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Have you started thinking about them? Today I'm going to share with you how you can learn to become your own financial planner and how you can build a rock-solid financial plan that will allow you to hit or at least make significant progress toward all of your financial goals this coming year.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheet and I'm your host. Today is Wednesday, December 10, 2014. We're coming up on a new year and now is the time to start thinking about your financial plan. Today I'm going to tell you how to do it, but no boring useful pack stuff or 10 tips you can use to implement.

Rather a coherent framework that you can use this next year. Right about now you're going to start to see, if you haven't seen already, a bunch of articles coming through all of the various media sources that you consume. They'll be coming up on your Facebook news feed. They'll pop up on your Google homepage.

Does anybody use those anymore? They'll pop up on Yahoo Finance and maybe your financial planner, your accountant might send you a link. Nine-year-end or 10-year-end planning ideas or 14 things you can do to save on taxes this year. Those things are good. There's nothing necessarily wrong with them, but more than anything else, they're primarily intended to essentially harvest your click on the internet and to build page views.

When I look at them, most of them are really not useful for the average person. We're going to have a discussion of tax loss harvesting. Tax loss harvesting is utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of people who A, have no money, B, have no investments, and C, if they do have money or investments, it's in a tax qualified account where tax loss harvesting is a waste of time.

There's just no point in that, but it's what makes the news. People don't realize it's irrelevant. What I'm going to share with you today is something that's eminently relevant. I would encourage you. I think today's show will be a good show. If you're looking for something to send to somebody, I hope that today's show can be useful for you.

The end of the year, is it useful for you as a resource that you can send to somebody? The end of the year really is a good time to review finances. New Year's resolutions get a bad rap in our society. They've become somewhat cliche. I think they're very useful as far as a plan for setting out what you're going to accomplish in the coming calendar year.

I think they're very useful, but there's such a back and forth about New Year's resolutions that many people are turned off of thinking about this, but thinking about New Year's resolutions. In financial planning, transitioning to a new year is a great time to focus on what your goals are and what your progress has been toward your financial objectives.

For most people, the average individual is using accounting lingo, would be what we call a cash basis entity. What that means is that the calendar year is your fiscal year. January 1 through December 31, that is your fiscal year. That's when all of your personal accounting is done for your federal income taxes and things like that.

Because of that, this is an important time of the year where you need to sit down and look at your planning and figure out, is there something that you need to do? There are a lot of detailed tax things and detailed little tricks and tips and things that you can implement.

I may do some shows on that as well. Today, I want to start with what's actually practical, what actually makes a difference. That's your overall framework for your personal financial plan. Success with financial planning has a few core guiding principles that you need to follow. To begin with, in order to successfully develop a plan, it's important to take full responsibility for, frankly, for your life and also, most especially, for your financial life.

See, the only people that plan are the people that take responsibility. If you don't start with saying, "I am responsible for my financial condition," you're never going to set out a plan. Start with that. If you haven't done that before, sit down and take responsibility. It doesn't mean you have to take blame if something unfortunate has happened.

It doesn't mean that you have to somehow take some kind of criticism that's not actually yours. Things happen. Situations develop. There are unfortunate circumstances that happen to all of us. We have to start with taking responsibility. That's what gives us the power to go on and build a plan.

Many people are overwhelmed by finances. I think it's okay to recognize, if that's you, if you feel overwhelmed, I think it's okay to recognize that. Many people feel inept, incompetent, unqualified, unskilled. Many people feel like they lack the knowledge, they lack the skill, they lack some sort of discipline.

We're not trained much in our society of how to think about finances. So it has to be something that, a transformation that we go through to where we learn those skills. But good financial planning, personal financial planning, is just a skill. It's just a skill that you learn. It's a skill and you need some tools and a thinking process, and then you apply that to your life.

That's what I'm going to share with you today. You can do it. It's really not that tough. But it does require a disciplined thinking process. And that's primarily what financial planning is. It's a thinking process. It's a systematized, disciplined way of thinking about the situations and decisions that you face.

Now, the good thing is you probably already have, if you're listening to a show like this, you probably already have the skills that you need to do this. But if it is overwhelming for you, you may need a little bit of encouragement to figure out how to apply those skills.

One of the big things that helps is to distance yourself from your own personal situation. I've worked as a professional financial planner for a number of years. And one of the advantages that I always have in working with clients is that I'm not emotionally involved with their situation. If you're working with somebody who's deeply in debt or who's going through a traumatic emotional experience, the death of a loved one, a divorce, loss of a business, bankruptcy, something like that, it's very challenging to help them through because they are so overwhelmed often by the emotional reality that they face.

But from my perspective, it's fairly simple. I don't have that emotional burden, so it's fairly simple. I think you can apply in your own life. If you don't have a good financial planner to help you, I think that you can apply the idea of doing something for someone else to your own life.

And pretend that you were hired to run a business unit. Pretend that an employer has hired you and said, "Here, I need you to fix this." Or pretend that you have a goal of, you know, you were hired to turn somebody else's health around. How would you approach that process?

I would commend to you with financial planning that if you're interested in making a difference in your life, you've got to actually really be interested. And you have to have a reason to do something. If you are interested, if you have a goal, you'll figure out the path of how to do it.

If you're not interested, if there's not a goal that you have, then no amount of list of tips or tricks or tools is going to be helpful to you. The best example to illustrate this that I have ever heard, it was an example given by Dave Ramsey. And I'm not sure if he still uses this example, but years ago, I proctored his Financial Peace University class for some friends.

And at that time, one of the initial ways that he opened his Financial Peace University course was with an example of a young person, a favorite nephew or niece or child that had a significant illness. And what he said was he said, "Pretend that, you know, picture in your mind the favorite young person that you know, maybe a young boy or girl, maybe seven years old, super cute, a little out of that baby stage.

Just picture someone very cute. Pretend that you just found out that you got bad news and this young man or woman has been diagnosed with a serious, fatal, guaranteed terminal illness. And they're going to die one year from today, unless somebody can afford the treatment to buy the treatment.

Because the good news is there is a treatment for the illness. And the treatment is very expensive. You can't borrow for it and it's not covered by insurance of any kind. You have to actually save money and pay for it." And I think the number he used at that time was $10,000.

And he said, "If you had to come up with $10,000 one year from today in order to save this boy or girl's life, and you had to save that money out of your budget, could you do it?" And I've used this scenario dozens of times with clients. I always adjust the numbers to try to be a number that's a little bit high, a little bit of a stretch.

