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Visit AskForPrevnar20.com. Usually I begin shows with a quick note about the benefits of becoming a patron, but today I'm simply going to begin with a quick thank you for having become a patron. I'm going to be answering patron questions today. I think it's appropriate that I simply stop and say thank you.

I appreciate each and every one of you who voluntarily supports the show. It means the world to me. Today I'm in the mood to do some Q&A, so I've pulled out four questions from the patrons of the show. First question is about journaling. Joshua, what tips do you have to be able to successfully journal, especially as regards financial planning?

Next question is about where to start. If you want to actually get started with your financial independence plan, literally what do you do with the first $100? Question regarding your money or your life, if it can still follow the investment recommendations set forth in that book. Finally, what are my ideas about families investing together?

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets. This is episode 185 of the show. I'm going to be doing a little bit of Q&A blitz over the next few shows. I've got a lot of questions that have piled up, especially questions from patrons of the show, things I haven't responded to, and I've decided to step forward and just knock them out.

These seem like fun to me right now. They fit my mood, and I know the audience likes listening to them, so I hope you enjoy. Today I wasn't in the mood to dig into any really technical stuff, so I just pulled out four questions that are not exactly technical, and so hopefully it will be a little bit of a lighter content show today for you.

But we're going to kick it off with a question here from Chris regarding journaling. Chris says, "Joshua, thank you so much for doing the show. Thank you for the effort that you put in and for the thought-provoking product that you create. It's worth the voluntary money." Chris, thank you.

I've got a very open-ended question. "You often talk about journaling and writing to help develop thoughts, ideas, and plans. How do you get started doing this? What should a listener focus on when getting into the habit of journaling? How often do you write in your journal? Without any framework or place to start, I find myself wanting to move on to other activities.

I think there's a huge amount of value to the idea of putting your thoughts down on paper and developing them, and it's something I'd like to start as soon as possible. It would be great to hear your thoughts and maybe some tactics that you employ to get the most out of your journaling time.

Keep up the great work, Chris." Chris, it's a good question, and I wonder with questions like this if I'm even qualified to answer it, because frankly, I'm a failed journaler in this way. When I was younger, I really wanted to be a consistent diary writer, I guess would be a better word, or a journaler.

I really wanted to do the idea where every day I would sit down at the end of the day and write out, "Today is March blah, blah, blah, and this is what happened today," and hear my thoughts about it and compose a beautiful one-page entry on it. I've never been able to do that.

If I go back to my childhood, I could put forth a stack of failed notebooks. I would get a fancy notebook and I would write, and I would usually write for about five days or maybe four days or three days, and then I would quit. Then three months later, I would write again, "Dear Diary," and I would want to just try to create that kind of journal.

I was inspired to do that by a couple of things. Probably the biggest influence on me was actually my sister's journals. I had a sister who died when she was 14 from epilepsy, and she had an epileptic seizure, but she left behind her journals. She was a committed journal writer.

My family had five or six of these little books, and it's so nice to be able to go through and read all of her journal entries. After enough time passes, it really was always a real comfort to my family as we were going through that process, and especially for me.

I was young when she died, and when I got older, I never really felt like I knew her, but I could go through and read her journal entries and actually get to know her a little bit better. I remember being inspired by that, and I always thought I was going to die young.

I'm not sure why, but I thought I was going to die young. I thought, "Well, I want to leave behind the same kind of legacy as my sister left behind. I never could do it." So for a long time, I'd always beat myself up about not consistently journaling and not consistently journaling and not consistently journaling.

But that changed when I did one simple thing, actually two simple things. Number one, I bought a book that I actually wanted to use, and I remember it was a Moleskine notebook. They're very hip and trendy. Well, I guess they were a few years ago. Maybe they're still hip and trendy.

But I liked that notebook because it was just one book, and it was fun but not too fancy, and it was usable, but it wasn't just common. I made myself the promise that I'm just going to write down when and what I feel like, and I'm not going to try to stick to anything because when I would try to stick to something, it would always feel like work.

That was the first time -- I still have the book. I keep all my old journals. But that was the first time that I could ever actually say that I followed through. The reason I followed through was because I made it easy for myself to follow through. I didn't try to stick to a standard of every day before bed, sitting down and writing for 10 minutes.

I couldn't do it. I never did it. I never wanted to do it enough to actually do that. But I did find that if I just wrote when and how and what I wanted to, then I stuck with it because I made it easy for myself. Now, I've since gone on and studied, and now I know that there are far smarter people than me that often talk about that.

It's well-known in modern success literature. I don't remember the guy's name of the guy's book, but he got famous for saying, "Don't say you're going to floss your teeth every night. Just floss one tooth. Make it easy or just pick up the flosser," the idea being that the easier you make the first step, then the easier the process will be.

Once you start flossing the first tooth, then you'll start flossing the other tooth, the other teeth. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. It did work for me in the sense of journaling years ago before I even knew about the psychological research on that subject. To me, though, it's important to make it easy, and it's important to understand the primary benefit of journaling.

This may vary for different people, but I'll tell you what it is for me. The primary benefit of journaling is being able to look at my own thoughts and to be able to think in a disciplined manner. We often don't know how good or how clear our thinking is until we see our own thoughts, and for me, it's actually more powerful to hear my own thoughts.

