Today, I'm going to share with you a one-year update of Radical Personal Finance. I'm going to share with you some changes to the format of the show and the content coming up in future days. And then also, I just want to say thank you. We've officially hit 200 patrons and $2,000 per month of patron support.

I'm going to talk about that and simply say thank you. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Josh Weschetz, and I'm your host. I'm your host. I'm your guide to financial independence. I'm your financial planner. I'm your teacher. And I'm your fellow journeyer on the pathway of financial independence here with you just about every day.

We're going to talk about that today. But journeying with you and guiding you to financial freedom and financial independence each and every day. Today I'm going to share with you a little bit of behind-the-scenes stuff on the show, some things that I want you to be aware of, especially some changes to the content and the programming and the schedule of Radical Personal Finance coming up in the future.

I'm not going to be teaching you anything about personal finance today. So if you would like to skip it because of that, feel free to skip. But I do ask that you give a shot because as soon as I talk for just a moment about Patreon, then I'm going to talk about the changing format of Radical Personal Finance going forward.

So I'll try to keep this straight and to the point. But let's start with Patreon. I just want to thank you, each and every one of you who have signed up for – with a Patreon account and supported the show as a patron of Radical Personal Finance. There are a total of 201 of you.

Actually, it's 200. Two hundred of you. I have a fake Patreon account that I use to keep an eye and make sure the content is going out. So I'm one of my own patrons. I guess that's good. You got to believe in yourself. So I patronize myself on Patreon.

So you should too. There are 200 of you who have taken the step to go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron and sign up to support the show. And we officially hit the first milestone goal that I really wanted to work towards. And that first milestone goal is $2,000 per month. And now that we've hit $2,000 per month, I'm going to be swapping out the new intro – swapping out the intro to the show and trying to work out a new introduction.

Now I may or may not switch the music. When I said that I was going to be switching the music, I did that because I got a rash of emails and comments saying, "Josh, Radical Personal Finance has the worst intro in the world." But when I said on the show that I was going to be changing it, I got all kinds of more emails saying, "I love it.

It gets me piped up. It gets me in the mood. I get ready." And for me personally, it's kind of funny. It's almost a Pavlovian response where when I hear the music, I go into character and I'm ready to go and it gets my energy up a little bit and reminds me to be peppy.

I like upbeat Latin music. I will often – if I'm going to listen to music, one of the choices I'll go to sometimes is Latin music. I'll listen to salsa or merengue or bachata, things like that. So I like that being the intro to the show. But I may update it.

I may kind of swap it out a little bit. We'll see. I'm going to figure that out and try to serve you guys in the best. So that will give me the opportunity to keep going. The biggest impact though that you have made on me is not reaching this first milestone of being able to swap out the music, although it's key.

At the end of this – I'm in the process of finishing out a contract that I've been working on, which has been how I paid my bills for the last year while building this show. If it weren't for this Patreon account here, I mean every dollar of it is incredibly valuable.

It's not quite enough for me to live on, so I've got to build some other sources of income while I'm going. But if it weren't for Patreon here, then I wouldn't be taking the track that I'm taking, which is to keep on focusing 100% full time on the show.

Patreon is what has showed me that at least 200 of you believe in what I'm doing here and believe in the content and have benefited from it. I mean just think for a moment about how incredible you are, that there's something that's available for free. No one is charging you for it.

You can listen to it. You can do anything you want with it. And yet you've taken the step to go out voluntarily and say, "I appreciate the content. I'm going to reward the content creator." I want to thank you for that. It's been quite a journey and an incredible path.

It's what gives me the confidence to know that I'm on the right track and I'm going to continue going forward and continue building Radical Personal Finance. We've, like I said, hit a year here. I launched the show full time on July 1, 2014. As I record this, it's actually July 22, 2015.

So it's not quite a year, but I was a little busy around July 21. I had a brand new little baby and she's still a brand new little baby, still settling into life. I wasn't really actually ready on July 1 to tell you some of the changes that were coming.

Now they're clearer in my head and I know what's coming in the future. So the last year of the show has been awesome. It's been a lot of work. I've released – today is episode 223, so I've released 213 episodes of Radical Personal Finance over the last year. Some have been good.

