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With no hidden fees and a 100% purchase guarantee, you can feel confident when you book your premium LA tickets with Sweet Hop. Visit Swithop.com today. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we're going to talk to a legend in the personal finance space, the founder of Get Rich Slowly, Mr. J.D.

Roth himself, aka the money boss. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today. If you're new to the show, welcome, welcome, welcome. Glad to have new listeners each and every day. If you're old to the show, welcome again.

I appreciate your being here with me. This is the show where each and every day we work hard to try to unravel the mysteries of finance to help you win at money and at life. I just made up that tagline on the spot. I think I probably stole it from somebody.

Somebody's probably got that trademark. Sorry, whoever I stole that from. Who knows? It was good. Maybe I should steal it more. But thank you so much for being with me today. I have an interview for you with Mr. J.D. Roth. J.D. is a longtime legend in the personal finance blogging space, the original founder of Get Rich Slowly.

And I think you're really going to enjoy this interview. We're going to talk about how he got rich slow and then he got rich fast. And it's an interesting study in finance, interesting study in investing, interesting study in basically how the world of business works. And I think you're going to enjoy hearing his personal story and also hearing what he's been up to since he got rich.

It's kind of fun to talk about things like that with legends. Before we get to the interview, let's talk about our sponsors. Sponsor of the day number one is You Need a Budget, the YNAB budgeting software. If you're not familiar with this software, go back and listen to episode 246 of the show.

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I depend on that feedback to be confident of the quality of the recommendation that I'm making to you. If you're not familiar with Paladin Registry, start by listening to episode 248 of the show. That is, again, a one-hour interview with Jack Waymire, who is the founder of the Paladin Registry.

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Thank you so much. Let's get to the interview. So, JD, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Thank you, Joshua. This ought to be fun. I don't know whether to call you, like, the godfather or something, but it certainly feels that way. People have started calling me the grandfather of personal finance blogging, and that makes me feel old.

I'm only 46. And what's funny is we're talking, what, nine years, eight years? I'm not sure when you started Get Rich Slowly, but-- I started Get Rich Slowly in April of 2006. Okay, so nine years. It's 2015 right now. Yeah, nine and a half. And the thing is, there were people who were doing it longer, but for some reason, because I'm older, because I'm 46, I get to be called the grandfather.

Oh, my gosh. What's funny is the lady who was sitting in the chair right before you, Stephanie Halligan, she was talking about how she graduated from college, and she was deeply in debt, and she was trying to figure out, "What on earth do I do, and where do I go?" And she started reading Get Rich Slowly, and that was her inspiration.

Is that right? See, I've never actually had a chance to talk a lot with Stephanie, just briefly in passing, but I really like the work she does. She's awesome. She just told the story, and I asked her, because I was curious. I said, "What were the personal finance blogs that you were reading?" And she said, "Well, definitely Get Rich Slowly." And she didn't know I was about to interview you, but it's just a cool connection.

So this will be fun, because I want to talk a little bit about personal finance and financial planning and what you've learned over the years. Okay. But I am especially interested, and I hope you're not just tired of talking about it, I'm especially interested in your experience actually running, you know, just in this massive change in the last 10 years.

Yeah, oh, no, I'm happy to talk about this. This whole new industry that's developed and reflected. So what was the genesis of Get Rich Slowly? What was the story? So with Get Rich Slowly, I started that site because, to be honest, I was terrible with money. I sucked with money, and I had managed to accumulate a lot of consumer debt.

I mean, it was $35,000 in consumer debt, which might not sound like a lot to some people, especially people that have a lot of student loans. For me, it was overwhelming. $35,000 in consumer debt from personal loans to credit cards to other loans as well. And so I wanted to get out of that debt, and I just felt overwhelmed.

And I started reading personal finance books on the recommendation of friends. So I read things like Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover and Your Money or Your Life. And I started trying to put these things into practice, but I'm the kind of person who has to read things again and again and then regurgitate it.

And so I had a personal blog at the time, and I wrote a post called Get Rich Slowly. And the gist of the post was, "Based on all the reading I've done, there's no reliable way to get rich quickly. Some people do get rich quickly, but there's no reliable way to do it.

But there's time-tested methods to get rich slowly." And so I wrote this post, and this is back in 2005, probably, May of 2005. And for whatever reason, that post was very popular and got picked up at outlets around the web, like the early days of Lifehacker, the early days of Boing Boing.

They picked it up and they shared it. And so a year later, when I decided I really wanted to focus on getting out of debt by making a little bit of extra income, I thought, "Oh, I'll start a new personal finance blog. It'll be the first personal finance blog on the Internet, and I'm going to call it Get Rich Slowly." I didn't realize there were already personal finance blogs around.

And so that's where Get Rich Slowly came from, is me trying to find a way to chronicle my journey out of debt, sharing what I was learning along the way, and trying to help other people get out of debt and make a little money at the same time. And what's ironic is that, although at the beginning it was slow, you actually got rich quick.

Yeah, I know. Not everyone notices the irony, but those of us who do notice it, we're like, "Hmm." So, yeah. And the thing is, the methods I talk about, about getting rich slowly, they do work. But, yeah, I was very fortunate in that through a combination of circumstances, I actually got out of-- It took me a while to get out of debt, 39 months, but then I got rich quickly.

Right. So, I'm not going to complain. No, and it's just such a remarkable-- I'm just amazed at the world we live in, where stories like that are possible. And it seems like they're on every corner these days. It just feels like-- not that people are all of a sudden making millions overnight from some unethical thing, but it just seems like there's all these interesting new angles on business, where people pursue something and then, boom, an opportunity opens up.

Well, and the thing is, it's always been like that, but it's just moving at a much more rapid pace. So, 100 years ago, you had, say, radio coming into existence, and people were finding out how to use radio to spread their message, and people were getting rich off radio, slowly.

And then television came, and so on. So, it's not like it's a new thing, it's just the outlets are changing, and they're starting to change much more rapidly, I think. So, to complete the story, though, for those who may not have heard-- We jumped to, what, seven years, six years, something like that.

Describe the life arc of Get Rich Slowly and your involvement with the website. So, I started Get Rich Slowly in April 2006, as I said, and that's back before there was a lot of social media. There was no Twitter, there was no Facebook, there was no Reddit. Well, actually, there was Reddit, but Reddit was not prominent.

And I built the site by spreading the word among my real-life friends, people I knew, and then also I participated in online forums, a variety of online forums, so I spread it. And I happened to have some influential readers right from the start, for whatever reason. So, for example, Lifehacker, which was one of the first big blogs, and Boing Boing, the people there read the site.

They would share articles now and then, which helped increase traffic. And then the readership of Get Rich Slowly grew relatively rapidly, so that by 2009, within three years, I had 100,000 subscribers, which at the time was a huge number. Absolutely. I suspect it's a relatively large number now, too, but I don't know because I haven't been paying attention.

So, in 2009, for a variety of reasons, I decided that I wanted to sell the site. It was time for me to sell the site because I was just overwhelmed. It was a lot of work. It had gone from being a joy to do to being a burden. And so I sold the site, and as we said, that allowed me to get rich quickly.

