids.

So what—the trip that we ended up taking was—you know, fast forward a little bit, but we ended up being on the boat for three and a half years. Went to 25 countries, and I think we sailed 15,000 to 16,000 nautical miles. Wow. And, you know, the whole thing grew much larger than we first anticipated.

But it was without those—without that first step to Costa Rica, I don't think we could have made the transition as easily from our house in the U.S. straight to a sailboat. You know, there was so many things that, you know, I won't get into about the adjustments we had to make and sacrifices that we made to comforts that we gave up to go to Costa Rica and then to the boat.

Again, same kind of situation. It would have really been a shock, I think, to go straight from a house, you know, the way we were living, to a sailboat. But Costa Rica was a great transition for us. So, you know, that was part of the mixed blessing of all of the things that went on there.

It really got us prepared as a family for going on the sailboat. And, you know, it was a fun time for us as a family to talk about, "Hey, none of us have done this before. I don't know how to, you know, sail a boat like this or anything about what it's like to check in and out of countries or what we're going to be doing." Or, you know, we're all on this adventure together.

We're all equals in that we're learning this. And what a great—it turned out to be a fantastic way to bond our family together and to see our—or have our kids see us in these uncomfortable situations and unknowns. And, you know, as the trip went on, we really involved everybody in a lot of honest discussions about our finances, our budgets.

And it was like, "Here's the money we have. You know, this is what it takes to live like this and live this adventure. And here's how much we can spend on food a month. And here's on, you know, all these different things." It was just a fantastic way to draw us together and an education for our kids.

How old were your kids when you first started the trip, the sailboat trip? So my daughter was 16. My son was 14. And then my next daughter, Emma, she was 8. And we had Zoe—or Lily, I'm sorry, who was 4. She had just turned 4. And then Zoe was just 2.

And then you had another baby on the trip, right? We did. So we started in Greece. That's awesome. Yeah, that was another twist to the plot. So we were in Greece, sailing, you know, made it to a couple different islands. And we met some people that said, "You have to go see Turkey." And we were on the eastern part of Greece, a string of islands, the Donikonese, over by Turkey.

And you could see Turkey on the horizon, you know, just the outline of the mountains. And they said, "You have to go to Turkey. You know, you will love it. The markets are fantastic. The people are great." And so we said, "Okay, let's go to Turkey." Well, we ended up being there for seven months and just fell in love with it.

And it was everything they had said and more. You know, just every town has a day where there's a fresh fruit and veg market and locally made cheese. And it was just fantastic. The people are so friendly, so patriotic. They love Turkey. You know, they love their country. They're eager that you are enjoying it.

And, you know, they just go out of their way. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that they didn't hate you because you were an American and that they're not desperate to get to the United States of America? It can't be so, Eric. Crazy, I know.

Yeah, it's hard to believe. Actually, we had people that were warning us, you know, "Hey, you're going to be over by --" You know, this is before we even were going to go to Turkey. We were just in Greece. "Hey, you're next to Turkey. And, you know, you're going to be flying an American flag, and you need to be careful." And a funny little side story is for Turkish people to have their boats registered in Turkey is hugely expensive, the taxes and all this kind of thing.

So what a lot of people do with the bigger boats especially is they'll buy a Delaware corporation and register the boat in the United States. So all of the boats or all of the big boats are flying U.S. flags anyway. So I think we'd have looked out of place if we had a Turkish flag.

Right. That's funny. Yeah. So that was that worry gone. And then, of course, as you know, you've traveled extensively, so people are people. And especially when you're traveling with kids, we found it to be just an amazing experience. Kids are amazing ambassadors and open so many doors. And it was hard to go through a market without the kids being given fruit and ice cream bars.

And something that we picked up along the way was we would teach our kids, the little girls especially, to say thank you in whatever language or whatever country we were in. And so, you know, somebody would give them an orange, and then they would say thank you in Turkish.

And then the shopkeeper would just light up and believe it. And then he's telling his neighbor, you know, the next shop over, hey, give him give him something and watch him say thank you, you know. And so here's our kids, you know, getting all this stuff and apples and, you know, ice creams and whatever.

And it's just it was just great. People really respected what we were doing. They were thought we were crazy. But there we were, you know, just fumbling our way through it and enjoyed every minute of it. So but while we were in Turkey, we found out we were pregnant with number six.

And so that was the turning point there where, you know, Rachel and I talked about how do we handle this? Should we go back to the US? Should we? Is this the end of the boat? And, you know, Rachel's an amazing woman. I'm very blessed. And she said, well, there's there's people that have babies everywhere.

Let's figure it out. And we found an American midwife that had moved to Israel. We talked with her on Skype and she was willing to take us, you know, to to help us with the birth. And so we sailed to Cyprus from Turkey and then we ended up sailing to Israel and had the baby in Israel and Jerusalem and on and on it went.

Yeah, the the the baby and the children thing, as far as like traveling with children and even having children abroad. It's interesting in the US American culture, we have a built into us. I don't know why. And it's not important why. And let me just I had growing up built into me this idea that we're the best, you know, we're the best.

