Today on Radical Personal Finance, we do a Q&A show. Joshua, how do I open a discussion on whole life insurance with people who have been taught to only buy term and invest the difference? How do we mentor young people toward financial independence, help them to see what their possibilities and their options are?

Joshua, what's your process of note-taking for books? Joshua, what about Roth versus traditional and are you confusing the effective tax rate with the marginal tax rate? Then if we have time, hey, I'm in the military and I'm being called to do a bunch of expensive stuff I don't want to do.

Do you have any useful tactics and strategies that might help me overcome? Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today. This is the show where we're dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today we seek to fulfill that mission with Q&A. I've built up an extremely long queue of questions from the audience, many of which are just great questions that I really want to answer. So I'm going to do some Q&A shows starting it off with this one. I hope that you enjoy these.

Happy to receive questions from you. A couple of ways to do that. The best way to get access to the questions is to join one of our Friday Q&A calls. Those calls are open to patrons of the show. You can find all that information at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron if you would like to get on a Friday Q&A call.

Also, you can email me, Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com, although you might be better served to use the contact form on the website. It's a little bit safer. If you want to email in a question, I get tons of emailed questions. So those are difficult to always get in the queue or you can leave them on the voicemail line.

Just look at RadicalPersonalFinance.com. The best way to do it is just on your mobile phone. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com. Click the "Leave us a voicemail" button and leave me a voicemail message and I do voicemail messages shows from some time. It's been a while since I've done one of those.

I have a queue of those built up and I do intend to do one of those shows. Before we jump into these Q&As, quick sponsor of today's show is YNAB, the You Need a Budget budgeting software. YNAB is awesome. It solves all of the major problems that have been associated with budgeting in the past.

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It's an acronym for You Need a Budget. First question on today's show, Joshua, I've been working as a new financial representative with a large insurance company that has a lot of whole life insurance business. I've redacted the name for a few months now and have a large market of Christians who have been exposed to Dave Ramsey's financial peace campaign.

The result is a lot of prospects who are skeptical of the merits of whole life insurance policies because Ramsey preaches in favor of term and investments and is very much against cash value altogether. Of course, no general strategy can apply to everyone. Each side of that argument has its advantages and it leads to some fascinating conversations.

I'm sure your listeners would be interested in hearing arguments on either side of the buy term and invest the rest debate and knowing your history in the business, I'd be interested in hearing your perspective on the topic, James. James, this question I'm not going to dig into with all of the arguments.

What I am going to do is I'm going to try to answer this to you in the function of a sales capacity of how I would approach this if I were actually interested in selling insurance. Here's what I have learned the hard one way. If you get into a discussion with people on this topic in an early stage, you're done for.

You've lost already. The reason is because you're committing the cardinal error of sales which is selling something that you want to sell instead of planning for a client's needs. The major problem with life insurance and the debate the way it's done is that people are going out selling the product that they want.

This whole debate – I shouldn't be too strong but it just angers me because once you understand what term life insurance is, how it works, its advantages, disadvantages and its major characteristics and once you understand what whole life insurance is, how it works, its advantages, disadvantages and its major characteristics, you won't make the mistake of trying to confuse the two.

They do very different things. What happens though is that the insurance industry makes the mistake of marching out there and saying, "Well, we do this. We believe in this." Guess what? I'm all for religious belief. I think that's very important but don't ascribe religious belief to something that doesn't need it.

You don't need religious belief when it comes to what kind of insurance do you believe in. If you get into a discussion with somebody in an early stage on this topic, you're done. You've lost already. This is a major challenge for those of us who go into financial planning, consultative selling type of situation and we usually want to dig into these topics.

Guess what? I did that for years and learned it didn't work. I'm going to try to save you some time and save any of the rest of you who are financial advisors and financial planners a little bit of the hard one. I'll save you some of the time with helping you avoid some of the mistakes that I have made.

Do not get into discussions with people on product fit. Are there exceptions? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, there are exceptions but think about it this way. If you went to a doctor and the very first discussion with the doctor, they're telling you that, "Well, my philosophy with cancer is to do surgery," or, "My philosophy with cancer is to prescribe drugs," or, "My philosophy with cancer is to do a natural nutrition-based approach." Wouldn't you be a little bit suspect that perhaps that doctor is trying to bring their philosophy and promote their agenda instead of actually trying to help you with your medical condition?

If it were me and my doctor without looking at my x-rays, without looking at the results of any scans or tests I'd had and they're telling me, "Hey, I believe in this," I'd get up and walk out. Now, that doesn't mean they can't have a strong opinion. If you go to a surgeon, they're obviously going to be skilled with surgery.

It doesn't mean that if you go and consult a holistic, natural-focused person that they're not going to prescribe nutrition treatments. You're expecting that and you're probably seeking that out. But even if you were sympathetic to their approach, you'd still want them to talk about the situation. You are the one who is creating these conversations for people.

