Shop break-resistant glassware at wineenthusiast.com so you can spend more time-- --and less time-- --ugh, I'll get the broom. Shop our Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals for the best prices of the season on wine storage, gifts, and more. Plus, get free shipping on orders of $99 and more. At wineenthusiast.com, we bring wine to life.

Exclusions apply. See website for details. Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's Q&A. And for the first time, it's actually the live Q&A, where you can hear kind of that whole, you know, caller and host type of interaction. Kind of cool, huh? Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host here with you today to answer your questions, although I'm not actually answering them today.

This show today is a little different than normal. This is the audio of that all-patron call that I did a couple weeks ago. This is where, as a bonus for all patrons of the show, I did about a two-hour Q&A. And this is the audio from that call. A lot of good questions, hopefully some good answers, but that's up to you to decide.

Going to go ahead and release this audio. I was thinking about just making it a patron-only file or releasing it for the general public. I decided to go ahead and release it for the general public. This is a little bit different from the normal style of the show. This is not quite as polished.

This is simply the unedited audio from the conference call. So this was my first time hosting a large conference call like this, so I was a little bit unsure of the etiquette of how to ask the next person to go and all of those things. So forgive my stumbling starts.

I'm getting a little bit better. I've done three of them since then for patrons again. But this one, I thought it was just interesting. There were some interesting questions. I thought it'd be fun to go ahead and release to you all. So I'm going to release the audio for, again, forgive my stumbling starts and also forgive the audio quality.

The audio quality is not up to my usual standard simply due to it being on a phone line. And I didn't record the high-fidelity audio on my end. I just recorded the phone line. So it should be legible for you, but enjoy that. Before we get to that, two quick things.

And actually, I'm going to skip the ending announcements today, and I'm just going to play this Q&A and not do a closeout for you. But two things. Let's take care of the sponsors of the day. Sponsor of the day number one is Patrick Snow, the publishing doctor. Patrick was recently on the show.

It was episode number 252, immediately before this one. So he was on the show with a full interview talking about publishing your own book. And I definitely would strongly recommend if you've ever thought about publishing a book or if this is something that you might be interested in, check out that interview with Patrick and consider speaking with him to see if he might be able to help you publish your book.

Patrick is my publishing coach working on the first Radical Personal Finance book, and he is helping me with that process. I'm publishing it myself and going through all that process with him. He's got all of the -- it's been great. He's got all the resources. He's got all the guidance.

He's got all the suppliers. He's even got the templates of how to actually write a book. So if you don't know how to approach it, he'll teach you actually the process of how to actually sit down and begin your writing process. And don't necessarily just sit down in front of a blank page.

That's kind of a difficult way to do it. Connect with him and see if he might be able to help you out. A place to check him out is PatrickSnow.com, or if you're interested in publishing, go to ThePublishingDoctor.com. There's also another interview that he's published on The Publishing Doctor that you would enjoy listening to on the right-hand side.

There is an interview with him talking about publishing and speaking. The best way to get in touch with Patrick, if you're interested, he will offer you a complimentary 30- to 60-minute consultation to find out your situation and see if he might be able to help you or not. The best way to do that is to text him at 206-310-1200, 206-310-1200.

And that phone number will be in the show notes for today's show. So again, with your phone, just pull up the show notes, click on that text number, and shoot him a text message, and send him your name and your area code -- excuse me, your time zone, name and your time zone, and he will arrange a time to connect with you.

Sponsor of the day number two is You Need a Budget. This is the budgeting software that I use to run my personal family budget, and it is excellent. Budgeting is one of the foundational skills. It is one of those core attributes. If you look at any of the work on millionaires, millionaires all -- I shouldn't say all -- a very high proportion of millionaires report having a budget, much higher than people who are not rich.

So budgeting is one of the core skills, but it's challenging to do when you've got all these different accounts and you've got the money and the bank account. It's easy if you just had dollar bills sitting on your desk, but it's hard when it's just money sitting in your bank account.

You Need a Budget is the budgeting software system that makes that easy. They've got a really great computer program. They've got a really great smartphone apps. It is excellent, excellent, excellent. When I found You Need a Budget for the second time, I immediately knew that it was really good, and I switched all of my personal accounting over to the You Need a Budget software.

If you'd like to listen to an hour-long interview and discussion and hear my own personal story with You Need a Budget, listen to episode 246 of the show with the founder of You Need a Budget, a man named Jesse Mecham. Or if you'd just like to give it a shot, try a 30-day free trial at radicalpersonalfinance.com/ynab.

So just type in radicalpersonalfinance.com/ynab, Y-N-A-B, acronym for You Need a Budget, and you'll be able to download the software. It's the full version of the software, no hidden features or anything like that. It's the full version, 30 days. It'll work for you with 100% functionality for 30 days. If you don't like it after 30 days, then just cancel it and take it off, and then you won't pay anything.

You don't even have to put your credit card number in to activate it. But after 30 days, if you want to continue using it, then you'll pay for the software then. I can't remember. It's like $60, something like that. So well worth it. Well worth it. Check it out, radicalpersonalfinance.com/ynab.

Only other announcements since I'm going to skip the ending announcements today. If you like the show, please tell a friend. Tell them to search their app store on their phone for Radical Personal Finance and consider becoming a patron of the show also. This phone call that you're about to hear was a recording, again, of a conference call that I did for all patrons.

And that was a unique thing for all patrons. But I'm also doing, continuing to do these phone calls every week during October and November for patrons who are supporting the show at $10 a month and up. So if that is you, go ahead and check the Patreon page for the information.

And if that's not you, go ahead and join. And I will be hosting the audio of these calls on the Patreon page of the past ones so that you can listen to those bonus episodes. And if you go ahead and join now at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron, you'll be able to join the weekly calls here during the month of October and November.

And so with that, here is the call. There we go. And we're going to get started. So I'm not -- this is just simply a phone only. I'm not going to be sharing a screen. That's actually one of the things that reasons why I'm doing a phone conference. I realized I've been offering for all the patrons of the show a monthly Q&A call.

And what I intended to do was I intended to do that as a Google Hangout. And I never grew up in the era of phone conferences. For me, you know, doing a conference is just always a video conference. But with moving the last couple of months and various things, it's been challenging for me to do the video thing consistently.

It requires me to have a good internet connection. It requires me to put on a shirt that I feel happy, you know, showing up on a video camera with. It requires me to have a good background. And so what I decided to do is instead of doing the video conference, just do a phone conference.

And so I wanted to do it today because I missed some of the patron benefits. I'm here to answer questions one by one. I'll answer as many questions as I can. And I'll answer as many questions as I can. I'll spend as much time here as I can, and we'll just see how it goes.

But I'm fully available to you guys. I hope it's easier for you to call in and easy for me to answer. Let me start with just who would like to ask a question, and we'll kick it off and get right to the content. Who wants to go first? Hey, Joshua.

Yeah, Susan, go ahead. Yeah. It's kind of a question, kind of a comment. And maybe this just applies to me because I'm older, but I'm not as technically savvy. But I was wondering if maybe, like, with all of the different technologies that you're using, and I think kind of the Facebook one that you were planning on doing, are you still planning on doing that, like, every other Friday or something?

Because I haven't -- and I know you've been having problems, but I don't know if it ever worked. I don't know, like -- I was wondering if you can do step-by-step instructions on how to get into some of this stuff and what we're supposed to do and what level of person it's for, patron it's for.

Right. So with the patron program, the basic thing that I was looking to do with the patron program, most of the content is found on the actual Patreon site. And I have been slow on delivering the content. I've just been overwhelmed on my end. And over the last month especially, I've made good progress on really increasing things.

But on the patron site, if you go right to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, that works in many ways almost like a Facebook wall does. So that's where I'm posting the show episode that's coming up, taking specific questions on there. You can comment and coordinate with other people who are patrons of the show.

At the $25 and up level, that is where there's access to the Facebook group. So if you are at the $25 and up level and you don't have access to the private Facebook group, then make sure that you email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com, and I'll make sure that you have access.

I try to do a good job of staying on top of that. And then in that group, there's over 60, about 65 members there right now, all of whom are interacting and answering each other's questions, some really smart people there. And then that's where I try to spend a good time every other day or so, going into that group and trying to answer questions there personally.

So some of what you're talking about was me trying to do Google Hangouts. And the Google Hangout system was just a disaster. It always had problems. I never got the right people invited. It just didn't work. And so I scrapped that whole thing and gone to this for now.

And we'll see if I switch to another platform in the future. That help, Susan? Yeah, I guess that didn't answer the question, because I guess I need to up my level, because I was thinking. I thought the $10 got to at least the Facebook, but I guess not. But that gets you something, obviously, right?

Right. The reason for the confusion may have been what I did with the original people who signed up for the original membership program. Then with that group of people, I was charging $10. And so all of those people were grandfathered in at the $25 level. The $10 a month gets you access to the live monthly Hangout, and that's what I haven't been able to deliver the last two months.

So going forward over the next eight weeks, once a week, I'm going to be doing one of these conference calls, and that's open to the $10 and up level, where I'll be answering as many questions. We can talk specific -- not specific, and answer any question, and I'll do my best to help out.

So next question. Hey, Josh. Josh, I'm up. This is Nate. Can you hear me all right? Nate, I can hear you. Welcome. Let's go with your question first. So I wanted to ask you a question related to social capital versus financial capital. Right. So I don't know if you want me to provide some context on how that relates to my situation?

Yeah, please do. Okay. Basically, your podcast has had a major impact on my life this last year, probably 75% of the reason why I was able to quit my job. And just from listening to your podcast, I'm super stoked to be a member, a supporter. I really appreciate everything you do.

And I'd kind of like to just get your advice on our situation. I kind of consider us cash flow retired at this point. We don't have huge savings or investments or anything, but I have some online businesses. I sell handmade products on a couple different websites through Etsy and others and covers all of our expenses plus a couple thousand dollars a month that we're able to save.

At this point, it only takes four to ten hours per week to manage everything, so I have a lot of free time on my hands. My wife doesn't need to really work, so she has a lot of free time on her hands. It's myself, my daughter, and we've got another one on the way in March.