So for some people it's $50,000, for some people it's five. But to make it meaningful, and every time I've asked it, as long as I've had the number within an appropriate range, and I've said, "Do you think that you could save this money?" The answer every time has been, "Yes, absolutely.

I could save that money." Now, nobody knows how they would save the money. Nobody knows what I work extra, what I get three jobs, what I start a business, what I sell my house, would I stop spending money, would I just live in my house like a hermit? I don't know.

Nobody knows how. The point is that you could figure out how if you had the clear goal. So I'm going to start with just giving you ideas of how to set out your financial goals. If you have clear and compelling financial goals that are your goals, not given to you by society, by your parents, or by your spouse, or by your friends, but that are your goals, then you can figure out a way to do it.

Dave Ramsey's example is brilliant from that perspective. You could figure it out. And I've seen this time and time and time again with people that have other goals, whether it's—one of the ones I see this the most often is someone says, "I want to go travel the world for a year or two." And this is not that tough of a goal to hit.

It's really not. It takes a little bit of focus, a little bit of saving, and a few life changes. But if you want to go travel the world for a year or two and take a sabbatical with your family and visit 10 or 15 or 20 countries, go do it.

It shouldn't take you more than a couple of years to plan for it and make it happen. And I've seen so many stories of people that said, "Well, I just decided to do it. And so I stopped spending money and I started saving money and I sold a bunch of stuff and I rearranged my life, and three years later, we left on our trip." Having a clear and compelling goal is the key.

I would encourage you to build your financial plan. Begin with some goal-setting exercises. Create a mental vision of what you'd like to have. You might already have one, or you might not. You might have one that is clear, or you might have one that's fairly vague. I think most people have a vague general idea of what their financial goals are, but they've never really clarified them.

So I'd encourage you to start with a step one of sitting down and trying to clarify what your personal goals are, what your personal vision is of things you would like to see and enjoy and appreciate and have in your life. There are no right or wrong answers in this scenario.

There's only your answers. If you've got a goal of a thing, great. Write it down. If you've got a goal of an experience you want to have, a bucket list you want to create, you want to check off, something that you want to do, a contribution you want to make, there's no right or wrong answer, but we can't figure out how to achieve something until we know what it is that we want to achieve.

We can't figure out how to accomplish an outcome until we know what the desired outcome is. December is a really good time to do this. If you can get away from your normal life, I've always found that to be helpful. So if you take some time off around the holidays, in the middle of the busy season, perhaps you can take a day, maybe two, maybe a week, and try to get away.

Even if you can take a couple of hours off, take an afternoon off from work. What I've often done is I like to go to a fancy hotel. I live in West Palm Beach, Florida, so I like to go to a fancy hotel on the water and sit out by the pool deck and have a drink and look at the ocean and write in my journal and do that for a couple hours and just get away.

That works for me. Some people will get away for overnight and they'll go somewhere. So if you wanted to go away with maybe you and your spouse and set up an overnight trip where you're going to go and you take your journals and you take some of the journaling activities and exercises I'm going to give you and you set some time apart sitting on the hotel balcony and looking out at a pretty scene and talking about your goals, I think it's worth the money to do that kind of thing.

But even if you just need to turn your cell phone off and sit down in your office and lock the door and put out your do not disturb sign, but sit down and make a time to figure out what your desired outcomes are, what your goals are, what your vision is for your financial life.

I would commend to you that this really should be on paper. Some people find it natural and easy to write and to journal. Some people find it difficult. It doesn't really matter in my mind whether this is just a list of bullet points or whether this is an 18-page essay.

But if you can get it on paper, that will really help. Another useful alternative, perhaps writing on paper doesn't come easily to you, make an audio recording. Pull out your phone, fire up the voice recorder application and make an audio recording of what your goals and your ideas and your visions are.

I'm going to give you some exercises, some prompting questions, or make a video. Some people are very, you know, a video recording of yourself talking it through. You can do this while you're driving down the road, easy to do. If you've never done this and you're a commuter, I'd recommend to you spend a couple of the commutes and just take some time and record this on your phone.

Some people are visual, so maybe you can draw a picture. You can, you know, there are people that make collages of boards of the things that they want, whatever those things are, images. You know, I've done that some here and there, but that doesn't really compel me very much.

I'm more of a verbal person. So for me, having the words written down and then hearing them and seeing them in my mind is easy. But maybe you're the type of person that's going to draw a picture, cut something out of a magazine. But write down anything that you think of that you'd like to have.

And don't be scared of that. This is not some frou-frou end of the year thing of what would you like to do this next year? It's just a guiding point. I'm going to get to some practicalities in a minute. Here are some useful ways, things that I have done that I have found useful.

And there are a few different scenarios. I would encourage you to start with the simpler ones and then move to the complex ones. And I've done all of these and I do all of these and I will continue to do all of these because each one of them will isolate something different in my thinking.

The reason that you do exercises like this is to get information out of your head and onto paper where you can look at it and you can think critically of it outside of your head where you're not trying to work through something in your head. That's the whole reason for this.

So here would be a couple of journaling prompts that I have found useful. And you can consider them and if any of them are useful, great. I'll write them down in the show notes so that you can print them and use them another time. So very simply, number one is start with 10 things you'd like to do in this next year.

10 goals that you have for the next year. So December is an easy time. Just write down 1 through 10 and write down 10 things you'd like to do this next year. It could be everything from go on vacation, buy a house, get a new car, save some money, etc.

So it could be as simple as that. One of the things that I've enjoyed doing is using as a prompt list a longer list with instead of just saying what are my 10 goals for the coming year, it's a good place to start, but I've enjoyed doing a what I want list.

I do this from time to time and I have my wife do it also separate from me and then we can compare them and I can see what does she want so I can make sure that I know and that she knows what I want and then we can work those things together and look for ways to accomplish this.

But what I call a what I want list is make a list of 30 things you want to do, make a list of 30 things you want to have, make a list of 30 things you want to be before you die. The number 30 I think is a good number.

With all of these, if you've ever studied the science of brainstorming or mindstorming, then you see that having a stretch is important. So 10 is fairly easy for most people, but 10 is a good place to start. 30 is great. I find that for me about the first 15 or 20 come pretty easily and the last 10 take me a long time to think through what do I want to be, do or have.

When you're doing these exercises, don't have any fear of commitment. Just because I write it down on a paper as something I want to be or do or have doesn't mean I'm committed to making it happen. Just an idea. You might do that list eight times and have something completely different on all of them.

It's just a way of mind prompt. Another set of questions that I think is useful is Dan Sullivan's questions. He's the founder of an organization called the Strategic Coach. These are useful questions. There's a series of four of them. The most important one is the first one. I've often used the first one in financial planning engagements with clients, but the other three are helpful as you're figuring out how to coach yourself.

