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Humor me for just a moment. Do you have a rent payment or a mortgage payment? What would your life be like if you didn't have that? And even better, think what your life would be like if you had never had one. Never. Right from the beginning. First house you ever lived in was a house you paid cash for.

I'm not talking about doing it at the age of 45, but at the age of 23? Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets. Today on the show, we're going to be talking with a man who's the father of eight children and his three oldest have all purchased their own houses for cash while in their early 20s before they got married.

That'd be a conversation worth listening to, right? I first heard about today's author when somebody had sent me a link to his book. He wrote a book called Buying a House Debt-Free. The author's name is Steve Maxwell. He and his wife, Terry, they're Christians. They run a Christian ministry, essentially working with people trying to provide some practical instruction and advice on the daily practicalities of life.

I saw this book and I bought this book called Buying a House Debt-Free. I was blown away by the stories in the book. I think you're really going to enjoy today's show. A lot of times, I firmly believe that you can't judge somebody. You can't criticize somebody. You can't bring an ad hominem attack and say, "Just because you haven't done something doesn't invalidate ideas." Ideas should be judged on their merit based upon logic.

There are some ideas where we have good ideas, but if there's no one that's actually done it, then the idea doesn't have nearly as much power as you wish it would have. My guest today, Steve Maxwell, he certainly has the clout behind his ideas. He has been a consistent man and it's really, really neat to read the story of how he's worked with his sons to help them to buy their houses debt-free.

Again, all of his sons are on track to buy their houses debt-free. The three oldest have already done it and the younger two are on the way saving for it. So it's going to be a great interview. I think you'll really enjoy it. Sometimes I listen to interviews like this and I think, "Man, I missed it.

I totally missed it when I was younger." But I have an opportunity with my children. At the moment, we just have one. We're hoping for more, but with my son at least to hopefully shape his life in a different direction. I am totally inspired by the content of today's interview and by this book.

A couple of quick summaries. In just a moment, I'm going to play the interview for you. Interviews with authors are always a little bit tricky because when somebody's written an entire book, they can't summarize a book in an interview. So an interview tends to be less about, "Here's the outline of the book and the lessons of it." The beginning of the interview is fairly chatty in the sense of just Steve telling his story.

It's really fun to hear the individual stories of how his sons found and purchased their houses. The experiences range from smaller price tags to larger price tags, from fixer-uppers to very nice fancy houses. So the beginning of that and then we get into a little bit of his philosophy and then some practical tools.

I will come back at the end of the interview and share with you a couple of the actual ideas from the book. It's a great book. It's well worth your time and your energy. But it's hard to get an author to say, "Here's the outline of what I want to do," because they want you to read their book.

So I want you to read his book as well, but I will come back at the end and summarize a few of the very practical ideas that he implements and talks about in the book. A couple of quick announcements. For those of you who are listening to me on iTunes or who have been subscribed in iTunes and are wondering where I went, still make sure I broke the iTunes feed and deleted all my iTunes subscribers a couple weeks ago.

So I think this will be about the last time I'll mention it. But please, if you're not receiving updates on the show, all you need to do is just simply unsubscribe, search for the show in the iTunes store, and resubscribe. If you'd like to get a hold of me, my email address is joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.

You can find me on Twitter @radicalpf, on Facebook, facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. I would love to hear from you. I've learned my lesson about not building out further connections and newsletters and things like that. A lot of exciting changes coming in the show. I'll mention a couple of them at the end of the show today.

I'm working hard to ramp up the professionalism of the show, working hard to build up the content. I'll mention a couple of those things at the end of the day and kind of share with you the plans for December and the new year. But for now, here's Steve. So Steve, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

I appreciate your making time to be with me today. Well, I am delighted to be with you, Joshua. I'd like to invite you to share your story, but as introduction, I am going to read back to you the first three paragraphs of the preface of your book, because I thought this was an amazing preface to a book.

And when I first read it, it was very interesting. And then I'd like you to share the backstory, behind your story with your family. So the first three paragraphs of your book say this, "Three of our sons have purchased their homes debt-free with cash before they were married. As we write, our two younger sons are working toward that goal.

It's not rocket science, and it's certainly not impossible to achieve the goal of owning a home debt-free while still in one's twenties. Simply put, it is a way of life. Some suppose that our sons had certain special advantages that enabled them to buy their homes debt-free, and that not everyone has those advantages.

Our sons had no special advantages or circumstances, but only a vision set before them of hard work in their own business, denial of self-gratification, and a mindset for saving money. Plus, they experienced the blessing of the Lord. We believe that most young men are capable of beginning married life, owning their first home debt-free.

And we believe that after reading Buying a House Debt-Free, you will agree with us. We have seen that it isn't a matter of whether they will fail in this quest, but whether they will choose to go for it with a serious level of commitment. You will be encouraged as you see your sons rise to a new purpose in life." This is a totally amazing introduction to a book.

And yet, to the best of my knowledge, it's actually true. How on earth did you do that? And what's the story behind it? Oh, listen, I'm just smiling. I was enjoying every bit of what you're reading, because it isn't hard. This is what's so shocking. I think today people have been so mesmerized by the current way of life that practical things are just seen as hard to believe, and they don't understand.

And so, Nathan was the first, and I think he was 24 when he bought his house. But he'd been saving for, oh, really probably since, seriously, around 1819. And by the way, tell me when you want me to drill down a little bit on some of the detail. And it was really, it was just a very natural thing when the widow's son across the street came over and just said, "We understand.

We befriended them. We understand that Nathan might be interested in the house. And so we're going to sell it. Mom's going to be moving. And so are you interested?" But what was really fascinating about that is, first, Nathan came, Nathan was talking to him and told him, yes, he was interested.

And the son said he would come back and have the house appraised and give Nathan a price without a realtor, so there'd be some savings there. And so Nathan told him he was very much interested. He came back with a price and about a week later or so, something like that.

And what was really very fascinating is the price was about $10,000 more than Nathan had in the bank. And Nathan at that point said, when he told him the price, he said, "Great. Thank you very much. And I'll get back to you and let you know if I want to get it." He could have said, "Listen, I don't have the money.

And I'm sorry. I'm committed to not borrowing." But he said he didn't say that. And so then he went, we just talked about it a little bit and he started praying about it, what the Lord would have him to do. And then I meet with the guys weekly and I remember the meeting, that meeting.

And I said, "So Nathan, has the Lord shown you anything?" "No, no, he's not shown me anything." And then I think the next one, it was, and so you, "Has the Lord showed you anything?" And he said, "Well, yeah, Dad, the Lord said to get it." Now at this point, he still didn't have the money, the remaining balance.

And I thought, "Well, okay, this is very interesting." And then he went on to say, "And Lord's also telling me it's time to get married." So that was a shock. We were, "Wow, okay. Did he say who?" "Well, no, not who yet." And obviously there was no audible voice or anything like this.

It's just a young man that's grown up with a relationship with the Lord. And so in his heart, he felt these things. So that was the beginning of a journey. And if you'd like, I can finish out a little more of that story at this point. Would you like to hear the rest of it?

- Yeah, and make sure I want to hear, go ahead and finish that story. But then I also want to hear at what age your other children bought houses and how much they paid for them, as far as cash, to get the idea of the numbers behind it. - Sure, sure.

And I think it's in the Home Debt Free book. And now I will, at this point, just without looking it up, I think it was somewhere around 80-some, a thousand, maybe 88, somewhere in there, that he told him he won for the house. And Nathan had, it was about 10,000 less.

So then Nathan is officially on record with his family, anyway, of saying that he was going to tell them he was going to get this house. And this was, I'm thinking maybe October. And then it was about a week after that, Nathan got a email from a national publisher of technical materials and said that they were interested in Nathan writing a book for them on Windows security.

That is Windows, the operating system security, as opposed to doubles, you know, or your Windows SASH security. So he had been on, I think, a message board related to Windows security, and he'd been answering and dialoguing on some questions. So it wasn't just this email, just totally out of the blue.

He had been interacting with these people all on a pro bono basis, just totally free and participating, and he was there to learn. And at the same time, he was sharing other things with them. And so they obviously had a very good understanding of his knowledge. But here he is, a homeschooled young man, never been to college, and all of a sudden they're saying that they would pay him to write this book.

And they needed it right away. And I think it was six or eight weeks, something like that. And he would have editors working for him, and by all appearances, this amount would actually cover what he was lacking in his, for needing for the house. And so we were pretty excited about that.

But in the contract that he had to sign, they had penalties if he didn't finish on time, because they said they needed it right away. So he is still praying about it, and he felt good about it, and I did too. And he's working for Western Auto, their corporate, their data center in downtown Kansas City at that point.

