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. Radical Personal Finance is 100% listener supported. This allows me to bring you the show commercial free and also conflict of interest free.

For more information on how you can support the show even with as little as a dollar a month and some of the benefits of doing so, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Today on the show we dig into some Friday Q&A. I've got two questions lined up. Number one, Joshua, I've had an ideological change of heart and I no longer can do my job with a clear conscience.

How on earth do I transition to another career? Number two, Joshua, my income is fluctuating greatly. How do I plan for a fluctuating income? Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and this is the show for Friday, February 27, 2015. It will not be released on Friday, but it is the show for Friday as promised.

Life gets in the way sometimes and sometimes you have to make adjustments and that's what we're doing, but I've got a good one for you. It's useful to learn from other people's experiences and that's what we're going to do today. I really love doing these Friday Q&A shows because over my lifetime I have learned so much from listening to other people's scenarios and other people's stories.

There's something to be said for simply learning from someone else. In so many times it's easier to see what other people should do than it is to see what you should do. I know for me it's very much easier to see what other people should do, but not so easy to see what I should do in my own situation.

I'm sure it's the same for you. That's why these Friday shows I think are super, super valuable. Real quick, as we get started, last night we had the first ever Google Hangout for the patrons of the show. I want to thank all of you who came. It was an awesome experience for me.

I really enjoyed it. I know many of you were actually unintentionally frozen out of the Hangout. I apologize. There are two kinds of Google Hangouts that the Google Hangout system has. One of them has a system wherein you can allow everyone in and everyone can video chat and video conference.

That has a total of 10 people that can be admitted to that call. The other one is Google Live where essentially it transmits a video feed of me to the internet. You can chat in a chat room, but it doesn't allow everyone to be seen. I was trying to launch Google Live.

I practiced in advance and I had everything ready to go, but I wound up somehow. I still can't figure out how I did it. I accidentally launched a Google Hangout. That allowed only 10 people into the Google Hangout and several of you were frozen out. I apologize to those of you who were frozen out.

It was a really fun experience for me to be able to interact with 10 of you face to face and answer your questions and see your face and for us all to see each other. That was super fun. In the future, it'll be more of a scenario where I think you'll be able to see me and I'll be answering questions that you give in a chat room type of environment.

We'll have that worked out for next month. Thank you to all of those of you who came. I really enjoyed doing it with you. I really did. I guess I'll plug in the Patreon account here a couple of ways. Those Google Hangouts are available to you for everyone who supports the show at $10 per month or more.

Every single month I'll do a Google Hangout for all the supporters of the show who support the show at $10 a month or more. There are also a bunch of other benefits, but that's one of the primary benefits that you get at that level. I'll try to answer all your questions.

I'll try to give you all the details that I can. Today also, in a Friday Q&A show, if you're supporting the show for $5 per month or more, your questions will go to the head of the line. I'll get your questions ahead of other people's questions on the Friday Q&A show.

At this point, I have too many questions for me to ever answer them all on the show and more coming in all the time, which is great. So I think this will help to prioritize it. I think it's in a fairly ethical way where I'm not saying I'm not going to answer everyone's questions.

I'm not saying I'm not going to answer anyone who's not a supporting patron of the show, but it does help me to have a way of changing the flow of questions a little bit. So I invite you to go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. You can see all those benefits. So enough advertising.

Let's get to the questions. First question comes from Bill. Bill has a question about career planning. He writes me this question. "Joshua, the reason why I'm writing has nothing to do with finances but career advice. Did you or do you provide career counseling? If not, can you at least recommend someone you trust?

I thought I heard you mention on a previous show that you were involved in that line of work, but unless I'm mistaken, it may have been a guest. Brief introduction. I'm 32 years old, a recent MBA graduate, and have a really unique professional background that makes career transitions exceptionally difficult.

Suppose I were a client of yours who was considering a career change at a radical 50% pay cut. There are huge financial and emotional considerations at stake. Would such a career change be consistent with my financial goals? I've been working in a specific industry since I started fresh out of college.

I have recently undergone an ideological conversion to a different system of thinking, and I now face some cognitive dissonance over what I do for a living and who I do it for. I want out. In fact, this is the reason I went back to school for my MBA a couple years ago.

I thought the MBA might help me push the reset button on my career, but the job market hasn't been kind to me. I've applied to all kinds of jobs that I've thought were similar enough to the work I currently do. Unfortunately, I find myself caught between a rock and a hard place.

I'm too old to be considered for lower-tiered, entry-level positions. I'm also too inexperienced to be considered for more senior or mid-level positions. I am seen as a liability. Recruiters think I won't last very long if they bring me in at a lower level. Recruiters think I won't last very long if I'm brought into a new environment or industry.

I'm stuck. I'm hoping to speak to someone who can help me do two things. One, better understand what marketable skills I have, and two, better understand what jobs exist that are the best match for my skills. It gets a little crazier. Due to nondisclosure agreements I've signed, I cannot fully disclose the exact nature of my skills.

This is perhaps the real pickle, which makes this ordeal much harder than it would normally be for other career changers. What are your thoughts, Bill? Bill, this is an interesting question, and I'm going to give you some referrals and some resources at the end, but first I want to give you just some ideas, some things for you to consider.

I have a theme that I refer to continually in my own mind. I've been planning to do a whole show on this. I can't remember where it came from. It may have come from Charles Hugh Smith's books. I'm not sure where it came from, but the theme is how can I focus on working comfortably instead of retiring comfortably?

This is probably, if you think this show is all about retirement or early retirement or something like that, that might sound like a bit of a disconnect for you, but I think both of these things are important. I think any time we have a career crisis, we should first in essence focus on fixing that.

The reality is most of us will spend more time in our lives working, earning an income, than just about any other occupation or any other activity. Work, actually doing it and thinking about it, consumes a massive percentage of our time, and as such it's going to have a bigger impact on our life than just about anything else.

For me, in essence, I've got kind of an almost small informal rule. If there's a problem with our career or our work or our income, our job, our business, whatever you want to call it, that's almost always going to be the first priority. It's important to change our mindset and not be so focused on this idea of how can I do something that I don't really like just so I can pile up a bunch of money and retire comfortably down the road, and rather just simply focus on working comfortably.

Again, I wish I could remember who I'm supposed to attribute for giving me that phrase. I'll just pawn it off as my own, I guess, because I can't remember it. If any of you know, I don't know. I mean, it's the kind of thing that's not really original with anybody, but just remember this.

Focus always on working comfortably, not retiring comfortably. Then in essence, you've achieved what most people are trying to achieve through retirement. Now I personally was not always this way. I used to be very focused on the income and how to do well and have the highest income, but I've changed after years of doing financial planning and meeting with actual people and talking about their money.

As far as I'm concerned, I've cracked the code on money. I've cracked the code. I don't care all that much about top line revenue. I don't care all that much about what the number is of the salary. It's not the most important thing. It does matter, but it's not the most important thing.

Remember, you can build in today's modern world a life that is comfortable in every way, that has all of the conveniences of every kind, a life that is abundant and just wonderful for simply not much money. And you can also spend a lot of money on a life that's not really so abundant, not really so comfortable.

So the primary focus being on top line revenue, on salary, is not a valid focus. It's a valid focus, but it's not the only thing. I think a better approach is to say, "How can I optimize my way of earning the income and then work out the planning on the back end?" The challenge is this.

If a career doesn't fit your personal ideology, you can't possibly be world class at it. So that leads you to either you need to change your ideology or you need to change your career. There are a few ways to do this. I would say first, one change I think is a good one to make is change your mindset about the nature of your career.

I'm not defined by what I do for a living. Regardless of how people want to define me by that, I refuse to fit that definition. There are many things that I can do for a living, and these things do not define me. Whether I'm Mr. Successful Financial Planning Guru or whether I'm world class podcast host or whether I'm a guy who—what's the most menial task?

I'm a guy who cleans toilets for a living or I'm a guy who swings a hammer for a living or I'm a guy who digs a ditch or who delivers pizzas. I'm still the same guy. I'll tell you one of my favorite scenes from a movie. I always loved the movie with Harrison Ford.

It's called Sabrina. There's a character in that movie. I've watched it a couple times with my wife, and I really enjoy the movie. The character in that movie that I would most aspire to be when I was younger, it would have been to be whatever—I think his name was Linus.

That was the main protagonist, the hero of the movie, the big business guy. That was who I wanted to be when I was younger. These days, I want to be the chauffeur. If you're not familiar with the movie, there's a driver. The chauffeur in the movie, he takes a job.