Congrats. Thank you. But we've just been using our time to develop fun hobbies that are financially beneficial, which we kind of learned through your interview with Jacob Lund Fisker. So we're focusing on valuable hobbies like biking, filmmaking, gardening. I'm just getting into hunting and foraging, permaculture-type stuff. And your interview with Curtis Stone has got me now interested in this urban farming thing.

And I've sort of launched one this year, HugsFarm.com, Hugs Urban Farm, it's an urban farming thing. And I'm getting a lot of pushback from my wife because she sees all the huge time that it's taking me, the huge time commitment and the low payout. And it's really good work.

I really enjoy being out in the sun, and I'm definitely starting to see some of the social capital that comes along with it. But it's a huge input, and my process for making my handmade products online is totally repeatable. I have it like fully systemized. I'm an engineer nerd type person.

And in a few weeks, I can get another one of those going that's making good profit. And then I'm still around to hang out with her more and stuff. But yeah, I'm just trying to kind of struggle to make a strong case of how the social capital is worth a lot to my wife.

So I was wondering what your opinion is on that, the social capital versus financial capital, and any opinions on situations when one might be worth pursuing over the other, et cetera. Is she upset about the fact that she thinks you should be making more money with your time? Is that what the conflict is?

I think she just -- she's kind of a wanderlust, and she likes to travel around. And we've been doing quite a bit of traveling these last couple years. And the farming, the gardening thing, and pulling on that and starting to sell the restaurants, it's just putting a lot of time into it.

And I love it. But she's more time of her just hanging out with Josie by herself now rather than having me around. And they hang out with us too on the farm, but she's a 2-1/2-year-old, so she's more ripping stuff out of the ground and destroying it than helping.

So I'm just trying to make the case of how -- what your opinion is of how, if I keep building this and develop good relationships in the community, is that worth more, you think, than pursuing like real financial independence, I guess it would be, where I should just keep trying to build the online businesses and get us to a place where we can just be considered financially retired on paper, I guess?

What's your primary reason for doing the farming? What's motivating you to do it? Well, I started doing it just as a value-added hobby. Growing our own food, hunting our own food, stuff like that, it just -- it pays dividends and it's -- I enjoy it a lot. I've always kind of been -- I grew up on a little bit of a hobby farm, so I've always enjoyed that connection to my food.

And then I just started selling stuff to a couple chefs I knew in town, sort of friends of mine, and there was more demand, and now I'm getting -- I have press -- there's a magazine in town that's published an article on our farm, and it's kind of like building itself.

And I really enjoy it, so I kind of feel compelled to keep it going. And I just love it. I mean, and Michelle likes it, too. My wife likes it a lot when she's helping. She just struggles with, you know, having a two-and-a-half-year-old now, another one on the way, so she's kind of tied up with that more.

And we switch off every once in a while, but I just work a lot faster, more efficiently, and more organized than her, so I've been doing the majority of it. Right. So here are some thoughts that occur to me in thinking about the question. I don't think of it being a social capital versus financial capital.

The point that I try to make on the show and that I see is that we don't do a very good job in our culture of recognizing the value of social capital. We're trained to only measure things in terms of financial results. But if you look at life a little bit more broadly, you can see that social capital does have a tremendous value, and I'll give you two examples at opposite ends of the spectrum.

When I graduated from college, I decided I wanted to go on a road trip, and I had some time off. I quit my job, and I wanted to go travel. So I went on Facebook, and I sent a mass email to everyone in my email address book. I went on Facebook.

I Facebooked every one of my friends, and I said, "I'm taking a road trip. I want to come visit you if I'm able to, and where do you live, and can I come see you?" And I got back dozens and dozens of responses. I took those responses. I charted them on a map of the places where I had an invitation to come and spend the night.

I charted them on a map with people that I knew, and that was how I set out my itinerary, was I went from place to place, a friend's house to friend's house. Usually stayed one night, sometimes two, sometimes three, but usually I just stopped and kind of went on to the next place.

And I traveled for just under two months. I went from Florida as far west as Colorado and up to Canada, and then all the way back to Florida. And I didn't spend a night paying for lodging, and I didn't sleep in my car. I stayed at a friend's house every night.

And so the point of that is that just simply by just knowing casual acquaintances and friends across the country, that I didn't need to spend $50 a night or $800 a night for hotel stays. So if I were to take that and add it on to what I do now with Radical Personal Finance, now that effect would be even more amplified.

And so even though with Radical Personal Finance I'm not yet making a million dollars a year with it, it's allowed me to build a worldwide network where I've received invitations from people all over the world to come stay with them. And if I wanted to go and travel with my family, then I guarantee all of you on the call today and many people all around the world, if they knew I were coming to Italy or knew I was coming to Georgia or knew wherever, I would have invitations, and many of you would invite us to stay the night.

Many of you would feed us dinner. So there's a real social benefit to this business, and that was something that I didn't have with my previous firm. So I walked away from more money at my previous firm, but now I have the potential to make more money now, and I have a much broader range of benefits.

So from the little scale to the big scale, a few weeks ago I read a book called "Clinton Cash," and it was all about President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and what they've been doing since Bill Clinton was out of office. And one of the things that he's done is he's leveraged his connections and his place of being the president, and he's leveraged that to, I think, build a network of--I don't remember the exact numbers, but something that went from being worth a few million bucks when he left office to being worth, I think, $300 million, something like that, with speaking fees.

He's gotten paid speaking fees as high as, I think, $1 million to go and give a single individual one-hour speech around the world. Now, what he was actually doing in that talk was he wasn't just getting paid for the content of the hour, but he, according to the author Peter Schweitzer, wrote the book, and this is the case he sets to prove, he's peddling his influence, and he is selling his influence around the world and selling the influence of his wife as Secretary of State, and that has resulted in him and his foundation and them becoming very, very wealthy because of the influence that they're peddling.

So my point with demonstrating social capital is that if you look at the world, if you don't have social capital, then you've got to rely entirely on financial capital. If you don't have friends around the country, you've got to pay for a night in a hotel all around the country.

But if you have friends all around the country, you don't really have to stay in a hotel and you can leverage your friends. This is what poor people can do, and this is also what rich people do. If you look at the things that people get done, the person who, you know, for example, if you're going to join a board, a nonprofit board, your requirements to join a board are the ability to leverage influence.

Either that influence comes from your ability to write big checks or that influence comes from your ability to compel other people and encourage and persuade other people to write big checks. So the point is to demonstrate that building social capital is valuable and you don't just have to be a millionaire.

If you can control the money, partly through social capital, you can accomplish massive change even if you're not rich. So that's one aspect of it. When it comes to actually deciding what to do, I think a thoughtful way to approach that would be to say, "Let me get clear on what the change is that I'm actually trying to accomplish, and let me see how can I affect it." If you look at the way that the mega-rich people run their money, you go through a series of steps.

The first step is building basic financial security, and you can go back to my, you know, seven steps of financial security. I won't go through that whole thing. Basically, you go through financial security, you go through some, you know, getting out of debt, you go through some basics of building a comfortable, luxurious lifestyle for yourself, and then you go through maintaining financial independence.

Once you get to financial independence, what you find is that people spend their time and their money investing in the causes of change that are important to them. So whether it's Bill and Melinda Gates trying to wipe out, you know, various diseases and trying to vaccinate every child throughout the world, or whether it's Warren Buffett trying to, you know, contributing millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood, and thanks to his wife, Suzy, because that was a cause for him, or whether it's the local business person who's trying to accomplish something, you see that people focus on the change that they want to see.

So my point is, why should I bother to wait to be a mega-billionaire? I don't need to be a mega-billionaire to make a change. So when you come down to something like urban farming, the reason that that's important to me is because I see that one of the causes that I want to promulgate is personal freedom, self-reliance, and independence, and that's the anarchist streak that I have to encourage people to be able to provide for themselves.

So when people take over control of their own food supply and are able to feed their families, when people take and build community in their local space of-- when people take and build community in their local space, what they're actually doing is they're taking back sovereignty over their own situation, and taking back control over their food might lead them to setting up a local economy.

Setting up a local economy might lead them to get out of other systems that I don't particularly love that run our nation on a national basis. So even if you look at social capital, I've been able to leverage the message that was important to me of urban farming and local autonomous food production without having to go into it myself.

So you've got to look at your life and ask yourself, "Why am I doing what I'm doing?" If your family is suffering because of your building a local farm, well, I wouldn't make that trade. I'm not doing local farming myself because at the moment I have much bigger opportunities with radical personal finance.

And if I spend time out in the yard, digging in my yard, that's time that I can't be putting into another project where I can reach thousands more people. But I'm still accomplishing with the leverage of my social capital. I'm still influencing people like you and several others who write me notes and giving them an opportunity for an independent business that they can do in their own backyard.

And that's helping them to build financial independence, and that's accomplishing my goals. So my goals are to help people build independence, and the farming is just a tool in that. Go back to your goals. Consider what your goals are, and then ask yourself, "Is what I'm doing, how does it fit into that in the scope of my life?" Is that helpful, Nate?

That's extremely helpful and extremely valuable. But I don't know if I can repeat all that to my wife. Can you send me that recording? I think right now it should be recording, so I think we're good. Cool. Yeah, I really like the idea you said about building a local economy and how through social capital you are essentially building a local economy.

And organizing and running a local economy is just guaranteed to trickle down into wealth in your life. And sometimes I hate this. I hate to equate friendships with calling it capital, equating it with financial means, but it just feels good, so that's why I've been doing it. It's obvious how good it feels, and you just start to realize it's more about money.

But it's really helpful how you kind of explain how the financial rewards pretty much always come from doing that. Right. Thank you so much. Good. I hope it's useful. I wrote down your website. Tell me again. It was hugsurbanfarm.com? It's actually just hugsfarm.com. You'll see Hugs Urban Farm, our logo on there and everything when you go there.

Hugsurbanfarm@gmail.com is just my email. It's pretty exciting. Cool, man. Keep up the good work. That's awesome to hear. And if I can help in any way, once you get it going, let me know. As far as track your numbers, track your experience, and maybe I'll have you on the show.

We'll do an interview at some point to share it with others. Since the Curtis Stone interview, I know of at least a half a dozen listeners who have started their own urban farm, started microgreens businesses, things like that, to bring in some extra money and start to build a little bit of autonomy for themselves.

