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're not going to talk about a specific financial planning question.

Rather, I'm going to talk to you about who you are and who your fellow listeners are. I'm going to report to you on some demographic data from a recent advertising – excuse me, recent demographic survey that I completed, which was very interesting to me to learn who is listening to this show.

I'll paint a picture for you. I love these pictures that many of you are sending in to me. By the way, I ask you if you haven't yet sent me a picture, please just send me a quick family picture. I want to put some pictures on a screensaver and print some out so I can always keep in mind who my listening audience is with actual faces.

That's super helpful to me. In addition to that, please make sure that you take a moment and record a quick two to three-minute voice memo on your phone and email that to Joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com telling me what you've learned and what you've changed in your life as a result of Radical Personal Finance.

I'd like to do a special episode 500 of the show and put that together so that you can share your story with other listeners. Other listeners can be encouraged by what's happened in your life since listening to Radical Personal Finance. Please just record a voice memo on your phone and email that to me, Joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com in celebration of our 500th show.

I've received a bunch of pictures. I haven't yet received any voice memos yet, so please do that. But I'll paint you a demographic picture of who you are. You as a listener, you are a man. You are white and you are between the ages of 25 to 54. You are extremely highly educated and you earn a lot of money.

That's who you are. Oh, and you're married as well. That's what my demographic data tells me. I'll give you the breakdown of all those because I think it's so interesting to see that data and I want to share that with you as well as share with you what I learned.

I want to do one quick sponsor of the day before I get into the numbers. Today's sponsor is Silly Grasshopper Media. Silly Grasshopper is the company that I use to do all of my web development. It's run by a friend of mine. His name is Jonathan Josephs. I reached out to him when I had put together the first website for Radical Personal Finance and a bunch of the other websites that I have as well.

I had started that on my own. And then I reached out to Jonathan and I said, "Hey, can you please help me?" Because he's a WordPress developer and had really developed some experience there. He works on other platforms as well, but he's a real expert with WordPress. So he agreed and we've been working together for several years now.

He does everything on the website. I don't do anything except to prove comments. That's it. Everything else he does, which has been such a blessing to me to be able to get out of the weeds. Listen, your website is important. If you run a business, your website is your street location.

Used to matter what street you were on. That still matters to some degree, but it matters far more what your website looks like and how it works. If you are an employee, you need a website. You need a career website that shows your perspective employer, your next great perspective employer, your skills, your talents, and your abilities.

So you should reach out to Jonathan at SillyGrasshopper.com. SillyGrasshopper.com. Very reasonable. He's got some self-help stuff. He's also got full service. I found for me that I just could not stand learning all the WordPress stuff. It just sucked all my energy out of me. And I've been so thrilled to work with him for the last few years.

SillyGrasshopperMedia. SillyGrasshopper.com. Let's get to the data. So let me run through a couple of the breakdowns here of the listenership, and then we'll come back and I'll give you some of my analysis of these things. First, about 80% of you are men and 21% of you are women. Now compared to other podcast listeners, that skews pretty heavily male.

Talk about comparison here for a moment. One of the challenges with going through this data is what do I compare this to? Do I compare this to the general population data? That would be a little hard to do because podcast listeners are a very small slice of the pie.

Do I compare this? What do I compare it to? I pulled some data from a company called Edison Research who's done some research in the area of podcast listenership. What they found is, first of all, still, even though it's growing steadily, a very small percentage of people actually listen to podcasts in terms of the number of the percentage of the population that listens to podcasts.

Just under about 2% of the population regularly listens to podcasts. Sorry, not 2% of the population, but 2% of the total listening time from their fall 2014 data listens to podcasts. Those who listen to podcasts listen to a lot of podcasts and listen for a long time, but a small number of people listen to podcasts.

I'm comparing this to the Edison data because that's probably the closest comparison I can get. The percentage of people who listen to podcasts, you could guess, would skew younger rather than older, for an older person much more likely to turn on the radio than my generation, would skew more educated and more higher income because of more familiarity with the digital devices, et cetera.

I'm going to compare my audience to the Edison data. If 80% of you listening to my show are men, 21% are women, that would be compared to the Edison data, which would be, say, 56% are men, 44% are women. The age bracket tree is very interesting to me. Probably the most important demographic is that 88% of you are between 25 and 54 years old.

If I broaden that to ... Well, 25 to 54 is 88% of you. 18 to 34 is 55%, with the most important, of course, being 21 to 34. That demographic of 25 to 34-year-olds is about 49% of my listening audience. Half of you are right in my generational cohort.

