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Would that make a difference in your financial plan? Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and today is Friday, October 24, 2014. Today I have for you an interview with Joshua Becker, founder of the website Becoming Minimalist, author of the book Simplify, and also Clutter Free with Kids.

We're going to talk about how to be happier with less. I'm thrilled to bring you today's show because this is a strategy that I've wanted to talk about on the show up till now, but it seems like it's almost something that is pretty simple. And basically the strategy is simplicity and minimalism as a financial strategy.

And essentially the idea is that if you want less and you have less, then you need to spend less. So that's it. I just did the whole show on it. And that was my concern about bringing this concept out because I think it's incredibly valuable, but it's also incredibly simple and it's kind of dumb to do a whole show on something I just described in one sentence.

And I knew also that if I did it, then I needed to do it in the right way because I needed to have the right person. So I reached out to one of my favorite writers, a man named Joshua Becker, and he agreed to come on the show and I'm really thrilled to bring you that interview today.

And if you're looking for a list of tips and tactics and tricks that are going to tell you the seven things that you can declutter from your house and the 18 tchotchkes that you don't need and the six bins to put all your stuff into, this is not that show.

That would be pretty boring. I mean, it's good for an article, I guess, and that has its place, but this is not that show. So today's show, however, is going to be very valuable for you because it's more of a philosophic discussion. And if we get philosophy right, then everything else I think can fall into play in a more powerful way.

So I think you're really going to enjoy this interview and I think it's a really great way to go into the weekend here on a Friday show. Hopefully you're listening to this on a Friday or maybe over the weekend. It's a great way to start the week if you're listening.

If you're listening on Monday morning. Last week I had a listener, Steve, from Steveonomics. He tweeted me on Twitter and said, "I started the show with, 'It's Friday!'" And he heard that on Monday morning, so he got kind of depressed. So Steve, I'm sorry about that. I didn't mean to do that.

So today's show is all about minimalism and simplicity and the philosophy behind them. And I think philosophy is incredibly important because as you'll hear with the interview when it starts in about 32 seconds, that we live in the richest time in the richest countries and we are the richest people in those countries.

All of you who are listening to this show and yet does our happiness and fulfillment follow along? I hope you enjoy this discussion of the philosophy behind minimalism and simplicity. So Joshua, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. I appreciate your being here. Well, it is a pleasure to be here.

It's an honor. Thank you. So I've reached out to you as the guru of what I would call modern accessible simplicity. And what I want to talk to you about is I want to talk to you about the impact of simplicity and minimalism on finance. And what have you learned or observed in your work in the area of simplicity and I guess mindful living would be a buzzword, and minimalism and how it relates with the situation that we as, I guess, modern Americans face regarding our finances?

Yeah, so I think minimalism finds its basis, simplicity finds its foundation in this realization that our physical possessions are not, they're not providing what we think they're going to provide for our lives. So they're not leading us to more happiness and more fulfillment. There's greater purposes that we can have in our lives than the pursuit of physical possessions.

And even worse than that, that some of these possessions, a lot of these possessions are not just not adding happiness and fulfillment into our life, but they're actually taking us away from the very things that do. So we just think about all the money and the time and the energy that goes into the stuff that we own.

So this forms the basis for minimalism of, okay, I'm going to own less because I want to pursue different things. Financially speaking, there's an interesting statistic that sticks out to me. 73% of Americans deal with money related stress of some sort or another. And I find intriguing because like we're one of the wealthiest nations in the history of the world.

Why are 73% of us struggling with money related stress? It's not because we don't have enough money. It's because we're thinking about it wrong. It's because we're hoping it's going to accomplish things in our lives that it was never established to provide. So security and happiness tend to be some of them.

And, you know, we reach a certain income level. I think we're going to be stable and secure. And we think we're going to be happy. And we get there and we realize we're not. And so often this causes us stress. And we think then the solution is apparently I need more money.

I need a different income bracket. We get there and find out that it doesn't offer those things. And so this stress then of I always need more and more and more to solve my problems is directly related in my mind to minimalism and saying, wait a minute, maybe there's different things we should be pursuing.

It's interesting because it almost seems, I mean, you have one of the most successful sites on the Internet around this topic. And there are other extremely popular successful sites. And I think sometimes if I were looking in from the outside, I've traveled a lot in the developing world. And I sometimes am very slow to say, do you know that one of the fastest growing industries, so to speak, and areas and niches online is the desire to deaccumulate and to simplify?

And do you realize that you have a problem of accumulating, but we actually have a problem to keep clutter out of our houses? I feel really obnoxious if I talk with people about that. And I don't know what to do with that sometimes. And I can't quite figure out how we got here.

Do you have any insight as far as how we wound up in this very strange position where we have more money than anyone else, and yet it seems like we have less happiness and more stuff and more stress than anyone else? Yeah, sure. Because it's a thing that pops up quite often.

Twitter, Facebook and even comments on the blog occasionally of, you know, you don't know what it's like. And, you know, how would you say this is someone who lives in, you know, my life, I live in poverty and, you know, think of third world countries. And I've traveled to a bunch of them myself.

And my response is always, well, I'm not addressing the financial concerns, the personal concerns of people who live in third world countries, like their financial situation, their possessions that they have, the temptations, the struggles that they deal with are very different from the struggles and the temptations that people who have a lot of money deal with.

And so I would say I'm not writing to them. I'm not trying to, you know, change their thinking on someone else. If I was, I'd be writing something completely different and I'd be addressing completely different topics. But we fall into this trap of recognizing the dangers of poverty and what they are, but rarely considering the dangers of having wealth and how when we do have excess, just the fundamental changes, the way that it impacts how we view ourselves and how we view the world and beginning to push against some of those, I think, dangers of having wealth is one of the ways that I think about what I'm doing and what I'm trying to write and who I'm trying to reach.