I love hearing those stories. I'm just getting the microgreens going right now and winding down the farm for the season. I'm super psyched, and I'll definitely keep in touch. If you ever want to hear more about stuff I'm doing with Handmade, that's really cool, too. I kind of etched it all out, sent it to my little brother and sister, so I've got an outline.

It's kind of fun to talk about, too. Shoot it over, and then I'll read the outline, and we'll correspond, and maybe that will be helpful to other people on the show. So, yeah, shoot me an email. Awesome. All right, thanks, Josh. I appreciate everything. No problem. Next question. Who's got a question?

Joshua, this is Mark from Grand Rapids. Hey, Mark. I have a question about--hi. I have a specific question about when you would want to consider gifting appreciated assets from a taxable account in lieu of doing a cash donation. When is that beneficial to a dual-income family, so in a high-tax bracket?

I don't know if you need more details than that or not to answer the question. I've heard about this as a strategy, but I don't really know too much about it or when we'd want to consider that. It's a simple answer, so let me just give you the simple answer, and if I need more details, I'll tell you.

The rule with appreciated assets is, number one, you gift them when you don't want to own them anymore. So if you know that I don't want to own them and I want to make the gift, then you look to say, "What's the best asset for me to give?" An appreciated asset, let's say that you've got $100 of cost basis, you paid $100 for it, and the asset is worth $200.

So you want to give a contribution of $200 to a charity. If you sell the asset in the open market for $200, then you're going to incur the tax on $100 worth of gain. So you sell it for $200, you pay the tax at $15, and you can only give $185 to the charity.

If you gift the appreciated asset, the $200 to the charity, you can give them $200 and you take the full deduction of $200, whatever the fair market value is of the asset. So the rule is you always gift appreciated assets instead of cash if you have them to give and you decide if you want to get rid of them.

Let me give you the other side so it's clear. If you have depreciated assets, you paid $200 for the investment, you lost money, and now it's worth $100, then the rule with depreciated assets is you always sell the asset first, take the loss on your taxes, and then gift the cash.

So if you sell the asset for $100, then you recognize the $100 loss, and then you go ahead and give the $100 to the charity. So if you don't want to own the asset, if you're happy with it, and if the charity actually has the ability to receive the asset, take care of the title transfer, and sell it, then you always want to gift the appreciated asset and not cash.

Okay. So the key piece to that seems to be if you want to sell it anyway, but what if it's just depreciated? I mean, is there any advantage to -- if we can do either, we can give to the charity from cash or we can sell some of our -- or not sell but transfer some of our appreciated assets directly to the charity.

Is there any benefit to doing that, or is it only if you wanted to get rid of it anyway? Does that make sense? What type of asset and what type of dollar value? Let's say $2,000, and it's a mutual fund in a taxable Vanguard account, just an index fund.

And what's the appreciation in the account? What's the cost basis of the account? This is hypothetical, but -- Okay. So I guess pick a number. Let's say it's 30% higher than when I bought it a couple years ago. All right. Well, if we're talking about -- so usually when people are going to get into the world of gifting appreciated assets, most of the time you're going to be dealing in, okay, I've got a $200,000 piece of property, or I've got a $60,000 classic car or something like that, where you're talking larger numbers.

If you're talking about a couple thousand bucks, in the scale of your life, it's probably not that big a deal. And so look at what the actual benefit is of the transaction and ask yourself if it's worth it. Let's say that we're talking about a $2,000 gift, and you've got a 30% gain.

So let's say your cost basis is $1,500. Well, if you gift a $2,000 asset -- excuse me, if you gift a $2,000 appreciated asset to the charity, then you're going to avoid paying the tax on the $500 worth of gain. Well, if you're paying a 15% long-term capital gains rate, that's saving you 75 bucks.

So is the savings of 75 bucks worth the hassle of doing the paperwork and all of that? I would probably -- maybe, maybe not. But that is that you're basically just saving the tax on the appreciated asset. So it's got to be worth the hassle to deal with it.

If it's a marketable security, you can just go out and buy the same thing. You can give the $2,000 and then take cash from your checking account and go and buy the Vanguard mutual fund again at current rates. Then, yeah, there's no reason not to. It's just worth the hassle.

Usually with appreciated assets, you're going to get into that when we're talking a $50,000 piece of land and you don't want to recognize it and pay $5,000 of capital gain. Sure. I think I understand. And I guess to be a little bit more specific, so instead of doing like a monthly gift to our church of cash, I was thinking of instead either doing a monthly or annual, if it's easier, just an annual one-time gift of $2,000, $3,000 or whatever.

If I could find a way to automate that like I do with just the cash gift, would that be something to do if it wasn't too much of a hassle? It sounds like, hey, if it's not too much of a hassle, it would be beneficial on your taxes to be able to do that.

Like you said, I would just go -- I'd still have the cash then that I would have otherwise donated, so I would just go and buy more of the Vanguard fund or whatever to replace it in my account. It sounds like there is some benefit there. It's just a question of how much it is.

Right, right. And it's got to be practicality. Is the church a big church where they've got somebody who's used to that, or is it a small church, 200 people type of thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know they do have the capabilities, but since I've never done it, I don't know how well it works or if it's a manual process or if I can just tell Vanguard here, send it here every month or what.

And that's something I'll have to do some research on. But, yeah, thanks for your call on that. I appreciate it. Yeah, for sure. It could totally work. My guess is, depending on the size of the church, so some churches would have the staff and the infrastructure ready where they could actually do that.

But a small church is probably going to be more hassle, and basically what you'd be doing is asking, say, the treasurer or somebody like that who might be a part-time volunteer to do a bunch of paperwork, title transfer, liquidate the asset. And if you're doing it for $75, I think it's probably more hassle than it's worth.

But if you're doing it as a one-time thing, you've got a $10,000 inheritance or whatever, then do that. So just ask yourself if it's worth the scale. Conceptually, it'll work. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you have any plans to do a podcast on charitable giving in general, like different strategies and things?

I've got like six books that I want to go through and talk about charitable strategies. The challenge for me is simply at this point in time figuring out what's the next thing that I should really be focused on and what's the priority. So at some point I will, yeah.

But in essence, it's simple. Appreciated assets always give the asset, not the cash. Depreciate it, sell the asset, give the cash. Awesome. Thank you very much. Cool. You're welcome, man. Next question. Who wants to go? Hi, Joshua. It's Nick here. Nobody else has something to ask? All right. Go, Nick.

I've got like four questions I owe you answers on Q&A, and I apologize. They're on my list, and I haven't done them yet. That's okay. Some of those I can be patient on. I was thinking just based on listening to some other people's questions, I guess I had a pointed question here.

Depending on how I calculate things and how my expenses go the next few years, I'm anywhere from, you know, four to 14 years from financial independence, depending on how things go, at least what I consider to be financially independent. And I have a whole range of questions about, you know, becoming self-employed from being a current employee and all that stuff.

But one thing that's kind of been gnawing at the back of my mind is about once -- let's say tomorrow magically I hit the number that's in my head to become financially independent, and I wanted to flip the switch and turn those, you know, savings vehicles into distributions to myself to start living off of that money.

The reason I'm curious about it so early is just because it's always a mental weight on me to know if once I hit that number if it's actually going to mean anything. And specifically, let's say I have, say, half of my money in, you know, Vanguard index funds, and the other half are between me and my wife are in IRAs and 401(k)s that, you know, the financial institutions that our company has picked.

What is the -- other than changing from, say, you know, 95% stocks and 5% bonds in my Vanguard index funds and maybe switching around the allocations appropriately, what is the actual distribution of income look like from having, say, you know, a pot of savings to actually living off of that savings?

What are the mechanisms that happen there when you make that switch? If that question makes sense. Right. I understand. By the way, first of all, congratulations on the baby. I forgot to say that. Thanks. Thank you. I got the email. I appreciate your letting me know. Yeah, that's one of the reasons my expenses are unknown for foreseeable next year.

We'll see how they level out with my cash flow statements. Indeed. Indeed. The making of that switch is -- the answer to the question is the frustrating answer of it depends. But I'm going to give you some scenarios so that it's not -- and I'll just leave it as it depends.

It depends on what are the sources of income. It depends on what is the age of retirement. It depends on what's the makeup of the assets. And it depends on what is the goal of -- what are you actually going to do during financial independence. You've got to realize with regard to the financial independence community, almost nobody actually fully retires.

So the number of people who are actually following the plan of saying I've saved a million dollars and now I'm going to sit back and do nothing, almost nobody actually does that. Almost everybody who becomes financially independent continues to work in some way or has some source of income and they just have the confidence and the satisfaction of knowing, well, at least I don't have to.

I'm doing this because I want to and not because I have to. And you can go through everything -- Yeah, that's exactly where I'm trying to get to, just to have those bases covered so I can go do more meaningful work in the world and affect more people possibly, including making my own work more rewarding.

That's exactly my goal. Right. I guess I can't divorce that from the actual distribution because it will affect -- Right. And so what I am convinced of, and this is my opinion, I'm convinced we ought to at least acknowledge that. And as proof of that, for example, I just interviewed a couple of weeks ago from FinCon, I just interviewed Brandon, a mad scientist, and his wife, Jill, and I'm going to be playing that interview at some point on the show in the next few weeks at least.

And so Brandon, he hit his financial independence date and he's still working because his employer offered him a job and he likes doing it and his wife is working. So even though he has the ability, he's actually still saving, even though he hit financial independence. Jacob, early retirement extreme, he took a job, not because he had to, but he took a job.

Pete, Mr. Money Mustache, he makes more money now on his blog than he ever did before as an engineer. And I'm sure, although he doesn't say this on the blog and I have no inside knowledge, I would be willing to bet a good amount of money that he's not living off of his index funds, that he's spending the money from his earned income.

And so what this opens up, I believe, is that you don't have to wait to be, you know, to have the $1.925 million to pretend like you're financially independent. You need $30,000 or $130,000 or $430,000 to get you through. Now, what you really need is what you're asking about, which is the income plan.