It's one of the reasons why it's a little easier for me to do a podcast than for many other people. Some people think well as writers. I actually think well as a speaker. And so for me, doing a podcast is cathartic. It's a way for me to hear my own thoughts.

I often listen to my own shows and try to think through, and I do a lot of preparation beforehand. I don't just sit here and talk. You're not hearing the first draft of my thoughts usually. But I do go through and often just want to hear myself talk, not in a narcissistic manner where I'm just my favorite person, but rather in the sense of if I hear myself talk, then I can think critically about what I'm saying and I can think and see does it stand up to inspection.

And journaling is one other way to do that. When you can actually get your thoughts out on paper, you can look at them in black and white and you can see are these good thoughts. For me, a lot of early journaling was writing down what I wanted in life.

It's kind of fun if you get in the habit of asking yourself what do I want. It's kind of a fun thing to talk about. And so a lot of the journaling where I would follow through was not necessarily me writing essays about my day, but rather me just writing lists.

I find it easy to write lists and especially writing lists about my goals. And I'll give you some specific prompts or things to start with. But ultimately, I would just say pick something that stands out to you and start. And again, I'm going to give you some specific ideas, but don't think that one is necessarily better than another.

The key is just pick whatever appeals to you at the time. Today, there is very little rhyme or reason to my madness as far as journaling. I just write down what I want to write down when I feel like writing it down. But I do have some ideas in the back of my head about prompts.

One of the first journaling exercises that really was effective for me was writing down a list of goals every day. I probably – yeah, I would have learned that from Brian Tracy who his first goal-setting exercise ever was simply to ask people to pull out a sheet of paper and write down a list of 10 goals that they would like to accomplish in the next year.

And he would talk to them about putting it in the present personal tense. So instead of writing, "I will earn $100,000," write it right down, "I earn $100,000 by – on January 1, 2016," or whatever the date is and just writing down lists of 10. And he would recommend as a very simple place to start doing that every day.

I did that for a long time. I would write down every day, get up, just write down a simple sheet of 10 goals that I'd like to do, my 10 most important goals. And that helped me to get a lot of clarity about what was important to me. I later moved on from that and realized that what was more valuable to me instead of writing just simple one-sentence ideas, it was more valuable to me to go through prompted – I don't know, visioning exercises I guess.

That was really useful to me. When somebody would step forth and say, "Write out – here's a question. Write out the answer to it." One of my favorites was always to think through an ideal day. What does a perfect day look like for you? That's a really useful one.

I love doing that one. If you're going to imagine the perfect day, what does it look like? Write it down and describe it with as much detail as possible. So think through where you are, what you do, what you look like, who you're with, what time does the day start, what do your surroundings look like, what time does the day end, etc.

I've done that one dozens and dozens and dozens of times. One of the outputs of that, radical personal finance. There are some things that are very important to me that directly tie into how and why I started the show. This show fulfills a very important part of my ideal day.

There's a reason I do it from home. I do it from a spare bedroom in my house. Now, you've got to put up with my dogs barking and my son crying in the background sometimes, but that fits my ideal day. I never sat down in my ideal day and said, "You know what?

I've got to get in a car and drive across town to fight the traffic." I always imagined getting up and having a cup of coffee and strolling into a beautiful office and sitting down and doing work that was important to me. Now, my office isn't quite as beautiful as it is in my ideal day, but I still – there's a cup of coffee here on my desk and I'm doing work that's important to me.

So I'm getting pretty close. So even just working alone, the fact that I can sit in my office by myself and I'm an introvert, so this fits that ideal day. I never imagined myself in a busy office with 45 other people that are responding to me and that I'm in charge of.

That doesn't fit my vision of an ideal day. I prefer to be alone a lot of the times. I get charged up sometimes by other people, but then I also get charged up just by being alone. So what you listen to every day is an output of my ideal day.

So try that one out. Write it out in detail. Now, I again – I like to talk. Again, I'm a verbal learner. I know I've said this many times, but it was just such an epiphany to me that I always spent a lot of my life thinking that I was – there was something wrong with me in the sense that if you are someone who talks a lot and you learn a little bit of social skill, you have to be very careful not to overtalk.

So I'm generally – depending on how comfortable I am with you, if you weren't a close friend for me, I would probably not talk very much if we were in a conversation because I don't want to be rude. But with my closest friends and with my wife, talking for me is cathartic.

And again, it was just such an epiphany when I read an essay or book or something on learning styles and I realized there was a verbal learning style. And all of a sudden, I read the description. I said, "That's me. That's who I am." And I'd always felt weird because I didn't necessarily think well visually.

I didn't think well with audible learning. I was a verbal learner. I come to conclusions as I talk them through. And so the reason this ties in here is one of the things I've done often is just I speak that vision out. Just use your cell phone. Maybe journaling in a written journal might be valuable for you, but it might be valuable for you just to pull out your cell phone and use the voice memo function and record what that ideal day looks like and then go back and listen to it.

Sometimes just getting clarity on what it is, even if you don't have a plan to get from here to there, can really be helpful. So that would be one prompt that would be useful. You could make a – so you got the 10 goals questions. You've got the prompt.

Another one that I find really useful, another journaling prompt, and there are lists of these things. Go online. You can find some lists somewhere. But one of the other ones is make a list of 30 things you want to do, 30 things you want to have, and 30 things you want to be before you die.