Then 30% of you are in the 35 to 44-year-old generational cohort. Over 55 is 4%. 10% of you are between 45 and 54. I'll put these data. It's hard to absorb numbers in audio form. I'll put this data in the blog post for today's show. Marital status, 70% of you are married, 27% of you are single, 2.4% divorced.

By the way, this is 903 total responses. So 70% married, 27% single. That's good. Marriage is good for your health and for your wealth. Racial breakdown, 82% of you are white. 4% of you are black. 4.5% of you are Asian, and 4.5% of you are Hispanic. So I would say there's a heavy, heavy white skew.

Educational experience. These are the two big ones that are really interesting. We'll come back through the analysis in just a second. Educational. 91% of you have a college degree or higher, and 96% of you have at least attended college. So that is a massive skew towards high education. Lots of lots and lots of formal education, which means that my student loan advertisers are pretty good advertisers to keep around for you guys.

If we were to compare that to other podcast listeners, let me give you an example of how extreme that is. Other podcast listeners, 22% have a high school education or less, whereas for you, my listening audience, 2.1% of you have a high school degree or less. Of the one to three years of ...

Let's just go with a four-year degree or higher. Of the general population, 51% ... Excuse me. The general podcast listening population, 51% report that they have a four-year degree or higher. But of you, my listening audience, 85% of you, 86% have a four-year college degree or higher. So a massive skew towards high education.

What about money, income? 58% of you earn over $100,000 a year. 58% of you earn over $100,000 a year. 85% of you earn over $75,000 per year. And 90% of you earn in excess of $50,000 per year. It's hard to overstate how extreme this skew is towards high income.

If we were to compare that to the Edison data, Edison would report that 28% of podcast listeners earn in excess of $100,000 per year. Whereas for you, my listening audience, you report that 60% of you earn in excess of $100,000 per year. So 28 versus 60%. If we broaden that to 75 and over, 41% of listeners in the general podcast space report 41% ...

Excuse me. Report $75,000 per year over for you at 75%. And remember that this Edison data is podcast listeners who in and of themselves skew high income. So what does this mean and was I surprised by it? Well, let's talk about men versus women. Wasn't surprised by this. I never have intended to try to speak to men or speak to women here on Radical Personal Finance.

I don't think much about it. I don't pay much attention to it. My guess would be that my content would appeal more to men than to women, but I've never intentionally tried to make any difference here. So that doesn't really matter to me. I have another show, Encouraging Christian Fathers, that's exclusively to men.

I should do some demographic data there to see if any women sneak in, but that one's exclusively to men. So I'd expect that to appeal to men, but I don't particularly try to do anything here. It's just interesting to observe that the audience does skew very male. Not surprising.

As far as the age bracketing, that makes sense to me as well. With the majority of the audience being between that 25 to 54, that's the goldmine for advertising. 88% of you are 25 to 54 and you're the primary target for advertisers. So that's where I'm working to beef things up there.

It's also reflective, I think, of the podcast culture, which would skew younger. My show would definitely skew younger even than podcast listeners. I think this is reflective of the type of topics that I choose to talk about versus others. For example, I haven't done a big long series on social security planning, although I have wanted to.

It just doesn't interest me as much as other things. Because of my bias in choosing topics that interest me, I think that also is reflective of the topics that will interest more of you. If I want to attract a more diverse age bracketry, I need to choose a more diverse array of topics.

Marital status is also fascinating to me because of this correlation of marital status with education and income. 70% of you are married, and that's a significant skew versus the general population. Over the last five decades, there has been a significant ongoing decline in marriage rates, especially marriage rates among young adults.

But the story of the decline of these marriage rates varies dramatically depending on the education and the income earning level of the respondent. In many ways, you have the story of two Americas. Just recently, a couple of months ago, I finished Charles Murray's book called Coming Apart, The State of White America, 1960 to 2010.

It was extremely eye-opening for me. It was probably the most important book that I've read so far this year in terms of it has helped me tremendously to understand what's happened in my own country here in the United States over the last 50 years. To really understand, it helped me to put current politics into view.

It helped me to put current social issues into view in a way that I never before understood. The story that he paints is essentially that there are two new Americas that 50 years ago didn't exist. I won't take the time to prove and provide all the supporting evidence for his thesis, but I'll just summarize it for you.

There's been the development of a new upper-class elite class which never before existed, and is not based upon income, although income is correlated to the elite. It's based upon education, and it's a class difference, a different lifestyle and a different class. The other kind of amazing trend that has emerged is that there's been the development of a massive new lower class which never before existed in US history.