It sold for much more than I thought it would, and I stuck around for three years. I thought I would quit immediately, but I started in 2006, sold in 2009, and remained on with Get Rich Slowly until 2012, and still occasionally. You didn't have a contractual--you didn't have to be there writing for a period of time?

No, and in fact, that was part of the negotiation. I think I can say this, is that they initially wanted me to stay on for three years, and they offered me a larger sum of money, but I said, "No, I want to leave immediately," so they offered me 30% less, and I took it.

And it turns out I stayed on for that three years, and so I basically gave away all this money. But you make the best decision you can at the time, right? Yeah. So in 2012, I stopped. It's now 2015. So you can see there's a three-year, three-year, three-year thing.

So wrote Get Rich Slowly for three years, owned it for three years, stayed on for another three years, went dormant, basically, for three years, and now I've decided to start writing about money again. Have you launched your new site? No, so-- Or you're launching? The new site is going to be called MoneyBoss.com, and I have a landing page up there, but we're working on the blog itself right now.

I know what the content's going to be. I have the first few months all mapped out in the spreadsheet, but as far as the design and stuff, we still don't have that. But it'll be up soon. It'll be up possibly by the time this broadcasts. I don't know when this broadcasts, but by October, we should have it up.

Okay. We'll come back to MoneyBoss, but before we do, I want to talk about the arc, what your experience has been in this arc of just financial stages. So would you say you're pretty much financially independent at this point? Yeah, I say that I'm financially independent. I would say retired, but that brings on a lot of baggage.

People think that if you're retired, you shouldn't be working, so I just try not to use the term. Right. So you went basically deeply in debt, struggling with credit card debt, overwhelmed, and then fast forward six years later, and you're financially independent. Right. What was like you expected? What was better than you expected, and what was worse than you expected of making that change from in debt and overwhelmed to financially independent and no money worries?

Let's start with what was better than you expected on the fun stuff. Well, better than expected is when you're financially independent, you have a great degree of freedom. And I know this is pretty self-evident if you think about it, and it's why people want to become financially independent. But when you achieve FI, you can do whatever you want within reason.

I mean, you're not going to go out and buy a Porsche or 10, but the whole definition of financial independence is you're able to maintain your current lifestyle indefinitely. Right. And I can do that. And so that gives me a lot of freedom. And I can choose what to do.

And it makes it so that I can take risks. Like right now, my girlfriend and I are on a well, it's supposed to be a year long trip around the United States in an RV. It's going to end up being 18 months or two years. And plus I can take time, I can spend a little bit of money and time launching MoneyBoss.

And I can spend two or three years working on it and not worry about whether I make money from it or not. So I guess the freedom is what, even though I knew that financial independence would bring freedom, that's been the thing I like most. The actual experience of the freedom.

Yeah. And what it means to me. For each person, it would be something different. Right. I mean, some people, maybe they want to play golf all the time, or maybe some people want to spend time with their children, whatever it is. Financial independence just gives you the freedom to do what you want, to take risks without as much worry that things are going to go wrong.

It's definitely a unique feeling. I'm not yet financially independent, as I would call it, where I can live purely off of income from investments, working towards it. But I spent years working as an employee. And I was a financial planner for six years when I closed my firm and started Radical Personal Finance.

And about two or three months into Radical Personal Finance, I was just utterly overwhelmed with this absolute sense of freedom that I had never had. And even still, this morning, I was thinking about it, that my entire life, I've always had a place to be, a time I needed to be somewhere, at a certain specific thing to please somebody.

And even the last year, well, so three months in, all of a sudden I realized, wow, for the first time in my life, there are no censors on my speech. I can say whatever I want, and I can sink my ship. I always notice, if I say something stupid, I can sink my ship, just like that.

But also, it was just this incredible sense of freedom of, wow, I can choose this. But even for the first year of Radical Personal Finance, I had a consulting contract with somebody in the financial services industry. And as I was doing that, I still needed to be near email.

But now that consulting contract has ended. So here, right before I came up here to FinCon, at a last-minute decision, I was leaving on Monday. On Sunday morning, my wife and I decided that instead of her staying in West Palm Beach while I was gone, it was better for her to go to Central Florida while I was gone.

So we made this decision, just pivoted on a dime, didn't have to ask anybody, didn't think about the schedule. I drove the car here, so I can go anywhere. I can go back there. And it's like this incredible sense of freedom and control that I'm in charge. That is so unusual in our modern world.

I know, and it's fantastic. And I think you hit upon something important, that there are degrees of financial freedom. So in my case, I'm financially independent in that I can maintain my lifestyle indefinitely. But you also obtain a degree of financial freedom when you pay off debt, for example.

You get a little bit of financial freedom because you're not tied to paying off that debt. You get some financial freedom when you're able to quit your job. And that's the kind of freedom you're talking about there, when you're able to support yourself on the work you're doing. At the same time, I think it's important to understand that with freedom comes this burden of responsibility.

Even though it's liberating, it can also be very daunting at times because you realize that, "Oh, if I make poor choices with my money, I'm going to have to go back to work." And it can be overwhelming. For me, there's always this balance between enjoying the freedom but then also thinking, "Oh, I don't want to lose that freedom either." Does that make sense?

It really does. So what is not as great as you thought it would be? When you were younger and you thought, "Oh, I'm just so broke and when I'm rich, I'm going to have this." And now you look back and say, "Well, it's good. Financial freedom is good, but it's not quite like I thought it was going to be." This is something that every retiree struggles with.

And again, to me, financial freedom and retirement are essentially the same thing. What people who no longer have to work experience is you come up against this need for purpose. When you work, you have a purpose. Even if you don't enjoy your job, you have a purpose. You know what you're going to work for.

And so a lot of retirees or people who become financially independent really struggle at first for two or three years or longer even because all of a sudden their purpose is gone. They don't have a reason to get up. They don't know what they're going to do. I was actually talking with a friend here earlier who, she and her husband are financially independent and so he's been able to quit his job, but now he does not know what to do.

He doesn't know what to do with himself. He just feels lost. So I experienced some of that myself too. When I stopped working for Get Rich Slowly, I spent some time just struggling to figure out what is it I want to do? What is going to give me purpose?

Now, of course, I didn't get there immediately because I just kind of enjoyed laying around, getting up when I wanted. I spent some time getting fit. I was going to say you either gained weight or you got fit, one of the two. No, I got fit. I don't think there's homeostasis in that situation.

No, no, no. I got fit because fitness became a priority. Now, on this RV trip, I've gained weight because, oh my gosh, the RV trip is a lot of not exercising and drinking beer. Right. Those two things do not go well together. Anyway, yeah, so for me, something that was not so great about achieving the financial independence was realizing that, oh, I really do need to make sure that I've got something going on that gives me purpose.

In those early days of the financial blogosphere, so with you and with Tranet, the simple dollar and things, there was a massive proliferation of just basic finance blogs, getting out of debt, saving in your retirement fund, your index funds, et cetera. Now, there is a tremendous proliferation largely due to the influence and the popularity of Pete, Mr.

