Don't just dream about paradise, live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs. Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value. Discover your tropical dreams at FijiAirways.com.

That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we talk lifestyle design with a guy who did pretty well in the corporate world, had a high profile, high status job, left that to launch a dream of entrepreneurship, which wound up failing, then went on to run for office, political office, and then he lost.

Wound up completely losing his shirt in that escapade, living in a garage with his in-laws, his wife and new babies, and then decided that, "Hey, actually, this low-stress life, even though I don't have any money, is actually pretty cool. I like being with my family, so how can I put together income from a variety of sources," he now calls it patchwork income, "in order to support myself?" He's gone on to do exactly that over the last few years and work his way out of debt while traveling the world and adventuring with his family.

It's well worth your time. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today. This is the show where we work hard to figure out ways to build, live, and enjoy a rich life today while also building a plan and following it, of course, and actually doing it, building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today's interview perfectly encapsulates both of those points. My guest is Clark Van Deventer. He is author of the book Unworking. Clark, through a listener of the show who had introduced us via email and reached out to him, it sounded like an interesting story, so I reached out to him for an interview and he sent me a copy of his book.

The book really touched me. Somehow I guess it just spoke to me in one of those ways that sometimes you read a book and it just speaks to you at a certain time. It's almost like you have a conversation with the author at the appropriate time. You may pick up a book today and it doesn't mean anything to you.

You pick it up a year from now and it, at that time, means something to you. I really enjoyed his book. In this interview, you're going to get a chance to meet the man behind the book. He does have that fascinating story that I shared with you right at the beginning.

It's well worth your time. I feel like this interview brings out both of those themes that are so important to me and to this show going forward. Both of the themes meaning living a rich life today while also building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

How can we enjoy the meaningful life today, not sacrifice it all on the altar of tomorrow, but rather how can we have it today while also continually building for the future? You'll hear in Clark's story exactly how he and his family are doing that. I also love interviewing people like this on the show who are doing it with family, with kids.

I hope you find a lot of inspiration and encouragement in the episode today. Before I play it for you, sponsor of today's show is Paladin Registry. Paladin Registry is a financial advisor registry service. What works is this. You say, "Josh, I want a good financial advisor." I say, "Okay.

I'm going to try to give you some good information so you can know when you find one, but how do I actually tell you how to find one?" It's not easy. So Paladin is my best solution that I've come up with at least so far to answer that question, which is simply how can we find some people who can vet and research financial advisors in advance and search and say, "Let's weed out the good ones.

Let's pull out some advisors who aren't doing such a great job and trash them and at least get some applicants for you." They're applying for the job of being your financial advisor who are screened. Paladin Registry does just that. So if you're looking for a financial advisor, if you'd like to speak with somebody, start your search at Paladin Registry.

I don't promise that you're going to find your perfect advisor through them. I really don't. But I think it's at least a good place to start and it'll help you to get some multiple opinions and diverse opinions and it'll help you to at least have a little more confidence that that advisor has been a little bit screened.

Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin, P-A-L-A-D-I-N. That will automatically flip you through to a landing page, which you'll put in your information, put in your name, your phone number, your address, the amount of assets that you have, things like that. Then Paladin will take that information and they'll match you up with a few advisors there in your local area, as long as they have somebody there in your local area.

Then they'll reach out to you and you can reconnect with them and interview them and see if they might be deserving of the job. That's up to you, but at least we can give you a good screening starting point. Here's Clark. Clark, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Hey, it's great to be on the show.

Thanks for having me on. All right, here's the test. You wrote a book called Unworking, Exit the Rat Race, Live Like a Millionaire and Be Happy Now. So, are you in the rat race? Are you living like a millionaire and are you happy today as we record this? Absolutely.

Yeah, I was certainly long out of the rat race. Living like a millionaire. I've been told many times by people who are millionaires that they want to have my life and I sure am happy. I really am. Good, good. It's February 9, 2016 as we record this. Are you living your Lake Tahoe lifestyle at the moment?

I sure am. We've been here in Tahoe. We had had a couple of years of what I call semi-nomadic living and had been in Tahoe last winter in a vacation, but this year I've kind of settled back in and gotten lots of days on the slopes so far this year.

After two consecutive summers away from Tahoe, I'm looking forward to being back here in the summer again this year too. Awesome. So, I jumped into the middle of the story. Why don't you start back and tell us the story of how you went from a fairly mainstream existence to a fairly non-mainstream existence with a special emphasis on how it relates to money.

Sure. Well, five years ago, a little over five years ago, I guess six years ago now, my wife and I, we were, I guess you would say, living the dream in some ways. I had a career with Upward Trajectory and then I mounded a campaign for Congress. I actually didn't know at the time what a huge risk I was taking in running for Congress.