But question number one is, if we were meeting three years from today, what has to have happened during that three-year period for you to feel happy about your progress, personally, professionally, financially, and any other category you want to think about? Then the three follow-up questions are these. What are the biggest dangers you'll have to face and deal with in order to achieve that progress?

What are the biggest opportunities that you have that you would need to focus on and capture to achieve those things? What strengths will you need to reinforce and maximize? What skills and resources will you need to develop that you don't currently have in order to capture those opportunities? That one's useful.

It's more of a technical one. I commend that one to you. One of my favorites is to do a visioning exercise of what my ideal day is. So essentially, just think through what would a perfect day look like for you and describe it with as much detail as possible.

Where are you? What do you do? Who are you with? What does your day look like? What are your surroundings? Things like that. I find that one useful. I like to do that one myself in an audio format. So try the voice recorder. Written is good, but I find writing to get in the way of that.

For me, it's easy to sit down and say, "When I wake up in the morning," and just kind of look around in my mind's eye and describe that. There's a really great one, lengthy one, in Jack Canfield's Success Principles book where he goes through an exercise, visioning exercise. It's fairly lengthy.

Look through the show notes. Look at the show notes on that one. I don't want to take the time now to read it. But essentially, you go through and think through what your financial life, think through your ideal job or your career, think through your free time, your recreation time.

What do all these things look like? I think this is super, super useful. Now, many people are scared by these things, by writing these things down. Here's what I see as the primary benefit of them. So that you can look at your thinking and see what themes there are.

When I do these lists, there are certain themes that are consistent. And then there are certain things that just kind of pop in and out. What I look for are the themes. What's similar between a list of 10, a list of 30, an ideal day exercise, and more of these complex scenarios?

I try to figure out what is consistent and look for the themes. That helps me to clarify what those themes are. It's not some kind of frou-frou thing of just simply saying, "Okay, I'm going to imagine these things and that's going to happen." I'm trying to figure out what's in my mind so that I can make a plan to accomplish it.

The key is to implementing these exercises, is to figure out what would need to be done in order to actually accomplish the goals. So if you have an idea, if you have a goal, however you're able to state it, whether that's something that you can state clearly or something that's more nebulous, then the next step is make a list of anything that you can think of that would help you towards that goal.

And then look at it and try to figure out which of the things on that list would make the biggest difference and what would be the quickest way to accomplish it and what order should those steps go through. Just by making the list, I think you can be really, really helped.

In doing this, I find the process of mind mapping to be very helpful. If you're unfamiliar with that, essentially it's where you, at the center of a piece of paper, there's some really great applications. There's free ones online. Just search "free mind mapping program" and you can use an online one where you write down a question or a goal or a thought.

And then you just start drawing out from that. You draw a spoke out, almost like a center of a wagon wheel. You draw at the center, "I want to be financially independent." Then you draw out a spoke from that and you write down whatever comes to your mind. I would write down something like, "What does financially independent mean?" Then I draw a circle around that and I draw a spoke from that.

Then I would write the ability to wake up every morning at whatever time I want to wake up, to have $5,000 a month of income that's available for me to spend every month without my needing to work at a job, whatever that would mean to you. You just go through that process and you draw circles and bubbles and you just write out whatever comes to mind.

I find that to be really useful in my way of thinking. I commend it to you if you've never tried it. But the key is making it through the list and thinking it through. And this is not a one-time process. This is an ongoing process. One of the key steps, I think, is to try to think through what would be the smartest way to accomplish goals and question everything.

For example, this is a personal finance podcast. So let's talk about financial independence. There can be many ways for you to achieve what you would consider to be financial independence. Perhaps financial independence to you means the ability to retire down to Costa Rica so that you can surf on the Pacific Ocean every morning and so you can drink an Imperial beer every night with your buddies.

Imperial is the national beer brand of Costa Rica. So maybe that's your vision. Well, there could be a couple different ways to do that. Maybe you need to do that by saving a million dollars. And if you can save a million dollars, then that'll give you enough money every year where it'll come off and you'll get $30,000, $40,000 a year of income coming in and you can spend that and that gives you the ability to cover yourself.

But you know what? Another way of achieving that goal, you might just need $300 for a plane ticket down and enough to cover yourself at $20 to cover yourself for two nights in a hostel so that you can find a job as a bartender and then you can surf in the morning and drink every night.

Those are both two valid ways of hitting that goal and only you would know and be able to clarify which is important to me. For some people, they need the million bucks. For other people, they say, "I don't have time to work and save a million bucks. Let's do it now." Asking yourself the questions of how you can actually accomplish something and brainstorming, brainstorming, brainstorming, brainstorming, writing down, writing down, looking at the goals, looking at it, saying, "How am I actually going to do this?" is super valuable.

You might consider goals that you haven't considered. And especially if you can develop a comprehensive list of the things that are important to you, then you can figure out how can you do all of them. Let's continue with a theme of having two goals. Let's say that I have a goal of financial independence.

Now, I've defined – for me, my personal definition of financial independence, for me, financial independence is a portfolio of investments that don't require my active management in a company that provides enough income to provide my family with about $6,000 a month of excess cash flow. That's kind of to me where I think an ideal level of my personal definition of financial independence would be.

Well, in order to accomplish that, with round figures, I need somewhere just under $2 million in the bank in order to accomplish that. I would probably be comfortable with a lower amount, but that's my current working definition of financial independence. We'll see what happens as time goes on. Well, in order for me to accumulate a million and a half, $2 million, somewhere in that range in the bank, then I'm going to need to work and I'm going to need to save a lot of money.

So let's say that I have a goal of taking my family on a ski trip. Well, the question I would ask myself on paper is how can I make a plan that will allow me to do both of these things? This winter, I want to take a ski trip.

Pretend I don't actually want to go skiing this winter, but pretend that I want to take a ski trip with my family. Well, skiing is not cheap. I took my family to Whistler a few years ago. It was an awesome experience out in British Columbia, but it was not cheap.

So let's say that I ask myself, how can I accomplish and make significant progress toward both of these things? Well, if I know I need to accumulate a couple million bucks, and if I have a short timeline for that, I'm probably not going to be doing that with just a straight up corporate job making $50,000 a year.

That's not going to allow me to achieve my goals in a short enough time frame. So I'm probably going to be investing on the side in a private business. That's going to be my investment plan. So in that side business, I'm going to have expenses. So I'm going to choose to put all of my business expenses onto a credit card with a mileage rewards program.