Money Mustache. There's a proliferation of financial independence content. Right. Do you feel like one is more powerful than the other because you gained financial independence, but you weren't focusing on it? What do you think about the goals of traditional blogging versus financial independence? Well, first of all, before I talk smack about one or the other, I will say that I think both are important.

So, if Mr. Money Mustache works for you, read Mr. Money Mustache. If the simple dollar works for you, read the simple dollar. Now, having said that, Money Boss comes squarely down on the side of Mr. Money Mustache. Okay. It's like Pete and I are good friends, and Money Boss is going to be, it's not trying to be a Mr.

Money Mustache knockoff, but it has some of the same ideals, but it's in my voice. So, I think that Trent's doing good work. He's still doing it today. Is he still writing his words? He is. Well, or his name is being used because he sold the site too. So, the simple dollar exists, and the simple dollar promotes a lot of frugality.

It does write some about earning more, but it comes down more on the side of the frugality. And the issue I have with that is there's only so much that frugality can do. What you really want to do, the most important thing you want to do, and this is something that Paula at Afford Anything writes about, is build a gap between your earning and your spending.

And so, one of my mantras at Money Boss is going to be save half. I think everybody should save half of their income. I actually think they should save more, but let's aim for save half to start. The 10 or 20 percent that everyone pushes in the financial industry, that's great.

That's a good starting point. But as Pete writes so well at Mr. Money Mustache and Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme, if you're saving 10 percent or 20 percent, you're basically saying, "Okay, yep, I'm going to sign on for 40 years of work. I'm going to retire when I'm 65." But if you can save more than that, you can achieve your goals much more quickly.

What I find interesting is the concepts do not change, but the voices change. Yeah. So, before Money Mustache, even just in the financial independence vein, when I go back and think about someone like Amy Decision, who wrote the Tightwad Gazette. Oh, right. And she wrote this newsletter for years, and it was super focused on frugality.

But what was the reason for frugality? She and her family were doing this newsletter, and they were practicing their frugality so they could become financially independent. Then they became financially independent. She shut down the newsletter. I've looked for her. I cannot find her to get her on the show, which, by the way, if anybody knows how to get a hold of Amy Decision, please email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com, and put me in touch with her or send her a good word, because I'd like to get her on the show, because I always admired her newsletter and the compendium that was made later.

Absolutely. But that was '80s, '90s, I guess? Yeah, I think it was late '80s, early '90s, I think. You go back before that, and you get to something like, earlier you mentioned, Your Money or Your Life. I don't remember when that was published. '87, I think. Okay, so there's the '80s version.

And you can go all the way back to The Richest Man in Babylon, which was-- Yeah, 1920s. There we go. And it's no different. And I have some interesting things. I have a couple of PDFs of old books that I look at sometimes, and the concepts are there. And if you go back even farther, you can find stuff in ancient literature that has to do with this topic.

The concepts don't change. The path doesn't change. You can't spend more than you make and ever hope to build financial independence. But the voices change and the tools change over time. Yeah, the delivery, both, like you say, the voice and the channel that you're delivering it. So we were talking earlier about going from radio to television to the internet.

It's the same thing. Right, yeah. And it is. And it's just every generation has a technology that fits them and fits their generation. Well, and I think that we're here at a blogging conference right now, and there are several hundred bloggers here. And there would be some who would say, "Wow, that's just too many.

There's not enough room for all of these financial bloggers." But there are, and that's because each reader responds differently to different voices. So some people read, for example, Mr. Money Mustache, and they're like, "Oh, that guy is too extreme. I can't do that." But they'll read Paula Pant at Afford Anything, who's saying almost essentially the same things.

Softer tone. Softer tone, different approach. And some want the technical detail of Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme. Right, right. Question, what type of work were you doing when you were working? Are you the guy who always talked about the box factory? Yeah. So I didn't realize. I always read that.

I was like, "Wow, they make boxes. They make boxes." And then somebody told me years later, I guess it's a euphemism for work, right? You didn't actually make boxes. Yes, we did. So you did actually make boxes. Customboxservice.com. Go look at it. That's a website that I made in 1990-something.

No. Okay, so all right. So I thought that was, I always thought it was boxes, and then I thought it was just a euphemism for plumbing business. No, I always tried to link to it. This is funny. This is before the days. I've never been an SEO guy, but because I always linked to my family's box factory from the early days of Get Rich Slowly, for a long time, my family box factory outranked some of the big guys in Google searches, and they didn't like that.

That's awesome. So in that role, were you in a position of leadership, or were you in basically kind of a more employee level? Kind of a combination of the two. It's a small business, so even at the peak, there maybe were a dozen employees, so it's between eight and ten employees, and three or four of us were family.

So, I was in charge of sales, and ostensibly I was a sales manager, but I hated sales, and I wasn't any good at it. I would be better now, older, have more experience, more confidence. So what I would do is, instead of going out and selling, I would stay in the office, and I would write blogs, both my personal blog and Get Rich Slowly.

So naturally, this created friction among the rest of the family members who are like, "JD, you're supposed to be selling. You're not doing it. You're blogging." But there you go. So, the reason that was a lead-in to this question, when you come to a conference like this, you are a mini-celebrity within this niche.

Right. You are looked up to as a leader. Have you had to grow to step into that role? What's it been like making that transition from just another blogger to, in many ways, a leader of a micro-industry? That is a fantastic question, and one that I've not been asked before.

You know, at first, it was really awkward and disconcerting, because to me, I'm just JD, the nerd who reads comic books, science fiction, wants to watch Star Trek, and I'm not any different than anyone else. And yet, when I come to something like this, I'm treated as if I'm somebody more important.

And at first, there were times I didn't handle it well. Now, however, I feel like, "Oh, I get it. It's not that I am any different, because I'm not. It's just that some people have a perception that I'm different." And so, what I try to do is just try to be open and gracious with anyone who talks to me.

Just today, at lunch, I sat down with a guy named Jason, who has a -- oh, I'm going to butcher his blog now. It's something with talents. Sorry, Jason, if you listen to this. You keep talking. I'll check it real quick, and we'll figure it out. It's brand new.

He started it in July. He's never been to a blogging conference before, and he's like, "I don't know anything about it." And he had no idea who I am, naturally, because I haven't been blogging for a long time. And so, we talked, and I feel like maybe some people would come to a conference like this, and if they are a mini-celebrity, they wouldn't -- they're like, "Oh, this is a new guy.

He can't do anything for me." I don't care. Here's somebody just starting out. I'm his first Twitter follower. He said, "I don't know how to use Twitter, blah, blah, blah." And he set it up, and he showed me his handle, and I said, "All right, I'm going to follow you." Harvesting talents?

That's it. Harvesting talents. Let's get him some traffic. Harvestingtalents.com. Yeah. And it's Jason -- hold on. Let me find it on the page. He's a really nice guy. And what's he writing about? Fill for me while I find this here. He comes from the engineering bent, and yet I'm not sure he's familiar with Jacob or Pete's work.

