Enjoying your podcast? We'll be brief. If you're looking for the perfect holiday gift, give Scratchers from the California Lottery. With so many to choose from, you're sure to find the right gift for anyone on your list. Now that your holiday shopping list is figured out, enjoy this bird singing Jingle Bells.

Give the gift of Scratchers from the California Lottery. A little play can make your day. Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we're going to talk about freedom. No talk of the American Revolution today. We're going to talk about financial freedom.

I'm going to round out this trilogy of shows by talking about how you can achieve financial freedom in 10 years or less. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement that you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host. Thank you for being here with me. This is the third in a series of shows where I've been explaining to you how to actually do the things I mention in that tagline. I've been using this tagline for a little while here, and it's very meaningful to me.

It was created out of a lot of thought and some experience and working on things. And then I've done two shows so far about how to live a rich life, what are some of the immaterial aspects of a rich life, and what are some of the material aspects of a rich life.

And today we're going to tackle this discussion of financial freedom in 10 years or less. This is probably the third-- I mean, this is the third in this series. It might be the last one in the series, or I might do one more on the difference between knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement.

That is one important topic, and I didn't talk about that, but that's ultimately what I aim to convey to you. Sometimes knowledge, sometimes talk about skills, sometimes talk about insight, and sometimes encouragement. I chose those four words carefully, so it's possible in the future I'll do one more show explaining the difference between those things and why we need all four of them.

But today we're going to tackle that financial freedom question in 10 years or less. I'm going to defend this idea to you and talk about why I believe this is an absolute possibility for any one of you listening. Here is the claim that I'm going to make. I don't care where you're starting from.

I don't care where you are today. I believe that with good coaching and knowledge and then with good follow-through on your behalf, you can be financially free in 10 years or less. That's my claim. And today I've got to defend that claim to some degree. Now, you'll notice, of course, immediately that anytime you hear a claim, you should immediately ask definitions.

A good skill to develop if you're not comfortable with it is that anytime you hear somebody making a claim of any kind, from any aspect of knowledge, any claim of knowledge or any claim of possibility, immediately investigate the definitions. So we're going to spend a lot of time talking about what financial freedom is and how I'm defining it there.

But that is my claim. I believe that no matter where you are starting from today, with good coaching and with good follow-through on your behalf, you can go from where you are to being financially free in 10 years or less. So we're going to discuss that here today. This is particularly poignant because as I record this show, it's Friday, July 1, 2016.

Not doing a Q&A show today. We're doing this show on financial freedom. And Monday is here in the United States, July 4th. July 4th is in the United States, considered to be Independence Day. It's the commemoration of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This was the document that the 13 American colonies at that time used to declare themselves as a new and independent nation.

So that's the celebration theoretically of freedom. We won't talk about the fact that to associate the Independence Day holiday with the celebration of – actually, we will talk about it. So five sentences. If you don't like political discussions, fast forward, skip forward about 60 seconds. But I always dread a little bit July 4th because it's one of the worst holidays ever.

It's remembered and painted in the US American culture as a celebration of independence and freedom. After all, we declared our freedom from Britain. But a couple of simple facts for you to consider and to pique your interest if you're into researching such things. But the people living in the American colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence, before that, were probably the freest people on earth.

If you want to cry, think about your tax burden in today's world. Think about the world that you live in in today's world. And now let me tell you that the taxation, the total taxation put on the US American colonies by the British imperial authority was probably about one percent of the total income of the colonies.

That would be the best estimate, about one percent. It could have been in the southern end of the United States and the southern colonies would have been as high as about two and a half percent. Now compare that to the level of taxation that you currently pay and ask yourself if you're more free.

And then in almost any kind of non-financial measurement that you want to assess, if the colonists woke up living the lives that you and I live, there would be blood in the streets by the end of the day. I'm quite confident of it. In 1775, Great Britain was the second freest nation on earth.

I've read articles talking about how Switzerland was probably the freest nation. But Great Britain was the second freest nation on earth and the American colonies outside of Great Britain, as long as you weren't a slave, as long as you weren't a slave, had the freest experience of any people within the British colonial system.

So if you were taught differently, you might want to go back and research who wrote those textbooks and what political ends are served by your believing that you are free today and freer today because of the Declaration of Independence. Back on track here. Let's not get too bogged down in such political meanderings.

Let's talk about freedom with regard to financial freedom. And that's my basic point. I just simply wanted to connect that financial freedom is celebrating a so-called Independence Day. It's a good day to talk about financial freedom. The other day that today is important to me, July 1, 2016, this is the two-year anniversary of my going out and starting Radical Personal Finance.

Two years ago today, I had terminated my contract with Northwestern Mutual on the 30th of June or a few days before, something like that. And July 1, I sat down in front of the microphone and recorded episode 11 of Radical Personal Finance. You can still hear that. It was the new first episode of the show.

And I explained that two years ago today. And the last two years have been quite the experience. I had extreme highs, extreme lows, a lot of success, a lot of failure. I mean I've failed at more things this last year than I would care to talk about in public.

It's pretty depressing when I think about them. I mean the last year has been really tough. I've failed at a bunch of significant things, and it's been really tough, especially the last six months have been extremely difficult. I've made some major mistakes with my business and just different things all across the board.

