Today on Radical Personal Finance, we talk about living a rich life. Here's my question. What is a rich life? Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me. This is the show where I work hard to provide 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 tackle that slogan that I've made up. I begin the process of explaining what I mean and where it came from. Throughout the course of Radical Personal Finance, I've looked for a tagline, a slogan for the show. Radical Personal Finance, when I chose the name of the show, I was pretty satisfied with it because I knew it expressed the thought of what I wanted to express.

But I wanted a way to kind of define it a little bit more. And if you're a long-time listener of the show, you'll hear me in different episodes struggling for that tagline. I tried all kinds of different things. Ultimately, where I settled and I've settled so far, who knows, it may change in the future, but I settled on this concept of a rich life now and financial freedom.

And I've been using that slogan for a while without ever particularly doing a standalone show on explaining what I mean for – by that. What I mean by a rich and meaningful life now and what I mean by a plan for financial freedom and why 10 years or less, I've never really defended those concepts.

And so today I want to expand on what I mean by those words in hopes that it'll be helpful and useful to you because I do believe that they express my goal, my desire, my heart for how I hope that this content will serve you. And I think that that'll be very, very useful.

Today we're going to talk about what is a rich life. And then in a future show, we're going to talk about how to live – because today we're not going to focus on what is a rich life as measured by materialism. In a future show, we're going to talk about how to live a materially rich life now because both of those things are important.

Today we're going to discuss many of the immaterial things, but the material things are also important. And then in the future, we'll talk about financial freedom, why I'm choosing that word financial freedom and why 10 years or less. Because all of these things are very important to me. But today we kick it off by talking about living a rich life, what that means and how to do it.

Before I get to this topic, the sponsor of today's show is YNAB. You need a budget. This is the budgeting software that I use each and every day. A few minutes ago, I just was working on my own budget. I keep one budget for my business, one budget for my personal non-business life, and that's it.

I keep all of my transactions in YNAB. I have since the third or fourth quarter of 2015 last year and I absolutely am thrilled with the software. It makes so many things extremely useful. It's the best proactive forward-looking budgeting software that I know of. If you run a small business, you can also use it.

And here I mean a pretty small business, something like I run which is using a cash basis of accounting and you just are keeping a simple number of accounts. You can use YNAB for your business software as well. That's what I do and I use it for my business budget as well.

It's not a double entry system. So if you need a double entry system because of the size of your business, you need to look elsewhere. But if you're just running a side hobby, maybe a simple side hustle of some kind, use YNAB for your business as well. You can try a free 30-day trial.

Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/YNAB. YNAB is an acronym which refers to you need a budget, affectionately referred to as YNAB. Now let's talk about living a rich life. Many people have a dream of being rich. Many people have a dream of being rich but they don't have it – they don't have that as a goal.

They don't have something clarified of what being rich actually means. Now there are some concepts that if I start going through some of the concepts that most of us would agree on, many people have some vision or some impression of material riches depending on where you are in the world and in what stage of economic development.

Material riches might mean having enough food in your stomach, might mean not having to wonder where your next meal comes from. Material riches might mean having – driving a car that doesn't break down on you continually. Material riches might mean having a house that has a roof over it that doesn't let the rain through.

But material riches might also be a shiny black Mercedes-Benz or a house with a pool or a fancy private jet. There are all kinds of different definitions of riches, different dreams that people have. But most people have this dream of being rich but they've never sat down and thought about what does it actually mean?

What does rich mean to me? The dictionary definition of rich is one of those definitions that has many, many entries. A dictionary has at least 19 or almost 20 different definitions, some of which apply to wealth, for example, having wealth or great possessions, abundantly supplied with resources, means or funds, wealthy.

Another definition, having wealth or valuable resources, of great value or worth, valuable. You talk about rich food or costly, expensively elegant or fine as dress or jewels. You can talk about rich as abounding in desirable elements or qualities. You can talk about rich as abundant, plentiful or ample. There are other aspects of rich as well.

So it's a word that we use a lot of times but we don't sit down and describe it. So what I desire for you and also for myself is to live a rich life. And in the definition of rich life, I believe we need to talk about the things that are immaterial as well as the things that are material.