What was your path into kind of this area? Were you always a minimalist or was this a transition for you? What was your path? No, you know, just for the sake of this, I'll go back. I went to my dad's a banker, did some personal investing for a while.

I went to college to go into banking. I got a degree from the University of Nebraska in banking and finance. When I had about a year left of that, I decided that I wanted to work in churches. So I was a pastor for 15 years. I came into this idea of minimalism about six years ago and it was actually I was just pretty typical American, you know, paying increases and bigger houses and spending and accumulating.

And I was cleaning out my garage one morning and my five year old son was alone in the backyard. I'd spent hours on my garage and I was just complaining to my neighbor about it. And she's the one that first introduced me to the term. She said, you know, that's why my daughter's a minimalist.

She keeps saying we don't need to own this much stuff. I'm like, it was like the first time someone had ever told me that I didn't have to own everything. And it just opened up this world to me of people who were who had intentionally decided to live with just the things that they need and not accumulate more than that.

And everyone was just singing the praises of having more time and more money and more energy and more freedom and less stress. And I'm like, I'm in. So that started our journey six years ago. I started writing about it just as a becoming minimalist was at first just a diary, just a journal of some of the things that we were getting rid of, some of the things that we were learning eventually became a place where I was hoping to inspire others.

I like to say it became a place where I want to play the neighbor role in someone else's life and just open them up to a new way of thinking. So I've been I've been doing the writing about the past year and a half, just writing and speaking full time.

Dude, did you just did you know about where to start or just do the common sense approach and say, wow, I don't need that much stuff and go out and throw away some of the kids toys that they weren't playing with? Yeah, no, I read one article online, how to create a minimalist home, I think was the name of the article.

I wish I could remember exactly how to create a minimalist home. Zen habits. You could Google that and you could find it pretty well. And it just very, you know, maybe eight or nine principles to think about. Not a step by step guide in any stretch of the imagination.

But I was cleaning out my garage and I I pulled my car back in and I was looking around my car and like, what is all this stuff doing in here? There's old CDs and sunglasses and pens and maps and ketchup packets and Happy Meal toys. And I'm like, this stuff just doesn't have to be in here.

So literally, that was the first thing that we that I minimized. I just took everything out that didn't absolutely need to be there. The following morning, I'm like, this this feels great in my car without all this extra clutter lying around. And so from there, we we did our living room and went up to the closets.

We just went kind of wave by wave through the through the house, getting rid of stuff we didn't need, trying some different experiments along the way. I have a metaphor that my wife and I use sometimes, and I assume I probably read it somewhere, but I don't remember where.

So I can't attribute it to the author. But I think they were just talking about the feeling of walking into a hotel room. When you're on vacation or something, you're traveling and you walk into a nice hotel room where it's well decorated and you just walk in and you stick your suitcase in the closet and you just feel at least I feel maybe some people feel very different, but I feel peaceful at that time.

And you think, why? It's because you have space. Yeah, yeah, right. And there's a bunch of stuff there that that you need to take care of that that doesn't need to be there. There's actually a you can Google how to how to make my bedroom feel like a hotel room and you'll feel like this whole this whole lineup of people who are trying to do this and trying to bring that feeling home, which is totally possible.

That's cool. I'll Google that and see because I've never read. It's been a while. I used to read a lot of your work and other minimalist kind of blogs. And then I felt like, well, I'm pretty good in this area. So I go on, I read your your Saturday coffee posts because they're always beautiful and you have the best designed pictures and like quotes.

Do you do it yourself or do you have a designer? Yep. No, I do it all. It's beautiful. You do a good job. And my wife does my editing. Other than that, it's a one man show. Very cool. So here's what I'd love to ask. How do you decide because what attracts me to your work is if I were if I were single and it were just me, I probably would be one of these kind of guys you read about that lives out of a backpack and travels the world full time.

That's that's probably what I would do. But I'm not. And I have a I have a wife and a son and two dogs. And we like our house. We like where we live. How do you figure out where to draw the line between what's too much and what's enough?

Yeah, I usually start with the assumption that I have more than enough. I think Maya Angelou once said the once had the quote, we need far less than we think we need. So I start there as a basis. But but right. So so I'm introduced to this minimalist idea.

And and I and I go online and I read about a guy in his 20s. He moves to a new country every three months. And I read about a guy who's trying to own just 100 things and list them on a sheet of paper. And a couple that's in Portland that's moving into this small 200 square foot home.

And and while the idea of minimalism sound attracted to me, their specific lifestyles weren't attractive to me. I didn't want to move to a new country every three months. I I didn't want to have a list of things that I owned on a sheet of paper. And it came down to what I wanted to accomplish with my life.

Like we liked living in our neighborhood. We liked being in our community, like being involved in our school. We had two or three different small groups of people that were meeting over at our house at the time. I felt I was working at a at a church. And so I'm like, my goal in life is to is to grow this church.

I mean, I want to be a spiritual influence. I want to be a helpful influence in the lives of as many people as possible. So what do I need in order to accomplish that? Well, I need a few places to sit in my living room. I need more than, you know, two cups and two plates because we liked having people over.

And so this became the the paradigm for us. It actually became our definition of minimalism became the intentional promotion of everything we most value and the removal of anything that distracts us from it. And so at that time, and even moving forward, it was like, okay, I got to be responsible to my family.

I need to raise them well. I feel like I'm called to grow this church. Now I feel like I'm called to grow minimalism and spread this message. So what do I need in order to accomplish that? And then what is just keeping me from it and stealing time and energy that I can be devoting to more important things?

I like that because to me, it seems it's an intentional decision of what I'm trying to do, which I think is one of the keys and then stripping away everything else. And that seems to be one of the keys of happiness. It's not a burden, probably not a burden to have if you're working on a project and you need four screwdrivers, you need to have those four screwdrivers.

But if you don't do that kind of stuff, having one is probably enough. I mean, that's a terrible example. But the goal, that's what kind of frustrates me with a lot of the other things. And again, I would, if I were 22 again and single and I want to travel the world, I would be writing a blog and taking pictures of my 38 things.

