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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ Today is a very special day. This is episode 100. And today, I'm going to share with you the background history of the show, and the future, and how you can be involved if you want to be. ♪ Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

My name is Joshua Sheets. I thank you for being here. Today is Tuesday, November the 11th, 2014. And this is episode 100. Can you believe it? It's here already. Episode 100. This is going to be good. I think you're going to like hearing a little bit of the history, and also the future of this show.

♪ I knew when I started the show that this was going to come fairly quickly. After all, when you do a show five days a week, episode 100 is going to come fairly quickly. But, it sure doesn't feel like 100 episodes at this point. It's pretty cool. And I've got an exciting show for you.

I'm going to be sharing with you a good bit about the history of the show, and then launching today something that I am calling The Irregulars, which is essentially going to be a membership program for you, if you would like to, entirely voluntary, for you to support the show financially.

And I'm going to share with you all the different things that I have considered doing, and why I am choosing and taking the path that I am taking. So, I hope you'll stick with me and enjoy the show. I think I'm going to try to share a lot of background history.

If you're a new listener to the show, I think you'll really benefit from this. I hope this isn't the first show you've heard. I hope you've at least listened to a few of the other episodes to have a little bit of context. But, regardless, I think you'll be interested in it.

So, let's begin with where did I come from, and what's happening with the show. And today, I am going to share with you a lot of details. I'm going to completely pull back the curtain on who I am, what I am doing, why I'm doing it. Try to just give you as much information as you might ever want to know.

I had one listener suggest to me that for the 100th episode of the show, that I do a show on kind of who I am and my story. And I may be able to do that at some point, but for right now, I didn't really see an ability. I didn't want to just sit here and talk about myself necessarily for an hour.

And I couldn't come up with anybody to interview me. So, I'll do that in a future show, because I'm happy to share anything about who I am. It just seems kind of boring to me for you to sit and just listen to that all day. But, who knows? So, that'll be coming in a future show.

But for today, we're going to talk about the history of the show, at least as it goes back over about the last year and a half now. So, I launched the show, let's see, what was it? It was basically July of 2013, so a little over a year and a half ago.

And when I launched the show, I wasn't really sure what would happen or what the future would be like, how the show would even fit, whether it would be well-received or not. I'm kind of a wacky guy. I have a lot of crazy ideas. I think a lot of them make sense, some of them probably don't.

But, you know, that's kind of, who knows? Sometimes people respond better to people who are a little crazy, and sometimes people respond not so well. So, who knows? But you guys, the audience, you, the listening audience, you've proven, at least to me, to my satisfaction, that there is a demand for some of the type of information that I've been sharing with you and some of the type of content that I've been bringing to you.

So, I want to tell you the story of how the show came to be so you can understand where the show is going in the future. When I began the show, I started it primarily just for fun as kind of a creative outlet to see if I could do it.

And then also because I was frustrated with the other options that existed. As far as fun, I thought I would enjoy it. So, for years, as I've sat down and worked on my personal goals, I learned that I really love teaching. I really, for me, the most enjoyment that I get is I really enjoy teaching people.

That's why I loved working as a financial planner, because when I could teach somebody something that they didn't know, I could see the light go off in their eyes, or I could have somebody come into my office that was just totally stressed out, and I could walk them through a process of rational discovery of what they were trying to do and then some ideas, and see the light come on.

It's just like it's the best feeling in the world. I love being in the classroom. For a few years, I've taught junior achievement. I love going into schools and getting a chance to work with and teach concepts that have been really helpful to me. I've learned through that process that I don't do so well with the younger children as in elementary school, but I really love working with high school students.

When I was a kid, I always thought that my dream career would be to get rich and then retire and go teach college classes, because I thought what a great environment if you can be surrounded by college students who want to learn. What an awesome thing. So, I love teaching, and I train myself for it kind of intentionally.

I always thought it might be nice to be a public speaker. I, like everyone else, was totally petrified of speaking, but I saw the value of it, and I loved listening to people who were effective orators and speakers. So, I would listen to them, and I trained myself for it.

I joined Toastmasters when I was younger, and I practiced, and I always just tried to practice and improve that craft. So, when I discovered podcasting, I discovered this amazing medium where you can share information. For years, I had bought audio course after audio course after audio course. People asked me what kind of music I listened to.

I said, "I don't really listen to music. I really don't. If I do, it's likely to be like a Broadway show, or it's likely to be like gospel, country gospel type of stuff. I'm kind of wacky as far as what I like, but I really don't listen to much music.

I primarily listen to stuff that teaches me something. I had one experience that I had a friend of mine that, years ago, looked at the binder of CDs that I carried in the trunk of my car for my CD changer, and he said, because he actually knew how much all this stuff costs, he said, "Man, your CDs that you have here cost twice as much as your car is worth." I said, "Yeah, I put my priorities in the right place.

Who cares what the car is worth? The information is valuable." I had all these audio programs and things that I had purchased and discovered. So, when I discovered the world of podcasting, I thought, "Wow, this is awesome," but I never really saw myself as being a podcast producer. What happened is I was working as a financial planner, and I had been working as a financial planner for between four to five years, and I became extremely frustrated with the financial media, just extremely frustrated.

I couldn't stand listening to really any of it after a while, and I'd always loved the financial media and the financial information, but I grew to the point where I could not listen. Once I had learned a little bit with financial planning and had had a few experiences actually working with clients, I couldn't listen anymore.

I hated the incomplete advice that was given. I hated how if I listened to a call-in show, the host would give an answer in three and a half minutes that I used to think was a good answer, and then I learned enough to know that the host had just bumbled past about 15 key pieces of information that could markedly change the outcome of what the right result would be, and the host didn't seem to appreciate it.

I hated the lack of appreciation of somebody's perspective or the viewpoint of their experience. There are so many battles and arguments in the financial world of people that dramatically disagree, but it seems like nobody takes the time to really listen and understand what's driving somebody. I couldn't stand how a lot of times in the financial media, if you read financial publications or consume financial media, oftentimes you feel like people are being talked down to, and I used to do that, I think.

I used to--hopefully I'm getting better, but people have often perceived me as being arrogant and talking down to them, and I think I picked a lot of that up just from watching how other people interacted with individuals. But the reality is I learned that each of us is a functioning, thinking human being, and we all have reasons why we do the things that we do.

And I didn't like just essentially the disrespect of a person, you know, a person made in God's image, like a valuable person. Don't disrespect people. Stop talking down to people. And so that really bothered me, and I hated the undisclosed bias that people would come from. They'd say, "Okay, here's my opinion," but they wouldn't disclose why all of the conflicts of interest and all of the personal bias that might have been at work or might not have been, but at least disclose them, the things that might possibly have been at work in their opinion.

And then worse than all of those is I just hated the unfair treatment of ideas and essentially the ad hominem attacks that are pervasive throughout the financial industry. And if you're unfamiliar with the term, an ad hominem attack, it's a Latin word. It's one of the formal logical fallacies that is utterly infuses every aspect of our culture, where instead of dealing with somebody's argument, you attack the person.

And so instead of dealing with the facts that somebody presents or the argument or the logic that they build in their case that they're making for whatever their viewpoint is, you attack the person and attack their credentials. You attack their knowledge. You attack their partiality. And I just couldn't stand it because the financial world is incredibly confusing and there are so many aspects to it and it's a massive, massive world.

And depending on your worldview, depending on the information you've been exposed to, depending on your goals, all of these things are going to affect your perspective. But don't just attack somebody for who they are. Deal with what they're saying. And so I became so frustrated with the financial media, I got to the point where I could not listen or read or watch really anything.

So I would read boring financial textbooks to pass financial planning exams and that was it. I couldn't deal with it. But over time, I listened to podcasts and I thought, "You know what? Something different should exist." So from time to time, I would go and look for a financial podcast and I couldn't find one.

It seemed as though, to me, it seemed as though there was a very basic elementary level podcast of, "Here's how you get out of debt," which is valuable. And by the way, none of this is criticism of my fellow financial podcasters, but I couldn't find something that really appealed to me.

It seemed either very basic or it seemed to have a specific agenda or it seemed so stilted in the direction of obvious marketing that it was painful for me to listen to. And again, I'm not attacking any of those things. They're very valuable. My show, for example, I do not expect it to appeal to all people.

There are some people for whom my show is way over their heads and there are some people for whom my show is so simplistic that it's utterly boring to them. And I think that's totally cool. The wonderful thing about podcasting as a medium is that we can walk through a journey of life with other people, depending on where they are.

But I thought something should exist and I couldn't find it, so I had the idea of creating it. And I didn't know how to do it. I've never recorded a podcast. I never had done anything like that. I hardly even had an MP3 recorder or anything that I could even use.

I had a little $20 MP3 recorder that came with my Dragon Naturally Speaking software that I used for dictation on my computer. And I said, "Well, I'll start with that." So I found a podcast, which was actually Cliff Ravenscraft's Podcast Answer Man show. I just Googled "podcasting" and found his show.

And this was in the days before I rejected Google. That slipped out there accidentally. And so I found his show and I just followed his tutorial. And that led me to a couple of things and I started the show. And I remember vividly, if you go back, you can find it in the feed.

Now that I opened up the feed, you can find the first show. And I was sitting in the middle of my bed just with an audio recorder, scared silly to-- I hit record like eight times because I was just so scared and recorded the show. And then I got done with it.

I was like, "Oh, wow." And I listened to it and I was like, "Would I listen to that?" I said, "Well, that's pretty rough, but I would listen to it." So I decided and I went ahead and uploaded it and got it going. Now, I had no idea how to do any of this stuff.

I still am a total bumbling fool when it comes to the techno stuff. But one of the things I discovered pretty quickly was that the growth was actually-- it seemed pretty strong to me. And I didn't really know what strong was or what it wasn't. I was doing it primarily for fun.

And also I had an idea that maybe it would be a way that I could serve my clients. Because one of the things that happens a lot in financial planning is that you repeat the same conversations over and over and over again, teaching clients information that-- and I thought, "This is not an effective use of my time.

Why am I having the same 30-minute discussion of what type of life insurance you should have four times a week? Why don't I have this discussion once, record it, and then say, 'Before you come into my office, listen to this. It'll save us half an hour of time.'" And I just was frustrated, but I couldn't really do that.

So I thought, "Well, maybe I would do that." And a simple example would be something as simple as level term life insurance instead of annual renewable term life insurance. I don't think any young person should ever buy level term life insurance. They should always buy annual renewable term life insurance.

But there's no resources out there that anybody had ever created to explain why and explain how they work that I could send that to a client. So I had to have the same conversation over and over and over again. There's lots of resources on term insurance versus whole life insurance, but that's not what I was talking about.

I was talking about annual renewable term instead of level term. So I said, "OK, I'll try it." So I threw the show out there and did it anonymously, and then all of a sudden I found people listening. I started to get emails. And you want to talk about encouraging somebody that's creating content, you send them an email.

It makes a huge difference. And so I said, "Wow, other people feel like I do." And I thought this would just be kind of a fun hobby, but I found myself really working hard at it. If you go listen to some of those early shows, I was getting up at 5 in the morning.