We're the best at everything. We're the best country in the world. You know, we have it all great. And it was through traveling that just opened my eyes. I went to, you know, I traveled to New York City and I was in New York City is awesome. And I went to Hong Kong and I said, man, I would never want to live in New York City compared to Hong Kong.

You know, New York City is like the slums of the earth compared to Hong Kong. And and then we have this idea, well, we're the best, you know, we're the best in the world. We're the safest at delivering kids. And then, you know, my wife and I, we were expecting a baby.

So you start doing your research and all of a sudden you find out, wow, we drag the rest, you know, many, many countries in the world for the safety of moms and babies and children. And there are countries that are shockingly ahead of us where you would never think that.

And, you know, I think traveling is one of the healthiest things for all of us to do to to moderate the arrogance that we have with our nationalism a little bit. And and there are many things about the United States of America that are amazing and wonderful. And there are many things about many other corners of the world that are far more amazing than some of the things that we have here.

And in traveling with children, I love I mean, I love seeing children. And there's something about, you know, you're a you're a white skinned, red haired guy. You stand out in much of the Arab world. You stand out in much of the African world, much of the Mediterranean world.

And so do I. I'm a big guy. I'm six foot six. I got white skin and reddish hair. And every time I've traveled, it's just it's it's such a it's so such a blessing to be treated so wonderfully. And I've I've been convicted so many times just to be a better host in my country when there are foreigners here, because it seems like you're right.

The children smile and your children are blonde. I mean, it just the people are overjoyed to see them. And a couple of foreign words, you know, whether, you know, a shukran or a sheshe or whatever the, you know, the language is just opens up the world to you. Absolutely.

Yeah. And and shame on us as Americans, you know, for having that attitude. And I don't know that that's an interesting study and where that comes from. And I think it's just drummed into us, you know, because there's we're told there's so many people just dying to get to the United States.

This is the best there is. Don't don't. Right. Don't even bother looking outside of the United States because because everybody wants to come here for a reason. You know, this is the top. And there is, like you said, amazing opportunities here. Opportunities like there there is in very few places in the world.

Right. And and that's what I think people are drawn to. But there is equally as amazing things happening in other parts of the world. You know, we're not on top in education like we used to think we were. And and, you know, infant mortality rates and research and, you know, you could go on and on.

But it's just really incredible to see that, you know, not to get weird, but the global family and how people are are just people. And and we had some wonderful times with, you know, an Arab family or a Muslim family in Turkey or Morocco and sharing tea and fumbling with the language.

But just, you know, everybody's smiling because your kids are playing and and, you know, it's just fantastic. Yeah. So and the political issues that seem so divisive around the world, they do exist. But every place I've been, I remember being in Egypt. I don't remember five or six years ago and just sitting there and talking with talking with some of the Egyptians or other places that are not necessarily on the standard, well-beaten Western Europe travel path.

I've never found a I've never found the people to care so much about the stupid political games that the countries play. And there are certainly very small pockets in many places that that you need to be careful of. But, you know, I've traveled in Egypt. I've traveled in Colombia.

I've traveled in Haiti and I have had wonderful experiences in all of those places. And I've read books from people who have traveled in North Korea and Iraq and Afghanistan in the middle of war zones. I haven't had the courage to do that yet. But they've recounted very similar, very similar experiences in the same way that in West Palm Beach, where I live, there are certain parts of town you don't want to go to and you need to be careful of.

That's the same all around the world. But for the most part, people are people and they're just living their lives trying to trying to get ahead, trying to accomplish their goals, enjoy their families and their loved ones. And and and just live their lives. And and I've been welcomed everywhere.

So I love hearing those stories like you're sharing. Yeah, that's absolutely the truth. And and, you know, it's great. And it really restores your faith. I think maybe it's the media or, you know, whatever it is that that puts this this fear into us that it is a very slim.

The political people, you know, whatever wranglings they've got going on. I don't think I don't know if any average citizens really are concerned about it. You know, it's just like, well, that's what they're doing. And we're on doing our thing. You know, we're living our life. I heard a great story about a guy in he was visiting from Chicago.

He was visiting in Africa. One day they went down to a large river on the Congo River or whatever. But there's a guy on the shore and he's got his his his daughter there. And, you know, she's for a toddler and his wife's there. And he's just wearing like a basically like a pair of underwear and going out into the river, getting his nets.

And and this guy's watching this fisherman for a while. And, you know, just dark from the sun and hard work and thin and, you know, sinewy arms and all this stuff. And he's studying this guy thinking, man, is a radical difference from my life, you know, and my cushy life in Chicago on the on the train and all this kind of thing.

And so, you know, he went up and he was started talking to the guy and he's like, you know what? Your life is so different than mine. What are your main concerns? And he says, I just hope for a better life for my kids. And I'm trying to understand my wife.

And the guy's like, well, that's that's all I'm trying to do. You know, it's I think that's everybody. We just want something better for our kids. And we're just trying to to get along with our, you know, with doing the best we can with where we're at. Right. That's pretty that's pretty universal.

It is. It is. And it's the same since the beginning of time to now. And you can if you read enough, if you read enough ancient works of literature, you start to see, I mean, as Solomon said, there's nothing new under the sun. It's the same cycle over and over again.