It's clear at the end of the movie. It makes it clear. He takes the job of a chauffeur, so it gives him time to read and to learn. Whenever you see him in the movie, he's either driving or he's sitting in his home surrounded by his books. The natural outcome is when he's driving the car, when he's waiting for his passengers, he has time to read.

That was why he chose that career. It's funny to me because that to me is what I would rather make that choice and just have the time to pursue the things that are of interest to me and have enough money to support myself. Now, I say that simply because I'm not defined by what I do for a living, and neither are you.

Our culture would love to define you that way. Our culture would love to define you as a cog in an economic machine. It's not true. You're not. I'm not. We're not humans doing. We're humans being. It's a big difference. Now, historically, throughout the history of civilization, we all did pretty much the same thing.

A hundred years ago, the vast majority of us worked in the soil and provided for our means of living through the soil. Does that mean we were no different because we all did the same thing? No, we were incredibly different. We just happened to do the same thing. As far as I'm concerned, my career is simply a funding mechanism for my life.

It's nice if I can do that and earn my living in an agreeable way. That's really ideal. But it's not a guarantee, and it does not define me. It's just simply a funding mechanism. Now, it's taken me a little bit. I didn't have the confidence years ago to declare that quite as freely as I can declare it now.

I remember when I got out of college and I had the fancy-sounding job with a fancy-sounding title that could sound really cool. I got to the point where I didn't like doing the fancy-sounding job. I didn't like doing it no matter how fancy the title was. I realized I don't really care.

I don't need to be judged by somebody else's system of social ranking. One of my favorite sayings, "I reject your reality and substitute my own." So I just simply view a career as a funding mechanism for my life. That's it. So if you change your mindset about it, I think it can remove some of the fear and some of the associated baggage of emotions that's built into our careers.

Remember this. We are trained and conditioned as young, aggressive, career-minded people to spend all of our time thinking about our career. After all, a common meme in society is the purpose of schooling is to prepare you for your career. If you don't graduate from high school, you can't get a good job.

You heard that. We have job counselors and career counselors that start talking to us from the beginning age. Then that became from getting a good job because you have a high school degree, that became getting into a good college so you can get a good job. So we spend 12 years preparing for college and we spend four years or more preparing in college to get a good job.

Then once we get a good job, we're supposed to build out our resumes and you spend all your time focusing on getting a good job and managing career and you forget about your life. What a waste of time. It's a total waste of time. Now, do you need to support yourself?

Yes. Does the intelligent management of a career make a play a part? Yes. I probably couldn't be doing what I'm doing now if I hadn't done a little bit of an intelligent job managing my previous career. So I'm not saying throw that out the window. I'm saying adjust the priority and realize that it may be tough.

You may have to undo decades of training and thought about everything is about the career, everything is about the career. That's tough. But if you get there, man, having been stuck in that career mindset and then also having been I guess freed of it, it's pretty liberating to realize that there are thousands of things that I could do quite happily because I'm not identified by my career.

I don't care whether that's managing a surfer bar in Nicaragua or whether that is running a hostel in Turkey or whether that's setting up a business and working as an insurance agent in Hong Kong or whether it's working as an urban farmer in Atlanta, Georgia. It doesn't matter. I can build something great in any of those areas.

So I know I'm probably laboring at that a little too long, but it's a big factor is that we're scared to mess up our careers. We're scared to mar our perfect little resumes. People say, "I want to take a year off and travel," or, "I want to take two years off and travel, but I'm concerned about what it's going to do to my resume." What's it going to do to your resume?

Everybody you ever interview with, that's going to be what they're interested in because you have the guts to say, "Forget this. I'm going to go follow my own path and chart my own course and I'm going to go travel." Now does that make you a highly qualified candidate? Probably not because it shows more of an independent streak and you might not fit quite so well as somebody with pressure.

But to the right employer, that ability to think for yourself is going to be the selling point. Remember, I think most employers are at least in a small enough business where the business owner can actually have contact with many of the employees. Job skills are relatively easy to train.

Character skills are not easy to train. Of all the business owners with whom I've interacted, I think the majority of them would rather have somebody that was poorly experienced in a specific area but were very dependable in their personal character because you can train most of the things that you need to do.

It's hard to train somebody's character flaws. So change and adjust and just recognize at least your mindset about the nature of your career. Now many people do change their ideologies in order to fit their career. A lot of people do that. I've had to think about this. For example, when I got into the financial planning world, one of the biggest things that I really struggled with was my ideology prior to becoming a financial planning about certain types of insurance, specifically whole life insurance because I had an ideology that whole life insurance was never an acceptable financial product and that was what I spent several interviews trying to figure out.

Well, then I had to go and I recognized that it wasn't necessarily the career that was wrong. It was rather my ideology was poorly informed. There was a lot that I didn't know and once I understood that, I was able to change my ideology and then enter into a new career on an ethical basis.

So for some people, that might just need to learn something about a career. So just check your ideology and ask yourself, "Am I really violating something that's important?" If so, change the career. If not, you might change the ideology. If you don't want to change the ideology or you can't, change the career.

There are thousands of careers that I simply couldn't do and excel at for various reasons from the mundane to the pretty big. I've always been fascinated with trucking. From the time I was a kid, I wanted to be an over the road trucker. I thought that would be the coolest job in the world.

Probably most boys, little boys do. But I couldn't do that today with a clear conscience. I couldn't do it. It would destroy my family and I'm not willing to do that. So I simply am not willing to even consider that as an option even though I always thought it would be fun.

By the way, for some of you, it's not a bad retirement plan. I've talked to some people who are husband and wife teams of truckers and they specialize in expedited freight or something where when it's got to get there, it's got to get there. But then there are other times where they can hang out and they live in their truck and they earn quite a bit of money for the two of them with low living expenses.

In a few years, they've been able to salvage their retirement. I wish I could get some of them on the show. If any of you know anybody who has a story like that, then let me know. I've talked to some in person, but I've never been able to find someone that I could bring on the show.

But it's kind of a potential retirement plan. If you wind up broke and bankrupt at 55 years old, well, maybe you get on the road as team trucking. Do that for six or seven years, save all your money and you can change your future. But I couldn't be an over-the-road trucker.

I couldn't – I don't know. I couldn't work and I couldn't serve in the military. I couldn't work for the federal government even though I thought it would be super cool as a kid. When I was a kid, I always loved reading spy novels and novels about that. I always thought – but a kid doesn't probably.

I thought it would be fun to be a CIA agent or Jason Bourne or Jack Ryan. For me, I always loved Tom Clancy. So I thought that would be fun. Then later on, as an adult, I just evaluated as an adult away from the romance of it and realized I could never serve in that capacity with my ethics and my belief system.

I couldn't do it. Not saying other people can't do it. I couldn't do it. So I could never excel in that. So I would never be able to do that. If I were in that, I would have to change my career. So some of those types of things you may need to change.

It's not that bad to change a career. A couple of pieces of good career advice that have really helped me and one of them – I just mentioned this on last night's Google Hangout actually with the listeners of the show. The source of this was actually John T. Reid's book entitled "Succeeding." In that book, he makes this statement and he says, "Go where you're valued and appreciated, not where you're merely tolerated." For some reason, when I read that book years ago – and it's a great book by the way.

I highly recommend it. It will be on my list of recommended reading. I'll give you in a minute and I'll put links in the show notes. But when I read his book, I said, "Go where you're valued and appreciated, not merely tolerated." It just struck a chord. Now, his example was that he started his career as an army officer.

He went to West Point, graduated from West Point, was in the army. I think he was in the Rangers, something like that, was an army officer. But he didn't get along well in the army because he wasn't willing to play the political game. His army career, although he certainly had an honorable discharge and no external markings of that, but his army career was substantially short-lived and quite miserable as he relates it simply because he was not willing to bend to fit the environment around him.

So he was destined to not be successful within that context. But over time, he was able to transition to a different career and he actually transitioned first to the career of a real estate investor and later to the career of a self-help author writing self-help books and instructional how-to books.

The exact same character quality which made him persona non grata in the army made him loved and valued and appreciated in his career as a how-to book author. Same person, different scenario. That was a huge thought for me because I've realized that, for example, in the mainstream financial planning world, I am, as a person, I'm more tolerated and people appreciate certain things but I'm more tolerated than I am appreciated and valued.

I'm a bit of a maverick. I've got a bit of an independent streak. I've got strong ideas and strong ideology behind certain things and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. But in a world like this, in the world of radical personal finance, that exact same character trait instead of simply being – Joshua being someone to put up with, that same character trait can make me somebody that people appreciate.

