Unwrap the holiday savings at Citadel Outlets. Shop the early access Black Friday sales for the best deals of the season. The all-night shopping party starts Thanksgiving night at 8 p.m. Visit CitadelOutlets.com for more information. Hey Joshua this is Anesh from Minnesota and I wanted to give a big thank you to you.

Tomorrow is my wife's last day of work after she put in her notice three weeks ago and I owe our new lifestyle mostly to the show and to some of the early retirement communities. Let me explain. We have two young children and we we've been both commuting spending about three hours to get them up, get them dressed, get them to daycare, commuting to work, having two cars, all the insurance and everything and after you're listening to your show and really paying more attention to everything from how much taxes we're paying to just some of the your money or your life things that they advocate for in terms of looking at your lifestyle and where your time is going.

It's just made me really think about all of these things in a greater detail and I was able to find about $30,000 in savings both from cutting out one car to lowering our tax bill to lowering my student loan payments and all of this was through the inspiration from your show and then my obsessive dedication to kind of crunching numbers and looking closely.

So I just want to say that starting Monday morning my quality of life is going to be better than it's ever been where I get to wake up, take an express bus to work while my wife and kids get to sleep in and have a nice breakfast together and I can come home to a little bit more of a peaceful house.

So thanks again for all you do and I look forward to all the future shows. Two major pieces of news today. Number one, we have an app and it's very exciting. I'll tell you why. And number two, we're launching a crowdfunding campaign and I would ask you to be involved.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and today is Monday, February 9, 2015. And today my friends, after weeks and weeks and weeks of work and delays and Joshua feeling totally flummoxed by techie stuff, I am thrilled to announce to you some changes in the show and I'm going to ask for your help.

Let's get straight to it with the launch of our new mobile device app, which I am very excited to tell you about. And then I will tell you about our new crowdfunding campaign and I will ask you to be involved. But I want to lead off with the app.

As of today, if you are on an Apple iOS device, so iPhone, iPad, or if you have an Android-based device of any type, or if you have a Windows phone, or if you have an Amazon Fire phone, we now have an app. And I would encourage you to check it out.

You can download it from the App Store. And let me explain the functionality of it and the reason why I've gone to the trouble of creating it. This may be of interest to some of you, especially if you're running or want to start your own podcast and I'll tell you what I've learned.

For years, I did most of my podcast listening with an Apple iPhone. And it worked great, especially after Apple came out with their own dedicated podcasts app, which is built in now and released on every brand new iOS device and cannot be deleted, which is great for the business and the science and the industry of...not science, the industry of podcasting.

That's a thrilling announcement. I knew that was coming. That was one of the reasons why I started the show and I did, to make sure that I was out there. Because this is leading already to massive growth in the podcast listener sphere. But so for years, I used that app and it's a great app.

It does a great job. And I never understood why would anybody have an app? I used to, if you pay any attention to web marketing or work with consumers, you find that people oftentimes, "I want to have an app." Well, what do you want your app to do for you?

And web developers quickly poo-poo and make fun of somebody who says, "We just want an app." And they say, "A mobile website is better." And that's true, except it's not in podcasting. Let me explain. I never understood how tough it was to listen to a podcast if you weren't already listening to podcasts.

Because for me, it was always easy. But it is not always easy for people who are not already podcast listeners. Again, the Apple Podcast app worked great and I never switched to anything else. But as soon as I created a podcast and I started telling people about my podcast, then I started meeting lots of people who didn't listen to podcasts.

And I found out that I had to explain a lot of steps to them. I had to say, if you're on an Apple device prior to the release of iOS 8, I had to say to them, "Okay, go in the App Store and search for an app called Podcasts.

It has a little purple logo. Install that app and then open it. Then go to the search bar and then search Radical Personal Finance. Scroll down to the bottom and you'll see at the top are podcast episodes and at the bottom are podcasts. And look for the little orange logo for Radical Personal Finance.

Click that button. Click subscribe. Now go back to the episodes. Click the feed button or whatever it's called and look through the archives and then pick a couple that look interesting to you. Click download those and then you can listen to them." And that's as easy as it gets.

When you go into the Android space, it's worse. And I never knew this until I switched from an iPhone to an Android device. And all of a sudden, you go into the Android space. Now, okay, go into the Google Play Store. Search for an app called Dog Catcher with 2Gs or search for an app called Pocket Casts or what was usually the easiest was search for an app called Stitcher.

Now, once you download that, go to the little search button. You get the point. It is horrendously difficult to teach people who aren't tech savvy and who are just learning to operate their phone how to actually operate a – how to get a podcast. And I realized, "Wow, I have got to create something better for this show because I need to make it very easy for people to listen to the show and it's not currently easy." That was one of the – that was the big aha moment that I had.

I never understood that before actually starting the show and trying to tell people to listen to my show, how small still the podcast listening audience is. I said I need a solution. The second thing was 100 episodes when I accidentally redirected my iTunes feed to a dead feed and deleted thousands of subscribers.