But we're still plugging away, and that's the joy and the fun of pursuing freedom because today I consider myself to be financially free. I'm pretty excited about that. And so I want to share with you a little bit more about this. Let's talk about financial freedom and what I mean by that so we can talk about some of the strategies and why I believe that you can do this in 10 years or less.

First, I've talked about the stages of financial independence. At RadicalPersonalFinance.com you'll see a category listed under topics where it talks about the stages of financial independence. And I wrote these out and made them up, but I made up seven stages of financial independence. I'm going to go through them and briefly explain them.

There is a comprehensive show in the archives explaining the details of these. But I call stage zero financial dependence. And at stage zero we talk about – we all start from depending on some other person for our care and for our provision. So whether you're a young adult who's trying to transition from being dependent upon your parents for your financial support to being self-supporting or whether you're an adult and you've hit a difficult patch of life where you're being supported by others, all of us start off in a place of financial dependence.

And the very first stage, stage one that I came up with is financial solvency. So if you're going to pursue financial independence, the very first thing is to become financially solvent. That means that you're able to support yourself on your own income without the aid of others and that you are current on all of your bills.

You're not behind on any bills. You don't have any creditors calling saying, "Hey, Joshua, get the check in the mail." You are financially solvent. And that will be the first thing for you to tackle. If you're not financially solvent, everything else should wait until you're financially solvent. You're able to live on your income and you're current on all your bills.

It doesn't mean you're debt-free. It doesn't mean anything except you're current on your bills. You're paying your creditors as agreed. So how to get there? Well, it's going to be a lot of work and there's probably going to be some very quick changes. If you're not there, some very quick changes that you need to make.

Simplest change, cut your expenses drastically. Second simplest change, increase your income dramatically. Various ways to do that. We've talked about that extensively in the show, Archives. Feel free. Go back and start at episode one if you don't know ways to do that. But there are many ways to do that.

Cut your expenses drastically and increase your income dramatically. You've got to solve financial solvency usually with hard work. That's stage one. Stage two is financial stability. And here by that, my definition is that once you're current on all your bills, you want to build some sort of buffer account.

Whether you call that an emergency fund, a rainy day fund, cash reserves, a buffer account, the purpose is the same. You have to recognize that problems are going to happen. Unexpected opportunities will show up and you're going to need money to handle those problems and to take advantage of those opportunities.

And so if you don't have any money saved, then the problems will take you out. You fall behind on your bills and you wind up in debt or you miss out on the opportunities because you don't have cash. So you want to make sure that you get yourself to a place of financial stability, solvent, current, and with some money in the bank.

Now, how much? You've got to decide for that for yourself. Three months of expenses? Great. Six months of expenses? Awesome. Twelve months of expenses? Great. $100,000? You decide that number. But you want to have some money in a buffer account. Next stage I came up with was debt freedom.

And my point here was simply to say that if you have debt, you probably want to get rid of it. Now, not all debt is equal. I do hold to the idea that there is debt that is helpful and there is debt that is hurtful. It's not the same thing to say, well, the fixed-rate interest debt on an appreciating asset is the same as variable interest rate on a depreciating – I was going to say asset but liability.

A credit card balance is not the same thing as a home mortgage. It's not the same thing as a car payment. It's not the same thing as a business loan. They are different. But for most people, you want to become debt-free. And that at least means getting rid of any high-interest rate debt.

It definitely means you want to clear up any old unpaid debts. It probably means that you want to get rid of any consumer debt that's tied to depreciating assets, aka liabilities, things that are going down in value. And you probably should have a clear plan in place to become debt-free on any productive business or investment assets that you've acquired because being debt-free is a great step on the way to enjoying greater freedom and independence in your life.

That's stage three, debt freedom. Stage four, financial security. And here's where things get a little fuzzy. I think they matter. But stage four is that one of the major goals is to build income so that your expenses are covered without your needing to put in hours for work to pay for them.

And that happens when you get the income from your investments coming in to a level that's sufficient to pay for your basic expenses. And I think it's really useful to break this down into beginner stages and ultimately larger later stages. And the first thing is to have your basic living expenses covered by your investment income.

I define that as meaning your housing expenses, your utilities, your food, your transportation, your basic insurance costs. When those things are covered, you've got a pretty good base to stand on. You've got a good degree of financial security. But do you want to spend more money in the future?

Many if not most of us do have larger financial goals that we would like to be able to enjoy in the future. So just having our basic expenses covered would probably not be how we would describe financial independence or financial freedom. We would probably describe that in terms of financial security.

That's how I've done it. Stage four is just basic expenses. Stage five is financial independence. I define that as when your current lifestyle expenses can be met with your investment income, then you've reached – excuse me. You've reached the point of financial independence. The point is not just bare-bones expenses.

The point is your actual current lifestyle is covered. Well, at that point in time, it doesn't really matter whether you work or not from a financial perspective. You're now financially independent. And then my last two stages are also important. My stage six after financial independence is financial freedom. And that was the word I came up with to describe that if you have some lifestyle goals that are bigger than what you're currently living, you want to have those things funded with investment income as well.