Today we talk about the things that are immaterial because material things come and go and you can live a rich life in many ways independent of the expression in the physical world if you're clear on the immaterial aspects of riches. So I sat down and I made a list of things that to me are hallmarks of a rich life.

I don't claim this to be an exhaustive list. It's just simply a list I wrote down and I thought had some useful things for you to consider. So when I make this list, what I want you to think about is does this – do these ideas connect with your perception of what it means to be rich?

And is there a way that you can move towards a rich life now? So let's talk about the first thing. To me, one of the biggest aspects of a rich life is to be rich in freedom and independence. When generally people think about the idea of being a millionaire, it's not so much what their bank statement would look like with a one and six zeros behind it as expressing their net worth.

Generally what people perceive with the idea of being a millionaire is independence, freedom, the ability to live by your own code, the ability to live based upon what you want to do, the expression of autonomy and self-direction, your ability to live free of the man telling you when to come and when to go and what to do while you're there.

That's probably an almost universal desire is for us to be able to live as we believe is right and to do as we want to do. And without financial independence, it is certainly difficult to live a truly free life. You can gain expressions of it and I don't think you need to wait until you are fully financially independent in order to have expressions of freedom and independence.

But without question, financial independence makes it easier. Financial independence brings with it the ability for you to be truly independent intellectually, truly independent with regard to your opinions and your perspectives and your views on the world. Anytime you're accepting money from somebody, it almost always comes with strings attached.

And so many people would like to be free of those strings. The person who gives you money is usually doing it with some strings attached. We all know where our bread is buttered and this happens from the micro to the macro. The simplest one that most of us experience is the idea of employment.

When your employer writes you a paycheck, it comes with strings attached. You're expected to do a certain job. You're expected to do it under certain conditions. If a condition of your employment is that you're there to open the doors of the shop at 9 a.m. to let the customers come in, well, you got to be there at 9 a.m.

If the condition of your employment is you need to produce work of a certain type or a certain quality, well, you got to get that work out. That's the condition of your work. And if you want to continue receiving that money, you've got to have these certain results. This goes from the micro to the macro.

Watch in government circles is probably the easiest things to do. What is it? How is it that government and politicians hold control over other people? Well, it's based upon the flow of funds, the flow of money. This happens on an international basis. What is a primary tool of large countries that are seeking to exert their influence and their will all around the world?

Money. The United States does this through the World Bank, through the International Monetary Fund. Lending money comes with strings attached. There's a great book, well worth your time if you're interested in international affairs. It was published at least a decade or so ago, John Perkins, Confessions of an International Hitman.

And he talks about his involvement of how the US government specifically exerts its influence and control all over the world through money, very euphemistically called foreign aid, control. Now we do the same thing from – for example, in the US and I'm sure in most countries and governments around the world, it's practically universal.

We do the same thing within a country, within a society. The federal government exerts its influence over state governments based upon the flow of money. What's the proof of this? Well, think about the recent – all of the recent transgender fights going on in the United States. What's the stick that the federal government is attempting to hold over the states based upon their participation or non-participation with the federal mandates?

Well, we're going to cut off funding. We're going to cut off your education assistance. So if your state doesn't step up and do what we think is right, we're going to cut off these billions of dollars and now as a state governor, you're going to have to stand up and tell your citizens, yes.

We're taking this stand that we believe is right and it's going to cut off the funding. Always comes down to money. What was – what's the carrot or the stick that's used? Well, we'll give you money if you participate in it. Education, it's easy to see it in there.

Think about how did the federal government incentivize the various state governments to participate in the common core standards. Well, if you participate in common core standards, you'll gain access to this funding. If you don't, you won't. Same thing with all government programs. So we see that on a government basis.

It's always easy because a lot of that information is public and you can see it working. But this happens on a personal basis. Generally when you're given money, it comes with strings attached. When you work for a company, you have a responsibility to represent that company in a positive light.

You will necessarily censor your opinions and your perspectives to please your employer because if you become a liability, political liability, you express opinions that are unpopular, your employment will terminate. So without financial independence, it's very difficult to live as truly free. Now is it possible to ever become truly, absolutely, completely free?