That would allow me to take those miles and spend them tax-free on a ski trip without damaging my savings rate from my income. So now I've got multiple benefits. Let's assume that my ski trip is going to cost me all in a price tag of $10,000 just in the open market.

But let's say that I have a lot of business expenses rolling through on my credit card, and so I can do that on miles instead. I can trade in the miles for the plane tickets, the hotel stay, and maybe some of the food or I pay it through out of my pocket.

Well, pretend I'm in a 28% tax bracket. If I were going to spend $10,000 out of my personal budget on the ski trip in a 28% marginal tax bracket, I would have to earn $13,888 of income, $14,000 basically gross income to get the same benefit if I spend after-tax dollars.

By the way, if you ever want to know how to do that math and how much you want to do, 28% bracket, take 100, subtract 28, that equals 72, and then just divide $10,000 by .72. So if you divide $10,000 by .72, you get an answer of $13,888. That's the mathematically correct way of running those calculations.

So you'd have to earn $14,000 or I can accomplish both things by putting my business expenses and then having a tax-free, not having to pay tax on the $14,000 of income to cover my $10,000 ski trip. So it's just writing things down, writing things down, writing things down. Now, I never seem to actually be able to finish my lists.

From time to time, I go through and look at all my lists and I find every few months, I kind of just scrap everything and start over again. I do another goal-setting exercise, do a brainstorming exercise, try to figure out what's the smartest way forward. And I never seem to cross everything off of my list.

But when I look back, I find that strangely, I'm closer than I ever thought in the past. And so the process of thinking it through in my mind is the key. One example from my life that I thought was useful, years ago, I had just graduated from college and I was working in a corporate job and I was making at the time, I think, 40,000, 45,000 bucks.

And I wrote down a goal that for me was I thought, "Okay, I want to make six figures. I want to make $100,000 a year." And I sat and looked at my job and I thought, "I don't see any possible way where I can make six figures six figures." And I said, I can't remember what the date was.

I think it was, it doesn't matter. I set a specific date on it. And I looked and I said, "There's no possible way for me to do it." But I kept kind of thinking, "This is my goal." I wrote it down. At that time, I was doing an exercise where every morning I would wake up and I just write down, "What are my top 10 goals right now?" And it's useful to center.

Sometimes, you write the same thing every day, every day, every day. And then finally, you recognize, "You know what? I don't care about that." So write down, "What are my top 10 goals right now? What are my top 10 goals right now?" So on that six-figure goal, what was remarkable to me is I had no idea how I could do it.

I didn't see any way that I could make enough progress in the corporate job that I was in at the time, enough in order for me to earn the money. So I wound up, I kind of forgot about the goal and over time, it just wasn't important to me.

But I wound up getting laid off from that company and I wound up starting a job in the financial services business. And all of a sudden, I woke up and realized, "Wait a second. I'm in the situation now where I can earn six figures a year." And it was this remarkable chain of events that happened.

I don't fully understand how this happens in the success industry. If you read any kind of success literature, they call it the reticular activating system, where essentially when you set a goal, you become tuned in to ideas that you never have thought of. Best example is the red sports car example.

You consider going out and buying a red sports car and all of a sudden, you look around and there's red sports cars everywhere. And you never know. They were always there, but you never saw them. But because you decided to buy one, you start seeing them everywhere. Same thing happens with financial planning.

I bet you start to see little ideas, little tax ideas or little investment ideas or things if you listen to this show. So I get that. It makes sense to me as far as a way that this works. Now, when you actually apply this though, you've got to think through and make a plan for accomplishing the goal and start breaking that down into action steps.

Because stuff doesn't happen unless you take some sort of action. Some of those actions are planned and intentative. Some of them seem to be just—they just happen. But you make a different choice. You choose at points in time based upon what you have an opportunity for. Some people want to build wealth.

They want to build a business. So when they have the opportunity to get a job, they turn it down and they start their business instead. Other people want safety and security. So when they have the opportunity to start a business, they don't. They take a job. Not right or wrong.

It's just up to you. What do you want to do? I suggest that from the perspective of financial planning, there are three variables that you can control. But you have to cycle through them continually. And this is a useful mindset, a useful framework for guiding your thinking, for building a disciplined way of thinking about financial planning.

The three variables that you can control are your income, your expenses, and the rate of return that you earn on the difference between those two things, which would be your investment money. Or it may be the rate of interest that you're paying if you're in the black—excuse me, in the red—if you're spending more than you are bringing in.

All financial planning is built on this cycle. Now, there are subsets that don't fit into that cycle. For example, risk management and financial planning is very important, but it doesn't really fit into that cycle. It's a way of assuring income and insuring income, but it doesn't fit as easily into that little mindset.

But the key is to recognize you can't do everything all at once, so you need an order of attack. And here's where people go wrong. I think it's very important to recognize that it's going to take probably a long time. It's probably going to take longer than you think.

Ask anybody who's built a house, and what do they tell you? It takes—plan for double the time and double the budget that you prepared for. Same thing with financial planning. Prepare for double the time and double the budget. You're going to have problems. Now, if you don't, awesome. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

But take whatever your estimates are and stretch them out. I think we have a disease, an epidemic in our culture, of praising and lauding overnight success stories. We always write and read articles about this person who became rich at 20 years old or this person who became a multi-billionaire overnight.

In my mind, those stories—and there's a balance here. You can draw some things that are useful. When I do a show on a 23-year-old young man buying a house for cash, I think that's cool. But it wasn't an overnight success story. Overnight success stories, I've found, don't really serve me.

They're very rarely true. I won't quite say never true, but they're almost never true. Because usually what's happening is you're seeing the end of the compounding curve. Perhaps this person had an overnight business success financially. They started this new company. But what we don't know is that the last 14 years they had been building their skills and building their ability and practicing and learning things.

They just weren't applied in a business, and they didn't make any money off of them. But that compounding curve of those skills brought them to the right place at the right time, and then you see the growth. Overnight success stories to me aren't useful. They just make me feel not worthless, but they make me feel inept.

At this point, I assume they're all irrelevant, and I just plan on slow and steady growth. I can't plan for an overnight success. I can't plan for going viral. But what I can do is I can plan on slow and steady growth over time, the application of steady, steady effort.

Jim Collins talks about this in his book, Good to Great. He talks about the concept of the flywheel. The point of the flywheel is this big heavy thing on a piece of equipment, and you put your shoulder into it, and you just turn it just a little bit. You push and you push, and it goes slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, and it's super fast.

That's the concept of the flywheel, that you never see and talk about that slow turning of it, the grinding of it out. But then over time, it builds up the momentum. So in my mind, that's what I plan on with most things is just assume it's going to be slow and steady and take a long time.

