Are you ready to make your next pro basketball, football, hockey, concert or live event unforgettable? Let Sweet Hop take your game to the next level. Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best premium tickets at stadiums, arenas and amphitheaters nationwide. Sweet Hop's online marketplace makes it easy to browse and book the best seats.

With no hidden fees and a 100% purchase guarantee, you can feel confident when you book your premium LA tickets with Sweet Hop. Visit Swithop.com today. Today on the show, let's talk with somebody who's made the money, lost the money, made it again and figured out how to keep it.

My guest is a lady named Joan Sotkin, author of the book Build Your Money Muscles. She's going to share with us some wisdom from her experience. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you so much for being here. This is the show where we talk about financial independence each and every day, giving you the tools, ideas and strategies that you need to build financial independence for yourself.

No politically correct talk around here, but we do have real answers and real solutions and real guidance for you each and every day on your path toward financial independence. My guest is a lady named Joan Sotkin, again, author of the book Build Your Money Muscles. Joan has a fascinating story and when she first reached out to me and asked if I'd like to bring her on the show, I immediately went and took a look at her website and I knew that I did want to bring her on because Joan stands out in a sea of money coaches and money gurus for a few reasons.

Number one, she's been around for a while. She's in her 70s and I think that is one of the coolest things possible where she has been doing this for quite a while. And also, she's a woman and these are two unique perspectives that we often don't get, especially in the internet world.

One of the most interesting things that you'll hear in today's show is you'll hear Joan talk about how long she's been involved with the internet and yet how her previous business experience actually ultimately translated over to the topic of money. Most interesting, you'll hear how she started with nothing, walked away from money, made a bunch of it, walked right away from it again through bankruptcy and then figured out how to come back and do it again.

Let's get to it. Here we go. Joan, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you being with me today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for asking me. Yeah, absolutely. So today I think I'm just going to sit back and learn because here I am a fairly new entrant into the world of financial coaching and financial advice.

But you've been doing this for quite a while and I'd love it to kick things off. Would you share a little bit about your story, especially as it pertains to money? Well, the money story is a long story. I came from a family that never touched each other. We just handed each other $20 bills.

Interesting. That's how we talk to each other. And I had two millionaire brothers and I couldn't rub two pennies together. I gave away everything I owned at one point to find out what life was really about because what they were telling me I had to grow up to be didn't make any sense.

And so I wandered about and finally came back and wound up starting this crystal business. I was the first one to market crystals and minerals for healing and meditation nationwide. I had a line of stones called Jones stones that were in 600 stores and I was making a lot of money and I had no idea how to manage cash flow.

And even though I was making in today's money about $50,000 a month, I wound up going bankrupt. So that I had to say to myself, what's going on? And just I went to debtors anonymous and just really started studying about money so I could figure out how to make it work because I loved being in business.

I just didn't want to go broke again. Were you you said you kind of wandering about trying to find yourself? Were you a flower child kind of cruising the world without any money and yet you come from a family of hard striving business people? Is that the kind of family dynamic that you had?

Yeah, they they humored me because they were so afraid I was going to become permanently schizophrenic that they just kind of humored me. And I had been sick, physically ill for a long time and no one could figure out what it was. And I was the family problem. I would get into financial trouble and my parents or my brother would rescue me and I wouldn't pay it back.

And I learned later on about codependency and and this need to get rescued was my way of asking to them to show their love. And it was it was very difficult. But when I was wandering, I mean, I literally gave everything away, had no money, never knew where I was going to be staying or where my food was coming from.

If there was no no money for food, then I figured I was learning how to fast. I was already on a pretty intense spiritual path. So I was meditating a lot, a lot and and was trying to. Reach what I believed were other dimensions of our lives, the you know, now we talk about intuition.

I've been around for a long time. This journey took place in the 1970s and and not many people were doing that kind of thing in the 1970s. In the 60s, I was definitely hanging around with a lot of hippies, although I was working in network TV. So I didn't quite pass.

I'm the kind of person, no matter how I dress, I always look like how Harriet of Hollywood. I could never get that hippie thing. But I hung around with a lot of these and organized demonstrations and that kind of thing. And when I was wandering, it was fascinating because all these weird things would happen that made no logical sense.

And I saw that things would just show up. And I wanted to be able to live like that because it made a whole lot more sense than push, push, push and set goals. And and so that's kind of what I learned how to do. So did you accidentally wind up making money or was it intentional, at least the first time with the crystal business?

Well, I was always interested in in in the world of money and others making money because that's what how people in my family measured things. So what happened was I came out of meditation one day and heard go buy a pound of tumbled stones. And I had no idea what that meant, except that my mother had been giving as gifts mineral specimens and she would paste a little pewter animal on it.

And so there was a lapidary store in near her house in Lake Patcon. And so I went to the lapidary, the lapidary store and I said, I need a pound of tumbled stones. And he said, what size? And my hand just kind of went up and I said that size.

And it was about an inch around. And the next week I had a pound of stones. And I just started getting these instructions while I was in meditation as to what to do with the stones. And people I so I needed money because I was staying in my parents' house.

My father was totally disgusted that I was doing what I was doing. He kept saying, get a job, get a job. I couldn't get a job. I was sick. I was weird. And, you know, who would hire me? And and so I started carrying, you know, showing people these stones so I could earn enough money to pay for my incense and a little bit of food and stuff like that.

And people started telling me stories about the stones. Oh, the stone you gave me. I had this awful headache and I put it on the stone on my head and the headache went away or I lost something. And I held on to the stone and I could see where it was.