Personally I doubt it because all of us are responsible to somebody. For example, I've worked very hard to build this independence into my income stream. I'm not financially independent to the point where I'm able to live purely off of the income from my investments. But I am very independent with regard to my business where I've sought and worked very hard to build an independence where I don't have a corporate structure over me.

I don't have a boss that I have to please other than myself. Now does this mean that I'm fully independent? No. Because who do I have to please? My customers. I have to please you, my listening audience. Now you have to define who are your customers. This is one of the challenges with accepting advertising on Radical Personal Finance.

If I accept advertising, I need to please my advertisers. And so I know that comes with a cost. I have to please you, my customers. This is why I've worked hard to set up the patron program and all of that because I want my fundamental allegiance to be serving you.

But I'm still not fully independent. Even if I were financially independent, I could live off of the income from my investments, would I still truly be free? I don't think so. I mean there is a point at which you could get there. But at the end of the day, you're still responsible for those investments.

If I own stock in a company, well, that company has got to please its customers. If I own real estate, that real estate has to serve the needs of its inhabitants. So you can move closer and closer towards this type of freedom. I think it's probably not fully achievable.

Maybe I'm wrong. But at any rate, I believe that we should all seek to live as free as possible of the charity or financial input or strings that come from other people. I don't think this is necessarily right or wrong as far as, well, you're wrong if you take this input.

You're wrong if you have a job and you have to go and build a business. No. But it's going to come with a cost. And if you desire to live a rich life, that rich life can be measured in terms of freedom and independence. So seek to live rich now with regard to enjoying the maximum amount of freedom and independence that you can build for yourself.

This is a progressive scale. But it's not only achieved when you're old and rich and financially independent. You can move towards it based upon the decisions that you make today. And the fundamental theme that I desire for you to see throughout radical personal finance is that you can make consistent choices that will lead you toward a lifestyle of greater freedom, greater autonomy, and greater independence.

And this can be tremendously helpful to you as you develop other things that are important to you. The next aspect of living a rich life now is living a life that's rich in choices. Financial independence gives you choices. It gives you options. You have the choice to get up and go to work or to stay home and read a book.

Having those choices is incredibly valuable. One of the things that causes people to feel a great amount of stress is feeling like they don't have a choice. If you're doing work that – think about the idea of human slavery, human chattel slavery. In this idea of slavery, what is so bad about slavery?

Is it the actual work that's involved? Well, sometimes it is. If you study the history of slavery in some parts of the world or in some slave-owning societies historically, whether historical societies or current societies where slavery is encouraged, it's deprivation of physical comfort. Like there's just some serious abuse of people involved in it.

But many times in slavery, in many slave masters, there's been very little actual physical abuse of the slaves. But is it still unattractive? Well, most of us would say yes. And here I'm not talking about the morality of it. I'm just talking about the practical expression for the sake of demonstrating the point.

It's unattractive because you have no choice. What's so difficult about being a prisoner? It's not the physical conditions. Prisoners usually have a bed to sleep in. A lot of times they have climate control. They can do things in the United States. We have pretty comfortable prisons. They can have a TV connection, maybe an internet access.

They can read books. They can learn. They have a library. They have weightlifting equipment depending on what level of your incarceration. But it's that deprivation of choice, that deprivation of freedom that has the biggest impact. Same thing with slavery, the deprivation of choice. If you have the choice, you might do exactly the same things on a daily basis that a prisoner would do.

And yet you would experience a great deal of fulfillment in those things because you're doing it based upon your own choice. You might do exactly the same things that a human slave might do. But because you're doing it by choice, you might not sense the negative aspects of it.

So you want to live a life that's rich in choices. Well, financial independence gives you choices, but there are different expressions of that. Million bucks in the bank, that gives you choices. But you know what? So does $10,000 in the bank. Because to a person who doesn't save any money and who's never saved money, $10,000 in the bank gives them the option of walking out of one job and walking into another one.

Gives them the option of picking up, loading up their car and driving from one city to another. Gives them the option of changing from one career to another. Gives them the option of moving out of a dangerous situation. And so to live a rich life, you want to develop for yourself a maximum number of choices.

How do you see this theme expressed in radical personal finance? Well, first, again, obviously, constantly we're working towards becoming financially independent as defined by being able to live off of the income from your investments. However, I also talk about savings. Also talk about low expenses, maintaining expenses at a very low level.

