The LA Kings holiday pack is back. The perfect gift for the hockey fan in your life. A three game pack starts at just $159 and includes a holiday blanket. Buy today and you'll receive an additional game for free. Don't miss out. Visit lakings.com/holiday today. Today on Radical Personal Finance, I have a fun and lighthearted adventure story for you.

Here's the question. Do you have kids? I do. Sometimes it's easy as parents to think that kids mean the end of adventures. After all, it would have been so easy if my wife and I had gone and backpacked to the world when it's just the two of us, right?

Well, how do you do it with kids? Today, my guests on today's show have seven kids and they live part time in a converted school bus with their seven kids. And they live the other part of the time in a tiny house with their seven kids. And they've cobbled together this fascinating and flexible and mobile lifestyle that I think you'll find fun and inspirational.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets. I am your host, your fearless leader in the pursuit of the good life today, while also building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Today, we're going to talk about living the good life and financial freedom.

Frankly, I don't know what to say about this interview. I just said it all. I think you're going to enjoy this because it's inspirational to see how life is just more fun and financial freedom is more fun when you incorporate family into it. I'm not usually caught flat footed with something to say there.

The music trudges on, but today that's the case. But my guests today are Shane and Julie Good. They have a website called goodnewsbus.com. I found them from surfing around a tiny house website. I, like many people have a fascination with this tiny house thing and I found their bus and it was just a beautiful bus.

And then I figured out they have seven kids in this bus. And I just said, man, this is perfect fodder for radical personal finance. We talk about their story. We talk about the conversion. We talk about just what their lifestyle, they built together this lifestyle that is really, really flexible and gives them a lot of freedom while still providing for their needs.

And they've got a lot of tips and tricks and tactics to share. And I think it's very, very valuable to see, you know, many of us think, oh, I've got to be old and rich to live the good life. Well, that may not be the case. You might be able to do it even when you have seven young children to care for and provide for.

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TradeKing.com/radical. Shane and Julie, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Hey, great to be here. Hi, thanks for having us. So I stumbled across your bus on some, I think it was a tiny houses forum. And I've always loved these, what do they call them, schooly conversions, right? Is that the right nomenclature?

Yeah, yeah, that's good. So I've always thought these things are awesome. And if it weren't for the fact that I'm six foot six and I can't fit inside of a bus, so I don't think it's the right route for me, I would probably do something similar to what you guys have done, which is take an old school bus and just convert it into just an awesome RV.

And looking at your website, I thought it seemed like you guys have an interesting lifestyle at least, a little bit unusual. And I thought it'd be fun to have you on and see what you've learned. So how did you wind up in the situation where you decided it was a good idea to take an old school bus and transform it into a house for you and all your kids?

Well, this probably started back when I was about five years old, believe it or not. My parents, I was born in Washington State, Seattle, and my parents were looking to move down to the Pensacola, Florida area. My mom's family, she's from Washington State. My dad's family's from Florida. So they've kind of done this back and forth thing.

So they looked into the cost of getting a U-Haul and driving it all the way down there. And after calculating the cost, I think it was my dad was thinking, "Well, shoot, why don't we just buy an old school bus? Put a divider about halfway back, pack all of their belongings in the back half of the bus.

It's just me and my sister and my mom and my dad. And put a set of bunk beds in, a little Coleman stove, and hey, we'll camp on the way as we're moving." And so that was kind of the very beginning of, as far as remembering back and kind of the excitement surrounding, I don't know what it is about a bus, all getting in a bus and you have your bed in the bus and it feels like camping on the road.

Personalizing it too. Yeah. And the ability to personalize it to what fits your lifestyle the best. So that's kind of where it started. And so we used that same bus to move, I think it was three or four times. We moved down south, then we moved back up. I'm making this really short, back up north.

And then when we went to move back down south again, this is about when I was, I think, 15. This would have been like in 1994, 93, something like that. The bus, as we were leaving, we'd gone through, we were in eastern Washington and we were in a town called Pasco, Washington, and the bus broke down.

And my dad at that point, it was going to be $5,000 to fix. It needed a rebuilt engine or something like that. And me and my sister, we could not fathom the thought of losing the bus because it just became a part of the family. And so we begged my dad, don't do this, don't send her to the scrapyard.

So my dad actually, after appealing to his sentimental side, we convinced him to keep the bus and to get it fixed. So we actually lived in Pasco, Washington for about, I don't know, it took about a month, I think it was, to get the bus fixed. And then after that, after it was fixed, we brought it all the way down, back down to the Pensacola area.

And then that's where it sat till years and years later when some guy came and picked it up. So my dad forked out all that money. Here we are on a finance show, all this cash for something that's just going to sit there. But it was for his kids, I guess.

He knew how we felt and we just we had so much fun and memories traveling in the bus. So that's kind of where all of that started. I was just going to say, we'll just call that an investment into the love with your family, that your kids know that you love them because you listen to them.