I think that's really cool. I like reading about it. But it doesn't seem like a very long-term doable strategy. That works great when you're traveling. And I traveled for a month with what I fit in a Jansport backpack. So when I travel, I'm into not doing that much. But as far as life, just simply having what you need to accomplish your goals and focusing on that and making sure you have everything you need but not more than you need, I think clears the mental space.

And I sometimes wonder, have you experienced that everything in life relates? So when somebody starts to declutter and simplify, do their finances improve? Do they lose weight? Does their marriage get better? Have you noticed, is that a trend? Are there some correlation there? Yeah, I'd say there's a correlation.

Certainly, it's no magic bullet. Remove your physical possessions and you'll be fit and lose weight and be healthier and not be in any debt. But I describe it as minimalism was like this introduction to intentionality in my life. And it started with physical possessions. I think that's a great place to start and a great place to look.

And I describe it like this. I took a mini van load of things to goodwill, felt great. My second mini van load of things to goodwill felt great. But by about the third or fourth mini van load of things to goodwill, it became difficult, not physically, but emotionally, mentally, internally difficult because I had to ask myself the question, why in the world do I have four van loads of things in my house that don't need to be there?

What was it that compelled me to buy this many things? And it was difficult because I'm like, well, I'm probably more susceptible to advertising than I think. I probably bought more into this consumer-driven society than I ever thought I would. I probably was actually thinking that I was going to find happiness in my possessions, even though I never would have said that out loud.

You know, I was probably jealous of other people. I was probably buying into new fashions and new trends. I was probably trying to impress other people with the things that I owned and the people who came over to my house. And when you start digesting and looking into some of those motivations that you didn't know were there, you're forced to think, okay, I need to get more intentional about what I'm spending my money on and what I'm buying.

I need to take control over my life and make it align with what I want my life to be about. About six months after this, I had a birthday coming and my wife asked me what I want for my birthday. I'm like, well, I certainly don't want a new watch or a new tie.

I just spent all these months getting rid of it. A gym had opened up down the street and I said, how about a membership to the gym? So I got a gym membership and after a few months of working out there, I didn't want to go home and eat chips and soda after working out.

So I started to eat a little bit healthier as well. And I started to really filter my whole life through this idea of, okay, what is going to - what's going to add value to my life? What is going to contribute to my purpose? And what are some of the things that I've just kind of drifted into, whether it's the way I eat or the take care of myself or the death I've gotten myself into?

What's this drift that I can bring back into alignment with my life's purpose? How did this process of change affect your finances? We were - I never lived with much consumer debt. We had a mortgage and student loan, but I always lived paycheck to paycheck, which I think the stats are 75% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, something like that.

So I certainly wasn't alone. And I was always a little uneasy because I always knew that I was one blown water heater or one blown transmission away from having to go into debt to support my lifestyle. So it's a little uneasy about it. But when we stopped buying things that we didn't need, more money appeared.

Shockingly so. It's so funny how like buying less is just the practical solution to so many of our money problems. I don't know why we don't buy into it. Well, I know why we don't buy into it because we think it's a sacrifice and it's gonna make our life miserable if we stop buying stuff as opposed to seeing how it actually improves our life.

So yeah, we were able to start saving more than we had. I eventually moved out of my job at the church to write full time, and we had our budget down to bare bones. I mean, we said, "Okay, we can get by on this much money. We can get by on less than we needed before." And so I was able, even though I liked my job, I was able to transition into a new job because I didn't need nearly as much money to support the lifestyle that I had been living before.

How did you stop buying new things? Was there a specific store that you had to stay out of? Was there some kind of tactic or was it more just a mindset shift? Yeah, it was a mindset shift that didn't happen right away but happened over time. I really bought in early on to this realization that possessions were detracting from my happiness and from what I could do with my life.

I recognized it early, and as we began getting rid of stuff and discovering more and more of these benefits of owning less things, my desire to buy things started to fade. There weren't any special tricks of 28 days of not buying something or these tight budget constrictions, but it was just a mindset shift on that there are just better things to do with my money than spend it on stuff that's going to break and need to be replaced.

Have you come up with any tricks or tactics to help somebody else who hasn't gone through that mindset achieve a similar transformation or does it just need to happen organically? No, I think that there are definitely some things that people can do. A spending freeze of some sort can be quite helpful and that looks different for different people.

I know a lot of people who have made the commitment to go a year without buying clothes and maybe that sounds too long. Maybe for someone just six months of, "I'm just not going to buy any new clothes for six months," and you get to the end of six months and, "I still have clothes that I like to wear.

Go figure that I didn't need to go buy more stuff." Any sort of tracking of budgeting, tracking of spending can be super helpful. I know there's a lot of online tools that can help you do that if you were never good at it. That was always my problem with budgeting was I was never good at tracking what I was spending and so the budget didn't matter because I didn't know how much I was spending.

But there's some different online tools that can help you with that now so you know, "Okay, I'm just going to spend this much money on whatever it is over the next three to six months or a year." You can keep an eye on that. Why is it that you came to believe that owning possessions decreased your happiness?

What was it about the ownership? I understand, okay, it's more intentional, but what was it about actually owning all the possessions that decreased your happiness? I think the decrease was just the fact that I was being taken away from the things that really brought me happiness. When we think about all the time that we spend cleaning, that was my moment, cleaning out the garage.

I just spent three hours on a beautiful Sunday morning cleaning my garage while my five-year-old son played by himself in the backyard and kept asking me to play and I kept pushing him off. "No, no, I can't because I got to care for all the stuff that I bought that sat out in the garage over the long winter and never touched." So it was the cleaning and the organizing and the managing and the maintaining and the repairing and replacing and all the time that we spend working on the front end just to earn the money so we can go spend time shopping to buy the things that we can bring home that we have to clean and organize and maintain and manage and repair.