But you have to start where you are. So with your personal financial planning, here's what I would commend to you. Here in December, start by constructing two simple financial statements. Construct for yourself a current statement of financial condition. We usually most commonly call this a balance sheet, what you have and what you owe.

And then also conduct a statement of cash flows. This would also be known as an income statement or a cash flow statement. It's basically just a statement of income and expenses, what money is coming in and what money is going out. Now, the harder of those two is the second one.

The easy one is the balance sheet. You can gather the information for that and usually about an afternoon of work. You sit down and you say, "What do I have? What are all the assets that I have?" You write down all of the things that you own at the top of a piece of paper, and you write down the current balances on all your debts and you figure out what you have.

That takes about an afternoon's worth of work. The statement of cash flows is usually a little bit trickier because you may or may not have good records on that. So I'm going to give you some ideas of how to do it, how to bring together that information. My most important tip for you is keep it simple.

Keep it simple. You can do this with a pen and a piece of paper. You don't even need a calculator. Just keep it simple. There are some keys of knowing how to actually analyze these statements and pull information out of them, but start by just creating them. Great investors in companies need to be able to look at and understand financial statements.

If you don't understand what a financial statement is signifying, you can't gather the information from it. Just like if you didn't have a concept of the meaning of A's, B's, C's, D's, and F's for academic grades, you would look at a report card and you wouldn't have any idea what A's and C's and this F means.

You might think F means fantastic and A means awful, but because you have a concept of A's, B's, C's, D's, and F's, you can look at a report card and you can know whether it's so-called a good one or a bad one because of that concept. Same thing with financial planning.

It's the concepts behind the statements that make a difference, but start with just creating them. There's no other way to learn that I've ever figured it out. I've done two entire shows on this. I would commend them to you to listen to next if you haven't heard them. You'll find a show on the balance sheet at radicalpersonalfinance.com/balancesheet and you'll find a show on the cash flow statement at radicalpersonalfinance.com/cashflowstatement and you'll find that information.

Those will help you. The hard one of these, easy one is a balance sheet. The hard one is the cash flow statement. You need a tracking system for your money. You have to design a tracking system that's going to work for you. There are many good ones that you could do.

I personally think the best one is actually just a simple checkbook register. I know very few people, okay, let me be specific. I don't know anybody other than me who keeps a checkbook register, but I think it's actually one of the best financial tools ever invented, and when I've been able to convince people to try it and to stick with it until they get used to using it, it's the best tool ever invented because it's both a backward-looking and a forward-looking planning device.

It's way better than an app on the phone. It's way better than just about anything else, but most people resist it and they resist balancing it. I find it easy to balance when you balance it regularly. Instead of doing it on a monthly basis, which is what people would get behind on, pull out your smartphone, pull up your bank account, and balance your checkbook register right side by side.

I would commend to you the idea of using a simple checkbook register, but that will allow you to have a history of your transactions, and you could figure out what you spend on different things. You could go the direction of setting up a system of cash envelopes. Now, this is helpful in a proactive way.

It helps by preventing overspending, but in my experience, it's actually really tough to track, and it's tough to have a record of the transactions. It's unwieldy for the purpose of tracking. It's good for the purpose of controlling spending. It's bad and unwieldy for the purpose of tracking, and it's tough in our situation where so much bill pay and so many transactions have become electronic.

You could use an electronic solution. There are a lot of great apps for your smartphone. Most banks now provide an app for you that tracks your income and expenses. I would recommend you start with whatever your bank provides. If your bank doesn't provide one, just do a search in your app store and find one that you like.

There are lots of good ones. One useful tip for you is you might consider simplifying your accounts down to, if possible, one account, or if necessary, perhaps one account and one credit card. This helps. It's tough to track things across seven or eight accounts, but if you have one account or one account and one credit card, then that can be helpful.

You may have one personal account, one business account, but simpler is better. My new favorite Tony Robbins quote from his recent book on money, "Complexity is the enemy of execution." I like that quote. Consider simplifying. One tip for you at the end of the year, if you have transactions that are everywhere and you're trying to figure out what to do, one little idea for you is you might just consider changing your credit card numbers and maybe your checking account numbers.

Call all your credit card numbers and get new cards issued with a new number. Just call the lost card department and they can do that no problem for you. That will automatically cancel for you all of the people who are charging your cards. You'll get a notice of, "Hey, you need to pay your cable bill because it's usually charged to your card." That's great.

That can be sometimes easier than you going through and manually doing that. You can set them up on a new payment system that you've designed in advance, so a new monthly tracking system and a new budgeting system. That can be useful. Some people I've worked with have so many cards and so many transactions all over the place.

Take back control. If you feel like you're overspending, one useful tip is always to consider taking full manual control back over everything. Today, it's very easy to automate everything. Automation is powerful, really is. Automation of overspending and excess is really tough because you have to break those habits. Sometimes, taking things back under manual control is useful.

I find writing out paper checks, paying the bills with paper and envelopes, even though the bill-paying system is easy, it can help because it helps you to stay current. You have to figure out what works for you. Plan out a system that you think will work, but here's the key.

Prepare for it not to work. Plan in advance for what you're going to do when it doesn't work. If you never track your cash and you don't have a system established that's going to work for you, then recognize, "I'm not good at this." Don't think that January 1 is going to create some kind of magical transformation where all of a sudden you're not good at it now, but after January 1, you're going to be good at it.

You're not, so expect it to fail. If you know that it's going to fail and you expect it to fail, then you'll be mentally prepared to keep working on it until you figure out a system that works for you. You've got to carve out time for yourself to work on your finances.

Put a calendar appointment of some kind onto your calendar system, whatever you use to do some focus targeted thinking, focus targeted planning. Set it aside, whether it's Sunday evening at your home on your computer or Friday morning right when you're starting work or Monday at the end of the day before you go home or Wednesday lunch.

Put a calendar appointment on your books for you to do some focus targeted thinking and work on your financial system. You've got to develop it and dedicate the time. Remember, finances fund everything in your life, everything. You spend how many hours working? Don't you think it's worth a little bit of time to focus on allocating things?

By setting up a tracking system, you're going to begin to develop some data. What you need to know is what you're spending each month and on what. That's one of the keys about this useful about the new year is you can set a system up now in December and then just track from January.

Track now so you're starting to practice it. But now from January 1, you just want to know what am I spending in January. That's not right or wrong. Just know the data. So you can say and look back at the end of the month, last month I spent $327 on food.