Empires rise, empires fall. And whether it's the Roman Empire or the American Empire or the US American Empire, I mean, it's the same cycle throughout history. Share me share with me, because this is a finance show. Do you have any sense or record of what it costs to do your trip over three and a half years?

And you said 40, 25 countries, I think, 25 countries. Any idea what it averaged out to or what the total cost of that was for you and your family? We have not actually put together a number on the entire trip. And that would be a great thing we need to work on.

We did buy the boat for 80,000 and we paid cash for it because we didn't want to finance it and have a boat payment because we didn't know how long we were going to be going for. So that was the decision we made. And we met other boaters that that financed their boats.

And that way, obviously, is a lot less out of pocket. I do know that we are our average cost per month was any fluctuated between twelve to fifteen hundred dollars a month, depending on boat repairs. Wow. We bought we bought an older boat. It was used. It's 1985. And, you know, boats in general, even even people I talk to that buy brand new boats, they all take a lot of work and maintenance and repairs and just the nature of boats.

But so for a family of eight to live on to live on fifteen hundred a month was a big shock to us. Right. And that was part of the reason we thought we were only going to be able to go for a year is because we had enough to set aside to do it.

You know, we were thinking it's going to cost us three or four thousand a month. We don't know. And and when we found out how cheaply we could live and travel and we did live very simple, we never flew back home to to visit family. That was what some people do on long, long trips.

And we never budgeted that in or had the money to do that. And we didn't do a lot of souvenir shopping. We didn't eat out in restaurants very often. And we would go to a few just to get the cultural experience and, you know, go as a family. But and that was that was a challenge because everywhere we were at were these beautiful beaches and resorts and tourist areas.

And everybody there is on vacation and, you know, eating in restaurants and buying stuff. And it was it was hard for our kids to to see that and not, you know, we were we we just told them we're we're not on vacation. We live here and next week they're going to go home and go back to work.

But we're going to be here for the next month and the month after. And so that was an adjustment. But so I guess an average of 50, let's say, fifteen hundred. What does that work out to? Let's see. Over. Fifteen hundred, say, thirty six. Yeah. So that'd be about fifty four grand over thirty six months.

Yeah. Yeah. And it might have been a bit higher than that with, you know, some major purchases are along the way. You know, the baby in Israel that cost us even through a midwife was about twenty five hundred. So, you know, some of those expenses. So say seventy five thousand altogether.

Yeah. It's probably a pretty pretty close number. That's great. Well, what kind of impact now that you're OK, so you've been back from the trip now for how long? Two years, two years. And so I'm going to wait on my question and ask you just to finish up kind of the story up till now, because I want to come back to the question which was going to be the impact on your children.

But when did you decide to to quote to to pull the trip to the end and why? So once we had a baby in Israel and by this time it was another year and a half into the trip, our oldest daughter was she was 17 and our son was almost 16.

And we thought, you know, they were starting to express interest, like we want to get jobs. We want to start our life or plan for the future, get a car, you know, all those kind of things. And and so we thought, well, there's really no place like the US for us to do that.

They could easily work there. No visas, no hassle. And they can make a decent wage. You know, most places in the world you're you're going to be making very little. And so you're not going to get ahead. And so we kind of made the decision, let's sail west from Israel and we'll go across the Mediterranean.

And still didn't have plans to cross the Atlantic. We thought if we get across the Mediterranean and we feel comfortable and and we did not want to push ourselves and be reckless or unsafe, obviously. So we just made longer and longer passages, two days, four days, five or six day passage.

And then by the time we got to Gibraltar, we had already pretty much made up in our minds. Yeah, we should we should sail down West Africa and sail across the Atlantic. We feel like we could like our family can do that. And so we outfitted life raft, satellite phone, all those kind of things.

And and then made the trip. So that was another expense, you know, in in in doing that. But it was a lot cheaper than anchoring, docking the boat in somewhere in Europe and then just hopping on a plane. Sure. For us, that was ten thousand bucks. I was just going to say, I mean, when you start having kids, all of a sudden, plane tickets are not a great idea.

It was not an option. Yeah. Yeah. So we can either spend ten thousand on airplane tickets and fly home in a day or we can spend four thousand on safety equipment and sail it in 18 days. Yeah. So that's what we did. So in January of 2012, we sailed across the Atlantic and that was an 18 day passage.

And then we spent the next several months coming up through the Caribbean islands, you know, plugging our way back to the United States. So since back we we relocated in Wilmington, North Carolina, kind of closed the chapter on Arizona and thought since we're starting over, you know, we can pretty much look at it as a blank slate and pick where we want to go.

And North Carolina kept coming up favorable homeschool laws, just great climate, you know, good lifestyle. And so we settled in Wilmington, which is on the coast. And we wanted to be close to the ocean because that's now salt in our veins. Sure. And so we were really happy where we're at.

So now that you've been back for a couple of years, have you had time with you and your wife to pull together your impressions of the impact on your family? What was the impact on your family? It's really hard to measure. We know it was hugely impactful for us.

And, you know, I don't want to put it across to people that there's no way to be close unless you do some ridiculous trip like we did. Of course. Because I think there's always, you know, you can be a close family and never leave your hometown. You know, that's that that's nonsense to say there's only one way to do that.