And as we jumped in right away removing things, there's just an immediate lightness, like an immediate lifting of this burden. We never know, I would say we never know how much of a burden our possessions have become on us until we try to remove it. It's like this very small, subtle shift in our life of collecting stuff and collecting things and it's not until we specifically say, "Okay, I'm going to radically change this," they were able to truly appreciate how much time and energy we had spent on all those things.

It's – I've had two experiences that have contributed because to me, that's the fundamental – what you just described is the motivation. Many of us just simply don't see how the things that we own actually make a difference and we don't see the connection especially to money but to time.

If you have a lawn, you got to mow it every – you're required – where I live, you're required by the code, local municipal code to mow it with a certain frequency. So we don't often think however about simply removing the lawn and there would be a variety of ways to do that whether or not you live in a house that has land around or not, you can still remove the lawn.

But I remember over the years, my dad always was a light traveler, a light packer. So every time I took a trip, I would pack pretty lightly. But kind of the crowning experience for me was one time I went and I traveled through the Philippines for a month and I was able to fit my – I was able to figure out my skill as a traveler to travel for a month and to pack everything in a loosely packed school bag size backpack, a Jansport.

There was actually one other time before that where I had gone to Colombia for a week and I experienced the difference in that when I was in Colombia, I was in a hostel. If you've ever traveled in a hostel where there's many people, there's four or five beds in a room and you go in and you see all these backpackers and a lot of times, they have this massive backpack on their back and then a little backpack on their front and you walk in and they're all locked to the bed.

So I had the joy of just simply having this one little bag on both of those trips. And the freedom that that gives you to be able just to go, you can leave the hostel in the morning and you cannot bother to come back the rest of the day and if you want to go to another town, you just hop on the bus because you have your stuff with you if you're carrying it around with you.

I feel like that to me became a metaphor for life, whether it's owning a house, whether it's having all the stuff in it, whether it's all the work, is that the less stuff you have, the more experiences you can pursue. You can jump on the bus that you just got to and you don't know where it's going and you don't need to worry about where you wind up because you've got all your stuff with you.

And the constant tending of the stuff, you have to go back to the hostel, it takes time away. So for me, the travel experience was valuable in facing that and doing that. But then I remember for me also kind of a key was when my wife and I were married, we decided we had looked for a few different places.

She was living in a small studio apartment, but we looked for some bigger places, but we couldn't find anything that we liked. So we wound up living in the apartment that after we married, I moved in to where she had been living in this little 234 square foot apartment.

And we were able to fit everything in there and just the joy of being able to get up on Saturday morning, clean the house, say we got to clean the house, and seven and a half minutes later, jump on our bikes and ride to the beach. It was an amazing experience.

But many of us, we don't experience that. So oftentimes people refer back to their college years and say, "Oh, this was great." Well, in college, you were pretty poor. You didn't have much stuff probably. You lived in a little dorm and yet you had more time. And now you're Mr.

Big Shot or Miss Big Shot and spending all this money having all this stuff and what happens to your time? You got to spend it all tending your possessions. Yeah, and just the added stress of that, the added, you know, in college, you're learning and growing and trying to develop yourself into the most marketable person you could be or develop whatever skill you're hoping to accomplish.

And then it seems like we get into our 20s and 30s and suddenly it becomes, "Okay, now how am I going to make more money? What am I going to do that I can acquire more wealth?" And it seems to be this pursuit changes, right? The things that we even want to get out of our life somehow change along the way.

And I loved how you said, "I was freed up to have more experiences." I think that that's what minimalism does. It frees us up to pursue whatever it is that we want to pursue. If we want to travel more, if we want to have more of those experiences because we're buying less stuff, if we want to do more charity and fight injustice and be more generous, that's where we're going to find our joy.

Then we're able to do that because we're tied down by less things, locked to our bed at the hostel, as they said. Do you think it's possible to intentionally manipulate our desires? That is an interesting question. Intentionally manipulate? Is that different than change our desires or what do you...?

Yeah, yes. I mean, as an example, let's say that I like BMWs and yet I notice that it's possible that for me, let's say that I like BMWs but I want to have more money and I recognize, "Well, if I spend money on the BMW, I'm going to have less money available to invest." Can I intentionally manipulate my desire for the BMW and decrease it?

Yeah, I think totally. And there's a proverb, "Our heart is where our treasure is." Wherever your treasure is, your heart will follow, something like that. And it's an interesting idea that... So I bought a minivan and it's a used minivan. We bought all our things used but it's new to me.

And I was in a grocery store and came out and someone had left this big scratch down my minivan and it left. And so, obviously, I was upset about the injustice but I just brutally mortified that someone had left this brand new, this big scratch in our new minivan.

And I remember driving home and not just being upset about the scratch but starting to internalize this. Why was I so upset that this had happened? And sure it was wrong but I thought, "You know, if someone had left a scratch on my bicycle, I'd probably be a little upset but I wouldn't be nearly as upset about it as I am right now that someone had done this." And this idea came to my mind that, "Okay, because I had invested so much money, because I invested financially into this purchase, my heart was drawn to this." It was important to me just because of how much money I had put into it.

And so, I think for your example, I think that we begin to manipulate our desires, we begin to change our desires when we start putting our money towards other things. When we start investing our treasure in investments, in a charity of some sort, we're just drawn to see that investment succeed.

We're drawn to see that charity succeed because we're putting money towards it. And so, if I want to get over my love of BMWs, I would say, "Okay, let me start putting my money towards something else." And as I do, I think that we begin to be even more drawn to those things than we ever were.

But it starts with an action. It's not, "I need to change my mind first." I need to change my actions and allow my mind to follow what my actions are doing. As a Christian, do you think it's different for a Christian versus a non-Christian? Yes and no. Yes, I think that a Christian should have more of a, certainly a spiritual mandate in that, but I don't think it matters whether you're Christian or not, whatever religion you are.