And you've got no goals that aren't met with investment income. So here you have the ultimate in financial freedom. And then finally stage seven, financial abundance. And what I mean here is that you have more wealth than you can spend. You have more wealth than you're going to need to fund your own lifestyle expenses and you have a good margin of safety.

So now what do you do with the surplus? And someday I'll do a show on how to skip straight to financial abundance. Because even though I've got this staged approach and even though my stage six is financial freedom and I – stage seven is financial abundance. It's my contention that we can experience financial freedom all along the way and experience financial abundance all along the way.

And so I'm sorry. I know that I'm mixing things, but that's because life is a mixture and the point is to demonstrate these concepts. So today we're not going to be – I'm not using financial freedom in the context here of stage six. Although I believe that it's possible to achieve that stage six financial freedom or stage seven financial abundance in ten years.

It is possible. I'll cover some strategies in just a moment on how to do that. But here I'm just talking about freedom in a more general sense. Because if I think about your current situation – excuse me. You think about your current situation. Those of you who are experiencing some measure of financial stress – if you're not experiencing financial stress, just tune out for a minute.

But if you're experiencing financial stress of some kind, what would alleviate that stress? For most people, there are a couple of very simple things that would alleviate financial stress. The first thing that would alleviate financial stress is having income that's higher than your expenses. If your expenses are higher than your income, you're going to be experiencing financial stress.

But if your income is higher than your expenses, although you may not love where you are, there's generally going to be less stress associated with that. There's a quote by – a famous quote by Charles Dickens that demonstrates this. It comes from his novel David Copperfield. The quote was spoken by a character named Wilkins MacAbre, and the statement was "Annual income, 20 pounds.

Annual expenditure, 19 pounds, 19 and 6 result happiness. Annual income, 20 pounds. Annual expenditure, 20 pounds, not and 6 result misery." Translated into modern vernacular, annual income, $40,000. Annual expenditure is $35,000. Result happiness. Annual income, $40,000. Annual expenditure is $45,000. Result misery. The point is that if your expenses are higher than your income, that's probably not going to feel so good.

And so how quickly can that be solved? It could be solved pretty quickly. And if you're in that situation and you're experiencing stress, then one aspect of financial freedom would just simply be to get your expenses below your income. That can be solved either by reducing expenses or increasing income, probably a combination of the two.

What else can cause stress? A high level of debt can cause stress. Debt that's out of line can cause significant stress. Well, how long can it take for people to become debt-free? For some people, a long time. But for many people, a lot less. All depends. I don't care how much debt you have.

I don't care if you're going into bankruptcy this month. You can be financially free in 10 years or less. A 10-year mark is enough time for you to get any amount of debt paid off. If you go through bankruptcy, that 10-year time is enough time for the bankruptcy to fall off your credit report.

And you can reset your entire life in 10 years. So these, I believe, are legitimate expressions of financial freedom. One more that's very, very basic. If you have a job that is well-suited to you, your interests, your skills, your personality, your abilities, if your job is positioned in a geographic location that you want to be in.

Remember my formula for doing work you love? Doing work that you care about with people that you like for reasons that are important to you in a place that you want to be. I think when I wrote it out, it was doing work that you care about for reasons that are important to you with people that you like in a place that you want to be.

Those are the magic components. That's the magic formula of doing work that you care about. Well, if you find yourself in a situation where you are working with people who you like and you're doing work that you care about and you're earning income that's more than your expenses and you find yourself in a place of stability, financially speaking, you got a buffer account.

Wouldn't that lead to a sense of financial freedom? I believe it would. I think it's accurate to use that. Now, I'm not scared of the proposition of you saying, "Joshua, wait a second. I showed up to this podcast and here we are 20 minutes in and I'm expecting to hear you say that I can be a multimillionaire and wealthy beyond my wildest dreams in 10 years." I believe that's possible.

But I don't believe that's the only way to achieve financial freedom. So I said at this point in time, I consider myself financially free. And I'm pretty happy about that. I'm pretty proud of that. I just turned 31 last week or a week and a half ago. And I consider myself to be financially free.

My balance sheet is healthy. I'm not a millionaire yet, but my balance sheet is healthy. My income statement has an income that exceeds my expenses. The way that I earn my income is very gratifying to me. It's very pleasing to me. It's in line with my skills and with my inclinations and with my interests.

It fits my personality. It highlights some of my strengths. Some of my strengths are allowed to shine in a competitive environment. Things that are difficult for other people are my strengths. And so I started working out of school. I've been working since I was in middle school. I was in about seventh grade.

But 31 years old, call that less than a decade after college, I'm pretty proud of that. Now I've made a lot of mistakes along the way. I've lost tens of thousands of dollars through stupid decisions that I made. And so I'm a little bit envious sometimes of others who at 31 years old have 15 rental houses and are multimillionaires.

I could have done that, but I didn't. But that's okay. I'm still pretty content with the progress that I've made. And I'm not saying these things to impress you. Just to demonstrate that you don't have to have standards that are through the roof. If my standard were that for me to consider myself financially free, I need $10 million in the bank.

That's a lot of money. Is it possible? Yeah. Is it as achievable as my standard, making it much lower, of saying that my income is more than my expenses? I do work that I care about in a place that I want to be with people that I like for reasons that are important to me?