The risk was not so much cashing out my retirement to run for Congress, cashed out my retirement so that I would have money for my family to live off of to allow me to be a candidate full time. That was not the risk. The risk was spending a year of my life without any irons in the fire.

As someone who has been self-employed for over eight years, you constantly have to be working on your next thing. And I spent a year without working on my next thing. So, when I lost my election, not only was I out of money, but I didn't have anything that was next.

And within two months of losing my campaign for Congress, I went from, I guess, a rising political star and candidate for Congress to moving my wife and then two kids into my in-laws' garage. And we were just totally, not only broke, but just simply broken. And in that garage, the one thing I did have was time with my family.

And I began thinking, "How? I don't want to give this up." You know, I don't want to give up all this time I have with my family, but I also need to figure out how to get us out of this garage eventually and how to get back on our feet financially.

But I began to sense that the solution was not to go get a job. And so, at that time, my wife and I really began to say, "How can we make the money that we need to make and want to make, but not give up what we've come to value in our family time?" And so, at that point, we really began building our patchwork of income.

And it's really income streams that are designed around the life that we want to live instead of getting a job and then buying the best life possible with the money that I make. So, on Radical Personal Finance, we talk a lot about financial freedom and financial independence and specifically in trying to figure out ways to get out of the rat race.

One of those methodologies is doing what you're doing, unworking, unjobbing, basically putting together a series of different sources of income that may be different at different times of the year or just simply different smaller amounts of income that come from different sources in order to be able to sustain your living expenses.

And it's one of the four primary methodologies of escaping the rat race. I want to ask, though, isn't this a whole lot more stressful? Because I'm an entrepreneur, and I'll tell you what, there are days that all I just want to do is go back and get a job.

Don't you find this a lot more stressful than just working? Yeah. Sometimes I do think it would be a lot easier until I think about what I'd be giving up. And I will say that over time, when my wife and I really began working on our patchwork income approach, we had lots and lots of small patches.

And there was a couple of years ago where we said, "You know what? Let's simplify this a little bit. Let's try to grow these two patches a little bit more and focus more of our income here and have maybe three or four medium-sized things instead of 12 small things because that's a lot easier to manage." But for me, one of the big things actually goes back to the garage.

I remember there was a really low point. And sure, my wife and I had been talking about trying to really design a different kind of life, but still, I struggled with waves of depression in the garage just thinking, "What the heck happened to my life?" And in one week, I got three phone calls from three really exciting job opportunities.

Just really interesting, cool opportunities. And my mind went to work about how each of these, "Oh, it'd be so cool to take this one," or, "This one would be good," or, you know, they were all interesting. And then, I still don't know why, but all three of those opportunities just disappeared.

You know, I tried to call them. They wouldn't call me back. I don't know what happened. But I remember thinking at that time, like, "Wow." It was a real wake-up call because I realized that if I had taken any one of those jobs, that my life and my well-being was going to be in someone else's hands.

And I really, I wanted to turn the tables. I wanted to be in charge of my own life and not be dependent on a job. And a lot of times, as my wife and I have built up this patchwork income, I think there's this false notion that we are living on the edge and it's risky.

You know, what we're doing as entrepreneurs and living differently. And somehow, this idea of getting a job is the secure, safe path. But to me, that is completely backwards. If I have a job and I'm dependent on one income stream, my job, for my family's well-being, well, I could lose that job tomorrow.

But with patchwork income and having multiple income streams, let's say something happened. One of my larger patches, I'm a consultant to nonprofit organizations and major gifts fundraising. I'll go back to my background prior to running for Congress. Well, if something happened and I lost all my clients and all of a sudden that money was gone, even if that happened, we wouldn't be destitute because we have other income streams that we can rely on.

It would maybe get tight for a while, but we could rely on those other income streams while we work to build up new ones or rebuild old ones. The idea is if diversification is such a good idea for retirement investing, why isn't diversification for income throughout all of life a good idea?

I think it is. Lee Drexel When you went from having – let me rephrase the question differently. In your book, you talk about – in a place, you talk about that you had this prestigious job working for the Reagan Ranch. You were hobnobbing with the politicians and doing the whole high consumption, high status, lifestyle job.

You had that status in your community and you had the status when you traveled and Mr. Important. And then you quit that job with the goal of buying a cafe. And you write a paragraph in your book that says this, "I felt I had to quit because my passion for the job just wasn't there anymore.

Sticking around just to collect a paycheck twice a month didn't seem right. I became convinced that if I stayed, I would become a shell of a man." Do you – this is a very – so I'm in your same generation and I haven't told you my story but in many ways, I've followed a similar path.

And the note I wrote in my book next to that paragraph was I said this is a very millennial attitude. This idea of we're just going to go out and if I'm not passionate for the job, I'm not going to stick to it. Did you struggle a little? I mean, did you struggle with the idea of doing something for the sake of doing it?

