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We never seen this before. Max, the one to watch for a good scream with Cricket. Yeah! Phone plan, streams, and standard definition. Programming subject to change. Fees, terms, and restrictions apply. Visit www.iccricketwireless.com for details. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today, we talk primarily about investing. We're going to talk about how to invest in the local community with local participants in the community. My guest today is Tim Yarbrough. Tim, I don't know how to describe you. Are you a businessman or how do you describe yourself when somebody says to introduce yourself?

Yes, I'm a business owner. I have been for over 40 years. So, I'm an entrepreneur. But I'm an entrepreneur with a vision for at least three generations. So, we connected online after I was doing some research. And just to set the stage for the audience, one thing that I have—one decision that I made a few years ago is I sold for various reasons.

I sold all of my publicly traded securities. And I'm not opposed to owning shares in a publicly traded company at some point in the future. I'm not opposed to owning shares if I've specifically chosen the company. But I'm no longer willing to participate in the market where a majority of people are—where someone else is choosing the companies and where I'm not holding the companies that—into whom I've invested my cash, where I'm not holding them accountable.

And over the last few years, this has been a very difficult nut to crack because once you walk away from the majority of mainstream investments, you're left with a very few—with few options. One option is obviously your own business or your own businesses, which is something that I am now obviously very actively engaged in.

You can invest in local things like local real estate, et cetera, which I'm also engaged in. However, I'd love to invest in other people's businesses. So when I connected with Tim and heard a little bit of Tim's story, I realized that I have a lot to learn. So, Tim, that's it for my kind of setting the stage for the audience.

I'd love for you to share a little bit of your personal story with business, how you got started, and how you developed the long-term vision that you have and how you've gone about fulfilling that vision over the past decades. Well, let me start out by saying that the framework that we have bought into, particularly in Western cultures, I think is counterproductive.

And when I say counterproductive, what I mean by that is that we've been taught to look for financial security. When I believe that the proper goal that we ought to be looking for is cultural security and that our investments ought to be aligned with creating cultural security. And what I mean by that is is that within the culture, as long as you have the potential for opportunity and to exercise that potential, you can create financial security.

But you can create what we call today financial security. But if you do not have cultural security for that particular property, it can become meaningless. So with that framework, that framework kind of gives a perspective to the way that I approach things is that in my investing activities, I'm far more interested in cultural security than per se financial security from a personal perspective.

So with that, what happened in my case when I was a young man, I had been converted to the Christian faith and I was very serious about my Christian faith. I wanted to know how to live, how to live the Christian life. And I didn't understand it at the time.

But as I grew older and I got some life experience and some maturity behind me, the thing that I realized is that the older men in that environment of my youth did not have a conviction and did not feel a necessity to invest their life experience into future generations.

And so as I began to study the scriptures and I became a student of the scriptures from a business perspective, I began to realize that the book of Proverbs, the book of James, Deuteronomy, that those books were oriented to the present generation that God had given maturity and life experience to investing into future generations to create cultural security or a term that I come to call cultural security.

So with that, when I started my businesses, I've been in the energy field and energy management field that has branched out into a lot of different activities. But what I started to do was the Lord used my experience to bring me to a place where I said that to myself, this was not going to happen to young men and young women around me if I could help it, that they were not going to be left without the benefit of the life experiences that the Lord gave me in business and also in encouraging entrepreneurship.

So from that, we started an apprenticeship program and I mean, we learned a lot over the years. We've had between 350 and 400 young people that have come through those the apprenticeship program. And with that, we are one of the things that we did not only with them, but with others in our community was we encouraged them to take a look at and begin to investigate, if not to jump right into running their own businesses.

And one of the reasons for that is that running your own business will teach you a sense of responsibility much quicker and at a much higher level than other aspects of life because it will speak to you through the market very quickly. The feedback is immediate, shall we say.

The feedback mechanism of the free market is tremendously efficient and it speaks quickly. So that was the background. And it's not just about business, but it's also about responsibility. It's about character. It's about life perspective, worldview. Why are you doing what you do? Those kind of things. So we literally live with these young people in the sense of working beside them.

We talk with them. I mean, it's very normal for us to have them over. We sit and we discuss practical problems. We have certain rules that we follow. For instance, one of the rules that we have is that you're not allowed to bring up a problem unless you have a proposed solution, at least one.

And what that means, and they go through the class on this, is that you have at least developed the maturity to understand that if all you do is bring up the problem and you have no proposed solutions, you're just a griper. And the world has sufficient of those. In fact, we have gone to the want ads looking for people seeking to hire complainers, and we have yet to find a company that has been so interested that they would advertise for that.

And so there are young people learn whether your proposal is accepted or not. You have the maturity to realize. That if you see the problem, you must think your way through it to bring forth at least a proposed solution that demonstrates maturity in your own thinking. So that's a life skill that goes across the spectrum, not just in business, but in marriage, raising children, relationships with your neighbors, the church world.

And it also helps you to identify people that you may or may not want in your circle of influence. If all they do is complain, that's generally not the person that you want to be in your circle of influence, influencing you or your home or your family, unless they're willing to mend their ways.