That was a pretty – that was a pretty rough day for a podcaster. But if I had had a way other than iTunes to reach people, I realized I could have kept more of my audience base which is leading to other thing – which has – I learned a lot which led to other things that I'm learning especially regarding a newsletter – the newsletter that I'm beefing out and putting a lot more attention on so that I have email addresses for those of you who are listeners to the show.

That's another big major focus on. I'll cover that another day. So I realized I needed an app and thankfully my podcast host, Libsyn, came out with a really great service to create an app. And so I've gone through that process and we've released the – we've released the app.

And I welcome you. Go to the store and check it out. As of today, February 9, 2015, it should be live. At the time of recording the show, it's not live in the iOS store. I've just finally gotten the final approval. But it should be live within 24 hours.

So I'm guessing by the time this goes out and by the time you hear it, then it will be there in the iOS store. But it is presently there in the Amazon Fire store and it's also presently there in the Google Play store. So what does it do? Well, basically it just gives you direct access to the episodes of the show.

It also gives you easy connection to all of the show's online social media presence. You can easily email the show. You can easily call the show right from the app. And it does have some functionality where I can release some extra bonus content which I plan to do in the future as I can work on that.

So I can release extra bonus content there right in that app. If you already have a podcast listening solution that you're happy with, stick with that. There's no reason for you necessarily to go and change this app unless you just want to check it out and see. But it doesn't matter to me whether you listen to my show in the Apple Podcast app, listen to my show in Pocket Cast or whatever app you use already.

Your Stitcher is fine. It doesn't matter. Just go with that. But here's the deal. If you want to tell somebody about the show, here's what you need to know. All they need to know now is they need to have a smartphone and you simply need to tell them, "Go to your app store." It doesn't matter what smartphone with the exception of Blackberry which is very few.

Just tell them, "Go to the app store and search Radical Personal Finance and download the app." That's all they need to do. And that's the reason I created an application is I needed it to be possible for you to tell somebody that. And now going forward, this is going to dramatically improve my life.

And so now when my mother who listens to this show is wanting to talk to one of her friends who just got a smartphone and is figuring out how to text, she can just simply say, "Go to the app store and search Radical Personal Finance and you can listen to Joshua's show." So that is the reason for the app.

Check it out. Give me your feedback. It's not intended to be any fancy personal finance application. That stuff, maybe I can build that out in the future. I certainly have my ideas but that's not a current priority for me. This is just a way for you to spread the show.

So please use this now as an easy point of entry. Tell anybody who has a smartphone who you want to listen to the show, tell them, "Download Radical Personal Finance from the app store," and they're in. They're gold and they can listen to the show. Now let's get to our crowdfunding campaign.

And I've been hinting at this for the last few weeks on the show where I've mentioned that I was updating the membership program, the Irregulars program. And I'm going to share this with you as I launch this new crowdfunding campaign that I'm doing using a site called Patreon. But I want to give you just a quick back story on it so you understand.

So over the first 100 episodes of the show, I was primarily kind of trying to figure out how do I learn to be a better broadcaster? How do I learn to put together better content? And then I felt over time that we had reached kind of a basic level of listenership where either A, I could go ahead and launch a sponsorship program, advertising revenue, or I could come to the audience and ask the audience to support.

And I am most comfortable with coming directly to the audience. And the reason is because of the industry in which I talk and the industry in which I deal. And not only is the professional financial advice industry rife with conflict of interest, and I'm aware of that. I talk about that constantly on the show.

But even just financial media is rife with conflict of interest. And as the landscape changes and as the older traditional media loses much of its luster and loses much of its impact over the general population, there are a lot of changes going on in the so-called new media of independently created content, some of which are great, some of which are not.

But one of the ones that's not is there's a lot of unsclosed conflict of interest. And especially I believe, I take very seriously when you're working in the financial advice space, that you need to be careful with that. And I just simply want to be as careful as I can.

So when I was working through those, my ideas, and I'm thinking about what do I do? Do I bring on sponsorships? Do I do affiliate relationships and set up affiliate links for products and services that I endorse? I realized that I want my interests to be aligned purely with the audience.

And so I want it as a base, at the very least, of any kind of compensation from the show. I wanted a base to be directly to serve the audience. And I came up with the idea of a membership program. And I modeled this based upon a couple of other podcasts that I listened to, the primary of which one was Jack Spirico's podcast called The Survival Podcast, of how he had structured his show that really inspired me.

And I loved how he's done it over the years. And I modeled mine on that. And in many ways, it was a raving success. And in many ways, it didn't work well. Let me start with first, even just the launch. The launch of this was a bit flawed on my end.

And it was flawed for multiple reasons. I just didn't do a very good job with it. I wanted to launch on episode 100 because I thought that would be an exciting episode 100, a nice milestone in the show's history. But I made some serious mistakes. The first one I already mentioned when talking about the app, on episode, I think it was 97, I deleted every iTunes subscriber that I had.

And this also affected many of the Android listeners. And to this day, I'm still fixing, trying to fix some of the dead links that exist out there in the internet because of my bad link redirects. And it's still not done. So that was a problem where I'm getting ready and I was announcing, "Oh, we're going to have a big launch, big launch." And I received email after email, "Joshua, I was looking for episode 100.