Do you feel like everything has to be around this sense of passion that if I somehow don't have a passion for it that I have to do it? What role does character and what role does just simply fulfilling family responsibilities play in your thinking? It's secondary. So while financial considerations came up as I prepared to leave my job, it was secondary to am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing with my life.

The night before I quit my job at the Riggin Ranch, my wife and I were talking. My boss was flying in from Washington DC the next day and I was going to have dinner with him that night to let him know my decision. And my wife and I were talking and I said, "I don't know.

Should I do this? Should I go through with this?" And she said, "Well, what do you mean?" And I said, "Well, what if we can't make the money?" And she said, "If it's the money, quit." She said, "If there's other reasons you're thinking about staying, you should stay and sort through those.

But if it's just the money, you should quit." And that was obviously a huge and powerful moment for me. But I think that the world collectively is poorer than it should be because people have settled for less than work that they love or work that they're called to or work that they're passionate about.

And I think that if more of us chose to actually pursue life calling, pursue the things that we're most passionate about, I think the world would just be collectively so much richer. And so I think for me, there's a faith aspect in terms of really feeling for me at that time that God was leading me in a certain direction.

I don't mean to go super spiritual, but I really felt like God wanted me to lead. I had written in my journal months earlier that I wrote that I had this increasing belief that I wasn't where I was supposed to be. And I can't imagine going back and reading that now and still being in the same place.

I just sucked it up and continued to trudge along through life. And even when I was leaving my job to buy the cafe, that didn't work. This was right at the beginning of the financial meltdown, the Great Recession. And I think a good friend who worked in finance who I think understood, knew before I did that the cafe deal was not going to come together.

He called me a couple of days before I quit my job and he said, "Clark, here's the deal. Let's just say that the cafe is not going to work out. Would you still quit?" And my answer was yes, because I really had this sense that I needed to move on.

I needed to do something different. And yeah, just trudging along and putting my nose to the grindstone and all those analogies you could use, I felt like I was going to be a shell of a man if I just kept doing that. It's interesting. Now, I think sometimes it can be a useful exercise to go through and say, "Which bad option are you not okay with?" With my personal story, I closed a successful financial planning practice in order to start radical personal finance.

And when I did that, I had thought it through and I had a lot of reasons. But ultimately, the question that swayed me was this question, "Would I rather try it, take this leap, make this decision that doesn't seem to be the thoughtful, careful one? Would I rather try it, fail, lose everything and start again?

Or would I rather not try it, continue doing what I'm doing now, and then always wonder what if?" I came to the position where I feared the regret of not trying it more than I feared the pain of potential failure. That's such a great way of putting it. And the thing is, having gone through the experience and actually having lost everything, for me, the conclusion is, "Well, geez, losing everything wasn't that bad." Now, sure, there were dark moments along the way.

But for me, the beauty of having risked it all in one turn of pitch and toss is because I failed and have come through, I have, in a sense, been freed from the fear of failure. Because I've lost everything and losing everything wasn't that bad, I feel this freedom and life to take risks and to go for it that I don't think I could have ever experienced if I hadn't, as you so well put it, realized that I would rather try and fail than to have not tried at all.

What was the most difficult part of financial failure for you? Shame. Really feeling like I wasn't who I had told people I was or people had come to think of who I was. And as I talk about in my book, I really retreated from a lot of relationships. Many people did not know, many very good friends who had been friends for a long time, didn't know that I had lived in my in-laws' garage until well after we had moved out.

And I had begun blogging at FamilyTrek.org and published a blog post about what had happened. And people were like, "I had no idea." Because I really just retreated. And that was really hard. You talk in the book about the impact of money on being able to build the life of your dreams.

And by the way, I asked you a bunch of antagonistic questions, but I really have loved the book. I don't feel like, to me, they're not antagonistic. I get these questions all the time. I try to ask questions, difficult ones, that I think many listeners are probably thinking. But about 65% of the way through the book, and I found myself highlighting extensive passages.

And I really resonated in many ways with your story because it expresses a lot of the lessons that I've learned more than probably anybody else or more than many other books. I just resonated with your personal path. But you made a comment in here that I underlined and highlighted and said – and it's this.

Most people get the highest-paying job possible and then figure out how to arrange their life. And then they get a job and then buy a life commensurate to their income level. To these people, one's lifestyle is determined by how much money they have. I suggest that you not arrange your life around a job, but that you arrange your life around what you value most.

Get a job that fits your life, not a life that fits your job. Why is this such a countercultural message? Gosh, that's a really good question. It's just not the way we've been taught. I do think there's a change that's slowly developing. If you go back to our grandparents, our grandparents, if they got a job, it was assumed that they would have that job forever.

