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Visit vegasexperience.com for Slotzilla. That's vegasexperience.com. - Here in the United States, we've just finished up a brutal two weeks of presidential politics being the central focus of our society. A week ago, it was the Republican National Convention. Then this last week, it was the Democratic National Convention. And if you're anything like me, this weekend, you're probably a little bit frustrated at the state of politics.

Seems like most people are pretty frustrated at the state of politics. So today, I'm gonna try to give you an antidote to worrying about political elections and presidential candidates and all of that by talking about how, although the politicians might want to be in control, you are actually the one who's in control.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show where we're focused on giving you the tools that you need to build a rich life now, while also building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Today, (laughs) hopefully a note of optimism in your day.

Don't worry, I'm not gonna talk to you about politics. I'm gonna talk to you about freedom from politics, especially financial freedom from politics. (upbeat music) Desired outcome that I have for today's show is that you will go away from this show thinking about how much control that you really have, how much you really are in charge of your own life.

Because frankly, it's hard. (laughs) It's hard not to be a little bit depressed by current political events. And if you're not listening to the United States, the same thing will happen in your country. It just might not be on the same schedule as it's happening here. And this event, none of what I'm about to talk about is particularly related to the 2016 election cycle.

It just seems that there's more universal frustration and depression being reflected in this presidential election cycle here in the United States, than in many others. And the genesis of the idea for today's show came from an interaction that I had yesterday. So short story, there are a couple of young boys here in my neighborhood, about eight, nine years old, who have built a summer business for themselves, going around and washing cars.

I'm very impressed with them. They didn't, I live in a neighborhood that we don't really have big lawns, and it's kind of a, let's see, I guess I would call it kind of lower middle class neighborhood. A lot of blue collar workers and whatnot living here. It's very much a rental community.

And so these boys are from disadvantaged families and disadvantaged circumstances. And in speaking with, and they built this little summer business. They came one day, knocked on my door and said, "Hey, would you like a car wash?" So they use my hose. They bring around a bucket and some soap, and that's the extent of their equipment.

And they're going around and building the business. And so I've encouraged them in their business. I've tried to seek to give them a little bit of encouragement and a little bit of advice and how they can learn a little bit more. But I really have a ton of respect for them.

And because they've been going out and building a business. And so I've had them wash a few of my cars for me as a way to support them. Well, yesterday afternoon, one of the boys comes by and my family and I were just getting back from our Sunday morning church meeting, pulling into the driveway.

And one of them comes by and asks me if I'd like our minivan washed. Now, they usually charge me 10 bucks for the minivan because it's a larger vehicle, and they do five bucks for the cars. And so one of these young men said to me, he said, "Hey, I'm trying to buy something.

"I'm trying to buy a bike lock for my bicycle "so it doesn't get stolen. "So I need to earn a little bit of money. "Would you be willing to have me wash your car for five bucks "instead of the normal $10 rate?" I said, thought about it for a moment.

I said, "Yeah, that'd be great. "A 50% discount is a pretty good discount in my book. "I'll take that deal." So I moved the van over into the grass. He washed the car for five bucks and gave him a little extra tip 'cause it was a hot afternoon. But, and it impressed me.

I saw him about an hour later and he was showing off his new bike lock that he'd purchased for his bike. And it made me think about the financial circumstances that he faces. Here's this young man, I don't know, maybe 10 years old. He's, I think he's one of the older ones.

He's a great young man. And he's got these goals that he has and he wants to buy this thing. And first, there's a whole podcast there if I wanted to talk about just how impressed I am that he is learning how to go and work for what he wants.

What a great lesson there. He lives with an uncle. He doesn't have, his parents aren't in his life. He's got kind of a rough circumstance. But he's learned that he's not helpless. He can go and make business. And then I was thinking about his ability to offer the deal to me.

And the fact that he was willing to work for cheaper than he normally would be willing to work for because he had something that he really wanted. And I was thinking about all the ramifications of it. Well, that turned me on to thinking about minimum wage laws which we face a interesting financial circumstance going into this election that it seems as though both of the major political candidates, obviously the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, is in favor of increases in the minimum wage laws.