So is this apprenticeship program something that is more formal? They apply with a paper application, etc. Or is this more of an informal relational type of approach? It's all organic. We have intentionally avoided the more formal approach. I mean, we do interviews and those kind of things so that we can assess where skills are and possibly where character strengths and weaknesses are, that kind of thing.

But, you know, in the course of all these years, we've worked with probation officers. We've taken young men who at an early age, they came from broken homes or homes that had just really bad backgrounds to them, but and brought them into it with the understanding that, you know, these were the roles.

These were the goals. And we've seen some of them succeed. They own their own businesses today. It's just been incredible to see what the Lord has done with their lives. So we'll come back to more specifics in a bit, but continue on. So people enter into your apprentice program.

How long would you define as is the apprenticeship process and then what happens afterward? Well, typically it's ranged anywhere from two to four years, and that primarily depends on a couple of factors. One, the maturity of the participant and whether or not we're willing to keep them and whether or not they're willing to continue on.

Then their goals. For instance, if we have some that are willing, they have certain skills. We see certain leadership qualities in them and they have a passion for a certain style of business. Like we've helped start a number of different businesses, everything from glass to furniture to electrical to heating and air to carpentry, automobile mechanics.

A total of 62 different businesses. And we're just now getting into online stuff where we're really using some of the younger people to mentor us because their knowledge and their task capabilities, they're just superior to us. And so some of them have desires to be engineers, things that require certain types of college educations.

We don't really encourage that. We think that as a general rule, particularly as it's gone along, people are better off to take the money they would invest in a college education. Educate themselves online and through the mentoring process and start a business. It's a lot less expensive. And besides that, people will pay you to learn.

That seems a little more economically feasible to me than paying people to teach you from a book that you could read for yourself. And you have mentors who are willing to invest their lives and their life skills and their life knowledge in you. So when we have people who we see that are interested in starting a business, they have certain passions, then what we do is we start putting together a five-fold business plan.

And as a typical rule, we try to create businesses that are family-oriented, that can be operated at a family level. Because, again, our goal here is cultural security. That's what we're after. And within that cultural security, obviously you want to have to a certain extent financial security. But our personal take on that is that it's overrated.

You know, the Lord himself tells us it is the Lord that gives the power to get wealth. And he also has some warnings that he gave through James to – I think to generations like ours where people make plans to say we're going to go here and live for a year and we're going to trade and make profit.

And James gives the instruction that's not as popular among the financial security industries or even the promoters, the speaking guys, that the Lord says that you should say "Lord willing" because you don't know what tomorrow may bring. But with that, what we try to do then is we drive the capital costs down as much as we possibly can and invest an amount of money from, say, $5,000 to $10,000.

I think the most that we've ever done into a business operation was about $50,000. But we try to keep the biggest part of the investment, the labor and the mental aspects of it, so that they have the potential to go through the experience of the hard parts of growth.

Because as you know, the greatest benefits that you get is not the financial rewards if you're successful. It's what you learn in the journey. You could lose the money. You'll never lose the lessons. Right. So as I understand it from our past conversations, you capitalize the business as far as you submit the – you put up the money in exchange for a stake in the business and work as a partner with the entrepreneur, with the younger person.

Is that accurate? That is correct. And what we try to set up is we have two goals in this primarily. One is we want the young people to realize there are two ways that you can get an education. God has ordained two ways. One is experience. Everybody is going to get that.

It is also the most costly form of education that you can possibly obtain. And you are going to get some of that. But the second way that God has ordained is to tap the wisdom of those who have gone before you, the life experience of wise men and women whom the Lord has already taken through the life experiences.

Now in doing that, you will not eliminate the cost of experience but what you will do is highly mitigate that cost if you listen. And we've all had the experience of saying to ourselves if I had only listened and I am no exception. So what we do is we set up a program where we hold the majority of the stock to start out with depending on how we set up the company.

But we have a three-, five-, or seven-year plan depending upon the maturity of the individuals where the stock ownership shifts to them whereby the end of that period of time, we retain 10%. And they are the majority owners. And by that time, making your plans with wise counsel has become habitual and you have gone through enough experiences with the cautions and the wisdoms that you can get from those who have gone before you until you have learned to have a great appreciation and a tremendous joy in being able to tap that wisdom.

It's not something that you find intrusive. It's something that you find beneficial. So I know you're interested primarily in cultural security but I've got to ask. Have you calculated what the financial return on investment has been from some of these companies that you capitalized? Well, it has – some of them have been very successful.

What we have discovered over the years because we're really oriented to family-based type businesses or where you have two to no more than five employees. And depending on what you do, that your gross income to those businesses will run between $500,000 and $1 million a year. Now, some can go a little beyond that depending on what they're doing but the other part of the process that we've discovered is that once you start going beyond that – and we've had this happen.

You begin to discover that you no longer own a company. It owns you. And so at that point in time, you have to decide what your tradeoffs are. And hopefully, you've already settled that question beforehand and that is that you're not willing to trade the time with the family, the investment in other people's lives, the fellowship in your community for simply greater money prospects.