Yeah, that's good. My balance sheet is healthy. These things are helpful. And I feel like I have options. I have choices. And so to me, that's financial freedom. And each of these components are important. Now, to tackle the question of can you be financially independent in 10 years in the sense that can I live and have my expenses covered by my investment income?

Yes, you can do that. And the secret there for you is what I talked about in episode 163 of the podcast that was called The Impact of Your Savings Rate on Your Time to Financial Independence, that if you want to be financially independent in 10 years or less, you can do it if your savings rate is high enough.

To do it in about 10 years, you need a savings rate that's about 70 percent. So if starting today you say I am determined to get there to financial independence in 10 years, save 70 percent of your income. If you're not willing to live on that or you say that doesn't work for me, I can't do that, well, you can adjust it.

But that's how you do it is you save 70 percent of your income, and you can back up and figure out the plan from there. You can back up and figure out how high your income needs to be, how low your expenses need to be. You can figure out if you're living on $30,000 a year and you're making $30,000 a year and you say there's no way that I could save 70 percent of my income.

Sure there is. You just need to increase your income to $100,000 a year. I'm not being flippant when I say that. I'm being serious. We can't bypass the math. I cannot stand pie in the sky, wishful thinking, positive focus, self-development, personal growth, personal success baloney. It doesn't matter how much you wish and wish and wish and wish and wish that your life were different.

At the end of the day, you've got to actually do something. There is cause and there is effect. So if you want an effect, you have to implement the cause. No matter what you've been told, there are some goals that you cannot achieve. To say, "Well, you can achieve anything that you put your mind to," is wishful thinking.

Now, it may be inspirational when you see people achieve things, but there are some goals that you cannot achieve. You can set a goal to be a millionaire by next week, but if you're deeply in debt, you're unemployed, you don't have a business, you don't have any connections, you're not well-educated, no matter how much you sit and visualize that goal for the next week, you're not going to be a millionaire.

But that doesn't mean you can't be financially free in 10 years. And so with the math of my saying you need to save 70% of your income for the next 10 years, that math gives you an action plan that you could start on. If you were a middle-class family earning a median household income of, say, $90,000, $45,000 times two, let's just make it – yeah, let's keep it at that, $90,000 times two.

And you were earning that amount of money and you got a couple of kids and you got some expenses and you're living an average lifestyle. You're putting, say, $5,000 or $10,000 a year into your 401(k) and you're spending – let's call it $60,000 a year because we've got to account for some taxes.

Well, you actually could make a series of choices and make a series of plans that would grow your household income from $90,000 a year to $250,000 a year. It's not that difficult. It requires work, but that's not that extraordinary. There are lots of households that have dual-income earners where both income earners are in six figures.

And you don't have to be remarkably talented or skilled. No, you can't be stupid. They don't give away six-figure checks to most people without some level of brains, but you don't have to be remarkably skilled. You got to at least be average and then apply it with some intelligent strategies.

You could also decrease your expenses to a level of, say, $40,000 a year. And if you could increase your income to $200,000 a year – I'm going to ignore taxes for a moment – and you could have your expenses at $40,000 a year, so $200,000 net of income taxes.

And if it took you a couple of years to make that transition, well, at those savings rates, you'd be living on 20 percent of your income. If you save 80 percent of your income for five and a half years, you'd be financially independent. Listen to episode 163 of the show if you question that math.

So if it takes you – under my 10-year timeline, you wake up. You're making $90,000, spending $60,000, and all of a sudden you say, "Wait a second. We got to make some changes." And we go from $90,000 to $200,000 net of tax, so let's say 230 household income, gross $200,000 net, and you cut your expenses from $60,000 to $40,000.

There are lots of families out there with two parents and a couple of kids that live on $40,000 a year. That's not going to living in an RV on the bad side of town, although we can go there if you want to. I'm not scared of that kind of lifestyle.

I'm just saying you could live a normal middle-class lifestyle on $40,000 a year and have plenty of nice things. And if it takes you four and a half years to make the transition, you do that for five and a half years, get your income up for four and a half years from that 90 to 230, you're going to be financially independent in 10 years.

So even if we're going to go to that financial independence number, this is not pie-in-the-sky thinking. A decade is a long time. You can achieve a lot in a year. What's the saying? There are a few different sayings from different people. We dramatically overestimate what we can do in a day and we dramatically underestimate what we can do in a year.

I think that's true. I think we dramatically overestimate what I do, what I can do in a year, and dramatically underestimate what I can do in a decade. So even if you're not already in that place – even if you don't buy my definitions of financial freedom being, hey, you've got income higher than expenses.

You're working a job that you like. You've got some money saved up. You don't have debts hanging over your head. Even if you don't buy those, you can still get totally all the way to financial independence in a decade, probably sooner if you wanted to. Now, what if you wanted to go even farther?

Ten years is enough time to come up with a business idea, test a few business ideas, build a business, and sell out for a lot of money. There's no guarantee of success in business. There's no guarantee that you'll be able to do it, but it's enough time that you could do it.