And then recently I observed that the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, was also in favor of increases in the minimum wage laws. So both of the presidential candidates are proposing and encouraging and promoting the increase in the minimum wage from what it currently is in the United States, federal minimum wage is $7.25 and an increase in that range to some other number.

The number I believe I saw from the Donald Trump campaign was $10 an hour. And so the minimum wage laws are interesting because I'm convinced they are tremendously harmful laws because they eliminate the people from the workforce who aren't particularly well-qualified for jobs. They eliminate people like this young man here in my neighborhood who's not particularly skilled from being able to work.

Because I would not have accepted, I didn't really need the car washed, I wouldn't have accepted his offer of wanting to wash my car at an offer of 10 bucks. That was more money than I wanted to spend for washing the car that didn't particularly need it all that badly.

But I was willing to accept his offer of five bucks. And then because of his hard work, I was thinking about other things that he could do around my house. And I was considering that, well, I wouldn't be willing to pay him the going rate for a laborer, which is about 10 bucks an hour here in my area, if I were gonna go and hire a day laborer from one of the labor pools here locally, I would need to hire somebody at probably about 10 bucks an hour, and they'd be looking for at least about a five-hour workday, probably more about a seven-hour workday would be ideal, and they'd prefer it to be longer.

I've hired day laborers, and that's pretty much the going rate. So I don't have enough work where it's worth it to me to go and hire somebody for 10 bucks an hour, but I would be willing to pay this young man, I don't know, five bucks an hour with a tip at the end of the day if he did a good job.

And I got some very simple work that's not particularly skillful, but would help me out. But I would be barred, legally speaking, from making that transaction with him based upon the minimum wage laws. So in considering it, however, I was considering how would I circumvent that law and do it legally so I could offer him what we did with the car wash.

I didn't track how much time it took him to do the car wash, we just simply made a contracted price that in exchange for a set rate, he would wash my car for me. So thus, I didn't make a contract with him for an hourly rate, I made a contract with him for a contract rate.

And it's so relatively simple to get around something like a minimum wage law and establish a contract between two people to do the work. So that little exchange, I tell you the back story just 'cause I think it's interesting and there's some ideas there for you, for your kids, and I encourage you, encourage the young men and women in your neighborhood who are learning these skills.

But I was thinking about how in reality, although the law might say one thing, I'm pretty free to come up with a different way of structuring things so that I can get around the law. And the great thing is that most laws are like that. And so today, if you've been a little depressed like I have been the last few weeks, if you're a little depressed paying attention to national politics, then here's my encouragement, turn away from that and recognize some of the ways that I'm gonna go over in today's show of how ultimately it's your choices that will influence what you do.

And you always have the choice that this young man in my neighborhood had to make a free contract with somebody and agree to do a certain job for a certain rate of pay. And that choice is yours. And hopefully this empowerment will be conveyed through the message of today's show.

And some of the specific examples, I'm gonna focus a lot on taxes about how, that's one of the major areas where government influences our lives, where they change our taxes and they increase our taxes and things like that, that you'll see that as incentives change, you can change. And there's always a way where you can adjust and arrange your circumstances of your life in a manner that's going to be advantageous to you.

So we'll get to that in just a moment. Sponsor of today's show is Paladin Registry. Paladin Registry is a financial advisor registry service where they go and do some of the upfront due diligence for you of vetting their financial advisors. When you hire a financial advisor, you need to do due diligence on that specific advisor.

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I was also thinking about an article that I saw this morning in The Telegraph. Quote, or excuse me, title of the, try again, the title of The Artograph. (laughing) The title of the article from The Telegraph in the UK is called "Britain Banishes Plastic Bags "as a 5 P Pence Tax Sees Usage Plummet by 6 Billion." Couple firsts of the leading paragraphs of it give you all the info you need.

"Britain has virtually banished plastic bags "just six months after the government "introduced a 5 P charge to discourage shoppers "from using them, official data has revealed. "According to figures released today "by the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, "shoppers are on track to use around 6 billion fewer "single-use plastic bags this year.