You may not agree with me. Usually, I can just give enough time. I'll give you something to disagree with me about. But at least you can understand and appreciate that and I can buff at your thinking a little bit. I get emails all the time from listeners saying, "I just like listening to your show because I'm challenged with my ideas." And so it's a strength of – it's just a character trait of mine that gets reflected in the world around.

So check that book out. I'll give some recommended in a minute. But if you are in a place where your ideology doesn't fit what you're doing, you got to get out. You got to get out and go where you're valued and loved and appreciated, not simply tolerated. Where would you be that?

Where would you be loved and appreciated and tolerated? Well, that would be where it sounds like you need some time to figure out and know yourself. I don't know a better way to do this than to spend a lot of time with a journal. What careers sound fun? Daily list making.

Write down 30 jobs that to you seem super fun and super interesting. If I were making that list, it would be all kinds of wacky things. I was recently in a kind of a mentoring appointment with a young man that I've been mentoring a little bit and we were talking about this.

For me, I actually have these lists. But there would be things on there, everything from being a commercial sea fishing captain to working in a Starbucks restaurant to running a beef ranch to building a financial planning empire. Those things might seem disparate to somebody on the exterior. But I actually know specifically why each of those four different occupations appeals to me intensely.

Now, some people, they say, "Why on earth would you ever want to…" I know the reasons why. So for you, you've got to know those reasons. So start with making lists. Write down what are the jobs that sound fun, what are the careers that are interesting, and then look at them and look for the common threads.

What happens is we're often looking for an external solution to our problems instead of understanding who we are and what we want. We spend so much time, and I've been guilty of this, we spend so much time looking outside for someone else to tell us what we should do.

We don't simply sit down and say, "What sounds good to us? What do I actually think?" Spend a lot of time with a journal writing down what are you skilled at? What are the skills that you have? What things do you like? Sounds a little airy-fairy, but it's really important.

Many people have no idea, especially you sound like a motivated go-getter, MBA, getting jobs right out of college. Have you ever stopped to actually ask yourself what kind of person you are? The cool thing is you're only 32 years old. The bad thing is when you're 70 years old and you realize you've spent 40 years practicing medicine because your mom said it would be a good career for you, and then the reality was you wanted to go and, I don't know, travel the world as a vagabond artist.

Figure out who you are. Yeah, I think some people can help. Things can help. There's all kinds of interesting personality tests you can do. Some of them may be helpful. Some of them may not be. Now, here's the key, though. You do need to do a market assessment and figure out what does the market want.

Oftentimes, I get very nervous about some of the career advice I hear because we're always focusing. Sometimes, it just feels like we're too much focusing on ourselves and what we like and what we want to do and not enough on what the market wants and needs. Supply has to meet demand.

That's the reality. That's how the marketplace works. You need to look at the marketplace and say, "Okay, how could I use these skills and use this knowledge and use this ability and use these interests and use these natural inclinations and proclivities and apply it to a demand that exists in the marketplace?" Look at the trends.

I love to teach would be an example. I like to teach, obviously, but I don't have any interest in going into formal academia. Academia is dying. It's going to be very slow and very long-lived, but A, I wouldn't fit well in academia and B, the trend is down. The trend is down.

So I want to be here on the cutting edge of the so-called new media where the trend is up. So look at the trends and figure out where does my supply of labor and ideas and skills and knowledge, where does that meet the demand that's in the marketplace? If you spend a lot of time looking and thinking, you should be able to find a bunch of common threads in who you are, what you've learned, and what you've already applied and you should be able to smoke out those skills that are transferable.

You have a wealth of skills that are transferable to any industry. I'm just using myself as an example because you probably at this point in listening to the show, you know me a little bit and sometimes it's easier to see an example in someone else, but my sales skills are transferable to any industry.

The things I've learned in the sales of financial products, that's transferable. I don't care whether I'm selling cars or airplanes or boats or dog food or cutco knives. Sales is a very simple process once you master it. All you need to do is simply find out what the product is that you're going to sell, find out who wants that product, and figure out a way to reach those people and convey to them the value of your product.

Done. That's all you need to know about sales. Now, of course, the permutations of that are infinitely complex, but it's a very simple process. You measure the inputs, you measure the outputs, you adjust the inputs, you see how that affects the outputs. Done. Create a system of tracking it, create a system of actually producing that result and connecting the product with the people that need and value that product.

It's very transferable. That was why I wanted to learn sales originally when I was building my career. As I said, sales, highly compensated, highly difficult skill set to learn, and infinitely transferable to every business no matter if it's working for someone else or working for myself. That's why I set out to learn sales.

My investing skills are transferable to any industry. For example, I always thought it'd be fun to work for some kind of international mutual fund or hedge fund as an on-the-ground analyst. I enjoy traveling and I like business and I like finding things out about industries and looking at trends and things like that.

You hear that reflected in this show. I always thought it'd be really fun to be the on-the-ground guy traveling around Thailand on a motorbike trying to find where are the up-and-coming companies in the Thai economy. To me, that sounds like a tremendously perfect job description for me. Now, the problem is it's attached to working for a company where, in general, the poor analysts are incredibly overworked and, in my opinion, underpaid and it's not a good lifestyle fit.

Underpaid in the sense of too much work, yeah, they get paid well, but it would just destroy the rest of my life, so I've never pursued that. To me, that sounds super fun. That's the skill of business and investing. It's transferable. It's no different whether I'm out analyzing commercial real estate or out analyzing trying to find good farmland for someone who's invested in wanting to buy farms.

I have a skill and background and an interest in agriculture. I have an understanding and a basic understanding and experience with business and I have a real interest in investing and in trends, economic trends. So that's what I can take and I can take it out and use that to find farmland or I could build a career bird-dogging investment deals for local real estate investors.

If I had no money, all I got to do is go out, put the hard work in to find local real estate deals. I know a bunch of investors right here in West Palm Beach where I live who, if I brought them deals all day long, the hardest thing is just finding the deals.

I brought them deals, they put it through their filter, boom. There's thousands of dollars of finder's fees for finding the deals. That's a learnable skill and it combines the sales skills, building up the infrastructure. It all works together. So once you understand what your skills are and what your interests are, then you can create dozens and dozens and dozens of potential careers.

Many businesses are very similar. One thought I had for you when listening to your scenarios, I would say look at the anti-industry for your industry. If you've had an ideological change of heart, perhaps you should go on the attack against the industry in which you're now engaged. Example, you hear this if you pay attention to the things that get advertised in financial media.

Oftentimes you hear tax defense companies advertise people who are going to go with you against the IRS. Where do those people often get their start? They often get a start with a career with the IRS. Now, I personally, I could not – it would be a violation of my conscience at the moment for me to want to go and work for the IRS.

But I could go and work and be a tax defender and have an excellent fit between my ideology, what I enjoy and my skills. A bunch of people do that. They work for the IRS and then they transfer over later to a tax defense firm of some kind and they represent people who are in combat with the IRS.

So is there an anti-industry? Another example comes to me. I don't know if you're familiar. There's a guy online. You can check him out sometime. His name is Barry Cooper and he started off as a narcotics officer and he was working in the narcotics group for some law enforcement organization, some local police department I think.

If you believe his legend in his PR, he was highly decorated and highly successful as a narcotics officer. He had a change of heart and he sat down one day and he's like, "Why on earth am I putting all my time into busting people who are just doing drugs?

What is the ethical foundation of busting people who are doing drugs?" And he switched and now he is the anti-narc guy. He has a whole website and he provides expert witness testimony. He has a whole site called Never Get Busted where he teaches people how to avoid the drug laws, how to avoid getting arrested for drug violations, how to avoid prosecution, how to get out, how to pull apart legal cases.

He's built a business on it. Now I don't know how successful it is. My point is look for the anti-industry, for the industry that you have the ideological heart from. It doesn't get much more obvious than to go from being a narcotics police officer to representing everybody against narcotics violations and having a website where you teach people and YouTube videos where you teach people how to not get busted for drug violations.

Years ago I remember reading a book by John Perkins called Confessions of an Economic Hitman. In essence, Perkins describes in his book that his job for years and years was to travel the world as an agent of various organizations, the World Bank, just travel the world as an agent of various financial institutions and construct deals with various countries around the world, financing deals through the World Bank and through the USAID program and set up financing deals with them.

But the goal of his work, the ultimate effect and the goal of his work was to create a system of pressure that the United States could bring to bear on those countries to further the political goals of the United States. Well, he does this for years and then according to his book and according to his story, finally decides, "You know what?