I think that we find more fulfillment in being generous with our money. We're always going to find more happiness when we use it to support a cause we believe in, when we use this money to help someone else. I think that everyone finds more joy in that than they do in buying another shirt or a new BMW.

So yes and no. Certainly there's a mandate, I guess would be the word for Christians, but I think that mandate just comes from that this is just a better way to think about our money and a better way to live life than pursuing excess for self-accumulation. Sometimes wondered in my experience, I've wondered—and because of my experience, I've wondered about the answer to the question I just asked you.

When I was growing up, I was a guy and I was totally into cars. I was obsessed with cars of every kind. I loved big four-wheel drive pickup trucks and hot rods, and I would subscribe to all the magazines. I remember when I was in seventh or eighth grade, I was saving all of my money toward buying a big Dodge Ram with the diesel and four-wheel drive and big lifted tires.

That was my goal, and it was going to cost me $13,000, and I was saving diligently toward it. That kind of dogged my heels until I went to college. I remember when I was in college one semester, I studied abroad. While I was there, it was really a transformative time in my life for a number of reasons.

One of the things that happened is I went through some experiences that up until that time I had been a very opinionated intellectual around Christianity, but I had never really had any transformative experience. I was so challenged on that that I was completely rocked at that time in my life, and I learned that I didn't have a clue what I was talking about, is that I had a bunch of ideas and knowledge about what other people thought about God and life and religion, but I didn't have any experience.

So it really rocked me and sent me back to the beginning to say, "Well, I need to understand for myself how these things put together." But one of the things that happened as I pursued that is there was a real transformation in my life, and a lot of it was kind of a spiritual release for me.

One of the things that I was able to let go of was that lust for cars, and I let go of it. And I know for me it was a spiritual transformation, but I've never known how to articulate that to other people, and I've never really known—for me it was a spiritual event, but was it simply—does it have to then be a spiritual event for everyone else, or does it just have to—or is there some kind of intellectual technique that can be applied?

And I know many people would say, "Well, all religious experience is an intellectual thing." I don't find that compelling. But I've always puzzled about that, because a lot of times when I'm encouraging somebody else with something, it kind of gets mixed, and I don't know how to unmix it.

I don't know if I have to give a Christian one advice and a non-Christian another, or give the same advice to all people and trust that God will lead them through. I've always puzzled about that. Yeah, I think it provides a—at least for me, it provides a worldview of who we are as people.

And so Christianity, for example, it says, "Okay, this is the state of humankind. This is what the world could look like, except that the humans are stuck in this, and here's a better way to live." It's certainly because I—Becoming Minimalist isn't—it was interesting because I was a pastor at the time, but Becoming Minimalist was never a Christian-specific blog.

It was just never that. I never wanted it to be. And as I was writing about these things that were always—my view is always shaped by my Christian worldview. I mean, if I'm talking about money or generosity or gratitude, whatever I'm talking about is always shaped by what I believe to be true about the world.

But what I found is that people were very drawn to these Christian ideas of joy and hope and peace and contentment and gratitude and generosity. I mean, if you ask 10 people, "Do you want to be known as a generous person?" I think 10 of them say yes. Very few people don't want to be known as a generous person or don't want to be generous.

We all want these things to be true. It began to kind of change my view of Christianity or change my view of religion in this way that it's promoting things that people want to be true of their lives. So whether you're a Christian or not, you're going to be drawn to the idea of generosity.

You're going to be drawn to the idea of contentment. You're going to be drawn to the idea that your life is more valuable than the things that you own and that there's greater pursuits than physical possessions. You're going to be drawn to these things just because it provides a worldview that I think is true, but certainly adds a layer to the world that we see and how we understand how we interact with one another.

Have you ever questioned your decision to take that tack with becoming a minimalist? Have you ever wondered if maybe the message that you're sharing is not the ultimate message? Or have you felt that maybe it would just provide people something that they would need and then if they were attracted then they would seek further?

Have you wondered about that? No, I've never regretted it. I'll get a few emails every so often. When I announced that I was leaving being a pastor to write about minimalism full-time, there were a few emails and a few comments of, "Why would you give up what you were doing for this which seems so trivial in nature?" My response was always that this is an act of love that I would take the time to promote minimalism and write about minimalism.

There are wonderful people and they're delivering clean water and they're delivering medical supplies and they're doing all these things that are needed around the world. It's not a, "We're just telling everyone about our religious views." It's, "Hey, the loving thing that we can do here is bring clean water to this village so we're going to invest time and energy and we're going to do it just for the sake of the people." I'm not delivering clean water to people who need it but I'm delivering a fresh drink of water, a fresh way to look at the world.

If they find happiness because of it, if they find a better way to live out of it, then absolutely this is what I want to do. How they choose to spend their money and time and energy after post-minimalism or post-removing the stuff they don't need is ultimately up to them but at least I get to introduce them to the idea of it.

You wrote a book entitled Clutter-Free with Kids. I haven't read it yet. I'm interested to read it. My wife and I have a one-year-old son and we're very committed to having what we need but it is challenging in our society. It's challenging. It's almost the reverse. People are so generous with us and even with kids that you almost have to be...some people may perceive it as rude when we ask for something different.

But what was your approach to being clutter-free with kids and how did you teach in that book? The book was an offshoot of a question I get asked every time I talk about minimalism. Yeah, but I have kids so how do I do this? I always say, "Look, kids are going to make it more difficult but kids are going to make this more important." The fact that we have this responsibility should increase our pursuit of physical things.

Not to mention the fact that our kids are watching. That became the base for the book of, "Hey, number one, it's possible. Number two, it's important. Number three, it could change the way you view parenting and just allow you to have less stress picking up Legos and spend more time with your kids." One of the tools that I probably go back to over and over again in the Clutter-Free with Kids book is the tool of boundaries and setting up boundaries for whatever you're talking about - clothes, toys, school, artwork, collections that they may be collecting.