And so he's got a full-time, call it job, as a contractor. And then so he had Saturdays, and we don't work on Sundays. So with nights and Saturdays, that isn't a lot of time. But he jumped in, he gave it everything he had. And at the end of the time period, he wasn't done.

He was close, but not done. And so he wrote him and asked if they would give him an extension, and they wrote him back, they said, "Oh, Nathan, we knew you could never do it in that length of time. However, we need this right away. We had to keep the pressure on.

So absolutely go for it. You're good." And he finished it. I think they gave him two more weeks, and he did it. And so you've got the feeling of accomplishment there. You have then God's provision of the additional money that's required. And frankly, probably maybe even to top all of that, you've got a young man who's seen, he can hear kind of in his heart a leading of the Lord, and know God is behind it and will follow through.

I don't know what that's worth. I don't have a price tag on that. And yet, then so he went ahead and got the house, and they're still in it. We've done an addition to it. I say we, it was a collective family effort. And it's just really, it's been exciting.

So he was 24 when he got it. I'm guessing he was, my wife's the date person, okay? She knows the dates. I'm not into dates. So he was probably 25 when he got married. So they've been there, and four children later, and it's been a great house for them.

Wow. So he was your oldest then, and was the first of your sons to buy a house? Yes. And then what's the story on the next one? Well, but I would say also, and we've had a vision. We have written up a vision statement years ago of things that we really believe the Lord would have us for our family, a direction from.

And it's again, nothing mystical. It's just virtually going through the Bible, and certain verses would stand out to us, like that they would be ambassadors for Christ. They would be obedient. They would love others. They would, just a number of things like that. And one of them was that they would buy their houses, and well, they would be debt-free for houses and vehicles and all that stuff.

So this has been cast before them for years. It's been an understanding is this, this is who we are. So it's a vision that's just been laid out before the whole family. And so it isn't about, okay, you're 18 now. I want you to understand these things. And it's not been that.

This is just who we are. It's our way of life. This is what we're working towards. Jesus Christ is who we live for. I mean, wait, he died for us. We're here to live for him. And so this is, that's why it's not just step one, two, three. It's the life that we live.

And so anyway, Nathan was the oldest, and it was exciting just to see how that all came about. It was the neighbor that came over and knocked on the door. So then Christopher, and most of the children are a couple years apart, so then we had Christopher. And he, what was it?

So he would have been even in his late 20s, later 20s, and not married. They don't date. One of that was one of the things that we kind of encouraged them in is, by the way, dating costs a lot of money. You probably dated, right? No, my wife was the first woman I ever had a relationship with.

Wow, that's beautiful. All right. And but see, most, I dated with him finding my wife. Well, dating is expensive. And so if they don't date, then you save a whole lot of money in that. So Christopher obviously then wasn't dating, and just he wanted to get married, but had his eyes open, and, "Lord, okay, we're looking who this might be." But somewhere in there, some other neighbors approached him and said, "Hey, Christopher, we've got this house." And there were two retired school teachers, and they're just great people.

And you can imagine, two retired school teachers are not putting much wear on a house. And so this house was just immaculate. And he was very, the dad, or the husband, I should say, not a dad, the husband was very careful and maintaining it. So it was a great house.

And I think they wanted, I also had that in the book, might have been 125 for it or something. And so they asked him if he was interested. And it was also happened to be fairly close to Nathan's house. And so he said, "I'll tell you what, I'll start praying about it." And he starts praying.

And we were actually on a trip. And I just kind of remember it was getting close to the time he told him he'd get back to them, because they wanted to move. They were in the process of building a house, and they needed to have a decision. And it just kind of kept going on.

And finally, he just said, "I got to tell him, dad, I got to tell him, but I'm just, I just don't have an answer. I mean, I don't, it's not a yes. I don't understand why. But it's, so if it's not a yes, it's got to be a no.

And I don't have peace about it. And I'm the one saying, wait a minute. I mean, I'm careful." You're trying to control yourself. "This house is gorgeous. It's not going to take any work. It's right, kind of backyard neighbors with Nathan's, nice neighborhood. It's a good price. You got the money, you know, I mean, I just, but he said no.

And I said, okay, okay. So then a short, oh, I don't know. Oh, no. And then on top of that, then the house next to that house, he'd been, he would kind of watch over their house for them when they travel. Well, they came to him and said, "Well, Christopher, why don't you buy our house?" So he had the money for the first house.

He just didn't. Yes, he had the money for the second house too. And the second house was really even nicer. The mom was this gifted decorator and it was even nicer. And so he prayed about that. He was praying about that. Somewhere in there, our house, well, we have this ministry, Titus2.com.

And the house really, the main floor is 2000 square feet. So it's a pretty good size house with a full basement under it. And so we had the ministry in one portion of the basement. And since it involves books and we'd have books stacked there, and then we actually ended up stacking some books down the hallway, another bedroom.

And then we had even at one point, which is a story on the, built a shed out back to the maximum size the city would allow. And then we were storing books there and we still kept generating more books. And so we had kind of this mini crisis, call it.

What are we going to do? We're out of room. And so we're discussing it and pray about it. And then somewhere right in there is when, I think it was Terry one day said, "Well, Christopher, you want to buy this house?" And we had totally redone the main floor, put in all new oak trim and doors and things.

And it was just, we just liked the house very much, nothing opulent, just very comfortable and energy efficient. It had 10 inch walls. And so all of that, it was just, but what are we going to do for space? So Christopher said, "Well, I like this house a lot.

I think I'd be interested in it. Let me pray about it." So at the same time, if we had bought a lot of this property right behind his house, not knowing what we'd use it for, but anyway, so we said, "Christopher, you know, we can't give you any bargain on this because we need the money to seed money to build a house there back there behind this.

And so it's got to be good for you, son. If you just have to know that's what the Lord would have you because it's no deal. And we just, he'd have to get it appraised. And if it looked like enough that we could work with and he was good with it, then it would be good.

And that's the only way that it would work for all of us." So he said, "Yeah, great." We got it appraised and they came in at 210 and he had the money. I don't know how much more, but he certainly had the money without a problem. And as he prayed about it, he said, "Yeah, I'd love to get the house." I mean, so is this ideal or what?

Can you imagine? I mean, we wouldn't have borrowed and yet how would you build a house without money? And where would you live? I mean, all of this stuff. I mean, I know people have those kinds of issues all the time, but here it was... How old was he when he bought the house?

He was, I think, right at 28. Okay. So at 28, he'd saved over $200,000 to pay for a house. Yes. And so that property is adjacent to the one we're at now. And so building the house, we just walked over. I mean, is that convenient or what? You can't beat lunch break when you can walk back to your own kitchen instead of having to bring a lunchbox to the job site.

Oh, yeah. So he was happy. We were just amazed at how the Lord worked all that out. But in the new house, the whole entire basement would be dedicated to Titus II. And then we would do a story and a half. And so the upstairs would be where what was like the living.

The boys had a bedroom. There were two bedrooms. And so that would be upstairs. And so it was pretty comparable to that current house, but just with the whole basement, well, walkout basement where we could bring pallets in for books. And so that's how it all worked. And it took us about three years to build it.

We did have it roughed in, but then we did all the sheetrock, the plumbing, the electrical, the tile with the whole main floor is all tile. We did all the concrete work outside. It was over a hundred and I think twenty five cubic yards of concrete. But I give you those details because the philosophy that the Lord has led us to is you learn, you work, and you do it yourself.

And so we didn't know anything about concrete work, except like at Christopher's house when we built the shed, we just read up a little bit on it. We did this big, long kind of drive sidewalk that a pallet jack could go to the back to the shed. And it was all family.

It's all family projects. That's how we learn. And the worst case I knew, OK, what if you have to jack hammer it out and throw it away and start over? You will have learned a lot in the process. And that first let me tell you that first sidewalk, even though it was relatively smooth and you could push a pallet jack back there just fine.

I mean, it wasn't lumpy or anything, but it was it was ugly. It was really ugly. Sure. I believe that's how you learn. I'd love to I'd love to kind of find out more of how you did it, but I don't want to skip past your third son. How old?

So your third son then also bought a house. And how old was he and how much did he pay for that house? OK, so then Joseph was 24. See, we have we have a Sarah, we have Sarah under the two boys, older boys, and then in a six year span where there were no children.

And then Joseph, the last actually five or reversal babies. So then Joseph, who was who was then 24, I think at that time, and he just really felt the Lord leading towards marriage. And and he'd been looking at houses and this house was it's about a mile away, whereas the other two are pretty close.

And it was a little I just say a little distressed. I mean, they had it was very, very dated, you know, kind of crummy carpet. Some of the ceiling, the sheetrock work was quite dated and and yet but the price I think they they had been asking, I think, oh, maybe closer to 100 for and and then all of a sudden they came down to maybe 80 some.