This is not right. I'm going to change this." At that point in time, comes out and writes the Confessions of an Economic Hitman and becomes the anti-political manipulation guy, exposing what he was previously doing and leading the charge against it. So whether it's Barry Cooper or John Perkins or more recently Edward Snowden, work for the enemy and then go out and expose the enemy or whether it's Julian Assange, not a great example but remember – by the way, remember though when you become the anti-industry, Bradley Manning, the guy who provided all of the documents for Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks stuff, that guy is in jail.

So be careful what you do. You'd be winding up in jail. My point is, is there a way that you can leverage your experience in the anti-industry for the industry in which you're ideologically opposed now? I would also say look for work in the non-published, non-public job market. So first, you've spoken with recruiters.

Awesome. That's a whole topic in and of itself of how to effectively work with a recruiter. I like the idea of using recruiters to find work. But if you've not found a good fit with a recruiter or you're not finding success, then you need to create an opportunity for yourself.

Easy one is this. Man, if you are unqualified for jobs, then stop looking for a job and go create a business. Sounds silly, but it's not. Here's an interesting thought process for you. What would you do if you were an illegal immigrant to the United States of America and you had no ability to legally get a job?

How would you do that? I've worked with a bunch of them in the agriculture industry when I was younger and I was fascinated by this. But one of the things you find is oftentimes you simply start a business. What would you do if you were an ex-convict and you had a criminal history in the past that made it difficult for you to find a job?

I'd say one of the things you could do is just simply go look for something where that's not a factor. There are tons of industries in which you can do this. There's very consistent well-known industries. Half the real estate agents that have a business selling real estate got started because they didn't know what to do and they could go out and spend some time studying and get a real estate license and start making stuff happen.

I don't know if that's of interest, but it's like half the people that are involved in multi-level marketing companies have done exactly the same thing. They needed an ability and somebody came along and said, "Here's a product. Go sell it." I've worked with people. Fascinating to me, there are product representatives that just simply go out and find products and then go sell stuff.

No one ever told them they could. They just set it up and they made the deal happen. Or start a business. There's all kinds of businesses. Don't restrict yourself to one specific thing. What happens if you're a corporate employee, you may only be looking in that perspective and you're completely forgetting about just going out and creating an opportunity for yourself.

If you just go back and listen to all the shows that I've done, you'll find tons of examples of stuff like this. Remember, I interviewed a guy, was it Ryan Finley, who makes his entire living buying and selling stuff on Craigslist. And he makes a good living, by the way.

It took him a while, but he makes an excellent living, buying and selling appliances on Craigslist and now he runs an info marketing business where he teaches other people how to do that. If you can do it with that, you can do it with anything. Another flip side is, so create an opportunity for yourself.

Another way to do that is just go into just about any other industry, any industry in which you're interested, just about any level and just show up and do hard work and you'll quickly get promoted and advanced to the place that you need to be and that you deserve to be based upon your skills and qualifications and work.

As long as you're not working in the government, the government is the one place where actually performance isn't the basis of promotion. There is just show up, show up and go along to get along basically. But as long as you're not in a government entity, you can start at just about any level and if you demonstrate skill and hard work and work ethic and integrity and character and all of those good things that certainly I'm sure you have, you'll quickly be advanced.

In reality, I would say you kind of focus on what industry do you want to be in and then just get in, get a foothold in and once you're inside the industry, then everything is going to be a lot simpler to you. Another thing that is you're looking for a job and this is why you have to start with skills and talents and what interests you have is just simply sell your way in.

It's a real pity in my opinion that we don't teach sales skills to young people. As far as I'm concerned, we ought to scrap half of trigonometry or the whole year of trigonometry and teach sales skills. I think we'd have far more effective and happy and successful and richer and better adapted adults if we did that.

But we don't teach sales skills. We teach resumes and we have classes in college on writing a resume. Writing a resume and trying to get a job with a resume is like trying to go out and sell a Ferrari with a written brochure. You don't sell a Ferrari with a brochure.

You sell a Ferrari by tossing a rich guy the keys and saying, "Get in and see how it sounds." A resume might be a necessary box to check but it's not the way to sell a job. Go out and create an opportunity for yourself. So if you're going to do this, you need to know your target industry.

You need to network your way in. You need to sit down and make a list of is there a company or there are a number of companies. Let me use this as an example. Let's use my IRS versus anti-IRS industry example. Let's say you're working for the IRS and you say, "I don't want to be a revenue agent anymore but I really would like to kind of change because I've had an ideological change of heart.

By the way, I have some friends and actually clients, former clients who are revenue agents. No problem. I'm just saying for me that wouldn't be a good fit." But let's say for you, you want to transition from being a revenue agent for the IRS to something else. What you do is you make a list of all the skills and abilities and resources you have and you make a list of all of the firms that are the leaders in that space.

You research and identify which are the firms that you actually want to work for, which are the ones that have a good reputation, which are the ones that are doing a good job, that are behaving ethically. You take that short list. You figure out who at these firms do I need to meet and do I need to know and you sit down and you call if they're small or medium-sized firms.

You call the CEOs of every single one of those firms and you tell them, "Listen, I'm currently working in this capacity with the IRS. Now I want to transition and I want to work with you. I don't know if you're hiring. I would like to come by and give you an opportunity just to share with you a little bit of my story and see if I could be a fit for you in the future when you have opportunities." Don't wait for a job posting and apply.

It's too late. Make it. Find out in advance or at least get on the list. Network your way in. Learn your way in. Promote your way in. Start a whole business and start a whole website about it. Do something flashy and unusual. There are dozens and dozens of ways to do this depending on the amount of time you have, but it all comes back to the stuff I've talked about tons of times.

Become a leader in your field. Establish your reputation. Market yourself. Create for yourself a way to be highly in demand. If you spend more time thinking about that and less time thinking on how do I effectively write a cover letter, I think you'll – yeah, the cover letter might be important because remember, the business owner has to check the box so that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doesn't get on their back.

That's why they advertise jobs. I'm convinced half the jobs that get advertised purely get advertised just simply so that the head of HR cannot get fired or can have some legal standing. But man, I've never gotten a job off of a – job offer myself and I've never really seen anybody get a job off of a job offer.

You're working in a – the problem is this. Even if the company is legitimately advertising for a job, and I'm not saying they're not, you're competing at the point of massive competition instead of creating the demand up front. Give an example. I have this – I've had this discussion with people in the financial planning industry and very few people of them understand.

The big focus – and I think it's right, but a big focus is how do I get leads in financial planning industry? And so everyone is always focused whether it's – whatever aspect you're in, whether you're selling insurance or whether you're doing comprehensive, some kind of in-depth planning. A lead in my experience, I would generally not want just what most people market as leads.

If you're in the financial planning business, if you sign up for information on a website, you're going to immediately get on a list of leads and you're going to be sold. And so agents and reps sometimes have to go out and buy lists of leads. And can it work?

Yes, it can work. And I want to clarify a piece of information here. When I say lead, I'm talking about a non-qualified or only moderately qualified lead, someone who doesn't really know much about me but they're interested in – let's stick with insurance. Somebody wants to buy life insurance.

They put information into an online website for a quote – they're interested in a quote and that's it. I'm not talking about somebody who listens to Radical Personal Finance for an hour and a half a day and who knows me and who knows everything about me and then comes to me for information.

That's not a lead. That is a highly qualified prospective client if I were doing that type of planning business. Let's just stick with a lead. I hate working with leads. I hate it. I hate it, hate it, hate it. You know why? Because now I'm in competition. I'm in competition with two or three or 15 other insurance agents and I've got to somehow beat them out.

I've got to do some kind of dog and pony show. 100% of the time, if I've got to build my business on that, I would 100% of the time say no and I would go work with people who have no idea that they even want to buy life insurance.

I would approach them out of the blue. I'd go cold call and approach them out of the blue and talk to them about life insurance and then through some skillful discussions and some good questions and some good discussion, ask them if they have any interest in buying life insurance because now it's just me and I'm not in competition.

Well, it's the same thing in finding a job. If I go out and I apply for a job and there are dozens of other highly qualified applicants, now I'm going to be sorted across stupid criteria. Like did I go to a more prestigious college or university than the other guy?

Do I have an MBA after my name or not? I would much rather go out and create an opportunity where there is no competition, find what I want to do, go out and find who needs what I want to do and demonstrate to them that I can do it even if I've got to go work for free for two months and demonstrate it to them rather than following the clogged up mechanism of replying to job ads on monster.com.

