♪ Bless him in the mornings ♪ ♪ Come back Sunday morning ♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

♪ Got to sort of tell 'em ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. - Today on Radical Personal Finance, we talk about living rich, how to live rich now. Expanding on the theme of, and the explanation behind the theme of the show, which is living a rich life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Episode 350 was the immaterial attributes of riches that you can control today. And today we talk about the material riches that you can access and control today. (upbeat music) 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 prosperous life. You need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. And this series expounds that concept with some practical suggestions on how to live a rich life today.

(upbeat music) I've been using this slogan for a little while without ever actually explaining it in detail and talking specifically about the topics. And so here is part of the series, I'm carefully doing that. I really believe that the information I shared in the most recent show, talking about the immaterial aspects of riches is truly the much more important aspect of riches.

And you'll hear even that theme come out in today's show. However, we're going to talk about some of the things and some of the aspects of material riches. And my hope is that I'm gonna be able to give you in today's show a long list of ideas, some things that you can incorporate into your own life of how to enjoy a rich life now, regardless of your actual financial situation.

I know that's a tall order, but I think if you'll stick with me through the end of the show, you will, well, hopefully you'll be able to tell me that I succeeded. Now, even this show is gonna be a little bit different from what you might be expecting. If you were to do a web search for, you know, how to live a rich life, you'll find all kinds of information.

Many people have many great ideas. You know, in a moment I'll talk about, for example, if you want to live a rich life, buy the world's greatest mattress, however you define that. That's a very sensible and thoughtful thing to do. You know, the reality is you can probably spend about a third of your life in bed sleeping, and you today can probably access the same quality of bed that the world's richest person could access.

Depending on how high you want to go, it'll cost you anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000, but you could access that, and that might very well be what you should do, is go ahead and invest in the world's greatest bed. It's not an idea that's original to me, but I'm sharing it with you to tell you that you'll probably get more value in living a rich life out of buying the world's greatest bed and driving a cheaper car than driving an expensive car that you drive for, what, an hour a day that mostly just sits out in the sunshine and gets beat up, whereas you're going to spend a third of your life in bed.

This is the type of thinking that most people don't do. They'll go out and buy a $30,000 car and a $300 mattress. I'll take a $300 car and a $3,000 mattress, and I think I'll make a better decision. So before I get to some of those, what I call normal things, we're going to talk about some of the kind of even more radical ideas because I want to impress upon you the benefits of the world that you're already enjoying and already experiencing.

We as human beings have a tendency to constantly look for what we don't have rather than appreciating what we do have. And I know I tend to be very philosophical at times, but that's because there's a tremendous amount of value and a tremendous amount of wealth that people many times don't take the time to appreciate.

And I want to emphasize to you here at the beginning 10 things that I guarantee every one of you is already enjoying that you probably are not appreciating. Before I do that, very quickly, sponsor for today's show is Paladin Registry. Paladin Registry is the best effort that I've been able to come up with to be able to provide for you guys a financial advisor referral service.

I'm no longer technically a financial advisor. I don't work with individual clients. I do a little bit of consulting, but nothing as far as technically. I don't carry any of the licenses to work with mutual funds or stocks or insurance policies anymore. I lapsed all those licenses, so I just simply do my thing and talk about personal finance.

But I know that many of you still have a need of working with a professional financial advisor. And you've come to me and said, "Okay, Joshua, I like you kind of pulling back "the curtain on the industry, "but how do I find such an advisor?" Well, Paladin Registry is my best effort for you to find such an advisor, that you can work with.

It's a registry service, which means that advisors come to them. They make an application to be included in the registry. And what the Paladin team does is they go through and they do an exhaustive research of the advisor's history. They go through, they check their disciplinary history. They see how long they've been in the business.

They review their credentials and licenses. They check any history of complaints. And they search to try to find out and weed out the bad ones. And then if they're accepted into the registry, the advisor is able to get a listing. And then what Paladin does is they set up the infrastructure for a website where you go and you put your information in.

And then based upon the information that you tell them, they will connect you with an appropriate advisor. Please use my referral link. Go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/paladin, P-A-L-A-D-I-N, radicalpersonalfinance.com/paladin. And there at that referral link, that link will pass you through to a landing page. You'll put in your name, your address, your financial information, amount of assets that you have, where you live, all that stuff.

And then what Paladin will do is they'll get in touch with you and a couple of advisors, and they'll put a couple of advisors in touch with you. My hope is that you will be able to meet some good advisors, and you'll be able to interview them for the job of being your financial advisor.

You don't have to choose them. I can't promise you that your personality is going to fit well with these people. Finding and retaining a good financial advisor is challenging. But at least you're going to have a good leg up and not just be starting with a random person that you see on the side of the street from a sign.

You'll start with somebody who's actually been vetted. So radicalpersonalfinance.com/paladin. Now, let's talk about 10 things that, 10 ways that you're already rich. And I know this is not normal stuff, but this is the reason why my show is called Radical Personal Finance. But just 10 things that I thoroughly appreciate and enjoy.

And I think that I want you to appreciate and enjoy about the wealth that you already have. 'Cause these 10 things, this is not an exhaustive list, these just 10 things are things that are really, really important to me. The first is, if you want to live rich, recognize that you get to enjoy easy access to electricity.

Not what you're expecting when you think about living rich, huh? But recognize the fact that every single one of you listening to me has easy access to electricity. You have easy access to electricity and that electricity is inexpensive for you to access. It's truly one of the most incredible technologies that we use every day and we're so insulated to it, we don't appreciate the impact that it makes in our life.