And no, I think I think that was I'm sorry, I wish I the book may have more details on in that regard, but I think it was around 100. And then and then Joseph went looked at it and he offered them somewhere around 70. And he was able to pay cash for that as well.

That's impressive. Where I'd like to go from here is I'd like to talk about how, but I would first like to start talk about why. Why was it such a big deal to hold this vision in front of your children? Why does it matter so much? What's the big deal about buying a house debt free to you guys?

Well, the point is, is certainly in my lifespan, the houses that we had owned up until eventually with Christopher's, that was all with a mortgage. And mortgage, it's just always there. You don't get out of it. In fact, I could look, there was Jesus uses, he uses sin as an example and then compares it to debt because, you know, people because people universally understand they don't like being under obligation like that under debt.

And so then he used that and tied it to sin to say, and that's how you feel once you resolve your sin. So, but the debt, it's uncomfortable. I mean, frankly, and as a believer, I didn't even come to understand it as much until later, even as I studied.

But, but the reality is, it's called, it is called a promissory note. I am promising that I am going to pay this. Well, I can't tell you what's going to happen tomorrow. I wish I could, but I can't. And if I can't tell you tomorrow, how can I tell you next week?

How can I say in a month, in a year? I talked to a dad that 20, I think 26 years with Hewlett Packard, 26 years. And now he's been laid off. 26 years. And their whole downsizing, I think, could be close to 55,000. General Electric, when Jack Welch took over, I think there were over 400,000 employees and eventually downsized for sure, I think down even around 300,000 if they're not lower now.

And Jack Welch, in his book Straight From the Gut said, said that the days of corporate loyalty are over. The, you know, that essentially the only way there's any kind of job security is, is pleasing a customer. So one can't count on it. You just can't. And so here's always that debt.

We, we've known so many through our Titus II, we've just known a lot of families that have heartbreak. I mean, losing a house, absolute heartbreak. And so as long as one has that, that, that note, there's no promises, no guarantee that something's not going to happen that causes you to lose your house.

So for you, then it's primarily from the perspective of essentially, you've made a promise to pay and because you let your yes be yes and your no be no, when you promise to pay, then therefore there's a moral obligation to pay. And by entering into a promise to pay, you're not sure if you're making a borrow.

You're not sure if you can fulfill that. Is that, is that the primary theme that, that stands out to you? Absolutely. Right. That makes sense. Cause I, I struggle. One of the questions that I have when, when reading your book is when I look at it and I think it through, you know, to me, so I come from a financial planning background and I like, you know, I think it's, it's, it's great to have a house paid off, but to me it's not really, it doesn't seem like a big deal one way or the other because in the current situation, at least where I live, there's no possibility of ever removing any of your payments in the sense that even if you have your principal and your, your mortgage balance paid off, you know, where I live, my property taxes are 3000 bucks a year and my homeowner's insurance is 3000 bucks a year and I live in a fairly modest house.

So even if I, even if I, even if I, you know, pay off the mortgage, that still doesn't change that there's still going to be a monthly or annual obligation there. So it doesn't seem to me like there's any emotional value beyond, it just doesn't seem like there's much value to it.

And then even I used to think, I guess, I used to think that there was some connection to, I guess, an emotional piece of just, hey, you know, we own this thing. And then I ran into an issue with the code enforcement in my county and I discovered that the code enforcement officials, if they don't like something that I do, all of a sudden, they can put a lien up to a thousand bucks a day on my house and there's nothing I can do.

And that destroyed any last, for me, that destroyed any last vestiges of idealism about any ever owning your property, period. So like, it just doesn't seem that big a deal to me. Meaning that whether the house is paid for or not, we, in our current system, it's impossible to ever own your own property.

And even when you think you do own your own property, you don't. Yeah, you are paying, you're right. The point is you're paying your taxes in some ways, rent to the state. Right. And that is, you know, that is the way it is. But let's, you know, if the economy totally goes south and you have a whole vast numbers within a city that can't pay, well, you know, yes, they could eventually, I don't know what they did in the depression.

Do you have a handle on that? Would they do it? Depends on what the depends on what the situation is. I mean, you just see that depends on where you are and you just see the market works its way out. And I mean, if you look back over the housing crisis since 2008, you can see our entire culture used to it used to be that not being able to pay and I'm speaking culturally, not morally, but from a cultural perspective, it used to be that not being able to pay your mortgage was a shame, was a source of shame.

And there was a cultural shaming that happened because that was dishonorable, where I've seen me personally in the last five years has entirely changed. And it's become that many of those negative connotations have disappeared culturally speaking. Doesn't make it right or wrong, necessarily. I don't want to judge my moral or ethical standpoint based upon culture, but I have seen that change in the culture.

Yeah, that is interesting. But I still listen. So if things get really bad, I have an electric bill. In fact, I know we had somebody write us two weeks ago, and they had no money. Well, they had just enough money either for the rent or the electric bill, one of the two.

They paid the rent and so virtually had their electricity cut off. And that's an option. They have a house. They are in a house. They have a place to stay. And that is it. The same can go with water. And I see that as different. Now, if it gets all the way down to your property taxes, yes, still, I mean, the lowest denominator there.

Yet, I still, it's not a promise. I'm not breaking my promise. And I am attempting to pay them as I can. And they want their money is really what they want. So it's just, I think so often it's used as an excuse, though, as an excuse, as opposed to being responsible and just getting as much out of the way out of there off my, well, you know, as I can, like some will say, wait a minute, I could never own a house debt free because in our area, they may be $500,000.

I had a gal from Australia, New Zealand, I think she was writing me that and she was she was being kind of sarcastic and said, well, in our area, you just couldn't, you just can't do that. And then she went on to say, and I think I even used the example of the book.

And so I bought my house, I got my mom making mortgage payments. And besides, if I'd have paid that money down, I wouldn't have been able to travel the world like I have. You see, because usually what you'll find is it gets in the way of people's fun that they want to have.

And that's what in fact she was doing is she wanted to have her fun. Whereas if she would have spent, put everything she could down to get that house down and then work to pay it off. It's just, it's a promise that has been kept. And one doesn't have to also at the same time, frankly, worry about it if things get really bad.

Right. And I know it's probably unusual pushback and maybe it's a generational shift or I don't know. I guess when I think about it, I have a world of admiration for your sons and the path they've been on. I think that's really phenomenal what they've been able to achieve.

But sometimes I wonder, just sometimes I worry, me personally, I worry about the opportunity cost of what they could have done with that money. So for me, when I think about the idea of a young man spending $200,000 of his hard earned money that he saved, and especially if that's the bulk of his savings, I get so nervous about putting that and sinking that into a house where I have no control over it.

And now if something happens, it's incredibly focused in one geographic area. It's mainly useful primarily for me to live in. And that's just about it. And I can think of so many other ways that I would personally be much more comfortable investing that money instead of purchasing a house.

And so, but other previous generations have a very different field. And so what I try to figure out is, am I wrong? And I just simply don't have the benefit of, for you, maybe 40, 50 years of hindsight. Or is there a shift in our culture? That's what I worry about.

Well, and I think, how do you, Joshua, I think, you see, once you've got the money, so for example, let's take John. He's next after Joseph, okay? And so he's now 23. He, they all have pretty much are developing businesses. So, John, at the same time as he's developing, saving, as he's saving, first he and Joseph had a construction business.

They had learned a lot of skills, and they just felt that that was, and we encouraged, trying stuff, doing stuff. So, they started this construction business. But with our traveling, as we would travel with Titus Two related things, then we found that, well, it's a little hard for a construction company.

You give a quote, well, I'll be back in a month or something. You know, that's not necessarily ideal. And then also they were seeing that with Joseph. Joseph started, and I'm another part of the story here, he started programming when he was 10 years old. And so, at this point, they're in their late teens, pretty much, and he saw that the programming money was really better than the construction money.

And it wasn't, you're not out in the Kansas hot and the Kansas cold, and sitting at a desk a lot more comfortable. I'll have another cup of coffee, thank you very much. And so, they decided that some of the desk work, computer work was better. Well, John, about that time, had an opportunity, a friend that needed some, we'll call it in more general terms, agricultural design.

And so, John decided, saw a need, and he went ahead and invested what money he had at that point. At that point, I don't think he had much over 5,000 in the bank, but still the emphasis is on saving. And at the same time, kind of along with what you were saying, I think, they had been investing in tools.