Right, exactly. Now, the remarkable thing is that you not only travel with you and your wife, because that's relatively easy, but you guys are traveling in this thing with seven kids. Is that right? Yes. Yes. Seven children ranging from the ages 13 to one. So down. Yeah. Yeah. So that is awesome because it's really hard to find.

I mean, maybe that's a little bit of an overstatement. Most RVs are not tuned to fit nine people and sleep comfortably. So when you get to the place where you have seven kids plus two parents, is that why you guys chose to make this custom design? Yeah, that's definitely one of the reasons.

When it came time for us, because my wife and I, we do ministry work and the house we are living in was owned by the ministry that we are working for. And so when they sold it, they basically said, look, we'll, because we do basically volunteer work for them.

And they were like, look, we'll invest into helping you guys get to where you need to go and traveling around and continuing doing the, we do ministry work. We do music ministry and different things like that, outreach ministries and stuff. And so we were able to, and that's one of the questions we actually get a lot is, why didn't you guys just go buy an RV?

I mean, you certainly could go find an RV. And really it's basically what you touched on that we have a large family. We didn't have as many kids then, but we kind of knew where the trend was going. The school bus idea was kind of planted in Shane's heart since he was young.

So I'm like, Hey, let's, let's get it. Let's find a school bus and let's convert it. But we took it up a notch. We didn't just put a sofa and a Coleman stove in and some bunk beds. We really wanted to make it a place that we could live for a long period of time.

If we were going to be say building another house or traveling a lot, whatever we were going to be doing, we wanted to be comfortable while we were living there. We have lived in it for up to eight months. So yeah, having it built the way it is, and I'm sure you've seen pictures and maybe our video.

So yeah, it's important. So spread out over the time of about, I think three years, we are sorry, about five and a half years now. We've lived in it probably a total of three years. And that, you know, well, I do, I do carpentry work as well. And so, you know, if we built a house and are selling it, we'll move back to the bus and we'll live in the bus while we're building a house.

Or, you know, if we're on a trip or traveling, you know, we'll live in the bus. So yeah, it, it, it actually has made things a lot more convenient because we always in a sense have a fallback. You know, we always have a house we can fall back on.

It's our, it's our own little home. It's small, but you know, it's got everything we need. Yeah. And we didn't have to, you know, take out a loan to build it. We built it cash. We just, you know, so it's something that is just ours. We don't have to have, I guess the extra fees and mortgages and that you would have on a house and yeah.

Yeah. One of the, one of the, I guess, major benefits I see of, of it, I would love to see, and I want to move to your tiny house as well, but I'd love to see most young people start their life with a tiny house and a trailer, one of the houses that's built on a trailer.

Because if you can start with your own dwelling place, that's small enough to go on a trailer and you can just hook it up to your truck or have somebody truck it for you. And you can know that you always have that as a fallback plan. You can always park it in somebody's driveway or in somebody's backyard.

It provides a sense of security and a sense of safety for you. And I think a lot of people are looking for that sense of security and they find it difficult to find. But if you have a little cozy place to live that doesn't have any ongoing monthly payments associated with it, that can be really, really powerful.

Yeah, exactly. The funny thing about it is that our son Ashton, he's 10 and he's already dreamed up these ideas of he wants to have a restaurant. And so he wants to do it in a tiny home and do one of those, I guess you'd call them tumbleweed style houses, but make it a little restaurant and travel around.

So tell me about the tiny house and let's define because a podcast is an audio only format. So let's describe a little bit of what we mean by a tiny house. It's not a tumbleweed plan on a trailer, but it's still relatively small. So describe the house and what's the story behind it.

Okay. So our tiny home or... Okay. Yeah. Actually, we lived down south for quite a long time and in the south, New Orleans style homes and beach style homes are a big thing. And so when we moved up north, no one has houses such as that. And I've kind of always made it a little bit of a hobby of mine, building and designing houses.

I like to build them as small as I can, but really functional. So a lot of time you see people with these large houses that aren't functional. They have wasted space and they aren't organized well. They don't use their cabinet space well and they find they just pile up their things rather than having specific places to put them.

And so I like to design a small space that is extremely functional. And so that's kind of where it started. So I would as a hobby design these very tiny homes and then we had an opportunity to build one. And so to kind of give people an idea, most tumbleweed houses and tiny homes, they'll fit on a, like what you were saying, on a trailer.

You may have an 18 foot or 20 foot trailer. The tiny home we built, we call it a tiny home for us because we're a family of nine. So it's, I think, about 1150 square feet. It's got a dining room, a kitchen, a mudroom area where you can hang jackets.

It's got a decent size living room, two bedrooms and two full baths. So we fit all of that into a 14 foot wide by 40 foot long two story house. And the number one comment we get from everyone is when they walk in, it's like, "Oh my gosh, it feels so big in here." Because Julie, of course, she does all the architectural designing of these houses and she's really good at organizing the space and making sure there's no wasted space anywhere in these houses.

