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It's more than just a ticket. Today on Radical Personal Finance we have live Q&A. It starts right now. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me. Today we have a live Q&A that's about as live as we can get it.

I'm doing an intro with guys hanging on the line. I know we're going to talk about stealth wealth, refinancing a mortgage, investing in tax efficiency, and how to handle money as a couple. Now, where we go from there, I have no idea. Thank you all for being with me today.

On Fridays, well, I'm recording this on a Thursday, but on Fridays generally we would do a Q&A show. At this point in time, one of my major intentions going forward with the show is to do this Q&A show once a week. If you would like to participate in a Q&A show, this is probably your most direct way to ask a question.

I still want sometimes – intend to do Q&A where I'm answering your email questions, but a lot of times what happens is they'll become so much work and they get to be so long and I got to compose this 82-minute answer to the email. It's a little overwhelming. So I love doing the live Q&A because it allows me just to have a conversation with people and it helps me to have a little bit of back and forth.

If you would like to be on a show like this, the one that we're starting right now, sign up to become a patron of the show, radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Change is being made to that website. We are simplifying the patronage levels. But going forward, basically if you sign up with $7 a month or above, you get access to these Friday Q&A calls.

Lots of benefits there. Thank you to the many of you who support the show there. So I've got a few guys hanging on the line here and we're going to start with a question here from Alex. I've got a few questions lined up and then who knows where we go.

But Alex, welcome to the Friday Q&A show. Go and ask your question please and introduce yourself. Hi, thank you Joshua. Yeah, this is Alex. Yeah, I just had a question about stealth wealth. I'm a big fan of the Tom Stanley books as I know you are and you've talked about on previous shows.

This isn't really an issue for my family yet, but I'm kind of seeing how it might be in the future. I guess my question is what are some techniques and maybe even just more generally like a framework or philosophy for how do you be more stealthy with your assets as your assets grow, as your income grows over time just because there are different social circles you may be in and you may want to maintain that information asymmetry.

So I just want to get your thoughts and ideas on that. Yeah, I'll give you a few ideas. I don't see – so the concept for those who aren't familiar with the term, I don't know who coined the term, but the idea is it's probably better to be rich and not have people know that you're rich than to be obviously rich.

Generally – and there are a variety of different reasons for it. But if everyone knows that you're rich, you're going to have to deal with the outcome of that. You're going to have to deal with some of the pleasant things but also some of the unpleasant things. You're going to be solicited for more money.

You're going to be solicited for more charitable donations. You could become a target of envy. You might have an Occupy West Palm Beach protest parked outside your house saying, "Hey, you're rich. You're the 1% and we are the 99%." This right now, I mean the US American culture, it's not too big of a deal.

Although the political rhetoric as things stand in February 2016 is changing. As the political climate change is going forward, this could be more important. But the idea is if nobody knows that you're rich, then you don't have to deal with some of those negative repercussions. You can just simply sit back and enjoy the outcome of your wealth.

There is a point in time at which it's going to be relatively obvious that you at least have a high income. Certain professions, if you're a physician or an attorney or a corporate executive, certain professions, you're going to know that you have a high income. If you are an executive at a publicly traded company, your compensation is going to be a matter of public record as a component of your company's tax filings and disclosure filings with the SEC.

If you work in many governmental positions, people will know your income. But many of us, especially those of us who are entrepreneurs, will be able to work in a situation where we don't have to disclose it. So what you find is many times people who are truly wealthy find it more advantageous not to tell anybody.

I love to see the newspaper stories of the old man or the old lady that dies and everyone thought they were broke. But in reality, they had millions and millions of dollars worth of stock. And if you can maintain the comforts and benefits of wealth while also maintaining a little bit of anonymity, I think it can really open up a lot of opportunities to you.

So simplistically speaking, I think it starts with just not talking a lot about your private affairs. Now, this is a rule that I break on the show and I do it because I figure somebody has to kind of break some of the barriers and talk about things. But unless you're selling something related to wealth or making money, there's almost no reason to ever talk about your wealth.

There's no reason to talk about how much money you have. And that's why one of my litmus tests for people who are suspect is when they're leading with lifestyle. I did a show on it recently, but I watch on Instagram and I always follow the stock traders and things.

And basically every other post is, "Here's my Lamborghini. Here are my – extolling the benefits of my lifestyle." Now, is it legitimate? It could be. But the only reason that's of benefit to them is that it's establishing them as an expert in the eyes of their customers. So you may want to convey some sort of wealth status as part of your credentials to practice a certain type of business.

You may need to send forth some of those social triggers and social cues. You may need to – if you're an attorney, you may need to wear a suit that fits you properly and looks great and drive a BMW so people think you're successful. That certainly has its case.

But if you don't have to do that, then there's really little reason to do it. So basically, choose carefully. Don't talk about your business. Drive a car that's moderate. A simple example, you talk about Tom Stanley. Tom Stanley would – discussed about the fact that he would drive a Toyota 4Runner.

You could get a top-of-the-line Toyota 4Runner that's incredibly luxurious, leather, automatic, everything, and nobody will look at it twice. It just blends in. Same thing with many SUVs. It blends in, but it's incredibly comfortable. So taking care of the cars that you drive, taking care of the house that you live in, what you see in my observation, you see almost a difference depending on different levels of wealth.