I was up once or twice. I was getting up at 4 in the morning and working for about five or six hours to prep the show, record the show, and get it, do all the techie stuff that I was dealing with before going to the office and working a full day.

And what I found is that when I was doing it, I enjoyed doing it so much that my work days were awesome. I had the most productive, effective days at work because I had started basically doing something that I really found important and valuable. But it really was wearing me down.

And I was essentially running on adrenaline, not getting enough sleep. And I would be going to bed late because I'm up late kind of working on tweaking how do I install a WordPress blog and how do I figure out how FeedBurner works and all this stuff I had no idea about.

And then I'd just wake up in the morning. I'd wake up without an alarm clock and just bounce out of bed. But still, it was wearing me down. So I got sick. And then that was the point when I went ahead and disclosed the show to my firm. And then at that point in time, they said, "Either you're done here or shut the show down." And I had done a lot of planning before doing the show because I was well familiar with the marketing issues in the financial planning business.

I'd done a lot of research, done a lot of planning, and I thought I had created a way to be able to do it without running afoul of the issues with broker-dealers. But I was wrong. So I got super sick, was super crushed because I'm like, "Man, this is the best thing." I really loved doing it.

So I took the show down and had to take the show down. Well, what I found was in the first month of releasing the show, I'm going to share with you some numbers. And this is purely just to help people because I could never find anybody else. It took me forever to figure out what numbers matter in podcasting.

And in the last year, a lot of stuff has changed even to when I started it. But in the first month of releasing the show, which was essentially July 15, 2013 to August 9, 2013, I had a total of 4,512 downloads of the show. And when it really took off, like towards the end before I shut it down, I had about 500 downloads a day.

And that just blew my mind because I couldn't even imagine. Like if you imagine 500 people sitting in a room listening to you, that is just – that's a lot of people. And I couldn't even believe it. But the really big deal was not the numbers because you don't have any idea.

With podcasting, the statistics are so difficult to figure out, at least for me. But I started getting these emails, and the emails just rocked my world, people saying, "Wow, this is so helpful. And here's my question. Here's what do you think." So when I took the show down, I didn't really know, "Okay, it's 500 downloads a day.

Is that good? Is that bad? Is that whatever?" And so I started trying to research, and I found out that it was actually pretty decent, at least in the podcasting world. But more important than the numbers were the emails that you guys sent me. And those emails just said – I said, "Man, there's a need for this." So I thought about it for a long time, trying to figure out a way that I could do the show.

Now, I spent six years working with my firm, and I loved – not every minute. I loved much of my life there. I really had built in almost six years. It actually wound up being more like five and a half, but I usually just say six because it's easier.

But I don't know. Maybe I should say five. It's hard to measure exactly how long I was doing it. But I spent about six years there, and I really had a great time. I really enjoyed it. And I had my crises. I quit after three years because I wanted to go do something else, and I actually quit and then came back.

And I had my crises. But overall, I was extremely settled and really had worked hard to build up a solid business. And if you've never been in the financial services business, it might be hard for you to appreciate how difficult it is to get a business started. In the financial planning business, in my estimation, basically from zero years to five years, barring some very strange aberration of massive success, which almost never happens, basically from zero to five years, you're desperately just trying to start your business.

And especially if you start like I did without any prior industry experience, you're just trying to learn, and you're trying to prospect, and you're trying to find clients. And you basically spend all your time jumping out of bushes at people trying to talk to them about their money. And it's a brutally difficult business to get started.

Industry statistics say that our attrition rate is 80% to 90% depending on the firm, of the people that start in the financial services business after five years or no longer with the firm that they are. So it's really, really tough to get started. I would estimate, and these numbers are totally fuzzy, but from five to 15 years, you're essentially building a really solid business.

And then from 15 years on, if you've built a really great business under you, you're just sitting back enjoying the fruit of your labor. And you still need to work, but the work is very different than it is the first five years. And I knew that going in. So I had a long-time perspective.

I was invested fully in building things, invested in my education, invested in my business, and I knew that going in. I was an okay producer. I was better at first. I was top core time my first few years, and then I kind of dropped back to kind of middle of the pack basically as far as how producers average.

And it took me a while to figure out my niche of the type of financial planning that I like to do. I never really just enjoyed doing a lot of production, massive numbers of clients. I really liked deep dive technical planning, as you can tell probably from the show, as I like kind of complex, difficult questions.

I like dealing with that. I'm happy to sit in my office for two days and puzzle through a complex estate plan or figure out a tax plan. It's challenging. So my production numbers are probably middle of the road. I think I averaged off the top of my head. I would say if I had to average it probably I averaged like $85,000 or $90,000 of premium for the first – you know, average for the first five years.

For those of you in the financial services business, that will mean something. And when I left, I had somewhere between five – like about five to six million dollars of assets under management, which I had built over the last two or three years. So that would get you totally fired at some firms.

If you're not in financial planning – I'll put these in context. That would get you totally fired at some firms, and that would get you – you would be a rock star in other firms. And in most firms, I'd be pretty much middle of the road. So I always – me personally, I like my time off.

I took over a month off every year that I worked, and I liked dealing with work that I liked. I never – to me, the money and the stuff that you buy with it has never been that big of a deal to me, and I always liked working on it.

But I often thought, well, why don't we fix this problem of marketing and client training? Why can't we provide more resources for people to really more fully understand what we do? I really thought that if I just tell enough people about how podcasting works, how we can set this technology up, and we kind of set this thing up right, everything will work.

And the financial planning business will embrace this, and it will be great. It wasn't quite so easy, and there are reasons why. But basically I spent six months when the show was off the air trying to figure out a way to just keep doing my practice, and I was fully committed to my practice.

Again, I bought a house that's four-tenths of a mile from my office. I loved my firm. I had a great office, a great managing director, no plans to ever change anything. I spent six months trying to figure out a way to do it, couldn't do it. So then I was like, OK, what am I going to do?

Well, I thought about just not doing the show, and I was like, well, I'll just forget about the show, and I'll keep going back to financial planning. And if you all hadn't sent me so many emails and so many emails asking where are you, then I probably would have done that.

I would have just said I'm just going to keep doing my practice and ignore the show. But I still couldn't find any good shows. I couldn't really find anybody doing what I was doing or what I wanted to do. And I was like, this should exist, and because of your emails, this should exist.

The only show that came along after I shut mine down that I was actually really jealous of was when Todd Treseder launched his show, The Financial Mentor Podcast, because he was always somebody that I enjoyed his writing. And I felt like he did a good job of balancing information and a comprehensive background on his blog, and then he started a podcast.

I was – he asked my wife. I was legitimately jealous of when he launched his show. I told him that when I met him a few months ago. I told my wife. I was like, it was the one guy that started the show that I think is something that I would want to do.

But I still couldn't find anything that was kind of the way that I wanted to approach it. So I thought about just not doing the show, but I got all of these – all your emails. I said there's a need for this. Like this should exist, and I'm a bit of an idealist.

I say if something should exist, somebody should do it. That's kind of how my brain works. So I thought about just simply keeping my financial planning practice going and doing it for a few more years so I could save the money and launch. But the problem was that I couldn't do it in faith and I couldn't do it in good faith.

So in faith has a lot to do with my personal faith. But in faith meaning I couldn't tell my clients. See, when I brought a client on board and I committed to them to be their financial planner, I felt like I was making – not a lifetime commitment, but I was making a serious commitment.

When I say I'm going to care for you and I'm going to be the steward of your financial house, that's a serious, serious commitment. And when I'm becoming somebody's steward and I now feel responsible – ultimately they're responsible, but I always felt responsible for my client's financial success, that's a big commitment.

I didn't take that lightly. And I couldn't keep doing production and selling insurance, bringing in new investment accounts and keeping on going if I didn't feel like I was going to be doing it for the long term. So I actually tried that, but then I just felt like I can't – I couldn't bring any new clients on.

So I hardly brought on – I don't know. I brought on very few clients that six – for that year between when I kind of launched – pulled the show down because I just couldn't do it. I was mainly just servicing existing clients and just kind of sitting there stewing, trying to figure out what on earth am I going to do.

So I thought about just keeping the practice going to quit and launch, but I couldn't do that. And the problem is it was really tough to walk away from my firm because the financial business is very much a deferred compensation business. In the beginning, financial advisors as they're getting in, you work a massive number of hours for very little income in the short term.

But that can flip around at the back end of your career to where you don't have to work so much for a massively over – probably overly high amount of income. That's just the nature of the business. So when I had spent five years pouring into this business and had relatively financially been compensated fine but very small compared to the amount of work that I'd put in, it's hard to walk away from it.

And then plus the way that all the compensation is structured, it's all on the back end. So it's entirely a deferred compensation model. If I were going to walk away from my practice, I was walking away from all of my residual income from investment management, from the majority of my renewals from insurance income, from the majority of my pension benefits, from the majority of all of the benefits that I had.

And that was not easy to do, especially when after five years I had almost essentially just hit a point where it was really fun. I was making enough money residually where I could walk away from the more difficult clients without needing to worry about it and I could – and I had gained kind of that independence of perspective of passive income.

And I was doing primarily work that I liked. I was working primarily in the retirement space, doing complex retirement planning. I had built up enough knowledge base where in the beginning of a financial services career, you feel very much like you have to prove something to people and people are always testing you.

And then after a while, you can – hopefully you hear me right. You can achieve this perspective of basically being able to pick and choose who you want to bring on as clients and you can only choose people that you like being with and enjoy you and that you like them and they like you.

It's a really nice business because you can choose who you work with. So it's tough to walk away from that. Bigger problem though is that I was kind of financially stuck and the reason is that I had spent a large amount of my savings on buying a house, on a down payment for a house, and also that the majority of my other savings were locked up in deferred accounts.

So retirement accounts and places where I didn't have easy access to the money. And that was a mistake. I put too much money – myself personally, I put too much money into retirement accounts without keeping enough money liquid. And when we bought the house that we lived in, it was important to me.

I put down a 20% down payment but we doubled the price of the house that we were shopping for to meet kind of the market that we decided to be in. And at the time, everything seemed like a really good decision. But it wound up with me not having as much money in savings as I was comfortable with.

And so this resulted in a real challenge of basically being stuck in a position where I couldn't do the show that I really wanted to do. And I felt like this should exist. Somebody should do it. I can't do it, which was my plan, and keep working my practice.

I couldn't really leave my practice because I couldn't – like what else am I going to do? But I had to get out of the financial business to be able to do the show. And so I just went in this circle and I talked to people and I tried to figure out like how can I do it.

And I had some savings left. But basically an emergency fund primarily. But I wasn't willing to make the decision to spend the savings down because podcasting is a business. That's a stupid business plan in my opinion. It's like saying I'm going to get rich being an author. OK. Maybe a tiny percentage of people will as being an author, writing books.

A tiny percentage will get very rich. A tiny percentage will make a decent living. And the majority won't make much money at all. So I'm not willing to trust the financial future of my family on essentially a crapshoot. Is this – could this work? Could this not? There's no way to – you have this entirely new medium, entirely new business, and I would just simply – I'm not going to invest my savings and be down to my last dime starting this completely untested business in a totally volatile market doing something I've never done before.