They bought a truck, they bought a trailer, they bought tools. And so, that's income generation, and that's what they, so they had invested in that. And so, John's now making a direction shift. So, he starts this agricultural design business, and he just is pouring his heart into it. Well, so now, here he is, oh, I don't know, probably, certainly three years, three, maybe four, and no more than five years later, he has gotten to where he's pretty much the premier design, call it, studio in that segment as an independent designer.

And so, as such, so he invested, he invests a fair amount in traveling and different trade shows, call it knowledge acquisition, contacts, making contacts. And so, that slowed down his savings, but now his savings are really starting to pick up. So, yes, I understand about, well, where you invest, but we just really feel that one can do both.

- Right. And I think about it, it's applicable to me because I have a one-year-old son. My wife and I, we have a one-year-old son. And as I think about, okay, what's the vision that I have for him, there's almost this constant tension in the financial planning business between what's mathematically correct or what we expect from the outcome of an investment versus the emotional side and perhaps the non-measurable and money values of life.

You see this often in financial planning with the question of, should I invest or should I pay off debt? And so, different people have different ways of answering it. And I love the focus and the idea that three of your children have been able to purchase houses debt-free in their 20s is remarkable in our culture.

But that makes one part of me say, well, if they take that and not buy a house and just keep investing instead of $200,000, they'd be up to a million bucks or something right now. And then they'd be truly financially independent. Then they would be in a position where they can live off of the income from their investments, which frees them to constantly increase their business skills and business opportunities instead of what I perceive, sinking a bunch of money into a house and then moving on.

And then you're out of money because you put it all on a house. That's the conundrum that I try to solve in my head. Oh, listen, absolutely. And I don't fault you. I mean, I understand where you come from. But see, with Titus II, I come in contact with so many dads that have had some of these investment philosophies and that becomes, they're going to leverage it and they're broke.

Then they don't have a place for their family. There's not the stability of at least a house. And so when you're leveraging in other people's money, I mean, Sam Walton said that there was a day that went by that he didn't feel the weight of his personal debt. And so it is so nice peace.

What is peace of mind worth? I think it's worth a lot, frankly. Because I don't know how you can, I personally, by all means jump on this. I don't know how you can have debt and not presume upon the future. And we're told not to presume upon the future.

So how can one do that? Right. It's an interesting theological conundrum. And I'm not sure that I've settled it in my mind personally, just simply because I've read and thought about it. And it seems that, you know, even in the end of your book, I can't remember which one of them it was that I read of yours, but even in the end of your book, you're clear to point out it's not that debt is a sin, but debt is, in your opinion, in your theological understanding, but rather that debt is a presumption upon the future.

And so it's unwise. And so I don't exactly know how to solve that conundrum. And I think it through. That's why I don't talk. Anyway, I think it through and I look at it from different angles. I go back to at this stage, like at this stage in my life, my wife and I, we bought a house and we purchased it.

We didn't pay cash for it. We put down about 20% on it. And it wound up, at the time I felt confident about the decision, but it wound up really hurting me because unexpectedly I made a business change and I had sunk all my money into this down payment on a house.

And so here I was following, you know, following all of the, following the ideas and the ideals of prudent planning, saying, okay, put down a healthy down payment on a house. And then through a variety of circumstances, I had a bunch of money tied up in a house right when I was ready to start a new business.

And looking back, did I make a mistake? I don't know at this point, it was too recent for me to look back and say I made a mistake. And even if I did, what's the point other than just to learn from it? I can't, I could sell my house and change from it.

But when I look at it, I just get, houses end up being expensive sinks of money rather than a, necessarily a quality investment. And what's, but what I struggle with is however, is that I can't, I'm a very kind of calculator focused person, but you can't necessarily always bring calculations into it because for my wife, the pleasure of having a house that she's comfortable in and, you know, it's very different for her versus me.

So I'm usually at this point, a little bit slow to share my opinion, just because I haven't, I don't think I've experienced enough, enough to know. I don't think I have enough life experience to know exactly what's right, which is why I seek out older people. And I ask them these questions to try to figure out if I'm wrong or right.

Well, and see, not only that, even from a financial guy, you know, a financial guy appreciates money. And so, so how much did you, what would, what'd your house cost? $220,000. Okay. So are, are you, I mean, you're going to know far better than me. Chances are you're paying over a hundred thousand in interest on it.

I'd have to run the, I'd have to run the schedule, but I would say less than that. Three and a half, three and a half percent loan. So it's probably, yeah. Wow. Okay. But even, even say, let's, let's go get ridiculous. Maybe it's even 60, 70,000 that you're paying in interest.

Right. Wouldn't you like that? If I wrote you a check, wouldn't you like that? And here you get into the problem of opportunity costs, because the question is, well, if I spend the, if I, what would I do with that money if I didn't do it otherwise? And if I were consuming it and spending it, then yes, the interest would be, it would be better to pay off the interest.

But if I take that extra money and I invest it, and if I don't, if I invest it at, in excess of the interest rate on the debt, then mathematically the $60,000 is not a big deal in comparison to whatever the other money could be. And so that would be, that would be, or if I just simply deferred the, the housing cost and I don't want to go too deep into this, but this is always the war in financial planning.

Because if I took that $200,000 and let's say that I had it in cash at 20 years old and I invested it, and let's just, you'd say I invested it at 10 for 10 years, 10 years at 10% interest, then now with no further contributions at the end of 10 years, I'm up to half a million bucks.

Whereas I would never, I would basically just expect the house to grow at the rate of inflation unless I were improving it. And so I would view the house as, it's not a wise investment, it's a lifestyle choice. And I always try to say, well, let me build investments first rather than, rather than lifestyle.

So go ahead and respond to that. And then I want to move on to kind of how you did it, because this is a, this is a never ending circle that we go around and around and around. - Listen, absolutely. And I think, I think that's it. I mean, it really, each must, each must settle it in their own mind and be at peace with it.

Absolutely. And, and I think, you know, as, as for us, when we look at the, the uncertainty of even the financial markets, the, the, the country, who would have thought of, you know, the Twin Towers incidents, you know, all that. So that's why, and each has to base, do it based on value to each one.

And so we don't, we don't ever judge or even really scratch our heads, you know, on when, when somebody makes different choices. It's just each, each has to be at peace. - Right. And I think, so for me, the idea of having fallback plan, you know, because you can't control things to me, that's, that, that would be key.

Me personally, if I were, if I'm planning from that perspective, I don't think I would, I wouldn't choose this house, which is, you know, semi fancy and big and expensive to be that fallback plan. I would, if I were working on that fallback plan, I would, I think like, this is where you get into this constant question of why am I getting out of debt?

I would keep the mortgage on this property and I'd buy, you know, an acre of land in the country and put a $10,000 mobile home on it. And that would be kind of, okay, if my financial life falls apart and I'm not able to make that promise, then I would have a place to retreat to that wasn't subject to, that wasn't subject to the bank as kind of my backup property to keep my family together.

But you got to look at every situation. I'd like to move on and just talk about, and by the way, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and, and, and feedback. It's a subject I think a lot about and I am inclined personally, I think I place a lot more weight on the non-measurable, non-financially measurable things of life.

Because to me, the only value of money is to fund life. And so if I'm spending all of my time, if I'm spending all of my time pursuing what was the appropriate, perfect mathematical solution, and I neglect and my wife is, is feeling insecure because, you know, I'm taking big risks with business and with leverage, then that may impact my marriage.

And if my marriage falls apart, that destroys my life. Far better to walk away from a couple hundred thousand dollars of potential interest and keep my family strengthened and start from that strong home base. That's going to make a much bigger difference in my life in the long run.

Excellent. Now, and listen, I'll even give you a little personal little example on that. So we were in, in Seattle area and had this very nice home with a mortgage on it. And I, so I thought, Oh, I need to be debt free. And so, and there you have one way to do it.

There's two ways to do it. One is, is just sell the house. And the other way is to pay it off. Then that would, the one way is a little more painful, takes more discipline. By the way, those that didn't describe me at that time. And, and so, but my wife was on board, but she loved that house.

And, and so we put it up for sale and sold it immediately. Person walked in, loved it. Yes, we'll take it sold. And then we moved, I was working for Boeing at that time and we moved closer to where I was working and, and it was a rental house, big rental house.

However, it, it just wasn't as, it wasn't as nice. It wasn't even in the, had a country feel to it, you know, many standards, not bad. It just, it just wasn't like the other one. And so here, my wife now, let's say celebrating being debt free, sitting on the back steps crying, you know, because of the one versus the other.

So, so that, that emotional component is, is huge. And really the lesson I learned in, yes, I could go debt free at that point, but you still have to live somewhere and the family is very important. Yeah. I'll share another personal anecdote that I, that I was really convicted in recently is I'm this very personally, I'm, I'm this very extreme kind of person always saying, well, let's go to the, you know, to the far end of, of whatever the subject is.