Where'd you go?" I had to kind of tell everybody. So that was pretty rough. And so that led to kind of a slower launch than I had expected. But even with that mistake, well, the other kind of problems up front was I didn't know exactly, I wasn't launching with a great big product base of here's the product that I'm going to be releasing for the members.

It was just I launched with a promise that I would do things in the future. Even with that, I would say the launch was really, really great. And it created something called the Irregulars. And to date, I have 82 awesome, awesome people that signed up to support the show at a level of $10 a month.

That blew me away that 82 of you would sign up to do that. And many of the Irregulars started with the deal that I offered for 99 bucks for the first year, which was great because it gave me a little bit of capital for the show and just allowed me to prove the concept that people out there are gaining enough benefit from this show that they're willing to support it financially.

That is awesome. The challenge that I faced was that I promised on the show page that there would be lots of extra content, but I didn't have any extra content ready to go. So the sales page just simply said – and I did not do a good job even with the launch from a sales perspective.

I had a page that said "Membership." I posted a two-hour podcast episode of Joshua rambling on about all the things I don't like about most of the compensation models in the industry. And then I simply said, "I don't have anything there in the membership site for you." And then when people signed up for the membership site, on the other side it simply said, "Thank you for your support.

I'll get something here for you soon." And still, there were 82 awesome supporters of the show that set that up for me. I immediately started hearing from the audience and I immediately wondered if I had done the right thing. So the first challenge that I faced was I really didn't want to receive donations.

I don't want to put a "Donate" button on the site because I don't want charity. I want to be paid for my work but I don't want charity. I appreciate it but I don't need charity. I'm a healthy, equipped, capable man. I need to work for my living. So I didn't need charity.

And I mentioned that on that show and immediately I got some feedback from the audience. I got a voicemail from Derek and several emails that said, "Hey, Joshua, listen. It's not charity for us to send you money. We're just simply thanking you with our dollars. We're sending you certificates of appreciation with presidents printed on them, the virtual version thereof, and thanks for the content you're already creating.

So you just put a "Donate" button there. That's not charity in and of itself." And so I said, "Wow, okay. That's true." And I see the value of that. So I immediately wondered if I had done the right thing. The next challenge that I faced was I received lots of emails from people saying, "I want to support you but $10 a month is just either beyond my financial capacity right now or it is beyond – it's just more than I'm ready to commit to." For example, on a show like this, which I respect like crazy, but on a show like this, hopefully you guys and gals as listeners are being transformed from maybe you come in as a profligate spender and we're steadily transforming you into a goal-focused tightwad where you're only spending money in line with your goals.

Well, then for some people, $10 a month matters. You put that into the thing I preach constantly on the show and you say, "Well, if I'm going to support Joshua at $10 a month, then I need $3,000 of investment capital to support him in financial independence. And my hope is that I give you in excess of – far in excess of $100 of value every month." Frankly, I'd love it.

I've received emails that it's been thousands of dollars of value. But some of you, just $10 was too much. And I had no way to test the price point actually. I had no way – usually what I would like to do in launching something like that would be to do some sort of market test and see does the market respond well at $5 a month or at $50 a month and do an A/B split test between those and figure out what does the market say.

That would be how a good marketer would approach it. I didn't have any mechanism for where I could do that. So I just picked $10 a month out of the air and I said, "I know I can deliver far in excess of that of value and it seems like a number.

I've paid more than $10 a month from any subscription websites and I have several that I subscribe to that are $10 a month." And it just made sense to me. So I also wondered, "OK, do I have the right price point?" I didn't have any way to test the price point.

Other problems, frankly, because the technology was a bit clunky, I was using a membership site to set up, but it just wasn't working well with my site, which is in the process of being redesigned. I've got to get a better site loaded up. Oh, and then other things is I had listeners reach out to me directly.

I had some very valued listeners, you know who you are and I thank you personally, for who simply said, "We want to send you some money." They wrote to me and asked for my address and I had promised to publish that, but they wrote to me and sent me some donations and just said, "Thank you.

I've received lots of value already and I wanted to share that with you." So I knew that I was kind of doing some things not so well, but the big problem was the promise that I made. And the promise that I made for the Irregulars program was a promise of additional bonus content.

Because of the way that I said it in the episode and even in the sales copy, I said, "I'm going to create some additional members only resources here for you that will benefit you." But when I launched, I didn't have any resources that were there. And I wasn't quite able to figure out how do I create these based upon the size of the membership program.

Here's what would happen. I've got ideas in my head for dozens of courses that I could create. Some topics of which I've talked about on the show, but that I could tighten them up, bring together multiple shows and create a life-changing course for somebody. Some topics which I haven't covered on the show that are quite technical or maybe more suitable for a visual presentation.

But the sheer investment of my time, of the number of hours that I have available per week, it's tough to know where to allocate those hours. So I plan on pretty much about a 60-hour work week. I've got 168 hours in my week just like you do. And I think somewhere around 60 hours is a pretty decent amount of time to be working.