Something like that can be useful. Number of page, 1 to 30. Here are 30 things I want to do. And don't censor yourself. The key with expressing yourself visually is no one ever is ever going to read it. Don't censor yourself. Don't censor yourself to what's practical or what's doable.

Just write it down. And then the key is to sit back and look at it and ask yourself if you actually believe what you wrote, I think. Because a lot of times what I've found is I've written things down, written things down, written things down. And then I finally looked at it and said, "You know what?

I don't actually care about that. I'm writing that down because that's what I think people want me to say or that's what I think people want me to do or that's what I think people want me to look like as far as what they think is successful or what they think I should do." But that's not what I – that's not what's important to me.

Another useful one and to me I don't think this is something you need to do all the time. But if you're struggling, ask yourself questions. And so a good one is let's say you have a goal and your goal is to earn what mine was for a long time, $100,000 a year.

Then write the question. How can I – let's say that you're earning $50,000 a year. How can I increase my income from $50,000 a year to $100,000 a year? If you ask a specific question and then you write down say a list, say 30. I like 30 because oftentimes in my notebooks there will be 30 lines.

But the key is to have more than is comfortable and less than is impossible. And say I'm going to write 30 ideas of how I could increase my income from $50,000 a year to $100,000 a year and then start writing. Don't censor the answers. Make some of them wacky.

Make some of them impossible. Make some of them easy. Just write them down. And to me the key is that builds the creativity muscle to be able to come up with better ideas and more ideas. And then you can sit back. Remember, you don't have to do any of them.

You can sit back and actually see are any of these things that I want to do. And what will often happen is it will lead to another question. So let's say that you've decided the answer to go from $50,000 a year to $100,000 a year is I need to get a different job.

Okay, next question. What kind of job do I want to get? Or what are the things that are important to me in a job? Making lists like that. So if you'd like more ideas on some journaling prompts, I have some of them recorded in episode 116 of the show.

You can find that I think at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/116. If not, it's 116, How to Set and Achieve Your Financial Goals in 2015 and Beyond. And in the show notes, there are a bunch of journaling prompts that I have listed out there which you can try out and see if they're useful to you.

But just one other answer to your question is in simple, start with questions and lists. Lists are easier for me because they're not long-form prose writing. But then another thing is mind mapping and whiteboards. If you're not familiar with mind mapping, just look up the term and read an article on it.

But in essence, you just simply write at the center of the page one question and write out a spoke and write something else. So sometimes I find this to be a more intuitive way to think visually than writing out in long form. And this works really well for me on a whiteboard.

If you don't have a whiteboard, the best way to get a cheap big one is go to Home Depot, Lowe's or whatever your home improvement store is and look for what's called melamine. You can get a 4x8-foot sheet of I think it's called melamine, this white flexible material which is basically whiteboard material and it costs about $13.

And that is a cheap way to put up a 4x8-foot whiteboard. Get yourself some nice, big, fat, juicy whiteboard markers and write at the middle of the page, goals. And then give yourself different categories. So let's say that you're going to go through this as a goal-setting process. Write goals and then put a spoke out and write health and then circle health and then put a spoke out from that and say tan.

I want to be tan or I want to be not sick or I want to be skinny or I want six-pack abs or I want to be strong or whatever. And just get this hub and spoke brainstorming system for me is a really useful way to think. That would be another way to try it.

Let's wrap up the question. Try some of these different things. Just do some search for journaling prompts. Give yourself permission not to stick with it but just buy one notebook and say whenever I feel like I'm going to write things down. And then go back from time to time and look at your thinking.

Ask yourself, "Do I believe this? Do I really want to do this?" And for me, some of the biggest benefits of journaling and some of the biggest benefits of writing down goals is I would take goals out of my head, put them on a sheet of paper, think I wanted to do that.

Think I wanted to do them, write them down, write them down, write them down, and finally one day just sit down and say, "You know what? I don't care. That is not important to me." And by eliminating that goal, I've freed up a bunch of time and energy for something else.

I don't have a single goal at this point regarding what kind of car I want to drive or what kind of toy I want to have. I don't care. It's just whatever the next car is if I need one. Right now, my minivan works great. If something stops working, then I'll sit down and try to figure out what the needs of my family are at that time and do that.

But I no longer have to deal with that idea of I want a 2016 Chevy Corvette. I don't even fit in Corvettes, but you get the idea. So give yourself permission to mess it up. I hope that's at least a good thought to get started with. Next question comes from Gary on.

He says, "Hey, Joshua. One of the biggest goals I have in my life is to become financially independent. I never came across your podcast in the first place, but I'm having a hard time figuring out where exactly to go from here. I just started keeping track of every penny I make and spend so that I can start to budget and plan accordingly.

I know I should have done this years ago, but I got to start somewhere. I'm 26 years old and have very little experience saving. I'm a compulsive spender, but I know I can change my habits with the right motivation, and I know that I'm still young enough to make a significant change in my life.

I've tried to find something from the beginning in your podcasts, but I haven't found one yet that meets my needs. The question I have is really basic to anyone who's been doing financial planning for a while. What do I do with my first savings? Say it's only $100. Do I keep it in cash at my house or do I open a savings account and keep it there?