That's pretty dumb. More importantly is that if I left my firm, I thought about starting another firm. But the problem was that if I did start another financial planning firm, if I started an independent firm, which is the way that legally I could work it out, is starting a registered investment advisory firm, and then that would allow me to do the podcast because I become my own chief compliance officer and I'm able to basically say, "Yes, this is acceptable." I needed the savings to start the new firm because there are capital requirements in the financial planning business.

So if I file for a firm with the state of Florida or with other states, there are net capital requirements of a certain amount of money that has to be set aside in a bank account that's reserved for that. And if you ever go below that amount of money, then you have to go to the state of Florida and say, "Invalidate me basically because I don't have the money for the net capital requirements." You have to submit the balance sheet and notarize and all that stuff.

So I couldn't just say, "Okay, I'm going to spend this money down," because then I'm really backed up. I really would have my back up against the wall and say, "I've spent all my money. Now I can't start a firm. Now I just got to go – I'd be out looking for a job." And then I've walked away from one firm where everything was built, my entire client base, the promises that I've made, and what am I going to go join that same firm back again?

Maybe I could do that. Am I going to go join a new firm? So that was dumb. That would not be a workable plan. So I couldn't spend savings on investing in the business. So I went round and round and round and round trying to figure out what on earth am I going to do.

My wife and I, we talked and we prayed and it was like, "What are we going to do?" And finally I figured out. It just kind of came as a flash of lightning one day. I said, "All I need is another job. If I just get a job that's good enough to pay my bills, then I can essentially just work two jobs.

I can do one job and I can build the podcast. And if the podcast works, great. I'll quit the job that's paying me money. And if the podcast doesn't work, at least then I can always have a backup plan." So I thought of a lot of different things. And the key was I had to get out of the financial planning business because I had to get rid of my licenses and registrations to be able to freely speak with the public without dealing with broker-dealer laws.

So I looked around for a paraplaner job. I thought about going and doing taxes. I thought about doing a bunch of different things. But what I needed though was something that was basically a dead-end job. I didn't need something where I was going to go and be some kind of junior tax guy helping somebody in their tax firm.

But then they start counting on me and clients start counting on me. I didn't want entangling commitments. I didn't want anything with a long-time perspective. I wanted to be free. So I thought about going and selling cars. I figured I could do that. I checked that out. The hours were crazy as far as they require you to work weekends.

And I wasn't willing to do that. I thought about delivering pizzas. I actually went and tried that for a week. I said, "Oh, if I can just make a few thousand bucks a month delivering pizzas five, six nights a week, it will work great. I can listen to stuff in the car while I'm learning.

I listen to my show, hone my craft, prepare show notes and things like that." I read online you could make like $20 an hour doing that. That would be good. Totally dead-end. Just enough money to pay my bills. Perfect. I found out that didn't work. I did it for a week and discovered that you don't make $20 an hour.

That's where I live. No way to make $20 delivering pizzas. That was kind of like why would I go do something if it weren't for that for a minimum of $20 an hour. But it was a really awesome experience. That's a whole show for another day. But I loved doing it because it gave me – I'd never worked in a minimum wage job before.

It gave me kind of insight. I had some amazing conversations with some of the people there. It was almost like just a total – it was an awesome experience. I really loved it. But I was like I can't do this. I thought it would be perfect. But anyway, it wasn't.

So eventually I wound up being able to negotiate a consulting contract in the financial business where basically I work for somebody for 24 hours a week and that pays me enough 24 hours a week from home. I do back office consulting in the financial planning business and that gives me enough money to pay my bills.

So that was great. So I said – my wife and I, we sat down and I said, "Listen, I'm going to invest a year into radical personal finance, a year of full-on focused effort, and I'm going to see if I can just launch the show in a strong way because I think the market is – there's a demand for this.

I don't know if I can do it or not, but I figure I could learn the skills and then decide at that point whether to just keep it as a hobby or try to turn it into a business." So that's where we are. So four months in into that plan and, again, I decided I'm going to invest basically a year of my life for sure, and I'm committed to at least doing a thousand episodes, but whether or not it becomes a full-time thing and I can really enhance the quality or whether it is something that's just a part-time creative outlet, then that's fine.

That's cool and that will be awesome as well and I'll go do something else. I have backup plans. I have a bunch of businesses that I've thought about starting as well. So I bought myself time and that was my only goal was just not invest savings, just invest time and keep saving so I have backup plans and just make enough money to earn bills, and so here we are.

So since July 1, when I relaunched the show, on July 1 of this year, I've released 90 episodes and that is basically Monday through Friday. There have been one or two days where I was sick and I was traveling and didn't release one, but I've released 90 episodes. So I want to report back to you because I want all of my allegiance to you as the audience and I'm going to share with you because that's where we're going with the membership program if you're interested, and I'll explain why I've chosen the approach I've chosen.

But since July 1, with the 90 episodes, since July 1, the show has been downloaded a total of 244,770 times. If you average that out, it actually averages out to be 2,719 downloads per show if you divide the total downloads into the episodes, but that's not actually accurate because the popularity of different shows varies greatly.

In all time of the show since 2013, the total downloads as of today are 255,281 downloads out of 99 episodes basically. You might be interested, the most listened to show is actually Curtis Stone's show. That was the show that I did with Curtis Stone, the urban farmer, where he's farming in people's backyards and making a lot of money on a really cool business model.

I'll put a link in the show notes for it. That one is actually the most popular and I loved that interview. I thought of all the interviews I've done, I felt like that one was probably the best one. We both walked away saying, "Man, that was fun. I love doing interviews like that." That show has been downloaded 16,536 times.

The second most popular show is actually the interview with Jacob Lundfisker of Early Retirement Extreme. That show has been downloaded 9,683 times. In third place right now, by a hair, because it's actually third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth, they're all basically similarly popular, but by a hair is the interview with Ed Mills on Becoming a Million on a Teacher's Salary.

Ed did an awesome job on that interview. He was very prepared and it was really cool. That show has been downloaded 4,496 times. By my best guess, and this varies like crazy all over the time, but right now the daily average of the show seems to be about 3,500 downloads a day.

We actually had the biggest day on Saturday after I broke the whole feed and then came back this last Saturday with just under 6,000 downloads. I think it might have been because I opened up the archives on the feed and switched the delivery of the feed to where instead of being capped at 50 episodes, it goes back all the way to the first one.

So that was cool. That was exciting. Here's the biggest thing, though. The growth seems to be really steady and strong, and there's not been any single major jump, with the exception of the one day when the interview with Curtis Stone got picked up and released on, I couldn't figure out for a week where it had happened.

Then I finally found the source and it had been picked up by one of the urban farming places, basically, and they'd released it on their Facebook page. It took me a week to find the source of it. So with that exception of that one spike that day with his show, there hasn't been ever a single spike.

So I think that's 100% because of you guys. You guys, it's growing. The show is growing because you're benefiting from it. You're telling somebody about it. I frankly have done almost no marketing at all. Now I know what I would need to do if I were to market the show, but I've got to get on social media and I've got to share content and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I know what I should do, but I haven't made the time for it. I'm busy, and I haven't been able to make the time for it. And every time I sit down and I say, "Well, what should I do right now?" The idea of going and posting random links on Facebook and Twitter that are going to be useful links versus preparing for the show and saying, "How can I deliver a better show that's more concise, that's more clear, that's more compelling?" I just say, "I'm just going to focus on the show." And so I don't really update the Facebook page.

I don't really post much on Twitter. I don't go troll forums and put my stuff out there. I haven't made any time to go post guest posts on anybody's blogs. I have done some interviews, and some of the benefits you get with doing interviews is you get some cross-promotion when you interview somebody, and they often list your show on their page and vice versa.

That really helps. But I haven't done much. And with you guys' help, we actually, at the beginning of the show launch, we got into New and Noteworthy. All the podcasting people said that was a big deal. So I said, "How do you do it?" They asked for a subscription and reviews, so I begged and pleaded and said, "Please, review the show." And so far, I got one email from somebody saying that that's how they found me, was because they saw me in New and Noteworthy.

And we actually – I got an email from a listener that said, "You're on the front page of iTunes." We were at least there for about one minute when I took the screenshot of all of the iTunes shows. And to the best of my knowledge, we got one listener from New and Noteworthy.

So I think that's a whole bunch of hooey as far as that mattering. I have never noticed any other spike other than that, and we were in there for weeks. So I think it's because of you guys and you, the audience. And let me tell you how I feel about that.

It is incredibly humbling. It's humbling. I mean, the businessperson side of me gets excited about the numbers, but frankly, they scare me more than anything else because I constantly feel inadequate with my ability to serve you guys. And I'm not saying that from the perspective of any kind of apology or any kind of false humility.

I know that I do have – and I'm very confident in what I do know and what I have learned and what I have been blessed with as far as some of the ability that I have. I don't like false modesty. I've gotten some great emails from you guys saying, "Joshua, quit apologizing," and I appreciate those so much because that really encourages me to stop apologizing for things and just keep going because obviously it's working.

But it's kind of hard to be in the financial world because there are some of the smartest people in the world in the financial world. And I constantly feel either I'm too young, I'm too inexperienced, I don't know enough, I'm missing some valuable piece of information, or I'm being too strong with an opinion.

Frankly, a lot of times I don't like the loss of my privacy. I'm scared of losing my privacy. I'm scared to be on the record because I don't know what will change in my opinions two years from now. I often – but I just feel like somebody needs to ask good questions.

And so the only thing I have to stand on is simply saying, "Well, somebody's got to do it, and I'll just deal with it." And as long as I am authentic and transparent and myself, then people can take it or leave it. I don't have to keep some weird story straight and some crazy alibi, and I don't have to create some kind of persona, I guess.

So it's a little – it's pretty daunting, but I just – I'm so humble. Can you imagine – I mean, I think of this. Can you imagine 3,000 people sitting in a room and how scary that is to consider 3,000 people sitting in a room listening to you? I mean, that scares me silly.

But I just basically have to go through it. And probably the toughest thing of this whole thing, of this whole process, has been having the self-confidence to follow what I think is right, basically. We're not taught in our culture to be confident enough to move in what we think is right, and I've pretty much had to go against what everyone advised me to do.

There are a few people close to me that when I shared what I was thinking and what I saw the need was that they really understood it and encouraged me. But most of the people that I told my ideas to said, "No, it won't work," especially in the financial world.

In the financial world, people just say, "It won't work." And I pretty much had to go against what everyone advised me to do. And on one hand, that's really freeing because it's almost a great maturing process where you start to – you do what you think is right and you are okay with the results.

That's really a great maturing process, but it's really scary because we're not accustomed to that. I'm not accustomed to trying to go out and – maybe some people do well at trying to go and stir controversy and do things that are going to say, "Look at me, marketing," and that's not me.

That's not me. So I just want to thank you, all of you, for your emails and your notes. They really encourage me and they often come in at really opportune times when I'm questioning something and I'm feeling like maybe I was too strong or I was insensitive and I'm questioning something.