The advantages that I have is I don't have a commute. I can start early in the morning. And so when I look at how do I divide those 60 hours up, I currently have 24 of them committed to the contract that I have that pays my bills while I start this show.

And that leaves me with a total of 36 hours that I can devote toward creating content for the show. The types of shows that I do are fairly – they're very time consuming to create. And they're time consuming for a couple of reasons. Number one, my shows are long.

That in and of itself is time consuming. And due to the format, I feel it's an appropriate format for some of the depth of content that we get into. But my shows are long. Number two, there's a lot of them. So there's a new show basically Monday through Friday.

The last few weeks, there have been four shows per week. But basically Monday through Friday is my publishing schedule. The content is very in-depth on most of the shows that I do. And that takes time. For example, if I was going – the Friday Q&A shows, if you listen to how I do them, I often will take about 15 to 20 minutes to answer a question.

Well, the reason is because I go fairly in-depth and I try to organize my in-depth comments in a way that makes sense. If I give a cursory two or three-minute interview like – answer like I would on the radio show, then I can just do that off the top of my head and I could sit down with a list of a dozen questions and do that.

But to prepare a little bit of an outline for a 15 or 20-minute answer to a question, it takes some time. The interview shows are generally not very time-consuming, which is why – by the way, there's such a proliferation of interview podcasts. Those are – interview shows are relatively easy to do.

And I think they bring a great value which is why I like doing them to the listener. And I try to do them well. I'm getting better. Some of them I'm not satisfied with or some of them I am. But I try to do them well. But even to do them well requires some preparation to be prepared with what's a line of questioning that I'm going to lead in, what is some – the body of work, where is somebody knowledgeable that would be interesting to an audience, scheduling it, doing the preparation before, putting the show together, doing the intros, doing the outros, editing the audio.

Just it's time-consuming. So even an interview show, probably I would estimate for me to do an hour interview show takes on average – well, an hour to – I don't do hour-long interview shows. They're always an hour and a half and I always talk with the person for another 20 minutes on top of that.

So there's two hours right there for the actual call. 30 to 60 minutes of prep in advance and then 30 to 60 minutes of audio editing and show notes. So an interview show is easily four hours. The content shows that I create, to do them well takes a substantial amount of time to bring together and figure out how am I going to convey this topic in a way that is comprehensive and yet understandable.

It takes a lot of time to prepare those shows, which is why in weeks like last week when – just as an example, I released four interviews last week. I don't want my show to become the interview central show. But I was working on writing webpages, building out the site for the Patreon site, working on marketing projects, filming videos.

I simply didn't have the day available that it takes me to prepare a Wednesday show. It's easily six to eight hours of preparation for my Wednesday technical financial planning shows. So the conflict with the Irregulars program is that I'm spending a lot of time focused on building content for the show and I'm feeling guilty about not creating courses.

So I'm constantly feeling guilty about not creating courses. But I've set the expectation and I've done it intentionally. I'm not crying or whining about any of this. I've set the expectation that I'm going to release Radical Personal Finance five days a week and that is what my focus is.

So I simply by the end of the week with the number of hours that I have, I haven't had a lot of time available with my time budget to commit toward creating courses and answering comments and redesigning the website and all this other stuff, which is fine. This is what all entrepreneurs face and again, this is normal to life.

But I realized I'd created a problematic incentive. If my commitment to my Irregulars program was to create additional content, then I needed to cut back on the number of shows that I'm creating simply to free up the hours in the week. Or if my commitment is to the show, I need to figure out a way to serve that audience and not disappoint expectations there serving that audience and that cuts into the course time.

So months went by and I haven't even created a single course. So finally in January, I knew I was having this problem and I would feel guilty every time I thought about the Irregulars program, which led to me promoting it poorly on the show. So instead of giving you an excellent committed sales pitch during every show outlining the benefits of the Irregulars program, well, the benefits was, "Hey, can you toss me some money?" And that led to me feeling a little bit embarrassed about my failing commitment to my Irregulars.

And so that led to me doing poor promotion on the show and constantly feeling guilty about it even when I did promote it because I had made a promise that I wasn't fulfilling. So I surveyed my Irregulars members with an email and I got a lot of awesome responses.

And thank you to each and every one of you who responded to that. But what I learned from that survey when I asked my members, I said, "What can I create?" The majority answer that I received was, "I don't particularly care about your creating anything more. I like the show and I just wanted to send you some money to support the show." And I realized I needed to change course and I needed to align the incentives for the show and create a way for the show to actually pay for itself in order to fund my actual activity of it rather than building everything on the...

everything on extra products and everything on the Irregulars program. The other problem with the Irregulars program, number one, not only was I creating a conflict of interest with the amount of hours that I had, but because of kind of setting the impression, although I don't think I explicitly promised it because I didn't intend to if I did, but setting the impression that I was going to be releasing extra courses as a benefit specifically for the Irregulars.

They're simply with $10 a month and where I was at with... where I am at right now with about 82 subscribers, I simply... there's not enough financial incentive there for me to spend the 20 or 30 hours to create a course, whether that's, you know, even if... let's just assume a four-hour course, well done one, by the time it's created, you know, it's built, it's written, it's created, it's recorded or whatever, you know, whatever the course is, I can't imagine doing one in fewer than 20 hours.