Interesting. And he's coming at investing, I think, and also Christian personal finance. There's a sub-niche of the blog -- the personal finance blogging industry that's Christian personal finance, and I think he's going to be part of that. So it's Jason Stump, and the website is Harvesting Talents. So, hopefully, we'll give him a little bit of a boost.

That's right. He'll be his second follower. And, yeah, he was a great guy. And so, talking to him, and he asked really insightful questions, so I have high hopes that he'll be able to build his blog, because he was listening, and he was getting different perspectives, and we were trying to tell him, you know, there's no one right way to do this, just as there's no one right way to make money or to invest.

Although some get better results, I guess. One more question on the blogging front, and then I want to switch to personal finance on our own. You made your million bucks, or proverbially, it doesn't matter the number, I don't care about the number. You made your money, and you blazed the trail.

Now, there are thousands and thousands of people with a similar dream. Do you think it's possible for somebody to do what you did in today's marketplace? Build a big website, sell it, make their millions, and retire? Absolutely. You know, a lot of people will tell you that that is not possible, and yet, again, I point to Pete, Mr.

Money Mustache, as somebody who has been able to do it, and he's come in, he's been able to do it almost exactly the same way I did it, by just telling stories, being in service to the readers, he doesn't worry about SEO, he's just doing the same stuff that I did in 2006, but he's doing it in 2015.

And then there's also other people that are starting new blogs. I talked to a woman at lunch, Emma was her name, can't remember the name of her blog, it's for single moms, and she started three years ago, she's a professional journalist who writes for Forbes and other outlets, and she's able to, I don't think she's ready to quit writing for these other outlets, but she's making good money doing what she's doing, and starting from scratch.

And so, when I hear people say, "You can't do what I did, or what Jim did, or what Harlan did," I disagree. I think it can be done, and I think it's interesting to see the fact that Jim Wang and I are both starting new blogs. Jim's starting Wallet Hacks, I'm starting Money Boss, and for us it's kind of a game, can we do something similar again?

But it's also because I think we both think that we can do something similar again, because the market is not saturated. If you have a strong voice, you have a strong message, and you know what you're doing, I think there's room for more people. - Emma's blog, I think you're thinking, wealthysinglemommy.com?

- There you go, thank you. - We'll help her out too. - I'm pretty good at that. - Wealthysinglemommy.com. So, it's interesting that you would give that response, 'cause I would, well, from your experience and your insight, I'm new to this industry, and I would say no, like the market has changed, but-- - And maybe it has.

- Who knows, I don't know. I just look at the, I look at it in this way. I want, one of my missions, my little missions, is to get thousands of people to launch financial blogs and to launch financial podcasts and launch financial YouTube channels and launch financial Periscope channels or whatever the next 15 things are.

That's one of my missions, but I think that it's a, I don't think it's, that doing it for the purpose of making a bunch of money is gonna work, and it might happen and it could happen, but every blogger that I've talked to has actually crunched their actual numbers until or unless maybe they've had a nice exit event like you have.

The actual pay is very, very low, but the benefit, probably the biggest benefit that you got out of Get Rich Slowly was getting out of debt in the first 54 months or 38 months or however long it took you. That was the biggest benefit. - There's like side effects, right?

- For me, the blog was more of a side effect of me trying to get out of debt, whereas I think for a lot of people, the getting out of debt is a side effect of blogging perhaps. - Right. - So. - And there are, so what I've learned even with doing radical personal finance, and I recognize even as I say that, I made the decision this was going to be a business for me and I pursued it aggressively as a business from day one, but even with starting radical personal finance, some of the ancillary benefits have been much more powerful than just the income from the show.

- Well, and for me, even if I hadn't had a fantastic exit event, made a lot of money off the site, the friendships that I made in this niche and the colleagues I have and everything I've learned, totally worth it. Fantastic. I love the people in the personal finance world.

Getting to see them is the highlight of my year. One of the fun things about this RV trip that I'm doing with my girlfriend is we get to stop and we get to see these people who have become my friends. My ex-wife called them my imaginary friends, but they're not imaginary, they're real, and these relationships are real.

- Right. - I like it. - What, so looking at the personal finance industry and the education and literacy, what do you see that we as an industry do really, really well, and what do you see that we just don't do well to serve people? - As far as financial literacy is concerned?

Because I've got a rant I can go on there. - Go for it. Go for it. - Okay, so I wrote a article that's relatively controversial called Why Financial Literacy Doesn't Work. And the reason I think financial literacy doesn't work is we are focusing on how to write a check, how a credit card works, what compounding is.

People don't care about these things. You can educate them all you want on this. And I'm not sure, if that's financial literacy, then financial literacy is not what we need. What we need to focus in on instead is the behavior, the psychology. Why is it you think you need to go out and buy a new car?

A new car can be one of the worst decisions you can make as far as finances are concerned because of the instant depreciation and so on. So what is it that psychologically motivates you to have to have a new television or to go on a trip or to spend every penny you make?

And so I think it's much more important to address the psychological and emotional issues than it is to talk about how compounding works. So for me, financial literacy is focusing on the wrong things. - So then I assume money boss is going to be you trying to focus on the things that you see missing.

- Yes, and I'm going to really try to push certain behaviors. For example, save half. I want people to save half of their income. And I'm going to explain why. I'm going to try to explain why it's such a powerful thing to do. And then I'm going to try to encourage people to adopt behaviors that reinforce this.

Now I think Pete, again, at Mr. Money Mustache does a great job of this. He really stresses, for example, transportation. He wants people to ride bikes. And what he's trying to do is reinforce behaviors that have positive, extremely positive financial results. - What else? What are some other types of examples like that that you see having a long-ranging impact?

- As far as things you can do. So Pete talks about transportation. I think housing is one of the biggest things people can focus on. In the United States, for whatever reason, we want as much house as possible. And I think that's because of the finance industry, the real estate industry, the mortgage industry want you to have as much house as possible so they can make as much money as possible.

But your best interests are not their best interests. And so if you look back at historically, first of all, the average house size in the United States has grown since the 1950s. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it used to be like the average home was 1,200 square feet and had four or five people in it.

And now the average new home is 2,200 square feet or something like that. Again, these are rough numbers. And it only has two or three people in it. Is it that we need more space per person now? No, it's just we've been sold this bill of goods. And meanwhile, the mortgage industry, it used to be that you could be loaned 25%.

It was a debt to income ratio of 25% they would allow. And then that increased to 30%, 31%, 33%. And in the height of the housing bubble, it was something like 42% they would do. And that's just ridiculous. Have people all of a sudden become better able to pay their debts or what?

No, it's that the banks, they've run the numbers, and they know they can push you up and loan you that much money before you're going to default. They're walking a fine line. And so I think you've got to stop looking at what the real estate agent wants to sell you or what the bank wants to loan you, and you've got to look at what is it that I actually need.

And instead of paying all this money for a house, try to only spend 15% or 20% for a home or for a rent payment. Does that make sense? Just keep those costs as low as possible. Right. I agree with you. I think you can look at a number of things.