We provide our kids freedom in these and obviously I'm talking about older than a one-year-old but we provide our kids freedom. My daughter has a closet and we say, "Hey, look, you can have whatever toys you want as long as it fits in this closet. We think this is enough space for you to have enough toys.

Put whatever you want in there. You can ask for whatever you want for Christmas. You can ask for whatever you want. You can spend your money on things but they need to stay in this confined location. Same thing with artwork. We have a plastic bin that all of her artwork and my son's schoolwork that they fit in and when it gets filled, okay, let's make some decisions about if we have enough or some things that we can get rid of, some toys that you're not using anymore, some artwork that you thought was important when you were in kindergarten but now in second grade, it isn't quite as important as it was before.

We empower them, I think, to make these decisions but they still have these boundaries in place and that's what we found helpful. I think that you could probably use that for a new child. Okay, we're going to have clothes but just this many and things got to fit in the dresser and things got to fit in the room and toys got to fit here in this space.

If you get down the road and it's just not working, we might be better at adding some extra clothing space or adding some extra toys than you can but setting up the boundaries to begin with, I think, is helpful in this flux of knowing how much is enough and we don't usually know that until we go over a little bit and we go under a little bit and finally we reach the spot of this feels right.

I like the word boundaries because one of the themes that I've discovered for me, at least, for me and I've kind of gone back and forth between too much junk and then too little junk and kind of, "Oh, I'm going to be so hardcore and getting rid of everything." What I've learned from me is that I find I'm totally peaceful with having things as long as they're organized and they're contained.

What I've discovered is that if I have a drawer and it has 38 pens in it, that's really going to bother me if they're just strewn about. But if I have them in a Ziploc bag sitting there where that's the pen bag and there is a discrete number of pens that can fit in that bag and then hopefully if the bag is at 50% capacity, that's even better because a dresser drawer, if everything fits in the dresser drawer but every time you've got to just kind of stuff the shirts in, that's miserable.

So if your stuff takes up about 50% of the box, then it works better. It's kind of how I've approached my garage and trying. I'm still working on mine because it moved and too much anyway. But as long as I have a container, if a kid's toys, if there's a container for them and they can fit in the container, then that's enough.

If there's more than the container or if the container is struggling to be closed, that's too much. But it's not the number, it's more the containment, the boundary around it. I've learned that as long as things are that and then if the surfaces are clear, if the surfaces are clear and they're contained within boundaries, then I'm able to find the peace regardless of the number.

Yeah, I mean, minimalism isn't about sacrifice. It's not about denying ourselves joy, right? It's about a tool. It's about a way of thinking that should elevate our joy, that should provide us with more freedom and with less stress and how that looks for different people is going to change and it's going to depend on what they find value in and what they find joy in.

I think the danger is just that we keep expanding the borders of our boundaries. So the average American home has almost tripled in the last 50 years and still one out of 10 Americans own offsite storage. So our homes are three times the size that they were 50 years ago and we're like, "Oh, well, I got all this room in my closet.

I could easily hang another shirt here. I could easily put another pair of shoes down here. I've got this whole drawer that doesn't have anything in it. I could start storing things in there," and our boundaries have gotten so out of whack with what we actually need that that's what needs to be adjusted.

And literally, we were in about a 2200 square foot home and moved to about 1600, 1600, 1700 and that forced some even more minimalism on us than we had in the bigger house just because we got smaller closets and we have less storage and so we were forced to make even more decisions about what things we actually needed and what things we didn't need.

And we found out that we didn't need nearly as much stuff as we thought we needed in a 2200 square foot home and that things are actually better having less. Was your wife on board with you the whole time or did you have to work with her from the beginning?

Work with her. That's a funny way to... No, she was on board. If I was cleaning the garage, she'd been cleaning the inside of the house all morning and tending to our two-year-old at the time. So she was in. I would say if I want to get rid of 80% of our stuff, she wanted to get rid of 60% and so getting rid of the first 50, 60% of things went pretty well.

But then when I wanted to keep going and I wanted to keep going through the house again to get rid of stuff, that's when she started pushing back and said, "I kind of like where we're at." So that's then when the compromise came in and, "Okay, well I can still handle my stuff and let you handle your stuff." So she was on board, just not as fully as I was on board.

Want to wrap up by asking about your business experience. It sounds like when you started your blog, it was just more of a personal journal, kind of for fun and maybe inspire some other people. At what point did it become an income generating activity? It became an income generating activity about two years into writing.

Friend of mine put out a book about minimalism that sold pretty well and my competitive nature said, "Gosh, if he can write a book, I can write a book. I've certainly written enough over two years that I could write a book." About three weeks later, my book came out.

I was pretty motivated when I saw him do it and just saw the value that could be provided in a book after two years of blogging. I go, "Okay, let's organize this in a nice orderly way." So we came out with a book and it sold amazingly well from the very beginning and still does simplify.

It's the one that sells the best out of all of our books. So that was the first income generation but it wasn't much. What would be the timeline? Maybe three years into it, a little over three years into it is when the first idea of, "Hey, maybe, not only could I do this full time but I'm becoming more and more passionate about this and if I want to devote as much time to this that I want to, then something's got to give in the other job." I was very different.

Most bloggers' dream is to quit their job and blog full time but I loved my job. I liked what I was doing. I wasn't doing it for the money. I was finding fulfillment in it. So that three year transition or actually a little over two years of, "Okay, I think I need to start doing this full time.

What do I need to put in place in order to do that?" Do you recommend blogging as a get rich activity? I wouldn't tell anyone to do something because they could get rich out of it. I would counsel anyone to go do whatever they think they can accomplish the most good in doing that that's what they should do.

Minimalism makes that possible in new ways that a lot of people haven't considered. So no, I don't think I would ever recommend a job to someone else other than, "Don't go do what you're doing for the money. Go do it because you can add value to the world and other people and you're going to enjoy that far more than you would a large paycheck." Do you think you'll ever retire?