At the uber-wealthy, you usually don't ever see the houses. The houses are locked behind gates. They're on a private island. You never will get near the house to see it, and that can be a good strategy. If you're living in a place where you're out in the country and you want to build a giant, beautiful house, you might have enough acreage around you where it's not really seen.

So that can work. Or a lot of times, you can deploy that wealth in a way that doesn't look obviously flashy but yet gives you a huge lifestyle. I remember the first time I went to – I've only been there one time, but I went to Martha's Vineyard one time, and I didn't know much about Martha's Vineyard.

I was there as a component of a trip traveling with somebody who was staying with some wealthy people who lived in Martha's Vineyard. I remember my first impression of the place was like, "This place is a dump." I mean it's nice, but it's not all that nice. It's not beautifully flashy.

So the people there were exercising a lot of just the benefits of the lifestyle without putting things on obviously from the outside. A couple ideas, you can enjoy wealth, the benefits of wealth, without flashy things. So you can in your home have paintings that are beautiful and that are very – that give you satisfaction, but that's not obvious to the external world.

You can – example of that, I remember I mentioned on the story which – on the show, one time I went and had dinner with a guy who was formerly the richest man in the world. We're sitting in his dining room. He's got some paintings on the wall. I'm not an art aficionado.

But one of them he starts telling me about and I think it could be mistaken in my memory, but it was worth something like $13 million. It's just this 300-year-old painting. I'm sitting there saying, "How on earth do you just have this sitting on the wall?" Well, an uneducated consumer from the outside, I didn't have a clue of what the value was.

So you can enjoy the fruits of your wealth living in a modest-sized home, but furnish it luxuriously. Make sure that you have the best bed. Make sure that you have the things that are around you that you value the most. Those things are expensive and they're a way for you to enjoy the fruit of your wealth personally without displaying it to the world around.

Now, a couple of other practical ideas, maintain the privacy of your business dealings through the use of appropriate entities. This idea is bandied about probably more than it should be based upon people who are selling – usually attorneys who want to sell their services out. But you can go ahead and own your property in a blind trust.

You can run a business in a blind corporation where it's just called XYZ Holdings and somebody is going to search for Joshua Sheets and they're not going to find XYZ Holdings. You can do those things. You can own your car in an entity so that if you're going to have this classic car collection, it's not necessarily traced to you.

You can use an attorney as a cutout between the ownership of the property, the negotiation of the deal, so that you can go ahead and as your wealth grows, you may want to do more of those things to maintain your anonymity and your privacy. Nobody needs to know everything that you're doing.

But at the early stages, there's not too much – you don't need to worry too much about it. But as things grow, you can plan for that circumstance. But ultimately, just don't talk about it and I think that if you look at the way the wealthy people handle their money, a lot of times the greatest pleasure comes from those things that aren't visible.

So there's no reason in the world why your – what people perceive to be your lifestyle should ever – that they should ever actually know what your lifestyle is. And if you're building wealth efficiently, that's probably going to be the case. You may be earning a high income but living at a moderate lifestyle, that's what's going to allow you to be wealthy.

And so those same skills that you practice when you are becoming wealthy are going to permit you to remain wealthy. Would you like to ask a follow-up question, Alex? Did that touch on a little bit of what you wanted to talk about? Yeah, that helps a lot. Thank you.

Yeah, I guess my follow-up was kind of in the back of my head. I was also thinking you touched on it a little bit as like how do you enjoy what you're creating and kind of the blessings that you have at the same time as making sure other people don't see that.

And I guess that's kind of an art it sounds like. You have to kind of look at things bit by bit and kind of deal with it as it becomes necessary. Each person will have something that they value more than something else. So for one person, what they value might be flashy cars.

For me, I wouldn't value the ownership of flashy cars, but how I would enjoy spending money on cars is I would enjoy renting fast cars as a component of a driving course. So you can do that and no one needs to know that you're spending a lot of money on your hobby of racing.

Or you can just go ahead and create a racing team. I mean you can do anything and you can make it discreet. I don't think – I mean you get to a point – there is a point of paranoia I think that's probably unhealthy. But you can certainly be a little bit discreet about the things that you do and many people won't know.

A good example, I know somebody who is quite wealthy, but they have just a simple fact of they don't park all their stuff at their house. They live in a very comfortable middle class house and lifestyle, but you don't see their RV at the middle class. They don't see their boat.

You don't see all those things displayed at one time. Rather at their place of business, they have a large warehouse associated with their place of business. And they park the RV and the boat and the ski boat and the salt water boat. They just park all that stuff there.

And then when they want to use it, they can go and get it. So nobody needs to know all of the toys that you have. Nobody needs to know all of those things. Any further follow-up? Great. Thank you. Cool. Awesome. All right. Let's go to James next. Go ahead, James.

Hi, Joshua. I'm hoping that you can help me clear up sort of a confusion I have as to what we're always told we should do versus the difficulty I'm having putting it into practice. Now, I'll give you some numbers against the advice you just gave just to give you some context.

I'm 45 years old, and about 12 years ago, I started really contributing to my 401(k) at work such that I've got about $366,000 in that. But then I've also been trying to save outside of that. So I've got about $400,000 in those accounts, a mix of Roth IRA and then the rest of it, $27,000 in the Roth.