Great. You need to know that. Then once you have that information, you've got to continue your thinking. So during your regular financial appointments with yourself, sit down and think about what your biggest problems and what your biggest opportunities are and compare how you're doing toward your goals. Think on paper, disciplined thinking, disciplined thinking.

You have to learn a skill. Consider one of those three variables I mentioned one at a time. So ask yourself, is my biggest problem? What's standing in the way between me hitting these goals? It might be income. Is your income too low? Would your plan be helped by making more money?

Don't too automatically answer yes. It probably would be, but it's not necessarily automatic. But if you think that making more money should be a major priority, then you need to write down another journaling exercise. You need to say, what would help me make more money? What could I do to make more money?

Powerful tool I learned years ago from Brian Tracy is he talked about every morning, take out a fresh sheet of paper and write at the top of it whatever your biggest problem is and write it in the form of a question. So he would say, you would write at the top of your paper, what would help me make more money?

It's probably a more empowering question than why do I not make any money. But why do I not make any money can be a useful scenario too, I guess. If you say, why do I not make any money? You might diagnose the fact that, well, I come in late, nobody likes me because I'm mean to everybody and I'm lazy and I goof off all day.

So that would be useful. Or it might be I work in a part of the country or I work in a dead-end job or something like that. That might be useful. But I would start with what would help me make more money? And then he would say, make a list of 30, number your list from 1 to 30.

And for me, when I've done this, I've just used however many lines are on the notebook that I'm using. Often, it was 34 or something like that. And write down 34 ideas that would help you make more money. So I could move across the country. I could move from a dead economy in insert town here to North Dakota where there's an oil boom.

That would help me make more money. I could develop a new career. I could start a business. I could get a second job. Just write down all the ideas and figure out what would help getting a promotion. And then at the end of it, start looking at those lists.

And if you don't have anything good, maybe you did 34 bad ideas, do it the next day and write down another 34 things that would help you. And step back and look at it. And then pick whichever one of those things makes the most sense to you. And then ask yourself the next question.

So let's say that, well, how could I make more money? I could get a promotion. Well, the next day's question would be, how can I get a promotion? And write down 34 things for that. Then maybe one of those things is produce more great work. That would usually help many people get a promotion.

So the next day, how can I produce more great work? Well, one of the answers to that might be, I need to learn how to be more skillful at marketing. Or I need to learn how to improve the company's profit margins. Next day's question, how can I become more skillful at marketing?

Well, I can read these books. I can go to some seminars. I can go to these courses. What do I need to do next? And you write it until it becomes a task to where you go on Amazon, you buy the five books that are going to be helpful.

You search the App Store. You search iTunes for a podcast on marketing. And you start listening to that or whatever the situation is that you need. And you start doing things. So would you be served by making more money? Now, that's a really useful scenario. But you've got to make sure that you don't overstate that when compared to the next category.

Would your financial plan be helped by cutting your expenses? A review of your current expenses, to my mind, is always important. I don't know any successful business owner who makes a lot of money who doesn't routinely review their expenses. The scale at which expenses are reviewed changes. When you're getting started, if you're making minimum wage at a minimum wage job, the $1 you spend on a hamburger on the value meal is probably a massive overpayment compared to how you could create the same food value for yourself for 30 or 40 cents.

That's double the cost of what you need. And when compared to your income, that is a big deal. It really is. That's a 50% savings. But if you're making $100,000 a year, the $1 you spend on the value meal as compared to the 40 cents that you could make the equivalent for yourself is utterly meaningless and irrelevant.

But it's very important to you if you're shopping for a new boat that if you can figure out a way to get the same value for 50% of the cost, that would be really, really important to only spend $15,000 on a boat instead of $30,000 on a boat. That would be well worth your time.

But if you're making a million bucks a year, it's important for you to spend more time reviewing what is the profit margin of this division of my company. And should we move our operations from this high-cost region of the world to a low-cost region of the world? Or can we find and buy a technology solution that will allow us to eliminate $300,000 a year of labor costs?

And don't worry about spending $15,000 to $30,000 on the boat. We all have a limited amount of time. So the scale has to change. But the thinking process is consistent throughout. You have to keep an eye on expenses at every single level. There is no level of income and no level of wealth that can't be destroyed by expenses out of hand.

Consider all the famous celebrity examples, Mike Tyson, Willie Nelson. Consider all of the people that earn tens of millions of dollars and go bankrupt. A review of expenses is always important. I think a useful way to do this is pick a category each month to work on. Recognize that this is not a one-time thing.

This is an ongoing cycle, which I'm going to finish up the show by talking about. So just simply look at your budget and pick a category. So now that you're starting to track for maybe we're in February 2015 now, and you have to—at the end of February, we have two months of data.

Look at your tracking and say, "What are my expenses?" And pick a category. Categorize your expenses and pick a category and make that a target. Put a bullseye on it. Now, it can be either a big category or it can be a little category. I commend to you that it's usually a better idea to start big with whatever your largest expenses are and move on to small.

Hopefully, probably for most people, the largest expenses are taxes, income taxes, employment taxes, housing, transportation, and food. If you look at the averages, those are the three areas that most people spend more money on. Pick one of those areas and consider changing. And consider and ask yourself the question, "How can I get every bit of value or happiness out of this?" Or, "How can I get more value for half the money?" Or however you want to phrase it.

That's how I like to phrase it. "How can I get double the value for half the money?" Make that the topic of your daily journaling exercise, top of the page. "How can I get double the value for my housing at half the money?" Well, write down 34 ideas, and those ideas could come from—they could be all over the place.

They could be move from New York State to Texas where I get double the square footage for half the price. Or it could be as simple as rent out a room. Or it could be as simple as—I mean, it could be any number of things. So you just write down your 34 ideas and then look at them and ask yourself if you actually want to do any of them.

If you want to, great. Pick one and do it. If you don't, then write a different question and keep doing it until you come up with an idea that you actually like. Now, a lot of people are intimidated by starting with big. If I were to walk into, say, an average couple's financial lives and say, "Got to sell the house, got to sell the car, what are you doing?

You're crazy, crazy, crazy," it doesn't work. Maybe the resistance would go up. So if you find your resistance would go up internally, then switch it around and start with the little things. And just pick something that's small. Pick a topic and focus on it and say, "What can I do?

Maybe I can cut my cell phone bill. Maybe I can cut my cable bill. Maybe I can shop my car insurance." Pick an area, pick a category, spend some time researching it, thinking about it, planning on it, and then implement your solution. Think on paper. Ask yourself these questions.