The employers took care of the employees. Oftentimes, if there was a new baby in the family, the person would get a raise. And that was normal. If you go to our parents' generation, our parents went to work assuming that they would work there forever. And then when that didn't happen, there was a bitterness that grew.

And I think in our parents' generation, in terms of like, they had this assumption that they were going to work for this company forever, be taken care of, but the employers had no longer viewed employees as family. They were really renting employees, not bringing on family. I think what's happening now with the, I hate the word millennial, and I'm a little, I think too old to be a millennial actually.

But I think what's happening now is that employees have turned the table and they're now renting jobs. So it's actually a quite fair and even relationship. Employers bring employees on without any expectation that they'll be there forever. Employees take a job without any expectation that they'll be there forever.

And I think you're seeing a lot of people come and go from jobs a lot more quickly because of that. But this way of thinking in terms of lifestyle over money is just not what our parents' generation thought. It was put your head down until you're 65 and you've saved enough money.

And the sad thing is that that generation is turning 65 now and all the things that they thought they were working towards their entire life, they're not there. They don't have the financial security they thought they would have. And of course there's no guarantees that we'll even get there.

As I talk about in my book, there's an example. I met with a man who I'd known for a number of years and his wife had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. And he said to me, "You know Clark, I wish I had just retired two years earlier so I could have had those two years with her before the disease started to take her away." And I just remember thinking at the time, "Two years?

Are you kidding me? I wish I'd lived my whole life differently." So put aside the financial issues, there's no guarantee that even if we managed to just do the right thing, the dutiful thing, and work all of our life and save all this money, that could all happen. And then your spouse could get a terrible disease or you could not make it yourself.

And so it just seems like a backwards way of thinking to me. But I think that things are changing, that this younger generation is beginning to put priorities on some different things. It's definitely a major change. I've wondered a lot about the influences and reasons why. Maybe it's just that our parents probably raised this saying, "You can do whatever you want to do.

You can be who you want to be." And some of us, I don't know why, some of us believe them. And then we look around and say, "Wait a second, I'm not doing what I want to do and I'm not being who I want to be. So let me make some changes." Well, I think also, my parents, I think, for example, they just think I'm crazy.

And they, I think, wish that I were still a big, important person. And it's like, well, by my definition of success, I'm as or more successful than I was when I had the big job. Because I have achieved relative success. I'm not where I want to be. I've achieved relative success, though, on a path that I've chosen to go down.

And I think it's difficult for my parents to, because they want to be able to be proud and say, "Well, my son is the deputy director of the Reagan Ranch." And that sounds like a really important job. But they don't know what to say about me now. It's like, "Well, he's living in Tahoe and he skis and, you know, just, okay, what's his job?" Well, I don't even know what his job is, really.

I think they're looking for something to hang their hat on, where I'm quite content to ski and take off to Thailand for three months. - I think the social ties and the social influences are definitely one of the biggest things that keeps people from pursuing alternative paths of life.

I've gone through, I guess, three major social transitions. Number one, in terms of the prestige of your job. When I graduated from college, I was working at a market research company. And I was basically a low and mid, lower mid-level, entry-level analyst. But based upon the title of my job position and based upon the projects that I was working on, I could certainly spin my job to sound very impressive.

Because we worked with a lot of Fortune 500 clients and I was always working on some interesting work in the marketing space. And it would seem very, very impressive to somebody from the outside. But the reality of it was I was thankful to have the work, I was thankful to have the employment.

But the day-to-day functioning of it was not a good fit for me. Pouring through Excel spreadsheets, pulling out marketing insights based upon the response of consumers didn't necessarily fit my idea of a great life. But it sounded prestigious. It sounded impressive. And I would go on business trips and fly into places and you fly in and you get the little black car from the executive shuttle service and you feel like a big shot on some of those things.

I went from that to selling life insurance, which life insurance sales is probably – life insurance and my buddies in the car sales business is one of the least prestigious jobs ever. But the reality of the lifestyle is far better in terms of I've got total flexibility of time, massive income potential, the ability to do work that I cared about.

And so socially though, it's not an acceptable social change. But the reality is it was a much better change. Well, built that up and then I moved into the investments business and then I had all these letters behind my name and I had all the social prestige back again.

I wasn't just the lowly life insurance salesperson. And then I closed that to go out and do this weird internet thing. But I'll tell you, when it comes down to having a clear vision for your life, I'm living the best lifestyle I've ever lived. But I walked away from the BMWs and the Mercedes and all of my other financial advisors who said, "Joshua, what on earth are you doing?" And I was always kind of the odd duck.

But to me, those things, those external factors were not important to me. What I wanted to do was to have my day go through – I wanted to go through my day based upon my own vision of how a day should run, not based upon what I needed to do to impress other people.