No. So you view work not as a chore but as a contribution. You've steered away from using the word passion and you've said contribution. Yeah, no, retirement is a whole other subject for me. I'm not a fan of retirement. Why not? It was, as I say, it was invented in the last 100 years and it was invented by the politicians so that should give us a little bit of worry right there.

I mean, if you track the history of it, 1930s and 40s and it was about, "Hey, we need to get people back to work and we need to get money in circulation so how can we get the old people out of work so that we can get the new ones working who are going to spend more of their money?" I think if you take an honest view of it, I think it's created a lot more stress and anxiety than it's alleviated.

And so the dream becomes, "I want to get out of work as quickly as I can." And people don't find joy in their work when they're just trying to get out of it. If the whole goal of work is to make enough money so I don't have to do it anymore, then no one's enjoying what they're doing and we're adding stress.

"Oh, you need to be saving this much money so that you can finally reach this life of leisure when you reach this predetermined age that someone wrote down in a law somewhere." As opposed to just saying, "Hey, a life of leisure, where's the fulfillment in this? I like what I'm doing.

I enjoy adding value to the world. I can see my work as love for other people and why would I want to get out of that just to gulf?" I think we'd be better off finding jobs that we love doing and want to do it on as long as we can.

And as long as we're—there's certainly physical limitations to some work and mental limitations sometimes when you reach a certain age. Those things to be—I'm all for transition, but this idea of trying to get out of work entirely is something I don't have any desire for. It's a big difference between providing for your later years when you may not financially be able to provide for yourself and saying, "I've got to provide to be able to have fun." It's funny.

You would like my show because I've done entire shows on the untold history of retirement. The scary fact is that nobody who can afford to ever retires. And once you actually study the history of it, you find out that retirement has always been a political tool. So I'm glad you brought it up.

I doubt you've listened to my show and yet it's exactly what we talk about all the time. But the question I think is a really valid planning question. And I think of ways to get in touch with what each person wants. And one way to get in touch is to ask yourself the $10 million question, "If I had $10 million, what would I do with my life?" Another way to get in touch is to say, "What would I do if I knew I could never retire?" And it's interesting because if you knew you could never retire, it's a different mindset.

And what I would do if I knew I could never retire is I would go about setting my life in order such that I could really enjoy every day and gain the most value from every day on my path forward. And I think both are valid because I don't want to tell somebody else how they should live.

But the easier way seems to be – there is one way and we talk a lot on my show about how to get rich and how to build up money and day by day. But there's really an easier way. Avoid the need. Don't worry about piling up all the money.

That can come in its time. But even if you just want to figure out how can I build a life that I wouldn't want to retire from, build that and then give all the money away if you want to. Because if you have that, you can't take the money with you, you can't take the stuff with you.

It all stays here. And a life that's devoted to the pursuit of stuff seems like a very shallow life. It seems a little bit foolish. But a life that's devoted to a pursuit of something that has meaning to you, that's very different. And it doesn't cost much to serve.

Really doesn't. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And I think that I've found that when you find that work that you like doing, when you find whatever you would want to do that you would never want to retire from, that the money follows. When you chase the money in your career, the passion doesn't typically follow.

But when you chase your passion, oftentimes the money does follow. But yeah, the pursuit of wealth, I think we work for the sake of work and we work because we're benefiting others through it. Right. And I'm glad you pointed out the impact that minimalism had in your ability to transition.

Because that's why I wanted to bring the subject out on the show, is I've observed that many times what people are fearful of is transition. And the fear is often due to a high ongoing commitment. So if you have fewer expenses, fewer things, then the fear of transition can really largely be really be dealt with.

And if you hold things lightly, which is kind of one of the inward benefits I think of simplicity and minimalism is that even the things that you do have, you probably hold them a little bit more lightly than many people do, recognizing their place and their usefulness, but also recognizing that they can come and go, then it makes flexibility more valuable.

And I had one experience that, as a financial planner, that really hit me. And I was working with this prospective client and he was kind of a middle-aged big shot. Not a big, big shot, but a middle-aged big shot. He was doing well in his career. And he lived in a part of town here where, large home, a couple of nice cars, kids in private school, kind of just the standard affluent, mass affluent American lifestyle.

And he got laid off unexpectedly. And the fear that was in his eyes from needing to make a transition for his family, he'd been looking for work and he wasn't able to find it, but the fear that was in his eyes just really hit me. And I thought, it shouldn't be this way.

How is it that I can design a life where I'm not so connected to my stuff and to my image? Not just the things, but rather to my image and to this certain lifestyle. How can I design, hold these things more loosely so that I can be more flexible so I don't have to look forward with the fear of the social, what's the word, the social, I guess, disdain.

Oh, this guy lost his job and he's going to lose his big house. But rather, how can I build a lifestyle that I can use events like that that happened to me as a transition time, as a springboard forward? And one of those tools, at least for me, is minimalism because the ability to externally not have that much and not need that much means that I can get by on less if I need to.

And then internally, having solved that internal battle to where I can hold things lightly, that makes a big difference in the approach toward life. One of my favorite emails I've received was from a woman and I would never wish this on anyone by the way, but she had written an email that her husband had just lost his job and so she was googling how to live on less.

And it led her to my Becoming Minimalist website and she said, "I got to tell you, you've just changed my view completely on what has happened." And I was searching because I didn't know how to live on less and how we're going to make our life not miserable without this income.

And you just opened my eyes to this idea that maybe life could be better if I had less stuff and that maybe this can actually be a good thing that we go through and a healthy transition for our family. And I agree. I think so many of us, the social stigma, we start in our own hearts.

We start, "Oh gosh, it would be such a sacrifice to have to live in a smaller house or to own less clothes, to have to sell a car." We think that this is going to be such a sacrifice and such a disadvantage to our lives as opposed to seeing how it could actually benefit us and could actually lead to a better life.