And I'm going, wow, this is all right. And I made this took out a couple of little boxes and I painted them with rainbows and I called them cosmic rocks and started selling them. And that was so as a rock with instructions in a pretty little box and people would buy them from me.

And that just grew and grew. When I when I got back to California, a while I was at my parents house, my father said, there's a box of rocks in the basement. Why don't you go see what's in there? And there were quartz crystals. And that's when I got turned on to the actual crystals.

When I got back to California, I contacted some crystal mines and I bought a pound of these little tiny, tiny crystals. And I put an ad in the East West Journal, which is a new agey magazine. And I said, send me a dollar and I'll send you a crystal with instructions.

And the first time I put the ad in there, I got three hundred and fifty people asked for crystals. And and so I had to figure out what to do. But by this time, because I had been sick, I had been studying mail order because I figured I'd never get out of the house.

And so I had already learned the principles of writing mail order copy and and and shipping and that sort of stuff. And the business just started that way. And the first the first year before I started this, I the one year before it, I had made six thousand dollars in the year.

By the fourth year, I made in in 1980s money over three hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. Are you proud of that business? Oh, yeah, I love the business. It's a shame I screwed it up. What I mean is, are you so there's kind of two ways that you could take a business like that.

Number one, this product is really valuable and it's helping a lot of people and it's really serving the clients. Or number two, you went out in the desert or figured out a place to buy some rocks and sold them and made a lot of money. Like, do you believe that the product was really helping your customers?

Oh, yeah, I would. Every every stone that I sold that remember, they were in six hundred stores and they had a little set of instructions which were a course in meditation. So I was teaching meditation through this process. And teaching people how to heal themselves by this time in nineteen seventy three, I gave up sugar.

No fooling. I mean, that was the beginning of my physical healing. And so I started learning and teaching about nutrition and other alternative alternative healing methods. And so I was teaching and using the crystals and stones as something someone could hold on to. And when they meditate, they hold on to the stone.

And I was teaching them how to use their mind to to to create things and to eliminate stress. And so, yes, I feel that I I did and am still helping people live happier, healthier, more prosperous lives. Interesting. So the concept then of the stones and the crystals, I'm not familiar with that as a as a as a I guess a product with any kind of spiritual benefit.

But as I understand it, then you're saying that the concept behind the value was that through a course in meditation and using the stone as an anchoring mechanism, the person could understand their own spiritual experience a little bit more. It wasn't that you had some special source of stones that had some sort of inherent spiritual quality.

Is that accurate? Yes. OK, got it. And now there are a lot of people who personify crystals. I mean, crystals are still out there as part of the new age milieu. And I you know, people will personify them and call this a recorder crystal and this this crystal. And one of the reasons I got out of the business is because I it was getting too airy, fairy for me, even though I had a line of stones that included psychic stones and healing stones and and serenity stones.

In other words, I was teaching people how to set intentions. And now the language is different. And it really took off when I was doing this in the 1980s. And I I was really buying a lot of crystals and and stones. And then suddenly there was like this crystal Congress and suddenly everybody was buying and selling crystals.

And I felt like I was raping the planet. And it's it just didn't make sense to me to to go on. Aside from the fact that I went bankrupt. So why bankrupt? Well, first of all, let's let's put it in a time frame. It was 19. This was 1987.

There were no coaches. There was no Internet and women entrepreneurs were not standing on every corner. I was like an outlier, as they say. And so when I would go to the bank for help, they thought it was cute that this woman was making all this money selling crystals and they would just lend me more money.

I really didn't know about how to manage money in a business. I had a bookkeeper three days a week who would just do whatever I told him. And I wanted to buy more crystals. My father had gone bankrupt. So he was an entrepreneur who didn't know have anything to teach me either.

So I there was just no place for me to learn. And I found myself in forty thousand dollars worth of debt, which in today's money would be about eighty thousand dollars. And I just and I had someone come in to to consult with me. And their answer was, you have to borrow more money from family and friends.

And I said, that's not it. And and I saw that there was no other option. Did something happen in the market that the cash flow dried up? Well, it wasn't that the cash flow dried up. I wasn't managing it well. And in 19 at the end of 1987, my father died.

And one of the things that happens when people are in a space of grief or loss, their money often gets screwed up and minded, too. It's easier to feel the loss of money than the loss of a loved one. And I mean, this is one of the things I teach is about is how you're acting out your emotions through your money.

And I was definitely acting out my grief through my business. Did you at least have fun spending all the money? I had a lot of gorgeous crystals. So that was actually what you were spending the money on piles of crystals. Yeah. Oh, and I got my pilot's license. That was expensive.

Yeah, that'll burn money quickly. Right. And and I loved making all that money. I just didn't know how to do it. It's interesting because that just makes I've seen it happen with people that I've known as far as people come into money quickly. And sometimes it hit you hit on a good business idea.

Sometimes you hit on a good job all of a sudden that was unexpected. And. I sometimes want to cry when I see people all of a sudden start living rich and just start spending it here and spending it there just simply because there are very few businesses that are going to be continuing on for a long period.

There are businesses that have that ability, but many times it's better when you hit the wave, ride it for as long as you can on the income side, but make sure that there's a massive lag behind and between your income and your expenses because the market can shift just boom like that.

And you want to make sure that you set yourself up for the good times and the bad times. Right. And that's what happened to me. The market shifted like that. And and it was like, oh, my God, I'm no longer the only game in town and other people are doing this and they're making up these silly stories and I can't compete with that.