"Since the policy came into force in England in October 2015, "the total number of carrier bags used "at the UK's biggest retailers "has fallen by an estimated 85%. "The total number used fell from over 7 billion a year "to less than half a billion "in the first six months of the policy, "saving 40,801 tons of plastic, "which is the equivalent weight of roughly 300 blue whales." So in short, they start this new tax on plastic bags and people stop using them.

And it's a really great story and an example of incentives and how incentives work. Now, I, as a small government person, I get a little bit frustrated by the government intervention here. But the cool thing is that you don't have to wait on government coercion to do certain things.

If a business, any business wants to make a change, they can just simply do it with an intelligent system of incentives. And the focus of today's show is incentives. How has incentives changed? You change your actions. For example, here in the United States, we have the grocery chain Aldi.

It's very popular among the frugal living cohort of US American residents. And they've got great food at really great prices. Well, they've got a few different ways that they keep their prices low. One of the ways that they keep their prices low is by having fewer staff working and by lowering some of the expenses associated with this.

They got this really neat system, if you've never shopped at an Aldi, where in order to get a shopping cart, you put a quarter into a little device that will then dispense to you a shopping cart. And then when you return your shopping cart to the front of the store, to the properly parked place, you'll receive your quarter back.

And a quarter is not particularly meaningful in most of our financial lives, but it does the work of providing an incentive for you to take your cart from the parking lot and take it up to the front of the store. Works really well. When we go to the store, naturally, we try to make money anywhere we go.

We'll grab a few carts. If there happen to be any in the parking lot, we'll bring them up. I don't mind getting a few extra steps in return for 50 cents or a buck of extra money. So we'll take the carts up and we'll get the quarters that are spit out from the machines.

And so it provides a really great system where Aldi doesn't have to have employees wandering around the parking lot, picking up carts, but rather the customers will do that work for them because of a simple little incentive. Aldi does the same thing with their plastic bags that if you want plastic bags, let's see, do they have them and you have to pay for them or do they just not have them at all?

Don't remember, but the point is that if you are incentivized to bring your own bags. The warehouse stores do a good job of this by offering lower prices and more self-service than they incentivize people to do without things like the bags and the bag systems. So incentives work. And these incentives are applied in every area of life.

Now let's bring it down to something specific, something like taxes, which is where we focus a lot of our energy on this show. Because taxes for most of us are our number one expense. It might be number two for some of you, but if you total all of the taxes that you pay in their various forms, from taxes on your cell phone bill to taxes on sales taxes to property taxes to income taxes, for most of us, taxes are the largest single category in our budget.

And there's a concept that I think is useful in taxation. It's referred to as the Laffer curve. Arthur Laffer is an economist and he came up with, well, he didn't come up with the idea. The idea has been around for a very, very long time. But he popularized the idea as the mythology goes.

He wrote it on a, he was having, back in the 1974, he was having a meeting with President Ford's administrative officials, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and he sketches this simple curve on a napkin. So picture in your mind's eye an X, Y chart in an upward sloping curve that comes then down.

Kind of looks like a hill, a gently, smoothly sloping hill. And the X axis is the tax rate, and the Y axis is the amount of government revenue. And the idea is that at the, some at 0% taxation, you have the lowest tax rate, but you also have the lowest amount of government revenue that's collected.

And as the percentage of taxation increases to a certain point at the top of the hill, then at that point you have the highest amount of government revenue that's collected at some tax rate. And then as the tax rate continues to increase through that, say, 50% margin number to 100%, you'll eventually at 100% taxation have government revenue collection of 0%.

So we don't know where that ideal number is, but in terms of maximum participation, maximum productivity, maximum government tax collection, and what that right rate is, but we do know that it's somewhere between zero and 100. Because if you had 100% taxation, then basically the theory is that practically all economic activity would switch.

Or some people would argue that it would at least change forms from a form that can be tracked monetarily and financially to a form that can be in some other form, such as barter. So that's the Laffer curve. And this applies in taxation. So it's a very difficult thing to figure out.