That's at least the hope. So, back to the apprenticeship program, when you're working with these young people, are they going through a formalized system of steps? Do you have – you need to read these 11 business books and do these actions here or is it just simply more of being together?

They're with you in your business endeavors. Well, there's a continual reading program in regards to growing and nurturing your knowledge and studying your business. But a significant amount of it has to do with just interaction, not just with me but with others. One of the things that we do, which is really interesting and I think it's probably had as great an impact as anything else we've done is that we do interviews of small business owners, family-based business owners, even large businesses.

But our young people go and they go through these interviews and they not only sit through them but that they then learn to conduct them themselves. And why did you get into business? What have you seen has been the most beneficial thing of owning your own business? What has been the drawbacks?

How has it impacted your family? If you could do it over, what would you do different? I mean there's nothing that helps like real live stories of people. And so as the Lord brings you to these particular circumstances, you know, you can say, "Ah, I remember Mr. Sheets told me about his experience with that and what he learned and what he would do differently if he could." And so that has had tremendous impact throughout our county, our area here.

We interview all of our business owners. We interview our pastors. We interview our various officials to get their stories. You think that you know people until you get to interviewing and then you get to hear their life stories. We go down to the nursing homes. I mean if you want to hear some fantastic stories that are so beneficial to life, go down and talk to the people who are 80 and 90 and 95 years old.

And one of the most amazing questions and some of the most profound insights you'll ever get is when you say to them, "If you could pass on to me things that you think would be vital for me to know, what would you say?" And I'll tell you some of the answers that we have gotten from some of these people have just been incredible.

One of the ladies that she just passed away earlier this year, she was 102. And the young people that got to hear her standing by her bedside tell them what she thought would be important got lessons that were incredible. She said, "I've lived to be 102, and if I could do it over again, the thing that I have learned is that I would let no circumstances in life rob me of my joy in Jesus Christ." And I mean it was just as genuine and warm and delightful as it could possibly be.

And by the time you lived to 102, and if I recall correctly, she had 11 children, you've had some pretty good experience. The other thing about being 102 is you no longer have a social filter. My grandmother is 101. One thing I always joke with her about, and she says it herself, she said, "There's a point in time where you just stop caring what other people think and you speak your mind." Yes, yes.

So, you set out a system of books and then a lot of interaction, relationship, and the young people go on these interviews with you. With regard to your business, one of the challenges I've often thought about is how do I figure out how to build a business that I can bring people into.

As an example, Radical Personal Finance in its present state is very much me-oriented. I'm the one who does things, and there are some needs for me to bring many other people in, but this isn't the type of business where I can necessarily just bring on another employee. For example, I get a little jealous of people that may own a construction company, and they can just say, "Well, here, go ahead and be a helper to this journeyman of some kind," or who own the type of business where there's always extra jobs and an extra hand is always useful.

So, what type of businesses do you run, or how do you figure out how to bring these people into a job environment where they're going to be able to learn and to work alongside you? What does that look like? Well, we do a lot of energy management type of work in terms of assessment.

We do construction. We do appliance repair, different things like that. So, you have to figure out what the skill level is. Ours can be taught to certain young people. So, when you start out with a business, it's certainly with an eye to the fact that you want to be able to do something like that.

It's not just to bring them on as an employee, but what we look for is something where we could actually train them and put them in charge of it. And, I mean, actually just turn over the whole responsibility and the authority to make decisions with them and realizing that with that, there's a potential that they could make some detrimental decisions, but hopefully they will practice reliance upon the wisdom of those that have gone before them.

And we have had very few times, but we have had a few times over the years where we had young people in order to demonstrate a superior class of wisdom have made some decisions we didn't know about. But we did learn later when they had to come and tell us about the results of that superior class.

It's only funny because you and I both have been there ourselves and had to go and eat our humble pie. Yes. But at the same time, you know, there's a principle we teach. The scripture says, "Though a righteous man falls seven times, yet will he rise again." Well, the question becomes one, why does he rise again after the seventh time?

And the point being is that you can't forget he's already done it six times. He knows the benefits of getting up again. Probably his discouragement level is much less after six times of having to get up than it was after the first one. And so therefore, at the seventh time, he gets up again with a greater hope and a greater vision and greater maturity than he did after the first one.

So when you're on the older side of that coin, you have to build into your process the expectation that one of the great strengths that life experience will give to young people is that they have to learn how to get up, which means they have to fall. And so you can't be disappointed that God lays out a directive that one of the ways that he strengthens them for the future is that they learn to get up from the failures of the past.

So when they perceive that it's not the end of the world, that it's actually part of the process that God has ordained in life, it's a tremendous encouragement to young people because they want to get it right. They want to be successful. They want everything to work right out of the chute, and life just generally isn't like that.

A term I like that I think that we should be thinking about and figuring out how to apply in our own contexts is the term "business incubator." And I've heard this term mostly around the technology space, technology companies. There are a number of business incubators where they bring in a young man or woman and say, "OK, what's your idea?" And basically they say, "My idea is to build an app that does blah, blah, blah or to build a website that does blah, blah, blah." And so they come into a team environment and there are other people who also have ideas and they bat the idea around.