You're creating this discussion about term life insurance versus whole life insurance and you're doing it because you think it's an interesting topic. The reason I know this is simply because I know that the vast majority of consumers do not have a clue when it comes to insurance. If you will stop bringing this topic up, your customers and prospective clients will also stop bringing it up.

You're the one who's creating those conversations and you're creating them because you like the debate or at least because you think that it's important to talk about. So I recommend you stop arguing with people. In the role of a financial advisor, you need to become an expert on finding out what people want first.

Ignore the product questions that people ask you and figure out what they want. Now, I'm using strong statements. We have to do that when making a point. Obviously there are exceptions. If someone asks you specifically and says, "Hey, what do you think it is on this subject?" Well, you need to answer the question.

Don't be evasive. You're not a politician. Answer the question but quickly turn it back on trying to find out what is their goal, what is their situation, what's their solution. And if you'll spend more time asking questions of people and less time talking about what you believe about this debate that goes on in the financial business, you'll have much more success.

You're simply not going to convince somebody who has a strong opinion on what's right that they're wrong. So quit trying. Instead, just listen to them and then find out how you can actually help and serve them. If you will do that, if you'll ask questions, if you'll find out what their goals are and then you'll do the process and the hard work of building financial plans, what will happen is – and then you make professional recommendations to go back to the CFP, financial planning process.

If you're not a CFP yet, so go and just study what does the process look like. Listen to people, ask questions, gather facts, gather data, make professional recommendations. If you do that, what you'll find is that in the majority of cases that you're referring to, you're a young financial representative, you're working with young families, you're not a skilled subject matter expert.

In the majority of those cases, you never need to bother with talking about whether somebody should have term life insurance or whole life insurance because the majority of your people that you're working with will need a majority of their insurance needs a return life insurance first. If you do good planning for people and you help them save for emergency funds and you help them set up disability insurance policies and you help them set up term life insurance policies, the majority of those cases, you're going to use up all of the available budget before you ever get to a whole life insurance policy.

That's the appropriate way to do planning. Now if you do that, you'll also open up the conversations with those people for whom whole life insurance might be a good and useful fit for them. And then having listened to them, made a professional recommendation, because you've listened to them first and you've understood it and you've spent your time thinking, "If I were in this person's shoes, what would I buy and why would I buy it?" Dave Ramsey will never come into the picture.

I promise. Because that person is not going, the person for whom whole life insurance is an important component of their financial plan or a viable component of their financial plan, they're usually not listening to Dave Ramsey. So I know I'm stepping around the question, but it's a really frustrating question because once you understand the products, they're as different as a Toyota Camry is from a Ford F350.

They're very different vehicles. And you don't accidentally wind up in one when you were looking for the other. They do different things. Doesn't mean they can't go and complement one another together. Doesn't mean they can't fit together, but they do different things. And so you've got to assess them at different points in the fact pattern.

Hope that helps to you. That's just a discussion. If insurance agents would stop selling their pet product and start doing good planning for people, this whole debate would be severely diminished and that would be a very good thing. Next question, Joshua, comes from Frank. "Joshua, I'm mentoring a young fellow, hopefully to leave my office and move on to long-term financial independence.

For the near term, I'm directing him to take as many classes that my employer offers and giving him many projects to work on. Long-term, he's having difficulty in focusing on where to direct his energies, true of many young graduates. Do you have any shows that specifically address this issue, if not a good show topic?

This is a bit easier for older folks. I have plenty of life experiences to draw from to decide on a different career or another business altogether. But for younger folks, they have so many options that they have a hard time picking one to focus on. Do you have any thoughts?

Cheers, Frank." I think this is an incredibly important issue and it's really difficult in today's world and young people have it really, really tough when it comes to actually being able to make an intelligent decision about this. Here's the situation, the practical situation that most young men and women face.

They are told, "Follow your passion," right? This is standard advice. I give this advice. Other people give this advice. It's a cultural context now that we all are told, "Follow your passion. Do what you're passionate about." This creates a bunch of people who are saying, "Wait a second. What am I passionate about?" Everyone wants to follow their passion.

We're told, "Follow their passion," but the challenge is that – two challenges. The first challenge is we're told, "Follow the passion," but we often haven't had to know what it means to follow something. I'm thinking here of somebody who's not in the work world. Many young men and women have had so many things given to them.

They don't know the joy of working for something themselves. The bigger problem is simply that their lives have been very focused on one specific track, primarily academics. Most people today, young people who are just coming out of the academic context are basically one trick ponies. If you look at how many young men and women today are groomed and sheltered, they have a single area of experience.

I'm certainly stereotyping here, but I think I'm stereotyping to a useful degree where it sets the point. If you think about how we groom people, it's all about academics. We start them young, get them into the right preschool. It's all this competition in high society about getting them into the right preschool.