And then I get an email from a listener and sometimes I'll be sitting there. I see him coming on my phone and 7.15 at night a listener says, "Joshua, I just wanted to send you a note to encourage you," and it breaks my heart. So I just want to thank you guys for that.

It means a lot. It really does. So thank you. I appreciate each and every one of them. They really mean a lot to me and they have encouraged me hugely. So where are we going from here? Well, here's the deal. I'm going to do a thousand shows no matter what and I don't care – that was a commitment I made to myself when I did it because I figured, well, it would probably take me 500 to learn how to do it.

I thought that maybe the last 500 would be good and I didn't think I could do enough quality in fewer than that. So I'm going to do a thousand shows no matter what. And the question is just how quickly those thousand shows will come out. It would be great to earn a little bit of money to be able to do this for you guys and I'm going to tell you how I think that can happen.

So far I've earned a total of 50 bucks of gross income on doing the show. And that 50 bucks came from when I – at Podcast Movement when we did the live – when I did the live podcast and all the podcasters at the beginning, I think I said that coming from the countrywide financial stage.

And so they sent me 50 bucks for saying the countrywide financial stage, which who cares? I would have been happy to do it otherwise. I think it's awesome that people are promoting this medium because the same things – my opinion, the same things that are happening – that have happened to the internet world and the blogosphere and all that can happen in the audio media and is now happening, which is awesome.

But I'm preaching to the choir. You guys already listen to podcasts. So far I've earned a total of 50 bucks of gross income. That doesn't cover even one month of hosting fees. Which by the way, when I talk to you guys about start a business, doing something and take your business losses, that's what I'm doing.

And so this year I think when I wrap up my 2014 taxes, I really don't think I'll be paying a dime of tax because I've invested quite a bit into getting things going. We'll see. I haven't done it yet. But I need to get on it and finish up my end of the year tax plan before the end of the year.

But I really shouldn't be paying a dime of tax this year, of income tax anyway. But frankly, it's not the money that matters. I mean you could do this – now that I actually have half a clue about the technology stuff, you could do this for free. You could start a podcast for basically free.

I didn't know how to do it, so I just invested what I did have, which is time and energy and a little bit of money. But I'm going to do the thousand episodes no matter what. But I want to share with you why I'm doing the show and then I'm going to share with you the different plans of actually making money off of a show like this and their advantages and disadvantages.

I'm doing the show primarily because I love to talk about this stuff. I would talk about this stuff and I do talk about this stuff for free. If you ask any of my friends, I constantly annoy them with all my little financial ideas and always trying to tell them what they should do.

And look, you can save $32.67 on this if you switch this around. It's kind of annoying to them. So I think a podcast is a better medium for someone like me to do that instead of annoying all your friends and ticking them off for being a know-it-all. You can just be a know-it-all on a podcast and tell people.

So I would and I do like just talking about this stuff and I do it for free. I've said in earlier episodes that if I had $10 million in the bank, I would do the show. Now, at this point, I'm not sure I would do it five days a week but I certainly wouldn't do it one time a week because I have way too many things that I want to talk about to fit into even five days a week.

So that's the primary reason. The big reason however in addition to that is I would like to create a business that allows me to talk about this stuff and then also allows me to create my ideal lifestyle. And I don't have any problem with that. I think that's one of the amazing things that in the world we live in in 2014, we should be able to do that.

I have supported so many other people that have given value to me and I've wanted to exchange value to them. I really think Zig Ziglar was right when he said you can have everything you want in life if you'll just help enough other people get what they want. So to me, the financial planning business is no different and podcasting probably should be or can be no different.

We'll see. So I would like to create a business that allows me to do what I feel uniquely capable of doing and uniquely called to do but that also funds basically my ideal lifestyle, which that's what today is about is how I'm going to build that business, how I hope to build that business.

Another big one for me is the reason why I'm doing the show. I really – I'd like to change the world and let me tell you how and why. I'd like to change the world because I want people to be financially free so that they can help others. I despise seeing people live in poverty and there are a lot of reasons for it but this is a big deal to me.

I despise seeing people live in poverty and I think poverty can and should be defined financially but also in other ways. Poverty, emotional poverty, psychological poverty, the lack of love, I just – I can't stand it. Now, I've done enough traveling to know that some of that is structural oppression.

When I was growing up, I was fairly naive and I thought I could apply how the United States worked to the rest of the world. And then I did enough traveling and recognized, wait a second, Joshua, sometimes your little pat answers just don't quite work. And so around the world, there is major structural oppression in many places.

But how is that going to be changed if we don't help people, individual people to be free? That's what's necessary and I don't wish to do any of that through the actions of a government entity or trying to go send a bunch of bombs to so-called free people. What a bunch of nonsense.

I just want to help those I can help and encourage them to help other people. In the United States, there is some structural oppression. Some of it is politics. Some of it is tax policy. Some of it is schooling. There's some structural oppression. But I think that most of that can be pretty much dealt with pretty quickly.

There are enough stories of people who have worked through that, through those structural issues, that I'm not too worried about the structural issues at least that exist in my country. What we need, however, is individual encouragement because sometimes people are starving for somebody to come alongside and care for them and put their arm around them and encourage them and help them.

Just this weekend, I helped a friend of mine sit down and he had a business idea and he wanted to do it. I helped him sit down and create the most rudimentary pro forma to figure out is this even a business worth pursuing. I learned that I could see no one had ever taken the time to do that.

To me, that's the simplest thing in the world. It took me about three minutes to do, but no one had taught him how to do that. Here's this opportunity that he has to build a business maybe if he wants to, but you have to start with saying is this even worth it.

So we've got – in my view, what I'm doing is hopefully sharing what I've learned, what others have taught me with you so that you can go and affect somebody else. So I hate seeing people live in poverty and I don't like the structural oppression that exists and I think we've got to change it.

But we've got to change it from a base of strength. The best way to help the poor is start by not being one of them. Now, that's kind of a joke and it's true, right? Start by not being poor. Now, poverty, again, is not measured only in dollars. Some of the people without any financial assets have accomplished major change, but they were rich.

They were just rich in other things. They were rich with other forms of capital. So we've got to change the evil that exists and we have to do that from a position of strength. Some of the reasons people live in poverty is bad habits and no one has simply ever pointed out to them that, look, you have this bad habit.

So I hope a show like mine or maybe you affecting somebody else can tell them, hey, look, this is a bad habit. And it's as simple as – in the financial business or in the financial media world, we're well-known for railing on people for buying cars. But it's as simple as this.

If no one has ever told you how much money you should spend on a car, then what is the number that you are going to actually think about? Well, so many poor people just go down and say, well, what's the number that the local – the Kia dealership will approve me on a brand-new whatever Kia – their little car is per month.

And they never actually calculate whether they should be doing that. Now, I say start with financial samurai's number, which is told from him, one-tenth of your annual income. That's it. That's your total purchase price. And unless you are totally broke, in which case you probably should be riding a bike.

I mean why would you ever finance a car? That's just stupid. So, if you start from that perspective, well, now that gives a minimum wage earning person who is just trying to break a cycle of poverty in their life, that gives them a starting point. Ah, well, let's see.

Minimum wage, my minimum wage hour is $7.25 an hour. So, therefore, 50 hours a week and then 52 weeks a year, that's $18,000. Ten percent of that, $1,885. So, my budget now for a car is $1,885. Now, we have a place to start from. So, instead of going down and getting swindled at the Kia dealership for a brand new Kia, which by the way is a perfectly good car if you have the money for it.

But instead of going down and just signing up for something because it's cheap, you can say, "No, my budget is $1,885." So, something as simple as that, a bad habit, replacing a bad habit of buying crappy cheap cars that depreciate like crazy and buying them new. And replacing that with saying, "How can I put my money into things that have assets like that, how I become a millionaire on a minimum wage job at Walmart?" You don't have a choice.

You have to invest first. Because if you don't take advantage of those plans that exist for you, if you don't take advantage of the 401(k) and of the tuition payments and all of that stuff, that's where all of your income can be multiplied. I don't remember the numbers. What is it, 30% raise or something like that if you just take advantage of that?

That stuff matters when you're at the low dollar figures. That's a big deal. So, some of this is bad habits. Some of it is just simply lack of knowledge. And sometimes people don't know what they don't – they either know what they don't know or they don't know what they don't know.

And so, this is the same thing. I've reviewed so many people's group benefits programs over the years. I'm like, "How did you pick what you had?" And basically, it became a joke. I leaned back in my chair and I told them, "What? You leaned back in your chair. They put the stack down in front of you or the computer page and you leaned back and you asked the broke person next to you, 'Hey, Tom, what is this?

Should I do the 401(k) – what's this? Should I do the this or the that or should I take the insurance?'" That's how most people do it. That's no good. It's like, "Call me. Why would you ever do this without calling me? I'll walk you through it and we'll run the calculations.

This is a good buy." It's so simple. So, some of it is just lack of knowledge. Well, we can impart that knowledge. Everything I've learned, I've learned from someone else and I can share that with you and you can multiply that with someone that you know. Whether you go start a podcast, start a blog or just help six people at your local job, that has a ripple effect.

So, what a cool way to help people have some knowledge. Some of it is lack of ability. There are people among us that just simply do not have the basic ability that they need and we have got to be advocates for those people. Not in a controlling, domineering way, but we've got to, got to, got to, got to help those people and see that they're not taken advantage of.

Sometimes, it's just tough situations. I've had some financial planning situations presented to me just recently. I worked with somebody and they were just finally got, after years of fighting, this person has horrible physical challenges. After years of fighting and having their claims denied, they were just finally approved for social security disability.

But you know how much their monthly payment was, is? Under 600 bucks a month. This is an individual with little family support, no ability to, makes me cry just thinking about it, no ability to gain from the social network, fiercely independent. And I'm sitting here trying to say, "How do we build a financial plan that works on $600 a month?" You know what?

It doesn't. I mean, this person is a rock star for how they've made it work so far, but that's our responsibility to help that person. And if you're poor, you can't do it. If you're living on 600 bucks a month, you can't help someone else to do that. The person's too disabled to go live in a car like I would do.

If I were disabled, I couldn't do that. It just didn't work. Major back problems. So we've got to be in a position of strength that we can help people. That's our responsibility, is to help our neighbor. And sometimes that means helping them break a bad habit. Sometimes that means tough love.

And sometimes it means putting an automatic check that goes to their house every single month and bringing them bags of groceries. Bags of groceries is great, but you don't solve a $600 a month living problem as an individual living in Chicago. You don't solve that on bags of groceries alone.

You solve that with a monthly contribution of a couple hundred bucks. And every one of us knows people like that. But if we're sitting here trying to say, "How on earth do I make my car payment? How do I make my student loan payment?" And all this crap, you can't add on a few hundred bucks to help somebody that's in need.

So in our world, we feel really good because guess what? There's a government program. That person should just get Social Security Disability. Well, it sucks. How do you live on $600 a month? And no, you shouldn't increase that. Our job is to help that person. So my hope is that I have a dream of changing the world.