How much should I have saved before I start looking at other options or retirement accounts, et cetera? Sincerely, Gary Young." Gary, it's a simple question but it's not necessarily an easy question. The key, as everything in financial planning is always, what is the goal and what's the basic plan to get there?

And that's why I worked through the stages of financial independence to try to give you my best bet. I'm not going to repeat that here in detail, but I do think that's the first place to start. But I'll give you a few examples of where I would begin, specifically what to do with $100.

Yeah, if I only had $100 of savings, I'd keep it in cash at my house. But assuming you're gainfully employed, then obviously we're talking about more than $100. There is no specific dollar amount that I or anybody could put onto your goal. But you've got to go through the work of creating a dollar amount.

Maybe it's $1,000. That's probably reasonable and that's just maybe the basics of some kind of starting emergency fund type of thing, just building some cash. If you start from the perspective of where are you on the stages of financial independence, are you dependent on someone else? If so, the first key is to move from dependency to solvency.

Then to stability, you need a buffer account, and so that should be a few months of expenses. Primarily, you just want to keep that in cash, and that can either be cash in a checking account, savings account, in your wallet, under your bed, whatever. You've got to look at what actually works for you and what doesn't.

So if you say you're a compulsive spender, then identify that and in the same way that if you are a compulsive eater and you're trying to figure out what are the things that always wind up in my eating the wrong things, what's the path, then figure out how to avoid that.

So if you're the kind of person who compulsively spends cash, then it wouldn't be a good idea for you to carry around a lot of cash in your pocket until you get that figured out. But if you're compulsively spending on a credit card, then don't carry the credit card around.

Or if you're compulsively spending on a debit card, then you wouldn't want to keep your cash in a checking account. Think it through for yourself and think what is working and what is not working. Once you clarify your goals of what you actually want – and financial independence is kind of – in my opinion, it's a bad starting goal because it's a huge goal.

By financial independence, I think you probably mean I want to be so rich that I don't have to work and I can provide my lifestyle. That's a good goal and it's good to save towards, but I think you should start with what do I actually want my day to look like?

Because let's say that you're just getting started with your savings and let's say that you have $2,000 or $3,000 and assume you have no debt or little debt and so you've got a little bit of savings. Why do you want to be financially independent? If you want to be financially independent so you can go scuba diving every day, maybe the best use of that $2,000 instead of putting it into an index fund would be to buy a plane ticket down to Belize and get yourself a job working at a dive shop or being a dive instructor, and you can go ahead and live that lifestyle now.

I have a buddy who did that. He quit his Merrill Lynch financial advisor job and realized that he hated the financial advisory business. He loaded up a backpack and he moved to South America. I can't remember. I think it was – no, it was – he moved to South America and he was working on a dive shop.

If you want to go out and spend all your time hiking, maybe it might be better for you to just go be a park ranger at some remote Alaskan national park than to go through all the work of taking and saving half a million dollars so that then you can go and hike.

So what does financial independence actually mean to you? I think if you start from that perspective, what you're going to do is your basic steps is going to be to build some savings and then focus on optimizing the way that you earn your income and the way that you spend your money and then move on to the long-term investing.

When you start long-term investing, remember, you've always got to decide, "What am I actually buying?" The only point of long-term investing is to cover your future living needs. So you might want to consider buying what you actually need to live first. So this is where the best example here would be housing.

You can invest so that you can pay for housing and in some markets and in some times that will be the right move. Other times you could just go ahead and buy your housing. So depending on the cost factor, you want to be financially independent and you sit down and figure out, "Well, I don't need a big traditional three-bedroom, two-bath house with a two-car garage.

That's not what my ideal lifestyle is. But rather I need an RV." Well, in this case, then you're better off investing just in a checking account until you buy an RV and you move into your RV. Now you're programming computers and that's what your income is and you can travel around the US all the time programming through a cell phone connection.

Or you decide, "Actually, that kind of lifestyle doesn't matter at all to me and I'm just going to go ahead and live in a traditional stick frame house and I'm going to take out a mortgage. In this case, I have invested in myself and in my income to the point enough to where I can go on and do other things." And now you just stick your money into a mutual fund.

So I'm being a little bit vague. Your question is a little bit vague of literally where would you keep the money. But I'm trying to demonstrate how to think it through because depending on what you want, that's going to depend on your perspective. If it helps you, then try to put yourself into somebody else's shoes or try to pretend that you're advising somebody else.

A lot of times we don't – we think we don't know what's the next thing to do because we're dealing with ourselves. We're trying to figure out in our own brain what's happening. But if you were telling a buddy of yours what they should do, it would probably become pretty apparent.

So try that. Either actually get together with a buddy and talk to them about what you're trying to do or just sit down and pretend that you're advising a friend of yours. Change the name and pretend that you wrote yourself that letter and ask how you would do it.

When you're clear on your goals, the path will be a lot easier. But until you're clear on your goal and you know why you want the goal, the path is very difficult. The last example that comes to me is one of the mental lenses through which I think sometimes is the thought of a migrant worker.

I used to enjoy when I was younger and in high school and college, I spent a lot of time working with Spanish migrant workers here in South Florida. Most of them were from Mexico and from Guatemala. I always enjoyed talking with them about their financial goals. What was so interesting to me and I'm amazed at is how they're primarily men.