And we'll both sit over a program, a plan and we'll just go back and forth with ideas and change things until we feel like it's like, "Yeah, that's perfect." One thing we did do is we put nine foot ceilings in the home upstairs and downstairs. And that really opens up your space because people are vertical, most of us, some people are.

But for the taller people, when you have your space go up, rather than creating a large room, it opens it up. It makes it feel larger than it is. And of course, we always put lots of windows and tall windows. So it opens up your space. - So that's really cool.

And the pictures look cool as far as having that New Orleans style, that tall two story, long, narrow and deep house design. But on the lot, why did you choose that place to build it? Because it seems like the lot is so large that the natural decision would be to increase the footprint.

Am I wrong? - The lot actually for that house is only 25 feet wide. - By 125 feet deep. - So that specific lot that that house is on- - There's six lots there total. - There's actually six lots there that sit side by side. So it's got a...

The front yard is very, very small. I mean, you can... I actually went out there one day and we hadn't bought a lawnmower yet. And I had a razor blade, it's called an Olfa blade. And kind of as a joke, because our grass was long, so I just sat down and just started kind of like cutting it.

I actually cut the whole front lawn with a razor blade. - But the funny thing about it is I actually videotaped it. So we'll have to put that on YouTube. - I don't know, I've kind of been holding that video back. So the reason I'm probing on this is here on Radical Personal Finance, we talk about a lot of strategies that will allow people to build financial freedom in a relatively short period of time.

And one component of that is income. Another component of that is expenses. And what stands out to me is because of your design capacity, you've built a really beautiful space, but two beautiful spaces, the house and the bus, but on less cost than many other people would face. And many people are intimidated by the idea of having seven kids because now I've got to have an 8,000 square foot house.

What was the path to making these decisions? Have you guys always been weird like this or what was the journey? - Probably, we know we're different than probably most people and we're able to just get up. One thing we like about what you're talking about, the financial freedom side of it, is when you live small, you're able to do more.

In the sense like we can just go, "Hey, let's jump in the bus and we're going to go down south." Or someone's invited us to go visit and minister at their church over here. We can do that because we don't have these enormous home payments. Actually that house that you're looking at too, the tiny home, we built that cash as well because we were able to sell another house and we've slowly just gotten debt-free.

And then we built... And you asked the question, "Why did you choose this small house?" Well, we were able to build it debt-free. That's the biggest reason. We were able to build a really beautiful home that feels rich inside, but it's small and we're debt-free. - Another thing we've discovered is when you have a smaller space, you can buy or invest in maybe the nicer things because you don't have to buy as much of it.

Say you want to have really nice hardwood floor. Well, in a large house, that might be totally out of your budget. But if you have a smaller space, you can have really nice wood floors or invest a little bit more money into say a really nice set of cabinets where...

You know what I mean? You can get nicer windows and in a smaller space and really make a rich environment where if you have say a large house and you have to kind of lower the cost on some things because you have more carpet to buy or more flooring to buy, more sheetrock, more trim.

- Yeah, the list goes on. - I agree with you. And it's one of the things that people often forget that if you are careful with the things that you choose, you can choose to have the things that you want. And as my friend Paula Pant says, "You can't afford everything, but you can't afford anything." So if you clarify what's more important to you and prioritize that, you can do it.

And it feels better. It's better to live in a small luxurious bungalow on the beach than a big ramshackle giant house in the suburbs of some cold city you don't want to be in. - Exactly. - It's not so much the size. It's the choice. It's better to have a small wardrobe of clothes that you love and that you feel good in than a closet packed full of things you don't want to wear.

- My motto is, "If I don't love it, I don't buy it." I come across things that I kind of like. In the past, I've gone and bought items because they're on sale, not necessarily because I really liked it. And whether it's clothing or shoes or pillows or whatever, I find if I don't love it, it sits in my closet.

I never wear it. And then I eventually get rid of it and I revert back to the things I really like. So especially with so many children, if I don't love that item, I just don't buy it. - If you don't love a child, you get rid of them.

- As long as we have so many children, we can't just go in and buy everything we see. Even with kids' clothes. - I'm just kidding. I always, my favorite... - You're teasing me. - I am teasing you. One of my favorite jokes, it was a little bit funnier before he fell into disgrace, but Bill Cosby always used to say to joke to his kids, one of his jokes was, "Better straighten up because I can get rid of you and make another one look just like you." I just thought that was funny.

- And actually, one other thing I wanted to mention, when Shane and I first had Isaiah, he's our oldest son, that we, the typical thing is when you have kids, you start holding back on things that you normally want to do. You don't travel as much, you don't go to restaurants because you now have a baby, and we're like, we do not want to live that kind of life.

So from the get-go, we would bring our children to a restaurant and teach them how to behave in that kind of environment. And the important thing about that is, for one, we can go out into public and our kids will be well-behaved. And then the other thing is living in a small space, the children have learned to respect our authority, and from a young age, we started that.