Many entrepreneurs have been able to do that. Years ago, I read a book by Michael Masterson called Seven Years to Seven Figures. And in that book, he profiled – I think it was seven people. He profiled something like seven people who had achieved this advancement from basically broke to a million-dollar net worth in seven years or less.

It was a good book for me to read because it opened my mind. It was one of those books that was instrumental in opening my eyes to the flaw of the thinking promoted by the mainstream financial press that the way that you get rich is by investing in a 401(k).

It started the process of realizing, wait a second. If you want faster results, you got to pursue a different plan. And he profiled these different people and talked about some of their plans. Years ago, I registered the domain. I still own it. I actually own Seven Years to Seven Figures and I also – I don't want to steal the title of his book, but I registered the domain just in case I wanted it.

I also – I think I did. I have to go check my registries. Maybe one of you will beat me to it and go get it if I – I might have let it lapse. I also own the one Seven Years to Freedom. And that was kind of my mindset at the time.

I was going through a goal-setting process. I said, "Wait a second. Seven Years to Freedom." And me being financially free at 31 was a product of me at 23 saying, "How could I be financially free at 30?" Now, it didn't go the path that I thought. It didn't go as well as I thought.

I thought I would be much richer than I was now. I didn't account for some of the mistakes that I would make and some of the money that I would spend. I didn't account for some of the expenses, normal expenses of life. I forgot about the expenses of paying for a wedding and getting – having kids and all those things.

I didn't account for the expenses of learning. But at 23, I had sat down and I said, "What would be my seven-year plan to be financially independent at 30?" And two years ago, I was 29 years old and I closed my financial planning firm. And about a year later, I was solvent with radical personal finance.

And so, again, financially free has been a component of that. The last missing piece for me was selling my house, which I did. You can see that in the archives, the story there. So that was the last component because that freed up a tremendous amount of capital that I needed back in order to feel much more free and comfortable instead of being out too much money.

So those – that book was very, very valuable. And that book made a big difference for me because it focused on the need for a financially valuable skill, how to develop a financially valuable skill. And so today, I know very clearly there are five major financially valuable skills for every business, value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance.

Pick one of those areas and excel at it, and those are the areas that are the fundamental core of a business. And so if you excel in one of those areas, you transform your – you transform into a financially valuable person if you can do really well at one of those areas.

So at any level, you can achieve this. No matter what your definition of financial freedom, in 10 years, you can achieve it. Now, I don't think that the answer to the highest level of happiness and fulfillment is to always focus on those high dollar amounts. I really think that a lot of people who set this goal, you go to some positive thinking success seminar and the lifestyle guru on stage shows you a picture of his Mercedes-Benz and is parked in front of his Prevost motor coach and showing you his fancy house on the water in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

He's standing up there and saying, "You can do this too," and so you immediately sit down and say, "I'm going to write down my goals and I'm going to have a black Mercedes-Benz SL500 and I'm going to buy this boat," and et cetera, et cetera. Well, hey, I'm not going to say you can't do that stuff, but I think that the people who should set those kinds of goals are the people who have already achieved some other goals.

And so why don't you start a little easier and start with getting solvent. Start with my stages of financial independence and make it a little easier on yourself. Start with solvency, move on to stability, move on to debt freedom. If you're driving a Honda Civic and you want to buy a Mercedes SL500, great, but why don't you actually make some money and let your money and your investments pay for the Mercedes instead of trying to fulfill that goal?

Now, if you're in that stage of goal setting and whatnot and that's helpful to you, great. Go for it. But the point is you don't need that stuff for happiness. If you want to get it, fine, but you don't need that. And some of the things that are missed are things like choices.

A lot of those things come with a big price tag and the truly rich people are the ones who when they buy those things, they don't even care about the price tag. I'm not sure that you – I don't know anything about you, speaking in generally. I'm not sure that you have the capability to go from deeply in debt, not earning very much money, just listening to some positive thinking success guru and get the net worth – level of net worth required to be able to live in a house on the water in Fort Lauderdale with your boat tied up to the back dock and your Mercedes SL500 in the garage.

I'm not sure if you can get there in 10 years. I won't say it's impossible. People have done some pretty extraordinary things. But I'll just say I'm not so confident that you can get there. But I am confident that you could achieve a high degree of financial freedom and after you've proven your skills with some simpler steps and some simpler actions, you could be in that situation to where you go ahead and get that fancy stuff.

Then go ahead and bring out the video camera and make sure that you walk around with your selfie stick and show everyone how big your house is and talk about the fact that you got it but it doesn't matter to you. That's the reason you're walking around your house and showing everyone your fancy cars because it doesn't matter.

Then you can do that and rip people off. Financial freedom is achievable in 10 years or less. So let me just give you a couple of ideas, some of these things I've mentioned to you. These are projects that if you want to be financially free in 10 years or less, these are projects that you can accomplish in a short period of time.

Number one, get a great job that fits you. I'm doing a seminar here in West Palm Beach. I'm going to do a virtual seminar as soon as I can get it done on how to do that. Get a great job that fits you and do that process in a carefully thought out, carefully researched way and you'll start to get some really great results and you'll get a high degree of life satisfaction.

Make sure that you find or create work that you love. Don't fall into the trap that that work has to be fun. It just needs to fit you. It's going to be work. Work is rewarding. Work can be rewarding. If it's meaningful work, don't fall into the trap that it's got to be fun.