The rest is in taxable accounts. And you're always told on the one hand you should keep anything that generates dividends or taxable events, you should keep those in tax-advantaged accounts. And you should avoid taxable events in your non-tax-advantaged accounts. But I guess what I'm confused about is they also say, "Well, you should buy low and sell high," goes the cliche.

But then if you feel like you have an opportunity to do that, that entails selling something you've made a profit on and then presumably buying something that you think is at a good valuation. And so do I really need to try that hard to avoid these taxable events? One time I had way more individual stocks than I was comfortable with, and I just wanted to get rid of them, so I sold those at a profit.

And indeed, I got a big tax bill of like $9,000. I actually had to sell some stocks to pay the tax bill. But if in general I can absorb the tax hit that's coming, do I really need to not have things that are fixed income, even if I feel like they're giving me a better opportunity at the time than just something that would appreciate capital appreciation?

So I guess I'm very confused as to what the rule is in terms of best practices, what they really are in the real world. What is your generalized investment strategy or approach? Well, it's sort of in flux. I've been listening to David Stein and trying to do sort of an asset class-based thing where I'm mainly in indexes and just try to kind of move based on trends in the economy and valuations.

So that's kind of where I'm headed. Okay. Well, I guess let's start with the obvious thing that a lot of times we forget. If you owe tax, that means you've made money, and sometimes it's better to sell the investment and pay the tax and lock in the money that you made as gains than it is to just simply continue on recognizing that – just to stay the course because you don't want to pay the tax.

So in one sense – and this is very difficult for me personally because I'm so extreme in my own personal opinions. It's very difficult for me to want to pay tax. But I'll tell you just what I often tell myself. I always just remember – I think it was Jim Rohn who would talk about it.

I love Jim Rohn. He would always say, "Be grateful and be thankful when you sit down and fill out your tax returns because you can be grateful that you're making money. And if you're paying more tax, you're making more money." It's easy in theory to think about hard in practice, at least for me, to put into practice.

So paying tax is not always bad. The key I think is to calculate the built-in tax liability that you face and consider the transaction in light of that. If you have a very – let's say that you have a very low basis in a single stock. So you bought the stock at $2 a share.

You have a lot of money built – of total – many, many shares built up and now the shares are worth $10. Ignore dividends. You've got a lot of capital gains set there. You've got to factor in the cost of the tax into your planning because if you sell it, you're going to pay the tax.

And so you've got to factor in, can I – even if paying – with paying the tax, can I then replace this with something better, something that I can beat it? So what I'm trying to emphasize is start with the investment decisions first, not with the tax decisions. Once you've made the investment decisions or you've laid out your investment strategy, then look at the tax perspective and say, "Is there a way that I can structure this deal in the most advantageous way possible?" That's where the idea of different accounts comes in.

The key about qualified versus non-qualified accounts, the biggest benefit of a non-qualified account such as a 401(k) is the fact that it allows you to defer the taxation on the upfront contribution. You earn money. You put money in the account, and you don't pay income tax in that year.

If you don't have a high need for that deferral, let's say that your income was – let's say that your income was relatively low and your – so therefore the value of the upfront deferral on the tax wasn't very high. I'm convinced in some cases it would be better not to hold that asset in the 401(k).

It would be better to hold the asset especially if you're working with single stocks or a long-term capital gain asset of some kind. It would be better to go ahead and just own that under long-term capital gains rates as things stay today because the long-term capital gains rates are lower.

If someone is in a 5% or 10% effective tax bracket, then there's not a huge savings of going ahead and taking that money out as income. Now, if somebody is in a 40% – 35, 40% effective tax bracket and they can defer that tax for the future, now it's a different scenario.

So I'm not sure how to answer it more precisely than that just to say that you start with the investment outcome and the investment strategy that you're trying to build, and then you look at where you're going to locate the assets. So there's no reason if you're going to own a capital gains asset, long-term capital gain type property, then yes, if your investment plan says 50% of my portfolio is going to be in long-term capital gain property and 50% is going to be in income producing property that's going to be taxed at ordinary income rates, then you should go ahead and shelter the income producing property in the tax qualified account and keep the long-term capital gains property in the non-qualified account.

But you've got to start with the investment plan, not with the tax plan. Do you want to ask a more specific question? Well, that basically makes sense to me. It gets a little bit more complicated in my mind because of how limited the options are inside the tax advantage account where I have the most opportunity to invest, that being the 401(k) where the contribution limits are much higher.

But you've got a very few choices. And so if let's say there's some sort of closed-end income fund that is trading way below net asset value that you can't get in a tax-deferred account, then it could seem like a very good deal to purchase that even though it's income producing outside of a tax advantage account.

Or am I thinking about that the wrong way? No, you're thinking about it correctly. You are simply identifying one of the major limitations of 401(k) plans, and that is one of the major problems. What's happened in our investment – the mainstream investment culture in the United States of America is that people – that the idea of a 401(k) has become synonymous with investing.

And so generally when people think, "Oh, I'm going to invest," they're wanting to say, "I'm going to invest in a 401(k)," rather than saying, "I'm going to invest through a 401(k)." And 401(k)s hold with them unique restrictions and limitations based upon the fiduciary duty of the employer. And so the – what we've done is we've effectively taken a very – so the pension systems in the United States used to be relatively stable.