Not that it can't work, just I don't have any interest in dealing in that world. So I would suggest to you that my plan is a little bit – I don't know. For me, it's better but your mileage may vary. Check it out. Couple of very important technical ideas for you.

Number one, you got to have a sound financial plan and so here would be what I mean. All of your ability to do these things is built and is contingent on your flexibility. So do you have money? Do you have savings? If you don't have savings and you recognize you're at a career transition point, stop any kind of external investments and save money and pile up money.

If you have debt, clear your debt because when you're talking about taking a 50% pay cut, if you're spending 90% of your income, taking a 50% pay cut, there's no possible way to do it unless you get rid of a bunch of debt and you cut your expenses. But if you're spending 20% of your income or you could live on 20% of your current income in another scenario, then yeah, take a 50% pay cut any day, especially if you're going into a career that you actually want, that you actually want to be a leader in and you can go from that 50% pay cut over the next three or four years to making double or triple or quadruple what you're making at your current job.

But if you remove all of the fixed obligations, so you clear your debt, you have savings and you're flexible on your lifestyle, maybe you can – then you can look at it as a comprehensive transition. If you move from New York City to rural Mississippi and you earn your income online, you might be able to build a way better lifestyle and way less money.

So there are some very practical financial planning steps that you need to consider on this journey. A couple of book recommendations and I hope this has been helpful for you. I hope it's just some ideas to spark your thinking. Realistically, I can't solve your problem but you can. Just apply a system of discipline, focus, systematic thinking.

Ask yourself, "If I were the president of this company and I'm putting all my fancy MBA knowledge to work, how would I do this?" and coach yourself through the process. Here are some books that might help you. The obvious one and kind of a good entry level one, a great one is Dan Miller's book, 48 Days of the Work You Love.

Some resonates with some – there are a bunch of mainstream job books. This is one. There's like What Color is Your Parachute is another famous one. Read them. Just look for inspiration but he does a good job. He has a good podcast if you're interested in career stuff. I've listened to it a little bit here and there.

Check out Dan Miller's work. He's got a bunch of career coaches that he does some career coaching. He certifies career coaches and I think there's probably a big value for career coaches and there may be a huge value for you in that context. Next check out John T. Reid's book, Succeeding.

It's just a good, really good general book. He doesn't really specifically talk about the job market but he does a little bit and I've just really enjoyed it since I mentioned it. Let me add that to the list. It's a good book. James Altucher wrote a book last year or the year before called Choose Yourself.

It's really an interesting, unusual book but he makes a big point of just simply like pick what you want to do. Choose yourself. Well worth reading. I enjoyed it when I read it. Then a good one which is pretty deep and pretty meaty but a well-written book. I don't enjoy a lot of the fluffy books because oftentimes they're just so fluffy and they hit at a point but the best book I've found that's kind of a comprehensive textbook on finding a job is by a guy named Charles Hugh Smith.

His book on this subject is called Get a Job, Build a Real Career, and Defy a Bewildering Economy. It's kind of a comprehensive look at the whole idea of how to get a job, build a real career and how to defy a bewildering economy. So check that book out.

I'll make sure there's links in the show notes. But man, listen, there are a world of incredible opportunities out there right now. So I say just get started and choose something you're passionate about and go focus on it. Go change the world. Choose something that interests you. I close this question with this scenario.

Years ago, I don't remember where I heard it, somebody described to me the concept of the hallway. It's been a helpful concept. And the idea is sometimes we open up a door and we look down a long hallway. We don't see anything except this long hallway. And we're a little scared to start walking down that hallway.

And so we sometimes don't do anything. We just sit and we sit and we sit and we sit and we sit and we sit and we sit. But if you would stop sitting and actually take a step forward and start walking, all of a sudden, there's a door. And you didn't see it from the end of the hallway.

But now you see the door and you can open up the door and you can look through it and see what's interesting on the other side. Maybe there's nothing there, in which case you close it and you keep going to the next one. Or maybe you go down that hallway or go into that room or whatever it happens to be.

The point is if you start moving, whatever that looks like, things happen. Exposure creates opportunity. As a former boss of mine, beat into my head every day, exposure creates opportunity. It's kind of funny. When I started Radical Personal Finance, I had no idea. I still practically have, I'm figuring things out, but I didn't really know what I'm doing.

I just kind of had an idea. But man, I've had so many opportunities that have come to me since doing it. But they wouldn't have come if I hadn't taken action. So just get started and start exploring, start reaching out to people, start networking. If you have a target industry, start writing down lists of target industries or start talking to people.

Make a podcast about your job search. Call people and say, "Hey, listen, I'm trying to find out what do you love about your job or I'm trying to figure out what's right for me." Write a blog series about it. Do something. All of a sudden, some opportunities will emerge that you'll be really excited about.

But if you're in a situation where you are hurting your conscience every day in what you're doing, you got to get out. Otherwise, you're going to wind up in an unhealthy place. Hope that helps, man. All right. Next question. It's a good thing I only grabbed two questions for today.

I knew that one would go for a while. Next question comes from Brandon. He says, "Hey, Joshua. Thanks so much for the show. It's really helped me and my fiancé get our finances in order and to start us thinking about how we could become financially independent. Even as a Canadian, I've gotten a ton out of the show and I've tried to hook as many people as possible as I can." Thank you, Brandon.

That is a huge deal. If you want to help the show, the biggest thing you can do, just tell people about it. Tell them about the show and then tell them just go to the App Store and search "radical personal finance" and you can listen. I made it super easy.

Just go to the App Store, search "radical personal finance." Keep going. "I was wondering if you might be able to touch on tips and tricks for someone who doesn't earn a consistent or regular income. I do video work and while it's consistent right now, I've spent most of my career either working every day in a month or not working at all for weeks at a time.

I was just curious if there might be any wisdom you can impart on those kinds of situations. Luckily, my fiancé has a very stable job and makes good money so it gives us the ability to plan at least a bit. Thanks again for the show. I look forward to it whenever I walk the dog and on the way to work.

Brandon." Brandon, thank you for the question. This is fun. So I would give you two simple answers. You said, "I was wondering if you might be able to touch on tips and tricks for someone who doesn't earn a consistent or regular income." The first answer, the big one, is start earning a consistent or regular income.

I know that sounds kind of smart, Alki. It was meant to a little bit. I'm serious. Change your income from an irregular income to a regular income and I'll give you a bunch of ideas on that. That would be the first way that I can go with answering this question and I'm very serious about that even though there is a bit of tongue in cheek.

Just simply stop earning an inconsistent income. It is hard to budget for an inconsistent and irregular income. It's hard to make that work. So make your irregular income a regular income. We'll talk about that. Number two would be, yes, you can adjust the budgeting system but this is tough.

So let's focus most of our time and attention on how to change from an irregular income to a regular income. The big thing I would focus on is simply increasing the demand for your services, whatever those are, so that you can pick and choose and schedule the work when you want to have it.

If you simply focus on that, you can solve your inconsistent and irregular income problem. How do you do that? Well, it probably comes down to how good is your product. Do you have a really excellent product? Also, how effective is your marketing? Probably the disconnect, which is for most of us, is how effective is your marketing?

But the key is create the demand for your products or services so that you have the choice over when and where you fill it. There is somebody in your industry, no matter the industry, and especially in the video industry, there's somebody in your industry who picks and chooses when they want to work.

Become that person. You can do this in just about any business. One of my favorites, let's see, probably one of my favorite examples here would be a guy named Joe Girard. I came across Joe Girard years ago. I don't even know how. I've researched all these weird arcane things.

Joe Girard is most famous for being recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's greatest salesman. He trumpets that high and loud, which is awesome. Good for him. Guinness, the year that he was done was the last year they ever awarded that. He was amazing. He sold over 13,000 cars.

He sold 13,001 cars at a Chevrolet dealership between 1963 and 1978. In case you're interested, that's 15 years, which means he sold an average of 866 cars per year over his entire career. Now, interestingly, I actually have reached out to him for an interview. He's declined, so I'd love to get him.

If any of you know him, tell him. I'd like to interview him on the show. For now, I'll just recount his story. When Joe Girard started working, he was broke and he couldn't feed his family. He tells this. He was completely broke. He'd been a total failure. He went down to an auto dealership.

It was in Michigan. He went to a car dealership. He said, "Listen, I need a job." This ties in perfectly to the first question. I'll give you a few details on the story. If I get anything wrong, it's just because I last read his books five, six, seven, eight years ago, something like that.