But I'll tell you, it's hard and there are still times where those social pressures still press in on you. The social pressures are the biggest challenge that we face. Yeah, I think one important thing to clarify here though is that, at least for me, one thing I talk about in my book is, look, I'm not saying live like me.

I'm not saying if you drive a BMW and you have all the expensive toys and all, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I'm saying that most people have never thought about what they really want. They're not actually living by design. They're just following the crowd. And I think the important thing is to step back and go, "Does my life really line up with the things that I say that I value most?" One exercise I have in the book, a very practical one, is make a list of the four or five things in your life that you say are most important to you and then look at your budget.

If the top four or five things that you say are most valuable to you don't show up as the top line items in your budget, that means that you're spending your life energy. All that money we make, we've just traded our time to get. So if the top items in your budget don't line up with the things that you say you value most, it means you're spending your life energy on things that ultimately don't matter to you.

And then another way of looking at it for me is if my goal is to ski 50 days a year and to be able to travel extensively, it doesn't matter how much money you're going to pay me. If you want to pay me half a million dollars a year, a million dollars a year, but I have to move to Washington DC and I have to work 50 weeks a year and be on call and work 12 hour days, it doesn't matter how much money you're going to pay me, that money doesn't help me achieve what I want in life.

And so going back to the quote that you read from my book earlier about how most people just get the highest paying job possible and then buy a life with that money, no, that's not what we should be doing. We should be saying what do I want in life?

What do I want life to look like? Okay now that I've figured that out, now I'll figure out how to make the money I need to have that kind of life. I got to ask, and this is one of my biggest questions throughout the book, you're describing a lifestyle that doesn't necessarily cost very much.

How on earth do you afford to buy lift tickets to ski 60 days a year? Well you know one of the great secrets of the ski industry is that buying seats and passes is not expensive. So a season pass to, well like a Tahoe Epic Pass, so it gives you access to three incredible mountains, Heavenly, North Star, and Kirkwood.

You're looking at 10,000 acres of skiable terrain. You can get that depending on the blackout days that you want for $450, $475. So let's just say it's $500. Well if I'm skiing 50 days a year, that's $10 a day. Now I always feel sorry for the people who show up and want to buy a single day lift ticket.

Single day lift tickets are $119 or something. But yeah it's a lot cheaper to live in the mountains than it is to visit them. In your book you talk about the three tenets that you and your wife developed that fit your financial vision, which are number one, get out of debt, number two, keep our expenses low, and number three, only take on work that is location independent.

Where do those come from and why are they so key to you fulfilling your vision for your life? Well first, get out of debt. I know that we're in tandem on this one. It's an anchor, something that's holding you back. If you have debt, you're paying for either yesterday's visions or yesterday's mistakes.

Getting out of debt was a big priority for us. I'll confess we're not there yet. We still have student loan debt. But getting out of debt was and continues to be a big priority for us. Second, keeping our expenses low. It just allows us to be nimble. When I was, as you said, I can't remember how you phrase it exactly, like high income, high expense, when I was at the Reagan Ranch, my monthly, the nut that I had to crack just to pay the mortgage, utilities, insurance, you know, the basic things, was $10,000.

I had to bring in $10,000 every month before I could even think about going out for coffee. And I just wasn't nimble. Now by having our expenses low, I'm much more nimble and can turn on a dime in a way that I never could have when our expenses were high.

And then third, location independent. We just love to travel. We love being in Lake Tahoe now. But over the past couple of years, we've taken two six-week long trips to Central America. We did a two-month cross-country road trip. We spent three months in Thailand. And these are life experiences that just mean a lot to us.

It's one thing that we value. And if we took on work that was not location independent, we would have to give up those things. And because travel and seeing the world is a priority for us, this was one more thing that we had to put into our kind of, you know, the work we take on has to fit within these things.

Some people may not care about travel. So they wouldn't have to have that, you know, as one of their tenets for income. Wouldn't it make more sense, you said you still have student loans and you went from a place of being totally broke and in debt, wouldn't it have made a lot more sense for you to have used the connections and the status and the reputation that you developed to get a job as a consultant, earn a lot of money for a few years, pay off your debt, save a lot of money and have a greater financial cushion underneath rather than to try to put together this patchwork income?

Wouldn't that make more sense? No. Why not? Because for two reasons, number one, I don't know. And this may sound fatalistic or may sound dramatic, but number one, I don't know that I have tomorrow. You know, and I talk in the book about an experience my wife and I had actually in our first date where, you know, we very likely could have died.

So maybe that's dramatic, but the other point is that my son is eight now. My three-year-old son is gone forever. He'll never be back. And I can never get these years with my kids back. So I have in some ways chosen, I thought, what I really came to was I would rather work less in these years when my kids are young and actually maybe work a little bit more when they're 15 or 20 years old and less dependent on me.