So whether we're in a small space and we need them to behave, because that can be a stressful environment, they've learned to respect our authority and respect us and what we ask. - And another thing, too, is you retain your sanity in the sense of, so many times, like what Julie was saying, when people start having children, it seems they almost put their life on hold.

And one of the things now is if we go to a restaurant or something and people will see us walk in with this huge family and, "Oh my gosh, they're seating this huge family next to us," and you kind of see the looks. But usually, it never fails. By the end of the meal, people always will come over to our table and say, "You know, when we saw you being sat here, we were nervous.

Is our nice dinner going to be spoiled? But you guys have the best kids and they're so well-behaved and they're quiet." And that comes from living life with your kids. You don't have to, just because you have a kid or two kids or three kids, it doesn't mean like, "Oh, now I have to stay home," or "We can't go and do things." You teach your kids to do things with you, and then they learn how to respect those environments that they're in and it just works so much better.

I got to admit, I am a little envious of your family, of a beautiful family. I got to imagine how much fun a bus trip would be with seven kids. It would be a lot of fun. I'm the youngest of seven myself. So when I say fun, I mean it's a lot of fun.

My favorite memory is growing up or traveling across the country with my family. For those who haven't been from a big family, I feel bad for families whose Thanksgiving Day tables are boring. Our table is never boring and it's even better. I don't know what y'all's family background is, but it's even better now because now not only are there seven kids, but now there's grandchildren all around.

So our family gatherings are never boring. Yeah, well you know, my parents, they only had two, it was just me and my sister. Looking back, I'm like, "I wish I would have had a brother." There's a lot of cool things I could be doing with my brother right now.

We do a lot of, we do filming and different things like that. I'm like, "Man, if I had a brother, he could be helping me right now." What were my parents thinking? That's where my sister's husband comes into play. I don't know if you've seen any of the videos that we have two different YouTube channels.

We have our Good News Boss channel and then we have our Lugnut Film channel. You can meet Chris on the Lugnut Film channel. He's the co-host of that with me. Awesome. I'll take a look at it. Practically speaking though, you said your house has two bedrooms. I would guess, I mean correct me, but as your children are relatively young right now, do you anticipate moving out and into a different situation in the future?

Right. We're on the road right now. We're not in the house. We've been out of it since December. What the plan is or was, it just depends on what happens, is we have six lots in that location. We were going to build more of these style homes and increase the size, not tremendously, but the next house would have been three bedrooms instead of two, but still keeping that small footprint.

What we did in the second bedroom, we have two sets of bunk beds. Then above the closet, because we have nine-foot ceilings, we made the closet shorter and we put a built-in bunk bed above there. We gained a bedroom there. This might sound bad, but our youngest child just slept in our closet.

It's a walk-in closet. It's like an open walk-in closet where the door was never shut kind of thing. My wife and I, we spent the first year of our marriage in a 234-square-foot studio apartment. We had considered where we'd put the kids. We had a walk-in closet. I figured two kids could go in there and then we could put a bed in the bathtub for the baby if we needed to.

It is funny. I mean, obviously, we're having fun with the subject, but generally, human beings take up what? Let's see. If they're small human beings, take up about three linear feet by what? Two feet wide? About six square feet when they're lying down and sleeping. They don't need 300 square feet to sleep in.

They need about six. Maybe eight as they grow. When we built that, if we would have built it to stay in, I would have designed it in such a way with built-in bunk beds and even a separate room for a girl's room and a boy's room, but we were building it for the purpose of turning it around and selling it.

I didn't want to have seven built-in beds and stuff like that because resettle wouldn't have been as good. Yeah, it wouldn't have been as good. Our bus is actually more accommodating than the house because we have a bed for almost everybody in the bus. Which is kind of funny when you think about it because it's so small.

It's like 220 square feet and it comfortably will sleep eight. Then we have the baby, which is nine. The youngest one, Seth, shares a bed with Kira. They're our two youngest, so they share a bunk right now. We get comments. You can read some of the comments, of course, that people make on our YouTube channel.

Every once in a while, you get a comment from somebody like, "What are you going to do when they get older?" Oh my gosh. We're stuck in the bus. We've never thought about that before. Actually, we already have a plan in the works of doing a new bus. We have an opportunity to possibly get a bigger bus.

I've already done the floor plan and everything that has a bed for everybody. It actually has a sofa in it, too. Yeah, a sofa, living room area. That sounds awesome. Tell me more about your lifestyle. It sounds like you guys have built what, from just an initial glance, seems to be a really fun family integrated lifestyle.

How do you earn your income? What does your average year look like? What's your lifestyle like? A lot of our lifestyle, as far as financially, is very much based on trusting and really faith that— Let's say the glue of our life is Jesus. It isn't money. We learned a long time ago that finances and having things and having money isn't what makes you happy.

We can look at society and see that you look at Hollywood. These people have millions of dollars in the bank and people are committing suicide. They're unhappy. The divorce rate, all that stuff. I think you hear—and you would probably know better on this—but you hear that so many marriages are destroyed because of finances.