And there's not enough financial incentive there for me to set that up and actually do it for the listeners of the show. Excuse me, for the Irregulars, based upon the amount of revenue, and I realized I was severely underpricing my Irregulars program. So all of these things led to this conflict and I gave it a lot of thought and I realized that I need...

I basically have a couple of options available to me. I either need to at this point in the show, I need to transition to building out much more paid content and using the platform that I've built with Radical Personal Finance for other means. So for example, building courses, building, you know, doing speaking engagements, doing paid things like that, and using the base that I've built with Radical Personal Finance and jump into those areas.

But if I do that, I need to cut back on the amount of time that I'm doing on the show. There's no question about it, I'm doing a thousand episodes of the show. Unless I'm dead, I'm doing a thousand episodes. But the timeline of those episodes is... I'm not sure.

I don't really want to do that because I love doing the daily show that I do. I really enjoy focusing on that and so that I want to focus on still continuing to create this show. Well that brings up the need then to focus on building the show and making the show itself as a product profitable, which leads to a couple of options.

It leads to most realistically advertisers and sponsorships and that right now is a very viable option. I've had advertisers approach me, multiple ones. I've negotiated certain things with some of them and I am willing to bring on advertisers as long as it's a personal endorsement by me. I'm willing to bring on advertisers but I've been slow to do that and the reason I've been slow is A) I think advertisers will dilute the show and I just don't love listening to advertisers myself.

I generally skip them on podcasting when I listen to them. I usually skip them myself and so I don't... I just don't love diluting the content of the show. And then number two is I just despise how people often in many businesses often only talk about a certain aspect of advertising and I'm not saying it's necessarily unethical.

I don't see any other way around it but I just despise how it's done and I feel cheated when people do it in the way that many people do it. I'll give you an example. This is one that really has bothered me. When I set up my site and I set up my show, I didn't know what I was...

I never set up a WordPress site. I never set up a blog site. I'm not a techie. I'm a financial planner. So and I was doing it myself so I just say well what do people recommend? So I start just going with what people recommend. Well if you haven't noticed and if you will...

if you haven't noticed it's only because you don't pay any attention to like the online business world. But if you pay any attention to the online business world you immediately find that there's one hosting provider that everybody recommends and that hosting provider is a company called Bluehost. Now it wasn't until I actually you know went through somebody's affiliate link, set up a Bluehost account, set up my site on Bluehost, paid my few dollars a month for it, until I actually found somebody that was technical enough and they said "Oh why did you go with Bluehost?" I said "Well everyone said that." Well what I've since learned is that Bluehost simply pays the highest commissions in the web hosting space and there's nothing wrong with their service but it's cheap.

And quickly enough if you're on Bluehost and if your site gains any traction you will have to transition from cheap to good. And I felt betrayed because I wish somebody had told me that there was cheap and there was good and laid out simply and said "If you want cheap here's an affiliate link I've set up with Bluehost and if you want good here's an affiliate link I've set up with another company and if you want great here's an affiliate link I've set up with another company and you pick." But it's tough for people promoting online web stuff to do that.

That's so... well Bluehost you know is this is my recommendation and you only find out after the fact that "Wait a second Bluehost may pay a great commission but they're not necessarily great." Now I don't care... so this is... people have this beef with the financial business and I think they should.

I think that you know financial advisors should be held to account of "Are you selling the product that has the highest commission or are you selling the product that is the best in this set of circumstances?" That's what I expect as an ethical point of view from financial advisors and I also expect the same thing from everybody else.

If you're gonna get mad at financial advisors, if you're gonna get mad at people like me who have sold lots of commissioned products, lots of commissioned insurance, I have sold some commissioned investments, not all the investment products that I sold were fee only which is the thing that everyone thinks you know fills all the conflicts of interest, it doesn't.

But I expect the same from everyone else and I expect someone to say "If you want cheap here's Bluehost if you want good here's this company if you want great here's this company and they're more expensive let me choose." And nobody does that. And which by the way if you're wondering why most blogs have the little how to set up a blog here's my little tutorial which is fine that works just tell people that's why you're doing it.

Why can't... I would buy I specifically go out of my way to support people with their affiliate links when they recommend products because I want them to get money and many of you do the same for me I don't have any affiliate links other than the Amazon links that I put in the show but you go out of your way to send me money again I've had listeners send me checks and I thank you for that because that's how I believe it should be.