And that's where you try, there's always this balance. And so you have traditional conservatives, fiscal conservatives arguing that if you lower taxes, you'll have an increase in revenues. At lower tax rates, you'll have an increase in government revenues because there'll be more economic activity because it's incentivized. And then you have traditional liberals, social liberals, excuse me, fiscal liberals, arguing that if you increase tax rates, you'll increase government revenue collection because then everybody's paying their fair share.

And so you see some form of this generally reflected in most elections. Well, the thing is, you don't have to worry about what the elected politicians have to worry about. All you have to worry about is what you do in response to the changes that they make. And the title of today's show is intentionally chosen, The Power of If, meaning that taxation schemes all work on the premise of if this, then that.

If you fall under these certain categories, then you'll pay these certain taxes. But those are your options to pay. And the reason that your options to pay is not because you can't be forced to pay a certain thing or do a certain thing because you participated in the activity, but because your participation in the activity is voluntary.

A good example is I was preparing the outline for today's show, I stumbled across an account of something called the window tax. A very interesting story. It was reflected to show that people change their activities based upon a taxation. So just the first paragraph here from the Wikipedia article on the window tax.

The window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house. It was a significant social, cultural, and architectural force in England, France, Ireland, and Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. To avoid the tax, some houses from the period can be seen to have bricked up window spaces, ready to be glazed or re-glazed at a later date.

In England and Wales, it was introduced in 1696 and was repealed in 1851, 156 years after first being introduced. France and Scotland both had window taxes for similar reasons. So the point here is that the taxes are based upon the number of windows in your house. Well, if you've got a 20-window house and your tax rate would be substantially less if you had a 15-window house, you call up the bricklayer and you say, "Hey, we're gonna take a couple of these windows out "and put some bricks in their place.

"Now we have fewer windows." And that concept perfectly illustrates the choice that you have. Now, whether it's a tax that's based upon your windows or whether it's a tax based upon the amount of money that you have, the concept applies. On this show, I've demonstrated a lot of information and materials about how significant of a decision it is to live in one state versus another state.

And there are various offsetting forces, but with regard to income taxes, you need to seriously consider the state that you live in. There was a story made famous back in the late 2000s with talking about the millionaire's tax in Maryland. And it was, I'll read the first couple of paragraphs here from a CNN Money article from January, 2011.

Maryland millionaires will have a little more money in their pockets come 2011. The state's 6.25% tax rate on income of more than $1 million will expire in the new year. Maryland imposed the so-called millionaire's tax in 2008, along with several other measures to help close a $1.7 billion budget gap.

I'm gonna pause for a moment in the story. What happened, and this is debated, I've read the debates and the rebuttals, but pretty confident that the data is accurate in this regard. But what happened is that Maryland had a significant exodus of high income earning people when they increased the tax rate by that amount.

And that significant exodus significantly impacted their overall revenue collection. So they increased the tax and their collection went down. Now, there are people at this time, obviously, who went through a significant economic, significantly challenging economic crisis. And so the rebuttals to this theory or this explanation of the data generally indicate, well, it's not based upon millionaires leaving Maryland.

It was based upon the economy. It was based upon the fact that people were earning less money. Perhaps there's some truth, but now I will continue with the article. Remember this when you hear people, politicians, talking about, well, as a Democrat, I'm gonna say this, or as a Republican, I'm gonna say this.

And I'm gonna do this. Remember, supposedly Republicans, we're supposed to cut taxes and return it to the people, and Democrats supposedly we're gonna raise taxes and make taxes fair, continuing the article. And governor Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, does not intend to bring it back. Instead, promising to wipe out a projected $1.2 billion budget gap with spending cuts.

Quote, "We can balance the budget through cuts "and without new taxes," says Sean Adamek, O'Malley's press secretary. Maryland is one of several states that levied millionaires' taxes to raise money amid the Great Recession. Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, and Wisconsin raised taxes on higher earners in 2009. Oregon did so this year.