And then, I mean, you know this. And then our story becomes an inspiration for others and you get to tell someone else about how you found this joy in owning less and suddenly they get it and it catches on there and it changes this stigma. And we see it in ourselves, right?

Like any societal change has to start in individuals and I think that's just a different way to look at it. And I never wished that transition on someone, but that was a very encouraging email I got that day. It really does. And it's because the way that we define wealth is so skewed.

In a world where wealth is being measured primarily with dollar signs and decimal points and commas, you have to kind of see through it and you have to see that who is wealthy. And a lot of this would come down to having, I guess, a spiritual understanding of life.

But I look at children as wealth. That is the relationship that people have. You work with enough retirees and what is the one thing that retirees crave, older generations crave is time with their family, time with their kids. And I figure if that's what I'm going to crave when I'm old, because that's what all the old people crave, why don't I go ahead and adjust my life in such a way that I can spend time now?

Why don't I go ahead and change things and focus on that wealth, on the wealth that I have? I don't think financial wealth is, it's certainly not irrelevant, but I wouldn't place it as high on the scale of wealth as many other types of wealth myself. Well said, well said.

I agree. Last question and then with this we'll close and mention your site and then if you have any projects or anything that you're working on that you want people to be aware of that you think would be helpful, I'd like you to mention them. But if you were going to connect with the things that you've learned over the last number of years, if you were working with your maybe 18 year old son or 18 year old daughter and you were going to try to impart to them some wisdom, specifically as it relates finance and what you've learned in this transition in your life, what would you share with them?

I would probably go back to even just the very opening of this and there's probably two things I'd want them to know. Number one, I'd want them to know that his money is only as valuable as what he chooses to spend it on. And if you choose to spend it on cars and televisions and clothes, then once those wear out, then those things are going to wear out.

But if you choose to invest it in the good of other people, if you choose to invest in something that's going to make a difference for others, then it becomes far more valuable. And then the second thing I would just impart, as I mentioned, is that money's never going to provide what it was never meant to provide.

It's not going to provide the security that you think it's going to. It'll provide some, don't get me wrong, but it's not going to provide full security in your life. It's not going to provide all the happiness and fulfillment that most people think it's going to. Again, some, right?

I mean, some security and some just ability to even have these conversations are because I have the money to do that. So certainly provide for your family, work hard to do it, but stop thinking that money is going to provide the things that it was never established to provide.

Becomingminimalist.com, you have a book called Simplify, and then you have a book called Clutter-Free with Kids. You have a book called Inside Out Simplicity, and then you have a book called Living with Less, An Unexpected Key to Happiness for Students. If you were going to point someone where to start, would you prefer they start with one of your books or the blog, or where would you want them to start with your work?

Oh, I'd send them to the website, becomingminimalist.com. They can find anything and everything from there. They can, I'm on Twitter and Facebook. They can find the books from there, but I'd send them there, say, "Hey, come check it out. See if you like what we're talking about. If you're looking for more help, if you're looking to learn more, then the books are a great step and they're pretty easy to read.

People seem to like them, so that's good. Very cool. Well, thank you for coming on today. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed it. I think this is a much-needed refreshment in the common discussion around finance, so I appreciate your making the time. It has been my pleasure. Thank you.

I hope you'll consider how you can use those concepts in your life. I think all of us have the opportunity to simplify our lives. Now, maybe you already live in an aesthetic, beautiful, perfect environment. You don't have anything extra in your house. Well, then let me ask you, could you simplify your schedule?

Could you simplify your relationships? Could you simplify your commitments? Could you simplify your business? Do fewer things well? I think there's a constant battle that we have to face in our culture to simplify. I really don't know why that is, but it seems like everything is always pulling for your time.

I know for me, it's always simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify my schedule, simplify my possessions, simplify my time. Just simplify, because there's a lot more freedom that comes with simplicity. And also, as we go here, don't gloss over the impact of not needing a lot of money. That is an incredibly valuable transition.

And if you're doing something that you don't like doing, quit. Figure out a way to quit. One of those ways that you can figure out how to quit might be to radically transform your life. Hope you found that to be an inspirational way to start your weekend. Hope you can apply some of the concepts in that.

I hope that you can, this weekend, continue down the path toward greater simplicity and greater meaning and greater fulfillment. Thank you for listening to today's show. I appreciate your being here. This week has been a good week. I've been bringing you a lot of interviews this week, and I haven't brought you a lot of teaching shows.

I've still been finishing up some projects here, and we'll be bringing those teaching shows, hopefully, back on the schedule next week. I've got a really exciting way to start off on Monday. We're going to be starting off, I think, with continuing the educational plan, which is going to lead into college, how to finance college in a much more intelligent way.

And we're going toward the technical side of planning, but before we get there, we're going to do with the alternative plans. And first, we've got to deal with high school and with school. And Monday's show, we're going to lay it out for you, I think, in a really neat way and share with you some history that you may not be aware of.

I think that'll set you up for a better understanding of basically how our world functions and maybe why it functions the way that it does. Because just like we talked about, if you can just simply eliminate the need to do something, if you can, instead of having to save a bunch of money and get rich so you can retire, if you can just eliminate the need to retire and go find a job that you love doing, isn't that a little bit more of a straightforward way?

Now, that doesn't mean you're not going to save any money, but it's a very freeing concept. So we're going to do some of the same things with school on next week. I've got a bunch of great guests lined up, and I'm also going to be able to bring you back some more of the hardcore financial planning shows.

I didn't bring you a Q&A show today simply because I had one question. So if you would like me to answer on our more normal Friday Q&A show some of your financial planning questions, call them in. Go to the website at RadicalPersonalFinance.com. Click the Send Voicemail button and send me a voicemail.

I'd love to hear from you. Love those reviews as well. If you like the show, let me know. Make sure you subscribe. Talk to you on Monday. 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.

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