We've had several times in our life where we have had zero dollars in the bank account. It didn't shake us. Why not? I wouldn't say it never has shaken us. Early on, there were some times where Julie and I originally were managing three businesses at one point, retail stores.

This was back in 2005, I guess. What happened was when the economy really started to tank, we pretty much lost. All of our stores were paid for. They were debt-free, but we had put hours and hours of work and time into these stores, and then we had to just shut them down.

That going through that, it never affected Julie and I's relationship or our marriage or anything like that. It was a time of like, "Man, all of that time, all of that building and stuff." We learned a lot from going through that. >> JANICE KATZ: We were fortunate that we didn't have to go bankrupt and we didn't have to have any debts to pay off.

People say, because we always have managed to stay out of debt. >> KYLE BASS: Yeah. Then we just kind of go, "Well, okay, let's just keep moving here. Let's just keep going on." I make money by doing carpentry work. I do carpentry work. I also volunteer for our ministry, and I do music.

As far as the music side of things go, web design, and we do video stuff. None of these things are bringing in just tons of cash by any means. Our family, whether it's through people blessing us or whether it's through a job I get, we're always taken care of and we've always had enough.

We've always had food on the table. That's really what the important things are. If you get a little extra money and you're able to do something fun, then that's great. The most important thing is that the family's happy. The kids have a mom and a dad that love them, and the mom and dad love each other.

Those are really the most important things. Preston Pysh (00:36:40): You guys live an unusual lifestyle. Have you ever regretted having so many kids, which obviously they require food to eat? Have you ever regretted it? Matt Theron (00:37:00): Not for a second, actually. We never planned on having a big family.

If someone would have asked me before I got married, "How many kids do you want to have?" I'd probably, "Oh, one or two, I guess." It wasn't anything planned at all. Rachel Tauber (00:37:22): I'm actually from Canada originally. Shane and I had a very long-distance relationship before we got married.

I got married really young, and so we actually had our first child not even a year after we got married. We got pregnant right off the bat. Just the ball's been rolling from there. We love every one of our children. There's been times when I'm like, "Oh my goodness, we have three kids in diapers right now." I've literally been changing a diaper almost every day for the last 12 years, whether they're a toddler or an infant.

There's always been a diaper to change. Matt Theron (00:38:02): I try not to tell myself that I could have bought a brand new BMW with the amount I've spent on diapers. I try to tell myself that. I try to forget those facts. Have you learned any tips, tools, tactics, techniques, tricks that come to mind that have helped you guys make the dollar stretch?

Rachel Tauber (00:38:22): We tried cloth diapers for a while, and I don't know. The cost didn't seem to outweigh. Matt Theron (00:38:29): Honestly, yeah, there are a few tips for saving money. One of the things that we learned, we did what every parent, I think, does when they have their first child.

They have a baby shower, and they'll get gifts from that. Anything they don't get in their baby shower, they'll go out and they'll buy the diaper genies. I can't even think of all the ... I know you could have a room full of things. You can have a cradle, and you have all this stuff.

Rachel Tauber (00:38:56): I think with Isaiah, we had the diaper genie and cribs and every little thing that you could think of. Pretty soon, as time goes on, you're like, "Boy, gosh, you don't even really need these things." There's a lot of those things you don't actually really need.

You're told that you need them. Okay, you have to have this, you have to have that. We've gotten to the point of just being, as far as parenting, raising young children, pretty laid back in the sense of not having to have all these things that- Julia Miller (00:39:34): I don't even have a diaper bag.

I always just keep a diaper in a little container, wipes in my purse. I don't know. I'm probably the worst at being prepared, I guess. I don't bring a closet of clothes with us when we go out somewhere for my child. We try to teach the kids, "Okay, when you sit at the table and eat, don't get it all over yourself." Shae Giesinger (00:40:05): Shane can't stand dirty hands.

It was funny, our kids got it drilled in their head so much to keep their hands clean that they'd go to fall on the ground and they're trying not to touch the ground to get up so they don't get their hands dirty. Shane Giesinger (00:40:17): Now, they still play outside.

They still play in the dirt. Shae Giesinger (00:40:22): They're good. Shane Giesinger (00:40:24): I guess we've tried to ward off things that we see other people having to struggle with and deal with. We meet people constantly and we'll go to Walmart or we'll have moms come up to us.

They're like, "I can't even handle my one kid. How do you guys handle seven?" Just trying to encourage them and telling them, "Just have more kids and it'll get better." I did find that once I had two or three kids, it seemed easier than just one. Maybe because I was also a new parent.

Then the other thing is the more kids you have, the more they occupy each other. If Ethan doesn't want to play with Elisha anymore, he can go play with Ashton or Kira or Isaiah. There's always a buddy to hang out with. I don't know. Shane Giesinger (00:41:02): It becomes where they very much occupy each other and help each other.