For us, it was hugely impactful. It was great for our kids to see so much of the world, to to learn how to get along together. Something that we see is our kids are actually friends with each other and can play together well. And and even our older kids have a genuine friendship.

That's just very, very cool to see. And maybe going through hardship brought that or through adventure. You know, living on a sailboat is not glamorous. It sounds glamorous, but it's a lot of work. You know, washing clothes in buckets and carrying your water from town and you don't have a car.

So you have a little dinghy. You go to shore and you find the grocery store and you carry your groceries, you know, blocks and blocks or whatever. And so it's a lot of work, but it's immensely rewarding because it's just a very raw and real way to live. You know, you're you're anchored in these amazing places and we're anchored in the Fiumicino River right outside of Rome.

Wow. And you walk over the berm here and you take you catch the euro or the the train for one euro and you're you're in downtown Rome. And it's just, you know, so many epic things are happening around you and you're in these amazing locations. But but then you turn around and you've got to haul your water, you know, for for two hours.

You got to take this jerry can and go fill it up so you can put water tanks in your thing so you can make food. You know, it's it's that that kind of difference going on all around you. So it's a very intense way to live. And it was great, as I mentioned, for our kids to see us struggle with things.

Attitudes couldn't couldn't go on unchecked. You know, if somebody had a bad attitude or somebody was frustrated, it was hugely impactful for communication. You know, where there's no TV, no, not a lot of things to do leisurely. And and we were running on battery power. So it wasn't like you had a ton of light.

So many, many times after dinner, we just sit around in the cockpit for hours and talk about life and religion and politics. And our experiences and ways we grew up and all these kind of things with our kids. And and it was neat to spend that kind of quantity time together and just really talk through things.

And then, of course, everywhere we went, we would see see things and situations and poverty and politics, especially in Israel with the Palestine and Israel and that whole conflict. And and so that led to a whole other group of discussions. And why? Why is this country so much poorer than this country?

And why do these people always struggle and why? You know, not that we had the answers, but it was just fun to talk about. And and that was just a gift that I'm just so grateful that we had. I've been reading a book by a guy named Daniel Crosby called You're Not That Great.

And he makes the point. It's I think that's the title of it. I think it's Daniel Crosby. I'm pretty sure I've got my facts straight. But he makes the point in his his his thesis is that this is a motivational book, but it's not the normal motivational book. And he makes the point.

He talks a lot about self-esteem and he digs through some of the self-esteem studies that have been done in the past, talking about the details of how we at one time had this philosophy that we just need to encourage self-esteem by telling people that they're awesome and that they're great.

And he goes through and he shows out that she shows the academic thinness of most of those studies. But he goes and he digs in and he really digs into the meat and illustrates that the way to build self-esteem in a child is not to tell them that they're great or praise them for some natural giftedness or for some natural intelligence.

And this is where to generalize our our society has largely gone his way. And what he recommends is that the research shows that the way to encourage self-esteem in a child is to focus on how hard they work. So instead of saying, you know, Johnny, you're so you're so smart, I'm really impressed with that.

That paper that you wrote, it would be, Johnny, I can see how how much work you put into that paper. You really you really worked hard at that, because what happens is that if children's self-esteem is fed just by their natural, you know, you're naturally great. And again, I'm generalizing his his conclusions, but, you know, saying you're so great, you're just so smart.

What happens is that can build a fear and a lack of desire to push on, because then we want to pull back and we want to we want to keep that greatness and we don't want to worry. We're scared about losing it. But if you're praising the hard work, then illustrating that you worked hard.

That's a that's a theme that can continue. And it's interesting that you talk about, you know, seeing some of the changes in your children and in their relationships. My family, we never when I was growing up, we never went on a long, you know, two or three year adventure or anything like yours.

But my parents worked very hard to keep a very close knit family. And we would spend time. We spent a lot of time camping and we spent a lot of time in close proximity. And I my wife and I have been talking a little bit about this as our son gets older.

And I feel like one of the things that I want to do is intentionally allow my children to suffer hardship, not to necessarily, you know, I'm a good father. I'm not just going to go ahead and say, how can I torture my children, but to put out put us in opportunities where it's difficult, because if you don't have to, if you're sitting on a bus and your stomach is hurting because you ate some street food that you shouldn't have eaten and you're pouring down sweat because and then there's a chicken underneath your seat that's just pooping and it stinks.

All of a sudden, you have to learn to have a good attitude in that situation. And the time to learn that is when you're eight years old, because at eight years old, your parents can instruct you, fix your attitude. And you learn that you do have control over your emotions.

Well, if you're trying to do that at 33 years old and you're sitting and you're standing in line and say, oh, there's lines just not moving. Well, and you haven't learned to control your emotions, then you're doomed as a as a as a parent or the being forced to have close relationships with your close relationships with your spouse.

You know, I feel sorry and genuinely sorry is a little bit judgmental, but I feel genuinely sorry for children who grow up with their own rooms, because you never are forced. If you if you're not forced to share a room with somebody and work out your relationship, you're not you never have to deal with your own selfish tendencies and probably the health.