And I just didn't know enough about business. And remember, I was still physically not in great shape and so just didn't have the energy to do anything else. And and it was really devastating to me when I lost the business. But again, I also had lost my father and we had a very contentious relationship.

And and so there was a lot of things I had to had to work through. And I really believe that whatever you go through or you're going through is getting you where you have to be in your future so that there's no such thing as something bad happening to you.

It's you're you're learning what you have to learn to become who you're becoming. And had I not had that experience, I wouldn't be doing the work I do now and I wouldn't have reached the level of inner peace that I have, which is to me my greatest success. I'm healthy and my adrenal glands are really healthy.

And I just have this level of acceptance that I so rarely see in people. So it really doesn't matter what's going on in the external world. I'm I'm OK with whatever's going on and have a tremendous amount of faith that I'm going to be OK no matter what. So I don't worry a lot about the future.

After the bankruptcy, what was your next business or what did you do then to recover? Oh, I I did a little wandering again. It's always good for the soul to do a little wandering. I'll tell you what I did. I eventually moved down to I was in Venice, California, and I moved down to Orange County where my mother was so I could get to to get to know her.

And I started a business called Build Your Business. And I it was all mail order stuff. And I it was just really hard for me to get my life together. I did do some coaching, although there was no such thing as coaching. Then I called it freelance advice and and was sharing some of my spiritual stuff with people.

And I've gotten to the point where and it was happening then where I just kind of let my my life grow organically. When I moved to Orange County, I joined the chamber and I wrote a book called Prosperity is an Inside Job. I love to talk to groups. To me, that's heaven when you can stand in front of a group of people and talk.

I know that a lot of people think that's nerve wracking. I could never understand why people get afraid of that, because to me, it's just having a conversation with a whole bunch of people and they're all looking at you. Isn't that wonderful? So people, yes. So I would go to Rotary meetings and Kiwanis meetings in my book.

And and I wrote another book called Starting Your Own Business. And and that's what I was teaching. So I've always been in a space of teaching and and coaching, really, without calling it that. And then when I was in Orange County, one day I woke up and I heard you're moving to New Mexico.

And I thought to myself, why would I want to move to New Mexico? My mother and I had traveled here once for three days. I was sick from the altitude the entire time. And but I I've learned to listen to that voice. That's what I learned when I was wandering.

So three years later, I wound up coming out here. And by this time I was on the Internet and I had built a site for myself. And so I started building sites for other people and wound up with a web development company for a number of years until I couldn't care less about other people's email.

And by this time I had my own site, Prosperity Place. And so I decided to do that full time. How long ago was that? 1997. So in the Internet world, practically from the Dark Ages. Yes. And it was so easy to make money online. Had to have a website and a button that said buy now.

And I had a mailing list. I had at first I had the e-commerce advisor and then I had Prosperity Tips, which started, I guess, in 97, 98. And so I've been doing Internet marketing for 20 years. Do you look at the Internet marketing world today and see a space that is essentially filled and opportunity is hard to find?

Or do you still see in some ways a wide open frontier? It's crowded, there's no doubt about it, but so is the whole planet. You know, there are too many people on the planet and it's crowded and the Internet world has gotten very noisy. Everybody's going me, me, me, buy from me, buy from me.

And some of the the sales pitches I see out there, I it really bothers me that people are making promises like you'll make a hundred thousand dollars in three months. And I mean, there's a lot of fantasy thinking going on out there. And so I think people have to learn how to discriminate and how to.

And of course, that's always been true in any field of commerce. And there's just a lot of noise. And it's like in the coaching field, I no longer call myself a coach. I call myself a prosperity and mindset mentor. I had to give myself a label and the whole coach field.

There are so many people who have gone into coaching and very few of them make more than 20 or twenty five thousand dollars a year. And they're always in this hungry space, always in that longing, hungry space. And and I think it's a shame that people think that you can just stick up a website and send out a few emails and make a living.

If you're in doing business online, you've got to pay attention and you have to work just the same way you do with any other business. Did you have a lot of when you started 20 years ago in that quasi coaching role, did you have a lot of experience, a lot of credentials that you could point to or did you simply say, I have something that I feel is important and I'm going to go ahead and press through and share it with people?

Even today, when people say to me, what are your credentials? I say I was really screwed up and now I'm fine. And they're there. And what I teach is so outside the norm. And I mean, the stuff I teach, I have I've had to figure out myself. It's like the stuff I do, you know, the stuff I do with connecting emotions and money and and how you create your life stories.

That's not written down a whole lot of places like the latest thing I'm looking at is I really see that the core of most bad behavior is the need for connection. People feel alone and disconnected. And just recently, I began to see the connection between under earning and touch deprivation.

And and it can also show itself in people who hoard money and just, you know, they they have to have more and more money because when humans touch each other, they they do that with money. When I hand you money, that's my way of touching you. We live in a touch deprived society and we've come up with all these protocols that are really touching.

And yet so many people and this was myself included, don't know how to receive the touch. I mean, it's it's not about money. It's never about money. It's always about relationships. And and because what I teach is not ordinary, there's no one to certify me. How do you how do you work?

So assume that what you said is true. Do you recommend 15 hugs a day? Are you talking about physical touches or are you talking about something more metaphysical, taking the time to slow down and care for someone? How do you mean? OK, that's a good question, because I ask myself that because it's not like I can go around touching everybody.

Well, some people do. It's just not culturally appropriate. No. And I'm a little bit more reserved. I've learned to be very reserved because in my family, we never touch each other. Literally, we never touch each other. And so now when I talk to people, I very often will put my hand on their elbow or on their shoulder.