And then there is a mentor or a team of mentors, and that mentor or team of mentors has a broad network of contacts throughout the industry. And so by this young person bringing their idea into the business incubator, the most famous one I'm aware of is Y Combinator headed up by a guy named Paul Graham out in California.

And so they bring these people in and they gain access to the network and the network can help and they've got to do it themselves. They and their co-founders have to work to build it, but they have the resources of the network. Now, that works well in the tech space.

Unfortunately or fortunately, not everybody is well suited to the tech space, nor are tech businesses necessarily the best businesses. They lack some of the characteristics that you described. It's hard to have family involvement in many tech businesses. To a certain degree, you can, but they're not quite the same thing.

And so the other area where I've seen this, where I've really admired it, is there's a man named Joel Salatin who is a farmer famously of Polyface Farms up in Virginia. And he's a famous grass-fed farmer, but he talks about it in terms of his business enterprise as little fiefdoms where he has all of these just – I mean, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say dozens and dozens of micro businesses that all operate on his farm and in his farming operations.

And so he brings people in and somebody might have the idea that, "You know what? We've got this woodlot over here and I'm going to start a business going ahead and harvesting and selling the wood." And he says, "Great. Go for it. You can use the wood." They work out a business arrangement.

And the person is not an employee per se. The person is a business owner and they have a business relationship. So they get to tap into the network of Polyface Farms. They get to tap into the resources. They get to tap into Salatin's experience, his business acumen and his advice and his wisdom.

But they are the entrepreneur. The results are on them. And many people come to him with all kinds of businesses and he'll say, "Yeah, let's do it." I remember when I read a couple of his books, he talked about how his delivery driver – almost nobody in his business is on salary.

His delivery driver has his own business and he just has a contract where he is delivering the goods for his own business. So I've just always admired this approach and I don't know how yet I'm going to be able to do it. But I think it's something that we who are business people, especially business people with vision, should be laboring to build and to lay the foundation in our businesses that we can work with younger people and bring them in in an apprenticeship program.

Well, one of the things – we had a discussion before and one of the things I thought about in regards to your particular endeavor is you're just in a prime position to be a facilitator for apprenticeship opportunities. And that can be a tremendous – we pretty well do most everything locally.

Now, that's – we have reached out into other states a few times. But we really work locally because it's my encouragement. But you're sitting in a position where you could have businesses that are in contact with you where you could facilitate that, where you could reach out to others that are looking for opportunities for their sons or their daughters to be trained or mentored.

The opportunities abound there. It's a great idea. I've never even considered that. I made a note of that and it's a great idea. I want to come back to something you said earlier and ask you to expand on it, especially with your experience. You made the statement that financial security is overrated.

What did you mean by that? Well, I went to a financial advisor mostly because I wanted to see what they would tell me that I would need for retirement. And I got the figure of a little over $2 million. And that's absurd. And so that would mean I – between the time that I was 20 and the time that I did this thing we call retirement, you know, that I occasionally eat and occasionally buy a pair of shoes or something like that as a typical rule for the people in our culture.

But this has made a goal of life and even something like retirement. I'm not a fan of the way we do retirement or what we call retirement. I really encourage people to stay away from it per se in the sense of just transition to a different type of activity and work.

I haven't seen retirement to be very beneficial because the way we do retirement in this country has very much a me focus on it. Whereas I am convinced that the obligation of the older generations is to future generations and that as you start traveling to the path of becoming that older generation, there's a story told of the three-layer cake.

And I don't know if you've heard the story or not. But you know the three-layer cake is – the top layer is the grandson. The middle layer is the father and the bottom layer is the grandfather. And then the grandfather passes away and all the layers shift and you become the middle layer.

And your destiny lies at the bottom of that cake. So the concept is that we can either live our lives so that the focus of our older years is ourselves or we can live our lives so that the focus of our older years is the middle layer and the top layer of the cake.

And it is a mark of maturity for a people who are able to look at life and say that what they hope to do is to leave contributions so that the second and third layer of the cake benefit by the fact that they were here. But you have to invest in it.

You have to live for it. Whereas the way that we do it in our country is that it's very much me focused and not only do I think it's destructive for future generations. I think it's destructive for the individual as well because it destroys purpose. And when people lose purpose, that just has such ramifications over all of life that it's very sad to meet them.

I see that all the time. So that's primarily what I'm talking about. Obviously, we'd like to have enough money to take care of things. But the idea that our productive years come to an end outside of health problems that make it necessary, I think is an idea whose time has come to pass off the scene of history.

How old are you now, Tim? I am 59. So my guess, if I listen through my own ears, you're preaching my gospel. If I listen through the eyes of the culture around though, I would say that one substantial difference in the ease of being able to accept a message like that is the fact that you at 59, you have a high degree of autonomy and control over your business, over your schedule, over your activities.