Workers work. Fun is fun. It's great when they mix. But a lot of times we call it work for a reason and it feels good to sink your teeth into work. It's much more fulfilling than fun. Don't believe me? Come down and sit on the beach, West Palm Beach.

Call me up. I'll go to dinner with you, have lunch. By the way, open invitation. If any of you guys ever come to Palm Beach County, always reach out to me. I like to meet up with listeners. I've done it many times. But call me up. I'll come have dinner with you and you go sit on the beach in a chair for two weeks straight, every day, all day at the beach and see how fun it is after two weeks.

It's not all that fun. So get a great job that fits you. That's a project that you can accomplish in the next year. And that should be on your goal list for the next year if you don't feel satisfaction that you're in the right job for you. There are so many jobs out there.

Don't waste your time thinking about how to save a million dollars. If you haven't just done the thing that doesn't cost any money, go get a better job. Number two, solvency. Having expenses that are lower than your income, the more substantial the margin between your income and expenses, as long as your lifestyle is reasonable to your goals, the happier you'll be.

So get your income higher than your expenses. If you have debt, get your debt in check. I think the data – I need to go and see if Dave Ramsey has released any data. But they keep these studies – I've seen some data that he's released in the past of listeners of his show where he's focusing on debt, debt, debt all the time.

And the average person that seems to be involved in his Get Out of Debt program usually takes about two to three years. And the reason for that is because usually the amount of debt that you have is commensurate with your income and your capabilities. People that are making a minimum wage job do not generally have $400,000 of debt.

So in general, with focus and energy and attention, you can probably get out of debt in a couple of years, no matter the amount of debt. If you're one of these people who has millions and millions of dollars of debt, guess what? You could still probably get out of debt in a couple of years because there's a mindset difference.

The person who accumulates millions of dollars of debt is also the person who's trying to do million-dollar deals. The person who accumulates $30,000 of debt on a car can, with focus, pay that off with their job. So a couple of years, you could get out of debt. Now, if you have a lot of student loans or something, you can get there.

That'll go a long way towards financial freedom. These things give you choices. Next one is you've got to save some money. Call it a freedom fund. Call it a buffer account. I don't care. But the point is, if you don't have any money, if you could just get to the point where you have – for some people, I mean $20,000 in the bank can be life-changing for many people.

Even better, shoot for $100,000. Get yourself $100,000 in the bank. Not necessarily in investments, not necessarily in an IRA. Just get yourself $100,000 in the bank. $100,000 in the bank will change your mindset because you will see options on all sides. $100,000 is enough to be confident that you can move anywhere, that you could go anywhere, that you could start anything.

You could fund a few years of a business. You can fund some down payments on rental houses. You can fund a transition to an eco-farm that you're going to start in the middle of Kansas. Probably a better place to just start an eco-farm. You should do it in a place where there's people because people in Kansas don't really care about having more farms.

But you could fund a transition to an eco-farm in the middle of Kansas or wherever you want to be. $100,000 buys a lot of freedom. It doesn't buy a lot of freedom if it's just sitting in a 401(k), but $100,000 in a bank account buys a lot of freedom.

You could achieve that in a few years. You don't have to wait until you have $100,000 to achieve the freedom. My point is that you could achieve that in a few years, and you could achieve that in some of the strategies like we talked about with the truck drivers.

Go drive a truck for a couple years. Go work in an oil field. Live in an RV up in North Dakota working on an oil field. I don't know if the boom there is sliding down, but go do something where you can earn a lot of money and have very low expenses for a couple years.

It goes a long way towards financial freedom. I think you can legitimately call yourself financially free and feel financially free, which is the important thing. It doesn't matter whether someone else thinks you're financially free. What matters is whether you feel financially free, whether you feel like your life choices are stymied by money or the lack of money versus not.

It doesn't matter to me at all whether anyone – any of you listening thinks I'm financially free or not. I know as a matter of fact that none of my choices that I'm making are being determined purely based on money. Money is very low on my list of priorities.

Not saying it doesn't matter, not saying it's not important, not saying I'm going to make a lot of it, not saying I don't want to save a lot of it, not saying I don't want to do a lot of things with money. I am saying that my choices are not being directly affected by the money or not.

To me, that's financial freedom and I'm not a millionaire. But I have achieved some of these things that I'm talking about and you can too. Once you reach these basic levels, you'll start to feel financially free and you'll start to see – again, some of the ways that I try to continually show you things, you'll start to see things that you could do that allow you just to enhance that freedom.

I look at things and I look at – I drive past sheds and people are selling sheds and I look at that little shed and I say, "You know what? I know how I could take that shed. I could pay $7,000 for that shed. I could go out. I could buy some land out in the country.

I can see how I could plug up an internet. That shed could be awesome. I could put some insulation. I know how I could put a water system in that thing really easy. I know how to build an awesome composting toilet that would be really comfortable, that would be climate controlled, that would be great for my family.

I know how I could figure out how to do an electrical system. I know how I could live off-grid. I know how I could do it. I could pay cash for all those things and I could go and be completely off-grid and be in good shape." Now, I'm not choosing to do that but I think about that.