The biggest industry in the United States is the school industry. Oh, I didn't know that. If you actually look through the number of people, the size of--if you run the math, and you run the size of all the people associated with government schooling systems, then you start following the money, follow the money from everything from bus manufacturers to food costs to buildings to teachers to textbook manufacturers, and you just start thinking about the economic impact as a segment.

You can't just go with just teacher salaries. It is a massive, massive industry. The main purpose--feel free to disagree, but this is an opinion that I feel confident about. It's a very unusual opinion. But the major purpose of school is to create a uniform society. If you look at the way that it's structured, the way that we school children, the primary purpose is to create conformity.

I would argue that mass media is doing the same thing. Exactly. So you look and say, "Wait a second. What are the interests that are going on?" Well, the interest of conformity is so that you can easily market to a population of people who are not free thinkers. And so people talk all the time about, "Oh, I need to have a bunch of--I need to be able to think critically." Well, when and where is critical thinking ever taught?

It's not. It's something that you have to develop for yourself. Now, conspiracy, non-conspiracy, I don't know and I don't care. It just is that way. That is an effect. I see that as an effect. Whether it's an intentional effect or an accidental effect doesn't really matter. It's an effect.

And so now you take that a little bit beyond and you say, "Well, how do we support industry?" We've got to feed lots of things to buy. We've got to feed lots of shiny things. And without an ability to step back and look at the decisions, then you say, "Well, I want to be just like everyone else.

I want to have what everyone else has." Exactly. And you're being marketed to steadily and consistently. And there's a reason why all the big buildings in New York are marketing buildings. And they're good at it. Well, they're also investment broker companies too. And so they're sucking the money away from you too.

So I think that's interesting what you say about that. I've never thought about education from that perspective. But I think about mass media like that all the time, which is why I opt out of mass media as much as possible. I do read some news online, but I almost never watch television.

I mean, I watch Game of Thrones, but I download it from iTunes and I watch it that way. Right. I feel like intentionally allowing yourself to opt into television and radio, it's just a way for--it makes it more difficult for you to think independently. I'm not saying that you can't and that your listeners aren't, but I'm just saying that it's much more difficult when you allow yourself to be bombarded by these messages constantly.

You subconsciously begin to think, "Oh, this is how people are and this is how they should be," when in reality, it's not. And I want people to be able to think independently like you're saying. You said critically, I think. I want them to be independent and make decisions based on what's important to them, not what's important to the mass media or to the schools, what's important to them in their life, and then make your financial life match up with that purpose or those-- Well, I lost my word there.

I generally try to stand on the positive, optimistic side, but every time I do that-- Yeah, I do too. I get evidence and facts that stare me in the face and say, "Joshua, you're being far too forgiving," and so here's the one. I just learned this here at this conference speaking with somebody, and I won't mention their name to protect their innocence.

I learned that you can actually build an income and a business doing product tours for large companies, doing what they call satellite product tours. And so what they do is you get hired by a company, and let's say this company is, for example, a credit card company, and this is a legitimate business opportunity this person is involved in, and they were telling me about it as it's something that they're involved in.

Now, as with most things, there's probably a way to do it ethically and a way to do it unethically, but I'm just going to describe what actually happens. So if I-- Let's say, I don't know, Citibank. Citibank could hire me, and they'll hire me, and they'll pay me a lot of money just to go on a round of morning news shows and to give the four-minute thing on-- Here's all the-- It's summertime coming up.

Here's all the travel things you can do. So here's a great new bag that's really well designed to get you through TSA, and here is a website that you can use. It's their latest, greatest hotel website. And then one of the other things is to-- Or you can get a travel rewards credit card, something like, for example, the Citibank credit card is offering right now.

This would just be an example, of course, but Citibank credit card is offering 50,000 points to sign up for the credit card. And they can-- And so they'll do this, and they call it a-- He was telling me they call it a satellite news tour, where you can-- They'll do 15 to 20 of these in a morning, and the representative will be paid anywhere, $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 for this morning of work because you have to be able to work it in regularly.

And most people don't realize that you're being-- You think, "Oh, this is just the consumer consultant," which it might be. Then on the morning news, they might be actually giving helpful information, but they're also being paid for that specific product placement. Yeah, it's essentially advertising. It is. Exactly what it is.

And it's everywhere. So whether you get to that or product placements in all the latest movies, it's a big business to have that. So when you sit back and look at it and say, "Every movie I watch, every news-- Well, newspapers, maybe I don't know what they do. But basically everything I consume, specifically with TV, these things are all designed to start in me a lust for this object that I need to spend my money on." And the best thing you can do, I think, is, number one, exit the matrix and cut yourself off.

I like that metaphor, too. I talk about that all the time. Yeah, exit and cut yourself off. But also go back and reframe your decisions and reframe your perspective. I'll give you one for me on housing. My wife and I are in the process of selling our house, and we just moved into a rental apartment.

And it's not small, but it's also not big. But I've used this with clients, and there are various reasons. The house was good for us for a time. But I asked many people, I said, "What was the happiest time in your life?" And oftentimes, if you ask the question in a certain way, they'll say, "College." Right.

"Well, wait a second. Let's talk about this. In college, you drove the fanciest car, right?" "No, I didn't have a car." Or, "No, man, I had this cheap old Toyota Tercel that broke down all the time." "Oh, okay. So you lived in the fanciest house, right?" "No, we had this tiny little dorm room that was terrible." "Oh, so that means you had all kinds of money to go out and have all the latest, greatest steaks and wines, the best eating and the best gadgets." "No, we were so broke we had to chip in our money to buy--what's that--what's that cheap beer?" Pizza?

Pizza and whatever--I'm trying to think of that. Natty Light. You know, we've been pitching all our money to buy pizza and Natty Light, and that was what we were doing, but it was awesome. What'd you have? You had time. Ah. Yeah. And you had friends. And you had friends.

Relationships. Exactly. And when you reframe it and you help people to recognize and identify and you say, "Oh, I see that I can probably have both, maybe, but I can have time right now." That was why we're selling our house is to free up time so I can spend more time with my wife and kids and less time working on the house.

You've hit on so many things here that I want to--that I feel like I want to talk about. Go for it. We don't set time limits on Radical Personal Finance. Excellent. So for me, one of the things that has been most liberating and given me the greatest sense of freedom and enjoyment in my own life is to buy a home.

I actually wouldn't mind renting, but I own a condo in Portland, Oregon, that's right next to a multi-use path--bicyclist, running, whatever. And I also live in a very walkable neighborhood. So when I'm home--and again, I'm on this RV trip--but when I'm home, I'm able to walk to almost anything I want.

And so I walk 5, 10 miles a day, I would say, when I'm out walking. Some days I'm in the apartment or the condo because I'm working. But I walk as much as I can, and it feels so good to be outside in nature, to not be in a car, and to go where I want, the way I want, and to be exercising.