That is based partly on income, but it's also class distinction. The story that he tells in the book is really interesting because the upper-class elite systematically discard many of the traditional values that the United States of America was founded on, the traditional values in terms of lifestyle. An example of a big one would be married.

The upper-class discard this in their vocal support, but in actual practice, people who are highly educated tend to get married and stay married, whereas in the lower class, marriage as an institution has fundamentally fallen apart, and people in the lower class very rarely get married and they very rarely stay married.

This has disastrous economic effects. Now, correlation causation, I don't know. I don't want to get into that in detail today, but it's interesting to me that you who are listening skew heavily married, especially heavily married in the context of the age, the trending towards youth, because when you pull apart the data on marriage rates among the general population, at an older age, that's different than at a younger age.

My generation and younger is, especially among poor people and low-income earners, are getting married at very, very low rates. Much more likely, again, at higher education and higher income to get married, but still, there's still been a significant decline there over the last 50 years. The other, of course, possible reason here that so many of you could skew married would be my own personal religious beliefs and the fact that I am pretty vocal.

Many people consider me to be fairly vocal about those religious beliefs. My guess would be that if I had any religious information, that you and the listening audience would skew more religious than the general population, less secular, more religious. I know this is a common complaint in the corners of the internet about my show, that I preach too much, I talk about religion, blah, blah, blah.

I would expect that you would skew less secular than the general population. That would also correlate heavily with being married. I can't prove that one, but that would be my guess. The racial makeup is, I don't quite know what to do with this. On the one hand, it doesn't really matter to me in the sense of what color someone's skin is, but what does matter to me is that I'm not really reaching an audience that is less affluent.

I don't know why I expected that I would. I bill my show as appealing master's degree level information, so of course my audience is going to be more educated. But I've had this dream ever since I started of being able to provide information, this dream of the 17-year-old boy or girl that finds me on their smartphone and listens to my show and learns everything they need to break out and be rich.

That's long been a dream of mine. Obviously it's nothing more than a dream because my content is so technical. That's going to put a lot of people off. One thing that this demographic data has done, among other things, I've become much more deeply appreciative of other broadcasters and their approach.

For example, when I started this show three years ago, I was heavily critical of Dave Ramsey. He's, of course, the leading giant force in the personal finance field. He sucks everybody. Everything he does rocks through the personal finance world. I was very critical of him. Some of that critique was technical, but some of it was just frustration with style.

Why do you say the same thing over and over again? Why do you answer the same questions over and over again? Three years later, I have almost no criticisms of Dave Ramsey and almost nothing but appreciation. I especially have a deep appreciation of his ability to reach people who are not high income earners and who are not very educated because he's done more good in that space than anybody else I can think of.

I understand the brilliance of his approach, especially given his radio audience. I just understand the brilliance of his approach in a way that I've never understood. The reason why the racial makeup is important to me is because there's a big difference in income and wealth between black people and white people.

This is a big, big problem. It's a big problem also between Spanish people, Hispanic people, and white people and black people as well. There are significant disparities here. I want to provide content that can help all kinds of people. I kind of have this problem where I thought I would be able to create this thing that would help the common person, the person who's just getting in off the streets.

I don't know why I was delusional about this, but thinking that if I say I'm going to do master's degree level information and doing three hour long shows on five to nine plans, of course that's not going to reach the common person. But for some reason, I've been laboring under the self-delusion that I was going to reach that demographic.

I'm still not ready to give up on that dream, but I think I need to have to go about it a different way, which is something I don't have any answers to at the moment. Let's talk education and income. Not a lot to say here other than it's fascinating to me just to see the incredible correlation between the fact that you are listening to this show and you tend to skew highly educated and you're a high income earner and you're listening to a personal finance show.

Now are you listening to a personal finance show because you're highly educated and because you earn a lot of money and you know what to do with it? Or are you earning a lot of money because you're the kind of person who listens to a personal finance show? Back to the kind of the self-selection bias of this data set, you had to choose to take action on my survey link.

That was hard. 900 of you said, "Yes, I'll go take Joshua's survey." But most of you, right now the listening audience, probably a daily audience, about 20,000 listeners per show on an average show. Sometimes there's spikes, sometimes less, but that's a small percentage of the 20,000 of you who are listening to the show who actually took the time to go fill out a survey.

So that tells me about something about your character. The other thing that it tells me about is the fact that you listened through an entire episode in order to hear my survey instructions. Because I did not post or advertise that survey that I was doing anywhere except at the end of the shows.

I didn't put it on social media. I didn't put it on the website. It wasn't visible as a call to action. It was just at the end of the shows. So that's really fascinating to me, just to kind of think and ponder through the fact that you're the kind of person who's likely to listen to an entire personal finance show, which is not for the faint of heart, detailed, complex, sometimes long.