So I get touched when I'm touching them. But my question was, OK, if I'm not getting hugs all day, how am I touching people? And part of it is awareness. If someone says to me, gee, Joan, I really like what you're wearing. That's their way of touching me. And I say, OK, I say to myself now they're touching me.

I'm being touched. I realized because I was touch deprived that I didn't know what being touched felt like. Can you relate to that? OK, so I actually had to teach myself what it felt like to be touched. It's like when I work with people, people, excuse me, people very often their habit is to be dissatisfied.

Well, in order to be satisfied, they have to learn what satisfaction is. And and so that's one of the things I help them learn. Or if they they feel like they're not enough or there's never enough, then they have to learn what enough feels like. In order to create it, you have to you have to have the feeling.

So I'm now looking at all the ways that humans touch each other. We touch each other in business. We touch each other with our with our words. We touch each other by complimenting each other. I mean, we walk with other people and we just have to be aware of the the barrier that we've set up between ourselves and other people because of our fear of being touched.

But especially for people who come from any kind of abuse background, there's a fear of being touched and that will act itself out through finances. It's an interesting world to be in. Years ago, I remember kind of looking into a little bit and trying to adopt some new habits for myself as far as how to create that intimate connection.

And I can't cite this research. I'm pretty sure that I have it straight in my head. But I was always I was interested when I read a story about how waiters and waitresses serving in a restaurant can increase their tips by touching their clients appropriately. And I've watched it in my own reaction to people and appropriately means not too much, but just kind of that very gentle one time almost touch on the shoulder that some servers do.

And I've noticed in myself just how in a simple way how the reaction that that puts in me when the server just right at the end or something like that kind of touches you on the shoulder. It creates a positive emotion in me. And I noticed I've watched this in some business people and politicians.

You've got the famous politician handshake where you reach out your right hand and you touch the elbow with your left hand. That non-threatening, non-sexual touch that kind of increases the intimacy of the relationship a little bit. And I had one – I had a business mentor and boss one time who did that.

And he was just always so good about coming alongside, shaking my hand, and just kind of touching my shoulder in a friendly way, in an appropriate and friendly way. And it always gave me a little shot of confidence just to kind of – same reason when your football coach or your basketball coach smacks you on the back or smacks you on the butt.

Depending on where you are. It's that sense of camaraderie that comes into it. It's an interesting area of psychological research. I've never thought about researching it with regard to money, however. So it's an interesting area. And that's the touch and the connection. And my secret to marketing is all anybody really wants is for mommy or daddy to love them and tell them they're a good boy or girl.

And if you can get that into your marketing, into the way you talk to people. And the touch is part of that. And because all – can't you see that most people, they just want to be loved? And when you can give that to them without an agenda, when you go into a sales situation, to not just be thinking about how much money you're going to make if you close the sale.

But to lead with love. To say, "How can I love and help this person today?" And not be attached to the outcome. To do what you have to do without regard to the result. Then you're taking yourself, your pressure out of there. And you can give full attention to the other person, which is a way of touching them.

We definitely live in an increasingly disconnected society. And our lives are generally fragmented. The family structure is increasingly fragmented. It's long been fragmented. But just the day-to-day cycle of most families, most families are not together during the day. Many families, even if they were together during the day in the past, the family itself has disintegrated.

And many people, more and more, it's hard to find close, intimate, personal relationships that are in person. And I particularly enjoy how electronic communication, I think, can fill an additional need. It has a lot of advantages, but it also can be a disadvantage. Because many more of us find ourselves increasingly in a world of disconnectedness with other people.

And then looking to the electronic feedback, the number of likes that we get on our latest Facebook post, as a form of love. And when you put something out there that you think is going to get you lots of love, I recently had an interaction with a friend of mine.

And this is a perfectly mature adult, a guy in mid-late 30s. We were talking about some things and it came out that this person was, well, he was offended at me in our relationship because I don't like his Facebook updates. And that really startled me. But I realized it was serious and this is a well-adjusted person, not somebody on the fringe, not a troubled youth, so to speak.

It's just a normal person. And I realized how our perceptions of love are changing. Definitely, and our sense of connection. I make sure, I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a relatively small city. In Santa Fe County, there's like a hundred thousand people. And we have this incredible dog park that has trails that are a mile or a mile and a half long.

And I make sure, I have a dog, and I make sure, that's another way to get touched. And I make sure to get up there every day and there's this whole community of people that are there. And we often hug each other hello and goodbye. And we're playing with the dogs.

And I could not be in the business that I'm in if I wasn't doing that on a daily basis. Let's move on to financial coaching. When you started helping people with whatever you called yourself that wasn't a financial coach, did you kind of make it up as you go along or did you start from somebody's framework?

I made it up. I still make it up as I go along. That's all right. Most of us do. And where did you start? I don't understand. Where did I start? If you're working with somebody, did you start by saying, "Sweep aside the checkbook. Don't worry about the day-to-day mechanics.

Let's talk about your inner feelings and your relationship with your parents." Ignore where you started. What do you do today? Do you approach it from a psychological perspective or from a practical perspective? Where do you start? Well, first of all, I send a potential or new client a questionnaire that they fill out.

And I ask them whether they like what they're doing, how long have they been doing it, what do they see as their greatest problem. And usually when people tell me what is going on for them, I can pretty much tell what the family of origin situation was. I mean, it's like in Hollywood, there are six basic plots.