They come through and they go through 12 years of schooling in which they're taught, "Prepare for college. Okay, great, great, great. Prepare for college." Academics are held as the key area of focus. If it's not academics, then it's sports or it's some area of specific talent that they're focusing on, sports or singing or whatever their thing is.

So focus on, build academics, then go to college. Okay, build academics. They come out and they have very little broad-based experience. Many times if you talk to young men and women, the little bit of experience that they have came from a context that was on the periphery of their schooling.

It came from a football camp that they went and they all of a sudden realized that there was this other thing available to them or they went to a sports camp and they realized that they could have this job leading sports camps. So the challenge here is exactly what you identified in your question where you said, "This is a bit easier for older folks.

I have plenty of life experiences to draw from to decide on a different career or another business altogether." You answered it in your own question. So I don't have a good answer simply that other than to be aware of yourself and gain experience. Now one of the challenges that a lot of people have and I see this changing in popular culture is that we're taught we need to protect our resumes.

We have to continue to build our resumes. This oftentimes leads to the very industrious go-getter, 22-year-old graduating from college, get the job, build it up in the industry, work, work, work, work, work and then you wind up with this quarter-life crisis in their late 20s where they say, "Wait a second.

I never had a chance to try different things." I personally encourage people and this is my simple advice is get a broad level of experience and there are a few ways to do that. There are ways that are very disruptive and there are ways that are not so disruptive.

Let's go with least disruptive. Take an interest, a broad interest in life. I don't know how to do this other than to read. I guess the non-reading way to do this would be subscribe to interesting YouTube channels but just follow interests a little bit and go and read and get exposure to different scenarios.

It's easy for me to go and consider a whole lifestyle and a whole life plan and a whole change that I could make simply by absorbing somebody else's experience. When you read broadly as a kid, this is – I wish one way you can really help boys and girls is give them opportunities to read broadly, especially in fiction where when they can read in the context of fiction, of a diverse types of fiction, they can get exposed to all kinds of different lifestyles, different jobs, different careers, different hobbies.

It's very easy to access all these different things when you're reading a book about it and those ideas will simmer in your mind. I could give you multiple careers that I would be interested in that I know were influenced based upon books that I read. I would enjoy certain types of private investigator work.

I would enjoy being a detective on a police force. I would enjoy that type of work. Now of course, it's not all it's cracked up to be as far as every job involves a large amount of grunt work. It's not all spies and stakeouts and most stakeouts are pretty boring.

But I would enjoy the net result of bringing justice to the world. I share this deep feeling of a desire for justice. So I know that but my exposure to that came through reading Hardy Boy books. I was obsessed with Hardy Boy books, really enjoyed it, used to get all kinds of books on private investigator work from the library.

I read all the techniques. I loved military thrillers. So I had exposure to this whole field and industry but I never knew anybody who did it and I've discarded it as not something I want to pursue right now. But it's there as an option. It's on my list of, "Hey, this is a career that I would enjoy." And I would personally – I've met different investigators.

There are a few different niches that I think would be really interesting. I've gained exposure through nonfiction, just simply reading career books, reading different accounts of people, reading biographies. I mean you read biographies, you start to gain different people's experiences. So this is not disruptive to your life to gain experience vicariously.

You can also gain experience through just simply exposure to a diverse group of people. One mistake that many people, especially young people make is you get into your circle of friends or your circle of acquaintances where you're comfortable and they don't branch out. We don't do a great job of teaching social skills to young men and women.

So you put people into a diverse social environment. Many people are very uncomfortable. Kids are very comfortable with other kids but they often don't know how to talk very well to adults and this transfers on. You often see this when – if you look at your company and it sounds like you're working with a young adult but you often see this where you're looking at somebody who doesn't know – they don't know how to walk over and have an intelligent conversation with the CEO of the company.

All the interns gather together with all the interns. Well, that's a silly plan. The interns aren't going to give you any life experience that's different than yours. Go make friends with other people. Also this can happen just through a focused, dedicated plan. Just simply by reaching out to people and walking over and smiling and extending your hand and say, "Hi, my name is Joshua." It's really all it takes.

But somebody like you has to come along and mentor somebody and say, "Listen, you need to expand your experience." Most people have not done something as simple as taking a class on social skills or read a book on social skills or how to be a good conversationalist. And so they don't know how to enter into these engagements and they can't gain from other people's experience.

So all you simply need to do is teach somebody, be interested in somebody else's experience and all of a sudden you'll find all these options open up to you. I'll tell a story that specifically relates that happened about 30 minutes ago before I hit record on the recorder here.

Right before I was – I was just sitting down to record this show. My wife had taken the kids out for a walk and she had just come back and she said, "Hey, by the way, there is a van down the road and you might want to look at it." She knows I have an interest in these – in vans and different ways that they can be configured.