Write down, "How can I reduce my electric bill and increase my happiness or increase my value or increase my satisfaction?" Brainstorm your answers. One may be, "I can turn lights off when I leave." One may be, "I can insulate my attic." One may be, "I can upgrade my furnace." One may be, "I can buy a smaller house." And just brainstorm your ideas.

Brainstorm ideas and then look, pick one if you like them. If you don't like any of them, move on. Do research. By having a focused category, it gives you an opportunity to focus your research. Things are always changing with every category of expenses, and I'd recommend to you that you have a mental schedule.

I used to recommend, for example, to clients that they review their life insurance basically about every two years. Things change. Situations change. The amount of insurance you need changes, and you can lower or you can adjust. You can shop. You can move. You should be quoting your auto insurance, your home insurance maybe every year or so.

There are always opportunities for change. And the key is look for value. If you just focus on price, I think oftentimes that can raise internal resistance. If you focus on price and on value, that'll make a big difference. Finally, of those three categories, would you be helped by increasing the rate of return on your investments?

Now, if you're in debt, this is very important. You still need to improve the rate of return, but it's not on your investments. You need to improve the rate of return on your interest payments. So think to yourself, "What can I do?" One trick that I use when I'm making a cash flow statement for myself or for clients, if I can get the data, is I break out the interest component of any debt payment as a separate line item.

So on my cash flow statement for a mortgage, for my mortgage, it would say mortgage principal reduction and mortgage interest payment. This is useful to me to know what I'm actually spending on interest, to know what my debt cost is. It's a good discipline if you're a business owner because it allows you to deduct that interest expense.

It's a good discipline if you're a homeowner. Yes, they'll send you your tuition, excuse me, the statement of interest that you're paying on your mortgage at the end of the year, but it's a good discipline to know what that number is. And it's a good discipline because it should lead to the question of, "How do I deduct this debt?" And I think you should never, ever, ever have any debt that's not deductible.

Totally a silly thing to do with as many simple ways to deduct interest. At least get the government to subsidize your interest payments if you're going to have any interest payments. Ask yourself if you can refinance the debt at more favorable terms and a lower cost. Now, if you're not in debt or if you're focusing also on your investments, which is ideal, ask yourself good questions and use this in your journaling exercises.

What do you want to invest in? Are you investing in your best ideas that are appropriate for you? Is there a strategy for investments that you know of that you need to research and learn more about or that you need to go out and search for? Where can you get the highest return on your money right now with the skills that you have at the investor level that you have right now?

What's the best investment for you? What fits your temperament? What fits your experience? Thinking in terms of a stock portfolio and reconsidering your asset allocation is good. That needs to be done and that makes a big difference over the long term. Your personal asset allocation will make a bigger difference in explaining your personal returns on your portfolio than anything else that you do.

But don't stop there. And remember that publicly traded securities are probably not your highest rate of return investment. The highest rate of return for you will probably come from investing in your personal earning power or in private business. So make sure you're prioritizing this if you're interested in that.

You may have already reached the point at which you're in the top 4% of your career. And so in that case, it would be less important to focus too much on earning power unless you know of a way to improve that. And now you're going to focus on other areas.

There's a point of diminishing returns in anything. But make sure you're prioritizing investments outside of just your public traded securities. There are extra risks to that type of investment that don't exist if you buy a McDonald's stock. But there's also more potential return. Now what's the right ratio? That's again back to that asset allocation question.

What fits you in your situation? Don't forget risk management in this ongoing thinking process. Ask yourself, what are the biggest risks that I face that could derail my financial plan? And then how can I plan for them? You might need insurance. You might need savings. You might need to build an emergency fund or a cash cushion.

It could be as simple as that. If you don't have any savings, you need some savings. You might need insurance. It could be as simple as you need some life insurance. Or maybe you just joined a nonprofit board and now you need to sit down and review your options for directors and officers' liability insurance.

Maybe you've unintentionally exposed yourself to a risk and you need to cover that risk. So think it through. Ask what should I next do? In my mind, this would be a good scenario for an insurance agent. Do a good review with an insurance agent. Ask the agent, what do you see?

What risks am I not thinking about? It's a useful question, by the way. What do you see that I'm not thinking about? If you put this together in an ongoing cycle, you will make substantial progress toward your financial goals. Now, I don't know what you should focus on first.

You have to figure that out. But if you go through this type of disciplined thinking in an ongoing manner, it will help you and you'll be able to guide yourself toward your goals. I commend to you that it's a good idea to forget looking for the magic bullet. I would suggest to you that it's a waste of time to look for the one thing.

I don't think it is about one thing or there is any magic cure that's going to create overnight success. I think it's more about ongoing cycles. It's like forget about the diet and think about the lifestyle. Forget about the magic incantation to say to somebody and think about the overall picture of who you are being toward them.

And forget about necessarily the things that you need to do to reach a specific goal and focus on becoming the kind of person who is able to build the disciplines and the habits that will allow your goals to be reached. As the saying goes, "Don't wish things were different, wish you were better." Isn't that the aphorism?

Frankly, I think I've wasted a good bit of my life wishing for the next thing and focusing on the next goal. Things would be better if only, and I don't know, for me, I've just learned that if only doesn't really exist. Money doesn't seem to fix most problems. It just changes the problems and the scale of the problems.

I used to think that if I only made a little bit more, if I only had a little bit more money, it would fix my problems. I've learned through my experience and also through vicarious experience of others listening to them that money doesn't fix any problems. It just changes them.

Just changes them. I've met with a lot of multimillionaires that said, "I thought if I were a multimillionaire, my life would be great." But the point is that it didn't necessarily fix it. It just changed the problems. Yes, there are fewer problems with, and there's less of a, there are fewer heart palpitations when the tire blows out and you got to get a new tire.

But it's a problem to sit down with the attorney and figure out, "Who do I leave my money to if I die?" That's a problem. So don't miss today by looking forward just to tomorrow. I think there's a healthy tension between these two things, and I don't see any way to resolve the tension, nor am I convinced that there's any reason to want to resolve it.

The tension in this sense is healthy. We only live once. I think there's a good healthy tension between deferring gratification and experiencing gratification now. Now, where that line is, I don't know. I have some ideas on where it is for me and my family, but I can't presume to tell you.

I think only you can ultimately know what's right for you. But I do think if you focus on using a process of disciplined thinking like I've illustrated, and you can become a person who is focused, who is thrifty, who is wise with money, who's working toward specific objectives, specific goals, specific outcomes, who is planning toward them, I think you're always going to have money, no matter what, because you're a different person.