Now maybe the older version of Clark will regret that decision. It's possible. But I just have this real, I had this realization that the years that my kids were young were fleeting and I didn't want to be absent those years. I wanted to be present. It was a big thing that hung over me when we lived in the garage.

My son at the time was three and my daughter was six months. And she slept in a crib a few feet away from us. And I remember every morning she'd wake up and she'd be stirring and kind of trying to get my attention. And every morning when I put my feet on the floor, she would clap because I was getting up.

And I remember thinking I have no money and I live in my in-laws garage but my daughter still claps for me when I get out of bed. And during that time with them, I just realized I go back to the grind. If I just go make money, I'm going to miss this.

And to me, it wasn't worth missing. Ted Keller: How did you deal with that within the context of your relationship with your wife? I know for a lot of husbands, that's a major challenge to say, "I need to support my family." And frankly, if I were living in a garage with my in-laws, I'd feel a little bit selfish about the idea of me chasing my dreams.

At the end of the day, I didn't sign up just to live a life that was just focused on me. When I married, I became one with my wife and that means that it's no longer me, it's we. And so I've got to make sure that I'm taking care of the commitments that I've made and me living out my dreams is not the most important commitment.

How did you deal with that in your relationship with your wife? David Bonilla: Well, for us, it was almost the opposite in the sense that when I was ready to take a job in the garage, my wife wasn't. I think she understood before I did that for us to build the kind of life that we really wanted to have, the solution was for me to not get a job.

And I've always said that the great gift my in-laws gave me, it was not a garage. It was not just a roof over our family's head. The great gift they gave me was time because we were able to live with them. We lived in the garage for six months and then I spent another three or four months in a cabin in Lake Tahoe that my wife's grandfather owned rent-free.

That time that we had, if I didn't have the family connections, I would have been forced to take anything. But because I had family supporting me, we were able to not just be desperate but to build by design. And I think this is actually a topic I want to take on in a second book.

I think there's something to be said for these family connections in terms of supporting one another and empowering other people in our family to be there. Looking back at the time, moving in with my in-laws was such a shameful thing. And now I'm like, "It was awesome." And I think about my kids having lived with grandma and grandpa, what a rich time that was for them.

And we still go back and spend, because we're location independent, we still go back and spend a couple of weeks or a month at a time with the in-laws. And I think we really need to do away with this idea that it's shameful that we go back and live with your in-laws.

If you could live with your in-laws and use that time to build something meaningful and lasting, that shouldn't be a shameful thing. And my wife really was on board with that idea before I was. I think it was much harder for me living there than it was for her.

And that may make sense in some ways. But she's always been right along with me in terms of this lifestyle design. And there's never been this, like I'm dragging her down this path or whatever. My wife and I really are partners. And whether it's our ideas about Pat's work income or living location independently or ideas about how we're raising our children or school choices we've made, sometimes people ask us, "Well, who had the idea first?" And my wife and I have no idea who had the idea first.

These are decisions that we arrive at very slowly and we do it together by living a shared life and lots of wine. Good releases the tongue sometimes. Yeah. I can't tell you how many long, long, long, long talks we've had. It's never been any animosity. It's just like we're constantly talking about what we want.

And by talking together, we continue to remain close and really of one mind despite radical changes in our life since we were married. What do you actually do to earn income to support your family now? We have a few patches. One and really our biggest patch is that I'm a consultant to non-profit organizations and major gifts fundraising.

So a lot of my work actually I do Skype calls with fundraisers for these organizations when I'm coaching them and working through these issues with them. And then I do travel to meet with these groups and things like that. So in that sense, maybe I'm not entirely location independent and then I have to jump on a plane to be somewhere occasionally, but it's never been an issue for us.

So I'll fly to Washington DC and spend a week in Washington DC or something. We're also credit card processing reps. So we have a company that we work with that provide all those terminals that you see at your favorite restaurant and coffee shop or whatever. If you go into by lunch at a restaurant here in Lake Tahoe and you charge $30, my wife and I will make maybe 50 cents on that transaction.

But we do that a lot. It's a numbers game in terms of having volume as you know, your background. But that is great income for us because it's both passive and residual. We did a lot of work up front to build up that income base and now do very little work, maybe a few hours a month.

And then that money just keeps rolling in. And then we have some smaller patches that we are developing. We have a website called TahoeSkiBum.com which is all about, as you would probably imagine, skiing and riding. Lake Tahoe, we built a pretty big audience. We're working to monetize the site.

It's a very small patch right now but one that we think will be bigger. And my wife also designs websites, does business consulting, does mobile apps, lots of little things sort of around e-commerce and the web. So those are our patches as they are right now. And then there's lots of smaller ones, freelance writing that I do and other things.

But those are the big ones. How do you fit your kids into a location independent lifestyle? Well, they come with us. For us, our bases really are Santa Barbara and Lake Tahoe. That's where their friends are. Those are the places we keep coming back to. And it's great to have been on the road for three months and to come home and immediately fall back into the same friendships and the same routines that we were in just before.