Some have been bad. A lot of them have been mediocre. That's kind of the normal scenario. But I've learned a lot all the way through. I feel that as I've reflected back a lot on the past year and kind of figuring out what am I going to do, how am I going to build a Radical Personal Finance business, what are the different areas where I'm strong in, what am I weak in, it's brought me to the point of realizing that I need to make some changes to the format of the show and the content of the show.

And I've gone back and done a bit of analysis over which shows seem to resonate with most people and which shows I got the most feedback on, which were the ideas that really seemed to resonate. And it's brought me to the place of realizing what I need to do better going forward in the future.

And as I've listened to the content and looked through and just kind of considered the content I've released over the past weeks, one of the things that really has troubled me is I've felt like some of the content that I've created has been a little bit me too. It hasn't really stood out.

It hasn't been super radical. It hasn't been necessarily playing to my core competencies. It's just basically been a little bit me too, me kind of just doing similar things to what many other people are doing. And for me to fulfill what I believe the unique selling proposition of Radical Personal Finance is, I need to change that.

And so one of the things that's going to change about that is that the frequency of the show is going to slightly change. From the beginning of the last year, I've had the goal of essentially releasing a podcast episode just about every day. And at the beginning, I was going on a very strict Monday through Friday format of that and that really helped me to build the skills.

And I released a show in the past called Why I Podcast Every Day and why you should emulate me and model me on doing what I'm doing. But at this point, I believe that the usefulness of my being so focused on creating so much content and releasing it on a regular schedule has reached its peak.

And I say that for a few reasons. Number one, because of the pressure of releasing shows consistently and it hasn't happened in the last few weeks with the birth of Baby Girl and June was pretty spotty. But because of that pressure, what's happened is that the actual quality of the content has suffered.

So I've released show topics that were kind of ho-hum or I've released an interview that was a me-too interview and I just did it because it was convenient and because I didn't have the time to sit down and pour myself into the outlines that I need for a large show.

The most difficult shows for me to create for you, just so that you know, the most difficult time-consuming shows are number one, the technical financial planning shows because there I need to take information, look back through and figure out what have I done in the past and what is a good way of keeping this at a deep enough level to be useful but to be able to articulate some of these concepts for you.

So those take a long time. And then also the Q&A shows take a long time. Well, what's interesting is the technical financial planning shows are the least popular of Radical Personal Finance episodes and the Friday Q&A shows are the most popular. I'm not willing to give up the technical financial planning because I believe that really builds into the, again, the unique selling proposition of this show.

That's one of the things that I can do very effectively that many other people can't do. There are many people with a cursory knowledge of finance that can do an interview with somebody on the basics of personal finance. There are fewer people who can do a deep dive discussion of a technical financial planning topic.

And so that content is still underrepresented in the marketplace. The Q&A is also important because the technical content actually drives the Q&A and oftentimes the questions that I get that are the most interesting that wind up being the most popular and the most listened to are questions that came out of your listening to the technical content of Radical Personal Finance.

So although I've said several times that I am not committed to the five-day-per-week format, I have said to myself, I've realized just in my own mind I still was working towards that as an ideal goal. At this point in time I need to change that. The reason is if you look at the survey, the marketplace of finance information and finance podcasts, there's more content out there than ever before.

When I originally tested the show in July of 2013, there were only a few personal finance podcasts. From 2013 to 2014 there were many more added. And from 2014 to 2015 there have been many, many more and much, much more content. So at this point the point of differentiation for Radical Personal Finance is not the frequency of the show, but rather my desire is that it's the unique nature of the content.

As I've listened to the feed over the past weeks, I've thought to myself, wait a second, Josh was kind of straying a little bit from his core message. And again, just the feeling I've had is this is a little bit me too. And if it's me too, that's a problem.

So I've learned what I've needed to learn with the five day per week format. I have gotten efficient as a broadcaster. I've gotten better as a broadcaster. I've built much more experience as a broadcaster. And I believe I feel pretty good about where I have gotten to as far as the skills that I have built.

I feel like I've become a much better interviewer. I feel like I've become more coherent. I feel like I've developed my ability to effectively articulate concepts and content without repeating myself ad nauseum. So with that, I feel that I've gained what I need from the five day per week format.

At this point, the big gaping hole that I see out in the marketplace that still is needed is deeper dive discussions, more technical content, and a deeper, more in-depth discussion of important topics that are not commonly talked about. As an example, I've been wanting for months to do a series on things like the origin of the Federal Reserve System, to do a series on monetary discussions.