If I'm financially independent, that gives me more ability to help people. So I want all of you listening to be financially free so that you can help others to be free. And I'm not just defining that in terms of being rich so you don't have to work. That's great.

Financial independence in that form, it's awesome. But you know what? You don't have to be at that place to help. So that's part of why I do this show because I have this naive idea that I can make a little impact on changing the world and I can help and inspire someone else to do it and that's how life works.

Next reason, I'm trying to solve problems that I puzzle over and I simply don't know the answer for. I read a lot. You probably picked that up. I read a lot. And I try to always read people who challenge my own beliefs because I find it – why would I listen to somebody that A, I didn't learn anything or just agreed with everything I said.

That's fine. I don't need that. I need someone who's going to challenge me so that I can fight back and deal with it. I can have that – it's called dialectic. I can have that debate with myself basically and say, "Does what I think stand up to this?" And so in the financial business, I read a lot and I look for the threads and there are so many debates that are so important.

And you have people looking oftentimes in the financial world, looking at an issue, two very learned – or more than two. But many very learned, very capable, very knowledgeable people looking at the same data set and drawing dramatically different conclusions. Why does that happen? I'm not sure and I try to deal with it, try to figure it out.

But it does happen and so there are a lot of things where I'm not exactly sure. So I do the show to try to puzzle through the answers and I figure how cool if I can just invite the expert on and interview them and you get to listen in and maybe that would help you because I never found people that could do that.

I never found people that could talk to someone that they totally disagreed with but try to understand why they said that so that they could – so that you can form your own opinion. That's what I try to do. So whether that's you're trying to figure out is the US dollar going to blow up in hyperinflation, so therefore I need to go put all my money into silver, which is what some pundits on the internet would have you do, or whether you're trying to figure out is the US dollar rock solid, so therefore I'm going to go and put all my money into treasury bonds.

That's a kind of a tough – well, it's not too tough. The point is that there are different perspectives and these are both valid perspectives. So I figure if I can just kind of puzzle through these things myself and try to figure out what are the common threads, what are the common themes, how would I apply this in an individual situation, I'll learn from that and then you'll learn from that.

In what sense – active versus passive investing and what's the key theme between passive investments and active investments because it's unfair to say, "Well, no one has ever gotten rich. No one has ever gotten wealthy off of active investing." That's not true. Active investing is what permits passive investing to even be an option, but yet passive investing has certain advantages over active investing.

So how can you puzzle through that and figure out what's right for you? And more than anything, I think about this and say, "How can I gain for myself and also help you to build more personal liberty into your life in a way that is going to really help you and do it where financial assets make a difference but then non-financial themes are also going to make a difference?" You can't buy everything that matters in life.

You can buy some things, but you can't buy everything. So a lot of times people try to twist financial planning to do something that financial planning really can't do. You need something else other than a financial solution in many scenarios. So I'm trying to solve some of these problems and give ideas that you can solve some of the problems.

Finally, my final reason is I really want to help the financial planning industry, and I've got a couple ways of doing that. Number one, I want to create demand for financial planning services. I cannot conceive of how the average person can negotiate in the year 2014. I cannot conceive of how the average person can negotiate the financial minefield that exists in our US American culture without a good financial advisor at their side.

I don't see it. There are so many traps that you can fall into. I don't see how it's possible for the average person. Now, for an above average, above average interested do-it-yourselfer, it's very possible. So maybe I can create more do-it-yourselfers and you can help somebody nearby, but I think that there should be a much higher demand for financial planning services than there is currently.

I've never understood – that's not true. I've understood why that distrust exists between the financial planning industry and the public because frankly, much of the financial planning industry has abused their clients, and that's got to change. But I want to create demand by illustrating to people what some of the questions they're going to want to consider and how they're going to want to work through it and basically just by talking to you about financial planning every day.

But I also want to educate clients so they can choose good advisors because here's a problem that we have in the business is that we lose a lot of excellent financial advisors or potentially excellent financial advisors who are caring and competent and trustworthy because of a lack of demand and because they can't deal with the meat grinder that is getting started in the industry.

So if there were more demand and more of these advisors were simply able to fit into the role of a trusted professional without having to go through the meat grinder of prospecting, which is the way that it's traditionally done, I think we would have more advisors. I think we would have more caring, competent, trustworthy, awesome advisors.

And I think that would be to everyone's best interest. But people desire the effects of financial planning, but there's not a lot of – like the results of financial planning. The industry statistics and surveys are unquestionably clear that people want a sense of financial security, but the path to get there is a bit more muddled.

And I also want to help the financial planning industry by illustrating that a lot of times we have to be more creative in our solutions. I like – in some ways I like restrictions on a financial plan. And there's a concept from the world of permaculture design that the more restrictions that you add on to a site plan for a permaculture design, the more creative and the better the ultimate solution.

And the problem is that few clients know their personal restrictions. So what happens is that they're bounced around the industry and advisors have to take polarizing opinions to differentiate themselves from one another. So instead of saying let's look – let's sit down and look at your situation and based upon the restrictions of your situation, let's figure out what type of life insurance is the appropriate route for you, you have a debate where it's like I'm a buy-term-invest-the-difference guy.

I believe in whole life insurance. What a bunch of nonsense. They're just products and they have attributes that you've got to apply to yourself. Or it's like, well, I think you should buy long-term care insurance or I don't think you should buy long-term care insurance. It's a waste of money or it's going to change.

What a bunch of crap. Sit down and look at the situation and look at insurance as an option and say, is this a reasonable solution in this scenario? Is this a good cost-effective solution or is there something more cost-effective? And if you have a restriction – like so for example, if you have a client that comes in and this client is uninsurable, well, now all of a sudden you get forced to get creative.

You say, well, how can I still make this plan work when this client is uninsurable? That's what we need to be doing. But few clients know their restrictions enough to express them to the advisor. So the advisor is spending so much time basically figuring out this is what I believe in.

This is what I believe in. Instead of saying, what do you, Mr. Client, Mrs. Client, what do you want and what are your restrictions? Then here's the plan. It's very simple. It's all this differentiation nonsense of you should buy stocks. No, you should buy gold and silver coins. No, you should invest in real estate.

A bunch of crap. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of them. So let's wrap up with this. It's not going to be a short wrap-up. But I'm going to talk through the compensation methods that I see of a show like this and how I would recommend that you support a show like this.

We're an hour and seven minutes in. I hope this helped. As far as the background, I think that's a big deal. But there are a few primary ways that I know of as far as in the Internet world, in the podcasting world, to actually be able to leverage a show like this to make an income from it to support my family.

The number one way is to start a firm. The number two way is advertising. Number three is affiliate commissions. Number four is selling other products. Five is speaking engagements. And six is listener support. I guess I should probably collapse other products and speaking engagements. But that's another thing. So the most obvious way to actually leverage a show like this in terms of and earn money off of it is to use a show like this as marketing for my own financial planning firm.

And I have received a lot of inquiries. I would estimate probably two dozen inquiries of serious inquiries from serious people saying, "Joshua, would you be willing to do some financial planning for me?" And so far I have turned them all down. And I've said, "Wait," primarily because of a couple of things.

Number one is that legally I do not have the legal financial planning firm established yet. I actually have filed the paperwork for it. I've filed the paperwork for a firm called Fiduciary Financial Consulting. So I've actually started the firm, but it's not approved enough where I could actually accept a financial planning client yet.

But the bigger problem is not just the legal entity and being able to legally do financial planning work for people. The biggest problem is just the time as far as committing the time to be able to do an excellent job with doing planning. Now I may still build a firm.

And the reason why this is probably the most direct and rational route is with a fairly small audience, there can be some people that can benefit. So if I came on every day and I talked to you and I said, "Listen, here are the ideas. And if you want, you can hire me," I would receive – and I think I would immediately fill my calendar with a client base that would desire to work with me.

And I may still do that. I'm not sure. But the problem is that it takes a tremendous amount of time and energy to create the caliber of the show that I want to create. And I feel like I can't do both things well. So I do have ideas on how the financial planning business can and should be done better.

And that's for a different show. And I may do an entire show on it and try to tell you all my ideas. So some of you who are listening who are financial planners can just take those ideas and run with them. And maybe you can start your own firm and build it.

But I don't think at the moment that I have the ability with the time – to dedicate the time and the energy to properly do both things well, to do the show well and also to do the firm well. And the struggle that I face, if I were going to just do a firm, I would not do a daily show, which some of you would be happy.

If you're listening, though, you like the daily show. The people who gripe about the daily show are probably gone by now. But I would not do a daily show. I would do a weekly or biweekly type of show, and it would be primarily as just a marketing method for the firm, which is great.

Nothing wrong with that in my opinion. I think that's a better marketing than just about anything else that's available because then it allows you to test drive your firm before – by listening to their show before you ever get there. So I wouldn't do a daily show. But the problem is that I have a certain amount of knowledge, skill, and ability.

And I believe that I have the ability and the knowledge and the skill to be an excellent financial planner, and I also have the knowledge, skill, and ability to be an excellent financial podcaster, especially as I continue to learn and to get better. And as I've thought it through and just kind of struggled with it, it seems to me I know a lot of really great planners who might not have the same capability of creating a really great financial show.

And so I feel like I need to really build out the show side because there are some really other great planners, even way better planners than me, who can fill that need. But I feel like I'm in some ways uniquely qualified to fill this need that exists. And I don't think I have frankly even just the time and the desire to build two businesses at this point in time.

I may still do it, but we'll see. If I can get the membership, which is where I'm going with this, to take off, then I probably will not continue to build the financial planning firm just due to a lack of capacity. I really mean what I say and what I believe is that I have a one-year-old son.

My wife and I were hoping to have more kids, and I'm not interested in working 70 hours a week to make a bunch of money at this stage in my career. Maybe after my kids are grown, maybe I'll go ahead and do that, but I can't see any way to do both things in fewer than 70, 80 hours a week, at least to do them well.

So the starting a firm thing is just kind of basically on the back burner. The next way to make money on a show like this is advertising. Now, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with advertising, but I actually have some issues with it. My first issue is essentially about truth in advertising.

As I record the show right now, I just finished lunch with my wife, and we were having some barbecue sauce, and it's Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce. It's so obnoxious because on the front cover it says "Award-winning barbecue sauce," and on the back it's got this cutesy little paragraph, and it says, "In 1985, Mr.

Ray or whomever submitted his family recipe to a barbecue sauce competition, and he won best of show." And if you look at the ingredients list, the first ingredient on the list is high fructose corn syrup. Are you telling me that in 1985, Mr. Ray submitted his barbecue sauce, and the first ingredient that he put into his sauce was high fructose corn syrup?

What a bunch of crap. So I just—advertising can be great, and it can also be terrible. Now, I have been approached by one advertiser directly, and I've received two inquiries from potential advertising so far. And I think that I could do some advertising, and I'll tell you how I could do it in a minute.

But my trouble with advertising is that essentially if I allow the sale of advertising on my show, you're getting the show for free, and the reason you're getting the show for free is because I'm selling you to an advertiser. That bothers me. Same thing with Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter.