I like big vans. I like campers. I have an interest in that. It's like it's two doors down. You might want to like take a look and see how it's configured. I know you have an interest in those things. So I humored her and I didn't think I'd be interested.

I walked out and I look – I was just kind of doing this casual stroll by to see what's going on. I thought it was a construction van. I get closer and realized that the person had a bed in the back and they had built a bed and it was kind of a homespun camper van.

Well, now that really engaged my interest because I have a weird fascination with living in vehicles. So I'm looking at this thing and I go over and talk to them and I make a little comment, just a polite introductory comment to see if he wants to talk to me or not and wound up standing there talking to the guy for about 30 minutes.

He is a man who travels all over the US and he sells headlight restoration products and services at flea markets and different places. He has the van just very simply fixed up. He's got a little air conditioner in there. He's got a little bed in the back, a little generator.

He's got the van fixed up that he can live in it while he travels. He makes a lot of money going to these flea markets and selling headlight restoration and doing headlight restoration. He told me how much he made and he makes a lot of money. I just asked him how and why and all the skills and immediately, I gained access to a whole new different lifestyle that I thought, "Oh, that's really interesting," and I got all the details on how he prices his stuff and how he sells it and how he sets up his booth and how he does it and we looked at the products and now I've got another business idea as a backup business idea to file away in the back of my head if I ever need it.

I can take that and as I walked home, I was thinking, "Oh, here's another thing that could be applied." Well, if I knew a young person that were looking for – let's say that they knew they had a passion for windsurfing or paddleboarding and they want to kayak all over the place but they need a way to make a living on the road.

Well, here's a business that with the right skill and the right experience can be established and this guy makes a ton of money and he works on his own schedule. He just identifies the shows where he wants to go and lives this itinerant lifestyle. So the point of that story is to say that a little bit of interest in somebody, a little bit of conversation skill to ask somebody some engaging questions so they open up and all of a sudden, here's a whole another lifestyle that I have exposure to that I can take and incorporate in.

This is not hard to learn. Anybody can do it. It just takes taking an active interest in other people. That doesn't – it's not disruptive to your life. Volunteering in different organizations as a way of testing things or volunteering in different – trying different activities as a way of trying things and being exposed to things is another excellent, less disruptive way to do it.

Go and try new hobbies. Go and take a class in something that you have never had exposure to. The famous example of this, of how these things build over time is Steve Jobs and his calligraphy courses in college which then went on to affect his design ethic for the rest of his life.

In the Apple design, you still see the impact of it from him taking somewhat happens – by happenstance a calligraphy class. So encourage the young man to try different things. Try different things with no intention of finishing them. Just address different things. Take some classes. Go join some clubs.

Go to some local meetups. Meet some different people from a diverse background. This helps him to gain experience from other people. Then you can get to the base place where you start to change jobs. Working different jobs I think is very important. I don't see how it's possible in a work environment to know yourself without having been exposed to different approaches.

You want to work for good bosses and bad bosses. You want to work at constraining companies and free companies. You want to work at jobs from different perspectives. If you can get that exposure over time, it makes a huge difference. One of the biggest benefits that I had was that my parents put a lot of work into giving me the opportunity to be exposed to different jobs and that helped me.

I've always felt like I know myself much more than most of my peers know themselves. I understand who I am, what I like, what are good fits, what's a good fit, what's not. I understand my values, my vision, all of those things much better. Well, it just comes from working different jobs.

I don't know that experience can be fully gained vicariously. I think a lot of it's got to be done personally. Experience is the common advice is they don't come by accident. They come from exposure. Those are some ideas of some ways that you can encourage this young man to get some experience so that they are able to make a better decision.

Again, I quote from your note, "This is a bit easier for older folks. I have plenty of life experiences to draw from to decide on a different career or another business altogether. But for younger folks, they have so many options that they have a hard time picking one to focus on." The reason they have a hard time is because they have very little experience.

Next question comes from Tyler. "Hey, Joshua, would you describe your note-taking for books? I follow you on Instagram and I noticed that you use a combination of various colors of highlighters underlining with a pen, stars. I'd love to get more out of the books I read based on what you recommend on the podcast.

Any method of the madness? Thank you for all that you do and for being the best personal financial teacher around. Kindly, Tyler." Tyler, thank you for the compliment. I do sometimes. I like to post quotes. I go on Kix. Sometimes I post a bunch and sometimes I don't post for a long time.

But I post quotes and interesting things I read on Instagram. You're welcome if any of you are Instagrammers. @JoshuaSheets, spelled S-H-E-A-T-S, you can find me there. I post pictures of my kids and pictures of things that I read. But Tyler, I have a very simple system. I would not – if you hadn't asked me the question, I wouldn't personally have tried to teach the subject.