He walks into this car dealership and he says, "I need a job." The sales manager said, "I'm not going to hire you." He says, "I don't need any more people." If you're not aware, in the car sales industry, there needs to be a certain number of salespeople. You know, it's a ratio of people that come in because most of the salespeople get most of their business based upon walk-ins, walk-ins to the dealership.

People walk in. The next salesperson who's up walks out and takes them. If they sell them a car, they get the commission on that car. Joe was desperate. He strikes a deal with the guy. He says, "Listen, I won't take any walk-ins. I don't need any walk-ins. Just give me the ability to sell some cars.

I won't take anybody from the floor." The sales manager says, "Well, I guess if that's the deal, you can do it." He gives him a desk upstairs. Joe Gerard goes up and he starts cold calling out of the white pages or yellow pages to sell cars. As memory serves, he spent all day cold calling.

He didn't get many leads. He called and called and called and he was desperate. Late at night, it's 7.30 at night or something, he walks downstairs. The guy had no training. He walks downstairs and sees a customer there in the showroom. He looks around and there's nobody there. There's no other salespeople there.

He goes over and he starts helping the customer. He sells the guy a car. He didn't know what he was doing, but he went ahead and he sold the car. That started his career. He sold a car on his very first day, but it was pure happenstance. It was actually a technical violation of how he had started.

It gave him the courage to keep going. He just kept on calling and calling and calling. As memory serves, a few months later, he had sold so many cars that all the other salespeople were jealous. The dealership ended up firing him. Now, he went to another dealership and that was where he worked his career at a Chevrolet dealership.

The key that I remember, if you know anything about car sales or if you ever talk to car salespeople, the average car salesperson sells very few cars. Joe Girard, in one year, he sold over 1,200 or 1,300 cars one year. In his career, he sold 13,000 cars. That's 866 cars per year, but he was slower at the beginning than at the end.

In one year, I think he sold over 1,300 cars or about that number. These were all, as he puts it in his books, person to person, belly to belly, cars at fair prices with people, fair prices without—it wasn't fleet sales where he's selling 200 cars at a time, although that's not a bad strategy, by the way, if you're in sales.

There's an interesting story I heard one time about the Cutco, one of the Cutco leaders who took that strategy. We'll save that for another time. He told the story. He had customers lined up outside of his office to buy a car from Joe Girard. Over time, he got to the point where he had so many people coming to buy a car from him that he had them lined up, he hired staff, and ultimately, in the end, he only sold cars by appointment.

I'm serious. He only sold cars by appointment. He had people lined up. He had a team of people. He had a couple of assistants that handled all the paperwork for him. He had somebody that came in, and when somebody was going to come in and trade their car in, that person would do the appraisal and get all of that prearranged.

They get their financing prearranged, and Joe would just simply do the final sale right there in his office. You say, "How on earth did he do that?" Well, that's—you go read his books, and you'll see how he did that. Listen to his audio. He did it with a comprehensive system.

For example, he sold good quality cars at a fair price. He took care of his customers. He was aggressive with his marketing and his advertising. He would go to football games, and he would take a briefcase full of business cards, and he would throw them around. He would just throw them in the air and say, "Buy a car from Joe Girard." He would send all of his customers away with a massive stack of business cards in their glove box, and he would tell them all.

He would call them all a couple of days later and say, "Has people been admiring your car? Who are those people?" He would call those people and come and buy a car from Joe Girard, and he would give them a great deal. He had the whole service department. He took care of, in essence, a lot of his own service to make sure that his customers were happy and they came back every single time.

He had a whole comprehensive mailing system set up where every single month, every person that ever bought a car from him, every single month received a card from him. It would be, "Happy New Year," and "Happy Valentine's Day," and "Happy March," whatever you do in March, and "April," and "May," and "June," and "July," "Happy Birthday." He was constantly top of mind.

He would constantly stay in contact with his customers, and from everything, from all appearances, his customers loved him. By the way, from financial planning, interesting financial planning tip, he got rich in 15 years and retired. He didn't want to do it forever. He got rich in 15 years and retired.

Saved a bunch of money, retired, did a little bit of corporate speaking and things like that after retiring, but he didn't want to do that for the rest of his life. He was working hard. It was hard work. What was my point? My point is that you can probably do that in just about any industry if you figure out how to do it.

The key is to go from ho-hum, same as every other video person, to being in the upper echelon of your field, getting to the top 20%. How do you do that? I don't know. I don't know how you do it in your industry, but all you need to do is get started studying and learning and applying what others have done and see what works.

Just apply. Go down the road map that others have already gone down and apply what they've done and see if it works for you. I'll use myself as an example. In the past, I wanted to increase the demand for my financial planning services. I wanted to spend less time working with people who weren't a perfect fit for me.

I wanted to spend more time working with multimillionaire entrepreneurs and people who were close to retirement. That was what I wanted to do. One of the motivations I was starting a show was I sat down and I said, "You know what? If Dave Ramsey did individual financial planning and financial coaching, he would be booked solid morning to night at any rate he wanted to charge.

He could charge $10,000 an hour and he would be booked solid from day to night." I said, "What did he do? He's got nothing on me other than a 20-year head start." So I said, "Well, I've got this desire to do this show and worst case scenario, the show becomes an excellent marketing vehicle for my personal financial planning services.

Best case scenario, it becomes its own profitable business." So I focused on marketing. I started doing this. As I do it, I'm simply copying and modeling and learning from the people who are the best in the business. Why is my show here Monday through Friday? It's because I just with Dave Ramsey and Clark Howard and Jim Cramer on TV and Suzy Orman.

That's what they do. They do a show five days a week, so I'll do a show five days a week. I'm studying them and applying all the fundamentals. I'm copying them, but I'm making it better. I studied Dave Ramsey's business model. I say, "Where does his income come from?" I look through his products and I figure out, "Okay, he's got this.

He's got this. How does his business work?" Well, at this stage, originally, he just started with an idea, but the radio program simply serves as an outlet for people to find out about him. That leads them into his sales funnel. The radio program is presented to them free, but he makes money on the radio program with advertising.

This is his business model. He produces a radio program. It's broadcast across the nation. People like listening to it. It's interesting, so it's picked up by more stations that pick up and pay him for it. Then it's also paid for with advertising. His listeners are listening to his show and they're listening to his advertising, so they're actually paying him for his show.

Then as they consume the content, then at some point they say, "You know what? I need something that's a little bit more specific," so he's advertising his specific books and his courses. I say, "I'm going to go ahead and buy Total Money Makeover. I'm going to go ahead and buy this new book on kids' finances." They go ahead and buy it.

Well, this starts the deeper relationship. They're working through the sales funnel. Then he's constantly on the show. He's constantly referring to his book. He's sending them out to his listeners. He's referring to his courses, so he's setting up Financial Peace University classes and sending people to those classes. Then he's creating and marketing those classes to other demographics.

He sells it to churches and he sells it to businesses. Then he creates a kids' curriculum, so he's building out more markets to reach more people. It's all built upon the core and the foundation of the verbal radio show. But he's got dozens and dozens and dozens of lines—well, probably not dozens and dozens, but he's got over a dozen individual distinct lines of income.

He's got seminars. He's going and speaking at seminars. Then he creates other seminars. Some people listen to how an A-list client of the Dave Ramsey empire goes through their program. They start with listening on the radio. Their listenership creates income for him from the radio station paying for his program and also for them listening to their commercials.

So that starts. Then they go ahead and they probably buy a book. They may or may not read it, but they probably buy a book. Then they'll probably give that book away to their friends and they'll buy more books. At some point, they'll probably go to a Financial Peace University class if they have a good experience there, which by the way is a brilliant business model because Dave Ramsey sells the curriculum and other people do all the work and he has no responsibility for paying them to do the work.

So he's got a bunch of people who are proctoring the class because of their desire to help. He's getting rich from selling the product. They're helping and they're creating and building more customers for the business. It's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. It's amazing. He's an amazing business guy. So then they become interested.

They come to a live event, a live seminar to bring their reluctant spouse along is usually what it is. Then they go to one seminar. They go teach another class. They buy more books. He serves them with four or five new books depending on the situation. They buy the envelopes for their – the envelope system and the fancy little vinyl thing that you stick in your pocket for your managing your cash and he sells them.

He's got a whole other source. So the business owner doesn't necessarily need my information on how to get a credit card debt, but how can I teach people what I'm doing with his Entree Leadership Program and high-end exclusive events and just look at it and you sit back and you say, "What a brilliant business model and what a brilliant business mind." It's absolutely amazing.