But I encourage you, go and spend some time living without electricity. Whether that's a weekend camping trip or you're out hiking through the wilderness, or whether you flip the circuit breaker on your house off for a weekend to test your blackout preparations, whatever it is, just figure out a way to try living without electricity and then recognize the tremendous benefit that easy access to electricity and light brings to you.

And now think about the panorama of human history and consider how rich you are in comparison to the majority of people who've lived before you. Electricity does some incredible things and easy access to light does some incredible things. This is one way that you're already living rich. If you don't have electricity, I have even better news for you because the world we live in today has the best, we just have some of the best access to be able to harness electricity.

I mean, the technology is amazing. I tell my wife sometimes, we talk about going and living off grid somewhere and building some off grid homestead or living out in the bush. And when I was younger, I always had this fear. Before I became a Christian, I always had this fear that if I became a Christian that God would somehow make me go live in the middle of Africa and live in a mud hut.

And I had to settle that before I became a Christian. But I often tell her, I said, "Listen, if we ever have to go live in Africa and live in a mud hut, I've got the inside track on the technology that makes living in a mud hut really, really good." I mean, I pay attention to the battery technology that's changing.

Lithium ion batteries have just tremendously revolutionizing battery technology. Lithium polymer batteries now are just amazing advances in technology that make it so easy where even if you don't have electric wire to your house, you can live a really great lifestyle. I won't go into all the details today, but if any of you are going to go live in a mud hut somewhere, get in touch with me and I'll share with you some ideas that can make your life really, really good.

Because for a few hundreds to a couple thousand dollars, you can use and harness the power of electricity to create a very comfortable life for yourself, completely off the grid. And it's incredible the technology that exists. Now, most of you don't have any need for it because you've got a wire coming to your house.

Recognize the fact that you are already living a rich life because of the electricity that you have. Number two on my list is easy cooking technologies. It kind of goes hand in hand with electricity. Some of you cook on electricity, which is fine. But just the sheer access to easy cooking technologies is really, really incredible.

I'm going to reference in some of these early things some personal experiences and some family experiences. But my dad grew up on a ranch in the middle of the Colorado mountains, and all they had to cook on every day was a wood stove. Now, I think it's fun to go and cook on an open fire.

I like to do that, go camping and cook on a bed of coals. But I'll tell you what, it is a lot of work to go and cook on wood. And if you go and you travel throughout much of the developing world, you will find that the simple challenges of daily things like cooking are a tremendous problem, tremendous problem.

And cooking technologies are a tremendous problem for many reasons. Many people in the developing world who don't have access to easy cooking technologies spend many hours of their week collecting fuel to cook their food on. They spend many hours cooking the food, developing, building the fire. And even the cooking methodology has a substantial impact on shortening their lifespan from smoke inhalation and all of the noxious chemicals they breathe from cooking over wood fires or dung fires or whatever they have to cook with.

And yet you and I flip on a gas stove with a turn of the knob, flip on an electric stove, flip on an electric oven, and we don't even give it a second thought. These things make you rich. No matter if you are the poorest person listening to my voice, these technologies make you rich.

And the cool thing is with the advancement of technology, even if it's in like cooking technology, just like I talk about battery technology and electrical generation technologies, there are things that have been developed with cooking technologies that make life just tremendously, tremendously easy. I've been, one of the things on my list to buy is I've been wanting to buy a small rocket stove for my kind of outdoor camping gear.

And I might get it soon, but I've done a lot of research on some of the new technologies with the rocket stove design. And you can buy these little stoves that you just feed with twigs and sticks and whatever you can scrounge around. They use a tiny amount of wood and they make an incredibly useful cooking flame.

And you can buy the things for, I don't know, 50 bucks, a couple hundred bucks if you want a fancy one. Easy cooking technologies make all the difference in the world. You can trot down to your local big box store and you can buy yourself a $20 stove that works on gas and you could take it anywhere in the world and hook up a little gas bottle or pour some gasoline into it if you buy the type that runs on a dual fuel stove and you can cook anywhere in the world so easily.

No noxious fumes. It's incredible. So if you've got any kind of access to easy cooking technologies, you're already living a rich life. Recognize that and appreciate it. Again, go build yourself a wood fire and now try to cook on that. The reason I referenced my grandmother cooking for years and years and years on a wood stove was you see these things about the good old days and I tell you, anybody who was there in the good old days doesn't want to go back.

Regulating a wood stove is not necessarily the easiest thing in the world. Now, the cool thing is, many people still today go and develop a wood stove system, but they're adding technology which has made it so much better. So even if you are living off the grid and you have a wood stove heating your house and you're cooking your food and one of my favorite was Ben Falk who I brought on many many shows ago on Permaculture Design.

He's got this awesome wood stove in his house there in Vermont that heats his water and cooks his food and keeps his house warm. Amazing application of technology. Even that is so much better than what people have done through history. So appreciate the fact that you're already living a rich life.

Number three, heating and cooling. Almost every one of you listening to this show has access to heating and cooling systems and these things make your life so much better. You are already rich if you have access to heating and cooling. And again, the development of new technologies, things that have come on on the heating side, I see very few good ones on the cooling side, but on the heating side, some of the development of new technologies have made things so much better and it's only getting better.

And if you don't have access to heating and cooling systems, you could still design for yourself a really great lifestyle just simply through the application of a little bit of intelligent design into your dwelling. I'll short circuit this one and go on to the next one. Labor-saving appliances such as washing machines.