I mean, my show is called radical personal finance. So I often talk constantly, probably too much. Well, listen, honey, let's go live in an RV or let's go live in a tiny house. Let's go like do these, do these things that are going to be financially so much superior.

And my wife is, is, is, is, she's an amazing woman and she's game for just about any adventure. And, but one of the things I realized is that I wasn't, you know, her focus, everything that is the current, she spends all of her days here in the home and everything goes out of the house here.

And so we have a very different emotional connection to the stuff and their living circumstances and, and, and just to that. And I think I was being insensitive to her needs just simply by kind of focusing on, well, look, I, you know, I can live, I can work out of a, I can work out of a backpack and I can, and I was just being very insensitive and I was really convicted about that.

And I decided that's it. I'm going to, I'm not going to complain anymore. I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to be insensitive anymore. And that really helped me to kind of free myself from this idea that I had to go and live out of my backpack, which is, I mean, it's okay that I would do that if I were single, but I'm not single and loving my wife means something very different.

That's right. And then you've got a little one now. And I mean, I saw your, your string of photos of that little guy. So I sense that little guy's kind of important to you and he's going to continue to rock your boat and influence your decisions over time. And, and so, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's an exciting journey.

All right. So we got a little bit, a little bit off on that. Where do you want to bring us back to? So how did you, how did your sons actually do this practically? What steps did you take as a father? I know you starting with a vision, but then practically to make this happen, because when your 23 year old son bought a house, this is the age at which is normal, normal advice in our society is that that's the age that, that your son would be graduating from college and would have maybe $30,000 of student loan debt getting ready to start his career.

So what practically did you do differently such that three of your kids so far have been able to buy their houses debt-free? Yeah, well, it really is. We desire to prepare them. It's a journey. It's a process. And I mentioned with Joseph how when he was 10, he started programming, learning, learning programming.

Nathan, when he was probably, oh, certainly early teens is when their granddad was teaching. So it was asked what I thought about it. He was willing to teach them. It was a Radio Shack course on DOS. And so those, those two little guys, Christopher and Nathan would go trucking over to granddad's house.

I think it might've been once a week and they would go through DOS and learn. And so, and that was kind of the beginning. So then over time, it's about looking for needs and filling them and what we can learn in the process. So then eventually Terry and I in the early nineties were asked to lead a homeschool group here in town.

So your kids, your kids are all homeschooled? Yes. So we, we agreed to do that. We had a newsletter. So we said to Nathan, Hey, would you be the, call it the editor? You know, we would write this stuff, but would you, would you put it in a newsletter for us?

And so he, he jumped on again. It's, it's the exercising of then skills and abilities. And, and, and in that process and back then is when WordPerfect was, was you know, WordPerfect and Word, but WordPerfect was what we were using and, and he would get on a message board and when he'd have questions on formatting or different things.

And, and so he over time he developed quite the reputation. I mean, and they, over time people started asking him questions and eventually then they, and WordPerfect invited him to be what's called a SysOp that he would be official part of it and answering questions. And, and that was a pretty big deal to this, this guy.

And he wasn't that old at that point, I'm guessing somewhere 15, 16, and maybe even up to 17 through some of those years. And there were some perks, there was no pay, but it was perks. And, and, and so eventually though he, you know, so he's learning, he's, he's being challenged, he's growing and, and getting more technical.

So then finally there was just some, it just was a time that we thought for him to stop and he, he agreed to stop that. But he had envisioned a career in computers. Well, about that time his sister saw a job opening downtown at a computer store that taught computer classes to, to the army officers from the, from the fort here.

And, and so he didn't have a driver's license. I drove him down there, but he walked in there with a letter of recommendation on WordPerfect letterhead about his abilities to, in, in, in WordPerfect. And so here's this, the, the owner there who needs somebody to instruct. And he looks at Nathan who's partly shaving and, and he needs somebody.

And then he looks at this letter again and finally says, okay, let's go for it. So at that point he, he started making, that was 25 an hour. So that was still a few years ago. He was making 25 an hour and I'm a electrical engineer. And frankly, when I, when I stopped or quit working in corporate America in '97, that's roughly what I was making.

So here my son in his first kind of a job like that is, is making equivalent to what I was making per hour. It's pretty amazing. It, what's clear to me though, from your story is that one of the reasons why one of the themes and one of the tools that you were able to employ in order to accomplish this as a father was that your children had a broader focus to their education than simply academics.

And there was a focus on academic skills, yes, but also vocational skills and developing skills at the market values. And I am really concerned about our broader culture because it seems to me that we extend childhood from zero to essentially at this stage is 20, 25 years old. And I had a remarkable experience in a previous company of working with a young man who had just gotten out of college and he was, he came from a very wealthy family and he never, he never wanted for anything, but he had just gotten out of college and for the first time in his life, he was working a job and was working a, it was his first job and he was 20 in his mid-20s.

Now, thankfully he wasn't existing under the pressure of student loan payments or anything like that because his parents had paid for that for him. But I get, I'm so, I'm concerned that the average person graduating from mainstream government schooling doesn't have any ability to go and do that. But yet we, that, that your son, like you said, how old was he when he was earning $25 an hour?

Oh, he was, he was 17, almost 18. Right. And this is the world that we live in. And, but yet we've got to help children to develop those vocational skills. And it's just simply not being done in mainstream culture. It's a real concern of mine. See, that's why, Titus too, primarily it does practical kinds of things for the ladies scheduling because it's practical, it's applying her time, it's making the best of her time.

When we, we have, we just did a communication book. Communication is essential in every, in every aspect of life. It doesn't matter what you're going to do, man, woman, you know, I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't matter. And so, that, even the ability to communicate is just absolutely so, so lacking today.

People carry on a conversation. They can, might be able to talk, but to be able to, to dialogue and, and learn. I mean, so we've, we've scratched the surface, for example, with you, Joshua, I have, I would just, you know, I'd have a blast getting to dig a little deeper inside that head, frankly.

And I just, I just, I just love that kind of thing. And what, you know, what can I learn from this guy? And communication is what, and what enables us to do these things. And so, I mean, even when I graduated, I was a double-A, graduated from a reasonable school, went to work for Rockwell.

And I remember the first time I had to write up a business letter. I was, I remember just, I was, I was at a total loss. I just didn't have to, to have to do it. Whereas our guys, and please understand, I'm not bragging, but I'm using them as an example.

The skills that our guys have developed, I list a few of them in the book, and not just the boys, the girls, they are so strong in the skills they have. And, and so, and I can tell you stories about other, other young men and young women, you know, that have these kinds of skills.

And that's what it's about. If you put aside the entertainment, which is going to cost you a fortune, you know, that's going to bleed you dry. You put aside the entertainment and make learning, well, let's use the word fun, make learning fun. It's, it's limitless what you can do with young people.

And, and that's what really is the preparation for life. Your jobs, people are looking for their jobs to, to be their security. Well, again, HP's cutting 55,000 possibly jobs. People just become a cog, even if you're an engineer, you're, you're whatever, whatever you go to school for, you just become a cog.

And, and then it becomes the business's financial responsibility to find who can do this job for the least amount of money, and therefore the greatest profit for the company and its shareholders. So, I think kids have to be, and adults as well, we need to be, we need to be robust.

We need to be versatile, flexible, and, and constantly learning. Right. It's a, we have such a major opportunity. And especially when guiding young people, we have such an amazing world that we live in, where there's more access to the market. Like you said, I mean, a 12 year old today can go on fiverr.com and hire their services out as a, or go to 99designs.com and compete exactly as effectively as a graphic designer, as somebody who is, you know, 42 years old and has been designing for 10 years.

It's all about skill. It's all about the application of skill. And I love, I mean, the stories in your book are plentiful, just illustrating to me the benefit that can come with home education as being an opportunity to train. And I want to give the math. So, because I thought this was really remarkable when I actually sat down and did it.

And I was just thinking, okay, it sounds so impossible to be able to save. And your second son, I think his name was Christopher, who had paid basically $200,000 for the house. And I thought, well, how much would it take to save $200,000 for a house? And then I thought back and I thought of the work that I did over the years and the money that I squandered as a boy.

And so, I think I started working, well, I don't remember when I wasn't working jobs, but from the age of, I was educated at home through seventh grade and then I went to a private school from seventh through twelfth grade. So, I had to work around the normal school calendar, which was an advantage that your children had over me.

But I still, I think I earned about, probably about $5,000 a year until I graduated from high school. And then I earned probably, while I was going to college, I probably earned $20,000 to $40,000 each year just doing just average normal work. Until my final year of college, when I raised my income up to about $40,000 my final year of college.