He's doing a job that is desperately needed. The market is desperate for his work and for his information. I just judge that by the numbers and by the sheer volume of his success. He's helping a ton of people who are committed, passionate, not only customers but advocates. He's an evangelist and they're advocates and they would defend him and his philosophy, many of them, extremely vigorously.

I know because I once did that. He's built an empire little at a time, consistently, and he is the number one guru in this space. So all I'm doing is copying what he did. He didn't get that. He got there in 20 years. So I can't expect to do the same thing in 20 months, but I can get there in 20 years.

So what am I doing? I create – trying to create really great written – excuse me, verbal content. Trying to create it, working hard. Okay, that's the first thing I got to do. That has been working. Next, I need to get paid for that verbal content. I don't particularly want to go out and build out advertisers.

That's why I came to you, the audience, and I established the Patreon program. That allows me to get paid for creating that content. Now what am I trying to do on the back end? Well, I'm trying to build the systems and the support to build me – to create for me the bandwidth so that I can create other additional products to scratch the itches that the audience has.

So that will be additional books, additional information products, additional courses, additional seminars. Who knows? At some point, maybe I'll find the right fit and we'll start a new financial planning firm. I don't know. So I don't know where all these things are, but my point is by understanding what did the leaders in the industry do, I can start.

So go and do that likewise. There's someone in your field who's booked solid all the time, completely high in demand. Go copy them. Call them up on the phone and it's better if you go and find a dozen people in your industry. Call them up on the phone and say, "I'd like to take you to lunch.

You don't know me, but I've been observing your level of success and you certainly don't owe this to me, but would you be willing to let me take you out to lunch and ask you a few questions? I'd really benefit from the career advice if you're willing." Who's that in your industry?

Is it Steven Spielberg? Will he go out to lunch? I don't know. Maybe he will. Is it Phil – what's the guy that does Lord of the Rings? You know, big famous producer. Will he go out to lunch? I don't know. Maybe he will. He eats lunch and he usually eats lunch with other people.

So maybe you need to make a couple of connections. Maybe you need to reach this agent. I don't know. But maybe it's just the guy or gal in the next town over that has a really successful video business. Connect with them and learn from them. So thing one is focus on increasing the demand for your services so that you can schedule it consistently.

Now, it is possible that you could have an industry that simply doesn't lend itself well to being booked solid. If your job is shoveling snow, you don't have any business the rest of the year when there's no snow on the ground. So that's not going to work. If you're a farmer, you probably have a big payday in the fall when you sell your crops or your cattle into the market.

If you sell jumbo jets for Boeing, your sales cycle is probably extremely slow and extremely lengthy. No matter what you're doing, the world doesn't have the capacity or need for jumbo jets such that you can sell one every day or such that you can sell – Joe Gerard, if he sold 1,200 in a year divided by 365, he sold three and a half cars a day.

You're probably not going to sell three and a half jumbo jets a day. But you should still look for consistency in your income. So if you look for it, you might be able to create it. So look at the market around you and see what other people do. That's why landscapers shovel snow in winter and mow lawns in summer so that they have consistency and continuity of income.

A farmer who focuses and says, "I'm tired of being paid just every year," can build out a business model to create year-round cash flow. So compare the business model of a guy who is running thousands of acres of corn in Iowa and basically he has a payday twice a year.

He has a payday when he gets his subsidies and he gets a payday when he sells his corn into the market. That's it. Now compare that to somebody like Joel Salatin who's kind of the hero of the local farmer movement. Joel Salatin has dozens and dozens of businesses that operate on his farm.

Amazing. All of them create revenue and all of them are all kinds of different times of year. So he has consistent income all year round. And he's built the marketing empire around that such that he can pick and choose what he's doing and what he's selling into. That's business.

That's what all of us need to be doing is creating all kinds of services, marketing them effectively to build demand for them, and then profiting off of them. So a farmer doesn't have to sit back and say, "I'm just going to get my cash flow in the fall and then spend the rest of the year." You can create year-round cash flow.

Now, it may be some of those may be every year. Joel Salatin, I think he has a buyer's club. He has books that he's selling. He has all kinds of different things but some of his businesses will be only every couple of months. Here's the season when his chickens are ready and they're grown and he's ready to sell them into the market.

Eggs might be for a longer season but maybe larger chickens are a smaller season. So you build that out and you look at your business and analyze it. So here are some ideas in the video business. I've never been in the video business so it could be that I don't have a clue.

That's why I'm saying go find the people who do. But here are just a bunch of ideas I made up off the top of my head. Let's say you're a wedding videographer and that's your core reason. So for some reason, it's either feast or famine for you. You're either working every day or you're not working for a month at a time.

What you need is you need some kind of non-correlating income streams and a non-correlating asset class. Here's how we're applying the principles of investing and asset allocation to a business. So maybe that's corporate work. So I'm making this up to illustrate the point. Don't get bogged down in details but maybe all of your weddings are in the summertime.

So in the summertime, you're working every single day. But in the winter, you're empty. Well, maybe all the corporate meetings in your town are in the wintertime or the corporate conferences. So you can go and do the video work there. Or maybe what you find is that there are no corporate conferences or corporate meetings that you can videotape in your town but there's a lot of editing work.

So you can set up a scenario with somebody in Florida where all of the conventions that happen in Florida seem to happen in Orlando for some strange reason and they seem to happen in the wintertime for some strange reason. Well, guess what? People, the business executives in Chicago want to get out of town and they want to take their families and go to Disney World.

So now you've got a dry winter so you build a business doing freelancing editing work instead of videotaping. That builds out your winter income. Maybe it's the other way around. All your business is in the winter and nothing is in the summer. So you say, "Maybe I can build a business niche out of making beautiful sales videos for high-end real estate listings and high-end real estate agents." Not just the ho-hum, the $50,000 houses for sale.

Maybe it's the 500,000 or the million-dollar houses and you can do that for a few hundred bucks. Man, if I'm selling a million-dollar house, I don't know what your real estate commissions are in Canada but in the US it's about 3%. If I'm selling a million-dollar house and I'm going to have about a $30,000 commission, a 3% commission before broker's fees and all that come out, I can spend 500 bucks on a beautiful video that will really enhance my property.

Maybe that's the thing that works in the summer. So you build out a little business doing that. You get some marketing built and you get a client base of real estate agents that love you and refer you. Now you look at that and you say, "What's another area?" Everyone is taking movies with their phones constantly but nobody has the time to sit down and create something special off of them.

Maybe another business niche is I'm going to edit home movies for the middle class and piece together all of the clips of film that are on their iPhones and create that into a business and market that because filming is easy and editing is not. People need Christmas presents for their families and it's hard to figure out what to buy a mom who has everything in the world that she could ever need but she would love a video.

You market that to busy middle class or mass affluent clients who just want to do that and you say, "Send me, upload all your files off of your iPhone into this Dropbox account and I'll edit it together." You do a little bit of post-production magic and create this beautiful film and you charge them 500 bucks for it.

It probably doesn't take you that long. You could charge a really nice premium off it. You can maybe hire some of your video work done externally, the upfront editing, and you just add the final tweaks and now you've created a business that is active around the holidays or is marketed for Valentine's Day.

You know, "Okay, I need Christmas work and I need Valentine's Day work," and you build this out and that's an opportunity for you. So you're building out and saying, "Here's when it's famine so how can I build a business that's going to bring it in?" Maybe you can figure out how to build a stream of consistent income by hiring out editing services to some prominent YouTubers or better yet, here's an idea, find some local businesses and help them understand and implement new media and strike a deal with them where you do the upfront work but then you get a percentage of the increased sales that come from it.

So now you want consistency and you find a stable of 20 local businesses, all of whom you're going to help and create a weekly or bi-weekly YouTube video for their marketing platform that's going to be well done but they don't have to deal with it. I desperately want to do video for Radical Personal Finance.

I desperately want to do it. I think it would be really great. I haven't learned the skills yet but I would love to do it. I don't have the space in my day to do it. I would love to walk into a studio, shoot the content and somehow split that business opportunity with a partner.

No one's approached me with that and I bet there's people in your town who if you approach them could do that. There's a big – the stuff that seems easy to you is incredibly daunting and overwhelming to other people. So maybe you're great at creating the productions but you're bad at the content.

I'm brilliant at creating content. I have no shortage of content ideas. I just don't have the bandwidth yet. I haven't made it. I'm making it but I don't have the bandwidth to create it. So you pick one of those and if those aren't good ideas – I have no idea if they're not.