I look at other lifestyles and I say, "Okay. I can see how I could buy a big old bus. I could fix that bus up. I could put my microphone in the back and I could travel the country with my family. I see how I could live out of a backpack.

I could go and travel the world and that would be really cool." I'm choosing not to do that but it's not the money that's keeping me back. I look at tons of businesses around, blue-collar businesses, white-collar businesses. I look at investment opportunities. I look at real estate business and I say, "Okay.

Here's how I could take the money that I have. I could invest it into this, this, this, this. I could buy that franchise agreement. Let me look at the financials of that. I don't really want to do that. I could take this job. I would really love to do that job." The point is that you can choose these things without feeling the constraint of money and you don't need millions of dollars.

If you buy the load of goods that says that it's a Mercedes in the driveway, a house on the water in Fort Lauderdale and a boat out back that you call financial freedom, it will be much more distant. But if you buy that financial freedom is choices, it's freedom, it's much more achievable.

Then, when you buy the boat and the Mercedes on the house in the water in Fort Lauderdale, you'll actually be able to enjoy it because you'll actually be there and it won't stress you out. Now, if those things are important to you finally, 10 years is enough time for you to learn some skills and start applying them in a series of businesses.

The reason I say series is because if you've not ever been in business, your first one is going to fail. Second one is probably going to fail too. Third one is going to fail too. But about the fourth or fifth one, you'll probably start to succeed. I do not buy the idea that the entrepreneur is the person who succeeds on their first time.

I'm sure there are examples out there, but that is not the normal course of action. The normal course of action is a string of failures followed by a success. Ten years is enough time to fail a few times. Make sure those failures don't wipe you out and then have a really big success.

And if you're strategic about your business, you choose something that's scalable, you choose something that's going to be in line with where the market's going, you choose something that's not going to be encumbered by certain physical constraints on growth. I don't know anything about the gold mining business, but if I were just going to do mining for ten years, it's hard for me to imagine that I'd go to the gold mining business to strike rich, try to develop unmined land.

Maybe somebody who knows about gold mining could do that, but I probably wouldn't do that. I'd probably pick a different kind of business, something that was more scalable, something that I could test and fail quickly so that I could figure out what's the idea that's going to succeed. And those are the ways that you can become a multimillionaire in a decade.

Ten years is enough time to get an education, to become a leading specialist. Ten years is enough time to become a salesperson and go from nothing to rich. I've mentioned on the show, Joe Girard didn't know much about sales, was flat broke when he started selling cars in Michigan, so selling Chevrolets.

I tried to get him on the show, he wouldn't come on, but I'll tell you the story. He worked as a car salesman for I think 12 years and he retired. And he wasn't just going with my little basic minimum level of financial freedom. He was going with, "I want to be rich." And I think he got it.

He got there. You can maximize a lot of careers as long as you are not constrained in a job where you're measured on time put in rather than results out. You could achieve that exponential growth. Nothing wrong with those jobs where you're measured on time put in. Just that if you want to use those jobs as a jumping off place for financial freedom, you need to either exercise tight control over your expenses to get to a high level of savings or you'll need to plan to do them for a longer period of time.

It's your plan. Own it. My point is if you sit and work on some of these ideas, you could build a plan to be financially free as you can design it in 10 years or less. And I think that decade time period is enough time to make some mistakes and still have time to hit your goals.

I think a couple of years is too fast. You can mess things up in a few years. But a decade is long enough. And if you start thinking in terms of a decade, I don't know for me, maybe this will change. Maybe when I'm older, I'll start to think in terms of 30 or 40-year periods of time.

But I have a hard time conceiving of 30 or 40 years in the sense that I can't really imagine myself doing the same thing for 30 or 40 years. I don't think I'll do what I'm doing now 30 years from now. And I recognize that I may make the choice to do it.

The longer you stay at something, the better your results will be because you start to get the compounding effect. You get the compounding effect of experience, of skill, of marketplace. So maybe it takes 10 years and I'll struggle along building a brand and I'll struggle along and finally 10 years from now it will start to take off and I'll do it for another 10.

I don't know. But since I didn't commit to that, I just committed to 1,000 episodes, which by my estimate was going to be about six or seven years and I'm holding back that I think 10 years is enough, I'll do this for a decade. Then I'll reconsider. And I might do it for another decade or not.

But a decade is a really great amount of time. And I think there's a lot more energy behind your goals. So I would shorten up the time span from this silly 40-year stuff to something more tangible. Final commentary on the 10 years. I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people face-to-face talking to them about their goal for retirement.

And I should sit down and write these numbers down hopefully sometime, but I'm just guessing here. But I would ask people, "Is there a point in time that you'd like to be in a position to not to have to work if you didn't want to?" That was how I chose to phrase the retire question.

And they would always say, "Well, yeah, of course." And I'd say, "Okay, well, when do you want that to be?" "Well, sometimes you get the joke of today." "Ha-ha, great. Okay. No, seriously, when?" "Say, oh, about 65." "Okay. Why 65?" "I don't know. It just seems pretty good." So then we would go from that.