I'd encourage you, if you've never had the challenge of cleaning your clothes without a washing machine, I encourage you to figure out how to do that. One time years ago, I was living with a family way out in the country in Nicaragua for a short period of time and I was staying with them.

And during that period of time, I needed to wash my clothes. And this was the first time that I had ever needed to do laundry without a washing machine. And so my host family, the host mother, offered to wash my clothes for me and so I gave her my dirty clothes and she washed them.

And then I was watching how they were doing all the washing. It was their washing day and they were washing everything by hand. So I said, "Oh, okay, this will be fun. I'll trot over there and I'll try this. I've never washed clothes by hand." So I trotted over and had the washing board with the ridges on it and I tried to scrub my jeans.

And about five minutes later, I was exhausted. I didn't even want to... And I thought, "Okay, this is done." And my clothes weren't even close to clean. In much of the world, getting clean clothes is an all-day affair. Here in my family, we do cloth diapers for our kids.

We do a load of laundry about every day, every other day. You just pop it in, push the button, click start, and it's done. What a luxury. And yet just about every one of you listening to my show has that luxury and you don't appreciate it. You don't realize how rich you are.

You don't realize how incredibly valuable a washing machine is. Pay attention. Next way that you're already rich and pay attention to is the fact that we all enjoy easy and practically free communication with the entire world. This one is so easy to gloss over because we're so used to it now.

You expect to get instant access to communication from the other side of the world for free. You expect when there's something going on, the first place you go is to Twitter or to Facebook and see what's happening live and in real time. This is so new in terms of the history of the world and yet we're so used to it at this point in time.

My parents are in their 70s and in the early years of their marriage, my father was in the Navy and he was in the submarine and they would go off on these cruises, on the submarine cruise, I think he went on three different six-month cruises. And the way that my parents communicated, so at first he was gone for six months at a time and of course they would sometimes write letters but the way that they would communicate is they would make tapes.

They would use a cassette recorder and they would record a tape and they would mail that to each other. So if there was meeting them at a port of call or however they could pick up mail, they would mail that to each other and that was their form of communication.

Six months and what you get is a letter here and there and some tapes. Today, you can go anywhere in the world. If you can find a Wi-Fi connection, you can talk to somebody on the other side of the world with no additional cost. Isn't that incredible? Another thing to put that into perspective, my great aunt and uncle live in Alaska and many, many years ago, they moved up there to be homesteaders and my great aunt, her husband had met her and had taken her from California to Alaska.

So they were going up there and they're doing the Alaska homesteading thing. His birthday present to her at that point in time was one time per year to pay for a long distance phone call so that she could call home and speak to her mother and to her sisters.

One time per year. I don't remember how long but maybe something like 15 minutes. That was all they could afford. Can you imagine that today? You leave your family and you move thousands of miles away and you can only speak to your family one time per year and you probably can't afford to travel home in person for at least many, many years, if ever.

Isn't that incredible? And yet we forget about the fact of how rich we are. Yes, these are material things. Material things that we're kind of crossing the barrier of immaterial communication abilities but recognize how rich you are. Next one which is kind of correlated with this one is easy global transportation.

Every single one of you, no matter your level of income or level of wealth, enjoys access to a global transportation infrastructure that is so incredibly convenient. You can expect to go from where you are to the other side of the world and no matter where it is, you could probably get there in about two or three days and you think you're suffering if your plane is an hour late.

You think you're suffering if your plane is canceled and you got to wait till the next day and take the next flight. I know, I think I'm suffering when that happens. You're not suffering. First, you have an incredible privilege to be able to travel from where you are to another place.

This is something that the richest people in the world hardly had access to many years ago and yet for you and me, we do it all the time. And also when you think about the danger that was involved in travel so many times and you think about how incredibly challenging and torturous it was to travel and up till relatively recently, the technology was so difficult.

Go and read about, I don't know, let's see, U.S., go and read about the U.S. immigration. Think about the westward immigration and what the settlers, what a hundred and something years ago faced. Go read about what the Mormons faced and how many of them died when they were traveling the Oregon Trail going from the east coast of the United States out to Utah.

Go and read those things. Many years ago or a few years ago, my wife and I, we traveled out to Wyoming to visit family and we went out to a place where the Oregon Trail roads are and west of the corner of Wyoming, forget the name of the fort, Laramie, maybe it's Fort Laramie, I can't remember, but the name of the fort out there and there's this place there where there are wagon ruts in the sandstone and it's a couple of feet deep.

And I just remember going out there and I just sat down and stared at the wagon ruts and just thought about the people that had passed that way. And we're talking rock, not granite rock, but sandstone, so it's a softer rock, but this rock, these ruts were seven feet deep and I know I'm not exaggerating, about seven feet deep worn.

And these are worn by people pushing hand carts across the country. And yet you and I, if we wanted to go across the country today, a couple hundred bucks gets you on an airplane and gets you there in a few hours. A few hundred bucks gets you a working car and you can drive yourself across the country in a few days.

You call yourself poor? Pay attention to it. You can go and do all kinds of things. I just bought an RV last week and I flew up to Atlanta, bought it off of Craigslist in Atlanta and I paid $60. I found a ticket on sale, paid 60 bucks to fly from West Palm Beach, Florida to Atlanta, Georgia.

Everybody can do that. Easy global transportation. Recognize it and appreciate it. A couple more and then we're going to go to the things that are more normal, the things you're expecting on a show like this. Comfortable furniture. The majority of you listening to this show have comfortable furniture to sit on, comfortable bed to sleep in and you don't even think twice about it.