I don't think I'm particularly brilliant at this. I'll just tell you what my system is. But I have a very simple system but I do have a little bit of thought behind it. First, I read paper books. I don't read e-books. I find that reading on a phone or a computer or an iPad or whatever is way too distracting.

Now, of course, that's not to say that there's not a place for that. Reading novels, that's fine. But when I want to read a nonfiction book, I just – I found that my level of attention span has suffered so much over the last decade and I've been working really hard to get it back.

It really bothered me because I used to be a really good student. I could sit down with a nonfiction book, go cover to cover, not get distracted, not get – just not get distracted. Over the last decade, I lost a lot of that skill and that really frustrates me because in order for me to feel confident with the work that I'm trying to do, I need to be an excellent student.

And so I've been working hard to regain that focus. One of the things is I need to read in a focused way where I am not distracted by dings and anything. Reading on a device, reading on my phone or whatever, it's just too easy to flip to something else.

It's too easy to follow that path and look up that word, etc. So I like to read on a paper book. I try to leave the phone and the computer in the other room, that kind of thing. That way, I can stay focused. Paper books, I've made this decision that I want to be able to destroy the books that I read with my – they call it marginalia.

Marginalia, the stuff that you put in the margin. So I like to – I want to destroy the books that I read with my marginalia. So I don't get nonfiction books from the library unless I'm just going to just flip through them. I just buy them used on Amazon.

Amazon used book marketplace is so fantastic and at this point in time, it's usually you can find a book for a buck plus $3.99 shipping. Paying four bucks or eight bucks or whatever for a book is relatively inconsequential. So I try to just get the book, had it shipped to my house and it's done.

So getting them used on Amazon helps me and then I can destroy it. I can write in it. I can keep my notes, etc. I am a – well, I always write my name on the book. I've gone to the point of trying not to lend out books. I'd rather just buy somebody a copy than lend the book.

It's not the most frugal thing but I want – it's important to keep my books. I write my name and I write the date that I read it the first time and if I come back through again, I write the date that I read it again. So if it's April 2016, I'll write just this morning, I'm starting a new book.

May 2016, I'll write in the front cover of the book. I am a generous highlighter and I do it for a couple of reasons. I do it to help me pay attention. By having something in my hand, I'm more focused and I'm less distractible and that's helping me to regain and rebuild my – the skill of reading, rebuild the attention span that I used to have.

I don't – so that's the first reason. The second reason that I highlight is that I want to be able to simply skim my highlighting if I want to absorb the book in the future. I'm unlikely to read most books twice. Most books are simply not great books. Great books are books you're going to return to again and again.

Well, most books, you're not going to return to them. But if I am going to return to them, I just usually want to just skim my highlighting. And so I do highlight extensively to the point where if highlighting is just intended to bring attention to the important things, I probably overdo it.

But it helps me and I like it because then I can come back and I can just skim the highlighting and get all of the important points from the book. There's no method to the color of highlighting. That method is just simply I buy highlighters and they usually come in packs of whatever.

So whatever one is not run out at the moment. A lot of my books will have four or five colors in them. There's no method or color coding to the highlighting. I do also sometimes underline important points as well. I will – in my marginalia system, I will outline books sometimes as they go.

So if they're pointing one, two, three, I will just put a little one, two, three. So that way I can come back and just real quick look here. Those are the one, two, three points. I also will – well, I also try to converse with the author as I read.

I think of books as a conversation between me and the author and I try to argue with authors. I think authors are the best people to argue with. So generally because you don't hurt their feelings when you disagree with them. So I write down the questions. I make comments.

I point down things that I'm thinking of. I try to just keep a note of my thoughts on the page so that – again, helping me stay focused and helping me to interact with it. All the highlighting and the marks also help me to know how far I got in a book.

I have a habit. I don't know whether it's good or bad. It just is but I'm often reading multiple books at once. I'd probably say I'm reading – there's about nine books on my desk right now. I don't finish all the books. I try to follow a little bit of my interest when I'm reading and a lot of it is based upon mood.

If I'm going to read something heavy or if I'm going to read something light, I just go based upon the mood. So I don't finish all the books. There's no reason to finish all the books. If a book is not worth finishing, just dump it and move on. I circle words I don't understand.

So if it's a new word, I always circle it. I look it up and then I write the definition at the bottom of the page. That helps to build my vocabulary and it helps me to make sure that I'm engaging with it and really understanding. Then sometimes I'll write notes, takeaways, actions, questions in the covers.

Then if I'm really a good student, which usually I flake out and move on to the next point, then I'll try to outline and put a little something in the covers. So I just flip to the back cover and I write the notes, takeaways. I use a simple system of if there's a question that I have about something, I'll write a big question mark.

If I have an action step, I'll write a checkbox there that helps me to take an action step. Those are the two basic symbols that I usually use. So if somebody references in the bibliography this other book and I say, "Hey, that sounds interesting. I want to go and follow that book up." So that's my system I guess.