Now, thankfully, some people go to college and they have to face roommate issues, and then maybe they can have a chance to learn in college. But think about the marriage that when you come to a marriage and you were you were raised your entire life to be selfish, to have your own room, to have your own stuff.

No one's allowed to do it. Keep out parents. And you're raised with this selfish perspective. You bring that to a relationship and you expect things of your spouse that your spouse can't provide. But if you had the opportunity as a child to learn to learn how to get along and how to have a proper balance between personal space, personal belongings, but then also how to live with people in harmony.

I mean, your marriage is so much so much. I mean, it's easier. It's a lot easier to get started and have a positive marriage. And I feel like now every parent has to deal with their situation. So if it's not that, OK, if I have two children, a boy and a girl, that I have to put them in the same room.

But no, I wouldn't say that. Or we have plenty of money, but we have to live in a one bedroom apartment where we're all sharing space. Not necessarily. But as a parent, I think you have to look ahead and you have to say, how can I allow a circumstance in a situation where my children's character can be formed?

And one one way to do it is in what you what you described. That was definitely a benefit that we didn't go think of going into it. I mean, we knew there was going to be challenges and it was exactly that that, you know, that was really shaping their character.

And we we tried to use it as an obviously, you know, Rachel and I had plenty of times we needed to apologize for losing our temper, losing our cool. And that's good to see as well. I was wrong. I was out of line. You know, I'm sorry. I had a bad day, whatever.

But there was a lot of times where it was like, you know, our daughter, Maggie, she was the oldest and, you know, going into the boat, she was very excited. But after shortly after being on the boat, she realized, you know, this is hard and this is I thought we were just going to be shoe shopping in Paris.

You know, this is hard. And and so there was a transition time for her where she was. She wanted to be back with her friends and, you know, she warmed up to it. It was a four or five month time where she didn't like it. And then where she, you know, it was a lot of discussions about you're not always going to be in a situation you love your whole life.

Right. You're going to be in hard situations. You're in one right now. And, you know, this this is not the last time. I guarantee you that, you know, you're going to face challenge in your life. Why don't you learn from this? Why don't you give yourself the tools to cope with people you don't like or situations you don't like or, you know, all of those kind of life lessons that that everyone has, in my opinion, has to learn eventually.

You can learn them when you're 12 or 15 or you can learn them when you're 40. Unfortunately, some people never learn them, but that's a different story. But these these are these are life lessons that we're all learning here. And the the boat was just the vehicle, you know, that brought all this about.

And that's that was what led us to the doing the podcast because we were so our family was so impacted by it. We I mean, of course, the places you see are fun and we saw a lot of cool sites, but that wasn't the point of the trip. And that was just, you know, kind of what we did while we were on the trip.

But the trip, I think, was really to build that kind of relationship and give and to instill our kids with those kind of tools. Hopefully that we could instill in them a love of learning because that's going to stay with them for their whole life. I'm learning to sail when I'm 38 or whatever.

I'm learning how to exchange money in Israel and how to do this and how to do that. And and we had a lot of conversation about you guys, you know, our kids. We wanted them to learn to love or to love learning. Right. And because that's unlimited, you know, whether you decide to start your own business or you want to get into financial planning or you want to whatever you want to do, you're going to have to learn about it.

So that was another thing we tried to do. There's a story that Richard Branson tells in his autobiography, Losing My Virginity, and he talks, he tells the story. It's kind of become in some ways apocryphal, but just this this legend. But he tells a story about his mom taking him out in the countryside about when he was about five years old and dropping him off and dropping him off and saying, you know, can you find your way home and telling him to find his way home?

And he tells the story. Now, that's a different era. There's a different that's a different time period. There's a long time ago. I'm not saying that we should that we should copy this. That's a little bit extreme. But he tells the story in his book and he talks about what an impact that made on him, that how he learned to survive and he learned confidence and he learned to specifically talks about learning to overcome his shyness and ask others for directions and that that was an experience that happened to him at five years old that that really set him up for a lot of long term success.

That from then on, everything seemed easy starting a business. And I don't remember off the top of my head how old he was when he figured out he's a millionaire. I think it was like 19 years old or something like that. And then that continues on and you can see the same thing with all of his all of his exploits of, you know, flying a balloon around the world and and and doing just all of these these things that from then on and in many ways became easy for him.

And one of the things that I feel is in travel, you have the opportunity to expose your kids to challenges and whether I'm sure you sent. I'm sure you probably sent your kids off in the dinghy and said, you know, that the water filling station is a mile over there.

You've got to get through the water. You've got to fill these heavy jugs up. It's going to take you the afternoon and you've got to get this done. Or you probably sent them off on an afternoon, the older ones, at least on an afternoon to go explore by themselves in a foreign country.

And those experiences is what builds confidence and that can fundamentally transform someone's future. Even as Richard Branson shares how overcoming a an obstacle at a young age, just learning to overcome it, built an incredible confidence in him. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly we did that, you know, several times we would give the kids a debit card and a shopping list and say, you know, go to shore.