I go out of my way to do that for people that bring value to me just tell me about it and so that's my trouble with sponsorships is for me to do sponsorships I got to do them in my way and that's you know hey this is the unique situation in which this this sponsor can serve you this is the unique selling proposition to this sponsor they're not the best at this they're not the best at that they're not the best at the third thing but they are great at this and that's the kind of sponsor that I can take on but that's tough to negotiate those sponsorship agreements and it's tough to feel confident tell your sponsors that and it's tough to also feel confident that that you've got enough you know of an audience in this niche topic here where hey if you need this niche financial service service then here is who you can approach so I'm willing to bring on sponsors in fact I I'm willing to but I don't really want to I want to be more than anything I want to be the consumer reports of financial media I don't want the conflicts of interest that's the other thing it is this sounds this is self-serving but this is the other thing having spent so long dealing with conflicts of interest because there are plenty in financial business and having spent so long fighting to do a good job and declare them and expose them and let the client choose and simply convey things factually explain here are my conflicts here's where I'm at now you are now armed with the information you need here's my recommendation here are the potential conflicts of interest and I I'm a you probably heard me do it on the show a bit of a stickler about it for example if I'm talking about you know Josh was opinion on life insurance I lead in which my opinion on life insurance is I think the majority of people should probably have a lot of it now I'm biased I used to say this every time I'm biased I sell life insurance I have a conflict of interest so you have to factor that in to the advice that I'm giving is Joshua saying everybody should have lots of term life insurance because he sells term life insurance or because he believes everyone should tell certain life insurance and I do that with everything try to explain my bias and explain the potential bias so that you can understand and make a decision and that's what I expect from other people so I've got a lead by example and illustrate those ethics for other people as well so let me stay on task so if I if I bring on sponsors then I will clearly say where this specific sponsor is a fit and also clearly say where they're not well that does make it challenging to bring out sponsors but the biggest thing excuse me I got off track with my line of thought what I'm saying is after so many years of working in a heavily conflict-laden perspective to have a microphone where you can say anything you want and you're responsible for the blowback that you create no matter what that is that is an awesome feeling it is a very freeing feeling and it's been years since I since I enjoyed that and I enjoy it now it's nice because then the only person that I have to pay attention to is I have to look and say do I believe what I'm about to say and am I willing to say and take the potential blowback do I believe this intensely enough if I do I can say it no matter how radical it is no matter how mainstream it is no matter what it is no matter what the topic is and I have to deal with the results and you as an audience member always are always free to simply hit fast forward or delete or unsubscribe I love that model I love that model because it leaves you fully with the choice and me with the choice then I can express myself and I can fight to support my opinions and explain to you the logic of my argument and then leave you free to make the decision that's right for you so I would love to be able to say stay as the consumer reports of financial media that's that's what I would love to do because then I can deliver to you a complete unfiltered view and if I end unfilter is not always great if somebody just has some stupid offensive opinion that's not backed up by anything I don't I don't appreciate listening to that I want someone if they have if somebody has an extreme or even potentially offensive opinion on something at least explain it and let me understand your logic let me understand your argument so so what all of that blows comes down to is I decided the best thing for the show at this point is to launch a patreon campaign campaign let me explain what patreon is and why I love this model and why what I'm doing with it and how I'm hoping you will be involved patreon is essentially a crowdfunding site similar in some ways to Kickstarter or what's that other one Indiegogo but instead of being focused on a large project it's focused on ongoing creations essentially it's a way for the audience of somebody's audience to support the creator the content creator directly for the creation it was started by a guy named to the best of my research it was the primary person behind it was a man named Jack Conte who was a musician and he produces various music videos which are fascinating the stuff he does with his music videos on YouTube and he just realized like there should be a better way so he created patreon and it's a way for individuals where each time he publishes a music video individuals can pledge a certain amount that they're going to pay for that music video and it can be you know a dollar or it can be you know it could be frankly any amount but they pledge that and then when he delivers the creation then they get charged and this allows a content creator to build what is the most important thing which is essentially an ongoing salary an ongoing financial support base in when you're running your own personal household or when you're running a business the toughest thing to handle is your cash flow and having a consistent cash flow gives you an incredible freedom to be able to invest and to move into certain things but if you don't know what your consistent cash flow is you're doing everything based upon savings you're doing it and you don't know how you can invest in a certain area take your content in a way that that that you're looking to go so a patreon allows this allows you the listener to choose a monthly amount that you decide this show is worth well you could be a dollar a month that can be hundreds of dollars a month anywhere in between and then it allows you to pledge it and then as I deliver you get billed for it and your fun your money goes directly from you directly to me with a small service fee and transaction fees pulled out by patreon and their fees are very reasonable all companies have fees so for example PayPal what is a pay three percent I think with the PayPal fees all of the the credit card processors everyone has their fees but it's very very very very useful and I love this idea and I feel like it's serve it's gonna serve you the audience in the best way and so that's why I'm focusing on it it's gonna serve you in the best way because it allows you to choose a monthly amount that's right for you again I've received many emails and contact information from you guys saying I can't do $10 a month but I really want to send you something I want to send a dollar a month or five dollars a month with this platform every single person can spend a dollar a month or you know if that's what you want to do or two dollars a month or five dollars a month whatever amount you