The reality is, and I freely share many of my expenses on the show, not to impress you with how rich or how poor I am, but to demonstrate and impress upon you the value of having low expenses. If you have low expenses, you have choices. I have very few fears of running radical personal finance and starting an entrepreneurial endeavor because I have very low fixed expenses.

And so I'm willing to run the risk of failure in my own business pursuits because I know there are plenty of jobs that I can go and do. I can take an entry level job doing manual menial labor and I can support my family such that we have a roof over our heads and food that we eat.

If I make poor investments and we lose all of our money, it's going to be okay. Low expenses give you choices. So I desire that same sense of freedom for you. I desire for you to have a lot of choices. And there are tools and things that we constantly talk about to try to make sure that you know that you have many choices.

One goal I have is often to profile different people's experiences, people living different lifestyles than you so that you recognize that you have a choice about where you live. You have a choice about what you do. You have a choice about how you live. I use the extreme examples to impress that upon you, that you have a choice.

Now you may continue to choose to live where you live, to do what you do, to live as you live, but doing it from a place of choice, having purposefully chosen that, will change your experience of it. That leads to a rich life. Another expression of living a rich life is to live a life that's rich in time and time freedom.

In many ways, time is the essence of life. It's how we define life. Study of time is a fascinating study philosophically, but I think it's fair to say that time is the stuff of life. What you experience is right now, the present moment. In many ways, when I talk and do private coaching with people and talk to them, what I generally hear is a desire to have control over time.

That's what many of us want, is control over our time. This ties in with choice, but we want to have the choice of what to do with our time. My desire is that you can achieve that quickly. I don't think you need to wait a decade to achieve that.

I think you can achieve it in a few months. Switch to a job where you have control over your time. Now you also will have responsibilities, but you can gain this control over your time with choices. You can also choose to surrender this control over time in order to have other benefits.

Recently, I did a private consulting call with a listener who is a physician. By the way, if you want to do a private consulting call with me, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/phonecall and I do private consulting calls with you if you'd like to consult on your personal situation. I was speaking with this listener, and this listener was a physician, a fairly high-earning specialty physician making plenty of money.

As I was speaking with this listener, they expressed that they were thrilled with their practice. They were thrilled with their business. It was extremely profitable, but they weren't so thrilled with the lack of financial independence. In talking through that situation, I asked this listener, I said, "What is it that bothers you about...

Why do you feel like you need to be financially independent?" Because from my perception, this person was experiencing all of the freedom. They were living a great lifestyle. They had a great family life. They had a lot of benefits. They had a lot of vacation time. They had tons of money, et cetera.

I said, "What's stressing you out?" Well, what was stressing out was as a physician, I have to be on call at a certain time. I have to be there on these hours and I don't have freedom over it. Well, my advice to this person was politely get over it in the sense that you have so many other benefits and you have so much flexibility of time that your need to be there with a patient at 8 o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday morning as they go into surgery, your need to be there with that patient.

This is a very small price to pay in exchange for everything else that you achieve. It's a small price to pay in exchange for the money that you earn, which can buy you additional freedom in the future. It's a small price to pay for the amount of vacation time that you have.

It's a very small price to pay. So here, just simply recognizing that can help you to live a life that's richer. But having control and having a richness of time, the control over time and choices of what to do with your time will help you to experience a rich life.

This is one of the things that I enjoy the most about my own business pursuits, that I can choose what I do with my time. Now, this is a double-edged sword. It comes with a tremendous responsibility. It's challenging and I struggle many times with knowing how to handle it.

But one thing that running your own business does give you is it gives you the ability and the opportunity to make a choice on a daily basis of what to do with your time. When you take the choice of time and mix it with some of the other choices, the financial choices like having low expenses, now you have the ability to pursue the things that you think are important, whether they're connected to money or not.

Next aspect of living a rich life is living a life that's rich in relationship value. Time is the stuff of life and relationships are the stuff of life. The quality of your experience of life will in many ways be determined by the quality of your relationships. This is an area that many of us can make significant improvements by simply recognizing it and focusing on it.