There's a big theme that runs around, not in the personal finance space, but in the economic space. There's a big theme that runs around about potential inflation, deflation, all of these macroeconomic issues. If you watch what's happening in Greece right now with the changes in the Eurozone, these are very important topics.

There are very few people who are effectively giving some kind of middle tier information, not just what you see when you're watching the evening newscast and not what you have to read when you read an economics book. Not many people are doing a middle of the road discussion. I'd like to really do that.

I'd like to provide some of that content. It's time consuming to do it well and to effectively articulate it without getting on the microphone and saying the same thing over and over again. It takes a lot of time. I'm going to be backing off a little bit on the number of shows as far as the deep dive, hour a day shows that I release on Radical Personal Finance.

I'm also going to be focusing in on the content that seems to be the most popular with you, the audience, which is Q&A. I'm going to be doing a lot more Q&A going forward. I have a whole list of questions from many of you that I have not answered.

I have many questions lined up that I have not answered and I need to start answering those questions. I'm going to be doing that in a variety of formats. The first thing is I'm going to be doing and creating much more video. I plan to answer some Q&A in the context of video.

Video has a unique place as far as a format. I love audio podcasting. However, there's a tremendous value to YouTube and to the video marketplace. There are some things that you can do in video that you can't do in audio. I chose to start by focusing on audio because I believe that is my core competency.

That's what I believe has the most benefit. Much of the information that I share on the show does not effectively articulate over to video. With video, many times people are looking for shorter content. Just frankly with finance, there's not so much that you need to see. There's a lot that just you need to hear.

I think audio is much more flexible. It can be released. It requires less bandwidth. It can be consumed while you're on the go. So I've waited on video. However, there is I believe a really growing hunger for people looking for information with video. So I plan to start doing a lot more regular video releases for Radical Personal Finance.

One of the aspects of that is I'm going to be doing Q&A. So I'm anticipating – I was going to say five minutes but when am I ever going to be able to answer a question in five minutes? I don't see that happening. I'm anticipating 10 to 20-minute videos as far as answering Q&A.

I've thought about should I just release that on YouTube and make all of the podcast listeners go over to YouTube or should I try to cross that over? Should I try to start a new channel on audio or what should I do? What I've decided to do is to simply adjust the format of Radical Personal Finance and release the audio for shorter format questions into the RSS feed, so into what shows up on your phone directly whether you're using iTunes or whether you're using my personal Radical Personal Finance app, however you're listening to it.

The reason is I really want to serve you with some of the content. Most people don't do this. I've tried to figure out whether it's a smart thing to do or not. Most people would split it out into a different channel and try to get people on different platforms but in my mind what I'm thinking of is how can I serve you, the core audience?

If I'm the listener of a show that I really like and if that show releases some long format episodes that are an hour long or two hours long or an hour and a half long and then they also release some 10-minute episodes, I just as soon have them show up in the same place.

The reason is because I'm going to listen when and where I want and my thought is I'm an adult. I can look at your podcast feed if you're a podcaster and see, "Okay, here's a 10-minute one. Let me listen to the 10-minute one and here's an hour one. Let me listen to the hour one," and I can just go ahead and consume that.

You should be aware that in the future there's going to be a lot more shorter format content showing up into your podcast feed. Some of it may be repetitive to ideas that we've talked about in the past. There's still going to be long format content released here and you're just going to see those labeled.

I'll try to label them clearly in the description somehow so you can know, "Okay, this is YouTube audio that's also showing up as a Q&A," and/or, "This is a normal episode of Radical Personal Finance." My hope is that you could just simply choose what's going to be valuable to you.

I will be releasing content on the video feed that I won't release into the audio feed. That content will be things that are intensely visual. That's where the breakdown often comes is if I'm speaking to you about something that is visual and you're listening to the audio only, which is showing up in your phone and I'm constantly referring to, "Well, look here and look at this and here's a consideration and look at this illustration," that can be maddening for an audio listener.

So I will be creating a lot of video content going forward in the future that I won't release as audio. But if there's something that I believe is easily digested as both, I will release it as audio and you can just simply look at it and decide, "Do I want to watch the video of this and actually see Joshua talking or do I just want to listen to this and hear Joshua talking?" And I'll just leave that up to you.