The pension systems were run by investment professionals. They were run by – I don't need to go deeper. They were run by investment professionals and they were invested conservatively, safely, and they were run as trust accounts. Those systems have largely given way to self-directed approaches. And in the 401(k) system, your employer has a fiduciary duty to make sure the plan is well run.

So there's a whole host of people who are working to help and who are working to provide options. But they have to be careful because they have some level of fiduciary duty to – they have a fiduciary duty to the employees to make sure that things are well taken care of.

It doesn't mean that they can't – that they're not – the employer is not responsible for losses in the accounts. But they are responsible to make sure that there are appropriate, suitable investment plans offered. And so in order to steer clear of the liability, generally, the 401(k) options are going to be mainstream, vanilla approaches.

In a large organization, you never get fired for not taking a risk. And that's basically the way it works. So in a bureaucracy, most people, whether it's large companies or large government organizations, you don't get fired if you do the safe route. What's the old saying go? No one ever got fired for choosing IBM.

Same thing happens in investment planning. So we want mainstream, very, very vanilla fund options and you need to have a limited menu of them. So is that helpful for the individual participants? Maybe. Sure, it is. But what it means is if you want to take more control, the 401(k) is going to be your most difficult place to do it unless you're doing it within a self-directed 401(k) for your own company.

So what I would encourage you is in many investment plans, you might have some amount of your portfolio that you want to have with mainstream approaches. And with other investment plans, you might want to have other options that are less mainstream. And so you've got to locate those investment options appropriately.

The best example, the guy who taught me my Series 6 class was a great guy. He's done everything in the securities business, awesome guy. But he always just told me, he's like, "I keep some of my portfolio always just in an S&P 500 index fund. I don't look at it.

I don't think about it. It's just basically my insurance portfolio. If I screw everything up and I lose all of my fund stuff, at least I've got this and it's there for me." So if your investment plan has you using a core portfolio and almost an insurance plan, then look and see does the 401(k) match that.

If not, if your 401(k) has really bad options, then look at the match. Say is it worth it and maybe you just funnel money into it up to the match and you do your other investments elsewhere. But I don't know that I can get any more specific than that without digging over into the world of like actually doing a financial plan.

But just look at it objectively and recognize the 401(k) plans do have significant limitations. They also have significant benefits and you'll have to judge how important those things are to you. I think that's helpful. I'll probably have to listen to that hinter again to let everything sink in. Good.

Well, I hope it was coherent and feel free to comment on the blog post. Maybe there's some other people that have ideas that will be more helpful to you. All right, Kevin, you're next. Go ahead. Hey, Justin. Thanks. Honestly, you're a very passionate person. Hey, Kevin, hang on one second.

You're breaking up a little bit. I'm going to go on to Lee and we'll come back to you. Try to get yourself a better signal on your phone call. Lee, go ahead with your question, please. Okay, yes. So, first of all, hi Joshua. Thanks for taking my question here.

So, I own my own home and it's financed by a HELOC, Home Equity Line of Credit. The reason it went that way is I had trouble getting a traditional mortgage because of a low income record. About two years prior, I graduated from college and tax return history wasn't enough.

I didn't have a full-time income, so I managed to get it financed through a HELOC. So, on one side, I really love the flexibility of it. I feel like I'm disciplined enough to make a large enough payment, even though the interest is all that's required. But I do like the fact that I can make a lower payment in a certain amount if I need to, and there's no penalty for that, as long as I keep paying the interest on it.

But at the same time, I don't feel that comfortable with my interest rate risk. The HELOC is at 4% now, but it will adjust if the rates go higher. So, now, at this point in time, I have enough of income history to qualify for a mortgage. At least that's my – I'm pretty sure I have about three years of full-time income tax returns.

So, my question is, what things should I be considering when I think about refinancing from my HELOC to a, say, a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage? It's a great question. The HELOC, is it on the house that you're living in, or is it on another property? It's on my house. So, it's based upon that you – explain to me why you were able to qualify for a HELOC when you weren't able to qualify for a conventionally amortizing mortgage.

I am not totally sure. I got it through my local bank branch. I'm not sure if it was a different underwriting department, but the local bank branch knew me and knew the family, and I kind of think that that's part of why it went through. And it was on a low – the ratio of the loan to the value of the house was relatively low?

You put cash down? I put cash down. It assessed that at a little bit higher than the purchase price was, so my loan price was 80%. Okay. Interesting. It's an interesting scenario. Do you know the actual terms of the interest rate adjustment? I do not. I realize I should, but I don't at this point.

It's not easy to figure out. So, definitely, the HELOC – and real quick, another follow-up question. You have the option on the HELOC. You're required to pay an interest payment each month, or you can forgo a payment. What are the terms of the payments? I'm required to pay interest, and it's at 4% now.

It's fairly low. It's like $450, $475 a month. So, I'm required to pay that every month, and I probably could even pull money out of the HELOC and then make a payment back into it. Probably not too many times, but – How much are you normally paying into the HELOC?

$800. If you continue to pay it at that rate, how quickly will the loan be paid off? Oh, boy. It's been long enough since it ran those numbers. I'm thinking it's going to be in the range of 15 – no, it's probably a little more than that – years, 18 to 20.

Okay. And do you want to put extra money towards it? Yes. This is the place where I want to live, and I'm at the early part of my amortization schedule, so I do want to put as much as I can toward it. And how much is the current balance on the loan?