And that's where it comes down to what are the numbers. The reality is most people who are pursuing this early retirement, early financial independence lifestyle, they're going to be earning something. And so what I would be concerned, what I wouldn't want to see doing, let's say that you were a 65-year-old retiree.

As a 65-year-old retiree, then the planning process is a little bit simpler. We know what your Social Security distributions are. We generally are going to be able to sketch out a lifestyle that is going to be fairly -- you're going to have a good sense of where you are.

Most people who are 65 years old and retiring aren't sitting down and saying, well, I don't know, I might have more kids, we might want to move, I might want to pay for this. Most retirees, they've had those major expenses. And so we can sketch out you want to live on $5,000 a month.

And then you say, based on our assets, we're going to set up -- you've got Social Security of $2,000 a month. We're going to set up annuity payments of $2,000 a month. That gives you a baseline income of $4,000. Then we're going to take X percent distributions from the 401(k), and that's going to cover you anywhere on the extra $2,000.

If you have lots of surplus of money, retirement planning is easy. So for people that have $5 million in the bank and they want to spend $8,000 a month, that's easy because you don't have to worry about fluctuation. And you can put a lot of -- you can keep the account invested aggressively.

You can keep it primarily in stocks. Because you've got such a margin of safety, you can go for highest overall rate of return. When people are just barely squeaking by with retirement, they just have enough, then what happens is you actually have to go safer in order to guarantee that minimum lifestyle.

And so the flexibility, if somebody is willing to be flexible with their income, the toughest type of traditional retirement planning to do is somebody who is not willing to be flexible with their income. I've got to have $5,000 a month. If the market's down and I have $3,000 a month, that's a total failure.

I've got to have this level. Well, in that case, you move in the direction of safer investments, less volatility, more fixed products, annuity products, guaranteed streams of income, things like that, because they're not willing to be flexible. You have somebody that says, "Hey, I could live on three or I could live on seven, and it's not really that big of a deal." Now you can go away from guaranteed products.

You can go to a more volatile investment portfolio, which in the aggregate will produce a higher total return with more fluctuation. For the early retiree, you can do the same exact thing. All right, I'd like to spend $4,000 a month. I could get by on three because I have no debt or minimum mortgage, but I'd like to make seven.

I think I might make a couple thousand dollars a month with this part-time deal. In that case, I would just be okay with doing from time to time distributions from a stock portfolio, where you look and say, "What's the dividend rate of my portfolio? Could I live on the dividends, or do I have a piece of real estate, and so I can keep invested for maximum return?" If I were, say, how old are you going to be in four or five years, Nick?

About 41. Okay, so if I were 41, and I were, without giving away any of your personal details, if I were going to be 40, and that was what I was shooting for for my financial independence day, knowing that I've got a couple of part-time businesses, what I would do is I would have some assets that are very, very stable from a cash flow perspective.

I would probably do that with a couple of pieces of real estate. If you're okay with a little bit of management or something like that, because that's very, very stable from an income perspective, then I would set up the taxable portfolio, and I would try to see if I were willing to live on just the dividends plus a little bit.

Then I would keep enough money in cash to know that I've got at least a year's worth of wiggle room of cash, and then I would just take distributions from my taxable account based upon looking at the market. If I'm looking at the market and I say things are feeling relatively high, I would go ahead and pull some money to the side off the market.

If things weren't, then I would go ahead and leave that, and I would balance it based upon my earned income. The technical answer, and I'm going to go into, as soon as I can, I'm going to get out some retirement planning shows. The problem is that most of the research is built around age 65 retirees, and even most of that research assumes some base level of income.

There's not a ton of formal academic research from somebody saying, "I've got $2 million in my Vanguard total stock market index fund, and I'm just going to do a few percent distribution off of it." It probably should work. The research indicates that it should work, because when the portfolios are stress-tested, they last for longer than 30 years.

But in terms of actually you yourself, I would take a more flexible approach, recognizing I'm going to make some money, I'm going to spend some dividends, I've got various asset classes that I'm going to be spending. I don't know if I answered the question or if I just talked around it.

Was that helpful at all? No, that was very helpful. Specifically, I think what you triggered on there is that I need to look into what my income plan will be. That's not a term I had really formalized, but that's exactly what I need to do. Specifically, I didn't want to, let's say, like I said, magically tomorrow I hit that number, and I turn around and say, "Okay, that's the number I hit.

Let me go ahead and start taking distribution in whatever way I could from whichever accounts that I have," and then find out that, "Oh, my God, half of my accounts, which are locked up in IRA, qualified accounts, are not accessible at all without major penalties." So really I think the devil's in his eagle's there.

I need to look into each of those accounts I have and start asking questions of each account, what are the rules surrounding this rather than it just being some amorphous blob that gets piled into one big lump to say, "Is that the number or not?" I need to understand each of those piles individually and what the rules are surrounding them, and I don't understand that at this point.

It's just like a target number without any rules for distribution known to me right now because I'm ignorant of that right now. So I think that's what I need to concentrate on if I want to feel more comfortable about that. But, yeah, it's always good to have that reminder of, like, I'm conservative, so I want to have that basis taken care of.

I'm flexible, of course, but I want that lower floor to be taken care of, whether it's through real estate or through my other dividends that I can take or whatever the mechanism I have to change to make a good dividend base happen. But, yeah, it's always good to get the reminders that I don't have to wait for the absolute number because, I mean, as I've told you before, I do have a sneaky suspicion that if I were to quit tomorrow and find more fulfilling work, I might even bring in more money than I do now.

Maybe not. Maybe I would bring in $0, but I just don't know. I always have that in the back of my mind and think of doing it earlier, and then reality sets in and two kids set in, and I think, "Well, I'll just stay with the job that's very secure." Right.

And it's so hard. I hate being wishy-washy on answers, but the reality is it's got to be such a personal decision. The message that I feel is not prevalent is the message that I say, "Recognize the fact that you're probably never going to retire." Some people retire if they work a career or a job, and then they retire and move into kind of the golden years.

Some people do it, but not many. And recognize that especially people who are financially independent, many of them are not going to want to do that. So recognize that you don't have to wait to have the number hit based upon your 4% or 3% withdrawal rate. Recognize that for the 23-year-old person, $50,000 in cash gives you the money to leave the job that you hate, fly across the country, join the organization that you would volunteer your time with for free if you weren't.

So we can be very personal, and each of us can lay out a plan that's exactly appropriate to us. So I will try to do -- there's not a good -- there's not good content out there for people who are planning financially independence as far as their actual distribution plan.

I'll put a note on my show idea and try to use an example of how it could be done. Where you're going to spend your taxable accounts. I'll try to think about -- see if I can create a compelling show on the topic to give some more technical answers.

But there are dozens of solutions. You could take the taxable account, put -- keep enough money on the side to get your business going, figure out what your floor is. If you retire at 40, buy yourself a 20-year annuity with a lump sum which gives you a floor of income for 20 years, leave all the money in the retirement accounts growing at stock plans.

It's got to be -- that's where you need your financial advisor. You've got to go through those projections with somebody who can go through what's the budget, what's the top range, what's the bottom range, what are your assets, what are your plans, et cetera. I hope one of those guys you emailed me about, continue to give me feedback.

I hope one of those guys works out for you. >> All right. I will do. Thanks again. I'll let someone else ask a question. Just with talking with the financial advisors, hopefully I find the right one at some point. You talk about early retirement a lot of times. When you combine they're not experienced with early retirement and I'm not -- don't have the vocabulary to describe what I need, it becomes a very confusing conversation pretty quickly.

I appreciate the tools. I'll keep you posted on how it goes. We're actually on our way very shortly to meet with one of the people from the Paladin registry right now. Thank you very much. I'll keep you in the loop. >> For sure. Who else? Who has a question?

>> Hey, Joshua. >> Rick. >> Go ahead, Rick. >> A quick question for you and I apologize if you've already answered this because I did come on late. And that is I noticed in your signature that you are providing a 30 or 60 minute consultation on a fully written financial plan.

Is that current? Is that something you're doing now? >> Yes, I'm in the process of launching that this week. And I've worked out the details on that. So, yes, I am willing to provide and I should advertise it. I will provide a 30 to 60 minute free no obligation complimentary consultation with anybody who might be interested in coaching just to check about and talk about personal private details.

And the best way to do it is to if you're interested in that, the best thing to do is you can email me or sometimes email goes to spam. If you're interested in coaching, just text me. My cell phone number is 561-386-6034. Again, 561-386-6034. And you can just text me your name and your time zone and we can find a time that works well for that.

And I'll just describe a little bit of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. So long term with radical personal finance, I do not want to do -- I do not want to be an individual financial advisor. I walked away from that business because there are lots of people who can do that really well.

And I'm hoping to find more of them to build a network. But I'm not -- I don't want to be an individual financial advisor. So coaching is not advice. But there are still -- there's a massive need for people who can actually provide big picture personalized wealth coaching, wealth creation coaching.

And that's what's missing in the financial advice space. Most financial advice is oriented around you've got a lot of money, let me tell you what to do with your money. And very little is oriented around you're broke, let me tell you how to get money. Now there are some people that are starting it.

That's why I've tried to support XY Planning Network. They're doing a good job there. And I'll try to support and promote anybody else who's doing it. But there's tons of books out there on it. And there's not a lot of great information for helping people think it through. So I'm bringing on a limited number of clients.

I haven't set the total number. But I think I'm probably going to cap it at 10 right now. And I'm going to be working over the next two months with 10 individual clients for individualized wealth creation coaching. And it's not going to be cheap, but it's also not going to be out of sight.

At the moment, the packages -- and I've got to publish the page. I'm working on the page to actually formalize this. But at the moment, the packages are from $1,500 to $4,500. And these are limited-time engagements with a certain number of phone consultations, email consultations, things like that, with a lot of homework in between.

And what I'm doing with that coaching program is, number one, I'm trying to provide it as a service to help some people get some more personalized plans and approaches. It also helps me because it's immediate income as I continue to build the income base behind Radical Personal Finance. And I'm using that data with the curriculum that I've developed that I'm going to be walking coaching clients through.

I'm using it to test it with individual people, get feedback before I publish the comprehensive self-help resources, before I publish the book, before I publish the curriculum, before I publish the seminars, the audio products, those types of things. And so I've got the curriculum designed, and I'm testing it with the up-front coaching clients.