I would write down 65 and probe or kind of dig deeper. And then we just kind of go on to the next thing. And then we come to the balance sheet and find out how much are you saving. And usually people aren't saving anything or usually they're only saving a little bit.

And there's no way they're going to be financially independent at 65, even at 65. And the point is that if you look at the data, the vast majority of people who are in their mid-60s cannot afford to retire. So why would we expect it to be any different 40 years from now?

What happens when you set a long-range goal like I want to be retired in 40 years or 30 years or 20 years is it lacks any juice, it lacks any emotion, it lacks any excitement. And it allows you to fool yourself into thinking that you're going to get there while actually you're doing nothing.

There's no cost to your putting 4% of your income in your 401(k). That's relatively meaningless. And guess what? It's not going to get you financially independent. But you feel like you're doing something but in reality it's so far away you've never sat down to count the cost. But if I tell you 10 years, now you got to sit down and say, "Wait a second.

What am I actually doing?" And when you're two years into a 10-year goal or a 10-year plan, you say, "Wait, something's happening." Now, you might not hit the 10 years. I didn't hit the 10-year goals I had set for myself at 30. I was behind. But I was a lot closer at 30 and I am a lot closer now at 31 than a lot of my peers who said I want to do it at 65.

The key is goals need to be close enough where you can feel them, where they have some energy, where they have some texture, where you can actually guess getting you there, getting yourself there. I know many of you listeners to the show are young. Many of you are older.

And so as a 31-year-old, I can't conceive of what it's like to be 65 or 70 except by talking to 65 or 70-year-olds. But the actual emotion of what it's like, I can't conceive of that. But I can conceive of a decade because I've walked a decade. So you've got to make the goals short enough to actually be able to conceive of them and follow through.

So that's the reason why I chose this idea of building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. You get to choose what your definition of financial freedom is. For some of you, it's buying a shed like I talked about it, insulating it well, putting in a composting toilet and a rainwater catchment system and an off-grid electrical system and doing that for $10,000, moving it onto a raw piece of land and developing a grass-fed beef ranch.

For some of you, financial freedom is that house in Fort Lauderdale with a Mercedes in the driveway and the boat out back. You pick and then build a plan around it. I believe that any option that's possible – excuse me, any goal that you have, I think you can design a plan for financial freedom in 10 years.

You can hit those goals in 10 years. Your plan – and I'm saying this again because I get so tired – I don't like when people mishear it. Your plan will have to be as aggressive as your goal is. Don't give me the fact that you say, "I want to be a multimillionaire and I'm deeply in debt and I'm going to save 5 percent of my income and put it in publicly traded stocks." Your plan will not work.

But you can design a plan that's as aggressive as your goal is. So my hope is that this show will continue to serve 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.

Those are the core facts. And as I close, I bring it back to the fact that you need to make sure that you're living a rich and meaningful life now. None of us are promised tomorrow. None of us can add a hair to our head, an inch to our stature or a day to our lifespan.

None of us determine the day that we die. So don't spend all your time thinking about what's in the future and missing what happens today. But do recognize that the seeds that you plant today will grow into the trees that will shade you 10 years from now. As the adage goes, "The best time to plant a tree was 10 or 30 years ago.

The second best time is today." You can make a new start. You can make a fresh start. You can make a new change in direction. I don't care where you are when you're listening to this show. I don't care if you're deeply in debt. I don't care if you're in bankruptcy.

I don't care if you just had a business fail. I don't care if you're rich. I don't care any of those things. I am convinced that this is possible. I've proved it myself. I've seen it profiled in many people's lives. I see it each and every day. And my hope is to continue to demonstrate this to you and inspire you and educate you with the things that you know so that you can build it for yourself.

And then my hope is that you'll turn around and you'll help somebody else. Because when you can achieve financial freedom in a very short period of time, it will radically change your experience of life. It will open up to you the options and the opportunities that many people don't get to enjoy.

You'll be able to help many people. You'll be able to focus on the things that actually matter, that matter much more deeply than the number of zeros behind your net worth. Because guess what? When you're dead, you're going to leave as much money behind as Bill Gates. When you're dead, you're going to leave as much money behind as Warren Buffett.

All of it. So make sure that your life counts for something more than money. But no, don't neglect the money. Because the money is something that funds everything else. That's it for my show today. I thank you for listening. I hope that this has been interesting and helpful and inspirational to you.

That's my hope. I hope this has been useful to you. A couple of quick closing comments. I've got 48 seconds. A couple of quick closing comments. Number one, Radical Personal Finance is going to be going on summer break for a while here in July. Part of it is going to be a little bit of a break.

For a while here in July, part of it is going to be my taking a short vacation. Part of it is going to be my cleaning up some things behind the scenes of the business that I need to make progress on. So I can't-- constantly producing the new shows often gets in the way of me doing some other things.

And so I need to take a time just to do some behind the scenes stuff. So we're going to be on break here for a little bit in July. Doesn't mean I don't love you. Doesn't mean I don't care about you. But I hope that you're traveling and enjoying yourself.

Enjoy July 4th. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. If you've gained value from this show and would like to support the work that I'm doing, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. It would be very helpful if many of you who have benefited and appreciated this content would sign up there and support that. It would be hugely helpful. Have a great Independence Day and Financial Freedom Day.

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