$135,000, $135,000, something like that. Have you looked into the rates if you were to refinance it under a conventional, say, a 30-year mortgage? The last I checked, it was around the same percent, 4, 4.5. Okay. So if you refinanced it at 4% under a 30-year mortgage, your principal and interest payment should be about $643 a month.

So that would make sense if – let's see. If we dropped it to 15 years, same interest rate, you would get an interest rate reduction. A 15-year mortgage is going to be a lower rate of interest than the 30-year. But if we dropped it to a 15-year and ran the numbers on that, the payment at a 4% interest rate would be $995.

So your round numbers of you saying 15 to 20 years to pay the loan off, that sounds about right to me based upon just running that amortization schedule real quick in the calculator. If you plan to stay on the property, it's hard for me to think that you're going to be beat.

I mean if you plan to stay on the property, this is where you want to live, yeah, I would – I think I would pursue refinancing it and try to get it on a fixed rate more often. I would try to get a fixed rate mortgage to remove that interest rate risk.

Now, in years past, I was vehemently opposed to variable interest rate mortgages and I was – it was a matter of philosophy. I said never borrow money on a variable rate mortgage. Since that time, as with most of the hard line stances I've taken on financial issues, I've realized that don't ever say never because there are compelling reasons and times at which you should make a different decision.

And the key point that I had not understood when I made the statement of always buy it, borrow it, a fixed rate interest rate, I had not fully understood how some variable rate mortgages adjusted and the limitations that were on them. So I'd encourage you to read the terms that are listed in your mortgage agreement and ask yourself the terms under which those things adjust and under which that specific mortgage adjusts.

There are times at which those adjustments are limited. So it might say based upon this external rate, we calculate the rate of the mortgage and it adjusts at this rate but it's not going to exceed a change of 1% or whatever the number is or it might be more open-ended.

So you want to read that mortgage document and really understand the terms under which it will adjust and calculate some likely scenarios. I think it's – so we've been in this low interest rate environment for a very long time. What's going to happen in the future with interest rates?

I don't know. But the reason I'm pointing that out is because people have been concerned about mortgage rates changing for a very long time and there have been people who have been much better off with a variable rate mortgage over the last few years by not – than if they had gone ahead and gotten a fixed rate mortgage.

So understand the rate of adjustment. I don't see any harm in refinancing it on a long, stable, amortizing mortgage. You'll have to compare the amount of money that you have to pay for it versus the amortization schedule and ask yourself that question. So the reason I ask you how long it would take to pay it off, let's say that you're looking at it and saying, "Hey, in five years, I could have this thing paid off because I actually want to put $1,500 a month towards it." And under that scenario, maybe I would just keep it as a HELOC, save the cost of refinancing, put as much money into it as possible.

Maybe you can pay it off quicker to the point where it's not worth extending it out. Good book recommendation I would give to you is the author's name. It's going to be on the show. Probably going to release the interview next week. But he's written a mortgage book. The author's name is Casey Lewis.

He's a mortgage consultant and he's written an excellent book on mortgages. And I've got an interview with him already recorded that I'll probably be releasing in the next week or so. When you see that interview go out, I'll link the book in the show notes today. I just can't pull the title off the top of my head.

But when you see that interview, listen to it and check out his book. And he does a good job in that book of describing scenarios and giving you your outline of things to think about. Any follow-up question on that? I have the option on the HELOC to convert it to a fixed rate if it's only a 15-year.

So I guess my current thought is keep it in the HELOC as long as possible until it's obvious that the interest rates are rising. At that point, do something. So I think that sounds like a good idea. Yeah. Does it allow you to convert it at a fixed rate?

Does it allow you to convert it at a fixed rate that's stated in the document or is it based upon a fixed rate at the time of conversion? The rate hike, I would take a hike. It's 4% now. And at the time that I asked, I would take a percent and a half hit.

So I could put it at a fixed 15-year for 5.5%. Shop the mortgage market. That's what I would say. Read the document carefully and shop the mortgage market locally. Maybe grab a couple of online people. I don't know what's the big one, Quicken Loans or whatever, the guys that advertise all over.

Try a couple of them and talk to a local mortgage broker or two and just understand your options. Try to get some realistic rates and run some math and put some different scenarios in force. That would be how I would approach it. I wouldn't jump into it. It's an interesting scenario.

And I would like personally if I could have it -- if I could have a fixed-rate loan with the old pick-a-payment option where you can choose to adjust the payment, I would like that. It doesn't put the same pressure on you to pay the balance down, but it also gives you a lot more flexibility and lowers my risk because I can choose the payment.

But I would definitely look into refinancing at this point in time and talk to some local professionals. Best I got for you, Lee. Maybe if other listeners have comments or questions, maybe you guys can hang out in the comments on today's show and help one another with some more details.

All right, next, let's go back to Kevin. You can go ahead and ask your question, please. Hey, Joshua. Sorry about that. No problem. Sounds good now. So I wanted to ask a more personal question, a less technical. You're obviously a passionate, organized, Excel spreadsheet kind of guy with money.

I think most of your listenership is. So I wanted to see if you would speak to how you and your wife handle your personal finances together. Do you split up tasks, you know, doing taxes, paying bills? Do you handle it all? And if so, how do you all discuss big-money decisions?