And then I'm building it out for where I can develop products and sell those products into the general marketplace. So that is new. I just added it to the signature, to my email signature in the last couple of days. I haven't -- I've mentioned it on the show here and there, but I'm right now working on publishing the page with my web designer on a different website, publishing the coaching page and putting the information out.

The difference between coaching and financial advice and financial planning, number one, I have not established an RIA, a Registered Investment Advisory Firm, so I will not be giving any specific advice on sell the security, buy that security. I can give overall generalized input, but I won't be -- I don't sell any products.

I'm not selling any -- no insurance policies, no investment products, anything like that. And I'm not going to be doing -- I'm not going to be delivering a financial plan with a specific projections of financial planning software, 132-page report of here are the projections. I'll do them by hand and give some big-picture advice.

And frankly, clients don't read the 130-page either. I've only had about -- in the time that I was doing financial advice and delivering 130-page reports, I probably had five clients who actually would go through page by page, and those were wonderful clients. And there's one former client who's actually on this call, and you know who you are.

That's familiar. Susan Harris. I wanted you to say your name, but go ahead. Susan is actually a former client of mine who started listening to the show after I left the financial advice business. And Susan, you were one of about five clients out of over 1,000 people who actually went page by page through the financial plan and understood each and every page.

So at this point, my intention is to do financial plans on one page and give people a clear rail to run on for a wealth plan, not just, okay, here's the standard application of your portfolio, because in the scope of life, that stuff's meaningless to people. So that's the answer, Trick.

Does that answer the question? That's what I'm doing. Yeah, that definitely helps. And with that said, maybe a follow-up to that would be, you've mentioned before financial advisor, podcast, or coaching as well. Is that also in the pipeline, or are you putting that on the back burner at this point?

It's in the pipeline. So here's the problem I face in the business. And as with anything, I'm working my way through the entrepreneurial process. And right now, I'm in the teenage stage of a business, the rough adolescence, as Michael Griver would call it, the difficult adolescence, where at the beginning, I've gone through a personal transformation.

When I started Radical Personal Finance, I was just tired. I was tired of employees. I was tired of assistants. I was tired, and I was just kind of tired. So my vision at that time was I just wanted to do me and my microphone and sit in the back of my RV and record my dinky little podcast and publish it and just do that.

So it took about four, five, six months for me to kind of decompress and realize, well, I could do that, but I think I need to build something bigger, and to realize, to prove out that, yes, the demand for good information and good advice is out there. And yes, I am willing to go ahead and build the actual business.

So after that point in time, I started working on the infrastructure, hiring the right people, hiring the web developer instead of me dealing with it, hiring a designer instead of me dealing with it. Next month, I'm hiring the audio editor instead of me doing it. So that frees up time.

And then also, once I dropped my consulting contract, that opened up more time for me as well. And so at this point, I'm building the larger business of Radical Personal Finance. And so it's taken time for me to build out the capacity to be able to handle the coaching, to be able to handle this.

The Financial Advisor podcast is a market that I believe exists with regard to the info products. But when it comes down to actually serving the Financial Advisor marketplace, I thought I could do it, but I realized I'm just not that excited about it. So I'm not excited about creating a once a week Financial Advisor-focused podcast.

There's lots of Financial Advisors that listen to Radical Personal Finance. And so in essence, I just decided I'm not as excited about that as I am excited about other things. I've still got the Simple website up. I've got a few people that have signed up on the email list of interest.

And as I outsource, I'm writing the Radical Personal Finance book right now. I'm going to build out from that a series of talks that are going to come from that, a series of self-coaching products, a series of seminars. As I build that out, then I'll continue to do that.

What I've realized, though, is I've had a number of people who are Financial Advisors who've reached out to me for kind of some coaching on the actual media side. And so I probably should do like a special one-time conference call or something for some of you guys who are from that perspective and just share what I've learned to try to help because this is absolutely the future.

Doing your own media and creating good access to people for Financial Advisors is absolutely, I'm convinced, is the future for any type of service business. And that's what we need to be doing now. Not trying to do what I'm doing as far as this crazy lots of content, all the focus, but just communicating with clients in a very focused, specialized way.

So it's on the back burner right now because there are bigger opportunities in front of me, but I do intend at some point to get around to it. Okay, great. Thank you, Joshua. And as an aside, if you're ever curious, I set up my full proprietor RIA in 2010.

So if you ever wanted to find out what that was like, if you ever do consider that path, let me know and I'll be happy to share my experience. Yeah, for sure, man. I think it's awesome that you had done it. I had gone through and I wrote the, I went through all the process and then just the last minute I pulled the papers from it.

And by the way, I do have still here on, I got, what's his name, the book, the Boston, here's the Boston Economics guy, Kotlikoff. I bought his book and I've got it. I've still got your question of your review of it. So at some point I may review the book for you.

Yeah, that was an old question. I didn't think, I thought that one had fallen by the wayside by now. So cool. I'm glad you got the book. I think you'll really enjoy his perspective being a little different than the mainstream. I do like, I always, I quote his numbers on unfunded liabilities.

He is at the high end, but I've never seen, you know, with 200 and what's the up to 220, $230 trillion of unfunded liabilities in a total government debt, inclusive of unfunded liabilities that we face. I've never seen a credible, I haven't seen an article that credibly discounts his numbers.

Most of the estimates are in the hundred trillion dollar numbers, but I just always use his $220 trillion number myself until I find someone that can discredit him. But he's done good work. So a little leftist in my face, but whatever. Yeah. He's done a lot of good work in social security strategies as well.

I'm pretty familiar with all his work on that. And he has a new book on that as well. That just came out. Yep. Yep. I've seen that. So awesome. So yeah, if I can help Rick, let me know. Who's next? Hey Josh, I just wanted to make a quick point.

A little while back you were asking if anybody would be willing to volunteer for, to help you with anything. So I responded, but I don't know whether you get some of my stuff, but if there's anything I can help you with, let me know. It would only be maybe a couple hours a week or something.

So, you know, take it for what it's worth or whatever, but you can always contact me to see if it's something I could help you with. I have to check this fan folder, Susan. I haven't gotten, I didn't get that email from you. I have gotten emails from other, from some other listeners and the challenge, and thank you very much for being willing to do that.

The biggest challenge for me has been figuring out what and how to outsource and how to actually do that, designing the business. And that was where when I didn't, I didn't design radical personal finance right from the beginning because I designed it as just kind of, I just wanted to sit down with me and my microphone.

I intentionally didn't plan out the scale of the business and how to do that. At this point in time, I have gone forward and kind of planned some of those things out, but I'm still finding challenge of how to, how to outsource tasks. And so it's been a challenge, but thank you.

I will keep that in mind. Yep, sure. Yeah. Hello. Hi, Joshua. This is Mike. Hey, Mike, go for it. Hey. So this is a little, I mean, this is talking about long-term planning, but we're considering long-term care insurance. And I was wondering what your opinion was on that. I've read conflicting things.

So I'll give you the big picture scenario and then you can, you might need to give me more specifics, but let me give you the big picture answer. Long-term care insurance is unaffordable for anybody with less than maybe say three to $500,000 of assets. It's very important for people with say $300,000 to a couple million dollars of assets.

And it's not strictly necessary for people who are going to have more than a couple million bucks at retirement, but it can be a really good buy as a hedge against the potential risk. The challenge is that the marketplace has changed dramatically over the last two to three years.

And the policies were in the past much more generous than they are now. And you've got to buy it at the right time in your life to be able to afford the premiums. And so big picture, there's nothing wrong with the product. It needs to be carefully bought and it needs to fit properly into the comprehensive plan.

I actually own long-term care insurance. What happened when I was in it for me and for my wife, even at my age, because when I was with Northwestern Mutual, it used to be you could buy big, big policies with unlimited benefits. And then systematically some of the companies systematically started pulling back on benefits.

And so Northwestern Mutual was one of the last three companies to offer long-term care policies with a lifetime benefit period. And I actually bought insurance for me and for my wife at that time because I could still get the unlimited benefits. And it's really a useful product from a tax perspective.

It's got a unique niche. And if you have the right type of corporate setup, you can fully deduct the premiums and get the benefits tax-free, which is unique. So that's my big picture answer. You want to give me more specifics and ask me about your situation? I'll try to give you more commentary.

Well, I mean, my wife and I are in our low to mid-30s, so we're not old. But my wife has some Alzheimer's in her family history. So we're just trying to protect our assets moving forward in case something happens. Are you fully on track for traditional retirement where you could expect to be well-funded for retirement at the age of, say, 60, 65, that type of traditional retirement age?

Absolutely. But the plan is for us to have a kid in the next couple of years. And we have enough in the savings to where we could just live off of her salary. So that's sort of the plan right now. What type of work do you do? I'm a software engineer.

Do you have disability income insurance? Yes. Okay. So you want to maximize your disability income insurance before you get to long-term care insurance. You're in one of those areas where it's hard, without going through a ton of details, it's tough to -- it's tough for me to give you an answer.

You're in the difficult space. In general, here's my approach to long-term care. The advice that you get out there in the marketplace is usually advice that says, "Wait until," for example, Dave Ramsey or Suzy Orman always said, "Wait until you're 60." And so there are a lot of people who will parrot that advice to get into web forums and things like that.

I've never been able to figure out any rational reason to wait for a certain age to buy long-term care insurance. And the challenge is when you're 60, it gets so expensive when you get into the 60s that many people find it difficult to stomach actually spending the money on the premiums.

So that's a real challenge when you get to be that age. So I've never been able to prove to myself that waiting until a certain age was a good idea. I'm open to somebody who could convince me of it, but I've never been able to prove it. What I have -- Go ahead.

I was going to say the only caveat to that is I've read -- I don't know if it's true or not -- that you can go ahead and buy it when you're younger, but then there's so much instability in that space. Like you were saying, that things could change and you could just lose everything that you had put into it if they totally changed the rules.

Right. So let me address that in just a second because that is a concern, but that's overblown, in my opinion. I'll talk to you about the state of the market. Let me just make a note. So I can make sure to come back to that. So how I've approached the buying decision is let's talk in order of risk.