Most of the time their families are back in Central America. That's the primary Hispanic population that we have here in South Florida, at least the unacculturated Spanish population. Most of their families are back in Central America and they're just simply here earning as much money as they can so that they can be rich and go back and be with their families.

That's an interesting mental model because all they simply do is just focus on spending the minimum amount of possible and they send as much money back to their family as possible. Then they set up a little life for themselves in Central America. I'm always amazed sometimes you travel through some little town in Guatemala and you can tell which families have family members in the US working versus not because they're a much fancier house than a lot of the other houses.

My point in that example is they're very focused. They're just here to work and they're building up as much money as possible and investing back home. Because they know what they want to invest in, they're not going to get that connected to the US-based economy. They're not going to start putting money in a 401(k) because what is more valuable is to save some money towards buying land in Guatemala.

Or they're not going to spend a lot of money on a speculative investment because the cash goes a lot farther in Guatemala. They're clear on what their goals are. I'm telling you, if you want to learn how to be clear on financial goals and how to be efficient, some of my friends that I talked to on this – unfortunately, I've lost contact with a lot of them over the last years.

But these guys are amazing as far as their ability to live in an expensive place on very low money. I've thought about going and trying to do some interviews with them, good radical personal finance, financial tips from migrant workers. One of these days I will. But I can't answer the question more fully without specific goals.

But if you'll say specific goals and specific visions and specific ideas going back to the journaling question, then you'll be able to know what to do naturally next. Next question from Daniel. Hey, Joshua. Question. With regard to the book Your Money or Your Life – I've been reading it for the past few days – is the strategy for investment and financial independence that the authors put forth in chapter nine still valid?

I apologize if you've covered this already. I'm working to get caught up with all your podcasts. Keep up the awesome work. Daniel. Daniel, no. It's not. For those of you who aren't familiar with Your Money or Your Life, the original book was published in the 1990s, and the one and only investment strategy that was laid out by the authors was to invest using government bonds.

And the idea was you can just simply live on the interest and nothing but the interest from the government bonds. Now, the challenge is in the early '90s, the bond rates were – in '90, it was 8% for a 10-year T bond and '91, 7% for a 10-year T bond.

That's very different than today where in 2000 and – at the end of 2014, what were it? Between two and three quarters, two to three percent on a 10-year T bond? If you did focus on that investment strategy, you have to save twice or more as much money as originally you would have if you were following the same strategy in the '90s.

And worse, you're not really accounting for inflation. Now, what the authors in that book do a good job pointing out is don't just pay attention to the general rate of inflation in the general society. Pay attention to your own specific inflation rate, and that could be true. I believe it was Doug Nordman when he was on the show that he said that the original – that Joe Dominguez followed that investment strategy until he died, and he never deviated from it.

So theoretically, I guess you could do it if you wanted to. So maybe I might know it was a little bit hasty, but I don't think it's the right investment – no. I don't think anybody should follow it as it's laid out in the book. In the updated versions, they did work on some additional commentary and provide some additional options.

If you were going to – following the same kind of – basically the conservative recommendation of that day was T-bonds. Today, the conservative recommendation is essentially a balanced index fund portfolio. That's kind of a similar thing. One of the reasons why I don't – I try not to give super specific investment advice and say always do this is because as soon as you do that, you can quickly become irrelevant.

That book always has to be given with a caveat that this investment advice is no longer valid, but the other concepts in it are. And the reason, in my opinion, the ideas and the tools and the tactics of investing change over time, and it's more valuable. I love what Jacob Lund Fisker did in his book Early Retirement Extreme where he steered away from talking about the specifics of investing and focused on how to be an investor and how to look at investing in general.

To me, the specifics of investing will change. They change as the markets become competitive, as some markets become in favor, some markets don't come in favor. They change as technology adjusts it and different trading mechanisms work and different trading mechanisms don't work. And the style of investing in many ways will change from year to year.

But then there are also some things that don't change. And I struggle to be able to effectively articulate it, but in essence – I love that quote that I read about John Templeton in Tony Robbins' book Money where he talked about the quote of John Templeton where I think it was an associate of his said he'd buy a tree if he could make money on it.

That when you actually look at investing, the key is to understand a strategy of investing that works for you. And all investing is about building income. So whether you're doing that with interest like you would be if you were following Joe and Vicki's original investment outline, whether you're doing that with dividends, you get interested in dividend stock investing and you're buying individual stocks and living off those dividends, or if you're just spending rents or royalties or any way that your money comes in, the key is how can you create income in an effective way?

We can only spend income. That's it. So the only reason we're investing is basically to create income. And you can create income by liquidating shares. You can set up a mutual fund and you can spend the dividends off of that portfolio and you can liquidate some of the shares and you can do a combination strategy.

You can just spend dividends. Or you can flip stuff. You could flip a house. You can buy and sell beanie babies online or find some incredible little market. My wife could probably make money buying and selling cloth diapers. I should suggest that to her. And it's all a matter of how can I create income.

I had a friend of mine one time who worked in a coin shop and he would put together these collections of coins and sell them to collectors, these rare coins of high numismatic value, and he had the ability to put together complete sets and sell them. And every single investment strategy has risks.