It's just fantastic. And then there are a couple of other things. You're talking about downsizing and stuff. When I started traveling about 6, 7 years ago, I realized that these 4 or 5 weeks at a time that I'm on the road in other countries are liberating. And it's not just because I'm in another country, but it's also because everything I own or everything that I have at this moment is in a backpack on my back, and that's all I have to worry about.

To me, there's a real burden that comes with having stuff. There's a financial burden, there's a physical burden, there's a mental burden. And so I started this quest to reduce how much stuff I had. And it's been a slow process because you have all these things, you've paid for them, and it can be tough to get rid of them.

The last point I wanted to make is traveling around in the RV, it's about 250 square feet, and yet it's amazing how this tiny little space is enough. And back home in Portland, Oregon, the tiny house movement is kind of a thing. And so I have friends who own tiny homes, and I've spent time in them, and they are perfectly comfortable.

And maybe it's because I grew up in a trailer home, a mobile home. But I feel like now a 500 square foot or 750 square foot home, it would be ample space. Yeah. If you actually look, most of us don't consume more than about, what, two square feet of physical space when we're standing up, and maybe 10 or 15 square feet of physical space when you're lying down.

And what I observe is just because you live in a smaller space doesn't mean that you have to exist in a smaller space. Exactly. That's what happens. When you're on the road in an RV, you spend most of your time outside. Yes, you go in, and if it's rainy, you're glad to have a couch to relax on and a place to cook your dinner.

But you spend more time outside. And if you live in a smaller apartment, you spend more time out in the city doing things like that. And even just physically being there, just because you're in a small space, most of us spend all day in an office or a cubicle that's eight feet by eight feet, while our big house sits empty, and we pay the money to heat and cool it all day long.

Well, and there are side effects to then being forced to get out because you're living in a small space. You become more social. You get to know your environment a lot more. You get to know the people in the environment. So I feel as if having a smaller place, there are a lot of actual benefits to it.

And I'm not sure, perhaps there are some rational reasons we've moved towards larger homes in the past 50 years, but I don't know what they are. Yeah. Now, the rational reason would be, and I'm not one of those that tells people how they should spend their money. Yeah. The rational reason is people think they want it, and they go for it.

And if your definition of success is framed in the context of, "I have a beautiful home that looks like it would be perfect on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens," then it's rational to want that. But if your definition of success is, "I have time to spend with the people that I care about and to devote to the work that I want to do," then you might make different choices.

And to me, that's the powerful thing, is so many people in our society are just bereft of meaning. And it used to be that people took interest in your jobs and take interest in your families, but more people now are choosing not to have families, not to have children.

Well, where is the meaning there? They don't get that same thing. Living for yourself to a point is pleasurable, but after a point, you need something. I wish I had kids. I mean, I'm 46, and that's going to be one of the regrets that I have when I die, is that I didn't have children.

Yeah. It makes a difference when you have something that's important to you. But if you have something that's important, then you can align your efforts in favor of that. And there's a guy, I really respect him. His name is Jeff Lawton, and Jeff's spelled the Australian way, G-E-O-F-F, and he is a L-A-W-T-O-N.

He is a permaculture teacher, and he lives in Australia, and his thing is he teaches permaculture around the world, and he does all these great videos on his site. I think he owns one shirt and one pair of pants because in every one of his videos, he's wearing the same thing.

And he spends all of his time traveling basically around the world, and he's got a beautiful farm in Australia, but I think he's there a few months a year, because the rest of the time, he's living in a hut in Zambia teaching the local people how to support themselves and their food.

And I look at him, and this is a, I'm using a secular example, not even any perspective of people who have religious convictions or anything like that. I look at him and I say, "That, to me, I would rather have his lifestyle than have the mansion that I sit in and mope about because I'm lonely and I have nothing meaningful." If you look throughout history, and you look at even just study history, and whether you want to look at Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Jesus or Mother Teresa or any person of impact, usually, they're not notable because they had this big house.

Maybe Andrew Carnegie, we talk about him, but the rest of them. Well, I think you're getting to a, you keep bringing up great stuff. I love this. This is a fantastic conversation. So, there are a couple of things that you make me think of here. One thing that I think more people need to do is figure out what their purpose is, or maybe that sounds too lofty.

Figure out what their goals are. I think that not enough people try to come up with what it is they want to accomplish in life. And that could be a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now, whatever it is. What is it that's most important to you?

And I think that if you can figure out what your purpose is, what your goals are, then you can structure your financial life around that purpose and those goals. So, in my case, for a while now, travel has been really, really important to me. So, I've been able to structure my financial life around that.

And if I'd actually been clearer on this before I bought my condo, I probably wouldn't own the condo, because owning the condo actually hinders travel rather than helps it. But it's also made it so that, because I understand that travel is important, I don't own a pet. I love cats.

I love dogs. But travel, this is something I want to do. I'm not going to have the pets. Cars are not important to me. So, I don't have a fancy car. I have a ten-year-old Mini Cooper. And I love it. It's fine. But mostly I bicycle or ride a motorcycle or walk.

And so, I think if you get clear on what's important to you, you can make financial decisions that are aligned with that. I had a second point, but I've forgotten what it was now. Have you changed? Have you had to learn? I'm trying not to ask a leading question, but it is a leading question.

My experience has been that there's a difference between consumer-level personal finance and the type of financial advice that you need when you reach a certain level of wealth. And I'm curious, after you sold the company, did you feel like you had to upgrade your knowledge and skills? Or did you feel like what you had learned before stood you in good tracks?

That's an interesting question. I didn't feel like I had to upgrade my knowledge and skills. But I think eventually I did upgrade my knowledge and skills, just through experience and just through thought and just through certain realizations. One of the realizations, I've talked with other people that have become financially independent.

And when you become financially independent, I'm going to go back to health. You realize that you've been making excuses, or in my case, I realized that I had been making excuses for my fitness all this time. I can't get fit because of X or Y or Z. In reality, I always had the ability to get fit.

I was just making excuses. And once you're financially independent and you have all this time and money, those excuses melt away. And if you're not getting fit, it is on you. And so right now, that's actually a helpful attitude to have. Because right now on this RV trip, I've gained 20 pounds probably.

And I own that. I know I've been making poor decisions, drinking too much beer, not exercising. I'm getting the results that you would expect from the effort I'm putting in. And so I don't know where I was going with all that, Josh. It's all right. It makes me just think.

I think there's two ways, there's two phrases that I refuse to say. And they come out sometimes and I catch myself. I probably said them on the show. But the two phrases I refuse to say is, number one, I can't afford that. And number two, I don't have time.

I prefer to say, I'm choosing not to buy that. I'm choosing not to allocate my resources there. Anything but I can't afford that. Or even if it's say, okay, I need to buy this thing, but I really don't have the money. That's not appropriate for me at this financial stage of my life.

But in the future, I'll do that. So then, go ahead. And on the time thing, I think that one's even more important. I'm choosing not to do this or something, because this I don't have time thing is such a cop out. You always have time for the things that matter.