I guess I'm kind of getting at what state does your wife have in it and how can we, you know, maybe balance things in a good way, you know, and maybe even go into how you all have evolved over your years of marriage and how that might have changed.

That's a good question. So that's probably the thorniest things that face us. And one of the things that's so difficult in the world around us is we have very competing philosophies. And the answer to how people will handle this question is very much influenced based upon worldview. So I'll answer the question very directly, very straightforward, and I'll tell you exactly what we do and what we have found to be helpful in that.

But I do want to caveat that this is – the way that people will handle it is based upon worldview. And in the context of marriage, many people struggle with answering the question. And you have to settle the question of how is marriage a partnership of equals? Is marriage – or as I would use it, using language that I would use, is marriage a union of two people into one?

In our modern world, there is – people generally have a problem with not being in a place of – people have a problem with anything except an equal partnership. It's interesting. There was an interesting article that came out in The New York Times this last week and surrounding Valentine's Day, and it was about the culture of language.

And asking about, hey, within the context of language, how do we refer in this new world that we live in with same-sex marriage being legal in the United States and in many modern countries around the world? How do we deal with cultural language? And the article was fascinating because it was talking about how we need to eliminate the words "husband" and "wife." We also need to eliminate – we need to eliminate – because, okay, how do you – is "husband" the right word?

If you have two men that are in a legal marriage or two women, it's a very – what do we call each other? In fact, there's even so far as in the article it referenced the discussion of partner A and partner B. Marriage certificates have been changed now to eliminate husband and wife, and they're using partner A and partner B.

And the writer was commenting how some people – it's unfair to have the concept of partner A and partner B. So the reason that's important is the mainstream thought of how to conduct relationships in our modern era is the idea of equality of function. And so the idea is we should split everything.

And the normal advice that I was given in the past and that I used to give was that you should try to conduct things in an equal manner as partners in the decisions based upon whoever had the functional – whoever had a functional advantage. And so the idea is that we should each have a 50/50 vote.

We should sit down. We should talk about decisions, and we should make those decisions equally. Well, my wife and I tried that in the beginning of our marriage, and we generally didn't find that that worked very well. And I haven't found that it works very well in my experience working with different couples.

Now, each couple has to figure out how to apply it, but for the first year, we would try to sit down. Okay, we're going to do the budget. We're going to decide everything together, and we're going to figure out – you get this and I get that, and you get a spending account of $200 and I get a spending account of $200.

And we're going to try to do these things equally. And we ultimately came to the conclusion based upon experience – our own experience – that that wasn't working well. There were a few reasons that it wasn't working. We're not equal in terms of we do different things. We're not equal in function.

We're equal in status, and that's where I said worldview. In a Christian marriage, one of the things you see that the Bible teaches clearly is that husbands and wives, they come together to become one. And we are equal in status before God, but we're not equal in responsibility or in function.

And as a husband, as a Christian, I am fully responsible for the outcome of my family. And that makes it very challenging because it puts all the responsibility on me. Well, when you put responsibility, responsibility also needs to come with ability to make decisions and to do things, to make forward decisions and to lead.

The other challenge is especially once my wife began to stay home with the children, that puts her at a different function where she's no longer a wage-earning spouse. And this is one of the reasons why if you study the changes in our culture, it's one of the reasons why it's been so important to have a workforce made up of men and women because in the concept of our modern culture, this creates equality.

Both spouses have their income. And the way that many spouses handle that, we both work. You have your income. I have my income. We split the bills and we kind of do our own things. I don't believe that's an appropriate model for marriage. That may be just simply a partnership and is it enjoyable for those who are engaged in that scenario?

Maybe so. I can't say. It's not something that I desire to be involved in. And so how I see my role is I am fully – as the husband of my household, I am fully 100 percent responsible for the health and well-being of my family. It is absolutely 100 percent my responsibility.

And again, that comes down to what I believe to be a God-given responsibility. It's not my wife's responsibility to provide the income. It's my responsibility to make sure that our household's needs are maintained. That doesn't mean necessarily that she's not going to contribute to the income. That doesn't mean that I have to be the one who's doing all the work.

That doesn't mean there aren't situations that can be difficult. But I am the one who's responsible and she is not responsible. And the challenge that we came to deal with was the fact that if you place responsibility on someone without giving them ability, then it causes an unfair strain.

And so there was a book that I read when I was in high school and it's probably one of the most politically incorrect books you could find. It's a book called Man of Steel and Velvet. The author was named Dr. Aubrey Andelin. And he wrote in that book a lesson that struck me fully.

It was called How to Handle Family Finances. And he laid out the problem – and again, this is within the context of traditional Christian marriage. He laid out the problem that you face if you put the responsibility on your wife for her to be responsible for the spending decisions.

And I think in personal counseling and in discussions, I see this happen a lot of times in marriages where usually it's the men and we abdicate our responsibility to run the bills. We abdicate our responsibility to take care of the details. And often what happens, especially if we have a stay-at-home wife, we say, "Well, you have time.

So you run the budget. You run the finances. All are in the money." And what this does is especially if there's stress, it puts a stress on your family where she's responsible for balancing the budget and I'm responsible for just making the money. But the problem is if the budget runs short, I'm not feeling the responsibility of that.