Elisha for example, he's our six-year-old. When Julie started, because she homeschools all the kids, when it came time to him start his schooling, he already knew so much from learning from the other kids. They would spend hours playing things like Monopoly and learning how to count money and all that stuff.

So Julie sat down with him one day. I think it was her first time to go over some math with him. Julie Schneider (00:41:29): It was like real school. Hey, we're pulling … because the kids from a young age, they always want to sit down with the other kids and do school.

This was the first year of him like, "Okay, this is your set of books and we're going to have a regular schedule." Shane Giesinger (00:41:43): She sat down with him and she's going through some math problems and he's popping off these answers to her. She's like, "Okay, wait, wait, wait.

How are you …" Julie Schneider (00:41:54): Calculating this. Shane Giesinger (00:41:54): "How are you calculating this?" He's like, "Well, this plus this equals that." He learned all of that from of course … Julie Schneider (00:42:02): Playing Monopoly. Shane Giesinger (00:42:02): Playing Monopoly or they'll sit down with … they'll play cards together.

They'll invent their own games. Julie Schneider (00:42:10): Ashton and Ethan. Ashton is our math child. So everything is mathematical. He sat down and figured out a game to play with speed, but they play with flashcards. So I'll have one plus five is this. So whoever has the highest sum would win the pile or whatever.

So it was teaching them to add or subtract quickly. He invented that game when he was six years old. So that was the games they would come up with. But that's only Ashton. He's special. Shane Giesinger (00:42:41): So then the younger kids are encouraged by that and they want to play and they want to learn and, "Oh, this is exciting." So really what's cool about it is it's like doing school but not feeling the suffering of doing school.

You know? Ashton Silver (00:42:56): Why do you guys homeschool? Shane Giesinger (00:43:00): Well, being mobile, I was homeschooled. I turned out halfway normal. Julie Schneider (00:43:04): I went to public school. Public school has some great programs too, but there's just, honestly, I think mostly I wanted to teach the children.

I figured most kids maybe want to be around their parents until they're 13. And then once they get to the teenage years, they kind of want their own space. So I figured, "Okay, I have 13 years that I can spend as much time as I can with my kids and I get to be involved in their learning." And the thing that's been amazing about it is that I've learned their strengths and their weaknesses.

And I know the kids will probably hate me for telling you this, but we started English, I think it was two years ago, and they were doing terrible with it. And it was grade five English. And I'm like, "Okay, we're going back to grade three." So I actually made all the kids go back to grade three and start over.

And we actually have kind of a policy that if they don't get 80% or better, they have to redo the assignment. So I figured if they don't get 80% or better, that they didn't learn enough of it. And it would be better to go back and get it down rather than just keep moving forward.

And so we went back to grade three English, back to English, and they flew through it. And I found that they improved drastically. And the foundational stuff was being laid down properly. So I'm able to do that in a normal class setting in a public school or a private school, whatever it might be.

The teacher might not pick up on those things or be able to take them back, "Hey, you need to go back to grade three in English." If Ashton, he's actually three grades ahead in math, and he wouldn't be able to be in a normal grade for the other subjects and be in a higher grade in math in a public school setting.

So I don't know, I'm really flexible with that area. And I love it. It's great. - So Julie's able to really see their strengths, see their weaknesses. And then, like she said, with Ashton, she's able to say, "Okay, you're good where you are in English and spelling, but you are just flying through this math.

So we're going to step you up." And he eventually stepped up three grades in math. So she's able to keep him where he's doing good in his English and his reading and that kind of stuff, and then advance him in things. So he's able to cultivate, in a sense, that gifting he has in math, and he's able to keep going with that.

And it's not being stifled, in a sense. - And I know probably a big question people are like, "How can you homeschool seven kids?" Well, once they learn how to read, they take the initiative and they do the school on their own. And I tell them a lot of the time that they will be done their schoolwork before I am done breakfast.

So they will get up super early in the morning because they want to be able to play the rest of the day. So they'll go and they'll finish their schoolwork beforehand, and then I correct it and probably spend the rest of the day correcting their school. And then we'll do it on the days that they have a test.

They don't do that beforehand. I'm the one that supervises that. So it's neat that way because it's not like I'm sitting down with each kid. Unless they have an issue, a problem that they can't figure out on their own, then I'll of course help them with that. But for the most part, the textbooks have been amazing in explaining things.

There's some really good curriculum out there right now. - How's the music business? - The music business is, well here, I'll just sum it up. We give away way more than we sell. - We're not in it. - We're not in the music business to make money at all.

We love blessing people with our music. And a matter of fact, a lot of it's available for free out there. But it gives us something to be able to, first of all, when we go and minister, it's something that we can either give to people or we can have a product available for people.

And then many times, just in meeting people and getting in conversations with people, I have download cards that give people a free download of one of our latest CDs. And it gives me something to give to people. Not only are we talking to them about our family or about the Lord, but it gives us something that we can give people as well.

And we love doing the music, and we've invested a lot into it, recognizing that we're not going to necessarily, it's hard to get, if you're not labeled, we're not labeled. If you're not labeled, it's hard to get your music out there. And the industry is changing a lot with iTunes.