Our kids have been traveling really since they were born. So for them, this is largely normal. At the end, this would have been March of '14, is when we moved out of our long-term lease that we'd had in Lake Tahoe, put all of our stuff in storage and began traveling for a couple of years.

And it was kind of interesting how that worked out. Really all of us at the same time, me, my wife, and our kids were all craving being off the road and to kind of push pause and travel and come back to Tahoe and settle in for a while. And I think that was important to the kids, but it was important to us.

It was kind of interesting how we all arrived at that point together. But our kids love to travel. I think they'd love to be at Grandma's house more. But it's interesting with them, too, the sense of pride that they have when they talk to people about where they've been.

If you think about it, when you're six years old and you tell someone, "Well, I've been to Thailand," or some other side of the world, and the reaction they get from grown-ups is like, "Wow, you've been to Thailand? What does that do for my daughter's self-esteem?" That's the way people react to her when she says, "Yeah, I've been to Guatemala and I've been to Panama," and all these other places.

The reactions that she gets are interesting. How do you handle their education on the road? Well, we've always homeschooled our kids. I don't like to call it homeschool. It's funny. When my kids were born, you should have seen them. They didn't know anything. They didn't know how to talk.

They pooped their pants. So we've been homeschooling them, if you will, or educating them from the day they were born. That's just continued as they've reached school age. We call it hack-schooling, what we do. There's an unschooling movement that we've been heavily influenced by, but we also bring in more traditional schooling elements into our education with our kids.

It's very organic. What you said earlier, wouldn't it be easier to just go get a job? Sometimes I feel that way about school. So take this experience we had in Bangkok, where when we were in Bangkok, we couldn't get on the BTS Skytrain, their metro that goes all around the city, until a few things happened.

The kids had to read the map and figure out where we were. At the time, the kids were six and four. Then we had our baby with us, but we didn't require this of her. But the six and four-year-old, before we could get on the train, they had to figure out where we were, where we were going, how much money it would cost, multiply that by four, go take our cash money to the attendant, get the coins, and then get the tickets that we needed.

So a process that could have taken me all of 30 seconds would take us as a family 10 minutes, or 20 minutes. And it would have been so much easier to put my kids in school and not worry about this moment at the BTS Skytrain in Bangkok. But look at what my kids did there.

They read maps. They did math. They had to work with someone, the attendant, to accomplish their goals. And so this has sort of been our approach to education over the years. And it's incredibly fulfilling and completely exhausting. So even like I say, I don't like to term homeschool because it implies that we do school at home, which we don't.

Yeah, in some ways, I think it would be easier if we just sat down every day and did school at home from 10 to 2 or whatever. But no, it's like for us, education is every moment of every day. And it can be exhausting. Having said all that, now that we're back in Tahoe, my daughter really wanted to go to kindergarten.

So she's actually enrolled in kindergarten now. But my eight-year-old son and my almost three-year-old daughter now just continue to go through life with us. Do you have thoughts on whether and how they will pursue perhaps a similar career strategy to you? What I mean is there's lots of people who make very cutting-edge decisions for themselves and say, "I'm not going to go with the status quo.

I'm going to go ahead and blaze a different path." But then many of those same people will hold before their children the same normal cultural norms. You need to make sure that you have a good education. You need to make sure that you have a good job, et cetera.

Do you have some ideas or thoughts or hopes for their future in terms of avoiding that? It's kind of funny, all the things that I've kind of like, "Ah, it doesn't really matter." Those are probably going to be the things that my kids build their lives around because they will think that I didn't put enough emphasis on them.

But I think for us, the key is just trying to keep options open for the kids and educate them on some of the pluses and minuses of different lifestyle choices or how they choose to design their life. One of my goals for my kids is that by the time they're reaching adulthood, 17, 18, 19, whatever that is, one of my goals for each of my kids is to have helped them and taught them how to make $1,000 a month in a semi-passive residual way.

Basically make $1,000 a month online. I feel like if I can do that, if you're 18 years old and you're making $1,000 a month in online income and you figured out that, that opens a lot of doors for you. First of all, if they wanted to travel and you're single and you're 18, you could probably travel forever on $1,000 a month.

Or maybe they say, "Well, gosh, if I figured out how to make $1,000 a month, maybe I could make $2,000 a month." So that's one goal that we have with the kids. But what kind of life are they going to have? I mean, if my kids become doctors or lawyers, these are much more high-stress jobs and high-stress careers than we have now.

All we can do is try to lead them and raise them right and get them to think about these kinds of questions. And they can make their own choices in terms of what they want their life to look like and what they feel called to do. Trey Lockerbie (00:15:40): With the patchwork income, sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower.