I don't have the ability to go ahead and make the decisions. So what we switched to is I went back years later and I was just – after our first year of marriage, we were just reflecting on what was working and what was not working. And I went back and I said, "We've got to try something different because this idea of managing things equally is just simply not working." And I said, "Here's this book that talks about the problems." And I said, "I'm going to take over all of the responsibility and all of the daily financial controls of our household.

I'm going to just take care of it. I'm going to take care of the stress. I'm going to take care of all of those things. And I'm going to fully take on the responsibility for these decisions. And you don't have to worry about it. You just tell me what we need, what you need, and I'll make sure that you have it." And once we did that, it brought a sense of peace to our household that was really, really beneficial.

Now, it also comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility and here's where you have to seriously, carefully consider who's involved in the situation and who's involved in the relationship. When you have a marriage, it's a partnership of two people and especially if you have a marriage where normally it's a wife, where if you have a wife who's choosing to stay at home, that puts her in a position of trust.

It puts her in a position of losing some of that autonomy and that's an incredible trust that she places in her husband to do that. And so you've got to make sure as a husband that you do not – that you don't betray that trust. And so that's a responsibility that I take very, very seriously.

And so there are some things that I think are important. Number one, it's a little easier for me that my wife is using Christianese. My wife is a virtuous woman in that I don't fear for her going out and just doing frivolous, foolish things with money. I fully have her – I'm fully confident in her.

She is capable. She is thoughtful. She's trustworthy in every way. And so I don't at all fear for her and for her decisions. That helps a ton and that's a challenge that many spouses struggle with. And in those situations, if you have a husband that is blowing money on golf or snowboarding or you have a wife who is blowing money on whatever her interest is, that can be a real challenge and you have to work that out within the context of a relationship.

But the way that my wife and I handle it is I take all of the stress, all of the responsibility, and I make sure that she has an unlimited amount of money to spend. And so I work hard to make sure that everything that she needs for running the household, for the things that she usually buys and she usually spends, I make sure to – I try to make sure that she has an unlimited amount of money to spend.

I also try to make sure that she has enough money to where she can buy the things that she needs to buy without – for her personally, without having to come to me and say, "Hey, can I have these things?" And so that has helped tremendously in our household.

Then from time to time, I sit down and say, "Here's where things are," give a reporting to her of where things are, how the income is coming in and how the income is coming in and how – where we're at, how much we're spending, the progress that we're making towards our goals.

So that is how we have handled it. And since we made that adjustment where I – and I always did kind of the basics of balancing the budget and things like that. But where I just took over full responsibility and didn't try to do this equal – we're going to sit down and decide together what this budget category should be and what that budget category should be.

It brought so much peace to our household and it resulted in a much better relationship between us. Now, the challenge that I always have is what to do in a public context and I'm always a little bit careful about this scenario because this is one of those things where I can present that idea as something for people to consider and to look at how to work it out.

But I don't actually know how to give advice on this subject in public. I've worked in personal situations and when you get into personal situations, what do you do when you have a spouse who is a frivolous spender? What do you do when you have a situation where you have a spouse who is – what do you do when you have a drug addict or a drunk spouse or somebody who's unfaithful?

What do you do when you have a marriage that's falling apart? What do you do when you have people that are untrustworthy that lie to each other and have situations like that? So I find those things to be very, very challenging and I do not know based upon limited life experience how to give public advice that should be applicable to other people.

I know in private counseling and discussions with friends and people who sought me out, then you can think about and you can get a little bit of sense of who the people are involved. But I don't know how to handle it in a public basis, which is why I don't talk a lot about it on the show and say, "Here's how you should handle your family's finances." It also makes a big difference about somebody's worldview.

That makes a huge difference and that's an area where most people don't share my personal worldview. Most people don't share a worldview of Christianity and if they do share a worldview of Christianity, they don't usually share my own personal perspectives on it. I have unusual opinions on many of these things based upon the theology that I hold and the way that I read the Bible.

So that's what we do. That has brought so much peace to our household where my wife – and it's just been remarkable just to be able to see – where she doesn't stress about money anymore. And some couples that I have worked with in doing that, it's brought tremendous peace to their marriages as well, but that is built upon the first thing of having a trustworthy – that's built first upon being deserving of that kind of trust.

As a husband, I think it sobers me significantly to know that my wife is placing that amount of confidence in me and it makes me rise up and want her to have the best. She's the queen of my household, but that's only within the context of somebody who's trustworthy.

And I don't know – I would not necessarily apply that and I wouldn't know how to apply that in situations where people are working with relationships where they're not trustworthy. And it's a point where – at this point, I don't give public advice on that system because I don't know how to give it.

I don't know how to properly protect the interests of people involved without being very, very careful in those ways. So that's my answer. What do you think? Is that what you were looking for? Do you have a follow-up question on that? No, that's great, Joshua. I agree with you 100%, and we've kind of had the same journey and we've landed at the same place and we found a lot of peace in that.

So thank you. Yeah. I'll tell you one story, and this is a personal story. Again, each of us has to figure it out within the context of our own relationships. And this is the place where – although I talk about public financial advice needing to be applied practically, this is an area where I don't think that – I mean you need good private counseling and good – people need good marriage counseling.

They need to meet with their pastor. They need to meet with somebody, an external person who's able to help. But I'll tell you this. A while ago, I had a relationship – excuse me. I had conversations with just some friends of our family. And we – this couple was going through tremendous stress, tremendous financial stress.