I encourage you, if you can get yourself in a position to where you are without comfortable furniture, you'll appreciate it when you come back. I learned this, I don't know, six or seven years ago. I traveled to the Philippines. I spent a month in the Philippines and I was there traveling around, preaching in some different churches and as we were on that trip, one of the things was my first time to the Philippines and in that month that I was there, I didn't sit on something soft for a month and the places that we were traveling were very primitive.

We weren't traveling in Western vacation tourist hotels and what I learned, first of all, you learn to appreciate a soft bed. The traditional Filipino sleeping style, their traditional dwelling is something called a nipa hut and it's a bamboo structure with a thatch roof and the floor is made of bamboo and the normal way of sleeping is just to roll out a bamboo mat out onto the floor and you roll out this bamboo mat and you sleep on the bamboo mat.

Well, some houses also have plank floors, wooden plank floors and so a couple of places that we were at, we weren't in bamboo huts, we were on these wooden plank floors and roll out a bamboo mat and I mean picture something like a front door welcome mat, that's what a bamboo mat is, just something to put between you but it's not at all soft.

You roll out a bamboo mat on a wooden plank floor and that's the extent of your soft bed. So I slept in those for a few days and after a while, you get tired enough and you sleep but then the other thing is that all of your things to sit on, you never sit on anything soft.

You're either sitting on bamboo furniture which is wood furniture with no padding or you're sitting in like those plastic lawn chairs or plastic porch chairs, those are very common throughout much of the world and that's what you sit in. Well, after a month, man, my sitter was so sore, I wanted to just have something soft and the best thing about coming home was being able to sit on a soft couch or sit in a soft chair.

Never appreciated it in my life until then but I tell you, you go for a month without sitting on something soft and you will be very grateful to sit in that comfortable chair that you sit in every night. Very grateful. Yet, when's the last time you looked at that chair and said, "Man, I'm so glad that I'm rich enough to afford this chair." Next, do you appreciate the fact that you have access to the world's information for essentially free?

The amount of information and knowledge that is available to you in today's world is stunning. It's practically all for free. This fact alone is revolutionizing and transforming the world right before your very eyes and it's lifting millions of people out of poverty and it's making options and ideas available to you that have never been available in the history of the world.

I'm not going to labor this point because already this section has taken me longer but pay attention to the fact that you can access just about any piece of information for free. Next, recognize the fact that you have access to plentiful, healthy food with a very low cost. Now, I know many people disbelieve me.

I tell you, I do shows, when I do a show where we talk about how you can live great for cheap and people say, "Josh, you don't spend that much money." You can't do it on that. You can live, at least in the United States. I need to be careful with my words here because it's not the same everywhere but in the United States, you have access to so much healthy food for cheap.

There is no reason for anyone to go hungry. If you look at the poverty statistics in the United States, they are so mind-numbingly small and when you interact with the people there, what you generally find is they don't even-- the people who are hungry, people who do miss meals, there's no need to when you have a little bit of education.

In your town, right near you, you can have access to inexpensive, healthy, high-quality food. You never have to go hungry. Don't need a handout. All those systems are there. You don't need it with an EBT card or a SNAP card. Those things are there. Just saying, you go down to the local grocery store and you can find all kinds of great food for cheap.

If the grocery store is too expensive, go down to your local fruit stand. Find out where all of the non-white people in your town shop. Ask them and go shop there and all of a sudden, you'll find that you cut your grocery budget by a significant margin. Recognize the fact that that fact alone makes you rich.

Finally, you have the liberty to make choices. You have the liberty to choose where you live. You have the liberty to choose what you do. You have the liberty to choose countries, cities, towns. You have the liberty to make choices. In the history of the world, it has not always been thus.

So appreciate the fact that you can make a change. Almost every aspect of your life is there because of a choice you've made. There are some things that are beyond your control. But many of the things that you look at in your life, these are choices that you've made.

Whether you made them consciously or unconsciously, that was your choice. Still, you made choices. Recognize and appreciate that. You live in the country you live in because you're choosing to be there. I'm not particularly thrilled these days to be living in the United States of America. But you know what?

I'm making the conscious choice to be here. I'm not here because I have to. I'm here because I want to be. And it's the same for many of you. You're in the country that you're in because that's where you want to be. That's incredible. So I'm going to transition here from these very, very unusual topics to more of the mainstream things that you're expecting in a show like this.

But I want to emphasize to you that you are richer and you have access to more luxury goods than just about anybody at any point in time in the course of human history. Every one of you who's listening to the sound of my voice right now, today, is enjoying more material wealth and riches and a richer lifestyle than was available to the richest person in the world 50 years ago.

And even today, no matter your income or your level of wealth, you can live in many things and in many ways as well as the richest person in the world today. You can maintain your house at exactly the same temperature as Bill Gates. You may not have his 142 extra rooms, but you can maintain your house at the same temperature.

And let me ask you a question. What's going to make a bigger difference in your life? Would you rather have 140 extra rooms that you don't go in that are all too hot or too cold for your comfort? Or would you rather have three rooms that are all perfectly climate-controlled for your comfort?

Every one of you would choose the climate-controlled three rooms versus the 140 rooms that aren't comfortable for you. So Bill Gates doesn't have anything that you can't have. I guess in theory, his AC bill might be – he might be able to afford the AC bill a little bit more than you can.