So, I thought back and I did the math on it and I said, okay, $200,000. Let's say that if I had been able to cut out a lot of the entertainment and the foolish things that I spent a lot of my money on and the lifestyle, and especially if I'd cut out the education costs, my college education costs were $20,000 a year.

And I paid probably half of that by my best guess without having detailed numbers. The other half was covered by scholarships. If I hadn't, and I live in a world where I don't, the degree that I have, the only thing that it opened up to me was that in order to get my certified financial planner designation, they do require a four-year college university degree.

But looking back, knowing what I now know, I could have taken the degree for, I could have taken the degree, I could have done that for $5,000, knowing what I know now, instead of $80,000. And so I look at it and I say, if I'd saved $10,000 each year from, say, from 18 through 22, that'd be $40,000.

And then if I'd saved $15,000 a year just towards the house cost, then there I've got, I'm getting a lot closer. And I did the math and I realized how, in many ways, the story of what your sons did should be normal. That should, in the sense that it's not, they really, as you said in the preface, I'm sure they're great young men, but there's nothing special about them in terms of, it's just a different path.

Yes. And so I think about this with my son and I think, wow, what if we switch these ages around and we shorten up and take care of the academic stuff at an earlier age and then add in the vocational stuff much earlier? And what an amazing future. Frankly, I'm not so sure that the powers that be would be very happy if we had many people doing that, because all of a sudden, we'd have a society of free men and women again who weren't enslaved to the tax-paying system.

You know, but listen, Joshua, friend, you got it. I mean, you really have. It's nothing abnormal. It's just the doors that it opens. And when people realize what young people are capable of and not incapable of, it just changes the whole frame of mind that, well, for example, you're business-oriented.

You've probably seen a ton of articles, I've seen them, that all say, you got to work your passion, work your passion. You got to be able to do what you love. I mean, really, it sounds good. I mean, so you got all these guys that love hunting and fishing, and they're thinking, wow, you know, yeah, why am I working hard and sweating like this?

I need to do the other. But now consider, and this is what really Christ would say, but now consider the concept of, maybe I should love what I do. Think about your wife. Do you think every aspect of taking care of your son, she absolutely just, I mean, you know, he just got sick and without getting graphic here or there, you know, and she is just absolutely thrilled to go take care of those needs.

Not a chance. Yes, yes. Cleaning the bathroom, or you know, you maybe, if you split that, it's the same thing. It's, life is not going to be to where you absolutely just love everything you do, but how much better to train our sons and our daughters to love what they do.

Right. And what's funny is, what I laugh at, what I notice, let me not say laugh at, I notice oftentimes that what's old is new and what's new is old. There's a book, I forget the title of it, but this guy got very famous, but young man, very famous by, I'm trying, I can't come up with the name of it.

He got very famous writing this book that basically doing your passion is wrong. And that the whole advice of like, go do what you're passionate about is baloney. This is a very popular book. And I played an excerpt of a speech he gave on my show. And his whole point was, it said, you can do two things.

You can either do the work that you love, or you can love the work that you're doing and do it so well. And that's what makes room for you to do what you love. And I thought to myself, every 85 year old preacher must be cringing in his seat of the fact that he's, they've been preaching this for 50 years.

And now it's very hip and popular as long as a cultural society. It's a best-selling book. The guy's all over the press saying, put your heart into your work. So essentially, as I would sum up, and I don't want to spoil the book. I want people to buy it and hear your whole idea.

But basically the way that you did this with your sons, as I took away the formula, was to focus on building academic ability and then also concurrent with that, after laying a basic foundation of academic ability, then building in vocational skills and then dedicating time and resources toward exercising those vocational skills so that at a young age, your sons were able to make money and even a substantial amount of money compared to many others by developing skills.

And so you invested in them by providing the equipment for that. Then encouraging and permitting the time where instead of needing to spend eight or nine hours or 10 hours a day locked up in a school doing busy work, they were able to spend maybe four hours a day doing academic work and another four or five hours a day doing earning work.

And then by building in an ability for entrepreneurship, all of your children seemed to have their own business and their own independent form of livelihood, which obviated the need to go to university, which cut out the cost of university, and then allowed them to continue saving money towards their goals.

And then when you put that formula together, it's relatively simple, right? You know, listen, I'll tell you now I know why you're the guy on that end of the mic, because what a great summary, truly. You encapsulated it very nicely. And so good job on that. By the way, I had forgotten, I would also encourage people that also like a little bit of taste of this.

At Titus2.com, there's a newsletter, it's called Seriously Dads. And they're very short, but they're designed to be very challenging, little emails. And so that might be, you know, it's all going to be stuff along this line. So it isn't going to be fun and games, no jokes. But may we be men and challenge each other towards that.

And may we raise sons to be men, not just big boys. So that's the thrust of what we're about. I'd like to close just with, I think, two final questions. And so throughout this conversation, and even in the title of your book, and even in the statement that you just said, you have talked about sons, raising sons.

And in your book, it says buying a debt-free house, equipping your son. So there's a reason why you have son in the title of your books. Is there a difference between how you encourage and raise your sons and their financial path versus your daughters? And if so, what did you do differently and why?

Okay. Well, we'll see if you—that's a mouthful, Joshua. I told you it wouldn't be an easy interview. Oh, it's great. No, no, you may have to bring me back on track, okay, just to remind you of that. But for example, the daughters, I mean, because as Christians, the typical role is, yes, the man is the provider.

And so that is—and that's the primary audience is going to be Christians. That's what they're going to relate to and understand. And in the very beginning of the book, we say, "And oh, by the way, daughters are going to benefit from this as well." And so it just depends.

Each one has to choose what they're—and all of our, really, Mary just turned 18. And so all of our, quote, "children" are adults. And we don't dictate to them. They're making choices. So for example, on the daughter side, and I could—oh, I would just love to tell you even just some of the stuff about our daughters.

I mean, certainly, of course, there's the typical, I mean, they all love to—they love to sew and certainly cook. But Sarah, for example, 10 years ago, we came to her and said, "You know, Sarah, the children's books that we see out there, well, we don't see a lot of positive books out there.

Usually—well, here's an example. Terry, for example, Terry one day noticed—you know what a spitwad is. She noticed some spitwads on the walls. And—but she knew what they were, but where in the world do these things come from?" And so she asked the children, "Children, what—where did this come from?

What is this up here?" Well, it turns out it was some children's classic, kind of classic children's book that had this stuff in it. And so they were learning what we would consider bad examples, bad behavior out of the children's books. And so—and that's very customary for them. And so we said to Sarah 10 years ago, "Honey, why don't you write children's books but that don't have negative in them, that actually are positive peer examples and encourage children?" Because the written word is extremely powerful and especially for young children.

I'm telling you, you know, your little guy, when he's three years old, if you started reading the Moody books to him, first off, you would find he'd absolutely love them. And second thing, it's going to be encouraging him to love his parents. And by that time, if they're siblings, to love his siblings.

I mean, it's this host—to love the Lord, there's host of positive things as opposed to negative examples. So anyway, she's been writing ghosts for 10 years. She just came out with her, really, I guess, ninth and 10th—well, the 10th would have been the Christmas book. But she's been doing that.

So she's an accomplished author. And those books go around the world. Children are saved through them. Moms and dads actually tell us how much they love these books. So I mean, you talk about power and influence in a positive way. Because by the way, the same thing, the children in the example, they work, they have their own little home businesses.

And it's all the things that we're talking about here, those are modeled with the children. So that's Sarah. But in that process, she has been—now, if this is going too long, you tell me. Sarah has been the manager of Titus 2 since, call it 2000, roughly, since back in 2000.

So she is one sharp lady when it comes to managing a business, whether it be bookkeeping, tax laws, through the different states, an absolute phenomena when it comes to organization, incredible at communication, her skills, Adobe Photoshop. It used to be Quark, and now it's InDesign. And so she used to know QuarkSort.

So you see I'm giving you, these are all professional-level skills that she has. And then now Anna, who's the next in line, and Anna's probably 22, I'm guessing, somewhere in there. So Anna now, she has a lot of skills when it comes to—she does e-books and also the book layout now.

So she has taken over InDesign. And that's been a lot of—I guess she's also been working with some photography and some other—but those are primarily for Anna. And also, all the five younger ones are all very accomplished musicians, and that was all self-taught. So Anna has spent a lot of time on music.

And then finally, Mary now, but she's just graduated, homeschooled, graduating now. And we're finding she's an incredible artist. So we are fueling that. And she just did the art, the drawing in Sarah's most recent book. So we're always looking, how can we expand their abilities and challenge them? In our home, if I ask you to do something, and I mean, you know, nicely, if I ask you to do something, you go, "Well, I don't know how to do that." Then the answer is, "That's fine.