Well, in life, it's the same thing. There are certain things that cause people to feel the way they do about themselves. What are those common things? Any kind of abuse or neglect, an alcoholic parent, anything where people don't get bonded in early life. And all of those things affect the finances.

Because it's never about the money. It's always about relationships. In my book, I say, "What is money?" Money is a symbol of relationships. And how, because it's energy passing between two people or entities, and how you deal with money is how you deal with your relationship with yourself and others.

I get a lot of people, a lot of people, no matter what their income bracket, saying to me, "I haven't reached my income potential." So they're feeling that something's holding them back, that they haven't reached a point of what they consider success. And so I look at whatever they're saying, and I often do a series of assessments.

I work on a very scientific level as well. I use the Hartman profile, which is integrated with the disk, and a motivator, so that I can see how people are making their decisions, what's at their base. And that helps me a lot, get an idea of where people are.

And then we decide what they're trying to accomplish. And I work on a highly intuitive level, because stuff just comes to my mind when I'm talking to people, because I'm not using someone's protocol. I'm not using a specific set of questions, that sort of thing. I'm just present with my clients in a very, using a common word today, mindful way, so that I'm fully present with them, and I can hear what they're saying, and I've got enough experience to know where to take it.

It seems intuitive that a lot of people do connect money to emotional needs. At least it seems intuitive to me, because we can observe that in popular culture. This person feels pressed, you know, they're making tons of money, and they feel pressed to make tons more, because they're trying to prove to their parents that they're not going to be a failure.

Or this person is spending all kinds of money on frivolous, whatever their little thing is that they're constantly medicating, whether it's ice cream to treat their depression, or whether it's a new muscle car every year to treat their feeling of lack of value in society. But I think we only see it at the extreme cases.

Excuse me, it's only obvious at the extreme cases. What are some symptoms that you see sometimes in, say, median income earners, just so-called average people? They're not satisfied with their life as it is. In other words, they just have the sense that there's got to be more to life.

And because I'm not only doing financial coaching, I'm really doing... I have to give it a label, and I do focus on money, so we call it financial. But there's so much more to it. I'm interested in the person and how well they're living their life. And money is only one aspect of that person's life.

So if they're troubled, if they're having trouble keeping track of their money... I have a client I'm working with who had a lot of money issues with his wife. It was a very good marriage, but the money issue was always there, and she died. And I had worked with him years ago, and he came back again.

And so I'm not just working on his money, although I've shown him how to use a cash flow spreadsheet, and we've worked on the actual money stuff, which I do, but we're also trying to find out what's going on inside of him. Because until he can find the value within himself, the money doesn't mean anything.

How old are you, Joan? I'm 74. Do you find that people who are near your age, maybe five years younger, five years older, do you find that a higher number of them have figured this out than younger people? Or is it just across the population? Across the population. I think the young people have figured more of it out.

I wasn't trying to bait you into saying that, but I've certainly wondered about it. Because my background is I come from a background as a financial planner, and I was always interested in personal finance, and I thought I knew what I was talking about until I worked as a financial advisor for six years.

And like you, started working with real people. And as I would sit and talk with people about their goals, they would list off goal after goal after goal after goal after goal. But what I realized is that generally they were listing off goals that weren't their actual goals. So for example, the most obvious is if you go out and you take a survey, my experience, my gut instinct is the numbers.

If you were to say in the way that I would ask it is, "Do you want to be in a position to not have to work someday if you don't want to?" It's a way of saying, "When do you want to retire?" But you can do either. And people will say, "Well, yeah, I do." "Okay, what age?" And it seems to me that 75% of the population – well, most people will say today, but then most of the people will say 75 or 80% of the population will say age 65.

Then 10% will say age 55 or 60, something early, and then 10% will say age 70. And only – there are a few percent of people that will say 35 after they get past the initial joke that everyone says of tomorrow or today. And what I learned doing that is I just kind of learned to just almost ignore the answer because what I realized was I would listen to it and I'd write it down and could build a financial plan toward it.

But I realized that so many people were looking to retirement to solve something that wasn't going to be solved by retirement. And then I started looking at just about all financial goals and whether it was I want to buy a new car or a new house or whatever it was, they were often looking to money to solve something that could be easily solved without money.

You don't need to be a multimillionaire. You don't need to retire to have a happy life. Probably the first step is to build a happy life that is going to be a little easier for you to get along on a day-to-day basis and start there with building the type of business that you don't want to retire from.

Or you don't necessarily need a new house. Figure out what the emotional need is that you're trying to meet. And it may be a practical need. It may be the fact that I've got 10 kids and this house was built for two, in which case you probably need a bigger house.

But getting a bigger house to impress the people who really don't care is a silly way to spend money. And once you clarify that, oftentimes you can actually achieve what you actually want on a faster basis. So your experience and my experience align even though they're probably coming from different perspectives.

Absolutely. And I agree with you completely. And this is why I say that if you don't learn to be satisfied, you'll never be satisfied. If you're always saying, "I'll be happy when," then you're always going to be saying, "I'll be happy when." And how sad that people go through their lives with this longing.

So my theory, which makes sense to me, my question has always been, "Why do we create the life stories that we do?" I had two millionaire brothers. I couldn't rub two pennies together. Why? We came from the same family. Why did that happen? And that's when I started looking into what I believe are the dynamics of creation, so to speak.

And I realized that we have thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. And I believe that the emotions are the creative force. They're like the bridge between our internal and external worlds. And we don't feel the way we do because of our story or our money. The money is what it is because of the way we feel.