So for somebody like you guys, okay, we're young, we're doing well financially, we're saving for gold, and what we're thinking about risk is to think, "Is this a risk that we face that we're concerned about?" And so the answer is yes, we're concerned that my wife might have Alzheimer's disease, and so therefore we want to protect against that.

That's not, however, a high priority risk. So you want to start with making sure that you're on track for all the rest of your plans. That's why I ask about retirement. And so how I approach it is to say, I would ask you if I were doing individual planning for you, Mike, I would say, "Are you on track for traditional retirement?" Yes.

"Do you have life insurance and disability insurance, which are much higher probabilities and likelihoods than long-term care needs?" If so, yes. Okay, do we have additional money that we could, do we want to hedge against this risk with additional money, and is this thing to make sense in our overall portfolio?

And if you, you know, we make plenty of money, we're saving well, we are not sacrificing our lifestyle, you know, at this point, let's see, my long-term care premiums for my wife and for me are what, 60 bucks a month? Yeah, about 60 bucks a month. I've got a, I've got a Cadillac policy with pretty decent benefits, with a pretty decent benefit amount, so it's got all kinds of fancy inflation options.

So 60 bucks a month is not going to materially impact, you know, it's not going to make a huge difference whether I buy it or not. And I like having the confidence of it being there. So that's how I would approach it at your age. As long as you're on track for other things, then yes, you can check it out.

State of the market. Here's what's challenging. When you get into the state of the market, and this was why I went ahead and bought when the unlimited benefit period was available. If I developed early onset Alzheimer's or I had a car accident that caused me to need ongoing care, my policy would never run out of money.

And so at 30, that's a really compelling scenario because I've got a, I've got a dramatic potential benefit for a very small cost. And those policies, to the best of my knowledge, nobody is offering unlimited benefit periods anymore. New York Life was the last one to pull their product and they pulled it back in about 2012, 2013.

I could be wrong. Somebody could have offered it, but I haven't heard of it, of anybody still offering it. So now how you price a policy is you build the policy in based upon an amount of money and you say, what's the total benefit value that I'm going to try to plan for?

So you might plan for a policy that has a total of $500,000 of benefits in the contract. And so it's a little bit more challenging now because you don't have that unlimited option to figure out what's the right fit from the contract perspective. There were a lot of companies that jumped into the long-term care insurance marketplace that thought they were going to make a killing and they thought they were going to make a killing.

And the insurance industry priced insurance policies originally based upon some assumptions from disability insurance, certain lapse ratios and things like that. They priced that into the products and the majority of companies dramatically underpriced their products. And since that time, there was a huge amount of turmoil in the marketplace where there was a huge amount of turmoil in the marketplace and many companies lost money.

They stopped selling the products. They increased premiums across the board, et cetera. You cannot buy, again, to the best of my knowledge, you cannot buy a contract that is using insurance lingo called non-cancelable. Non-cancelable means that the insurance company doesn't have the rights to raise your premiums. All insurance companies have the right to change premiums on enforced long-term care insurance policies if they want to.

So you can't buy a policy, even my policy, Northwestern Mutual has the right to raise the rates on me if they need to, not as an individual but as a class of insureds. So they can raise it on all males between the age of 30 and 45 that fit this demographic.

They can do that. So in long-term care, this was a little bit of a holdover from my selling days when I was selling for Northwestern Mutual, but I still believe it to be true. Company matters. And I would not shop based upon price. I would shop based upon company.

So there I would recommend you start with some of the big mutuals. Start with Northwestern Mutual, New York Life. Check out their products. Let's see, who are the other? Lincoln is a big player in the long-term care marketplace. They have a lot of business. Start with them, but look for stability of company.

I think that matters. What happens when the company stops selling the product or they get rid of it, what they'll do is they will at time write off the business. They set up a trust fund and then they take the policies and they move them over into the trust fund.

And they fund it and then that trust fund is accountable to pay off claims that are going to come out of that pool. So if it's poorly managed, then what can happen is the trust fund can become toxic and people bail. The healthy people that can get new insurance, they bail and they go on their way.

And then the fund falls apart because that's continually increased premiums and the only people that keep the policies are the ones who are sick. So that can happen if a company is poorly managed and that has happened. So in long-term care, a long-term care policy is a very different thing than a 10-year level term life policy.

I would go with one of the quality companies that are going to have a longer-term focus on the business versus just whoever's cheapest. Okay, great. Thank you. Yeah, hopefully that helps. I'm sorry I can't be more specific. In your situation, I would say it's probably a toss-up. If you – what I like about long-term care, I can run it through the business, fully deductible.

That saves me a little bit of money. And then the benefit on the back end is tax-free. So plus when you're young, it's so cheap. If Northwestern Mutual canceled the policy, I'm out, what, $600 to $700 a year for a few years. And if I decided to walk from it, it's not that big a deal.

It's cheap enough when you're in your 30s that as long as you're on track for retirement, as long as you've got life insurance, disability insurance, and you're funding other short-term goals as well, then toss it in. You're probably not going to miss $60 a month. All right. Excellent. Thank you so much.

Who else? Joshua, I know you're over your hour's time, so you don't have to answer this right now if you don't want to. But I took your advice a while back when we got together, and I sold my house up north because I wasn't really making a killing. Awesome.

Yeah. So now I don't know what to do with it. By the time I dish out some money here and there and stuff, I'll probably have like $100K that I'm not really quite sure what to do on that, even thinking maybe annuity. I don't know. So think about it.

You don't have to answer it right now. I know other people might have questions. I set aside on my schedule two hours, so I wanted to take as many questions as I could for up to two hours. Oh, okay. Good. So I'll answer. I'll give you just a quick thing.

Did you ever connect with the person who took over your accounts when I left Northwestern Mutual? No. They've been calling, but I haven't. Okay. At least meet with them and just talk to them and just see. I think the person who should be calling would be the Marks office, or it might be somebody else, but it's probably Marks office.

So set up a thing there and they can help you by going into the numbers, rerunning a financial plan and talking about it and talking about details of it and in your situation because it needs to fit into the overall plan. I would say don't worry about just keeping it in cash right now.

Just be happy you have the cash sitting aside and you're not going to spend it. Just set it aside and think about it in a longer term basis. You need to again find another advisor who can work with you on details. Consider also reaching out to the person who is advising you on your 401(k) plan and see if they can help you out.

Okay. All right. Yep. That's it for me. Thank you. This is great. No worries. Who else? I've got time. Anyone else want to ask questions? Joshua, this is Mark again. Go ahead. I don't know if anybody else had a question that hasn't asked anything yet, but nobody was saying anything.

I thought I'd jump in. You don't have to go into too much detail on this just because I actually have to drop off here in about 10 or 15 minutes. Some of your recent podcasts have inspired my wife and I to take a look at maybe some side income businesses, either franchise or some web business or something like that.

We've never done anything like that before. We're both employed right now, and that's all we've ever done. I don't know if you have a couple of quick hit type considerations, things that we should think about as we start to think about not necessarily a specific type of business in that, but just considerations from moving from just solely earning W-2 income to starting a business and what kinds of things we would need to think about.

I know there's tech implications and some other things, but it's a pretty broad question. I don't know if you have a way to answer that. Yeah. It's an interesting question. I'll just give you some big hits. Just kind of my general business advice. Number one, go slow. You have no reason to move fast if you have a good situation.

There's no reason to try to jump into something quickly when you can just simply focus on – by the way, I'm sorry. Right when I was answering, I got distracted by the question in the chat that Jonathan asked. Jonathan, I'll ask the question on the phone here in a minute.

Jonathan's asking for some questions in the chat to find out who's also in the California area. Check that out in the chat if you're on a computer, which he is. Sorry, I apologize for getting distracted, but I realized I wanted to answer those questions people are listening on a computer.

In general, start slow and do explore something for fun and look for opportunity. Don't worry about any of the stuff that people get concerned about. You don't need to worry about entity selection. You don't need to worry about tax implications. All that stuff is actually really simple. It's not hard to do, and it's really not a big deal to start a business.

The key to starting a business is just simply getting a customer. As soon as you can get your first customer, you're in business. Look around and look for opportunity or look for need. Try to do it based upon an understanding of your personality, based upon an understanding of your goals, based upon an understanding of what you're actually trying to accomplish.

If you start with that, then explore things. The business can be as simple as, I don't know, one of these things you see, the guy is going out. There was a TV show I saw one time, it was something like Dirty Jobs, but it's different, where people are out hunting truffles in the woods and making decent money.

People up in Alabama are hunting truffles in the woods and selling them and making money on that. I've got a friend of mine who's a commercial fisherman. For him, his perfect business is going out and fishing every day because he loves it. For me, that's exactly the opposite. You don't have to be limited to the online world, the online stuff.

For me, I don't want to go out on the boat every day, but for him, he loves it. Find the customer first and then let the customer create the business. The mistake that most entrepreneurs do is they spend too much time planning, then they buy a bunch of stuff before they have customers.

They're out saying, "Well, I've got to set up an LLC and I've got to go and do this and buy business cards," and things like that. What they really should just simply do is go and see if they can sell some services. If you do that, then you'll be focused on where you get feedback from the marketplace.

The next thing is look at what your actual benefits and advantages are that other people might not have. If you're trying to start a business and you don't want to invest any money in it, then what is your knowledge and expertise that you can apply that other people don't have?

That's what radical personal finance was. It cost me very little to start it, but I looked at the marketplace and I said, "I have knowledge, expertise, and ability that many people don't have." Many people would struggle to do what I do as far as creating this type of content.

I don't struggle. It comes naturally to me. On the other hand, if you've got half a million dollars and you're trying to figure out, "I've got half a million dollars," recognize that's a huge advantage and let the marketplace screen out all the competition of people who don't have half a million dollars to invest.

You go and figure out where you can compete in a way that they don't have. In general, a good book to read on it, I would recommend Michael Masterson wrote a book called "Ready, Fire, Aim." I thought he did a good job in that book of laying out the process of business and walking through the different stages.

The second thing as far as education, read Michael Gerber's book, "The E-Myth," stands for "The Entrepreneur Myth," and design your business intentionally, recognizing that the job of a business is to create a product or service that the marketplace desires and wants and create profit for you, the owner, and that profit has to be substantial enough for you to want to continue in business.