Have you put in any place, any strategies that have helped you to avoid or limit the amount of credit card debt that you get into when income is low? David Bonilla (00:16:02): No, we don't have credit card debt. I think in part because I was just in a decision to not have credit card debt.

And so for us, it was always like, "We've got to make more money. What am I going to do? I've got to make some calls. I've got to book another consulting gig. I've got to get a freelance writing gig because we need more money than we have right now.

So I've got to go find it." It was never really an option to rack up credit card debt. And I think that it goes back to my first tenant, get out of debt. So last thing I want is new debt. So I think it really is, you have to discipline yourself or you have to give some things up.

Well, it goes back to the second tenant as well, having fewer expenses. So the money you have to bring in this month that you're obligated to bring in is just a lower number. So it's tough. It's worked out for us over time. Never been in a situation really where we had to rack up credit card debt to buy groceries for our family.

We're always able to go out and find one more thing. Last question, Clark. It's easy for… I mean, not say it's easy. If I were listening to this interview, one of the questions I would be having would be thinking, "Oh, it's easy for somebody who's been to the heights of prestige and success, made a lot of money, made six figures of income, lived in a fancy house, worked with fancy people.

It's easy for that person to say, 'Well, listen, being broke is not such a bad thing.' But what about me? Maybe I've never made a lot of money. Maybe I've always been broke. Maybe my family comes from a very poor, disadvantaged part of society or part of the world." Does your philosophy fit that type of person?

Do you have lessons that you'd like that kind of person to consider? Or is your philosophy only for those who've been privileged enough to reach the pinnacles of success and then realize, "Well, it's not always cracked up to be, so I'm going to design my life differently." Well, remember, when we really started rebuilding, I was in a shameful position, you know, really only by my own standards.

I retreated from all past relationships. So when we began rebuilding our life, we weren't rebuilding our life with old connections. You know, we were doing it ourselves. Can't everyone do it? You know, I'm asked that question a lot. And my answer to that question is, "I don't know." You know, I don't know if everyone can do it.

The question isn't, "Can everyone do it?" The question is, "Can you do it?" You know, do you believe that you have it in you? And I think that if you're listening to a podcast like this, chances are you do have it in you. And, you know, when we started out, when we moved out of the garage and moved up to Tahoe, we made $217 that month.

That was what our patchwork of income brought in. And slowly but surely, we continued to build it up. Can everyone do it? I don't know. I'm not willing to say everyone can do it, but that's really not the question. The question is, "Can you do it?" And I think that if we begin to say we can and we begin to try to live epically today and to make the most of every day, I do think that you will see that a life of your own design isn't something that's reserved for a few lucky or a few special people.

Can everyone do it? I don't know. But I think it's possible for far more people than who are currently achieving it. Clark, thanks for coming on the show. Tell us about all your websites, where people can buy the book. Give us all of your addresses. Sure. Well, you can go to unworkingbook.com.

You can buy the book there at unworkingbook.com, but you can also read detailed chapter descriptions, the introduction, the prologue. Actually, the book starts out with a letter to my children. So unworkingbook.com. And then I blog haphazardly on family travel and lifestyle design at familytrek.org. And then, gosh, I'm on Twitter @clarkvand.

And I'm around the interwebs. But go to familytrek.org or unworkingbook.com. You can find me. My challenge for you today as we go is to ask you, how can you take some of the lessons from Clark's story and apply them to yourself? Can you build a little bit of patchwork income?

Can you lower some expenses? Can you eliminate some debt? How can you take some of the good things from his experience and then just put them in your own situation? You don't have to live his lifestyle. I don't want to live his lifestyle. I'm not really that into skiing.

I don't want to move to Lake Tahoe. But I can learn from it and then I can apply it in my own life. And that's really what we've got to do is continually learn from these things and apply them in our own lives. I hope this has been useful.

You may check out Clark's book Unworking. I really enjoyed it. Probably the most useful thing about – well, I really enjoyed the stories in the book. Probably the most useful thing about it, though, he's got a bunch of great journaling prompts in that book, a lot of great journaling prompts.

In fact, it's probably worth the price of admission just for those alone. But frankly, that's my opinion on it. So check it out, Unworking. Link in the show notes for today's show. Check out his blog. All that stuff will be linked up in the show notes. Thank you all so much for listening to today.

If you would like to continue supporting the show, please support the show at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Got some bribes there for you, a couple of different levels of patronage. I've substantially simplified the patronage options for you, made it very, very simple. You can join at whichever level is right for you and you get access to our Friday Q&A calls, you get access to our Facebook group, etc.

So please check out that information at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron for all those details. And hey, get out there and build a rich life and the plan for financial freedom. Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs.

Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value. Discover your tropical dreams at FijiAirways.com. That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. (basketball bouncing)