And that's very different than perhaps the feeling of somebody who works for a large company in a job where they don't have any family. There's no family integration. They're traveling a lot. They're doing work that they don't particularly see the benefit of. They feel like their opinion doesn't count, et cetera.

So it's much harder, I think, for somebody in that context to feel that same sense of purpose as perhaps you do. Am I right? Do you think that's a major disconnect as far as the message that you're saying as compared to the culture around? Well, what I would say is this.

That's an intentional disconnect. Because as an individual, we have to concede that we are absolutely responsible for the choices that we make. And if the choices that we make have left us purposeless in the direction that we're traveling, there's only one person that can change that. And if you're willing to – for lack of a better word – if you're willing to sell having a passionate purpose in life for this illusion of what we call financial security, that's the tradeoff you make.

It is definitely an illusion. But that's something that we don't think about so much. We might think about it more when the stock market crashes and all of a sudden our portfolio diminishes in market value by 50 percent. We might think about it more when somebody evil absconds with a company and the company goes bust and they cleared out the accounts beforehand.

I think about it when watching political debates and political movements and thinking about how simple it is and how in so many governments over the world have quickly changed some laws and the wealth evaporates from the wealth builders' hands into the hands of the government in charge. But we don't often think about it so much.

I mean those are rare and generally here in the United States we live under the context that everything is secure, everything is consistent, and we don't need to worry about such things. Yeah, I think the term I've heard used for it, which I think is pretty good, is called the bias of normalcy.

We think things always will continue the way they have. And so we don't become intentional in terms of the future outside of just ourselves. So it – I mean it definitely is a challenge. We teach a concept that the Lord himself only holds us responsible in three areas of life, and outside of those three areas we can do what we want.

But the three areas of life are every thought, every word, and every deed. And most people will do exactly what you just did. They get it. And so if we're not going to think about it and we're not going to be intentional in our decisions, it's very difficult for us to complain about the purposefulness or the lack of purpose in our lives because we are responsible for that.

One of the first classes we teach our 13-, 14-, and 15-year-olds in our – we have a different homeschool co-ops and so forth, but we teach them a class called How to Quit Being a Sponge. And it's a very much a class that is intended to impress upon the young minds a very different view of their place in the family whereas – what we impress on them is that as early as possible in life, you are to become an economic asset to your family and not a liability.

And whereas what we have done as a cultural norm today typically is that our young people until the age of 22, 23, 24, 25 are continuing liabilities to the family economic structure. That is just so destructive not for just the family. But that's just so destructive for young people.

And then when they come out into the marketplace, I have interviewed literally hundreds and they don't have a – generally a clue in terms of how to respond in a responsible manner. This is not in every case obviously. But we deprive them of some of the greatest assets that they will need in life because we taught them dependency for all their formative years.

And dependency, whether you do it in a family, whether you do it in a church or whether you do it in a state, creates the same disease. Aaron Ross Powell: I'll affirm that. When I was in seventh grade, I was educated at home until seventh grade and my dad came to me and through some varying circumstances, he decided to put us into a private Christian school.

And he came and said, "I want to do this and I think it would be best for you." And he had the conversation with me and with my siblings. But he said, "I want you guys to pitch in. It's expensive and I need you guys to pitch in." And as I remember, it was a relatively nominal amount.

I think it was something like $100 a month. I need to ask him at some point to get this so I've got it for sure and clear. But the number was about $100 a month. And so from seventh grade on to twelfth grade, I contributed $100 a month to help pay for my private school tuition.

And in hindsight, I'm so grateful for that because even though it was a relatively nominal amount, it gave to me a very different approach. It put within me a very different spirit about my place in the family and how I was a contributing member of the family. I was contributing to my education.

I took it much more seriously. And it gave me a lot of pride that I wasn't a leech but that I was partners with my dad in the educational process. Yes. Well, I'll share with you a little story. It's one of the – you know, every family has their humor stories.

And we had a rule in our home. We were a home-educating family for all the years of our children. They're now in their middle 30s, married. We have grandchildren and so forth. But the rule in our home was is that communism is a great system until you reach the age of 12.

At the age of 12, all communism stops. In other words, the way the rule worked is if you wanted to participate in extracurricular activity, you earned the money and you paid for it yourself. Well, our youngest son, his birthday is August 30th. And so the year that he was going to be turning 12 at the end of August, he was 11 and he was – loved to play basketball.

So he came to his mother and I. He's 11 years old. This is the first week of August and he's going to be turning 12 at the end of the month. So he come to his mother and I and he said, "Mom and Dad, I've got a great idea." He said, "I think if I could get my tennis shoes early this year and get in the next four weeks of practice, it would be so beneficial to me." So I agreed to the proposition and so we go down to the shoe store and his mother and I are over in the $39 and $49 shoes looking for him a pair of shoes and we couldn't find our son.

And so then we find him over in the $100 to $120 section and his mother and I get a 15-minute lecture on the quality – the superior quality of these shoes. So anyway, my wife can't believe I paid $100 for a pair of tennis shoes and this was quite a number of years ago.