decide this show is worth and I'm grateful for any amount and it also allows me to set up and to set up some incentives for you at different levels where you are specifically aligned and able to specifically able to support things and have the incentives aligned with the show so if you look at the patreon page and the best way to find it is go to radical personal finance dot com slash patron and that's so that you can become a patron of the show if you look at the patreon pages I've set it up I've set up a number of incentives so for example if you pledge a dollar a month that comes out to essentially five cents a show and now you get access to an exclusive activity feed which is similar to Facebook where I post all the behind-the-scenes information on all things radical personal finance so I'm focusing on producing a lot of I'm gonna try to produce more and more access of behind-the-scenes stuff directly to support to those who are supporting the show you also get first dibs and I'll set up a discount system for the courses as I develop them in the future I do still hope to develop courses I've just got a it's just a matter of an alignment of my of my time and figuring out what's the best thing if you do you know three dollars a month I've got additional incentives there you get the top next day's topic in advance so I'll be releasing the topic for whatever tomorrow's show is in advance you can comment on it you can ask questions and I'll try to weave that in and directly maybe address your concerns in that show five dollars a month your question will get priority in my Friday Q&A shows at this point I have too many questions for to answer to answer with on my Friday shows and so I have to pick and choose and I can filter I usually filter them based upon content of specifically what's applicable to the audience what I think the audience will most be interested in and will benefit from but this will allow me to give a priority to those who are patrons of the show ten dollars a month there then I'm going to set up a free monthly live Google Hangout where I'll take questions and I'll answer everything interactively with the audience $25 a month that's the new irregulars program and so I've increased the cost for the irregulars program from $10 to $25 and here this is the level at which I'm viewing essentially still the irregulars program which I think of as my board of directors and all of the that's who I'm primarily responsible to in my mind and to be clear those of you who are already supporting the show with the irregulars program your costs will never go up for this program that's what I'm planning is I'm gonna keep it still a little bit wonky to integrate the technology but what I'm working to do is to just thank you for the initial support that you gave for the show because that means the world to me the big benefit you get all those other benefits for the irregulars program that you get all the benefits of the the irregulars program but in addition to the you know the other stuff you get access to our private irregulars Facebook group and what I wanted to do was to create a forum but I wasn't able to get that to work well so we've created a private Facebook group and every irregular has access to that to closed group you can't find it if you go search on Facebook you can't act you can't join it unless you receive an invitation but I am spending the majority of my time in there trying to make sure that I'm very very available to listeners and I'm I'm spending less time on email I'm spending less time on show content and I'm really dedicated to spending as much of my time in that Facebook group as I can answering questions and the coolest thing is it's not just me there's a bunch of irregulars there's some very smart people very connected very experienced in very in many areas online business investing business you know traditional business and it's it's even and so far it's growing to be a pretty cool community and I think it's just gonna get better and better as time goes on so that's that's a big one and then I've got another man level there at $200 a month if you want to support the show at that level then I'll do an entire show on the topic of your choice you tell me the topic so if you want to get Joshua to just research a topic for you and you want to make sure it gets done support the show at $200 a month and then I will I'm gonna host a once a month essentially a mastermind call that's limited to four people but we'll host a once a month mastermind call with those four people and I will give you as much attention and focus as I can and so I'm gonna be reporting to you most importantly so that's in different levels that you can join at and every level matters again even a dollar a month it would be Matt what matters I've if at this point in time let me let me go through the campaigns let me tell you kind of how it works out as far as listenership of the show and the numbers I've also running a number of campaigns and these campaigns are goals under which I'll be reporting to you of certain amounts so for example the first goal is $2,000 a month if we can build the patron the patron campaign up to $2,000 per month at that point in time I'm going to commission a new intro for the show so those of you who hate the music then I'm gonna commission new intro for the show and those of you who love the music it'll still be around every now and then but it's maybe it'll be the outro music but it is a little it's a little much to do it both both sides of the show so that's the first thing is to get to that at $4,000 a month and you can see right on the patron patreon page let's go to radical personal finance comm slash patron and you can see it you can see it right there by the way both patron or patreon will work so radical personal finance comm slash patreon is the site patron is you you are the individual patron who's patronizing the show you're a patron of the arts so if you go to that you can see the number of at per month once I get it at $4,000 per month I will create a video course on the topic of your the audience choice and I will release that free instead of separate setting that up as a separate content for other people then I will release that directly to all of the patrons and that will be of as much value as I can possibly build and then the big one is ad free so the level of financial income that I need is for the show for this aspect of the show to keep the show ad free is about $6,000 per month and if we can get to $6,000 per month I will commit to keeping the ad the show ad free that's the first that's the big push that I'm gonna be asking for you to push toward and support the show at is a $6,000 a month I can keep the show ad free and the I've got other ones as well so for example I really want to bring a producer onto the show someone to help me edit especially some of the interviews some of the interviews get very long and they could use some editing but again with that the reason that they are long is I'm doing this with the number of hours that I have in a week and I just I don't have the time that I'm able to budget toward sitting down and going through the interview editing it carefully and you know making it more concise and I could certainly I could do fewer shows and release more and commit that time but I've received so much feedback from so many of you that you really are benefiting from the broad diverse show topics and so I want I feel like