It's impossible to remove risk. And so at the time what Joe – primarily Joe I assume because he was the one with the trading background who was trying to articulate an option for how to invest. But primarily Joe, what he was looking at was the safest thing he could find.

But that's not as different in 2015. So there are other episodes of the show and that's why I'm trying to bring on different people from different perspectives to demonstrate different strategies. But remember that all investing is basically investing for income. And whether you're spending – again, you're taking interest income from bonds or you're spending dividends from stocks or you're selling stocks and spending the principal down.

Or you're taking rents from real estate or rents from a cell phone tower that you own or you're collecting profits from a business. The whole point is income and you'll figure out a strategy that works for you. I personally would not recommend somebody follow that investment advice. I think that does not work in today's world.

Next and final question for today comes from Ryan. Ryan says, "Josh, I'm a huge fan of the show and of your format. It's refreshing to have an in-depth discussion of personal finance rather than the surface level stuff that you find online." Thank you, Ryan. "I've been growing more interested in personal financing and investing and I'm curious if you've ever encountered or heard of families that invest together, whether it be siblings or siblings and parents investing together.

This is something I've been pondering lately. It seems like this would be a smart way for families to invest and take advantage of strength in numbers. Perhaps it's not discussed because it's taboo to talk about money at that level of detail. I really have zero experience in this area so it would be interesting to hear what some of the benefits or challenges would be of this kind of thing or if you've personally heard of families doing this.

Keep up the good work and know that your work has had an impact on me. Ryan." Ryan, thank you. Interesting, very broad question because if we're talking about it on a US-centric focus or a global-centric focus, that would be one answer. In the US, very few families seem to invest together.

We don't have very close family units. Most of us generally don't work very much with finance with our families. We have a social taboo about wanting to get involved financially in our families. Parents usually want kids to be independent. Kids usually want to be independent of parents. Usually, we don't want to be connected with our siblings.

But if you go globally, that completely flips for most societies. Globally, many societies, the family structure is an incredibly important part of their financial establishment. So that would be one way of looking at it. You could look at it on the context of scale. There are a few global families who most definitely invest together.

I've got some friends. I've never really worked in this market but I've got friends that work at some of the large trust companies or some of the – what we call single-family or multifamily offices here on Palm Beach where we have some of the wealthiest families. We have some of the wealthy dynasties and some of them you've heard of.

Some of them you haven't heard of. You've heard of their families, the big ones as far as the families that have been able to keep their wealth together through generations. You've got the Rockefellers, the DuPonts, the Sassoons, the Rothschilds, maybe the Ford family. There are a few more recent ones, the Hiltons or the Marriotts, those types of people who they're working to bring things together and be able to have their families invest together.

That's a very different type of family investing together scale, however, than is the concept of me and one of my brothers starting a local real estate development firm or me partnering with my dad or mom as the financing arm behind a real estate deal. That can certainly work, but it's a very different answer.

I personally love the idea. I like the idea because it connects people and can help people to fit together, but you have to be very careful getting involved with family depending on how your family is structured. If your family is the type of family or you have a family relationship where you could work well and easily together, then it could be an incredible opportunity.

Because if you have that level of trust or that family spirit – I think of the movies about the Italian mafia, "We're family. We're going to stick together." I don't know whether that's true or not. I've never had any exposure to the Italian mafia families, but I just think of how that's presented in film.

If you have that level of connection, that could help to enhance loyalty. It would be very challenging for a family society to be able to build that same kind of loyalty outside of their family. But some families, it's completely disconnected. I think you've got to really face it accurately and understand what the opportunities are.

I have a lot of siblings. Some of my siblings I could effectively work with and I do effectively work with in business or investments. Some of my siblings, not so much. It would be really tough for us to have an effective working relationship. You would start to get into the impact of partnerships, who contributes, what are the aspects of it.

And then you would have to get into what are the type of investing that – what's the type of investing that we're talking about. So it's such a broad question it's hard for me to know how to answer, but a few additional thoughts. Probably the best way I see that people could help is parents and children working together toward a common vision, toward a common goal.

If you look at the way many non-US American cultures deal with children, they work very hard to set their children up for success prior to their death. In the US American culture, our common cultural norm is the idea that it's the parent's responsibility to pay for schooling, maybe including college.

And then it's the parent's responsibility to provide some ideas and some help for the grandkids. And it's the parent's responsibility to leave an inheritance behind when they die. Nothing wrong with that. I personally, though, think there's a lot of benefit if maybe we could go a little bit beyond that.

A lot of parents do help their children to start a business and a lot of parents are the ones who fund an original house. But so many people want to terminate the relationship and see that as the – terminate the financial relationship and see that as the primary driver of financial success.

The idea is I don't have my boomerang child who's moved back in with me. I look at it and I say, "Why not look beyond that? If you've got a child that's responsible, why not help them with low rent so that they can bootstrap their business?" I'll be forever indebted to my parents for the help that they provided for me.

But some people don't want to do that, and a lot of times they're bringing – a lot of things bring ties with it. My observation – and I won't talk too much because I just have a little bit of anecdotal experience but not too much actual deep experience here.

My observation is the families that do it successfully are the ones who can disconnect the financial obligation from a sense of indebtedness. If you use money as a sense of control, I'm going to control my child by investing in their business and, therefore, I'm going to force them to live in the way that I want them to live.