And so anyway, the next year, we call our son in. He's now turned 12. And we call our son in and we said, "You know, we thought your idea last year was so great about getting that extra four weeks of practice that we're going to take you in four weeks early this year and let you get the shoes for your basketball season so you can get in that extra practice again this year." So we head down to the same shoe store and of course his mother and I, having been educated the year before, we're over in the $100 to $120 section of the shoes and we can't find our son.

And lo and behold, we discover him. He's over in the $39 and $49 area and his mother and I this year get a 30-minute lecture on how the quality of those shoes have so improved in the last year it would be foolish to spend $100 on a pair of shoes.

That's a great story. To this day, he has never forgotten that difference between the money coming out of someone else's pocket and the money coming out of his pocket. But it's one of those delightful stories that the Lord put into our family, but it was a great economic lesson to him that he's never forgotten.

Indeed. Indeed. A couple of questions. When you talk about family businesses, could you give some examples of what that would look like and the benefits of that? Because I know this is definitely something that many in my audience desire to have. If you ask most people what's a major goal, they would say, "I want to have more time with my family." I see this as much more achievable if you build a business that's able to be integrated more fully into the family life rather than simply the idea that I'm going to somehow work 15 hours a week and have lots more hours sitting at home with my family.

Do you have some ideas? Could you give some examples from your business experience of families who have been able to build these more family-oriented businesses? Oh, absolutely. Well, let's start with Joel Salatin. He himself has had an impact in our area. We have a young man. His name is Noah Saunders, and Noah and his wife and children, they live south of us.

But he runs a farm. He started a co-op, and of course his wife and his – I mean small children – help with the planning, taking care of the animals and so forth. And he has developed a way to make a living running a small farm. And he actually does a conference called Redeeming the Dirts coming up in October over in Gadsden, Alabama.

And I mean just a delightful family, but they're very much integrated into all that they do. We have another one. They run a business that is heating, air conditioning, electrical, do stuff like that. And the wife is the accountant. She handles those kind of things, runs the schedule, those kind of things.

And they are just a young family starting out. So they have a son. He'll be coming along, and of course he'll get integrated in that. We have another one raising different animals, goats, lambs, those kinds of things. And then we have a construction business where the plans and things like that are done by the wife in conjunction with the husband.

And even the on-site stuff and delivery stuff are done as kind of a joint venture kind of things. A lot of these things, what you discover is as you venture into them together, we have a process where we call assigning responsibility. And you have to be very clear on who's going to handle what responsibilities, those kind of things.

And that helps everybody define their different roles and spheres of responsibility and that kind of thing with it. We have another young couple which is pretty remarkable. They're just excellent at doing typesetting for books. They do design covers, indexing, and they work from their home together. So you have different things like that.

We have another business where people – this had to do with mission orientation because we think that we do the same things with mission work that we do with a lot of our structure here in the Western culture, particularly in the United States. Is that we create – we do missions by a dependency model rather than a self-sustaining model.

And what we mean by that is we go out and we have missionaries, and the plan when they go out is to always be dependent on the receiving of funds from the sending organizations. And we think that's a very bad idea. In fact, it borders on the idea of theft because Christ himself said it's more blessed to give than to receive.

And so when you start a mission work, one of the things that we do as a group of entrepreneurs is that we help evaluate work opportunities so that the people in that locality can learn how to work and become self-sustaining and move from being the recipients to being the givers and become self-sustaining in the evangelization of their own culture.

And that's a model for wherever you are. So those are some of the ideas. I've known people who have done that with – we have some that do online businesses. I'm just now getting educated on that. I see some real potential with it but where it's branched off to where their older children have taken up their own branch of an online business, and they all work from home together.

So you also told me some about some of the things that you've done to help young people get established. So you work in the areas of education. You described some of the co-ops and things in the classes. You work in the area of business apprenticeship and you also mentioned that you have some involvement of helping young couples to get established in housing.

Describe to me what you do there, please. Well, over the years, one of the things that we have in our culture is we've come to accept debt living as a normative operational principle and we reject that. Debt living is anathema to the Christian worldview in that the Christian economic system always has you preparing for future decisions, not paying off past decisions.

And so one of the things that we did with our sons and with other people over the years is that we have helped build 17 homes in our area debt-free. And what we do is young people would have to save up or not necessarily young people, but all but one couple have been young, young people.

And they would get the foundation done and then have enough money to order the material and pay for it. And we would go in and set up basically a little mini camp with about 30 of us. And we've got people qualified in each of these areas of need. And then we would go to work and the house would be a house that has this within their budget.

It's frugal, it's modest. And within two days, we'd block that thing in. And then we would finish it out, you know, so that it's ready for them to move in. And then if there were things left to do, they could finish it out as they could afford to pay for it.

But that family started out without that albatross of debt over their head. So that's one mechanism. A second mechanism that we've done is this was started actually spurred by one of the young men. And what we did is we started going out and you would have abandoned trailers, you know, that owned lots.

And so we would find the eventual owner of that property. And what we would agree to do is we would take and clean that lot, the trash, the debris, clean it up and all that. In return, we got the old abandoned trailer. And what we really wanted was the framework out of it.