You look at this stuff and you're like, "Why is all this stuff for free?" It's not for free. It's just that you are the product. You as the user are the product. Now, it doesn't mean you can't go into that with eyes wide open and manipulate it to your advantage, but it does mean that fundamentally you're the product.

So when Facebook has their IPO, the reason they did it is because you and I both have Facebook accounts, and we are the product. And there's just something about selling you, the audience, that puts your faith and confidence in me that doesn't feel really great to me, especially if it were just to a random advertiser, somebody that reaches out to some advertising distribution.

This is growing in the podcasting space, and they reach out to an advertising distribution company, and they come in, and they sell access to me. They say, "Hey, will you pimp this product?" And I say, "Sure," and I take it on, and I do a 15-second spot, and blah, blah, blah, sponsor of the day, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's like, "Come on. I'm not going to sell my audience. I'm not willing to do that." And here's another thing I don't like. I don't like the conflict of interest because if I were doing advertising, then my interest is to pump up my numbers as much as possible. So one of the things that you see happening in the podcasting space, if you go and there's been a few people that have led the podcasting space and basically have figured out a way to make tons of money on telling people how to do podcasting.

And so out of this, because they talk about and they advertise how much money they're making, then this has caused a lot of people to jump onto the bandwagon. And so essentially what's happening in podcasting, and you may have noticed this in other shows that you listen to other than mine, and if you don't, fine, skip this section.

But there's a lot of people basically flogging the medium of podcasting, trying to build massive audiences as quickly as possible and get a bunch of reviews and things like this. And you go out, and I could. There are some organizations that I've looked at because I don't know anyone really that does podcasting.

I didn't know anybody. I need some help. Who do I talk to? How do I figure this thing out? And I'd go and I'd look for basically groups of people that I could connect with and learn. But I'm bothered by that one of the primary advertising ideas of some of the groups that exist, some of the mastermind groups, is, "Oh, we do these circles basically where we sit around and we review each other's shows." And so if I signed up for some of the – right now I think I have something like 75 reviews on my show on iTunes or 80 reviews.

And if I went and signed up for one of those shows in a week, I could get 200 more. Well, the benefit of that is that would gain me a lot more notoriety, a lot more attention. That would give me higher rankings on iTunes. I would be able to attract the bigger audience.

And then if everything is about the advertisers, then that gives me an incentive to just simply say, "How can I build the biggest audience as quickly as possible?" I'm sorry, but I don't think it's – I'm not saying it's unethical for other people to do that. To me, it just doesn't feel right.

It doesn't feel right. And I seriously considered joining some of these groups because I considered it because I need help to figure out how to prioritize, what do I prioritize, how do I do it. But I'm not comfortable with this like let's all pat each other on the back and Monday is review Mondays where we're going to review each other's shows.

Now, we're going to get 132 reviews from no one who's ever listened to my show, but they give a bunch of five-star reviews. Joshua's show is great. And then Tuesday, we're going to have Twitter Tuesdays and everyone is going to advertise all how great Joshua's show is. It doesn't feel right to me.

And so I don't want to participate and I'm not going to. Again, I'm not saying it's wrong for people to do other – I admire the business sense of the people who have built that and are making their fortune. That's awesome. But I don't want to participate. And it just doesn't feel right and it's a conflict of interest because if everything is based upon the advertising, then I have an incentive to go and build the numbers as quickly as I can.

The next conflict of interest that I don't like with advertising is I'm not so sure about half the products that are out there. And so look at talk radio. I'll pick on talk radio instead of podcasting. Maybe you listen to talk radio. I do. But sometimes I do. I have in the past more than now.

But let's say, for example, that there is a legal document production company. This is a very common advertiser. And so the legal document production company comes to me and says, "Josh, I'm going to advertise on my show." Well, that's on your show. Well, then what I'm supposed to tell you is I'm supposed to tell you that if you need to file an LLC or open a corporation and have documents of incorporation, then you should, like I did, you should go to this legal document company and you should go ahead and buy this form for $38.

What a bunch of crap. Go on your state's website, print out the form for an LLC, file your articles of organization for an LLC or articles of incorporation. They have a standard boilerplate thing, or at least my state does, that's all part of the corporation filing fee and save the $38.

Or, you know, if you need a will, go to your library, get a book on wills, look in the back, copy the form down, go take it down to your credit union, get it notarized, and file it for free. You don't need to pay $23 for some stupid document you can get for free.

You don't need to go and file some standard boilerplate articles of organization when you don't have a clue what you're trying to do and when you can get it for free on your state. Now, I don't have anything wrong, actually, with the companies. I think in their place, for somebody who's knowledgeable, then they have their place.

But something as simple as that, I got to tell you that you can file it for free. You can get the document for free from your state. Now, if you're setting up a new business and you've got 32 business partners, don't you dare go out and buy some document from a kid.

You sit down with an attorney and spend $20,000 on legal fees getting it done right because you will be screwed if you don't. So, I have an issue there. If I can say that and put a document, production company, and I can say this is where it's valuable, I'm willing to do it.

But if I can't say that, then I'm not willing to do it, and I'm not so sure how many of them – none of them have approached me – but I'm not so sure how many of them would want their stuff on my site when I'm going to give you that advice.

Or the identity theft people. So let's say that an identity theft protection company comes out. I would say save yourself the $10 a month. Go online, freeze your credit profiles with all the credit accounts. You wipe out the vast majority of identity theft and save your $10 a month or your $20 a month.

That's a better solution. Now, it doesn't mean there's no place for identity theft protection. That doesn't help you if you do have your identity stolen, but you can pretty much reduce a lot of the risk if you just simply freeze your credit accounts. Or the gold and silver people.

It's like, "Okay, they're going to come on my show, and I own gold and silver coins. But what? Am I going to have some overpriced person come on and advertise that? And I'm going to send you off, and the guy's going to talk you into 1832 Spanish doubloons because they're three times the market value of gold instead of their numismatic value?" Skip the overpriced crap.

Go online. If you want to buy silver coins, go buy a $100 or $1,000 face bag of silver from a cheap online place. Or better yet, go find a local dealer and deal in cash so there's not a ridiculous record of all your transactions on a credit card. I don't know a decent financial advisor that's advertising on things like this.

And the problem is that if a firm came to me and advertised and said, "Hey, we've got a financial planning firm," the problem is that the firm doesn't predict how great your advisor is. You can have a brilliant advisor at the worst firm in the world, and you can have a horrible advisor at the so-called best firm in the world.

So your results are going to depend on who your advisor is more, in my opinion, than who the firm is. The firm makes a difference, but the advisor is the key deal. Or if you're going to do audible books, start with going on YouTube and listen to one for free and then send some money directly to the author.

Or go get it from your library. It's less convenient than having your audibly recorded book on your phone, but it's cheaper. Online banks, is an online bank good that's going to be advertising on the show? Yeah, I think so. But you know what's better? Go down and support your local credit union.

I can't stand the banking cartel we have in this country. And if you're doing business with any of the big five banks, stop it. Unless you need some service that only they provide, go find another option and get out of the big five banks. Their actions are utterly criminal.

Or if it's whatever the latest financial strategy is, "Oh, we're going to do infinite banking," or "Bank on yourself. This is really great, so therefore you should call the Bank on Yourself advisor. Here's my fancy stock trading software," or "Buy this overpriced real estate course." All that stuff is usually overpriced and under-delivered.

So now that I've ticked everybody in the world that would be a potential advertiser on my show off, my issue is that I can't in good conscience necessarily do all of those things. Now, I think I could actually accept advisors. And I'm used to dealing with conflicts of interest.

I work in the financial business. Our business is fraught with conflicts of interest, and so I'm very comfortable with that. But I don't want to try to manipulate rankings to make myself more attractive to an advertiser. And I would have to seriously work through any advertiser. And if I bring an advertiser on the show, I'm not interested in somebody buying my audience.

I'm not selling you the audience. If I bring an advertiser on the show, it's because I think they feel a need that you are looking for, that I'm getting emails about, that they say you need what they have. And if I bring an advertiser on the show, it's an endorsement by me that says, "This is a company that I think has a service that may be valuable for you.

Here's how you would know it's valuable for you, and here's who it would not be," and it's an endorsement. And I would take that very seriously and do my due diligence on things. I actually have discussed with two people. One of them is actually a financial advisor referral service, and this may be something I'll bring to you in the future.

I've done a lot of due diligence. We've talked about it, but many of you said, "I need a good financial advisor. I need a good financial advisor," and I don't know how to answer that question all the time because it's a tough question to answer. But this may be a service for you.

Another one is a simple – like for example, I recently spoke with an estate attorney, and I've tried to find somebody who can do simple wills at inexpensive prices because you can do your will for free. You don't have to pay a dime for it, but you also need to get good advice to know – and a document doesn't help you.

You need to get good advice to know when you need to do something a little bit more complex than a simple will. And many people, even though you still just want a simple will, you want about 15 minutes of time with an attorney, and you don't mind paying a couple hundred bucks, but you don't want to pay 2,000 bucks for a simple will.

So I've been trying to find somebody, an estate attorney that would build out that kind of their business and do a good job, not giving a lot of time as far as billable hour time. You don't need three hours to sit down and do a simple will. I've tried to find someone that could build out education in advance and cut the cost but still have a short conversation with an attorney to give those people who want that assurance a little bit more than just go get the document for free.

By the way, if any of you are estate attorneys, if you are doing that or if you can do that, let me know because this needs to exist. It's a niche in the marketplace that I've had so many people ask for, and I can't find anybody doing it. So now that I've destroyed advertising, that's one way.

And I may bring some advertising on the show. We'll see. Number two way is affiliates. And so affiliate commissions is essentially the most popular – the best I can figure out – the most popular model in the online world. And in the affiliate commission space, this would be where I find a company and they pay me a commission to tell you about their product.

So let me tell you guys today – so today is November 11, 2014. And let me tell you how I have invested my money. I've moved 50% of my account over to Betterment, and here's why you should. Or I've decided to use personal capital. It's the greatest thing in the world for me to do this.

Or guess what? Mint.com is blah, blah, blah, and here are this bank here. Why do all these people do this? It's freaking affiliate commissions. And I have no problem with any of those services. Actually, I'm thrilled with the work that Betterment is doing, personal capital, LearnVest, Wealthfront, Mint. I am thrilled that they exist.

But I'm not going to participate in this crap where we all turn around and all of a sudden now every other show has a banner ad for freaking Betterment. Betterment is great at what they do, but they're not a panacea where I'm going to go put my money with them.

Understand what they do and understand, and you go seek them out. Now, I get it. If I were running Betterment – what's his name? John, I think, is the guy who owns it. If I were running Betterment – which, by the way, he just built an amazing business in a short period of time.

It's a really cool story. I'd love to have him on – I need to have him on the show. I'd love to. But if I were running Betterment, I would be doing exactly what they're doing. But I don't want to participate in that crap from my perspective. And next month is going to be something completely different.

It used to be ING checking accounts and here, I'll use my ING affiliate code. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. I used to have an ING account until they sold to Capital One and I resigned in protest. But I don't want to do this. I hate it. I despise it.