That can be a real problem. I've worked with people. They said, "I never borrow money from my parents because it's just got too many strings attached." But if you can disconnect it a little bit and if you're the kind of parent or you have the kind of parents who aren't going to use it as a form of control over your – aren't going to use money as a form of improper influence and control of your child, then I think it's a really strong idea.

I wouldn't want to go into business just because it's family. But if there's a family business that works well, I think there can be a lot of benefits from it. The only other two things that come to mind as far as answering this broad of a question and this is an interesting thing for us to think about is the concept of scale.

Family businesses can be extremely valuable, but depending on the scale of the business and the scale of the family is a big impact. Recognize the fact that there are some successful family businesses, but most businesses that are exclusively run by family don't seem to do so well over time unless the founders of the business or the controllers of the business are very diligent about building character into the future generations of family.

That seems to be the challenge. If you read some of the books that are written by the sociologists on it or the people who coach wealthy families, you often find that little thing about character. The old joke is what is it? Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations that the first generation scrimps and saves and makes the money.

The second generation keeps it going, and by the third generation they succeed in spending it because the character is not formed. The frugality is not formed. The work ethic is not necessarily formed. It's very challenging. We see this all throughout our culture. I think it can be changed with people who have a vision.

I worked with a couple of families when I was advisor who had family businesses that had made it through different stages, but it is a tough thing to keep going. I've talked with people who are advisors to wealthy families on Palm Beach. I might like to do an interview with them and talk about what makes it work.

It's a little bit out of my area of expertise, so I can't comment too much on it. But I think it's doable. The only other thought that I have as I close this up is this question to me really seems to come down to the concept of character development.

One of the major reasons why I try to talk about such unusual financial topics, why did I do a show – why do I do these shows on education or schooling or why did I do a show on the concept of a bar mitzvah or a non-Jewish version of a bar mitzvah or why do I talk about these different concepts of aging?

Well, they're important to me, but they're important to me because of the concept of character development. This, again, is one of the broad sweeping problems that I see with how financial advice is given. If financial advice is only given with a focus on the numbers, the dollars, the cents, then there's often not going to be the capacity for the people involved to deal with it.

If your investments are all in stocks and you've never developed the character of an investor and then there's a stock market crash, you're going to be wiped out. But if you're an investor and there's a crash, well, you can do it again. Same thing with children. If you've – the example – and I hate talking about it as much as I do, but the point of school and college.

College, I think, is very important in a modern US American society. But what's more important is the character capacity of a child. And if that character capacity is built, then the college thing can be funded in different ways. So if all we do as parents is fund an account, fill up a 529 account with tens of thousands of dollars and send our child off hoping for the best, might get lucky, might not.

But if we really give ourselves toward developing those character qualities, it doesn't matter whether we send them off with a fund of tens of thousands of dollars in it or not. Because if they have the character qualities, then they can actually achieve it on their own or if we're able to help out, great.

So to me, this is what I see emblazoned across financial planning is talk about what's actually important. And in closing, I'll just share a story that for me has often been inspirational and really affected me since I first heard it years ago. You often sometimes will read this in parenting books.

And unfortunately, you have to be careful with the actual facts involved. But there are often two families that are compared. And these two families are the family of Jonathan Edwards and a guy named Max Juke. Now, the way that this information is usually presented in parenting books is as a hard contrast that you've got here, the family of Jonathan Edwards and the family of Max Juke.

And this usually pops itself up in Christian parenting books because Jonathan Edwards was a well-known theologian. Unfortunately, I hate it. The books usually get it wrong and they're loosey-goosey with their facts. There was a family of Jukes and there were some studies and there was some research that was done.

I will put a link to the article on Wikipedia about the Jukes family. The point of it was, though, that one family had children who were a real problem to society and the other family had children who were a real asset to society. I'll read from the Wikipedia entry here that sociologist Richard Dugdale wrote a book and he studied the records of inmates of the 13 county jails in New York State as well as poor houses and courts while researching the New York Hill family – that was the Jukes – their ancestry in an effort to find the basis for their criminality.

His book claimed that Max, a frontiersman who was the descendant of early Dutch settlers and who was born between 1720 and 1740, had been the ancestor of more than 76 convicted criminals, 18 brothel keepers, 120 prostitutes, over 200 relief recipients, and two cases of feeble-mindedness. It goes on and talks about the criminals and Dugdale estimated to the New York legislature that this family had cost the state $1,308,000.

I'm not going to take the time to go into the controversy anymore. Interestingly, this family and this study by the sociologist was an important part of some of the early 20th century movement toward eugenics, the idea of creating a superior class through careful reproduction of certain families and not through other families.

And it's an interesting thing to study out, but this family is well-known for that. This is often contrasted with the family of Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards was a theologian in the United States in the early 18th century. He and his wife were amazing people. They had a total of 11 children.

And what's interesting is they'll go—depending on what you read and where you're looking for, it'll go through anywhere from 700 to 1,400 of his descendants. But what's incredible is with his 700 to 1,400 descendants, you'll find an amazing level of societal impact based upon his descendants. There were practically no lawbreakers, practically no run-ins with the court system.

He had more than 100 lawyers in his descendants, over 30 judges, 13 college presidents, and over 100 of college professors, 60 physicians, 100 clergymen, missionaries, and theological professors. Eighty of his descendants were elected to public office, including three mayors, three governors, several members of Congress, three senators, and one vice president, who was actually Aaron Burr.