Design your business intentionally, and that's the best general advice I could give you. Quick question here, Jonathan asked in the chat, and I didn't advertise this, but you could actually listen to this call on the computer and not just on the phone. Jonathan asked in the chat who also is from the California area.

Rick, was that you who's from near Reading, California? All right. Well, hey, this is Evan. I'm actually in California as well, but I'm in the Orange County, California area. Okay. All right. So, Evan, shoot me an email later. There's another listener who lives near you, and we're just asking in the chat to connect, and I'll just connect you.

If you guys want to be connected, I'll connect you guys, and you can see if you can form some kind of in-person relationship, which would be cool. That was just the question I wanted to respond to. Yeah, sounds great. Did that help with the question about business? Did that help at all?

Yeah, very much. Thank you very much. Okay. Anybody else want to ask a question? I have another half hour or we can end it. I don't want to belabor it, but I'd be happy to answer any questions that you guys want. Hey, no, should I start? Go ahead. Go ahead.

No, no, no. Yeah, throw another. All right. All right. Hold on. Hold on. 412 area code. Go. All right. Sorry. Hey, this is Nick again. I can't stick around for the answer, unfortunately, but I'll listen to the recording wherever you make it available if you want to answer this question, but I'm hopping in to see that financial advisor right now.

But one question I kind of was curious to have your take on is day to day I find it more and more difficult to, I guess, balance just the organization of living life and being able to systemize things that need to be systemized and living organized and feeling like you're struggling with the chaoticness of trying to start a side business, whatever that may be.

I have three or four things going on right now, which is one of my problems. I lack focus. But if you had to pick one thing, which is between the two of getting your life organized first where you feel stable enough to go forward with a venture or just doing the venture first and the other stuff will just fall by the wayside if it's less important.

What's your take on that? Because I always struggle with that. Should I get my life more organized or should I be really hammering down and focusing on these on, you know, pick up side venture and focus on it? I'd just be curious to hear your answer on that. But I do have to run in to meet the advisor now.

So thank you for that. And bye to everybody. For sure. I'll go ahead and answer it and I'll post the recording for you. So it's an interesting question. My answer to it is that I think the idea of getting your life organized for most of us who would be on a call like this is it's absurd.

We're never going to, it's never going to happen. And the reason I say that is because I used to stress out about getting everything done and well, someday I'm going to get everything done. Someday I'm going to get it on top of things. And then I realized that any time that I started to get on top of things, I would just add more things on top of the list.

And that for people who are, I'm not sure what the right word is, but I guess I would say for people who are big picture thinkers, who are courageous, who are success oriented, we're never going to finish everything because as soon as you get to the end of your list, you're immediately looking for the next thing to do.

You've already added four more ideas. And so the type of person who is going to accumulate money, the type of person who's going to start a business, not the type of person who's just going to sit around and who's going to sit around and have everything done. So the way that I've come to handle it, maybe you disagree, maybe you agree.

I don't know. I've come to just simply walk away from the expectation that I'm ever going to get on top of everything, that I'm ever going to be organized, that any of those things are ever going to happen completely and focus first on saying, what are the things that I want to get done and what are the things that must get done?

And instead of focusing on having everything under control, just simply focus on doing the highest priority things. And for me, what I find is that if I focus on doing the highest priority things and let other things suffer, there's never enough time to do everything and there's always enough time to do the most important things.

So if I know what my priorities are and I put hard deadlines around those, then I'll be able to move forward. So what happens is, give you some examples from my life. I know that, for example, one of my highest priorities and values is time with my family. So I know that when it's time for breakfast or when it's time for dinner or when it's time for lunch, I generally don't work through breakfast or dinner or lunch unless I'm out of town.

And so whether I'm done for the day or not, I'm quitting and I'm going to go and spend time with my family. And that allows me to make sure that my highest priority things are done. And if I don't get the show out, I don't get the show out.

If I don't get the email sent back, I don't get the email sent back. Then also in the morning, what I try to do is just spend time first focusing on what is the most important thing. And what I find is I have to maintain two different, I guess, productivity systems.

I have to maintain the productivity system that's based on my goals. And by productivity system, I just mean a list, whether it's a list in a notebook or I use a couple of different apps. I use an app called Goals on Track. I use an app from time to time called Nozbe.

I almost need to maintain two different things, one that's based upon goals and the other that's based upon everything else. And so first I want to start by focusing on my goals. If my goals say I want to get stronger, then I need to get to the gym. If my goals say I need to get my business started and I need to get that done and push everything else back, in that way I'm at least getting the things that are most important to me.

And then just scheduling time from time to time to review those priorities and doing that. I think it's a hopeless type dream to have the idea of ever getting organized. I don't know any successful entrepreneur, any person who's made a big splash and a big impact who's fully on top of everything.

It's always a little bit chaotic. And I think one of the aspects of being successful in business is learning to be okay with a little bit of chaos, but also having the systems to make sure the most important things get done. So that's my answer. Hopefully that's helpful. Evan, I think you were fighting with Nick.

Go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to kind of piggyback on the side business and goals and focusing question. For someone who knows that they want to do something on the side and maybe the situation is a little bit more urgent, maybe it's not, but can't decide on what that thing is, do you have any recommendations for how to work through that process and actually thinking what you might be good at doing and what you actually want to do on the side versus just wanting to make extra money?

Well, if you have any idea whatsoever, go do it and see what the marketplace says. Because what happens is as you start to move and you start to take action, all of a sudden opportunities come your way. And in the last, I've been doing radical personal finance a year and a half now, and in the last year and a half, I have had more business opportunities come across my desk than I can count and more connections and more relationships and more opportunities and more paths that I could pursue.

I've got product ideas left and right. I've got business ideas left and right. But if I had just simply sat around and thought and thought and thought and thought, then I wouldn't know what those things are. So if you have any inkling of an idea, then I say go and start.

And this is so if I'm giving career advice, I give the same advice to people who are, you know, if I'm talking to a 15 year old, if you have that, I pity and I hate what we do to kids, where we force kids to spend the first basically 20 to 25 years of their life spending time on schooling, and they don't get any practical experience with different things.

And so they spend the first 20 or 25 years of their life spending all this time sitting in class when the class is basically designed to prepare them for the next thing. And they have zero, many people have very little practical experience in something that actually matters. What happens is in if you if we quit that, or it's one of the best things that my dad ever did for me, was he worked and worked and worked to get me involved in all kinds of different jobs.

And looking back on it now, I never realized when I was younger, how hard that was for him. It would have been a lot easier for him to just pay me an allowance and give me money to spend than it was for him to take me around and take me to all of my different jobs every day or, you know, every Saturday if it was during the school year or however it was.

It would have been a lot easier for him to just simply 20 bucks a week wouldn't have made a big difference in his life versus the cost of the time to get me to me and all my siblings. Remember, I'm the youngest of seven to get me and all my siblings to all of our jobs.

But the confidence that it gave me by going by by working all these different jobs and doing all these different things, I actually I know who I am better than most people my age and knowing who I am has come through doing all these different jobs. So by doing all these different jobs, I've had the opportunity to I've had the opportunity to be exposed to different industries, different things.

And I've made notes mental and physical of the attributes of things that I like and that I don't like. And so radical personal finance is a reflection not of just an idea that came out of the blue, but it's a reflection of a design that came to me when I was kneeling on the floor laying tile and grouting a tile floor with my back aching saying, "I don't want to do this for a living." And it was coming from driving around in a car selling life insurance policies saying, "I don't want to drive around in the car all day.

I want to be able to sit at home and spend my time building." So from a kid perspective, that made a huge difference in my life and I'm so grateful for that. And I think that the best thing that we can do for kids is expose them as broadly as possible.

And then if they want to go deep in a subject, then let them go deep. I hate, I love the fact that a lot of times a 14 year old or 15 year old young man or woman might be working. But if you're just working as a cashier at the local grocery store, that's good.

It's better than doing nothing. But it's not nearly as good as if you spend three months working as a bagger at a grocery store, three months on a construction crew, three months working on a farm, three months working in an office doing all these things because then you can start to see who am I.

So rant on kids over, what about us as adults? Well, the same thing applies to us as adults. In general, most of us have had a vision held in front of us by our parents. You know, you're going to go and be a doctor. You're going to go and be a law student, an attorney.

You're going to go and do this or go and do that. And we follow in this one course without getting feedback from the marketplace. And so my answer to anybody who's interested in something is don't go and don't go and spend too much time really pursuing something until you've gotten into it.

Don't go and open a restaurant without going and first getting a job as a bar back carrying dishes to see if you like the restaurant environment. You know, don't go to law school unless you've gone and worked as a paralegal or been an assistant to see if you like actually like the environment.

Go and get as much experience as fast and cheap as possible before you go and spend a lot of time and commit a lot of resources to something and then make the opportunity push its way back to you and say, yes, I really the opportunity that you should be following.

So build the flexibility in your life to try different jobs, try different industries. And the same thing with businesses, try a bunch of businesses and see what you like and see what you don't like. And you've got to. That's why it comes back to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell as fast as you can.

Don't commit a lot of time and a little a lot of money to something until you're sure that you've that this is what you need to do and test the ideas as quickly, as cheaply as possible, recognizing that it's only one out of one idea out of 10 that's actually going to really probably pan out, maybe less, maybe more, maybe less, maybe two out of two out of 10.

You know, back to the 20 percent deal. But recognize that most ideas aren't going to pan out. So the goal should be to get the idea to fail as quickly as possible and make the idea prove itself that it's really a good idea. So that's how I approach it.

That's how I think about it. And based upon all the entrepreneurs I know, based upon studying people who are successful, I find that to be a good strategy for many things in life. Great. Yeah. Thank you. That's that's very helpful. Just trying it seems to be where I get hung up.

So I'll try to take that advice to heart. And trying it is going to mean something different for every industry and for every for every industry. So that's one example of trying it. It could mean something as simple as, you know what, I don't know what I want to do with my life for the next, you know, once a week I'm going to call somebody that I know and admire and respect and I'm going to take them out for lunch and I'm going to ask them about their journey and just ask them a question that could allow people.