Not fancy. I'm not going to claim that it's great even but that's the system. I will conclude with this question simply that reading is a skill and it's a skill that has to be developed consciously and proactively. If you can read it and if you can get through it, a good place to start is the classic book by Mortimer Adler called How to Read a Book.

The reason I say if you can get through it is because the majority of people who would probably consider themselves fluent readers can't get through the book because it's just a totally different style and a totally different approach. It makes you think just to read the book on how to read a book.

The major takeaway and the major premise is simply that reading is a skill that has to be developed. The unfortunate case of what you see is that the vast majority of people are illiterate. They might be able to read but they can't gain the information and grasp from the book.

So what I would encourage you is don't be – if you're working to become a more skillful reader, expect it to take time and don't expect it to come easily. You will have to work with books and your fluency with different books will vary depending on the subject matter.

So when you're reading something that's a subject that you're very familiar with, you can jump through it. If you're reading a subject matter that you're not familiar with, you can – it's going to take you some time. I'm going to go ahead and – there's a question further down my list.

I'm going to go ahead and pull it in here because it's relevant to what I'm saying here. It comes in from Alan. He says, "Josh, I'd like your thoughts on if you recommend gulping or savoring information. Savoring is reading many books at the same time, sort of skimming and grabbing the golden nuggets, listening to many, many podcasts, reading book summaries, etc.

Savoring is slowly engorging yourself in a single topic at one time, perhaps reading one single book at a time and only listening to podcasts on that same topic while reading it. I tend to savor stuff but I saw an interesting video by Tai Lopez on this where he says he prefers gulping.

He has a point and he seems to be quite successful." So tying in to that question and – because it's important. The skill of reading is developed over time and you're going to want to apply that skill depending – differently. So there's an initial stage. I think kids should read a lot of fiction to build a love for reading.

Maybe there's a better way but I find that fiction is the way that you get people engaged. So if you're not a reader at all, you might want to just start by reading fiction and not necessarily read nonfiction. But find some books, find some genres, find some things that engage you and build that basic skill of being able to understand the words and being able to read quickly.

If you get to that point, then you'll be able to read quickly. In fiction, you can build your reading speed. I can sit down. I don't allow myself to read a military thriller except if I'm on vacation. I know I'm going to have time to read because it destroys my life.

I find it difficult to put down. But when I was younger, it was Tom Clancy. I always had a soft spot even though the novels were just terribly repetitive for Clive Custler. Today it might be Brad Thor or who's the other guy, the guy that died in that genre.

There are some really great writers writing this type of – this fiction. Well, I could sit down with a thousand-page Clancy book and get through that in a couple days on vacation if I've got time to read during the day. My lifestyle is different now that I have kids.

So you can learn to read very quickly when you're reading a subject that you are engaging with. That's the basic level of skill. Then you go over to the level of skill of engaging with the content and the topic. And so here's where I think it's important to learn the skill of gulping and reading a lot of different books from a lot of different genre and also savoring.

And here's my answer to Alan's question. They're both important. My personal practice is to gulp a lot of information from a lot of different genres simply based upon interest. I just go to the library, check out 30 books, 40 books, browse through them, browse through the books at the bookstore and you can look through – the majority of nonfiction books are a few hundred pages.

You can look through them in about 15 minutes, grasp a lot of what they're about. Gulping is good to get exposure to a diverse area of topics. But gulping is useless if you actually want to do anything with the information. The danger with gulping, and I'm susceptible to this, is that you're always taking in and never doing anything.

If nothing changes in your life, you're no better. So if you're reading a book on a subject, you don't actually do something with the information. It hasn't actually done anything more than give you information. And so Tai Lopez, his claim to read a book a day is silly. You're not reading a book a day.

You're skimming a book a day. I can do that. Anybody can do that. But you don't retain the information. You just get exposure to a diverse area of topics. If you don't follow that up with savoring, with an intense focus into a different area, you don't wind up with anything – you can't really make an impact.

So the specialists are usually the ones who make an impact. And so we're always balancing that generalized knowledge with the specialist knowledge and it's good to bring these two together. So you choose an area, a focus based upon the impact that you're trying to make. Now this could be something related to a goal that you have.

This could be something that's related to the business that you're in, to a cause that you're working in, to something that's important to you. And then you dig deep and you focus on consuming the majority of the literature that's within that genre. And that's where you should slow down your reading speed, where you should engage much more seriously and critically with the topics and not try to just go through lots of things.

You should read systematically. In almost any field, if you would just read systematically through a dozen books in that area, you'll be a world-class leading expert. There's almost no topic that you can't become a world-class leading expert to. And if you apply this to a few areas, it can – people think you're really smart.