You need to find an ATM. You need to get the Turkish lira. You know what our budget is. You know what groceries should cost. Go find a store. And, you know, they're 16 and 17 or 15 or whatever. And that's, you know, it's the middle of the day. We had no fear, you know, and felt totally comfortable doing that.

And that was a great confidence builder for them that that they're going to carry with them, I hope, the rest of their life. That, yeah, with some of the things we've done in the United States, you know, driving a long distance or whatever, people like, aren't you worried? I'm like, are you kidding?

Everybody speaks English and I've got a cell phone. I mean, what could possibly, you know, there's it's it's almost sounds easy, but, you know, it's getting that kind of confidence. And, yeah, so I don't know. I think that it'll it'll take many more years, I'm sure, before they reflect back and are able to recognize some of the experiences that have shaped them.

I mean, if your kids are in their late teens, early 20s now, that's a difficult time to be able to look back with perspective. But I bet you within a decade they'll start to be able to specifically highlight the experiences that molded their character. And I'm sure they will come back and thank you.

Thank you for that. I hope so. Yeah, exactly. And I hope we've instilled with them a little bit of out of the box thinking and creativity to to take with them into business or whatever pursuit they want to we want to go. And and to try to teach them that if you can if you can dream it, you can do it.

I mean, we're nothing special. Don't believe me. We're just regular people. And, you know, we're no smart moves on our part or anything like that. It was just I had an opportunity and just took it. And and hopefully it worked out, you know, impacted them in a positive way.

People often talk about, well, I've got to keep doing this thing that I do for my children, for the sake of my children, for their stability. Or I have to live in this nice house for my children or whatever it is. And and people can do what you can live your life how you want.

But I look at it and I and one of the things that has been a real catalyst in my life is having my first child. And I look at it and I say, how would I advise my son if he were in my situation? And that was a big deal for me, even in in in leaving the bed where it was comfortable with my previous business to start a new adventure.

I said I wouldn't I would never tell my son I would never tell him stay where it's comfortable and where you're doing OK, but you don't feel that zest for life. And, you know, after all, you need to make some money and you need to have health insurance. You need to have an abundance of cash.

You need to have a comfortable retirement account. Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't encourage my son in that way. And it feels oftentimes like many parents make do make the mistake of under the guise of doing something for my children. They demonstrate to their children that what they actually should do is not be courageous and not follow the path that they would like to pursue, but rather just kind of lie down and die in many ways, die inside and let those dreams of whatever they are fade in an oblivion of beer fueled Saturday afternoon football games on TV or whatever the female equivalent of that is.

Right. Right. It's the old it's the old line about, you know, you don't want to be on your deathbed. And nobody's ever been there and said, I wish I, you know, I wish I spent more time at the office. Right. You know, it's those kind of thoughts that let's live extraordinary lives.

Why can't we and why shouldn't we? And the reasons why we shouldn't are very, very few. And we want to have that kind of life for our kids. Why? Why can't we have that as well? How are you financing your life now? What have you did you get to take a job?

Are you starting a business? How are you financing your life now after coming back? I'm doing the same business I did in Arizona construction and in learning it kind of over again in a new town, trying to get familiar with the real estate market here. We're we're doing some remodeling for customers and clients and then starting to invest into our own properties and do, you know, fixing flips, buying old homes and then fixing up and trying to resell them.

So that's part of what we're back into is real estate. And we want to we want to travel again because our kids, the younger kids won't remember this trip as much. So that's our goal now is to start building a real estate portfolio, rentals or whatever, and then we'd like to travel again.

So that coupled with the podcast, we're really passionate about encouraging families to travel and we think real estate is a great tool. And so that's part of what we're what we're doing with Family Adventure Podcast is eventually going to be doing some classes or some online resources to help people get their foot in the door with real estate and how it can how it can benefit them, how they can use that to go travel.

I've been a lot of millionaires made in the real estate business and and it certainly is. The thing I've thought a lot about as far as real estate investing is there are a few businesses that are probably easier and better to integrate your children with. And that's something I think a lot about as far as in my business pursuits.

I want to have business pursuits where my children are involved. I don't want to send them off to business school, quote unquote, to have a bunch of professors who may be retired business people, but probably just simply, you know, study business, teaching them business. I want to have a business where they can be fully integrated into my life and learn from the very beginning age the skills of business.

But it's tough in a professional environment where you're expected to go to an office building and, you know, it's tough to bring your kids to work every day with you. But in real estate, you know, as they as they attain a certain age and as is appropriate for their skills, it's the kind of thing where you can integrate them with you, even if you're riding around.

You know, if you're riding around with your six year old looking at properties, knocking on doors of abandoned looking houses to see if anyone's there. That's an education and teaching a son or daughter how to spy opportunity. And I feel like real estate is one of those amazing industries where you can more easily integrate your family.

And that's a huge benefit. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I mean, I've been in it now for off and on for almost 20 years and and I've tried other things, but I just keep coming back to real estate because I just I just enjoy developing. I love catching the vision for a property or and there's so many different aspects.

I mean, commercial, residential, multifamily, you know, on and on and on. And I'm very blessed now. My son's working with me. He's 19. And my son in law is actually working with me as well. And he's just getting ready to go into the army. So it is a family thing right now.