Get a smaller room and insulate it and now you can have that room as cold as you want. You can sleep in the best quality bed. Luxury stuff doesn't cost all that much. Even if you have to buy a $10,000 bed like I went through before. Are you telling me that if Bill Gates spends a million dollars on a bed that somehow he has a better bed than you do?

Yeah, it might have a gold bed frame and silk sheets, but you can have all that stuff too. Not the gold, but does that make a difference when you're sleeping? You can drive your car the same exact speeds and enjoy the same exact roads that the billionaire next to you can.

They might be sitting in a $200,000 car, but guess what? The air conditioner on my $500 car works just as well as the air conditioner does in a $200,000 car and they can't drive theirs any faster on the road than I can. Now, they can pay off the cop and pay the speeding ticket, but they can't drive all that much faster.

Yeah, on the track they could, but guess what? I can go to the track and I can watch and if I want to spend a weekend at the races, a weekend driving a car, $1,000. I get access to the car. I always chuckle. Here where I live in West Palm Beach, I guess Donald Trump calls this his, I don't know if his home, his second home, but I always laugh.

He's got this big gaudy black airplane and he comes down here to the Palm Beach International Airport and he always parks the thing right out in front where you can see it. It's kind of annoying to me because I'm not into the gaudy thing. He's got this big black airplane and it says Trump on it and he parks it right by the road.

So you always know when Donald Trump's in town and I take guests by and show them Mar-a-Lago on Palm Beach as part of kind of like my standard Palm Beach tour. And then I drive past every week going to a friend's house. I drive past his golf course here in the one that's – it's just south of the Palm Beach International Airport and it's a big Trump golf course, giant gaudy gold gates and all these things.

I can't remember what the fees are. I think it's a few hundred thousand bucks to join and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a year for the membership. But I always laugh because that golf course looks up on the Palm Beach County prison. The prison looks down on that golf course and the jail, the local Palm Beach County jail looks down on the golf course.

It's all the prisoners. I always just chuckle thinking of what they're seeing from up above from their cell, looking out the window and looking down at Trump's golf course. I always laugh because the roads around the golf course are not all that great. They're not bad. They're not unsafe.

But the roads are fine. What I mean is the neighborhoods are not all of that. They're not posh. They're not – it's not Palm Beach Island. And so I just chuckle because here you have a billionaire and all of the billionaires and multimillionaires who are members of the golf course and they drive on the same roads that you and I do through the same kind of mediocre neighborhoods to get to the golf course.

And if you want to golf, you can go down and you can play golf at the public – at the – it's south of Palm Beach, Lantana, public golf course. It's right on the ocean. Is it as beautiful as Trump golf course? No, it's not. But it's really good and has a much better view where you can see the ocean instead of the jail.

You have the same internet. You can buy for yourself the same internet access speeds as the richest people in the world and you get all the same information as they can. Now, obviously, there are things that break down. From what I'm told, I read Warren Buffett's book Snowball a number of years ago and he said the one thing that I don't ever want to give up about being a billionaire is having a private airplane.

OK, fine. But you know what? It doesn't take all that much money to buy a NetJets membership and get all the benefits of the private airplane without all the hassle. There are many things that you don't have. But if you look and recognize the fact that you have more luxury goods in your life, the phone on your hip gives you more access to the world, the information of the world, than the president of the United States had 25 years ago.

Pay attention to that. I think it's important to recognize that. Now, let's move past batteries and solar power and jets and composting toilets and let's talk about some normal things. Most of us are familiar with the idea of things versus experiences. And I would just emphasize that in general, you're going to appreciate and value the money and time that you spend on experiences much more than the money and time that you spend on things.

But there are some ways that you can live rich now and have some of the material things dramatically influence the benefit of your experience. Let's talk about housing. You can make your house feel like a rich person's house if you learn how a rich person makes their house feel rich.

And you can do it with any size of house and probably with any budget. Now, for the rest of the show, I'm not talking about people who are in survival mode. I'm talking about normal middle class to upper middle class households. But these techniques are still applicable to your situation.

And my proof of that would be if you look at some things, if you look at sailboat design, if you look at tiny house design, if you look at some of these little interesting niches where people apply good design to very small spaces, you'll find that they can create a luxurious feeling in a tiny space.

So even if you're living in a one-bedroom apartment, good design will take you to making that space feel rich and feel luxurious. But a couple of suggestions for you to think about how to live rich now with your house. First, choose location over just about anything else because the location of your house will drive your lifestyle more than anything else.

We who are here in Florida like to taunt those of you who live in the snowy north and just demonstrate. Now, if you want to – you can live in a big fancy house, but if you can't bear to go outside in February, it may not be as much fun.

And you can have a small little house with a beautiful garden out back that you can go outside in February and you'll enjoy it a lot more. Now, there's geographic location with regard to climates and climate zones, but there's also geographic location with regard to your city, your town.

If you want to live near the water, if you want to live away from the water, if you want to live in the country, if you want to live in the city, whatever those things are, if you choose your house carefully and choose a location, that will dramatically impact your experience and your enjoyment of it.

And although there are exceptions, you can usually find a place to live in the location that you want. This last Sunday night, we went for a walk on Palm Beach Island. In Palm Beach, there's this thing called the Lake Trail, and it cruises right along the intercoastal here and right up behind the mansions.

And you're walking past on the Lake Trail and you're walking past the backyards of 15, 20, $25 million houses. But I was just always interested and I always pay attention to these details. The street that I parked on in order for us to have access to the Lake Trail for our Sunday evening walk, the street that I parked on had a small apartment building there.