We'll just give you a little longer to do it." And that's life. That's life. Yeah. To me, this is—you're hitting on one of my hot buttons. You talked a little bit in—I think it was your Buying a House Debt Free book—about autodidactism. And in the world we live—being an autodidact, a self-taught learner, and the world in which we live, we live in such an amazing time.

I mean, let's see, in the last couple of weeks, I learned how to—well, right now I'm learning piano. I found some YouTube courses. So I take the iPad and I toss it on the piano and I print off the stuff online. And I watch these piano lessons on YouTube and I watch the instructor.

And there's all the lessons that I need. I found a kid, a TED Talk one time of this kid in, I think it was Pakistan, somewhere in that region of the world. Very poor, but he taught himself something like 15 instruments in that scenario. I've taught myself—I mean, the world of learning that we live in—I taught myself how to cut my wife's hair.

So I've been doing that. And I've been learning how to use a computer program. The first thing I do is like, "I don't know how to use this program." I go to YouTube and type it in and say, "Let me learn how to do it." And this opens up.

It's hearkening. So what happens is there's this cultural war. I see this cultural war that happens in popular culture. And one of the major things that people try to do is divide it along gender lines. And to me, at least my vision, that's a whole involved conversation, which is probably appropriate in another forum.

But to me, I look at it and I say, "I don't care that much. I mean, genders matter. Men are not women and women are not men." That doesn't mean that somehow women are destined to be stuck in the house as the cultural battle goes, barefoot and pregnant, and then the man is going to go off and conquer the world.

I desire to be at home and present with my family. And that's no different for my wife versus me. There is a difference in responsibility. And the key is that both of us need to be freed and built up with those skills and with those abilities. And that I think a wise parent should be looking to equip their children with skills and with abilities.

And those skills and abilities go beyond just academic skills. I want to close with, I'm going to read an excerpt from a book here. And I've been wanting to share just this. It's about a page and a half on the show. And I'll take the liberty of doing it now and then give you an opportunity to respond.

Because this is right up your alley. But this is just a page and a half from John Taylor Gatto's book called An Underground History of American Education. And this is in a section entitled Extending Childhood. And to me, I think this is important information that people need to know.

And it says, and I'm leaving out just a few sentences in it to keep it concise. So there are, I am skipping one, a couple of sentences here and there. "From the beginning," and this is John Taylor Gatto writing, "From the beginning, there was a purpose behind forced schooling.

Purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, this grand purpose was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationaling itself was thought to need. That and what a strong centralized political state needed too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the 20th century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance.

In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure. "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific, difficult, manual tasks." By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of a group referred to in the press of that day as "The Education Trust." The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association.

"The chief end," wrote Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist in 1918, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination." At first, the primary target was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be extinguished, at least among the common population, the immense capital investments that mass production industry required for equipment weren't conceivably justifiable.

Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing for the favor of management, not as Franklin or Edison had once regarded themselves as self-determined free agents. Only by a massive psychological campaign could the menace of overproduction in America be contained. That's what important men and academics called it, the menace of overproduction.

The ability of Americans to think as independent producers had to be curtailed. Certain writings of Alexander Inglis carried a hint of schooling's role in this ultimately successful project to curb the tendency of little people to compete with big companies. From 1880 to 1930, overproduction became a controlling metaphor among the managerial classes, and this idea would have a profound influence on the development of mass schooling.

I know how difficult it is for most of us who mow our lawns and walk our dogs to comprehend that long-range social engineering even exists, let alone that it began to dominate compulsion schooling nearly a century ago. Yet the 1934 edition of Elwood P. Cumberley's Public Education in the United States is explicit about what happened and why.

As Cumberley puts it, "In this, it has come to be desirable that children should not engage in productive labor. On the contrary, all recent thinking is opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of organized labor and the interests of the nation have set against child labor." The statement occurs in a section of Public Education called, "A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence," in which Cumberley explains that, "The coming of the factory system has made extended childhood necessary by depriving children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave.

With the breakdown of home and village industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its extreme division of labor and the all-conquering march of machinery, an army of workers has arisen," said Cumberley, "who know nothing." Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers.

Sentimentality could not be allowed to stand in the way of progress. According to Cumberley, with "much ridicule from the public press," the old book subject curriculum was set aside, replaced by a change in purpose and "a new psychology of instruction which came to us from abroad." That last mysterious reference to a new psychology is to practices of dumbed-down schooling common to England, Germany, and France, the three major world coal powers, other than the United States, each of which had already converted its common population into an industrial proletariat.

Arthur Calhoun's 1919 "Social History of the Family" notified the nation's academics what was happening. Calhoun declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true. The child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts." He offered a significant forecast that in time we could expect to see public education "designed to check the mating of the unfit." And I'll stop there because it's a long, lengthy quote, but it's interesting when you get into these certain things.

I think we have a moral responsibility in an age and time in which it's easier than ever to train children to be productive, autonomous, self-independent, functioning members of society with skills to provide for the needs of their life and the skills of learning the needs of their life. I think it's utterly criminal how we've removed that foundation of practical education from children.

And if you look at the net result in our society and you look at the rising wage gap, the rising wage gap for men, the rising wage gap for women, the difference between the wages at the lower end and the wages at the top end, and you look at it, you can come to many different conclusions.

But I often come to the conclusion that, interesting, labor is consistently getting cheaper. Why is labor consistently getting cheaper? And I keep looking to find the statistics on this. I've read, but I haven't been able to prove it to my satisfaction. Even in the course of gender roles, it gets very, very sticky.

I try to read various people that talk about gender issues, and it's a big conversation that often with a show like mine gets you into trouble. But one of the things that I often wonder, do you not notice the fact that historically, that a man could support his family with his wage, and when you double the workforce, you have the salaries.

And that's essentially what's happened in our culture, is if you double the workforce, you have the salaries. And I've worked in financial planning with so many families who are just so struggling and frustrating to struggle. They're frustrated with how do they improve their situation. And as I work with them to go through the situation, oftentimes just some very simple changes can make a dramatic difference.

But we have the opportunity in starting, and by teaching skills, and pursuing another path, and building vocational skills that are needed and valued in the market. I mean, as your own story shows, and I pray that you continue to have continued success, and that you can maintain a clean testimony, and that because you can lay out for those of us who are younger and look at the problems of the world and say, "How do these problems get solved?" I think that what you've done is an important aspect of solving those problems.

I give you the last word. Listen, I've had a delightful time. I mean, truly, I think any number of these different areas, we could just kind of keep going on. I mean, because they're fascinating. We lose sight, I think people lose sight that the educational system, certainly once you get into brick and mortar colleges, it's a business.

And it's about turning out product. And people have to look at all the factors that are going on versus just, "I've got to prepare my children." And it doesn't mean just because everybody else does it, it doesn't mean that that is the best way today. And I'll stop because I really, I just feel so strongly about it.

We could really, this whole thing siloing, you come out of the schools and you're only trained in a little narrow fields versus being like you're doing, flexible, learning, expanding. This is what we model it first as parents, and then we work with our children and teach them as well.

Steve, I thank you for making the time to come on the show today. I've really enjoyed it. And so your website is titustothenumeral2.com. And how many books have you written at this point? Any idea? I think Terry and I, we've probably got 10 and Sarah maybe is close to about 10 as well.

So that's great. And we have that for men seriously. It's for really guys that are serious, serious about what their job as dads is. And they can sign up there as well. Right. I've read, let's see, I think I've read three of your books. I've read Buying a House Debt Free and Raising Sons to Provide for a Single Income Household.

And then also your book, Redeeming the Time. And I have on my desk here, the book, Making Great Conversationalists, which is, I could do interviews on all of those subjects. I think that they're incredibly, incredibly valuable. So titustwo.com. And I would encourage people if you want to get the full story on your process, on the path that you've done, Buying a House Debt Free is a great book.

And I will look forward to the update after all of your children are older. I'll look forward to hearing when they're all in their thirties and forties, hopefully they look back and at that point in time, hopefully they'll be proud of what you raised them. And then we'll find if there's the issue, then that'll come out.

But I love to hear, I would love to talk with them and hear their stories. It would just be so interesting to me. Steve, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. Pretty inspiring, eh? I told you it would be cool. It's such a cool story.

It's so neat to hear people who have accomplished things. I'm still not sure. I really struggle with the idea of just holding the vision of the house being the ideal, but I certainly understand why Steve does that. I struggle with that a little bit personally, but I love the tangibility of that or the tangible nature of that as a goal for a young person, of holding that as a specific, tangible goal.

You'll have to think about that and you'll have to decide how or what you want to apply from that. But I really encourage you, get Steve's book and read it. It's well worth reading. He does a really good job in his book of presenting this as a comprehensive plan.