And we're we're excited. I'm just telling him what I've learned over the years. And we're out there pounding nails and, you know, summer. So we're sweating and getting it done kind of thing right now. But I'm trying to teach them, hey, this can be a great, great thing for all of us.

We can get a little family business set up here and a portfolio where we can all work together at this thing. And I think they're catching the vision of that and excited about it. In your area is construction is the construction cycle on an upward swing. It seems to me like it is.

Yeah. I mean, from what I can see, the market's getting better and better all the time. And I think certainly we're through the worst of it and still learning it. But Wilmington seems to be a destination for retirees. And it's also got a strong movie presence here. A movie industry is here as well.

And there is some factories. So it's got a and it's also got UNCW, a university here. So there's a good broad base of of things that help the town. And, you know, as people are able to sell their houses up in the northeast as they're retiring, I think it's just going to continue to help this area.

And I'm very optimistic about it. I think we're in a great spot. I want to share a story with you and obviously the audience as well on that topic, because it's a concept that I have never heard many people talk about in public, but I really learned a lot from it.

And it's just talking about integrating the business cycle with the with personal life plans. When I was a and this is what you've done and you maybe you've thought about it, maybe not. But I'll share the story how I learned about it. When I was a new financial advisor, I'm this wet behind the ears, brand new, eager, motivated 23 year old kid.

And I'm out calling on people and I wanted to work with business owners. So I'm calling on people for appointments and and that's how you get started in the financial business. And I'm going out and I'm meeting with a lot of people. And I found I liked working with business owners because they were clear and direct with me and they would often let me come by.

And the richer they were, the more likely it was that they would give me five minutes to come in. But they would cut me off at five minutes. But I met with this one guy and he ran a large construction business. But this was back, so I started in financial planning in late 2008, early 2009.

And this was exactly when the real estate cycle, the real estate bust was happening. And his business was dead. But he taught me about how he and his business, he had always been very frugal and very focused on keeping his overhead low. So in his personal life, he had no debt.

He had some nice toys. He had a lot of money. He always kept a lot of money liquid because he's in the construction business. In his business, he had designed his construction business to be very flexible. So instead of having a lot of employees and a lot of overhead, he had a very small warehouse.

And he had most of his employees had contract relationships with him instead. So as the construction industry declined, he just steadily decreased, decreased, decreased. But because he wasn't living on the margin where he had a lot of pressure, he was able to take that time and just take more time off.

And so I asked him, I was like, "What are you doing these days?" And instead of being stressed out, beating the pavement, looking for as much work as he could have, he said, "I'm going fishing every day." And he bought a big fancy boat at a fire sale from a friend of his who went broke.

He had overfinanced this boat, and he got the thing at a crazy steal of a deal, and he's going out fishing every day. And he was basically just, he says, "This is the third or fourth depression or recession that I've been through." And he says, "I know how to handle it.

I've been there, done that." And he says, "All I'm doing is I'm just taking time off. I still have my contacts there. I'm still, you know, I'm just taking time off." And then recently, I've talked with him, and as the construction cycle has come back, he's been pouring it on, building his business back up, and he'll make his funds back up.

And I thought of that, and I thought of that from a lifestyle design perspective, and it was something that really has stuck with me. A, the value of keeping a low overhead lifestyle. And then if you know you're in a cyclical business, as the old saying goes, "Make hay while the sun shines." Farmers take their rest time in the winter.

They don't take it in the spring, in the summer, in the fall. A farmer doesn't take off on a trip around the world during harvest time. So, when it's winter time, you know, spend your time inside by the fire reading books. But when it's harvest time, get out there and harvest.

And I feel like, whether intentionally or not, in a way you've done that. You rode the real estate wave up. Then, during the time where it was very difficult, you spent time with your family, pulling back, and not necessarily actively pursuing those business pursuits. And now, as the business cycle comes back, you have the opportunity to pour it on again.

And it may be that the business cycle will turn in another five years. And at that point in time, you're right in the situation. You've built up the money, and you can spend off again. But I just want to point that out, because I've never heard anybody talk about that.

And I learned it from this old business guy, and I'd never thought about it before. And I thought it was a really useful mental concept to have in the back of my mind. Yeah, it has worked out that way. And it's not because I'm clever, but it just seemed to, that's the way it's lined up.

And we're grateful for that. And we're excited. I mean, I think it's going to be, of course, as you mentioned, it is a cyclical business. And history repeats itself. We're going to build up again, and it's going to get overheated. And hopefully, it won't crash as badly as it did this time.

But there are always just corrections in the market. And that has been great for my early years, learning from the mentors that I learned from, how to read that, and how it is cyclical. And even on the way up and on the way down, there's bumps where you can do well.

You can profit off of little bumps on the road, but keeping in mind of the overall picture. And so that's what we've been thinking is, you know, maybe we've got a good 6, 8, 10-year run here. And let's dive in and do it, and then we'll see what's next.

Last question is this. Your show, and I want to plug your show, it's Family Adventure Podcast, and it's at familyadventurepodcast.com. My wife and I like to listen to it together. There are very few podcaster shows that we can agree to listen to together, that we're both interested in. And we've enjoyed your show because it's a subject that we're both interested in.