I need to do more shows on the topic, but I believe that if it requires money to spend on relationships, you probably should do that before you should buy stocks. Someone can work a job that the actual functions of it he doesn't necessarily feel all that enthusiastic about, but if he's working that job with people that he enjoys being with and if his home life is in good repair and in good shape, his experience of life is going to be pretty high quality.

On the same hand, many of us have experienced the joy of doing something that's fun, that we like to do, the physical act or the physical work, but when you're doing it with people that make you miserable or if you have a miserable home life, your experience of that job is pretty, pretty rough.

So by investing in the quality of your relationships with your immediate family members, investing in the quality of relationships with your coworkers, with your customers, with your employees, with your friends, this will lead you to the experience of a rich life. When you get old, you're going to look back and reflect on your relationships, and based upon what you do with those relationships, your aging process will be very different.

I have no desire to be an old rich person, meaning rich in financial wealth, who has destroyed all the love that others have for me based upon my actions and behavior. Far better to be completely financially broke but be surrounded by people who love you and who care for you than the opposite.

Far better to experience that. It's one of the things where I have a personal real just frustration with how in the US American society we view children. I'd rather have children who love me and pour into their lives and take the cost of that and get to experience the joy of relationship throughout my entire life than place the priority and emphasis on financial gain for myself and wind up without relationship wealth, without relational wealth.

Now it's not an either or. You can only have one or the other. I believe you can have both. But if you have to choose, you can guess where my choice will be. I'll pick relationships. Living a rich life means that you live a life that's rich in meaning and impact.

Man has a deep desire for immortality and impact beyond the grave. I think it's very healthy to always recognize that life ends in death and that you and I are in the process of dying. I always shrink away from people who want to talk about death euphemistically. I think it's a very bad cultural trend that we don't face death.

We try to hide death away and not face it head on. Guess what? You're in the process of dying and that should have an impact on you today. It should have an impact on how you live. Now you could take that in many different directions. I won't try to decree for you how you should take that at this moment.

But simply to say that at the end of your life, you're going to be looking back and wanting to see a life that had meaning and impact on things that are important to you. So rich life is one that has meaning and impact that will go beyond your own life.

A rich life is a life that's rich in experience, especially a life that's rich in a diversity of experience. One of the most pleasurable, rich things that you can do in your life is to learn new things. Learn and apply new things, new skills. It's a great danger in looking to always be entertained because entertainment is generally passive.

But if you can engage in something that's active, you'll get far more appreciation for the activity out of it. What I encourage is don't just live in one way. Look at diverse experience. One of the challenges of wealth is you often lose appreciation for it. If you live in a place where lobster is cheap and you eat it all the time, it's no longer a special event.

Eat enough lobster, I've heard from those who've lived in such places, they say eat enough lobster, it tastes like soap. I believe it. Because if you do the same thing over and over again, it becomes somewhat boring. It becomes somewhat the same. So challenge yourself. I think we can challenge ourselves and intentionally create a diversity of experience if we focus on it.

If you're used to living in material comfort and material luxury, challenge yourself by living without material comfort or without material luxury. It's relatively easy to do. Go camping. Make yourself do without material luxury, material comfort. When you go home, you'll appreciate your nice soft bed a little bit more.

Or if you're used to living a rough and difficult life, figure out a way that you can treat yourself to some material luxury, material comfort. It's very accessible. Many times people spend all their time eating every Wednesday and Friday night at TGI Fridays and feel like, "Well, I can't ever buy the $300 meal." Well, you can.

Take a few weeks and don't eat at TGI Fridays and save up and go and enjoy the special experience. You're going to really enjoy it. You'll enjoy it especially because it's unique. It's diverse. Seek out a diverse experience with people, diverse exposure to people who live all in different ways.

This often is reflected in people's goal of travel. Some people like travel. Some people don't like travel. But to me, one of the biggest benefits of travel is diversity of experience. You face new things. You face new ideas. You face new philosophies. You're going to be challenged. If you want to travel, go for it.

But don't feel like if you can't travel that you can't do it. Just reach out beyond your comfort zone and invite somebody to dinner in your neighborhood. I have a Mexican family staying with me right now with me and my family. It's been fantastic. Spend all kinds of time talking about it.