Now, it's not an apartment building like normal. It doesn't look like an apartment building. But I knew it was an apartment building because I had known somebody who lived there at one time. And you could rent a small apartment right there on Palm Beach Island, right next to the $25 million house and have the experiences and the enjoyment of the Palm Beach lifestyle for a couple thousand dollars a month.

There's always a way. In almost any zip code, there's a way you could live there. So choose your location. The best houses usually have the best locations. Then think carefully about the amenities that you actually want and buy them. Most people don't want the amenity of 48 extra rooms.

If you need it to impress somebody, fine. You might need to buy a house with 48 extra rooms. But you can only be in one room at a time. And depending on the size of your family, you can probably only occupy a certain relatively small number of rooms at one time.

So your enjoyment of your house is not going to be based upon how many rooms it has or how many square feet. It's going to be based upon the amenities in those rooms. If you bought a large house with lots of extra rooms but you didn't have a functional kitchen, you just had a basic kitchen, would you get as much enjoyment out of that as you would if you bought a smaller house with an extremely functional, extremely luxurious-feeling kitchen?

If you want to live rich now, start with a kitchen because in many houses that's the heart of the home. Take the house that you have, hire an interior designer and a kitchen designer, and make your kitchen luxurious. You will probably not recoup the money when you sell the house.

But you'll have a place that you want to be. If you have a backyard, you can have a backyard that's empty and bare, and nobody really wants to be in it. Well, you could go buy a fancier house, a bigger house perhaps, but you could also go ahead and spend $10,000 or $20,000 landscaping the backyard.

If you want a pool, put one in. If you don't want one, take it out. If you want a garden installed, install a garden. Install a water feature. Install a backyard kitchen. Install something that makes you want to be there, and create the house with the amenities that you desire, and go ahead and buy them.

Upgrade the things in the house that add pleasure for you. If you accomplish location and amenities, you'll be living a rich lifestyle no matter where you are. Those are usually the two things that make the biggest difference, not the size of the house or the gaudiness. Lots of ways you can live rich in the house.

Pay attention to the furnishings. You might reach a point in time where you can upgrade your furnishings. Pay attention to the artwork. If you want to create a feeling of richness, don't buy the cheap tacky stuff. Go ahead and spend the money on the good stuff. You don't need to buy the $20 million painting, but go ahead and put a painting that's classy.

If you don't have the skill for it, hire the designer. Create the house that you want to come home to. So you can live rich now in the house that you are if you pay attention to it. This one's always hard for me because I don't want to spend money on this stuff, but it is important to spend money on these things, especially if you want to live rich.

Let's talk about the car that you drive, another budget category that many of us spend a lot of money on. One of the keys with the car is think carefully, but if you want to live rich, you're probably better off buying more of a luxury car, a really good car, and owning it for a long time.

One of the things that's destructive if you look at the habits of those who are poor is they often buy – and here I'm not talking about the subsistence poor but people who are just lower class. They often buy cheap cars and are always getting rid of them instead of buying a car that they want to have for a long period of time.

You can buy a $9,000 Kia Rio and that's an amazing automobile. If you were in the first half of the show, I talked to you about the fact that Kia Rio has a radio in it. You can listen to stuff from your phone from all over the world. I talked about how you can drive comfortably on the highway.

I talked about the fact that the AC works so great. It's economical. That's the first half. Now let's just talk about what it's actually like to be in. You're in a car. It doesn't feel all that great on the highway. It kind of feels a little bit cheap. You're surrounded by plastic.

Well, you could spend $9,000 on a Kia Rio or you could go and spend $9,000 on a nice luxury car that's a few years old and your experience in that luxury car will be dramatically different. If you want to live rich, consider buying a really nice car from a really good brand and owning it for a really long time.

Do the math. Think it through. But when you actually look at luxury goods and you figure out what's the price that you pay and what's the price at the value of it when you sell it and how long do you own it, the price that you pay up front is not always the most important thing.

Length of ownership will probably be the most dramatic impact to your budget. So what I mean is all cars are going to depreciate, but the longer you keep the car, the less costly the depreciation is. If you just want to decrease the amount of money that you spend on cars and you want to increase the amount of enjoyment, go ahead and buy that new car or save the money and buy the car that's one to three years old.

Buy the newer car, but just buy the car that you're going to be happy keeping for a long time. That will dramatically decrease your cost and dramatically increase your enjoyment. Let's talk about food. Here I'm just going through budget categories. This is how I came up with just some of the things that I said.

You can eat the best food in the world on the budget that you have now if you simply pay attention to it. You may not be able at this point in time to go out and buy a $1,500 meal, but you could take the components of that meal, look up the recipe online where some chef has deconstructed whatever the menu is at that exclusive restaurant, practice their techniques, buy the food, and you could create that great food for yourself.

Cooking great food for yourself is a great way to eat rich. If you want to cook for quality food, buy it, cook it yourself. There are many tips and techniques if you want to go to restaurants. You can go to the world's greatest restaurants. If you go at a different time of day, you can afford to be there.

I've done this frequently where I might go to a restaurant, again, here in Palm Beach. When I just say Palm Beach, it's one of the most expensive places in the world for stuff, and you can spend as much or as little. I'll often go to some of the expensive restaurants but go for lunch instead of dinner.

You get the same experience, same quality of food, but a fourth of the price. Or if you want to go and have the experience, then go to the restaurant, enjoy the experience, but get appetizers and drinks and skip the three-course meal. All kinds of ways to do it, all kinds of ways to take things like the restaurants and enjoy them on less just by being slightly out of it, out of sync.