And this gets to a story that I've told a number of times. And it used to be, I think this goes back to fitness. I can't actually remember what the subject was. We're going to call it fitness. I was talking with my cousin. My cousin Nick is a very wise man.

And I worked with him at the Vox factory. And I was complaining about how I wasn't able to lose weight. I just wasn't able to lose weight. I didn't have time for the gym, whatever. And he said, "JD, I've been listening to you complain about this for so long." He said, "You're not losing weight because it's not a priority for you." And I got really indignant.

I'm like, "No, it is a priority for me. It's my top priority." He said, "No, it's not. If it was a priority, you would do it. What's a priority for you is going home and playing World of Warcraft. That is your priority." And I was really angry with him for a little bit.

And then I realized, "No, he's right. It's not the things we say are our priorities that are our priorities. It's the things that we do." And so I'm just as bad as anybody else about prioritizing things. But I own it now. I try not to have these cop-outs that I don't have time, that I don't have the money.

Even from a money perspective, the most powerful example I've ever seen or heard on this to teach people to get rid of the "I can't afford it" mindset was how Dave Ramsey at least used to start his Financial Peace University course. I don't know if he still does, but years ago, he would, I believe in the first session, he would give the example of if you have a son or daughter that suddenly contracts a deadly disease and they're going to die one year from today, but there's a vaccine that costs $10,000 and you can't borrow for it and your medical insurance doesn't cover it.

And he would always, and he'd ask the question, I used to do this with clients, give them the kind of the dramatic version, but think there's somebody that you love that has this incurable disease, but $10,000 to save them. And I would change the number to make it a real stretch, but doable for them.

And I'd say, if you had to, could you come up with $10,000 one year from today to save the life of your son or daughter or favorite niece or favorite nephew? And 100% of the time, even though every time I use, I don't think I ever went below the $10,000 number, but sometimes I go far higher, 100% of the time the answer was yes, I would.

And to me, I've never seen a more powerful example, I don't know if he came up with it or if he just stole it from somebody, but it demonstrates that if the emotion is strong enough, you'll find a way. You might sell your house, sell your car, and be completely without a place to live and without anything to drive, but if you had to come up with $10,000, you'd do it.

You might work two jobs, you'd figure it out if the reason was there. Yeah, I think it's a great point. I'm not sure if you're familiar with George Kinder and his three questions that he asks clients. I think he actually derived these questions from a time management book in the 1960s, but they're along those lines.

They're like, if you found out that you're going to die five years from now, how would you manage your money, what would you do? And you had unlimited wealth, what would you do? I don't know them off the top of my head, but he's got three questions that he asks, and they're designed to lead a person through to figure out, oh, what are my priorities?

What am I doing with my money, and how should I be using my money? He's the financial life planning guy? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so everyone has told me that I need to read his stuff, and I've never read his stuff, because evidently he pioneered what I do, and I haven't read any of his stuff.

So I need to check him out. If you look at, and that's why I think just goal setting is so powerful, if you look at your checkbook register or whatever digital equivalent you have, and if you look at your calendar and you have information, you'll know exactly what your priorities and values are.

And then if you look at goals that you have, and you compare those two things, then you'll know whether or not you have any chance of reaching your goals. It's as simple as that. I want to write that down. I mean, the way you said that just now, that's great.

You've got a documentation of what your goals are. Man, I, okay, I need to, you're going to have to let me know when this goes up. I will. It's the most, one of the most, if listeners haven't done it, I would recommend, I try to do it from time to time.

Number one, track every dollar that goes in and out of your life, and review the reports. That's simple, and many people do that already. And you don't have to do it forever. Just do it for a few months. Right. Even if you do it to check in. But the big one is track every minute, or what I have used, 15-minute increments.

And every now and then, for a week, just track, okay, this 168 hours in the week, what did I actually do? What did I actually accomplish? And then look and see, am I satisfied with these certain things? And if you're happy, great, keep doing it. If you think it's going to get you to your goals, keep doing it.

If you don't, you know, don't. I want to close with just a couple final questions, and we'll wrap up, JD. Okay. This has been fun. Looking back on yourself in that sense of frustration in the box factory to where you are today, I would imagine that you persisted in that state of overwhelm for quite a while before something happened.

Can you think of anything that you would have been able to say to the younger you that would have helped you to pay attention earlier? That's a great question, Joshua. I don't know. I mean, I can't think of anything right off the top of my head that I would have said to myself, because I feel like I had to just go through some of these experiences.

I wasn't ready to listen. People were trying to tell me things, and it wasn't until I hit rock bottom, basically, that I was ready to hear what people had been trying to tell me. And I think that's often true, is people do try to reach out, and if somebody's not ready to listen, they're not going to respond.

They're not going to do the things that people are -- the wisdom that other people are sharing with them, if that makes sense. So I can't think of anything off the top of my head that I would have told the younger JD. The older I get, and I think many people also have this experience, the older we get, the more we realize our parents often already told us everything we didn't know, but we didn't listen at the time.

Yeah, that's true. For some people. And one thing that I'm thinking as I'm giving you this answer, and this is something I've said many times, is I am really happy with where I am today. I'm happy with who I am and where I am. And the reality is, despite all of the stuff I went through when I was younger, and how much I didn't like the stuff I went through when I was younger, I wouldn't be here now if I hadn't been in debt for 18 years.

Right. If I hadn't struggled with a marriage and then had a divorce. I wouldn't be where I am and be as happy as I am now if I hadn't been through these things. And I'm not saying that everyone should get in debt or get a divorce. But I'm saying me, myself, I'm a product of everything that's come before, and I like who I am and where I am, so can't complain.

Last question. Many times when people hear somebody else's fairy tale story, and yours is a little bit that way, It is, yeah. they often, I think, underestimate what the reality was like during those years. Think back to, I'm going to call it year, well, how long did you blog before you sold?

I owned it for three years. Okay, so let's go to year two. Yeah. Average week, Monday morning through Sunday night in year two of Get Rich Slowly. What was your average week like, would you guess, as far as the work that you were doing and what your life looked like?

Well, okay, and this is a great question because, to me, there's definitely an element of luck in my story, and I don't want to downplay that. Luck and fortune played a role, but there's also talent and hard work there. For me, there's an equation. It's talent, but talent isn't enough.

If you don't put in the work, you're not going to get any results, so you've got to have talent and hard work. But a lot of people have talent and do hard work, and then you have to have a little bit of luck to break free. So in the middle years of Get Rich Slowly, when I was building the site, at first it was a happy coincidence that I'm making money off this site.

It's just a hobby for me that I'm doing in my spare time at the box factory. Then I quit the box factory to do it full time, and oh my gosh, all of a sudden, it's a job. And so what had been a happy lark before, all of a sudden became a bit of a burden.

And even though the income was growing, it still became--there was a lot of pressure. A lot of it was self-induced pressure, but it was still pressure. And what I often say is I had the expectation that I put upon myself that I was going to produce 12 posts a week, two every weekday and one every weekend.