You've got a lot of these artists that are going independent and things like that. >> JOANNA: We do it because we love it. >> BRYAN: Yeah, we do it because we love it. My very first CD, which I came out with, that was back in 2001, I think. That one actually got national airplay here and around the world.

I was doing a lot of traveling then. That's before Julie and I were married. I actually met Julie in Canada on a mission trip up there to her church. And that's how we met. The music that we've done, we've put out three albums since then. We came out with an EP with three songs on it.

And then just recently, we came out with two new singles. And it's one way we always, every once in a while, we'll post and say, "Look, if you want to support what we're doing, you can purchase our music and you get something in return for your purchase or whatever." So yeah, that's kind of how the music is going right now.

>> LEE: Final two questions, one related to the bus and the other just more general. On your website, you indicate that your guess is that the bus cost you about $30,000. It's a pretty sizable sum of money. I'm curious, have you ever regretted doing the bus conversion? Have you ever wished that you had gone and spent $30,000 on just a used RV?

>> BILLY: No. We had sold a house. Like I said, the house was owned by the ministry. And the ministry actually gave us a certain amount of money to be able to do the bus, knowing that it would be used often and get a lot of use out of it.

So in that sense, no. And also that we were able to—I mean, it is still usable for our family. It's got the bed arrangements and a very nice kitchen. A couple other things that are unique about it is you're able to design it to who you are and what your family is.

I knew that we were going to need a hot water heater that was going to be able to keep up with our family. And most RV hot water heaters are like a six-gallon or a ten-gallon. I'm like, if all our kids are out running around playing or we go somewhere and they get dirty, how in the world are we going to shower all of our kids off with a ten-gallon hot water heater?

I just don't think that's going to happen. And so we checked around and we found an InstaHot hot water heater, which are very, very efficient. And it's a company called Precision Temp that makes them. And things like that. So you're able to—if you just went out and bought a used RV, it's not going to have all these things.

Another thing is the stove that we have. It's got an oven. Julie actually bakes—I mean, there's pictures on our Facebook page. Our Good News Bus Facebook page. But she'll bake cinnamon rolls. She's made full Thanksgiving dinners, turkeys in that oven. And most RVs don't have— I bake bread twice a week.

She bakes her own homemade sourdough. This is real sourdough, not made with yeast from the store. I mean, it's real sourdough. It's my pet. I have to feed it. She has to feed the starter and all that stuff. And we want to do more videos about that kind of stuff.

So the bus and then the bunks, the bunk arrangements and everything. Every aspect. It's wood. I mean, we have solid oak wood everywhere. We have hardwood floors and stone countertop. And to get something that nice, to buy it off of, say, a lot, you're going to pay a lot of money.

The other thing is it's a school bus. Not many people have a school bus that they're living in and they're safe. Yeah. They're one of the safest road vehicles. I mean, they're actually designed—because they're designed for kids, they're designed to actually, if they get in a horrible wreck, they can actually roll over without collapsing on themselves.

So even that aspect of it with an RV, it's going to be all over the road. Plus, I have good news for you. Go ahead. I'd love it. You can convert a bus and raise the roof to your height. That's right. So you could do it for you. There's hope.

I always figured I'd need like a Greyhound coach, something that's a little bit taller if I were ever going to do it. Yeah. There's a lot of people. A lot of people do it. And it's one of the things we looked at. It's one of the things I somewhat regret not doing is raising the roof just to give it that extra open feel.

But yeah, a lot of people will do that. They will raise the roof on their bus. You can raise it an extra foot, an extra foot and a half, and it gives you that extra headroom. Awesome. Final question is this. The lifestyle that you have been able to put together, it sounds – obviously, it has challenges.

We all have challenges. We all have problems. We all have difficult days. But it sounds to me like you've been able to put together a very integrated lifestyle that allows you to do work that's important to you with the people that you care about and you did it without coming from – parents didn't leave you tons of money.

You've worked at it yourself. What advice would you give to somebody who's trying to kind of break free of the normal humdrum of US-American existence and build a more integrated life? What advice or counsel would you give them? Well, I would – I mean, Julie can answer too. I would say do your best, first of all, to stay out of debt.

From pretty much all the ventures we've ever done, we've tried to do that. We've tried to completely – whether it's starting a retail store or anything like that, we always started very small. One of the businesses we started was in our home and it started with an internet business.

We didn't go and open a humongous store and spend millions of dollars. We started slow where we would buy a couple pieces of product and sell it and grew that way. That's kind of the – I think usually when we're looking, "Okay, we want to do something. We don't have the funds to do it." We don't think, "Okay, where can we get a loan?" We think, "Okay, what can we sell that's of value that can give us a start and give us steps into the right direction or a direction that we want to go?" We're not very attached to anything.

Anything can be – Our very first house that Julie and I built together after we were married, it took us I think three or four years to finish because we built it debt free. That's probably the biggest advice because then after you build a house debt free, you're not tied to it for 30 years.