And frankly, it's pretty simple. Hold a vision before your child, hold a vision of what they can accomplish, and then help them build up a high amount of income through building job skills, through building work skills, through exposure, through creating businesses of their own. Hold that vision of income and then help them to keep their expenses low and then build the character in them that they can do it with a vision where instead of saying, "Oh, I just can't spend any money and I got to go out and get out from under my parents' household and go out and blow a bunch of money," hold the vision of why you're doing and how you're helping.

So that's essentially what the topic is. Also, the book is well worth getting just for the stories at the beginning of each chapter. There are a total of 15 chapters in the book. And at the beginning of each chapter, Steve tells a different story of a different young man and his story towards buying a house.

And so I hope you enjoy that. It's really a great book. He does a good job of laying it out in a comprehensive way and it's totally integrated. It's really worth reading, really inspiring. And I'm definitely thinking a lot about that and how to hold that vision before my son.

I hope you check it out. Real quick before I hit the music, I just want to give you a quick preview of what's going to be coming over the next couple of weeks. Tomorrow on the show, I plan to record and release the show that I had planned on Gratitude and Gratitude and Optimism.

I think it'll be a great show. And so I plan to do that tomorrow. And then on Friday, I'll be doing the Friday Q&A. I've got lots of questions and I love getting those questions. I still will need more voicemail questions. So if you want to call in those questions on the voicemail line, just go to the website at radicalpersonalfinance.com, hit the Leave Me a Voicemail button.

You can do it right on your phone, right from the road. I'll hopefully try to do it when it's quiet. That'll help to play it on the show. But you can do it right from your phone or from your computer and leave me the voicemail. And I do have a number of email questions as well.

So I'll be doing that on Friday. Next week, I've recorded a bunch of interviews. I've got some really great interviews lined up. I've got an interview with Doug Nordman, who is, we're going to talk about the history of early retirement. He's known as Nords all over the internet and the early retirement forum.

That's a great interview. I've got an interview recorded with Jeff, who writes at the Sustainable Life, talks about the integration of sustainability and green living and early retirement, personal finance. I've recorded an interview with a man named Jonathan, and he has a site called 10K to Talent, where he talks about how to help your son or daughter develop their talent and understand how they can apply their talent in a way that the market would recognize.

It's a really great interview. I've recorded an interview with Scott Young, who is the guy who did the MIT challenge, where he put himself through the MIT computer science curriculum in about a year. That's a really great one, where we talk about college. We talk about college and other ideas surrounding how to learn more easily.

I also have an interview with a man named Dr. Vern Poythress, who is a professor. He talks about some things that he has helped with children and helping his children, helping his two sons matriculate to manhood at the age of 12. We had an interesting discussion around that and how to help that.

I may play all five of those interviews next week. My concern is I've wound up somehow recording a bunch of interviews on family, kids, all this stuff. This show is not the raising kids show. There have been several interviews with Christians and a lot on religious faith. That's also not the point of this show.

I need a week or two. I may play all these back to back next week, just so that I can get some time. I've got to get some stuff squared away on the website and get things improved. It is in rough shape. I need to really amp up the professionalism.

I need to dedicate some time to that. I may next week play all five of those shows and do interviews. I may not, just because I need to vary the content. I don't want this to just all be... This is not the Christian personal finance show, which is taking me to the next thing.

I do have a bunch of more interviews scheduled this week on some other topics. I found a couple of Canadian financial advisors that I've got interviews scheduled with, which will be good. I've got some interviews scheduled with a young lady who runs a personal finance blog for teens. I've also had an interview scheduled with a man named Ben Falk, who is a permaculture designer and really a neat guy focused on sustainable development.

It's just a really, really cool guy. He does some really neat work up in New Hampshire, Vermont. I can't remember which state. I've got a bunch of cool interviews. I need to do some more technical interviews. I've got an interview lined up with Paul Merriman, who is a financial advisor, a former financial advisor, has a neat financial planning website.

He's written a bunch of books to help many of you guys. I'm doing plenty of technical content, but I just needed some time. What I could really use some help with, I've got a bunch of topics on my list of potential topics that I'm going to be doing shows on.

I also have a bunch of shows that I want to interview people on, things that I'm not expert enough with. I've had several recommendations from some of you people with Bitcoin guests, Canadian guests, which is something. I would love to talk with some people about ethnic differences in financial planning.

If any of you know anybody, I'm interested in different cultures' approaches to financial planning. Asian cultures, I would like to do a show on the Haitian and Latino practice. I don't know what it's called in Spanish. In Creole, it's called a soul, where they do this idea where everyone chips in.

Every month, everyone puts in 100 bucks, and then each or every week, and then each week, it goes to a different person. That allows them to accumulate larger amounts of money. I'd love to do an interview on that. If you know much about that topic or if you know someone, could you get in touch with me?

Email me, Joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I'd love to do learn some about different religious approaches to money. I'm familiar with Christian theology on money, and I'm a little bit familiar with some Jewish teachings on money. I've talked with a few Jewish rabbis, but I'd love to bring somebody on the show who would talk about that and also Islam.

I know there are Islam teachings and Islamic law about money. I'd love to learn about that. I'd also love to learn if there are other religions that have. I don't know if Hinduism or Buddhism have teachings about money. If any of you are experts in that or if any of you know anybody who you think would be an interesting guest on that topic, I'd love to learn about that.

That would probably help to balance the content out a little bit on this show, which I think would be interesting. I'm just interested in those topics. I don't know anything about them. If any of you are on those topics, I would love to hear from you with suggestions. If you have other show suggestions, other show guests, I've got a couple of guests that I'm working on on some of the technical things.

I'm going to do a show on the fiduciary standard versus the suitability standard. I ripped Tony Robbins apart on that, but I owe you guys an entire show so you understand that concept and that conflict that exists in the financial planning business to explain it clearly. It's not fair of me just to tear Tony apart, but I need to actually provide the education on that topic.

I'm working with an attorney on that. I've got plenty more technical financial planning shows coming. I just wanted to give you a heads up on what's going to come, but I need to get some time. I'm going to be applying a bunch of interviews over the next couple of weeks so that I can get some stuff squared away on the site.

Be thrilled. For those of you who aren't members, I'd love for you to consider joining the membership site. Major focus for me also is to enhance that. I've got an idea. I'm not going to take any more time today to go over, but I've been working hard on that to add some more content there.

I'm going to leave it there, but I've been working hard on developing some content there. I had some conversations today with a First Perspective sponsor that I think will be a sponsor I can feel comfortable endorsing on the subject that I get more questions from you guys than anything else about how do I find a great financial planner and a great financial advisor.

I've been trying to solve that question for you, and I think I may have it. I've got to work out some details with them still, but I'll be bringing that to you hopefully over the next couple of weeks as well. Exciting times on the show. I've been enjoying it.

I hope you guys are too. Working hard to make this great. I love your feedback. I love your suggestions. Feel free. Comment on the show. Make sure you can email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I love those. Love the reviews as well. I'm going to read one review as we go out here from iTunes.

This review comes from CQ and CQ says, "Highly recommended. Most inspirational. I love this podcast. This is a perfect example of why podcasting is such a great tool to help people improve themselves through a wide variety of available subjects. It's obvious that Joshua is passionate about teaching personal finance and helping his listeners get a handle on their finances.

If you are here because you are working your way out of debt, trying to reduce your spending, don't know how to invest or plan for college or home or retirement, or you just want to simplify your life, Joshua has already built a huge resource. He doesn't just cover the highlights, leaving you unable to apply those ideas to your own situation.

He gives plenty of examples and when helpful, breaks out the calculator so you can follow along. Just subscribe and start." That's awesome. I thank you. Makes me feel so good reading that because it's getting across. It makes me feel like I'm doing okay and getting better. So thank you for those reviews.

I'd be thrilled if you haven't left a review. I'd be thrilled if you would leave a review. Don't do it for any other reason than me. I love to get them. They pop up on my phone and they make my morning. They usually come in around 5 a.m. or I wake up pretty early and I take a look at my phone and boom, there's a review.

It's awesome and I get really excited. So if you value the show, leave me a review on iTunes or on Stitcher. That also does clearly help the show, helps other people feel good about it, helps with some of the social proof and it means a lot. So you can do it right from your phone.

You can do it right from the computer. It's easy to do but I value those and I thank each of you who has left a review. Back with you tomorrow. Talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to today's show. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education and financial enlightenment.

Your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. This show is not and is not intended to be any form of financial advice. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent and trustworthy and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals and provide specific answers to your questions.

Hold them accountable for your results. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show but I'm one person and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please come by the show page and comment so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.

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