And as I close today's show, I want to illustrate this to you with a couple of anecdotal examples that I do think are instructive. Consider your favorite famous rich person, Donald Trump or Warren Buffett or I don't know. You pick who your favorite rich person is. I like to pick personally on Trump because he's so extreme.

He's almost a caricature of many things. So I'll pick on Trump. Question. Can you imagine Donald Trump being poor? Seriously. Can you imagine if Donald Trump just being a millionaire, having a net worth of a million bucks, and imagine him being satisfied with that? I can't even conceive of it.

And I always think that's a little bit funny when I think about it. Because many people, rightly so, for many people, me included, I don't have a million dollars yet. But for many people, accumulating a million dollars would be a watershed moment and they would feel as though they had accomplished a major goal, and rightly so.

Many people, if they had a million dollars, would feel rich, I think. What would Donald Trump feel about that? So my point is, we get used to where we are unless we become a different person. What do you think Donald Trump would do if he took all of his money away?

Well, it's kind of fun to think of him because this has happened to him. He had suffered some disastrous results with his real estate investments back, I think it was in the 90s, and he was a billion dollars in the hole. But what do you think he would do if he took all his money away?

Take away every dollar he has. Do you think he could rebuild? I think if he gave him a decade, he'd be back where he is today. Now maybe a little bit less, a little bit more. Once you get to the billions, it really doesn't, it's just a matter of scale, and it doesn't measurably affect your lifestyle in any way, whether you have one billion or two billion dollars.

But I think it's an interesting scenario, because to me the key is not what did Donald Trump do, although that is probably a useful thinking process. It's rather, who is he? What has he become that allowed him to accomplish his objectives? He became a deal maker. He became an entrepreneur.

He looked for opportunities and he capitalized on them. Am I focused on becoming somebody different? I really do think if you took every dollar, or whatever the foreign currency equivalent is, from every person in the world, and you just simply divided all of those dollars equally among the population of the world, was it seven billion people?

You divided it out equally. I think within a decade, they would be right back in just about the same hands as they are today. Now, why? First, I think there are two reasons. First, money really has no practical value, other than as a representation of either an exchange of value, or some kind of coercion or force.

In my mind, money is a simple system of accounting that we've come up with and designed, which measures transactions between people. That money can measure a transaction of force. It can. In centuries past, wealth wasn't measured in currency. Wealth was measured in land. Wealth was measured in soldiers. The wealthiest ruler, by force, could keep his or her—I guess it was mainly his in many cultures—his or her subjects under subjection and extract wealth by force.

The wealth was an illustration of the power that they were able to put on other people. Now, in a capitalist system of voluntary exchange, I think money is a representation of value, and it's very different. I think it's pretty cool that we live in a system that's tilted more toward the capitalist end than the force or coercion.

Certainly in our economy, I could be short-sighted and naive to think that it's all based upon a representation of value. There is a measure of coercion or force, but I'm not interested in dealing in that system. But primarily, money is a representation of the value that's been brought to buy people.

It's not the money that has value. It's the value that has value, and the money is our system of accounting for it. So that's the first reason that the money would flow. It would either flow to those who exert force over other people, or it would flow to those who bring value to other people.

The second reason is people that are rich usually become rich by becoming a different person. And again, having a million bucks in the bank is less important than becoming the type of person who can accumulate a million dollars. I see this all the time. You take the money away from a millionaire, they'll make it again.

They know how to do it. It's the same thing when you look at the business success and business failure statistics, and there are oft-repeated statistics about how many businesses fail. But if you look at how many new businesses fail by people who have had previous businesses, it's a much lower statistic.

I hope this show has been useful to you. As we finish up one year and we move to another one, it is, I think, a really neat period of time. And I would commend to you that this is a good time to think through afresh what your goals are.

In my mind, there's nothing magical about January 1. There's nothing magical about a New Year's resolution, unless that resolution is tied to a vision, a plan of action, and a system, a framework, a methodology that you can put in place that will assure that you keep going toward that vision.

That will be useful to you. Finances touch every part of life. I guarantee that if you sit down and make a list of 10 goals that are important to you, it's very possible that none of those 10 have anything to do with money from a dollar perspective. You may not say, like I used to, "I want to make $100,000 a year." You may not say, like I used to, "I want to have a million-dollar net worth." Those goals, I think, sounded good, but they weren't really connected to anything.

You might say, "I want to take my family to South Africa or on safari. I want to go and spend time with my grandmother before she dies." We've got to figure out the financial end of that. So that goal has to be tied to the money in some way or to the financial wealth in some way.

There's no one big thing that's going to make a difference for you or make any difference in 2015 versus 2014. If you keep doing about what you did in 2014, you'll probably get about what you got in 2014. So who was it? As Zig Ziglar used to say, I think, "If you like what you've been getting, keep on doing it." He had a great way of saying it.

But if you like where things are going, great, keep doing it. There's always a few tweaks. If you don't like where things are going, that's okay. As long as you're not expecting an overnight transformation, you can begin the process, and that ongoing process will transform the ends. You can do it.

Any culture, you can do it in any culture. You can do it in any situation. You can do it in any scenario. You can make meaningful progress toward your goals. At least what I've learned, for me, making meaningful progress, that's what's fun. Life is pretty cool when you feel like you're making progress.

Tackling challenges. We've been sold a bill of goods about pleasure. In a modern society, we have a very hedonistic society where everything is focused on pleasure, self-pleasure, and hedonism. Pleasure has its place, but progress I find more fulfilling than pleasure. I think many people do. It's satisfying to make progress towards something.

I find it to be so. That's it for today's show. I hope that you enjoyed this. I hope this was useful. If I can get it done soon with the things that I'm juggling in my schedule, I will produce for you a technical show on some year-end planning ideas.

I wanted to begin with this. It's always the problem with financial content. How do you balance what's valuable in the technical sense with what's practical in the behavioral sense? I feel that these concepts are way more valuable than the technical. The technical stuff is easy. You can hire it done.

A few hundred bucks and you can hire somebody to fix the technical stuff. A few thousand bucks will hardly get you started on the ability to hire somebody to do this for you. You can do it for yourself. This is what will make a far bigger difference than putting money into a traditional IRA before the end of the tax season.

Often, that's a bad idea. We'll talk about that another time. Thank you for listening to today's show. If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can email me joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. Twitter, we're @radicalpf. Facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. I've got a number of shows planned over the next couple of weeks, a bunch of interview shows, a couple more things.

I'm not going to go into that because I don't want to commit to what I'm going to get on day one versus another day. I hope this has been useful to you. I'm done for the day. Membership program, radicalpersonalfinance.com/membership. Thank you for your support to the show. Have a great day.

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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