I haven't tested them. I made them all up off the top of my head but if those aren't good ideas then figure out a good idea that is and implement it. Then maybe here's your real consistent income is you create a – you sell the course. You create a continuity product of some time where you're building a course and maybe your vision is you get really successful with taking those iPhone clips off of people's phones and charging them $299 to create a home movie for mom for Christmas.

Now you take that and you teach local home educated kids how – Kennedy probably don't have those. You teach local high school kids how to do this themselves and now they can do this on a Saturday once a week and they can make $300 in a Saturday. That's a lot better than wasting their time working down at the local fast food franchise for minimum wage or maybe you master the real estate agent video marketing scenario and you can sell a high priced course teaching other people how to replicate that business idea or have a membership side of some kind.

So those are just hopefully things that will spark you to figure out what is it actually in your business and again, none of those are market tested ideas. I just made them all up but that type of thinking I think will get you closer and the simplest way to handle the problems created with your inconsistent and irregular income is going to be to create regular and consistent income that's ample and in excess of what you need for your expenses.

It might sound a little silly but that is the answer to your problem. Now as far as how to actually change and create a budgeting system to handle the irregular income, that's tough. It's probably simple but it's not necessarily easy and I've struggled with this for years myself. So when you – because I've had inconsistent and irregular income for – ever since I was laid off from the corporate job that I had before and got into the financial planning business.

And so it's very difficult to so-called budget under this kind of scenario. Now you may have to prioritize and say, "Okay, sometimes I'm going to pay this and not," but it's very difficult to do this idea of monthly budgeting. "All right, now I'm going to spend $3,000 next month and so I'm going to write it all down and end up with zero and have a zero-based budget." It's a great idea if you make $3,000 a month but what if you make $30,000 in one month and then nothing for the next four and then $15,000 and then nothing for the next 13 months.

So that's why I spend so much time on the other. That's the bigger problem and more challenging. Now the only way I've been able to solve this problem is with a buffer account and I think you need a buffer account if your income is inconsistent and irregular. You need a buffer account with lots of money in it and that's more important to your actual ability to execute on ideas than any of your long-term investment dollars, than any of your long-term IRA dollars, things like that.

You need a lot of money just in savings accounts and it helps if you can have or develop a sense of timing with regard to your income to actually know when it will come in. If I earn $0 this month, $30,000 the next month, zero for the next three and then $11,000 and then zero for the next 18 months, that is very difficult to plan around.

But if I know that, "Okay, I've got some history now and yes, there's a cycle where my income is down and my business is down during the winter months but it comes back during the summer months. Now I can plan," is what farmers do. Farmers are usually – they're planning based upon the depth of their bank loan.

I come from a family of farmers. They're usually planning based upon the depth of their bank loan. My grandfather always had a sign on his wall. He said – this is a non-profit enterprise. He said, "Taxes and banks keep it such," I think, something like that, a very empowering message.

I got waylaid. So the point is that if you know, "Okay, I'm going to make – here's my income. We're going to sell our crops and we're probably going to have a half a million dollars of income," then you sit down and you budget out the coming year. But every farmer I've ever met and done work with, you need a lot of money in the cash and cash just to fund those things.

That's about the only way I know to do it. So if you know the cycles, then you can figure out what's the real amount of money. But I think you just simply need deeper savings accounts than many other people. You need accurate records of what you're actually spending and so that you can have a sense of what does $30,000 in the bank mean.

Does that mean three months of expenses or does that mean 30 months of expenses? Big difference between your planning in those two scenarios. You need to have an idea of a buffer amount that you're focusing on and that would be different for every industry and every situation. Maybe you need three months of cash in the bank and maybe you need three years, very much dependent on what your expectations are.

If you can find a way to budget off of your steady income, that would be awesome. So let's say that all of your expenses are from your fiancé's income and you budget based upon that. But all of your extra fun and all of your real investments are from your income.

That would be really, really great. What I have worked towards is my goal and I almost hit it before I left the firm I was with. But my goal was to get to the point where I could always budget from my renewals and my residual income from my investment accounts.

So instead of ever relying on new commissions, which can come in in big chunks and be some consistent and some are not, then I could focus on, "Okay, I've got this level of base and I'll always budget off of that and save all of the new commissions." So then over time that was my very simple guidelines of how I would be able to make sure that I was always saving a lot of money but I was still increasing my lifestyle to a certain point where I didn't feel like I was just starving all the time.

Then in the early years I was focusing heavily on that, "How do I create more business so that I can get enough upfront commissions coming in until the renewals and the residuals and the size of the investment portfolios that I was managing got to the point where I could run my lifestyle off of that?" So now, under a different scenario, now my focus is to budget based upon my consulting income and the membership side income and my goal is to build that as the foundation of my business so that I can budget off of that regular income and then have different one-off business projects be the big, big money that I can save off of that I can invest off of.

Again, this is all relative to scale. If I'm making $2,000 of residual income and my expenses are $5,000, I can't do that. I got to be making big chunks. But if I'm making $20,000 of residual income then maybe I'll go ahead and just keep living on five or ten and save half of it.

So this is all relative. Hopefully you get the concept and the idea and then you've got to figure out what to do. The last piece of advice I would have for you in this situation is keep your fixed expenses and your fixed obligations low and your margin high. You can get away with living close to the edge if you have regular income.

Many people do. If you have a nice regular income that's a very consistent paycheck, you can go ahead and you can max your life out. You can borrow a bunch of money. You can do well. But you can't if you have irregular income and expect to keep your business going.

The number one cause of business failure is usually cash flow problems. Kind of self-evident, right? If businesses fail because they run out of money which means there's some extra problems. Is the problem a lack of sales or is the problem expenses too high or what? But the problem is cash flow management.

So if you can keep fixed expenses down then you can have a bit more margin. I could not be doing what I'm doing now if I had an extremely high fixed cost lifestyle. I've told you all how much money I make off the show so far. It's not enough to support my lifestyle.

But it's a long way away from the $5,000 or $6,000 I need gross of business expenses to support my lifestyle. It's a big difference between creating $5,000 a month versus $15,000 a month in the short term. So then in the early years while I invest and build a business, in the early years that will compound later on down the road and I'll have more flexibility.

But those are some thoughts that I have. I hope that's helpful to you, Brendan. That's the best guess I have and you'll have to figure out and take that and interpret it for your situation. As with all financial advice, this really is the big deal. As with all financial advice, you have to figure out how to apply this and interpret it to your situation.

Everything, you hear these things, the details of your situation are fact dependent. That's a big deal. They're fact dependent. There's a big difference between somebody saying, give you an example. I did planning work for one time for an attorney and he's at variable income. I asked him, how much money do you make?

He said, it varies. Some years, last year it was $3.5 million. This year it's looking like a $1.2 million. He says it kind of wanders around next year. I don't know. But he was winning big cases and so the income was extremely variable. Now, is it such a big deal to be budgeting if your income is between $1.2 million and $3.5 million?

Well, if you're spending $2 million every year, then it's a big deal. But thankfully, this guy wasn't. He was spending a few hundred thousand. He was certainly living fine. But it's not a big deal for him if it's between $1 million this year and $5 million the next year.

So the question is not just about irregular income. The question is, what's the scale? What is the actual scenario? What's the irregularity? So that's why I have to spend all this time talking about concepts and ideas and hopefully this has been helpful to you. So that's today's show. I'm sorry the show will be going out late, substantially late.

It's still in line. It's just, well, we'll get into that another time as far as the reasons. I'm still learning my own business and then learning how to buffer for the details of life and the details of life have been challenging the last few days. But here it is and I hope it's been helpful to you.

If you would like to get your questions answered on a show like this, feel free to email them to me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. And then I do always give priority to the patrons of the show. So if you email me, one thing I check actually, but the names, but it would be helpful to me if you email me a question, just make a note if you're a patron or not.

And that way I'll just be able to more easily prioritize and make sure that I'm prioritizing those of you who are patrons. And if you want to find out and become a patron, check out all the benefits at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. I've got a bunch of things there set up for you and hopefully you can benefit.

But we're doing well, but we're working hard to get to 6,000 a month of income for the show by June 1. And if we can do that, I can keep the show commercial free for you. So that's it. I'm out of here. Have a great weekend. Have a great day.

Bye. Thank you for listening to today's show. If you'd like to contact me personally, my email address is joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. You can also connect with the show on Twitter at RadicalPF and at facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment. But your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you.

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. 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 help me by coming to the show page and commenting so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here. With Kroger brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season because Kroger brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.

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