The amount that you end up – I think I did calculating once. The amount you pay for just your toilet in your house on a 30-year mortgage is just – when you start calculating all that stuff, you just kind of go, "Oh my gosh. I can't believe this." That would probably be the biggest thing.

Not having debt frees you up a little bit because if you want to sell your house, you can sell it. Which, you can do that if you're in debt with a house as well. But if you want to have a house and you can't sell it and you want to just be able to leave and go do something else, hey, you still own a house and it's still paid for.

Or if you get in a sticky situation where maybe you are unemployed or you become ill and you can no longer pay a mortgage payment, then you're not put in an even worse position where you're losing your house now. I don't know. Ben: I know that for us, it's made things a lot freer.

Our tiny home that we have, we don't owe anything on that and no mortgage. We're able to, "Hey, let's go and do work here." We don't have that extra amount of money that we have to make. It's already enough. It costs a lot to feed our family. Rachel: If you have a mortgage, you're also strapped with insurance.

You have to have insurance with a mortgage. Some people might call it risky for us not to have insurance. There's times that we just cancel our insurance if we don't have the money. We're flexible to be able to do that because we don't have a mortgage. So it's another area where we can save where most people can't.

Ben: Great lessons, guys. I appreciate you guys sharing a little bit of your life and your lifestyle with us. So goodnewsbus.com is one website. Share with us your other websites, YouTube channels. Promote all the different places and ways that people can find you here. Ryan: Sure. Yeah. Goodnewsbus.com has got a full ...

We blogged from the beginning of the bus to the end. You can go on there. It's a great resource if it's something that you're looking to wanting to do, if your listeners are wanting to do something like that. I also just started a forum on there, too, just to communicate with people more.

Lugnutfilms.com is kind of our film side of things. We're trying to produce more and more bus life with nine videos. So you can go on YouTube and type in "Good News Bus" and you'll find all of our videos there, and our Bus Life with Nine videos. And then our Lugnut Film videos, we have a carpentry show.

We do some tool reviews, and we always add kind of humor and make it fun. And then we're on Facebook and Twitter, all the usual places. Yeah, we love to hear ... Shana: Literally, if you type in shangood.com, that will take you even to our music page. Kyle: Yeah, shangood.com will take you to our music page, and you're able to listen to a sample, a lot of music on there.

And our music, of course, is on iTunes. If you just type in "Shangood," it'll be on there. And Julie and I do the music together. I am the lead singer. I play some of the instruments, and then Julie does backup singing on there as well. We actually hired professional people in the industry to help us do those projects.

So they are well-done projects. Dave: How on earth did you manage to be able to do this interview and have a quiet background? Where are your kids? Kyle: We actually ran over to a friend's house. We have some friends in the area, and we're at a very good friend's house right now.

So the kids are with grandma and grandpa. Dave: That's funny, because I have two kids, and I can hardly get a quiet recording in. I've been impressed with that. Kyle: My daughter, Arwen, she actually asked me, she goes, "So are we going to be on?" I'm like, "Well, not this time, sweetie.

Maybe next time." Arwen: Yeah, she would have loved it. Kyle: She would have loved to be on it, too. Dave: Well, Shane and Julie, thank you guys so much for coming on. I really appreciate you sharing your story and your life with my audience. Shane and Julie: Great. Arwen: Thanks for having us.

I've seen people from every walk of life, from every situation, figure out a plan to pursue their own family goals, to build and fulfill their own family vision. I've seen it no matter... I just said it. I've seen it from everywhere. So here's my encouragement today. Many of you are looking at something in your life and saying, "This is an obstacle." And guess what?

You're right. Some of the things that you have in your life are obstacles. We're not all in the same situation. But many obstacles can be overcome. Many obstacles can be destroyed. And many obstacles can be integrated into a plan. If you're deeply in debt, you might need to get out of debt first.

That's an obstacle that can be taken care of. If you have kids, no, it's not going to be... Everything is not going to be the same as when you're single or with just you and your spouse. It's going to be different. But guess what? Kids are not an obstacle.

You can figure out a way to adjust to the situation and fulfill all of the goals and the vision that you have as a family. Hope you were inspired and motivated by that interview today. Hope you found it valuable. I love stories like that. Check out all their websites.

Goodnewsbus.com, check out their music and all the rest of their stuff. If you haven't been, go to Good News Bus. If for nothing else, just so you can see the bus. It's really, really cool. So it's really well done, really, really beautiful. Goodnewsbus.com. Thank you so much for listening to today's show.

If you'd like to support the work that I do and allow me to travel the world with my kids, then please consider becoming a patron of the show. Details on that program at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Of course, it's not just for me. I'm not begging. If you would like to pay me for the work that I'm doing in providing this content for you, which is part of the pathway for me to travel the world with my kids, then consider becoming a patron.

Radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron for all those details. And until next time, get out there and make a plan for living your good life.