And I just think, "Do you really want to just pay me a bunch of commissions?" I'm going to set up a credit card page on my site. I'm going to tell you about mileage hacking. And I'm thinking to myself, "Go buy your credit card from someone." If I just – why am I just – I do this part-time and I'm going to tell you about the three credit cards that I get.

Why don't you go to the guy who does mileagecreditcards.com or whatever the million mile people are and reward them because they live and breathe the stuff. Don't buy it just from my stuff because you can do it. The only affiliate commission so far that I've accepted or put on the show is I put – some of the things I use Amazon links when I put the links to the books in the show notes.

As of date, I think – as of so far, I think exactly zero people have ever purchased anything through my Amazon link. And the other thing is I actually set up my – several family members. I'll use this as an example, Republic Wireless. So I currently use a Republic Wireless phone.

I don't – I think I've told you about that only in the context of the show I did with Techma Shugunah. I went two hours in when he's destroying Republic Wireless and I said, "I have Republic Wireless." I don't come on and tell you about how great Republic Wireless is because here's the problem.

They're great for some people and I'm not sure they're great for everyone. I did set up an affiliate commission actually, an affiliate link, which was hidden behind a password-protected site because my mom needed a phone and I decided it was the best option for her. And my sister needed a phone and a friend of hers needed a phone.

So I set up a commission, a thing for them and sold them three phones with Republic Wireless. But I just don't like how – I don't like it. I don't. And maybe I'll do it. People always say if you have software that you use, then you could do that.

The problem is that I go through software all the time and half the time I just think you could do the same thing with an Excel spreadsheet. So why do you need me telling you what software you need to use? I may change my mind on this and I hope I'm not too emotional as far as being too obnoxious.

But this is a lot of what I think about. So I could – here's what I could do. I could set up something like a life insurance brokerage. So technically I still have a life insurance license. I'm good at life insurance. I've sold a lot of life insurance. I could create some stuff with that.

I could set up a brokerage and I might – who knows? I might do that. It's hard to say if I can make $100,000 a year selling life insurance without my ever filling out an application for somebody. That's certainly a tempting offer to consider. And who knows? Maybe I will in the future.

But I don't actually really want to do that right now because I think that what you need is not just me telling you and explaining six videos on how life insurance works and then you buy through my commission. I'd rather you have a local life insurance agent and I want you to be well-equipped and knowledgeable.

So I'm going to make – I want to make the six videos and tell you watch these videos and understand so you actually get – understand the terms and then go find a good agent who's going to care for you and who can understand your situation and work with you.

I could set up some kind of carefully established referral relationship with an investment firm. This is tough in the investment business because it can't be any – legally it can't be some kind of pay for performance. But it can be done as a marketing program. So I could do that.

I could refer it to my own firm. That was originally my first plan is that I said, "Well, it's probably the most direct way of making some money." But I just – I don't have the energy to do it. I feel like even though my shows are probably longer, I feel like there's so much more I could do.

I kind of feel like I cheated you guys on Friday. I had eight questions lined up and I did three questions in an hour and I'm thinking like, "What about these other five people that need the answers to my questions?" So I thought of launching – on that topic, I thought of launching multiple shows, maybe just doing a Q&A show where it's one question per episode.

I don't know. Some people have done that and that's kind of new and popular. So I've been approached by other joint venture programs of some way to leverage this and that was not less appropriate to an affiliate relationship. But so far, I haven't felt good enough to pursue any of them.

So last – and then we're going to get to what I am doing – is other products. So I think I am probably going to create other products as time goes forward. I see a real need for some better educational products, a standalone products. I thought I could do it with the show.

But what happens is I think that to fill the need of something that's interesting to listen to every day, if I did five episodes in a week that were all about the estate planning thing, then that would be really boring to me to listen to. I can handle one show a week on estate planning.

I can't handle five. So I'm learning that a carefully planned out product could be helpful. Now as time goes on, if I can figure out how to do it, I want to create on my website a series of – basically series where the shows are in order. So if someone is coming in at episode 400, they don't have to go back and listen to all 400 shows but I can lay out for them the series.

But I think there is a need for specific focused products, tutorials on specific topics. "Hey, you're going to meet with a life insurance guy. Spend $30 on my video course and I'm going to explain to you how life insurance works in the next two hours so that you'll feel well-equipped to understand." Or "Here are the advantages and disadvantages." So I want to create some of that stuff.

But the problem is that if I use that as the primary method of supporting the show and leveraging the show and I don't have something where my efforts pay off financially from the show, then I'll focus all my time and energy on creating those products and the content and the quality of the show will suffer.

So I'll spend 50 hours in a week creating a brilliant expose on life insurance so you can feel well-equipped to make the decisions you need to make for your family. But then my episodes that week will suck because I spent all my time on what was going to make me money.

So that's my concern with products. So I'm going to create some of those as time goes on, but I don't want that to be the primary method of making money on the show. Speaking engagements, I'm going to pursue speaking engagements, but that's more of a long-term plan and that's more of a one-off thing.

I don't expect that to be really applicable to most of you, but I do enjoy speaking and speaking for pay would be nice. Last one, and this is what I'm going to do, is direct membership support. And so here's the thing. I want all of our incentives to be aligned.

I want my incentives to be aligned with your incentives. And I want us to have a proper alignment of those things without conflicts of interest. Now, I think I'm probably walking away from a much higher level of income by walking away from some of those other models that advertising and affiliate commissions.

I think I'm walking away from a lot. I've counted the cost. And as I've done my research, if I came on here every day and set out a plan of affiliate commissions and just started kind of pimping whatever the latest product is in the financial space, I think I would be making a lot of money because I think you would probably trust me enough to if I tell you to do something, I think you'd probably do it.

But to me, money is not everything. Money is important, but it's not everything and it's not the only form of capital. And the person that I've most admired how they have approached this world is actually a guy named Jack Spirico who hosts a show called The Survival Podcast. And I've enjoyed listening to his show for years because it's always fresh.

It's always new. He does a really great show. I would fight him tooth and nail over a bunch of stuff, which would tell you why I like listening to him because he constantly challenges me. But one of the things that I most like, he's been doing his podcast for six or seven years, is he developed a membership program that he calls his Member Support Brigade, a membership program that's been very successful for him.

And it's a win for him, it's a win for the audience, and it's a win for the companies that are involved in his program. So the way that he structures his show is he does a thing where he has, I think, 12 sponsors. He does two sponsors a day at the beginning of the show.

He gives those, and those sponsorships are personal endorsements, which I really admire him doing. And he's fired sponsors at times because of it, and I really admire him for doing that. The second thing about it is with his show is he created his membership site, and that is his primary way of supporting his show.

And in that membership site, he has some additional bonus materials, bonus e-books, bonus videos. He has zip files of his shows, of previous episodes that are more convenient to download. He also has a lot of discounts that he's negotiated with different companies in his space. And he's involved in the survivalist space, the prepper space.

So if you're going to buy a water filter, then you can go and do this, or if you're going to buy seeds for your garden and things like that, then you can go and you can use his discounts, and it'll save you a lot of money. And I love that, actually.

I've been a member of his program for at least, I think, two years, three years, for a while. And I have used his discounts on different things that I've purchased, which has been really valuable. So if somebody is active in his space and they're kind of a very committed prepper, survivalist type of person, then they can easily get in excess of the cost of his membership support back in discounts, let alone just value for what he's done.

And I admire kind of how he's done that and been able to keep his objectivity as time goes on. I really think that's awesome. He doesn't actually, on that show at least, he doesn't accept affiliate commissions. So if somebody comes to him and offers him an affiliate deal, he changes it from an affiliate deal into a discount.

And then he offers it to his members as part of their benefit. So if somebody comes with a course or a product that they're selling, he negotiates the discount instead of taking an affiliate commission. And I think that's really cool. And so I've just decided that I like the ethics behind that more than any of the other models.

And I've decided I'm just going to copy his model. It's worked well for him. He has a very successful show that supports him with his primary source of income. And I really admire the ethics behind that. And I like the win-win-win nature of it where instead of just simply asking for membership support, which I think is totally fine, excuse me, listener support, which I think is totally cool and many people should do that.

I think that I like how he works hard to do it in a way where he actually gives more value back to the customer than just them supporting him for the show. So I've decided I am going to copy that. And to be clear, I'm not looking for a handout from you, the audience.

If you find value in the show, the show will always be free. That's my plan. So if you find value in the show and you just want to consume it for free, that's totally fine. Now I do think that I feel entirely justified in saying if you would like to contribute, then you should do that.

Scripture says a worker is worthy of his wages. And so I have no issue with saying, "Hey, if you've benefited – let's see, 100 episodes, probably average episode length, an hour and a half to two hours. So that's somewhere between probably 175, 200 plus hours of audio at this point that's available for free.

So if you've benefited from that, I would be thrilled to have a contribution from you financially." But the key thing is I don't want it just to be structured as that. I want it to be that win-win-win all around. And I really want 100% of my focus to be on creating great content for you because I know that makes it more likely for you to want to pay me money and join my membership program.

I haven't done any marketing, like I said earlier, because that takes me away from creating great content. I think that if I focus on creating great content, you can help me market the show and go and tell somebody else about it, tell somebody that you've benefited from it. And then if you'll help me market the show and I deliver awesome content, then you'll want – I think out of just basically the human law of reciprocity, you'll want to provide it back.

So that's my idea is I'm building a membership program and that membership program, I've decided to call it The Irregulars. I feel really bad because I didn't plagiarize Jack Spierko's thing on military thing. I just – as I was thinking about it, I was thinking of The Irregulars. And if you're not familiar, The Irregulars is essentially a military term where – for units that don't operate according to the standard operating procedure of all the militaries.

And I like that because my show is all about radical personal finance, finding and exploiting the hacks that you can find and the little nuances and the little ideas. I like that idea of The Irregulars. So I thought it would be fun to use that term. So that's what I'm going to call it.

And essentially the membership program is I'm going to build out some bonus content. I'm going to find some e-books, some videos, some other audio files. I may create bonus materials specifically for you guys. And more importantly, I'm going to try to find and negotiate some discounts that in the financial business of things associated with finance and the topics of the show will help you to save money on things that you're doing.

Now, I don't have any of that stuff yet. So that's the idea. But I warn you right now, if you join, you're purely doing so because – basically as a way of financially paying me for the back episodes of the show. But I'm going to focus on building that out as time goes on.

It took me a little while. I had to figure out how to do the membership site. I think I got the wrinkles ironed out. And I'm going to put a bunch of stuff in there, but I don't have anything in there right now. So it's going to be coming.

So I would – I appreciate the vote of confidence if you want to go ahead and join. And I'll have it there as quickly as possible. I put bonus materials, bonus content, discounts. I thought about keeping kind of maybe a different feed or zip files of the shows behind the paywall.

That's what others have done. The reason I couldn't open up the whole feed was because I was going through FeedBurner previously before this weekend. And FeedBurner has a cap on how much it will deliver. So I switched though and I got rid of FeedBurner this weekend when I broke my feed.