You say, "I'm not smart. I just read a book on it. I just read a dozen books on it." So I think that you do have to choose and then once you choose an area, you dig into it. So those are my thoughts on the reading system. Let's do one or two more.

This comes from Joseph says, "Joshua, I was listening to your podcast about Roth versus traditional the other day and there was something that was bothering me about your explanation. I like the fact that you're bringing light to a common misconception. It seriously drives me nuts when people claim that you don't pay taxes on the gains in a Roth.

But your math is based off of a faulty assumption, which is that you will be paying the same effective tax on your contributions as your withdrawals. The problem is that the taxes that you pay on a Roth are at the marginal tax rate at the time of earning and the taxes that you pay on a traditional are at the effective tax rate at the time of withdrawal.

You said effective for both, but the way you were talking about it, it almost sounded like you meant marginal. The main difference is that all of the money is contributed at the highest tax bracket, but money being withdrawn has the benefit of receiving a new standard deduction and personal exemption as well as being able to take advantage of the 10% and 15% tax brackets each year.

So while an individual making $60,000 might pay a marginal tax rate of 25% on that $5,500 contribution to a Roth, an individual withdrawing $60,000 will pay $0 on the first $10,300, 10% on the next $9,275, 15% on the next $28,375, and 25% on the last $12,050. That totals to $8,196.25 on $60,000 for an effective tax rate of 13.7%.

Because of our progressive tax system, someone in the 25% tax bracket can never have an effective tax of 25%. They will need to be withdrawing enough money to get into the 33% tax bracket to pay a 25% effective rate. I just wanted to point this out because I thought that it might confuse some listeners.

I thought it might be beneficial for you to clarify this point. Joseph, you are absolutely correct. That's exactly the case. That's exactly the math behind it. I regret ever doing that show. That show was a spur of the moment show. I sat down and I said, "You know what?

I'm trying to figure out what's the right type of show to create for Radical Personal Finance. I create sometimes these just huge long shows. I'm just going to create one short show on one specific topic. I'm going to be laser-focused. I'm not going to dig into the Roth versus IRA question.

I'm just going to point out that the math is the same." So I sat down to do the show and I have received more feedback from listeners on that show about all the things I left out than any show in a while. I regret doing it because it makes me think I just got to create these mountains of shows, every pro and every con.

I guess that's kind of the style I've developed here. But you are absolutely correct. What this points out – so just in summary, I'll just summarize it. When you put money – when you defer money using an IRA, a traditional IRA, you're deferring money at the highest possible marginal rate.

Later when you take it out, you're probably going to be taking it out at a lower rate. This is why mathematically, I think most listeners will almost always be better off with some sort of system of a traditional IRA or traditional 401(k) as compared to the Roth. For many people, this would be one reason.

I'm generally not in favor of something like a Roth 401(k) contribution. Now the problem is there are so many other factors. What is the actual tax rate that the person is in? What are their plans for their career? What other assets and resources do they have? Simple example, I think there's a very compelling argument to be made for people putting money into the Roth IRA simply that they can get it out again if they need it.

So you can use a Roth IRA and you have simple access to your contributions if you have an emergency. That's really powerful and really compelling. So – but mathematically, I think that most people will be better off using a deferred system. Now I've tried to actually figure out if I could figure – find a way to prove this.

I've never found anybody who has done the simulations. I invite you very smart listeners to do it and send it to me or to show me where somebody has done it. But what I would like to see is somebody do a simulation and see if it's even possible to come out ahead with Roth contributions.

So for example, run it as a Roth 401(k) versus a traditional 401(k), to come out ahead with Roth contributions under normal circumstances and under the same tax rates and tax chain codes that we have. The reason why I can't just do the analysis is for the reasons that you said here, Joseph.

But what I would love to see modeled – and I know there's some tax software. At one point, I tried to look for some and I tried to – I did a – to get some complex tax software to do it. But I'd love to see it modeled to say – let's say you have somebody who is working – take median plus 50 percent.

So let's just say that a $75,000-a-year job, median income I think is somewhere around $52,000 currently. Take a $75,000, $80,000 a year. Put – save $15,000 and model it with a traditional 401(k) contribution and then model it with a Roth 401(k) contribution and then model the distributions throughout the retirement and tell me the total taxes paid on either of them.

The reason it's so complicated, I can easily get to the balance. I can do that in a minute. But what I can't do is I can't model the standard deduction. I can't model the brackets. I can't model the social security income, et cetera. I can't model those things easily enough to get a good handle on it.

But I think the Roth, most people, if they're prioritizing Roth contributions, most people would be paying a far higher tax – total taxes than using the traditional scenario for the reasons you said. It's really difficult to know how to convey that to somebody because it's got to be done on an individual basis.