It was a combination of a significant decrease of income mixed with tremendous – with a difficult phase in life with young children mixed with a lot of debt and a struggling business, and they were under tremendous stress. And they had been working for years to try to – they'd been working for years to try to figure out how to fix this problem.

And they were very, very frustrated because they were trying to fix this like we're going to do everything equal. So the husband was – he had the most income potential due to his occupation, but he was trying to go to work and get home real quick to take care of the kids.

And then the wife was working at this other side job and she was going to – she was going and trying to earn a little bit of money here. But it was stressful because he had more income opportunity, but she was the one who was managing the budget. And she, because she was caring for the children, she didn't have the ability to go out and say, "OK, we're going to go and I'm going to work lots of extra hours." She had to take care of the kids.

And so we sat down with them and just listened to them for a while. And I said, "Try this." And again, this is trustworthy people. There's no infidelity in the relationship. It's just difficult. So I said to the husband, I said, "You need to take over full responsibility for the money." And I said to the wife, I said, "I would recommend that you give him full responsibility.

It's not your job to worry. It's not your job to make the bills." And I said, "It's his job and it's his responsibility." Now, cutting to the chase, they did it and they weren't sure about it when they did it. But I watched those people – I watched them blossom in just an incredible way where the husband stepped up and took responsibility for his household.

And I watched that sense of meaning of laying down his life for his family just make tremendous progress in his – I mean I just watched him blossom. And I've seen the wife also blossom and her respect for her husband has increased tremendously. And both of them have in retrospect given to me just a positive report and said this has made a huge difference in our lives.

The last comment I wanted to make on it though, you said something about love and you said about how do we make big financial decisions. When I signed up to be married to my wife, I agreed to love her for life no matter what, which means practically speaking, I must never make a decision without her being involved in it.

And every decision that we make has to have her best interest at heart. And so practically speaking, I am – is there a potential or a possibility that at some point I need to lead my family in a decision that she doesn't agree with? I think there's a possibility there.

However, I'm not – I've never done that and I'm not willing to start doing it today. That we are one and her interests are more important than my interests. And that's where it's – where it so starts with worldview. If you have a perspective of relationship where the idea is what can I get, then I personally don't see how marriage works in that context.

But when marriage is based upon what can I give and how can I sacrificially love my spouse, then to me I see how that works. And so it's my job to lay down my life for my wife and to love her and I would – I am not about to make any major financial decision without her being in complete agreement.

I would think that to be foolish. And so I involve her very, very practically in – I talk about the things that I'm doing with my business. I talk to her about all my business decisions. If we have any significant expense, we talk to one another. And I don't know what significant expense is, maybe $100.

But like we talk about it. What do we need? I make sure – and it's my job first and foremost to make sure that my family has what we need before I deal with any of my personal stuff. And so we talk extensively about it. And even as we go forward in business decisions and things like that, I don't make any major decision without her being aware of it.

Because her intuition, her wisdom, her judgment is one of the most valuable tools that I have. Because she knows me and she knows reality. So – and she's – and thankfully with her background, she's actually very well equipped to be just a tremendous influence for good. So I do – so I don't make any decision whatsoever with – any major decision, any major financial decision without her being involved and in agreement with that.

And I don't intend to start. However, I shoulder fully all of the stress of the day-to-day, the business, the bills, and all those things. And I make sure that she has everything that she needs to handle her aspects without handling the stress of how much income is coming in this month and all of that.

So I hope – wow, I don't know. I mean that's one of the thorniest issues in our modern culture. But hopefully, that's a useful answer to you. Any other questions or follow-up, any response to any of these things before I end the call today? Does anybody else on the call have any input or advice or experiences on any of the subjects that we've covered that you would like to share?

I'll give you an opportunity here to do that. Cool. Well, thank you all so much for calling in. I appreciate your involvement in these Q&A calls. I intend to do many more of these calls in the future. I'll just share a couple of things. So these Friday Q&A calls, I really enjoy doing them.

I don't claim to have all the answers. And so I invite you, if you are listening to this in the podcast feed and you have some advice or suggestions for the listeners on today's show, please come by the blog post for today's show and comment. And if you asked a question, I encourage you to watch that and maybe listeners can provide recommendations for one another.

I'm just one guy. I don't have all the answers. I'm a normal dude just like everyone else. I have a little bit of experience. But I have all of my own questions, all my own things that I'm looking to work towards. And what my hope is that out of the Radical Personal Finance community, we can build a more useful community of people encouraging one another.

We've seen that happen a lot in the Facebook group with people just giving ideas and inspiration. I don't think it's any of our responsibility to make another person's decisions for them. It's only our responsibility to give ideas and resources and things that would be helpful. And hopefully I have succeeded in doing that today.

If you in the future would like to be able to have a call answered on a show like this, feel free to sign up and become a patron supporter of the show. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. You will have access to the call-in number and the times as they are scheduled and you'll be able to call in.

And I welcome your comments. I welcome your questions on a show like this. So again, all the details of that can be found at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Take the information that you've had on this show today. Take it. Study it out. If you've got additional comments or ideas, feel free to post those in the show notes.

I will link to the books I mentioned, the book by Casey Lewis on mortgages. I guess I'll link to Man of Steel and Velvet. In the notes for today's show. And I think that's it. Thank you all so much for listening. Be back with you soon. Hey there treasure hunters and bargain seekers.

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