And, of course, strip it down and we have designed three models of homes that can be built on that between $8,000 and $15,000. That's not included in our labor, but it would allow young people who are prepared to start out to live and have opportunity if they want to take that same home.

And then they can expand it. And the goal there is to build a rich family life that has, again, the cultural security rather than, you know, the things that would indebt them and cause the pressures in their lives that – which is one of the reasons we're trying to eliminate it.

Yeah. It always strikes me when I consider those stories and they're so inspiring to me because I very much want to – I want to be able to perpetuate that type of procedure here where I live with the community that I'm involved in. But it just stands out to me as the vast difference between – and I know you're working and building from a biblical worldview and everything that you say – but it's the vast difference between the biblical model and the biblical approach as compared to the mainstream model around us.

And it seems to me that – now, I'm no expert, but you basically have three levels of government in the Bible. You have family government, you have church government, and then you have civil government. And what seems to happen around us is that you attack all of those institutions.

You attack the family, destroy the family, attack the church, destroy the church, and that leaves the only alternative as the civil government. And so when people look around at the problems, they say, "Well, we've got to solve the problem. We've got to solve the problem of homelessness. We've got to solve the problem of lack of education.

We've got to solve the problem of – insert whatever problem it is that you're concerned with in your context at this time in life. And you try to come up with a civil governmental solution. But you don't have to go there. There are many other alternatives and the better alternatives are to return to the family government and to the church government.

And what you're describing to me – one of the dreams that I have with my children is I don't care at all whether they get a college education or not, whether they get a college degree. It doesn't matter to me. I think it's very useful. I think that all indications are at least my son who I can assess his academic ability.

He seems to be academically capable. And so I think that I'll wind up encouraging him in our context just to go ahead and get a college degree during his teenage years. Time will tell. Obviously, you can never know these things a decade or two decades in advance. Time will tell.

But I'm much less interested in providing a college education for him than I am interested in helping him to own a debt-free house so that he can begin his family without, as you said, an albatross of debt around his neck. That seems to me to be far more valuable than a college diploma to tack on the wall or stuff in a bin that is almost never again used or referenced.

And so I really am inspired by some of the things that you share from your experience because this is where I desire to labor. I don't want to – I'm convinced you can't beat something with nothing. You can't just sit around and complain about all the problems and, as you said, your rule for your apprentices.

You can't sit around and complain about a problem unless you've got a solution ready to go, at least one solution that you've thought about that might work better than the existing problem. And so I love how you guys are getting involved and working to solve some of these problems to build up again systems of family government, church government, etc.

Here in my local church, we've not built entire houses, although we've done many things close to that. I mean when I was a kid, we re-roofed – I don't want to exaggerate. I would say eight to ten, perhaps a dozen roofs. And that's the type of thing where it's manual labor and you can be of tremendous help to a family where if the roof is in bad shape and they've got enough money to buy the shingles, you can come in and in a few days of work, heavy work, you can re-roof an entire structure for them.

Yes, absolutely. I don't think that any listeners who are inspired by this – you don't have to wait until you've got a full mentorship or apprenticeship model developed with a complete curriculum just to start taking young people under your wing and helping them and integrating them. You don't have to wait until you can build houses for people.

Just go and clear out the weeds in somebody's yard, build a new fence, help them re-roof, and help people to do it so that we can systematically disconnect and detangle ourselves from the civil government of our day. Well, in regards to the idea that you laid out there in terms of how we look at family government and church government, we would add a little bit to that in the sense that we believe that the first form of government is self-government and from self-government to family government and from family government to church and community government.

But to look to the civil government as a solution to problems is to miss the whole point, and there's a very good explanation as to why. And what we do is we teach what we call the five circles of influence, and this makes perfectly good sense to anyone that disconsiders it.

I mean it's not like it's a great insight. But in the first circle, if you look at it, you have self-government and family government, and that is where we should have the investment of most of our time, and it is certainly where we will have our greatest influence. Then our second circle in our lives is what we call our circle of influence.

It's people that we intentionally want to be into our circles of influence. I want them to influence my life. I want them to influence my family, and we will either choose them or they will choose us. I prefer to be in the choosing mode. I want people who are going to have positively impact my family to be into that circle.

But when you move out into that second circle, you're going to have less time and you're going to have less influence. So if you're going to influence a culture to the positive good, the people in that circle have got to have a shared value system so that your cultural influence magnifies itself or, as the scriptures put it, the leavening principle.

And so through that second level, then you reach out into the third circle, which is your church and your community. Now, some of the people in your church will probably be in your second circle, but it's through that second circle that you influence your community, the businesses, the local governments, the other churches, home education, private education.

You just run the gamut of things, and all of them, when you move out to that third circle, you will have less time, but you also have less influence. But that's also why you need all of these people who have this shared value system. Now, when we go further to the fourth circle, like in our form of government, that's the state, and the fifth circle is the federal government.

Well, when you look at this, if you're going to make changes, the fourth circle and the fifth circle only have circles one, two, and three to draw on for resources. So if you're going to change circle four and five, it is imperative that you change circles one, two, and three.