The stuff she likes listening to is not necessarily always what I like to do. But you've now interviewed, I think it's at least, is it 34, 35? Something like that, yeah. Okay, something like 34, 35 individual families who have all taken an adventure of some kind, whether that was for six months or whether that was for six years, and you've taken them, whether it's RVs, hotels, backpacks, sailboats, etc.

Of those interviews, what is the biggest lesson that you've learned, or what was the story or the takeaway that you've taken away from those interviews that has made the biggest impact in your life so far from some of your guests? I think there's one theme that absolutely jumps out, and that is "Go now." You can overthink it, you can overplan it, and all of my guests, if we get to the regrets stage, those kind of questions, it's always "We wish we'd have gone sooner." I actually get emails from people that are in their late 50s or in their early 60s, and listen to the show and say, "We were going to do that.

We had some money when we were 30, and I just got laid off, we were going to go, and we didn't, and I wish we would have." Which is heartbreaking, and it just chokes me up because it's just opportunity lost. But it's just, life is fragile, life is short, this is not the practice round, this is the real thing.

And all of our guests have talked about, you absolutely just make a plan, pick a date, that's another theme that comes up, is just pick a date and you just have to go. There will always be something else you wish you would have known or could have planned for, or some unknown that caught you by surprise, but that's just the nature of it.

And the most important thing is to go, and the sooner the better. It's a good place to end. Eric, plug your site, lay out what you're doing, some of the resources that you're going to be bringing as you develop more, and just plug your stuff real quick here as we wrap up.

Great, thanks Joshua. Family Adventure Podcast, yeah, we'd love to have you come by and visit. Subscribe, check us out, listen to some interviews, get inspired, send us an email. We'd love to hear from people, and as Joshua mentioned, that is the plan. We're going to try to add more resources, maybe an investor's club or an online class, a webinar on how you can incorporate real estate, even part-time, into a travel fund, and get your family out there and see some of the world, see some of the U.S.

And just, our thing is to go. That would be great to see, and I hope you can help people. There's so many shysters in the real estate advice industry, so I hope that you can be a good resource for people. Eric, thank you for coming on this morning. I appreciate it.

Thanks Joshua. Pretty cool story, eh? Eric, thank you for coming on. I enjoyed our conversation, and I look forward to many more conversations together with you. A couple of just things that I noticed during the podcast with-- during the interview with Eric that I thought were interesting. Notice that he started at the bottom, you know, just basically started at the bottom, simple laborer.

But what was it that allowed him, when he was starting his construction business, what was it that allowed him to work his way up? Well, he took an interest beyond his job position. No matter where you start, I'm convinced that if you just take an interest in something that you don't know, whether it's a different job position to the side or another job position up above you, you can learn and you can develop.

So he took an interest, and mentors appeared. There are mentors in every business that will take you and help you. We all want to help people, help one another. So wherever you start, just take an interest in something else, and mentors will appear. He had to save and take action, though.

If he didn't have any money, if he didn't save, if he didn't actually ever buy a house and work on it and start a project of his own, he never would have been able to build any kind of entrepreneurial success. And I was impressed--he didn't share too much in the interview today, but from our previous conversations, I know that his family is very integrated in his life now with the real estate endeavors that they have going on, and I think that's awesome.

It's something that I think a lot about. And he's had skills. He's developed skills for himself, and he's taught his children skills that will really help. And they're able to continue working, and although they're not living on the water anymore, they're still having a family adventure right there in North Carolina where they are.

And then the last thing, one of my new taglines. Did you notice that his choice was almost--not quite, but almost basically, "Do I want a Suburban or a Sailboat?" Don't really think about that sometimes when we buy a Suburban. What is a brand-new Suburban? It's $50,000, $60,000, something like that.

If you were to buy a brand-new Suburban, how much does a sailboat cost? Just a little bit more than that. And yet when he sold the sailboat--or sells the sailboat, I can't remember-- when he sold it or sells it, he's going to get a substantial portion of it back, whereas the Suburban, he's going to depreciate quite a bit more quickly.

Go check out his podcast. I really love his show. If you're interested, after the interview we were talking a little bit about, he's going to try to figure out--because he's pursuing real estate, and he knows real estate, and one of the things he's trying to work on is to teach people how to use real estate as an avenue, as a tool for funding their family adventures and their travels.

I think that's awesome because it's accessible to so many people. Real estate is one of those things where you have a very inefficient market in many ways because it's so hard for large companies to-- just markets are so unique, so it's a good place for an individual to find and exploit an inefficient market.

So he doesn't have anything available for that right now, but I know he's working on developing that, and he's going to be putting together a whole series of shows on tools and resources. So go check out his show. My wife and I really enjoy listening to it, and I think you would as well.

It's at familyadventurepodcast.com. Thank you for listening today. Be back with you soon. Thank you for listening to today's show. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment. Your situation is unique, and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. This show is not and is not intended to be any form of financial advice.

Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy, and consult them, because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions. Hold them accountable for your results. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person, and I make mistakes.

If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please come by the show page and comment, so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here. With Kroger Brand products from Ralphs, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season, because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.

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