And now I think I can deliver hundreds of shows in my feed. So now in your podcatcher, if you're using iTunes or whatever, you can download all the way back to number one. So that's there. So at this point in time, that's what I'm doing. And now you have the – I'm going to build you a membership program and you have the opportunity to vote to join it.

If you vote with your dollars and you say, "Joshua, thank you for the content," and you are wanting to do that, if you vote with your dollars, then I can support myself and my family and I can focus on building the show. If you don't, then – which is fine, totally cool.

I'll keep doing the show, but I'm going to have to go and build a firm, and that's going to take some of the effort away, the time and the focus away from actually providing the great – the show content. As far as price, I can – so I struggled a little bit with trying to figure out how to set the price.

I really didn't know what to do. And usually how you would solve a problem like this would be to either copy somebody that was doing it or another possibility would be instead of just copying, maybe testing it. So I would – if I were doing this with advertising, I would create some sales pages and I would do A/B copy and I would put one over the other.

But how do I do that on audio? I don't have any way to do that. So I just basically picked a number and I picked the number of $10 a month, $9.95 a month. So I played a little trick that has been proven so many times to work, so that's why everyone does it.

So $9.95 a month or $99 a year. And so $10 a month comes out to basically – assuming I publish 20 episodes a month on average, which is essentially what I've done, that comes out to about 50 cents an episode. And my deal is if I can't save you – here's kind of how I think it should be.

If I can't return to you at least 10 to 1 return on your money, I don't think you – I really don't think you should join. That should be – that's kind of my personal goal for myself. I can't do it every day or every month, but that's my personal goal, is that if I can't deliver to you in value at least $100 a month worth of value, if you're listening to all the shows and kind of taking all the ideas and the thoughts and the tactics, if I can't return to you at least $100 a month in value in exchange for your $10 a month membership, I think you should probably skip it and just take it for free or, I don't know, send me two Bitcoin or something.

But I think I can deliver far in excess of that. If I do go ahead and establish the firm, I plan to build clients at $500 a month. My largest client when I closed my firm had about $1.3 million under management with me. We charged in excess of 1 percent, but that was basically – at 1 percent, that's $13,000 a year of fees.

And that's the space that I would be working in is – at this point in my career is primarily in the million-dollar and up space. I have all of the ability to do that, and so we're in basically the $10,000 to $12,000 a year space. So I think charging $500 a month is actually a really great deal for those who are able to afford it.

But the problem is there that I have to go after the upper end of the market in order to have – to deserve that amount of money. And so I have to focus on the higher end of the market, and that's primarily due to I don't have the time to work at the lower hourly rates.

So I didn't know what to – I had no idea how to approach it. So I just picked $10 a month, and I said, "Hey, sounds fair to me. I've joined lots of membership programs. I still do that are more than $10 a month and some that are less than $10 a month.

So if you think I'm worth more than $10 a month, let me know, and you can send me more money. Just send me some percentage of what I save you." I thought about trying to figure something out like that and saying, "You, every month, figure out how much you – I saved you in a month, and then send me 10 percent of that." But the key is you have the opportunity to vote.

So I can basically run my household on – we run our personal household on somewhere between $3,000 to $4,000 a month. And so if I have $4,000 to $5,000 a month of gross income, $1,000 of business expenses for hosting fees and all the rest of that stuff, so I figure if there are something like 2,500, 3,000 of you listening, if maybe – let's say that there's 2,500 of you listening.

If 20 percent of you, that would come out to be 500 of you, go ahead and join the membership program. And $10 a month, that gives me $5,000 a month of gross revenue, and that's enough then to where I can start to invest in the show. I can phase out of my other contract that takes up 24 hours of my week and apply that time to building a better show.

So my hope is that by fully aligning our interests, I'll have a major financial incentive to serve you more and more as time goes on with better and better content. And with the more time – I've got a stack of books on my desk I'd love to read. I've got some very intricate shows I'd like to prepare on Social Security planning and retirement planning.

But those take on a tremendous amount of time to do it in a way that's not rambly and that's packed with content. And when you've got to get technical details right and then deliver it in a way that's detailed – frankly, I hear people do these interview shows. Interviews are easy.

You just read the guy's stuff or even if not – or a gal's stuff or even if not, you just sit down and ask them some questions. In an interview, you can do that in no time. The other stuff is what's time-consuming. So anyway, I like having our interests aligned.

And I don't mind being told I'm wrong. So I've bumbled into some controversial subjects on this show completely unintentionally. And if I'm wrong about something and I veer off track, you can penalize me directly by abandoning ship. And you just cancel your membership and then send me a nasty email telling me why I'm an idiot.

Now, I'll pay attention to that. That's probably actually my only conflict of interest in the way that I'm setting this up is that the question is, "Will I change my opinions that I strongly believe in if it costs me?" And I've dealt with this for a while and I don't think I will.

So if I strongly believe in something, I obviously do it. I do it no matter what it costs me. But I think if I just present it in a more factual way – so let's say I have some far-out crazy opinion. I need to present it to you in a more factual way that might be more compelling.

So if I deal with something that's in the world of opinion and I'm just obnoxiously opinionated, I think you'll leave. But if I present to you challenging information that has affected my opinion, I think you'll stay and you'll keep paying me even if you disagree with me. One of my favorite podcasts to listen to is a show called The Peace Revolution.

And I find it so tough to listen to because I disagree with so much of their show. But it is an awesome show because they present such compelling, comprehensive evidence. And it's not about do I like their opinion or not. It's about their evidence and the work that they've put into to create it.

I really value the work that they do because of that reason because it just keeps me thinking. And I love that. And I like their model. They don't accept any corporate sponsorships. So as far as payment methods at the moment, if you go on the site, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/membership or you'll find it right there at the top.

It says membership. I don't have any long 20-page sales page. I wrote three paragraphs over the weekend and put a PayPal button. And so right now, the only thing I'm accepting is PayPal. I would like to accept some other methods. But let me tell you why I'm using PayPal.

And again, I've stolen this unashamedly from Jack Spierka. He was the one who pointed it out. I really like it. With PayPal, when you sign up with PayPal, you can put PayPal on your credit card or to your bank account. I don't care what you do. If you credit card people that are accumulating points and miles, that will give you a way to do it on your credit card.

But what I like about PayPal is it will put – sorry, my dogs are barking at you. Excuse me. What I like about PayPal is that it will set it up for you on a recurring payment. So if you choose $9.95 a month or $99 a year, it will put that as a recurring payment that you're authorized.

But if you ever want to cancel that, I have no ability to go and charge your credit card. So it's not like you're giving me your credit card number and you got to worry about Joshua's off hiking in the Appalachian Trail and now you're trying to cancel your payment and you can't get a hold of me to do that.

With PayPal, that puts you fully in charge. And at any point in time, you can just click Cancel and that immediately cancels your membership. And that's fine. So if it's a few months, something is tight or you just feel like the value is not there, you can cancel at any time.

So I like that because it puts a good pressure on me to make sure that I'm constantly delivering. And I will pay attention if I all of a sudden get a lot of cancellations. So let's say that my quality is suffering and I'm drifting and I'm too rambling and I'm doing eight-hour shows.

Well, now I'll go ahead and I'll pay attention when people are canceling. However, I'm going to set up some other methods of payment. It's just going to take me a little time. I've got to set up a method of accepting checks for those of you who aren't interested in participating in PayPal's scenario.

I also would really like to promote other alternative forms of currency. I'm a big believer personally. It makes a lot of sense to me that we should have competitive currencies, competing currencies. And I think the way to start with that is just simply by doing it. So I've got to set up a way to accept Bitcoin for those of you who are into that and some other cryptocurrencies.

I haven't done the research to know how to do that yet. So if any of you are experts or have a tutorial, shoot me that so I can know how to set that up. And I'll have to manually give you the account. I want to set up a method for doing gold and silver coins like silver coins.

I think the barter networks or some of the barter currencies that people are doing based upon buy and try metallic standards is pretty cool. I don't buy the whole gold bug, silver bug theory of investing personally. I could be wrong about that. But I'd love it from the perspective of competing alternative currencies.

I love some of the bartering script currencies that exist. I think that's awesome. So I'm going to set up some of those methods as well as I can take some time. And then if I can create some revenue, if you guys are willing to pay for it, then I can tighten up a lot of the details of the show.

I may be able to commit some time to doing some editing that is desperately needed in some of my shows. I think of a few. I think of my buddy, the tech mashugana, and we wound up having an absurd three-hour ramble. And I should have edited that thing and taken two hours of that out.

People have said, "Why don't you just do fewer shows?" I could. But I feel like even now with what I'm doing, I feel like I should be doing more. And if I just did two shows a week or three shows a week, I feel like I'd be taking the lazy way out.

I mean there's such a need and somebody's got to do it. So if I have some revenue, I could hire some transcripts done or some better show notes that are more comprehensive than what I do. In the three minutes, I sit down and bang them out, better links. Sometimes I forget to link stuff in the show notes.

I have a tremendous number of products I'd like to develop, guides, tutorials, DIY resources. And the show is just simply not a great format for that. So I have video tutorials, audio guides, written guides. I can dedicate more time to participating in some of those things and developing better shows for you.

So that is the fundamentals of the program. And I hope that doing it in this way of kind of introducing everything has been helpful for you. I hope that it helps you to understand kind of where I'm coming from and who I am, a little bit of my story.

I wanted to include that at the beginning to help you to understand kind of where I've come from and where I'm going. But that's essentially my vision for the show. Now it's up to you and you get to decide. At this point in time, you can decide if you think I'm worth hiring and if you've received true monetary value from the show.

If so, I ask you to sign up. Sign up for the show. I think I've got everything working. I tested it. If it's broken, I'll let you know. And I tested the stuff so it should all be working to set up the membership. So if you like it and you value it, I ask you to sign up and do that.

At this point, I don't have anything in the membership program that's a special benefit from you. Basically, it's just your way of saying thank you and that the last however many hours of audio has been helpful for you. I'm going to keep on going and I promise that I will always provide for you massive value in excess of what you pay me.

That's how every successful trade works. A voluntary trade always has to be win-win. When you buy something in the store, the store values your money more than they value having the product and you value having the product more than you value having your money. So trade always has to be win-win.

And if you feel that way, then go ahead and join the membership program. It's right on the website or at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/membership. I'll get extra stuff there as quick as I can. If you need to wait until I enhance the member benefits, that's cool. I'll do that as soon as I can.

I'm just hustling to get stuff figured out. I had to get my feed fixed and fix my website over the weekend. So I'll get some other member benefits in there as quickly as possible, and I'll let you know about them on the show. And then basically from now going forward, I'll start reminding you about the membership every day.

But that's the introduction to the membership. That's why I've chosen it. Thank you guys so much for listening. It's kind of an emotional show for me because it's a lot of history here. So I want to thank you all for listening. And here's to another hundred. Actually, here's to another 900 and beyond.

Have a great day, everybody. 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. It began with a vision that from the majesty of this land could rise new possibilities. That spark of an idea created something you have to see to believe.

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