So if you feel alone and abandoned, then you're going to have one kind of money story. Whereas if you feel energized and fulfilled, you're going to have a different kind of money story. It's never about the money. And so my question has always been, "Why?" How do people make the decisions that they do in order to create the life stories that they do?

I do not believe that we are victims of life circumstances. Now, there are certain things that you might be a-- not a victim of, but might just be there. For example, I have a genetic disorder that limits certain things that I can't do. I can't exercise a lot. I'm hypermobile, so I have to be careful how I move.

And that's just something I've had to learn to live with. But I think that people have this idea that some external force is giving them their life stories, which puts you in this victim position. "Oh my God, what is life going to give me today?" Whereas if you-- To me, taking responsibility for your life means I'm the one who have created my life stories.

And if I don't like the life stories, what do I have to do to alter them? Because I have the power to do that. And that's where I think people get in trouble, is thinking that they have no power to create something else. And it's like having given up sugar 42 years ago.

And honestly, I don't eat any sugar. I was suicidal depressive for 15 years. And two days after I gave up sugar, I wasn't depressed anymore, so I don't eat sugar. And I see people destroying themselves by eating junk. And they don't say, "I have to stop going to the doctor to get touched.

What can I do to touch myself?" And overweight and so many dis-eases are caused by lifestyle choices. And so what does it take to get people to-- to help people, not get them, but to help them make better lifestyle choices? And until you get to the emotions behind the dysfunction, it's very hard to change something permanently.

It's interesting that you talk about the importance of health and I've seen this play out in a few areas. I think people often labor under this idea that I have to be rich, especially people that are likely to be listening to this show. The concept is I have to be rich, and so therefore I should maximize the financial benefit of any decision.

But I was recently talking with somebody that's close to me about health and the impact of health, and we were talking about the need to spend money on their health, and I just was thinking it through myself. If I suffered from poor health, I think the right decision would be to spend all of my money, if that's what it required.

Now, it usually doesn't necessarily require all of it, but to spend as much money as necessary to work to get my health back, because if you have your health back, it can bring back the joy of life to the daily circumstances. And I've known people who they couldn't wait to retire because they were so miserable.

It was the fact that they were miserable already that led them to hate their life and hate their job. Well, if you fix the feeling of miserableness, at least you feel a little bit healthy, and you can fix some of the chemical imbalances that are really affecting you or just the physical weakness or whatever the root causes are, then all of a sudden the normal flow of everyday life, the normal income, the normal expenses, the normal engagement of a daily life can be really meaningful.

And you used the word "flow." It's like when you're--all the rules they tell you, "This is one thing my age has given me is experience." I've been on this health kick and the meditating. I've been meditating since 1972, and I've been eating properly for 42 years. It works. I exercise every day, and I meditate every day, and all of those things matter because, first of all, your business and your money are just pieces of you.

They're not you. And you are the force behind your business and your money, and if you're healthy, then your business can be healthy. And the world is in such a high stress, overadrenalized state that when you watch out for your adrenal glands, you're going to live longer, you're going to feel better, you're not going to have a heart attack.

I mean, it's just so simple, and yet people make it so complicated, and they avoid--so the question is, why do they avoid taking care of themselves? So that, to me, has an emotional base. So you can't just work on the food and the health and everything. You have to work on the whole person.

I'm a holistic practitioner because I look at a person's entire life because it all matters. This is a mild rabbit path, but I think it's important because you sound like somebody who's done a good bit of research or at least learning on the topic of adrenal function. Are you--I mean, you're fairly knowledgeable on adrenal fatigue and some of those things.

Is that true? Unfortunately, I lived it. Sounds like it. Could you take a few minutes-- and again, I know it's a bit off topic, but I think it's important because I've experienced some family members and some friends who suffered from this condition, and nobody really explained to them what was actually happening.

And when they could finally figure out what was going on, it brought a tremendous amount of clarity. Could you explain just a little bit of what you would look for to understand if somebody's facing some things that are being caused physically by their lifestyle and give people some tips on what to look out for so that they can go and seek appropriate help?

Sure. Well, I mean, I learned it because my adrenal glands were seriously compromised. I mean, I could not get from my bedroom to my living room. I had so little energy. And so I had no choice but to heal my adrenal glands and get all stress out of my life.

And when things don't work right in your body, those are symptoms. It's like when you put the wrong fuel into your car, it's going to start pinging. And symptoms are your body's pings. They're telling you something's not right. And the adrenal glands are involved in the blood sugar circuit.

In other words, part of the whole blood sugar system includes a number of your endocrine glands, including the adrenal glands. So when you're eating foods that are a stress to your body, your adrenal glands are going to get stressed. Any time you go out in traffic, you're having an adrenal response.

Your adrenal glands were not designed to be on all the time. When we were out on the plane and a buffalo went by and it was time to go catch the buffalo, that's when you need adrenaline. You don't need it every day. And every time you drink coffee, every time you get excited, every time you get scared, every time you worry about money, your adrenal glands are getting compromised.

And it's going to affect a number of body functions. You might get heart palpitations, you might get fatigue, you might get constant headaches. A lot of symptoms can be connected to this. Now, the problem is if you go to the doctor, the doctor does some blood tests. Well, unless you're going to do a 24-hour cortisol test to find out what's going on, they're not going to be able to easily say it's adrenal fatigue.

And people have gotten accustomed to having to have an actual diagnosis before they change something. Well, this is why I think it's so important to learn about how the body works and how to take care of it. It's pretty simple. And when you give the body the nutrients it needs, and one of the things it needs is rest and sleep.