You can read the article if you want to. It's obviously out of date at this point. But the point that I wanna draw your attention to is you have a Democratic governor who is sounding a whole lot like what Republicans used to sound like, saying that we can wipe out a $1.2 billion budget gap with spending cuts and there's no need to raise new taxes.

So if you think that the cause of the decrease in taxation and tax revenues collected was entirely based upon the economy, my guess here would be that the governor doesn't think so. The governor is wishing he had a few more of those millionaires back in his state. So when a government makes a change in the laws, you have a choice.

You can choose what you do. You can choose how you respond. And it's much healthier to focus on the choices that you can make in response to what's actually happening rather than worrying about how your vote is gonna change or not change what's actually gonna happen. There might be a time to vote, there might be a time to research that vote, but in general, it's far more empowering to spend your time focusing on what you can control rather than what you can't control.

You have no control over national political elections in the United States or in any country that you live in. You have no control over statewide political elections in the United States or any election that you live in. You might have a little bit of control at your county commission, and that might be worth your pursuing, but you have no control on the rest of it.

The good thing is that the power and the force of the free market is much stronger than the power and the force of a political system or ideology. Exhibit A, Governor Martin O'Malley doesn't intend to bring his tax rate increase back because all of a sudden his tax base disappeared.

So don't worry about politics, don't worry about the problem, sure, get involved if that's what you're interested in doing, but spend the time focusing on what you can control and take the power back, and don't fall prey to the idea that because the Republicans think A, B, C, D, E, or the Democrats think X, Y, Z, that you don't have a choice.

You have a choice, and you can always find a way to change your behavior in response to what happens and improve your situation. At the simplest, you've got the black market. We'll cover the black market at the end, but today I wanna just go through some specific examples for you, especially as they relate to finance.

Social issues are incredibly important. Social issues have an if-then, and those impact finance, and those need to be discussed, but I'm not planning to talk about them today. But I make decisions in my life that impact me financially because of the social issues. But today let's focus on taxes.

So what do you do if a government increases taxes? Well, simple. You make a choice to change your activity in such a way to reduce the impact of it. So let's talk about income taxes. Well, remember the fact that income taxes are a tax based upon income. Sounds simple, but remember, income taxes are a tax based on income.

So if you'd like to improve the problem of your income taxes, avoid earning income. Couple different ways to do that. Live on your savings. So if you run into a period where the income taxes are very high, that's a good time to live on savings. Borrow money. You can live on borrowed money.

This is what real estate investors do constantly, where they borrow money, they use it to buy an asset, they take some of the borrowed money and they use it to spend on their own circumstance. If the asset increases in value, they'll ultimately be able to pay the loan in the future, but their income is not taxed.

When you borrow money, you're not taxed on income. You can also focus on gaining if you're being paid. For example, if you're being taxed on wages, then you can switch to a different system of taxation. You can switch to a system of capital gains. So you can focus on growing the asset values.

If your income is being taxed very highly, but you look at your property and realize that well I could spend some of my time and energy improving this property, improving the value of it, and then I could sell it, and oh by the way, there happens to be an exclusion of $250,000 of capital gains for an individual filing singly, or a married couple $500,000 filing jointly.

You can avoid taxation on $500,000 of capital gains. A handy person, instead of working at a highly taxed wage earning job, might simply choose to focus on improving the value of their property, and then turning around and selling it, and taking that tax free income. You might do this commercially.

You might buy houses and improve them and keep them, or build businesses and improve their value and keep them. You can do this with various asset based businesses. I've heard a story one time of a family who would build hotels, and they'd buy the property, build the hotels, keep all the corporation.

They're keeping all these assets in their family, and now they have an asset value that's growing, that they've done a lot of work to improve, and they're not paying income taxes on the money. You can do this with a business. If you build a business and you substantially grow the value of that business, the business assets, you can defer much of your taxation for the future.

Then you can also make choices. You can choose to move to a different state. You can move to a different county. You can always move to a different country. You have a choice. And so recognize that this choice goes two ways. This choice serves as a natural restriction on the power of the government system, meaning that in the United States, if taxes grew too high, people like me who have a mobile business, I'd very quickly expatriate.