Sixty of his descendants attained prominence as writers or editors with 135 books of merit, 75 army or navy officers, and a comptroller of the US Treasury. It's really an amazing story when you start looking through it. Now, unfortunately, oftentimes when you find the story, the facts are bad, and that's just poor scholarship on behalf of some of the authors to actually search through and find the facts.

You've got to be careful with which of the facts you take. But there is a marked distinction, and I've always been inspired by just the impact of Jonathan Edwards. What's amazing, when you read his story, I'll put a link to a book on him, or just one of the books written by a guy named Winship comparing these two families.

It's a little difficult to figure out what he was actually saying as far as the comparison, which is why I'm not directly citing it. But what's amazing is when you actually start studying it, it wasn't actually Jonathan Edwards. It was his wife who had the primary impact in their children.

He was primarily – obviously, he had an impact, but he was primarily involved with his preaching and his theological work, whereas his wife had just an incredible influence over their 11 children. And what always inspired me in reading his story was the fact that they left almost no money behind.

They left almost no financial legacy. I'll read to you two paragraphs here from this book I'll link to called – or this short pamphlet written in 1900 by A.E. Winship. It's called "Jukes Edwards, A Study in Education and Heredity." And so this is a classic scenario. But here is the interesting – two interesting paragraphs.

"And with all this, there was no adequate financial inheritance when he died." He died at 56 and his wife died a few weeks later. "There was no adequate financial inheritance for the children. The inventory of Jonathan Edwards' property is interesting. Among the livestock, which included horses and cows, was a slave upon whom a moderate value was placed.

The slave was named Titus and he was rated under quick stock and not livestock at a value of $150." You can read about Jonathan Edwards redeeming some black slaves at the time in the culture. But I don't want to get waylaid with that. "The silver that his family owned was inventoried as a tankard, valued at $60.

A can and porringer at $47 and various other articles valued at $85. The chief material legacy was his library, which was inventoried as consisting of 301 volumes, 536 pamphlets, 48 maps, 30 unpublished manuscripts, and 1,074 manuscript sermons prepared for the printer. It was valued at $415. If Jonathan Edwards did not leave a large financial legacy, he did impart to his children an intellectual capacity and vigor, moral character, and devotion to training which have projected themselves through eight generations without losing the strength and force of their great ancestor.

Of the three sons and eight daughters of Jonathan Edwards, there was not one, nor a husband or wife of one, whose character and ability, whose purpose and achievement, were not a credit to this godly man. Of the 75 grandchildren with their husbands and wives, there was but one for whom an apology may be offered, and nearly every one was exceptionally strong in scholarship and moral force." Now, for those of you who get upset with the discussion of religion and controversial subjects, I'm not making any comment on slavery, and I'm not making any comment on religion.

It's a sociological book. But my reason for emphasizing this is it's incredible to look at the actual impact that one couple can have on many, many generations and to look at that from the perspective of societal transformation. Money comes and goes, but the investment into character and the investment into family, the investment into integrity, that's a legacy that can't be taxed, can't be stolen.

Certainly would change as time goes on, but it can't be taxed or stolen. Business entities can come and fall apart. Industries can close. You might be running the Ford family money, and then all of a sudden the car business has changed. It's happened to many other things. The investment managers may make bad investments.

The family business leaders might make poor decisions, and the business can close. It's a little hard to think about the Rothschild family and think about the banking empire that they've created and be able to apply that to my life. I don't personally connect very easily with what they've done throughout the centuries.

But I do connect with this idea of investing in my children and investing in children from the perspective of their character and their integrity. I hope that's at least just a useful idea to you. It's kind of interesting to read this book. If you want, dig into the facts of the actual families.

Unfortunately, most of the analyses that you read don't have a high degree of academic integrity, so you've got to actually look through to try to figure it out for yourself. It's challenging to pull, but I just wanted to mention to that. It's an interesting example from history. He's somebody who made a mark.

I guess I should rather say his wife is the one who made a mark. She's the one who – just an amazing woman when you start studying her life. But it's one aspect of finance, just what came to me when thinking about your question, that we can invest in our families in multiple ways.

So some of it is figuring out the right trust arrangement. I didn't want to go into that. That's easily hired. But whether or not you choose to invest by building a family business and you're going to build the next Rothschild banking empire or the next Rockefeller empire or the Ford family empire or the DuPont family empire, or if you're just going to – which is more important for me – focus on not so much the business but rather the person, hopefully that will be an inspirational story to you and we can learn from those who've gone before us.

Take them not as necessarily heroes that are anything different. They all had flaws and we all – all of us have issues, have flaws. But I've always been impressed with his legacy and just impressed with what he accomplished in his life as an inspiration to me and in my family.

That's it for today's show. Love getting your questions. Feel free to submit those. You can email them to me at Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com. You can also call them into the voicemail line at RadicalPersonalFinance.com. You can send me a voice mail. We'll be doing voicemail questions on another day. Always give preference on these things to the patrons.

Three of these were patron questions. And you can find the patron questions – or if you are not a patron, you can find information on that at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron for details on that program. That's it. I'm out of here. I will talk with you all tomorrow. Thank you for listening to today's show.

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