And I honor my body. It's been carrying me around for 74 years. At this point, most people think I'm in my 50s, based on how much energy I have, what I look like, and how I live my life, because I'm not sick. Because I take care of the vehicle that I'm driving around in.

And so if you've got a lot of symptoms and you go to the doctor, and the doctor says, "Well, you seem to be perfectly healthy. The fact that you don't feel good, that's your problem." Well, it is your problem. And if you take care of yourself, you're going to feel a lot better.

I have a client who's a doctor, and he was kind of dissatisfied with the medical system as it is. And he heard my podcast, and we started working together, and he gave up sugar, and his kids started eating better, and he started meditating every day. And now he's treating his patients differently, and he's teaching them how to figure out what they need.

People have forgotten that they have this little voice inside that will tell you what you need. But you just have to listen, and if you're in this adrenal space, you're not going to hear it. So when you say, "How do you take care of your adrenal glands?" You meditate every day, you take high B vitamins and vitamin C, and you learn to stop worrying.

I had a Swami tell me in 1972 that worrying is a waste of time. And it's not only a waste of time, it's harmful to your systems. If you're living in the future, you're going to worry. If you live in the present, you don't have to worry. If you have everything you need today, there's nothing to worry about.

And that takes mental training. And I think it's a good idea to meditate every morning. Two final areas that I'd like to explore with you. Number one is starting points. If you were going to give advice to you however many years ago when you were in the middle of running your crystal business and you were going to try to coach the younger you a little bit on where to start, what would be some of the first few steps that you would advise somebody in that position to take to start to get a grasp on their money as it relates to their emotions but also as it relates to the practical day-to-day function of life?

That's very important. I stress that a lot. You have to keep track of your money. I was very lucky I went to Debtor's Anonymous. And the whole basis there is you have to write down your money. You have to write everything you earn, everything you spend. And now it's really easy.

You don't have to know about numbers. You just have to know about data entry. And you have to get a piece of software that works for you and you enter the data. And it tells you what you've spent every month. You have to look at the numbers. It's the looking at the numbers part that people have trouble with because they're ashamed of their numbers.

They're ashamed of what they're making. So you have to keep track of your money. And then you have to learn how to manage cash flow. And what I've got, if anyone's interested, I have a little video. And it's called "How to Use Joan's Ugly Cash Flow Spreadsheet." I created this spreadsheet that really works for me where I can see everything I need to know in one sheet.

I don't like to use the ones in the software because they're assuming that you know how much you're earning every month. And when you're in business for yourself, that's not true. So I have this spreadsheet that I created. And it helps me see what's coming in, what has to go out.

And if I see that it's a little short, then I can decide to pay this thing a little later so that you're making decisions on a regular basis. And while you're at it, then you have to look at whatever shame or anger or deprivation you're feeling in your money.

But you have to start out with keeping track of your money and then learning how to make financial decisions. The last area I want to ask you about is with regard to the baby boomers and kind of the retirement age, so your age group and a little bit younger than you.

Are you concerned about many of the people in your age bracket who are approaching retirement? The media is filled with stories about the financial shortfalls and the financial woes that face most people with regard to retirement. And the same media fills those people with a tremendous pressure to retire.

What's your perspective on that? Well, as someone who doesn't think about retiring, because what would I do? I love the work that I do. I love being with people and helping people. So I don't think about that. And I've learned not to worry. I was sick for so many years that I didn't build up a big pile of money the way many people do.

And I've just learned to trust that I can create what I need when I need it. I'm not at all concerned about that. Am I worried about other people? No, but I think they should be concerned and they should take action. When I see people in business for themselves on a wish and a prayer, "Well, build it and they will come," they're putting themselves in difficult positions.

I get people contacting me every day who need help. And there is nothing I can do for them at this point because they just don't want to change. I do have this program called Freedom from Financial Struggle, which is a membership program, and I teach all the basics in that.

It can be very draining to work with people who are always in a state of need and want to help them move forward because they see no possibility because they're maintaining their habit of being in need. Does that make sense? So I am concerned. I give money to the homeless, and to me, I want to feed the hungry and house the homeless.

I am concerned about a lot of them, but it's amazing. I live in a town where it's not a very-- the state of New Mexico is one of the poorest states. In Santa Fe, people say, "Oh, you can't make a living in Santa Fe." I love Santa Fe and I love my jobs.

It's a hard place financially, but somehow people get by. A lot of people I know are in what might be called my age group. They don't live lavishly, certainly, but somehow they get by and they fetch a little bit about the part-time job they have to take. They'll never be satisfied because they haven't learned to be satisfied.

It's an interesting psychological, I guess, issue, just simply in understanding people's perspectives with money because I enjoy working with prospective retirees and people in the-- I'll call it 50- to 70-year-old age bracket, but I've also seen watching a lot of shifts, a lot of things changing. There's a large segment of the population that hasn't grasped the financial reality that they will never retire.

It's simply not going to be possible. Then there are some people who have grasped the financial reality that they're not going to retire and have built a life that is going to be fantastic no matter what. Then there are some people who do retire and live a great life, and there are some people who could retire and choose not to.

One of my personal heroes--you ever hear of a lady named Dr. Denmark, a pediatrician from Georgia? She's one of my personal heroes. My wife actually was a patient of hers when she was a baby, but this lady, Dr. Denmark, she was a pediatrician, and she retired from active practice at the age of 103 years old.