Another great way to live a rich lifestyle with regard to food is develop diverse tastes and be willing to try something new and something special. In dining, and here I'm just talking about dining out, if you have diverse tastes or if you're willing to try something different, you can experience all kinds of things for cheap.

You can live a really adventurous lifestyle with regard to your food that doesn't cost that much. But if you only eat a certain type of cooking, yes, you might have to go to the expensive restaurant. Many other ideas on food, but let's keep going. I'm coming to the end of the time that I want to keep this show to today.

Drinks. Simple suggestion for you, do you like the water that you drink? For a couple hundred or a few thousand bucks depending on how you actually choose to install it, you can get the world's greatest water that just tastes fantastic, and you can drink that. If you think about the things that stress you out, I focus on this because many people think drinks, "Oh, I immediately got to go to my wine cellar.

I immediately got to go to some expensive type of thing." Just make sure that you have great water. We did this in our house. We're now on a city water system, and I bought a water filter. The one I bought is this thing called a Big Berkey, and then I bought the chlorine and the fluoride filters for it.

I put the city water through that, filters out the chlorine, the fluoride, takes out any of the minerals that happen to be in it. The water tastes fantastic. A couple hundred and something bucks up front. New filters every couple of years, and the cool thing about it is you can actually pour pond water in that thing, and it'll create safe water to drink.

So that's part of my hurricane plan. It tastes great. I spent years at a house that, when I was younger, spent years at a house that didn't like the water, and then finally, my parents went ahead and got a nice water filtration system. That little upgrade made a bigger difference in our lifestyle than just about anything else.

Another one, get a great shower. We have this awesome showerhead that has great shower pressure, and every single time, it's like being in this incredible—it's just a great experience. Hot water and lots of it. I feel like living rich even though we're in a cheap apartment. I'm going to skip.

I mean, there's so many things you could go to, to other types of drinks and other things like that. Just recognize the fact of the incredible variety that's available to you. I'll make two comments on drinks. The incredible variety that's available to you in terms of different things to drink, whether alcoholic or nonalcoholic, and the incredible quality that's available to you.

Probably the people who are the snobbiest in—the people who are the snobbiest is people who are really into different types of alcoholic drinks. I'm not making fun of people. I just think it's funny because people are really snobby about their particular drink of choice. But you go to a store.

We have one near us called Total Wine. If you have one near you, go check it out if you've never been there. You walk into a store like Total Wine. It's practically the size of a large grocery store, and all it has is alcohol. I don't think you could buy a bad drink in that store.

And it's practically all cheap. It doesn't matter if you're a multimillionaire. You can't get a bigger beer selection than what you and I can get of walking into a Total Wine and more. And you can buy the most expensive bottle of beer they have for almost nothing, a few bucks.

Now, wines, you can get expensive wines. Sure, some people go for that. I'll tell you my theory. I go to Total Wine and more, and they sell boxed wine. And here's my theory on boxed wine. I can't prove this, but I'm not a wine snob. I do enjoy a good red wine, but I'm not a wine snob.

And here's my theory. Because there's such a low-class stigma associated with boxed wine, I'm convinced that the winemakers really only put good wine in boxes. I think you could probably buy some bad bottles of wine, probably not at a big store like Total Wine and more, but at a corner gas station or whatever, just super cheap.

But I don't think you can buy a bad box of wine because I think they know that they've got to overcome people's snobbery when it comes to buying something that comes in a bottle with a cork instead of buying something that comes in a box. And the technology of a box of wine is so vastly superior to the technology of a bottle.

They're trying to make that change, but people just aren't accepting it. So at Total Wine and more, you can get these boxes of wine and they often put them on sale. And they'll also – their wine person, their staff will put on these different boxes, staff's choice. So there are four bottles of wine that go into a box.

So when you buy a box of wine, you're buying the equivalent of four bottles. And at Total Wine and more, they put these things on sale for $12, which means you've got a cost of $3 a bottle. So I buy these boxes when they go on sale and I serve them in my house with different dinner guests.

And I have never served this particular brand to a guest and had them say, "Man, Joshua, this is terrible wine." Usually I just serve it, but almost always I get an unsolicited comment, "Man, this wine is great." And then I tell them what I just told you, box of wine, three boxes of bottle, but it's really good wine.

So there's my theory for you. You're not going to get a bad box of wine because they know they got to make it good. Now, you might not like that particular type of wine. You might not like that particular type of drink, but it's probably not all that bad.

It's just something that you don't like. So get great water. Get boxed wine. That's all I got for you on drinks. Clothes, how many clothes can you wear at one time? The mistake that poor people make is they buy lots of clothes that they bought on impulse that are cheaply made, that they don't like to wear, that don't fit them very well.

The thing that rich people do is they buy clothes that are quality, that fit them well, and that they feel good in. So choose quality over quantity and buy stuff you love and own things that fit you. It's a challenge for me. I'm in the process of trying to revamp my wardrobe.

But same thing. That's what rich people do. You can only wear one set of clothes at a time. And the even more telling thing about clothes, it's usually not the clothes that make the person. It's the body under the clothes that makes the clothes look good. It doesn't require lots of money to get a better body.

It requires discipline and effort and a little bit of knowledge. Finally, vacation and entertainment. I just want to point out to you that you can access, if you pay attention, you can access the world's greatest leisure time opportunities on a pretty inexpensive budget. And there are so many aspects to this.