Most people are not going to accrue portfolios that are going to leave them in a larger income bracket at retirement. That's the simplest way to sum up the point. If you look at what would be required to pay – if you look at what would be required for the Roth IRA – for the Roth 401(k) to be better than a traditional 401(k), you would have to model a system where in retirement, somebody is receiving more money, perhaps even substantially more money as their retirement income than they were during their working income or during their working years.

That's just simply impractical. It's not going to – it's not going to happen for mainstream savers. Some of you extreme savers, could it happen? Yes. Somebody who's built – building a great business and experiencing substantial – yes, you guys are the outliers. But for the mainstream saver, that's not going to happen.

Just the common life cycle of the common person, you don't make more money in retirement. You need more money earlier in life because you have more years of life to fund. You have higher expenses. You have higher lifestyle expenses, family expenses, et cetera. The retirement years, you often need less.

The people who don't need less are the ones who are living a high retirement lifestyle based upon intentionality and I think it's something that the financial planning industry doesn't talk about enough. So I invite any listener who has the tax software that can – if you can model that.

If you can model it for me, say from 40 to 65 and then model the distributions, model in retirement – excuse me, social security income and use current tax expectations, current tax rates, current tax brackets and model that for me through retirement, I would love to see that. I've never been able to build it myself.

I'd love to see it. The reason that this is often pushed down – I apologize for the dog barking. My software should moderate the sound so it won't blow out your eardrums but I don't have time to edit that today. The reason I don't buy the arguments about – the major argument that people make is well, remember, tax breaks are going to go up in the future.

After all, we have this major – we have all this major debt. We have all this major – we're going to have to raise taxes in the future. That's the argument that the people make. Personally, I have no crystal ball. I am unconvinced of those arguments. I don't think that – number one, I don't think that debt will ever, ever be paid.

It's simply never going to be paid, neither the official on-budget debt nor the unfunded liabilities. I see no way for it to be paid. Second, I see no way that the US American population is going to accept any major changes in tax rates. We could play some games at the corners.

We could play the political games about the 1%, blah, blah, blah. They'll change it 5%, 10% but everybody agrees. The Democrats and the Republicans all agree that raising taxes is a bad idea for business. It's just a matter of what they argue about in the election cycle. But the reality is when times get tough, they know they got to cut taxes.

The actual effective taxes across the country have been 20% of GDP and they haven't changed in decades. So, when I look at that chart and I say, "Okay, put aside all the four-year – every four-year arguments that obsess people during election season. Put aside all the talk that gets votes and look at what people actually do," I don't see it happening.

So I don't think we should – I don't think that that should be the compelling reason. Ed Slott makes a big deal of this of get all the money out into the Roth. I'm going to have him on someday and talk about that. But I don't buy the argument anymore.

Let's do one more and – no. I'm going to quit for the day there since I did that other extra question. We're going to save this question about how to fit in in a military context without breaking your budget for another Q&A show. Thank you all so much for listening today.

Thank you for listening. I apologize if my delivery wasn't as smooth. I've been out of commission the last few days. That's why there's been such a paucity of shows and so I'm working on getting back to that. Sorry about the dog barking. Podcasting is real. Again, if you'd like to have me answer a question from you on a show like this, feel free to send it in to me.

You can use the contact form on the website at RadicalPersonalFinance.com. That's a great way to get the question in to me. Happy to hear from you at any point in time. Thank you to those of you who are patrons of the show, supporting the show on Patreon. Super, super important to me, especially right now.

If you gain value and benefit from this show, please consider becoming a patron. I don't like to oversell it, overemphasize it, and turn the whole show into a pledge drive. Just know that, put simply, it's very important. It's helpful to me. It's very important to me. If you benefit from the content that I distribute on the show for free, please consider becoming a patron.

RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. A couple of benefits there for you. Hey, one quick thing as we go. I need to do a standalone question. Either way, if you would like to be of help to me, I don't like to make the show all about "Hey, here's how you can help me." But I know many of you write to me and say, "Hey, is there something that you can do?" Reviews for the show would be extremely useful in a couple of different places.

First, if you listen on an Apple device, please do a review on iTunes. That's super, super important. The reason it's important, it helps a little bit with rankings and activity. But the reason it's important is new listeners will come through and they'll browse the shows and they judge based upon the number of reviews.

I haven't focused heavily on trying to get lots of reviews, and so I could gain a lot more. So please, one or two sentences is all that's needed. You can do it right on your phone. So it takes no more than about two minutes. Just one or two sentences.

Give it a star rating. Say you hate it, you love it. Do it right on your phone. Some of you are Google users. Supposedly, Radical Personal Finance is available in some of your Google Play Music apps now. Not on the Radical Personal Finance app, but on the Google Play Music app.

It's being rolled out in stages, but if you're a Google user, could you check? And if you find that the show is there, could you email me and let me know? And I'll leave a review? I'd really appreciate it. Have a great day, y'all. Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best in premium seating at stadiums, arenas, and amphitheaters nationwide.

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