Many people would. Many companies would. Many companies are. And so this serves as a natural restraint on a governmental system. Doesn't mean it's always going to be successful. Look at countries that destroy their economies by driving all the business people out. It happens. But it means that it's usually, for most thoughtful people, it's gonna serve as a restraint.

So the key is to always look and read the law and say, ah, here is a tax, or here's something I don't like. What are the exceptions to this? What's the if statement? If income taxes. What else? Social security taxes, a good example. Okay, so we're gonna change social security taxes.

Well, what do you do to plan for that? Well, if you want to avoid the social security tax or minimize it, then you just simply need to earn your income in a way that's exempted from social security. How do you do that? Well, you study the law and you understand.

Ah, social security taxes are employment taxes. So what you need to do is simply avoid employment. That means that you should earn your income through some other means. Earn your income from interest or dividends or capital gains. All of those are exempt from social security taxes. Earn your income from rents or royalties on products that you've developed and are selling, books that you've written or intellectual property.

There are a couple of other interesting little tidbits to the social security tax. If you're a student and earning student income that's being earned as an employee of a college or university while pursuing a degree, that income is exempt from social security taxes. Also, if you are receiving scholarships or grant money, that income is exempt from social security taxes.

So when I talk a lot about applying for scholarships, applying for grants, you should take that information and you should filter it and say, ah, if I were working a job, I'd have to pay the 7.65%. Excuse me, that's including Medicare as well. You'd have to pay this six, what's the number?

6.6-ish percent social security tax. And so, now it's gonna bug me. It's, Medicare tax is 1.45%, 7.65%. So that means that the social security tax is, ah, I hit the wrong buttons. 6.2%, I think-ish. Six-ish percent of tax, you have a 6% increase if you can get that scholarship.

And guess what else you're doing? If you get the scholarship income, you're not earning wages. So that's useful. There's a lot of ways to compound that. Why is it so beneficial for you to encourage your high school students applying for scholarships and grants? Because all of that money that they don't have to earn to pay for their tuition by working a job or by your working a job is gonna be much more efficient in the tax system.

Disability benefits or social security, remember that only applies to the wage base. You have exempt wages. So the social security wage base in 2016 is $118,500. So if you were at $118,000 annual income, planning for social security taxes should be pretty high on your list. If you're at a $818,000 income, then social security wage taxes are an insignificant factor for you.

What else? Well, if you don't like the sales taxes and the sales tax rates, just avoid them. Simple ways, buy used. Buy from a place that doesn't collect sales taxes. It used to be a major reason to patronize Amazon. Now I think it's a reason to patronize other retailers, online retailers other than Amazon, now that Amazon is participating in the sales tax systems.

Or just simply buy used in the private market. Look at your property taxes. Choose where you live carefully. There are disparities in property taxes. If property taxes were to go too high, then people will make significant decisions and move to a different county or move to a different state.

Or if property taxes were to go too high, people would respond just like they did in the window tax and choose not to improve the property value. All of a sudden, they would go to living in mobile structures or temporary structures instead of permanent structures. You would figure out instead of building a barn, I'm gonna figure out the housing needs for my livestock in some other way.

Or I'm gonna figure out the housing needs for myself in some other way. And if you start reading the laws, you'll find all kinds of interesting little exemptions. For example, here in Florida, if you wanna own a boat and if you wanna save money on your boating fees, now, it's gotta be an older boat, but antique vessels in Florida, meaning that the hull and the engine are older than 30 years old, don't pay registration fees.

If you go back and you think about the boating marketplace, you could probably find a vessel that was 30 years old and have a significant high-quality vessel still that can help you to avoid the registration fees. Now, maybe not. At the end of the day, you calculate the money and you figure out, is this an important dollar figure in my life?

And it'd be silly, don't be penny wise and pound foolish. Don't spend all your time buying a 30-year-old boat and then living in an expensive high-income tax state. But you can make these choices. That's my point. Hotel taxes, parking taxes. I avoid places in town here in West Palm Beach where the parking is ridiculous, and most people do.