And I almost never did that. I usually produced like 10 posts. And so I would get frustrated. "Oh, I fell two posts short," or "I didn't meet my revenue goals this month," or whatever it was. And so I had to change my expectations. I changed my expectations so that I was just going to produce one post a day every day of the week.

And so all of a sudden, I'm expecting that I'm going to produce seven, and I still produced 10. And all of a sudden, because my expectations changed, I was a lot happier. I'm still doing the same amount of work. But I did a lot of work on Get Rich Slowly to build it.

I mean, I don't have the stats anymore, but at the time I sold it, I don't want to make numbers up. But it was a huge number of words I had written, a huge number of articles. And I'm proud of what I did, but it also took all my time.

But it's good encouragement because I'm in year two of radical personal finance, and it's definitely in that work grind. And I'm not quitting. I committed to myself to 1,000 episodes before I launched, and we're in the mid-200s right now. Before you launched? Wait. Oh, you're saying before you launched.

I committed myself to doing 1,000 episodes. I thought you were already out there. No, no, no. It's out there. What I told myself before I started was if nobody listens, I'll do 1,000 episodes. And so we're in the mid-200s, and very gratifyingly, people are listening. But it's still a grind.

It's definitely a grind. It's work. And it requires a tremendous amount of time. It requires a tremendous amount of work. And even if you have a sense of purpose and importance, where you're doing something that's important to you, it doesn't mean it's not work. Yeah, absolutely. It's work. And in the case of the kind of work you're doing and the kind of work I do, you never really leave it behind.

It's always there. One thing that my girlfriend finds interesting, not frustrating, but interesting, is I always have a notebook in my back pocket or someplace, and I always have a pen with me. I'm always--inspiration can come at any moment. And I have to say, "Okay, stop," and I'll take five or ten minutes to write something down.

And it's just--I never leave it behind. Yeah, you have to. So, moneyboss.com is--and you also--are you still writing on your personal site about that? Yeah, I write at jdroth.com. In theory, I haven't really posted much this year because I've been writing at farawayplaces.com about the trip. But even that's going to fade as Moneyboss launches because all my attention is going to be focused on Moneyboss.

And then, do you still have a course? I think you launched with Chris Gillible, an unconventional guides course. Tell us about that. Yeah, so I worked with my friend Chris Gillible to produce--we were going to call it the Unconventional Guide to Money. But we decided to call it Get Rich Slowly, the Unconventional Guide to--maybe it is the Unconventional Guide to Money, actually, now that I think about it.

And the cornerstone of that is the guide to becoming the chief financial officer of your own life. And that's where the Moneyboss idea actually comes from, is I want people to be the chief financial officer of their own life. But I also don't want their eyes to glaze over, so we're leaving the CFO thing behind and just calling it a Moneyboss.

Awesome. Awesome. JD, thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks, Joshua. Success is not a straight line, no matter what you might have been told. Success usually follows a bunch of loops and circles and some left turns and right turns and ups and downs.

And you might end up near the original destination that you charted off before you started on your journey. Or you might wind up at a better destination, but regardless of which destination you wind up at, you're not going to get there in a straight line. So what I want you to take away from JD's story is notice that he started and then things happened.

He started in a very simple way, but he started and he worked and he gained exposure and then things happened. Take that principle and implement it for yourself. Start and work and you'll be surprised at the things that happen. Don't sit back and wait for everything to be perfect.

Start and work and things might happen. Make sure to go and check out JD's new site, Moneyboss. You can find that at Moneyboss.com. I know he's very excited about that project. He has holed up. They've put their RV trip on hold and they are holed up in – I think it's South Carolina, something like that.

And he is spending a lot of time writing and he's very excited about that project. So if you enjoy his voice and enjoy his information, go to Moneyboss.com and check out some of his work there. I'm going to – you'll notice I haven't started playing the music yet. I'm going to make one more comment here about one of the things that we referenced in that discussion.

And the reference was the fact of – where we were talking about spending on public schooling. So if you're not familiar with those numbers, I will put some links in the show notes that you might enjoy checking out. The first thing I will link to is I will link to a lengthy YouTube video.

I will cue the video at the point in time where I actually learned that idea or fact about public schooling being one of the largest industries in the world. It's by a presentation by John Taylor Gatto. It's a long interview. It's actually an interview that he gave when he was talking about Columbine and the school shootings in Columbine and was discussing some work that he had done.

He was talking about why there are so many school shootings, which might be some content you might be interested in. So I will cue it up to the point in his presentation in this lengthy YouTube video where he was talking about the size of the US public schooling budget.

But you might go ahead and check out the full video. You might find it useful and interesting to you. In short though, here are the quick audio version. If you actually run the numbers on how much we spend on schooling – and so here I will just simply cite as a starting place statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics.

The question is how much does the United States spend on public elementary and secondary schools? And the figure cited here from the National Center for Education Statistics is $621 billion in 2011 to 2012 or an average of $12,401 per public student. So $621 billion total, $12,400 per public student.

I will also cite and link to an interesting analysis published by the Cato Institute where they talk about are those actually the studies, the actual facts of how much we actually spend. And if you read through that, what you'll find is their analysis is that the actual figures that are being spent are about 44% higher than the cited figures.

So it could be higher than that. To put that number in context, whatever the actual correct number is though, if you were to put that into context, $621 billion in 2011 and 2012, the 2016 US military budget is $763.9 billion. So we practically spend about the same amount on public schooling as we spend on military spending.

Just to put those things into context. Now, it's up to you to determine whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I find it a little bit crazy how we spend anywhere from $12,000 on average, some school districts $20,000 to $30,000, and yet my siblings who have been teachers in a public school system are sitting there trying to figure out how they can get their kids' parents to send in more pencils for their kids.

It's a little bit of a silly system. I'll let you decide what the reason for it is. I won't go into that political discussion today, but check out the numbers and the statistics linked in the show notes if you doubt that fact. It may have been new to some of you.

Thank you all so much for listening to today's show. I really appreciate each and every one of you lending me your ear, and I hope that this content has been helpful to you. I hope that you can learn something, and I hope that this continual exposure to these types of interviews can help to broaden your horizons in ways that you can really find useful.

I really hope this content serves you. If you've benefited and appreciated the content from today's show, please support the show by patronizing our sponsors. Again, sponsors of the day today are YNAB, You Need a Budget, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/YNAB, and Paladin Registry for financial advisors, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin. Or, even better, or also with that, if you'd like to support the show directly, you can become a patron of the show.

Please do that at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. What that basically means is that you sign up and you pick a dollar amount to support the show. That number can be as little as a buck a month or it can be as much as a couple hundred bucks a month, whatever you feel the show is worth.

Support the show directly, and that money goes directly from your pocket into my pocket as a form of compensation, and that is the primary source of income for me from Radical Personal Finance. So please consider doing that at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. For the almost 250 of you who support the show, we're at 230-something.

We'd love to get that number 250. For the 230-something of you who support the show, thank you very, very much. I appreciate your support of me and my efforts here with Radical Personal Finance. I think that's it. That's all I wanted to talk about today. So I will leave you with some really fun music for you to rock out to.

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