We've been talking about – they're tried and true Mexicans, lived there their whole life in their late 40s. So we're talking about it and it's so interesting to talk about Donald Trump and his comments on Mexicans with a Mexican family. It's a lot more interesting than talking about Donald Trump and his comments with Mexicans with all my white friends.

Do this with – invite your Asian neighbors over. Invite your – if you're a Christian, invite your atheist neighbors over. If you're an atheist, invite your Christian neighbors over. Seek to gain from someone else's experience and all of a sudden you'll start to really enjoy things a little bit more.

You'll start to be challenged in what you think. You'll start to appreciate different perspectives, different opinions. Again, you don't have to travel to do this. Just set aside on your weekly calendar one night per week and invite a different one of your neighbors over every week. My family has Tuesday night.

Every Tuesday night we have somebody different over for dinner. That gives me an opportunity to expose my children to all kinds of different perspectives and all kinds of different ideas. That leads to me being challenged and exercised and it leads to a rich life. It doesn't cost that much to have somebody over.

Add an extra five bucks. You're going to be eating food anyway. Put an extra cup of rice in the pot and throw an extra steak on the grill. It's about five bucks extra. What you gain from it will go far beyond the expense because now you'll have a diversity of experience and you'll be challenged in your perspectives and in your opinions.

You'll see the world differently. That's a rich life. Another aspect of living a rich life is live a life that's rich and full of hard work. There's a great danger in the US American culture. There's a great danger in the financial independence early retirement movement. I don't know if it's called a movement but perspective.

The danger is to seek ease and relaxation. The danger is to seek recreation. Some of the most miserable people in the world are those who don't have any work to do. Hard work has huge benefits. There's a Bible proverb that teaches, "In all toil, there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty." I like that proverb.

A couple of different ways you can look at it. But I just love the idea, "In all toil or in all work, there is profit." Think about how satisfying it is to engage in something difficult and to finish it. Think about how satisfying it is to look out at your front lawn and it's just covered in weeds and it needs some work and you go out there and you toil and you sweat and you mow the lawn and you pull the weeds and you spruce things up and you get to the end of that afternoon.

You sit down on your front porch and you look at the lawn and it makes you go, "Ah." Does something in you. It's a huge danger for those of us who are so-called knowledge workers and that we don't get that same sense of satisfaction. Tradespeople who work with their hands are much more mentally healthy than those of us who are knowledge workers because you can see the results of your effort.

You can see the results of your work. Hard work feels good. Recreation and relaxation and rest and rejuvenation only feel good when they come after the hard work. When they become the priority, they become very empty and very hollow. So don't be scared of hard work. Wade in, roll up your sleeves and tackle it, whatever that work is.

I'm not implying that because you're financially independent means that you can't work hard, but your experience of financial independence will be much better if you just simply take some of the work that you've been doing for money and you apply it to things that you may or may not do for money, but work hard.

And finally, my final expression, perhaps the most important one as a rich life, is a life that's filled with spiritual peace, peace with God, because on that basis, everything else can go away, but yet that peace can be experienced now and that sense of richness can be experienced. And this is entirely independent of all of the other factors.

One of the most influential, one of the most important factors, it's the one where if everything else is taken away from you, if you have no independence, if you have no choices, if you're a slave, if you have no control over time, if you have difficult relationships, if you are doing things that are not meaningful and impactful, if you're doing things that are the same all the time, so you have no diversity of experience, well, if you're at peace with God, it's a rich life.

It's the cornerstone. And it fundamentally transforms the experience of everything else. Now all of these things are immaterial. Haven't talked about houses and cars and fancy clothes and fine wine. But guess what? If you have all of these things, those immaterial...excuse me, those material things, they're nice to have.

I enjoy going to sleep in a nice soft bed. I like having a fancy phone. Enjoy having enough food in my stomach. But we all know that the material things are temporal. And these immaterial aspects are far more important. They make a far bigger difference. But in some ways, they're far harder to achieve.

They're far harder to get clarity. They require much more work, much more searching. It's a lot easier to set a goal and say, "I'm going to buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and fulfill my dream of owning a Harley-Davidson." Much easier to do that than to say, "I'm going to have a goal of getting at peace with God." The Harley-Davidson is tangible.