I've done that. And that allows you to try occupations in ways that you never would have been able to. You could say, what do you love about this? What do you hate about this? It could be as simple as that. It could be as simple as let me take a class.

Let me find out for Lynda.com or Coursera or go on YouTube and watch some videos and keep notes. I try to keep a notebook and any time I'm interested in something, make a note of why am I interested in that and what is it that reflects like and ask yourself the question, what why does that appeal to me?

And then by factoring that in, you know, when I was younger, I always wanted to be a truck driver. I know very clearly why that appeals to me. I don't want to drive a truck every day. But what I like is I like the ability to go here, go there, see different things every day.

And so for me, one of the things I didn't like about my financial advice practice is I needed to be in West Palm Beach, whereas what I like about Radical Personal Finance doesn't matter where I am. So my desire to be a truck driver when I was a kid, I know why that appeals to me.

And now I can design that into my life now. So take good notes on yourself. Gotcha. Will do. Thank you. All right. Let's see. Anyone else have a question? Hey, Joshua, this is Nicole. First off, thank you for all you're doing. It's just fabulous. And I'm always delighted to share with someone your podcast and connect them with you.

I am thinking about passive income streams. I'm probably four years or so away from financial independence and outside of our Vanguard portfolio that will support that lifestyle down the road. I'd love to have some additional revenue streams. You talked about it a little bit, more stable ones. When I think about passive income, I always hear real estate.

I hear, of course, your portfolio and the market, that sort of thing. It feels to me like there's probably some pseudo passive income opportunities out there. You had one on that sounded like a little bit of a passive income stream with vending machines recently. Are there others that come to mind that someone could, with just a little minimal effort, participate in in their later years when they're looking for passive income?

It's a fun question. Let me answer it in two different ways. First, by talking about passive income and second, by talking about investing. I personally do not believe that there is any source of actual passive income that exists except for dividends on large publicly traded companies. That's the only form of passive income that I think is actually passive income.

If you can amass enough capital to buy shares of Coca-Cola Corporation and you can adjust your budget to live on the dividends from Coca-Cola Corporation, that is actually passive income or GE or whatever company you want to put together. If you can put together a portfolio of large publicly traded companies that are well diversified and if you can live on the dividends, that's actually passive income.

It requires you to do nothing, absolutely nothing. If enough dividend income is flowing into your account every quarter that gets you through that quarter with regard to your income, you are truly, absolutely 100% financially independent. Now you don't have to get all the way to dividend income to be able to also have passive income.

So speaking simplistically, I'm going to do a show, the show after today's, the show, two shows from now is scheduled to be a show on annuities. And so you could take a pile of money and you could annuitize it and that could be passive income where you're just receiving a lifetime annuity and whether that was because you won the lottery and you took the lifetime income option or because you took your million dollars, you turn it in for a life income annuity, that's passive income.

It just shows up every month and that could be expanded. Maybe you have enough income from oil and gas ownership to pay you money, but that's passive income where you're not involved at all in the management. You're not involved in anything except just spending the money. If you were a trust fund kid and your, you know, your mom and dad left you 30 million bucks and with Northern Trust, Northern Trust will manage your passive income for you.

They'll put the, they'll put the money in your, in your account every single month. That's passive income. Everything short of that is not truly passive income. It's closer to passive income, but it's not passive income. And so the question is how much involvement am I going to get into?

So real estate, the way that it's commonly thought of something like buying single family houses, renting them out, that's not passive income. That's a mix between investing and business. You've got to do some kind of business work associated with that. And you've got a, and it's a mix of investment and business.

The reason that's so appealing and the why that's often referenced is because it's so accessible. It's one of the most accessible business investments that you can make where you've got a part time business and you've got an investment portfolio. And because of the business associated with it, you can have a higher rate of return.

The overall rate of return from a portfolio is going to be driven based upon your level of involvement. So the more involved you are with the, with the, with the investment, the higher the rate of return that you should get. Think about somebody like a, think about something like somebody like a hotel magnate.

Think of someone like Conrad Hilton, the founder of the Hilton Hotels. His wealth increased much, much bigger than anybody else. You know, his wealth increased because of his level of involvement with Hilton Hotels. And he put in a ton of work up front. Then over time he transitioned to a chairman position and then over time his role became much more laid back.

Think of any business tycoon that you come up with and you'll find that same exact strategy where what they do is they start by, they start by putting in a ton of work and then they gradually pull back, but it's still not passive income. So that's how I think about passive income as far as scale.

If you've got tons of money, you can achieve true passive income from other people managing your portfolio, other managers, other, you know, if you hire the Coca-Cola board of directors to run your company for you, they're the ones who will show up to the management meetings. They're the ones who will keep an eye on the CEO.

You've also hired the CEO of Coca-Cola to take care of his management team. You've hired them to run the company and you've hired a bunch of managers, but your rate of return is going to be lower at that than it is if you're the CEO and if you're the chairman of the board of directors.

Now, so that's, that's my comments on passive income. Switch now to investing. The key I think with investing is simply to look at all investments based upon some simple attributes. The number one goal of an investment is to produce cash for you. And so you should compare your investments across the board based upon what is the cash that's going to be created by these investments?

What are the risk attributes of those investments and how am I going to integrate these investments into my life? We don't teach in our culture investing. The only people that teach investing are the financial advisors who have mutual funds to sell you. And so that's why in general, you know, people only think of investing at, I can buy mutual funds or I can buy real estate.

That's about it. If people were to ask about that, but there are many more options. You can buy a local Dunkin' Donuts franchise. You can open up a local Marriott hotel subsidiary. You can buy a 50% equity stake in the local lumber yard. You can put your equity to work opening a chain of supermarkets.

You can be a hard money lender with local real estate investors who don't have any money. You can be the hard money lender who backs their deals for them. So you can put all of those things are legitimate investments. They all have different characteristics of risk and return and require different levels of expertise.

And that's why I think we've got to understand ourselves, understand what we know and what we are going to be involved with, and then go and look at the marketplace and say, what is it that, what should I be focused on? Think of the reality TV shows that you know about the gold digger, the guys that go dig gold in Alaska.

So those guys are trying to leverage some kind of specialized knowledge, excuse me, some kind of specialized knowledge that they have of Alaskan gold fields to go out and strike their fortune. They're putting in a lot of work to hopefully make an outsized rate of return. I'm not going to go invest in Alaskan gold fields.

I don't know anything about it. But if I accumulated money from another source of business, I could go and be a capital backer for them and make some and be the person who puts up the stake that they use to go and make the money. I'm investing where I know with Radical Personal Finance because I know this market, I know the online business world, I know the investing world and I'm leveraging what I have behind me to create a business that should create much outsized rates of return.

So in my mind, it has to start with business and for somebody, you know, if you're an employee and you have a high degree of specialized knowledge such that you can command a high price from the marketplace, then that's probably where you should focus your time doing a really good job there and then saving the money and you're not going to have time to go and figure out should I buy this West Texas oil field or that West Texas oil field.

So you go ahead and just buy shares of Exxon Mobil, you know, through the context in your case what you said with your Vanguard index fund. But other people who want to get there a little bit faster who don't have the expertise you have in the employment situation, they might go and start the local plumbing company, etc.

So to me, I see them all as integrated and the key is for us to know our goals, our abilities and then set out a customized specialized wealth creation plan that fits our actual goals. That's my answer. Awesome. Thank you. It's a yeah, as I think about what you're saying, the passive income, something didn't sound right to me about it.

And I think you put it in words better than I could saying that you have to leverage some specialized knowledge and put hard work in to get that above market return. And it's not truly passive. You're putting time and energy into it. Right. I think there's a false perception of passive income opportunities out there like real estate like you said.

Yeah. I wish we could come up with a different name. So I'll tell you as an example how I think of passive income. I don't expect radical personal finance to ever be passive. And especially because I put myself and I hope it's useful. I figure because you all listen to the show that it can be a useful, I guess, context, you know, metaphor for me to use.

I don't expect it to be ever passive because I'm kind of at the front of it. But what I'm intentionally trying to do is not trade my time for dollars. And so even though it's not going to be passive, my focus is always on how can I build leverage?

So for example, I mentioned I'm doing coaching. All right. Well, I'm doing coaching, but I'm not building a coaching business because if I were, if I wanted to build the coaching business, I should have stayed as a financial advisor because I had much better profit margins in that business.

The coaching business is a means to an end. And I don't want the bulk of my income to be based upon me. As much as I enjoy helping people, I don't want the bulk of my income to be based upon me helping somebody one-on-one. I want it to be built upon me helping creating a product or a book or a podcast that helps a hundred thousand people at one time.

And so that way, if each of those hundred thousand people says that's worth a buck, they can send me a buck in exchange for something that took me 10 hours to create. And now my hourly rate is much, much higher. It's not passive, but it's much more in the direction of where I can put an online store up.

Those products can sit there. They can sell night and day. I need to manage a minimal staff, et cetera. So there's always a path for all of us to take our skills and knowledge and work our way through and find the situation that's the best fit for us. Any other questions?

Who else would like to ask a question? My voice is about shot. We've got 12 minutes, so we can cut it off here, but I'd be happy to answer any of the questions for the next 12 minutes that anybody has. Going once, going twice. All right. Thank you all so much for being on today's call.

I appreciate you being here. This was really fun. I will be doing, again, many more of these for those of you who are members of the show at 10 bucks and up patron over the coming weeks. I'll give some thoughts of moving the times around as you guys have suggested so that maybe more of you can participate.

I really enjoy, they won't be two hours, but they might be an hour. And I really enjoy talking with you guys. Hopefully this has been useful and I really appreciate answering the questions. In conclusion, thank you guys so much for your support. Much of you on the line are patrons of the show and I've intentionally built the show the way that I have based upon the patrons first, just to see if I could do it.

And it makes such a huge difference to be able to have you as individual patrons supporting the show. And I really love the way it incentivizes me. And it's really awesome to talk with you guys. It gets a little lonely sometimes behind a microphone because you're just one person speaking out into the online world, but it's really awesome to be able to be in a situation like this and talk with you face to face.

So I wish you a beautiful rest of your day and I wish you all tremendous success and fulfillment in every area. And thank you all so much for calling in.