I also plan to be releasing a number of shorter format shows, almost like the coaching shows that I've done the last couple of weeks. And I believe this is really, really important because this is filling kind of that crossover niche in personal finance. There's too much talk in finance on the technical details and not enough talk on some of the other aspects of finance.

I've worked with some people in an office recently and as I've worked with them, I have observed that – I just observed the dynamic of their working environment. I said, "These people aren't going to have a job." In the next recession, these people are not going to have a job.

If I were the boss – and I know the bosses and I've worked with the bosses – they would be the first on the chopping block. It's not a matter of – it's just some simple things, some simple personal development stuff, some simple things. That stuff needs to be addressed.

And so I plan to be also releasing to you just some of the shorter format focused ideas on here's a specific idea. It doesn't merit a long introduction to the show. It doesn't merit a long outro to the show. It's just a specific idea but I think it can be really valuable.

So you're also going to see some of those things show up and a lot of that won't be video. It's just going to be adding some different variety to your feed. So don't expect – the synthesis of all of that is don't expect all of the shows going forward to be the normal 45 minutes to an hour length of radical personal finance.

Expect the frequency to vary as time goes on and also look to see the labels and you'll be able to figure out where this is from. I think that will be really useful to you. The core idea of radical personal finance is to be your guide and your encouragement to financial independence.

That's the core idea. That's it. That's what I can tell you. So the other reason why I'm making this change is I really want to do some interviews on things that aren't often done. The biggest – one of the bigger frustrations that I've had over the past weeks is I haven't been able to bring you the interviews that I've wanted to bring you.

It's hard to get some of the people that I want to interview to sit down and do interviews. But I want to do some really deep dive discussions with people who are – I want to bring you Jack Bogle on the show. I want to bring you Mohamed El-Erian.

I want to bring you Bill Gross. I want to bring you an economist. I want to bring you some of the billionaires that come to Palm Beach and then live here during the season. I simply haven't been able to get that content done because of the amount of time I've been putting into all the other content.

If I look at basically the 40 to 50 hours a week that I spend creating the five-day per week show, it doesn't leave enough time for me to do the additional work of figuring out how to get networked through to some of the billionaires that live here in Palm Beach or that come down and visit, some of the business tycoons, some of those people.

I really feel that's a market that's not being tapped. If you want to hear an interview with an internet entrepreneur, there are about a gazillion of them out there. If you want to hear – I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying there's other people doing that stuff. There's no reason for me to waste my time doing things that other people are doing well and interviewing the same people that go around on every different show.

Rather, I'm going to be bringing you the content that I can bring you that's uniquely useful and uniquely valuable. So that's the information going forward. So what can you do to get connected and what are some of the changes going forward? I'm also going to ask you for some help and then we'll be done for the day.

Number one, the email newsletter is working again after months of problems. So sign up for the email newsletter, RadicalPersonalFinance.com. Sign up, confirm and verify and that would be the best way to keep an eye on all of the content going forward. That will be your best outlet. So sign up for the email newsletter if you will.

I won't spam you but that way I'll try to make sure that I send out – if it's a YouTube video or if it's show notes or whatever, do that. I'm also going to be doing more writing. I've been doing – posting more content on the site, more book reviews.

Oh, that was the other thing I meant to mention, book reviews. For example, I've got a bunch of audio from some book reviews. This is three-minute audio, four-minute audio from YouTube that I've been releasing on the YouTube channel. I'm just going to go ahead and slide that audio into the RSS feed because many of you won't want to watch a three-minute video but you'll listen to a quick three-minute book review and it will say, "Ah, that's a book that would be useful," or, "Oh, that's a book that I'm going to ignore." Obviously it's not too repetitive to concepts that I have mentioned before.

I'm not taking the same content and recycling it which is what many people would recommend that I do. I'm not just adjusting it and recycling it. So again, listen on a fast speed and it won't take that much time. Sign up for the email newsletter. I've got that working again.

Number two, I'm going to start using the hashtag #AskRPF on Twitter. If you would like – if you have a question that you would like me to answer, please tag it with the hashtag #AskRPF. I'm also going to be starting to do some additional social media discussions. I'm going to be doing some Twitter chats, #AskRPF on Twitter and also some Periscope Q&A sessions.