It's concrete. You can make a goal. You can make a plan. You can set out, "Okay, it's going to cost me $25,000. I can save it a savings rate of $500 a month. Therefore, based upon my savings rate, it's going to take me this number of months." That's why we tend to jump towards those things.

Most of us probably have some tangible and material goals. I've been enjoying a few months ago, I got some paddle boards. And just a week or two ago, I went ahead and bought a small RV. I've been enjoying that, fixing it up, fixing a couple of things that need to be fixed to make it truly roadworthy.

If you want to see a picture of it, it's on my Instagram page, instagram.com/joshuasheets. But it's great. But you know what? If you take a tangible... If I took that tangible goal, that RV, and if my life were a life of turmoil, if my relationships were out of line, if I was experiencing stress and conflict in all parts, the experience of using that material item, the RV would be very different.

So these are the hard things. These are the difficult things to work through. But they have a far bigger influence than those concrete materialistic things. So before you jump to, "I want a big fancy house and I want a fine wardrobe filled with fancy clothes," spend some time thinking through, "What is your definition of a rich life?" Spend some time considering these ideas of mine and then make your own list.

Again, I don't claim that this list is in any way exhaustive or complete. It's just a list I made up. But I think there's some food for thought here. I think these things will make a difference for you. And when you are seeking to live a rich life now, you don't need to be a millionaire to get these things in line.

You don't need to ever be a millionaire to live a rich life. When you think about the people who are many times most honored and respected, it almost never had anything to do with their financial wealth. Many times the people who had the most financial wealth in history often face the least respect.

And they had to work to do something to gain social respect. It's often a guilt complex with many people who achieved great wealth and they try to do something different. But think about historical figures that you admire and respect. Think about presidents of countries, American presidents. Is there an American president that you admire or respect?

Think of that person. Now ask yourself, how wealthy were they? Do you have any idea? Most of us don't. No idea. Think about a social figure, somebody who was influential in society, an actor, an actress, a scientist, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin. These people that had influence, do you have any idea how rich Einstein was or how rich Darwin was or how rich Newton was?

We don't know. We know their name because of something else. Think about religious figures, philosophers. Gandhi, there's a famous picture of what he died with when – I think he's like a white toga and a pair of spectacles, a pair of sandals and a bowl and a spoon I think was all he owned.

Jesus Christ, the most influential man in history, didn't even own the clothes on his back at the end. We often forget that in a materialist culture. We forget that these people had an impact that went far beyond money. We spend all of our time chasing money and we neglect the greater things.

Don't let that happen to you. If this show has been useful to you, at least to inspire you to think, again, write down your own list. Make sure that you're clear on what is a rich life. I don't mind if it's different from mine. Maybe who knows, maybe I'll do a show like this in a couple of years and maybe my things that are on this now will change.

But you can live a rich life now. It takes intentionality. It takes thought. It takes hard work. It takes design. It often doesn't take money. Some of these things do take money. We'll talk about money later. We always talk about money. But many of these things don't take money.

Rich in relationships, you could take the same money that you're going to spend on dinner tonight with your spouse. But if you turn off the TV, take the food, put it in a basket and take it out to a park where you can watch the sunset, your experience of that dinner will be very different.

Take that workday lunch that you were going to spend with a co-worker and just mindlessly toss off the 15 bucks for lunch and call an old friend. Set up lunch with the old friend. All of a sudden now, your experience will be different. Anyway, I've made the point enough times.

Thank you all so much for listening. I think the next show we'll talk about material wealth. We'll talk about ways to get a great bargain because material things matter. They are important. It's a fallacy to think that you can focus entirely on the so-called spiritual aspects of wealth and not pay attention to the physical aspects of wealth.

Material things are important. Everything in life is connected. The spiritual and the physical are fully connected. But tomorrow maybe we'll talk about that. That's my intention right now. Thank you so much. And then we'll come back and in future shows we'll talk about financial freedom, what I mean by financial freedom and why 10 years or less and what I actually mean by that.

Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to support the work that I'm doing, please consider becoming a patron of the show, radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. The way I set that program up is very important. I set it up to where my responsibility is to you, my listening audience. You can vote with your dollars.

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