This is not for the faint of heart. And so you're also the kind of person who's earning a lot of money and who has finished significant upper level academic coursework. Really, really interesting to see that. I would love, I don't know that I have the patience for it. Statistics is not my thing, but I would love to see and hear more research about just the type of person and the causation correlation factors of this.

On the one hand, let's talk about just kind of output and results. Probably the biggest disappointment to me personally was that I'm not reaching people who are not earning a lot of money. And that's not bad from a business perspective. And I'm not going to change, by the way, I'm not going to change radical personal finance to try to reach that person.

I'm just telling you personally, that was a dream of mine. It still is a dream of mine. I want to help people who are just getting started. And I thought, well, if I just put something out there for free, people will find it. Well, yeah, the people found it were the people who were looking for it.

We're already doing just fine. I mean, you guys are doing well, many of you. Income doesn't tell the whole story. I know some of you are struggling, but on the whole, you're doing really well. So that was a real disappointment to me. And I don't know quite what to do with it.

I do think that first, that podcasting is probably not the best medium for it. Even though I love that podcasting is free, video is probably a better medium for it. A couple of my listeners, and I mentioned it, pointed out that in many ways, Tai Lopez, he's the here in my garage guy who does all the stuff on YouTube, he's probably the one who's reaching that cohort, younger people getting started, or Gary V, some of these kind of people who are doing a lot of video work.

So I'd like to do more video work because video is definitely, unfortunately, young people don't read, poor people don't really read, and video is probably the best. They don't listen to podcasts really either. So video is probably the best avenue of reaching that type of demographic. So I've got to figure out what I want to do there.

It's not a real pressing thing. That's just a personal desire. I want to help people who are poor get rich. I love helping people who are rich get richer. That's really cool. But I want to help people who are poor get rich too. And I'm not doing that right now.

So I guess the other outcome of this is in thinking about the content of the show, that now that I know who you are, listening, I need to tailor my content to help serve you. Of course, I could try to tailor my content to help serve the poor person, but I think Dave Ramsey is doing that really well and I don't have the patience to do what he does.

So it's made me reflect and to say, "Okay, how can I serve this audience better?" It's also made me consider more deeply my business model because with the average income and the education level of you, the listening audience, it proves to me that if I can create better, more useful materials for you, you'll pay for education and you've got the disposable income.

And so that's been a major takeaway for me as well, to look at it and say, "Okay, well, I need to serve this audience. I want to serve you." I hope you don't feel slighted by my talking about my disappointment. I thank you for listening. It's an honor and I want to serve you better.

I want to serve you better than I've been doing that. So please, I was just simply expressing that because it was just kind of a dream of mine and that was just one takeaway that I had that I wasn't really doing a good job there. So that's the demographic data.

I share that with you and for interest, I applaud you and congratulate you on your listening to this because it's reflective in the fact that you are getting great results. So if you are in the listenership, if you felt not represented here by my commentary, if you felt that, "Well, Joshua, I'm not in that bracket.

I'm not earning a lot of money or I'm not highly educated or I'm this other color of skin or whatever," just recognize that there is correlation and there is causation here that as my job is to serve you and I want to see these numbers go up over time.

As new people come on, I want to take those of you who are earning under $25,000 per year, which is 2.8% of you, and I want to move you into the $200,000 and up category. So that's the goal over time. That's the demographic data. I'll put some of these numbers in the blog post today.

You can see them and take a look at the breakdown. I want to thank you to all of you who have taken the survey. If you haven't taken the survey, the survey is still open and I just wanted to promote it for a short period of time, but it's still open.

You go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/survey. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/survey. It takes about two minutes to do. Five quick questions. There's an email box there, but you can leave that blank. I don't care if you fill that in or not. Five quick questions will take you about 30 seconds to do. So RadicalPersonalFinance.com/survey. Don't forget our sponsor of today's show is Silly Grasshopper.

And then also, just a quick plug for the patron program here that I have done. Probably one of the biggest challenges has been to grow the patron program and that's my responsibility. I've struggled with what to offer. But as of present, there are 260 of you who are sending me $1,625 a month.

And I don't want to say thank you for that, but if you're not one of the 260 who's sending me a total of $1,625 a month and you're getting value, educational value from this, I would be thrilled if you come on over and support the patron program. You can do that at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron and link, as always, in the notes.

Be back with you tomorrow. And tomorrow, I will be sharing with you my book review on Tony Robbins' brand new book Unshakeable. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. Are you ready to make your next pro basketball, football, hockey, concert, or live event unforgettable?

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