She died at 114, but she retired from active practice at 103 years old. When you read stories about her--she died, it was a couple years ago, three years ago, 2012 now--when you read stories about her, she had just an incredible, fulfilling life. But one of the things that was so interesting to me about her story was she had built a life doing something that she cared about, that she was good at, and she had integrated it with her life.

She was a pioneer in her day when she went to medical school. She was--I think if memory is right, she was the only woman in her class of physicians, but when she came out of medical school, she wound up--after she had a baby, she wound up opening a private practice in her home so that she could be a pediatrician but also be present and care for her child.

She had a little girl. It's just an amazing story because here was this woman who, for years, had provided this useful contribution to the community and worked, again, until 103 years old in active practice, and she was amazing at what she did. But her life was, I think, in balance from everything I know about her.

I love--I wish we spent more time lionizing those type of people instead of lionizing-- The people with the 15 Lamborghinis. Right. There's a show on CNBC called The Secret Lives of the Super Rich, and these are people who just have to have so much opulence in order to live their lives, and I wonder how truly happy most of them are.

Some of them are and some of them aren't. Right. I always try to be careful-- Generalizations. I try to be careful not to say that money is going to necessarily cause misery because I don't think that's accurate, certainly. No, I don't say that. Let me ask you, you've been rich and you've been poor.

Which was better? Yeah, well, I mean, actually, it doesn't matter to me. When I was wandering around with nothing, it was the most interesting time of my life. To me, that's exactly the point I was driving at is it seems to me that when people have things in balance--the quote I remember was Ross Perot was asked about that.

Here he is as a billionaire, and he says, "Are you happy?" And he said, "Yes, I am happy." He says, "But I was just as happy when my wife and I were living in barracks housing when I was in the military and we didn't have anything more than my military income." He says, "We were just as happy then." And that to me seems to be the important point.

I think that it is a virtue to accumulate money and to use it for profitable purposes, but to think that money is going to bring happiness, it's simply not. Last night I took my family down to the beach, and it's a free publicly funded beach. We were able to pull up and set up a picnic.

The picnic cost us, I don't know, $8 worth of meat and bread and cheese, and invite our friends and put some chairs there and sit and watch the sun go down behind the lighthouse. I had just as good of a view as the $3 million house right across the inlet from where I was sitting.

So would I be happy sitting in the $3 million house watching the sun go down? I could be happy there. I can also be just as happy sitting on the beach, right on the public beach, also watching the same sun. It's the same sun and the same sunset. And which side of the inlet that you're sitting on isn't going to make any difference in my happiness level.

It's just going to make a little bit of a difference in my--well, partly my ease and partly also my stress. And I have to say, the big house doesn't appeal to me at all because then I have to manage all the people that are going to take care of it for me because I ain't doing the housework.

John, tell us about your website. I think you have your website, you have a podcast, I think, and you have a coaching practice. Go ahead and send people to where you want them to find you. Sure. The central place is prosperityplace.com and you can find the coaching and the podcast and everything there.

If they're interested in the spreadsheet that I mentioned, you just have to go to prosperityplace.com/spreadsheet. And if you're interested in the idea of getting rid of your financial shame, if you go to prosperityplace.com/bonus, I'm offering a free copy of my audio called Healing Your Financial Shame. I like it.

You are with it. You got your freebies lined up, you got your aggregators. This is impressive. This is great. 20 years. That's good marketing. I like it. Describe your coaching practice and what service you have because I know that a lot of listeners or some of my listeners are in the process of establishing their own financial coaching practices and also some are looking for financial coaches.

And what I do, obviously, is I combine the actual, you know, I get people started on keeping track of their money, you know, getting familiar with their money and getting over whatever emotions they're bringing into their money, which keeps them from paying attention to it. And also, if you have the sense that you're just not living up to your income potential, that has nothing to do with your business.

That has something to do with you. And that's what I really like to help people figure out. I'm not a therapist. You don't have to tell me the whole story. And I just help people figure out what's going on. John, thanks for coming on the show today. I appreciate it.

I loved it. This was terrific. I love learning. Don't you? Isn't it absolutely amazing that you and I can sit here and learn from somebody else's decades of experience and just think about the great advantages we'll have when we reach an older age and that we can look back and share our experience with somebody else?

Hope you enjoyed that information. Please go and check out Joan's website. Check out her book, BuildYourMoneyMuscles.com. Build Your Money Muscles is linked on her website, which you can find at Joan's.com. I'll put all the links in the description of the show, and you can check that out. If she sounds like she might be a good fit for you as a financial coach, feel free to reach out to her, and perhaps she can help you along your way as you work toward your own financial independence.

Thank you all so much for listening today. I really appreciate it. If you'd like to support the show directly, please go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron and sign up to support the show on Patreon. I would be greatly indebted to you. Thank you for doing that. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Please forgive the erratic nature of the show this week.

We're working on tightening some things up and getting back in the flow, but, man, it hasn't been easy. So we should be back to our more consistent schedule just as quickly as I can make that happen. I appreciate you all's patience as you stay with me. So RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Sign up to support the show there, and thank you all so much for listening.

Thank you for listening to today's show. Please subscribe to the podcast with our free mobile app so you don't miss a single episode. Just search the App Store on your device for Radical Personal Finance and you'll find our free app. If you have received value from the content of this show, please consider becoming a patron.

Your financial support is how I pay the bills for the show and how I plan to grow our content. You can support the show with as little as a dollar a month or as much as you feel the content is worth. Details are at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. If you'd like to contact me personally, my email address is Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com, or connect with the show on Twitter @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 come by the show page and comment so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.