So as the market regulates, and as the tax systems change, as the incentives change, you can change your own personal approach. That puts the power back in your hands. You have the choice. So today, I encourage you, take control. Recognize that there are often exemptions and you have a choice over the activities that you're doing.

If you don't wanna be subject to a law, change your circumstances so you're not subject to it. Focus on the things that you can do, not on the things that you can't control. And I think your potential for happiness will be far higher. Sitting around and stewing about political events and talking about how bad things are, it's a good recipe for depression.

Trust me, I get there. I've worked very hard not to pay attention to politics, and yet I still have that interest. And so it creeps in, and if I don't exercise discipline, and I didn't exercise my discipline the last few weeks, I started to pay attention, I started to get involved, and I just get sucked in, and it just destroys the joy out of life.

And when I recognize that happening, I say, okay, time to walk away. Dump it all away, I can't do anything about that. But I can do something about what I do. Very simple concepts. Circle of concern and circle of control. There are many things that you're concerned about. Your circle of concern is very high.

Excuse me, very big, very big. I'm concerned about taxes, I'm concerned about the weather, I'm concerned about my family, I'm concerned about my neighbor, I'm concerned about the general direction of Florida, I'm concerned about changing levels of sea level in Florida, I'm concerned about all kinds of things. But I can't control most of those things.

And misery can be found in focusing on your circle of concern rather than your circle of control. Circle of control is much smaller, and it's located within, usually, the circle of concern, but it's much smaller. It's the things you can actually affect. Can't do anything about changing levels of sea level on the Florida coast.

I can't do anything about the tax rates, but I can do something about my choices. I can do something about where I live. I can do something about how I earn my income. And I couldn't do anything about the laws regulating me and my ability to communicate with you being a licensed financial advisor.

Can't change those laws. But I can change the authority those laws have over me. I encourage the same to you. Focus on your circle of control, the things that you can actually do something about. And then over time, as you focus on the things that you can do something about, your circle of control will steadily expand.

And more and more things that are simply in your circle of concern will slowly come under the jurisdiction of your circle of control. But if you do it the other way around, it's a good recipe for misery. Hope these few thoughts are encouraging to you here. We live in interesting times.

(laughs) Interesting times. And my hope is that Radical Personal Finance can serve for you as a voice of encouragement, a voice of motivation, a voice of, I guess, encouragement. And in order to do that, I gotta practice what I preach. I've gotta stay focused on the things that I can affect.

But make a habit, and that's my outcome of today's show, make a habit of reading the if statements and then seeing how they can apply to you. Much of life is about incentives. When you understand the incentives that govern our lives, then you can understand a little bit more about our behavior.

And so understand the incentives, understand the things that are affecting you, and then make good decisions in your own life. That's it for today's show. Thank you all for listening today. Couple of quick closing announcements. Tomorrow's show will be an interview with a listener of the show who's an Indian immigrant.

He heard me, listeners, Manhar Patel, excuse me, Manhar Patel, and he emailed me and said, "Joshua, I heard you said you like to talk to immigrants." And he's got a great immigrant story, immigrated to the United States from India, has been here for a number of years. He's still working to establish his career.

It's just a fun, interesting interview with a listener. And I think you'll be impressed and encouraged by how much progress he's able to make even though he faces dramatic difficulties. He's a credentialed physician, but he can't get into the medical market as working as a doctor. But I think you'll still be impressed with the progress that he's made in his life.

It is a fun interview. Wednesday, I plan to talk to you about, this is my intention, is to talk to you about various types of business entities. We're gonna talk about sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, C-Corps, S-Corps. I'm gonna cover this, all the data, all the business trusts, all this stuff from the CFP curriculum.

Thursday, I got an interview planned as well, and then Friday, Q&A. Thank you all so much for listening. If you'd like to support the show, I would greatly appreciate that, radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron, radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. If you'd like to speak with me about any particular consulting, area of consulting I might be able to serve you with, feel free to book a phone call with me at radicalpersonalfinance.com/phonecall.

Be back with you tomorrow. (upbeat music)