The key is follow me @JoshuaSheets. I think I'm going to shut down the @RadicalPF Twitter handle. I don't like running two accounts and it really annoys me to do two accounts. Just follow me @JoshuaSheets and ask questions there. Use the hashtag #AskRPF and I'm going to be doing some Twitter chats and Periscope sessions on video Q&A.

The best way to keep abreast of that is follow me on Periscope @JoshuaSheets and on Twitter. If you're not familiar with Periscope, it's an app that does real-time live video streaming. Super easy because you don't have to fire up the computer. It's all done right from the mobile device.

It's pretty cool. So I'm going to be doing more of that and I will use those questions and funnel those into the YouTube content. I also have some of your other questions that I'll be using as YouTube content as well. Finally for today, if you want to help, some of you in the past have made offers to help me with the show.

And so still bootstrapping this thing, kind of a one-man band, I'm going to be reaching out to some of you who have offered to help me in the past. But I'll just go ahead and mention it here. There are some things that I could use some help with. And these are things that I will hire if I don't have a volunteer.

But it would help me if any of you just want to volunteer to help me with some things, then here are some things that would be useful. Number one, if any of you would like to help me with some notes on audio episodes and some time stamping as far as so I could put in the notes, time stamping, here's what the conversation was, here's what the conversation was, that would be really useful.

I haven't made the time to make that happen. I've been focused on creating new content rather than trying to more effectively package the old content, but that would be useful. If any of you have skills with graphic design, I could use some help with simple graphic design. Again, I can hire that, Don.

I've done it in different ways. But little things like making a fancy little graphic for the topic of the day, making a YouTube thumbnail for me, some of those kinds of things would be really useful. I also could use some simple video editing and some simple audio editing. So if any of you would like to do that, it's a matter of splicing together some audio bits and then on the video editing, it's a matter of taking some video from, for example, interviews that I'm going to do, things like that, and putting that together.

And then just some general help uploading and managing some different things on the site. What happens when running a site is all these little things don't take that long in the individual, but in the aggregate, they take a long time. So if any of you just like to help me with some of those things on a volunteer basis, that would be great.

Or if you work in those areas, feel free to let me know and I'd be glad to consider working with you. So in summary, I guess, oh, the other thing I'm going to scrap the outro. I'm tired of it. I don't know if you're supposed to have a disclaimer or not, but I'm tired of it as far as the disclaimer that I play at the end.

I'm going to shorten that up. I think that's those things I wanted to share with you. So thank you each and every one of you for having been here and for listening to the show for last year. It's been awesome. Without your feedback, who knows, maybe I would have quit.

But each and every one of your pieces of feedback has been awesome. As we close as far as this week, so next week I will be at Podcast Movement in Texas. I'll be doing a Radical Personal Finance meetup. As soon as I get these shows published, then that's one of the things I'm going to be working on is picking a time and the schedule.

So I'll be at a Podcast Movement. I think it's in Fort Worth, driving out there. So I'll share some follow on the social media stuff if you care. I'll try to do a better job posting. I don't post as much as I probably should. The thing that would be really helpful, going into Podcast Movement, I would love to go out there with Radical Personal Finance in something like the top 10 in the investing segment of iTunes.

So what would be really cool, if you haven't done it, and a bunch of you have this last over this weekend, if you haven't done it, please leave an iTunes review or any other platform as well. So just take a moment, leave a quick rating and review on iTunes.

That would be super useful. That'll help push the show up and that would be fun to be at Podcast Movement as a top 10 podcaster. That would stroke my ego a little bit and make me feel really good. So if you haven't left an iTunes review yet, please do that.

Also if you haven't signed up, if you're one of the 4,300 daily listeners who are not one of the 200 patrons, 4,500 people listening and 200 of you signed up to support the show, please consider becoming a patron. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. You can sign up for as little as a dollar a month or as much as a couple hundred bucks a month.

The more money, the more access you get to me. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Thank you to each and every one of you who does that. I appreciate you more than you know. It's been an awesome ride this last year and I am excited about this next year. I'm going to take over the world.

Got the plan in my head. I've just got to get the work done to make it happen. Thank you all so much. Have you experienced Slotzilla? The world's ultimate zip line is at Fremont Street Experience in fabulous downtown Las Vegas. Enjoy the thrill with two ways to fly. Take off on the lower zip line from seven stories high and fly three blocks down Fremont Street.

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