that's a better priority but after we get to the $6,000 per month I'll do a producer campaign I'll do other campaigns and the key with all of this is that everything you'll notice every one of the incentives is focused on the show and so what I've done is I've aligned my personal incentives to create a really great show for you and to serve you directly for listening to the show not for Joshua over here writing a book or not for Joshua over here creating a course it's all about the show and yes I'm I will still do those other things but now instead of having that internal conflict of should I do the show or should I focus on the serving you the patrons my direct incentive here is to serve you the patrons and so today I am launching this as a three-month campaign and a little over three months but the first initial phase of this campaign is until June 1st and I'm committing to keep the show ad free until June 1st and if we can get the if you if West if we together can build the show content excuse me skip build the patron contributions to $6,000 per month before June 1st I will continue to keep the show ad free this is the bad form to talk about your personal like things that's better form in sales to always talk about the needs of your audience but let me tell you why I'm choosing that so far I have funded I'm just I've invested in the business with my time and with my money out of my own savings and then done other work to support my family and again this is not a request for charity I'm coming up to the I was prepared to do that for one year from when I launched the show and I launched the show on July 1 and so I was prepared to do that for one year now at that point in time until one year but the other thing is my wife and I were expecting a baby girl this summer and so that's gonna be even more cut down on the amount of time that I have available and so I need the show to be financially viable for me to continue doing it at the rate that I'm doing it by that one year time point time horizon and so if I I know that I can make the $6,000 a month with the level of listenership and the ad and ads if I were to do that so but I really again for the reasons I've sketched out for your benefit I'm hoping to do this with this crowdfunding campaign instead of with ads so if we can do this about Jan June 1st to get to $6,000 a month I will keep the show ad free forever if we can't do it by June 1st then I'll bring ads onto the show and then probably once we get it under $6,000 a month my plan would then be to scrap the ads so I'm hoping that you guys can can do it so at this point I just simply ask you to consider supporting the show and here's the key if every listener to the show pledged just two bucks a month that would be we're at $6,000 and I can keep the show ad free for you forever and then many of you hopefully will pledge at a much higher amount than that and then I can get some really cool stuff done I can get better interviews I can do things I mean I've there's so many things as you bootstrap a business and I hope you'll find this out as you bootstrap your own business or build your own business you've got to make sure that you're focusing on what the on what serves the odd on what serves your customers there are as an example there are a bunch of big-name people that I would love to interview I'd love to interview you know Markowitz and sharp and and and John Bogle Jack Bogle and and you know I'm here on the island I've got there hundreds of billionaires within a 15-minute drive for me and I'd love to interview each one of them the challenge is where to allocate your time and so once I get I can build a financial model underneath the show that's supporting that then I can really increase the the the level of content to a much higher level and I'm still regardless of whether regardless of it I'm committed to doing this thing at a world-class level so I still am doing those but for me to get on a plane and fly to Philadelphia and sit down with Jack Bogle for an hour or two I'd love to do that but it's got to be I've got to be able to support it and justify it to my bookkeeper which is me to my business coach which is me so if every listener to the show pledged two bucks a month we're at six thousand dollars I can keep the show ad free forever and then we can build into some really great some really great content so I would just simply ask you to consider to consider supporting the show and consider being my customer directly and I commit to you if you pledge to the show I commit to you to continue working as hard as I possibly can and I promise to keep bringing to you in-depth financial information that will help you to to reach your financial goals and I'll do it in a straightforward way I'll tell you what I think every single time I will explain why I think so what I do so that you can figure out if I'm right or if I'm wrong and I will and I'll bring you thousands of dollars of tips and advice and information that will help you I will bring you thousands of dollars worth of that in the in future shows and as your financial advisor I would tell you you know if you can invest ten bucks a month or 25 bucks a month or one dollar a month and get thousands of dollars per month of value that's a pretty good investment and I can't think of another investment that's gonna help you as much as that one I really can't that's my commitment is to produce that level of value it's a little bit slow going sometimes I've had a bit of a learning curve and learning it but that's my level of commitment to you as the promo that I played there at the beginning actually as the promo I'm about to play for you said sorry I was gonna edit it in later I was gonna put it in here instead of at the beginning this listener as you're here in the testimonial this listener saved thirty thousand found thirty thousand dollars a year of savings from the content that I'm creating thirty thousand dollars in a year saved thirty thousand dollars from his wife choosing to stay at home actually it's gonna be in the beginning of the show you've already heard it that is that is that is awesome that is really really awesome and I will continue I've gotten more than just that let that voicemail that I played for you at the beginning I've gotten so many emails from listeners and and and I know the value is there and I'll continue to tighten things up on my end so consider please go support the show check your show notes you can click right there go to radical personal finance dot com slash patron and become a patron of the show super easy to sign up you could just simply click pledge all it'll ask you for you're gonna set up a user a put your name in email address password credit card number that's it and you can choose the amount that you can support the show so in fact I am going to skip the outro so now you have two minutes to do it two and a half minutes that normally you'd be listening to the outro and I ask you to go do it radical personal finance dot com slash patron watch the video read the levels pick an amount that's right for you and I'll be back with you tomorrow the holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos your go-to shrimp cocktail or your first Cajun risotto Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions Ralph's fresh for everyone choose from a great selection of digital coupons and use them up to five times in one transaction check our app for details Ralph's fresh for everyone