And by the very process of selection, it will require the change of circles four and five. You can change all the people you want to in circles four and five, but if you don't change the ideas, it's immaterial. But that has to come out of the growth in the local communities where this value system of honor and honesty and integrity, freedom and liberty, have a very strong hold in the lives of the people themselves.

So that's kind of how we approach changing it. - That's powerful. That's why God always starts with self-government. He says, "You, submit to me." - Yes, yes. - And everything flows out of that. Everything starts from our individual self-government. Tim, my final question, trying to think of how to phrase it.

Here you are at 59 years old, so looking at the second half of your life. When you think about your vision, and you think about that three-generation vision, if you were talking, I mean, when you're talking to a young man like me, a 31-year-old young father of a couple of children, what are some of the things that you would encourage me to consider to help to develop that vision that goes beyond what is so commonly held in the culture around?

What picture would you paint for me to be looking for and considering? - Wow, that's an outstanding question. What I would say to you when you're raising your children, this is a two-way street, is that if you can help your children to develop a purposeful vision that consumes them passionately for the kingdom of God, you will have given to your children the greatest gift that any parent can ever give to a child.

If they can be so consumed with the priority that God's assigned, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," and the word means justice, that they orient their whole lives to the priority that God assigns there, I cannot imagine a better gift that a parent could give to a child, not only by their words but by their example, that could make their life so meaningful and so purposeful and so fulfilling that it stays with them their entire life long.

I just can't imagine it. So that's one thing. Secondly, the orientation of your home, which would be the same thing. The priority is the same. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness." And all these things will be added unto you is to ask yourself, "What is the vision of my home?

Do I have a unity of vision in my home for what purpose or purposes we want to live for?" That is just so powerful within the context of a home, that we have unity in our vision for what we want to live for. That creates a unity and a purpose that is just incredibly powerful and uniting in its purpose.

And then I would say, given the fact that we've had some interaction before, I know commitment to debt-free living, and when I say commitment to it, here's the way we look at it. If we had a choice between having to borrow money and have a house to live in or to have to live in a tent, my wife and I would ask this question, "What colors are the tents?" And so, you know, these are just some basic things.

But then the other thing is that in a world that has captured the spirit of our fellow human beings, is hopefully to be able to break through that and to help them get beyond what has been passed on to them in the past two generations or so, and to be able to capture a vision of purpose for living that goes beyond themselves.

And if they can get that, they will never lack opportunity to do good to others. And if they can just be captured by that vision, all this other stuff will fall into place. So those are the things that we really focus on, is that purpose of vision. And integrating it, sustaining it, feeding it, nurturing it, it's a lifelong passion.

Tim, I want to thank you for coming on. I appreciate it very much. I have enjoyed very much hearing from you. I'm going to come up at some point and see you there in Alabama and see some of the things that you guys are doing in person. I really want to come up and see you at some point.

Do you have a website? Do you have any online properties or anywhere that you'd like to have my audience go and connect with you further after this interview? I actually do not. We are, when we say we're organic, that's intentional. We are putting up a website. This year we're working on it, trying to fill our way.

You know, one of the things that we discovered, Mr. Sheets, is that with what we do here, it's very difficult in the way that we approach it to be able to do what we do without the human touch. And, you know, it's one of the handicaps, if that's what it can be called, of our approach to life.

But it's the tradeoffs you make. How do you mean? You mean just simply that because you're having so much interpersonal communication and it's hard to replicate that in a digital form? Is that what you're saying? Oh, I'm horrible at it for the most part. And I mean, I do some classes via Skype, one on one or one on two at the most.

Even like with the material that we use, we use a notebook approach, which means everything is handwritten. For instance, developing a personal mission statement, teaching a class on this, we call it life skills. If I were to say, what is your personal mission statement? We would give you an example like this.

The Apostle Paul said, be imitators of me as I am of Jesus Christ. The things which you have seen and heard in me do. Now, how many people are willing to put that type of a personal mission statement out there and then live by? That's pretty strong. But that's what we want to encourage my generation to and your generation as well.

And I see a mixture of these two things happening. I see, number one, tremendous benefits from the digital revolution. For example, your discussion here today is going to affect, probably going to be heard by somewhere between 10 and 20,000 people. And in between those 10 to 20,000 people, there'll be a tiny minority of people who will do something with what you've said.

But the digital contact is incredibly valuable. But as digital contact grows, digital contact is no substitution for personal contact. And I fear that my generation and my industry, that we have pushed the benefits of digital connection to the detriment of personal connection. But at the end of the day, we are human beings and it's person to person where you make change.

I am happy to write an email from time to time to somebody in my audience that has questions and I'm happy to answer a question in a Q&A. But that's very different than me being able to work with the couple in my church for whom I'm doing financial coaching and financial counseling.

And most life change is going to happen with some personal interaction and involvement. So I think we've always got to keep these two things hand in hand. Well, Tim, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with the radical personal finance community. I really appreciate it.

Well, thank you for having me.