So many people fall into this trap of going to the movies every week. And they don't ever think about going to the theater. They don't ever think about taking in a musical or an opera if you're into that or those things. In your city, there are tons of those types of opportunities that are available.

$50 ticket, $30 ticket, that's called living rich. Fly to New York, set up a New York weekend and go to Broadway all weekend. Cost you $1,000, $2,000 for the weekend. It's called living rich. If you pay attention and you prioritize some of these experiences, some of these rich person experiences, you can experience them without spending a ton of money.

Things like vacation. I know some of you like to have timeshares and second houses and things like that. I can make something of a case for a second house in some circumstances, especially if it's going to be a bonding place for your family. Oh, we always go to this cabin in the woods and that's kind of our special thing.

But the majority of the time, man, you spend so much money on that stuff and it's so unnecessary. It's far easier and cheaper and less hassle to go and stay at a five-star hotel and change it up every couple of years when you want to go to somewhere different.

You can go to the best resort town in the world and you can stay there for a week in a great hotel. You don't need to have a house there that sits empty all the time. Why would you want to have another house to take care of, another house to pay for, another house to deal with, another set of maintenance problems to deal with?

Just go and stay in a hotel and have a great time. There are so many of these ways that if you look and you practice, you'll start to open up opportunities to yourselves that you never knew and you can live an incredible lifestyle. But you got to think about it.

If you want to live rich, it's a decision and it's a skill set. Part of it is just enjoying and appreciating some of the things I talked about, the immaterial things, richness of diversity. I so value so many of the experiences I've had that on the outside are nothing comfortable.

But comfort is not the goal. You find rich people and poor people alike seeking things that drag them out of what their norm is, participating in these hardcore athletic endeavors or making themselves miserable doing some kind of ultra sport thing. Comfort is not the goal, but you get that diversity of experience.

That's what a rich lifestyle is about. But you can access these things without the money. If you're willing to accept the difficult things and enjoy them as part of the story. I so value that time that when I shared the story about sleeping on wooden floors without a mattress.

I so value that time. Was it easy? No, it wasn't easy. But it was a rich experience for me for many reasons, not just because of the physical hardship. And I'd do it again in an instant. So develop that diversity of experience. And the other cool thing when you're experiencing these things, if you have the ability to appreciate the extremes, you can experience the extremes.

That same trip to the Philippines, went and had a friend, a Filipino friend who was a chef at one of the five-star resorts there. And we went and enjoyed a meal there at the five-star resort. Best meal that money could buy. Living rich. I've done this in every country, every place in the world.

You can go into the fanciest club. You can go into the fanciest bar, the fanciest restaurant, the fanciest hotel and go and stay there for a day and have a great experience. If you're in Hong Kong, you can go to the – what's the fancy hotel with all the Rolls Royces?

The Peninsula. You can go to the Peninsula Hotel and you can go and have their tea. Here in Palm Beach, you can go and have Breaker's Brunch. I think it's what, $60, something like that. World's greatest food. It's fantastic. It doesn't cost that much to live rich. It requires a little bit of thinking and planning.

That's it. Those are some of my ideas. Oh, one note. There is a good book that I read years ago on this topic. It was given away for a long time as a freebie by Michael Masterson. I think you can get it on Amazon, but it was available as a freebie.

I don't know if they still have it on the Early to Rise site. Living Rich. It was a bunch of essays. If you do a web search for Living Rich Michael Masterson, you'll find some of his essays. He's one of the guys, a rich guy who's done a good job of writing on some of these topics.

He goes into all these different stories and different studies. It's a great niche for one of you people to pick up as well and talk more about how to live rich. I've just decided to do kind of a cursory overview in this show. Pay attention to it. Focus on it.

Don't let money be the thing that stops you. Lots of other ways to do it, but I promise you, you can live rich now. You can take your little apartment and you can decorate it beautifully. You can more want to be there than the biggest house. Good design, thoughtfulness, luxury.

These things do not always require a lot of money. Yes, there are times that it is going to require a lot of money. You might need to put in a $30,000 kitchen and that might be appropriate at some stage of your life. But you know what? If you start with the mindset I tried to share at the beginning of the show, give me a cast iron pan and a Coleman stove and the right seasonings and the right knowledge, and I can make the world's greatest steak on a picnic table at the beach.

I do that sometimes. It's not the fancy kitchen equipment. It's not a good cook make. It's a skill. And a skill you can get with a little bit of effort, a little bit of practice and YouTube, which you can access for free on your phone, which is why I started with all those things at the beginning of the show.

Thank you all so much for listening. Appreciate it. I hope you all have an awesome day. Two reminders that this content is valuable to you and you would like to help me live rich. You want to put a little cash in my pocket as a thank you. Become a patron of the show radical personal finance dot com slash patron.

Lots of benefits there for you as a patron of the show. Radical personal finance dot com slash patron. I would greatly appreciate your support and your patronage. Also, if you would like to consult with me on a personal consulting call of something, you can book a phone call with me at radical personal finance dot com slash phone call.

Hey, cricket customers, Max with ads is included with your cricket. Sixty dollar unlimited plan at no additional cost. Max is the streaming platform where you can watch Scoob Meg to the trench, the Nightmare on Elm Street collection and so much more. Just log in with your cricket username and password to experience Max on all your favorite devices.

We never seen this before. Max, the one to watch for a good scream with cricket. Phone plan streams and standard definition programming subject to change. These terms and restrictions apply. See cricket wireless dot com for details.