Hey parents join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now@lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. 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.

My name is Joshua and I am your host. Today we tackle the subject of investing. There's many versions of this question that I receive on a continual basis in my email. Today we're going to go with Joe's version. Joe writes in and writes this, Joshua, I'm currently an active duty Navy member living in Japan, and I'll be here for the next two years.

I'm 20 years old and I've been consumed by your podcasts and other podcasts on investing and personal finances and how to be fruitful. This year I went from making less than $10,000 a year to now almost $30,000 and was spending recklessly as soon as this increase in income occurred.

I have no bills I have to pay beside my phone bill and groceries every month. And it seemed like I was always sitting on an excess of cash. Every check that I didn't know what to do with, except blow away before the next time I got paid, whether it was buying electronics, eating out, buying clothes, et cetera, I spent every penny I had.

And I also stacked up around $3,000 in credit card debt. So also instead of you responsibly using a chunk of the money I was expecting to receive to pay that debt off, I instead use it to go on a European vacation to London and Italy for 16 days. Probably wasn't the best move financially.

The reason I'm emailing you is because I have paid off this debt and have halted any and all of my unnecessary spending. And I'm now seeking some sort of positive outlet to plug this money into through investing. I plan to save a significant amount of it for an emergency fund, but just saving my money doesn't appeal to me.

And it seems like a waste of my time. If I could also somehow create another source of income through investing my money, or at least test the waters of investing as a way of spending it in a more productive way, what aspect of investing could provide a secondary source of income?

Any advice or tips on where to start learning how to do this or where I should look for some solid information on what the best option would be for a young person without knowledge on the subject? Regards, Joe. Joe's question may seem simple. And in some way it is.

But there are, of course, many different layers and ways in which you could answer it. Today, I want to tell you how I think Joe and you should approach the subject of investing and figuring out what to invest in. But we need to start with just a little bit of my background so I can tell you why I don't just recommend that Joe go and open a Roth IRA, buy a Vanguard total stock market index fund and go on with his life.

It's not that I don't think that such a plan, as you would commonly hear from many personal finance pundits, is necessarily wrong or even necessarily ineffective. I just don't think it's optimal. I have a somewhat difficult relationship personally with the world of mainstream personal finance. I come from the world of mainstream personal finance.

When I was growing up, I enjoyed reading books on personal finance and investing, but I didn't get particularly involved in the books or theories of those who were on the fringes. I was involved in relatively mainstream advice. I remember one of the books that when I was in high school, I read that really impacted me was David Bach and his book, original book, The Automatic Millionaire.

In said book, David recommends that you minimize your expenses by removing various small but regular expenditures from your budget. An example would be a daily latte at the fancy coffee shop. If you can remove that and invest the money instead, you can accumulate quite a bit of money. That's where he coined the term and trademarked the term the latte factor.

Additionally, David recommends that you set up your plan so that it functions automatically. Make an automatic transfer from your checking account into your investment plan, or perhaps do an automatic distribution from your paycheck, from your employer, into an investment plan. He also recommends that you purchase mutual funds and perhaps consider paying off your current house and buying a rental house.

In the book, he gives various resources such as a company like Fidelity or a company like Vanguard that you could call up and use and set up a tax favored investment account. Is there anything wrong with that plan? I think it would be wrong to say that there's something wrong with it.

But is it really right? See, a frustration that I had in working in the world of professional financial advice was it really didn't seem like that plan worked for many people. Oh, sure, it would work for some, but it didn't seem like it would work for very many. The data proves me out.

Most people in the United States of America can't scrape together a few thousand dollars if they need it. Most people in the United States of America, richest country in the history of the world, richest time in the history of the world, most people will never be able to afford to retire.

Now is the problem that they didn't have access to a 401k account, that they didn't fund it? You can make an argument, at least to the funding question, that yes, if they'd funded an investment account, it could have worked. But I've just not seen that plan as super effective.

Now, when I was involved in the world of mainstream personal finance, I looked around and realized that there were all kinds of people doing other things that didn't fit well in 180 page book that would sell well on the Barnes and Noble bookshelf. But yet these other approaches to finance also worked.

Over the last few years, I've really considered these questions. And I had a number of misgivings and questions about mainstream personal finance world that I was things I wasn't sure of. And I resolved not to try to make any quick decisions, not to try to come up and make a strong decision one way or the other, but just to let some time go, to let my thoughts percolate.

There's a very powerful statement that says, "It's hard for you to expect a man to see your point if his paycheck depends on his not seeing it." I've always been pretty sensitive to that. And there are a number of controversial areas in the personal finance world where I've wondered, are my thoughts and opinions colored by my paycheck?

In some cases, I think they were. In some cases, I think they weren't. I've sorted through some of those things and done my best to try to make fresh decisions. But on the topic of investing, I'll tell you what, knowing what I know now about the world of mainstream investing, I wouldn't participate again.

If I were Joe starting over 20 years old, or if I were coaching Joe as a client or perhaps as my nephew or a son, I wouldn't coach him to say that his primary tool or his primary approach to the question of investing is to go and open a Roth IRA.

Nor would I necessarily say that he shouldn't do it. I would seek to start to teach the deeper things. So let me give you just some ideas. I've got a list of eight, eight ideas that I think are useful and worth considering when it comes to investing. And here are some of the factors that you should choose to look at.

I do not know what Joe or what you should invest in. I don't even know where to tell you or Joe to go to look for knowledge. I've never seen any of what I'm about to give you written formally, but it's some of what I've put together just in my thinking as far as some of the appropriate factors.

Factor number one is you should consider the amount of time that you have available for an investment activity and recognize that the more time that you have available for an investment activity, the more money you can put into the investment activity. People with a lot of time on their hands should aim their investing activities into a world where time can be used constructively.

As I work through today's show, I'm going to try to use very simple examples. Take these examples as illustrations, not as specifics, and think about each of my examples and consider its applicability in your local area. Start with something most of us can relate to, and that's real estate.

If you desire to invest in real estate and you have a lot of time available to you, one thing you can do is use that time to try to find properties, properties that are undervalued or devalued. And this is a very valuable but also time-consuming activity. For example, many real estate teachers will teach you to go out and drive around looking for houses that seem abandoned.

Or some will teach you to walk up and down the streets and knock on doors and seek to find out what the story is on the property and see if there might be a potential opportunity. If you're an investor who has time, these activities are well-suited for you. You don't have to have any money to do that, but you do need time to do that.

If I had a lot of time, I'm quite confident I could build a career going and finding deals in the real estate world, and you just simply bring that deal to somebody who has money and they pay you for your work. This is normal. This is common in the world of real estate investment.

So if you wanted to pursue real estate investment and you had a lot of time, you would choose a strategy like that. But what if you don't have a lot of time? What if you want to invest in real estate, but you're a busy corporate executive? A strategy of investment that requires you to go out and spend your time driving around looking for abandoned properties or knocking on doors is probably not a good fit for you.

So how much time do you have available for your investment opportunity? You should analyze that. And you should analyze that and look for investment opportunities that will fit what you've got. Our friend Joe is in the military. That means in some ways that he doesn't have a lot of time.

After all, all of his time is owned and directed by the US government. But in other ways, he probably does have a lot of time. After his work week, he's got time where he's hanging out in the barracks and he's got his leave time, etc. And given the fact that he has minimal responsibility, I don't read anything about a wife or children, he doesn't really own any property to consume his time.

Joe's got time available to invest in his investment activities. So we've got to figure out how do we use that time appropriately. Second factor you should consider is money. Money can be a real problem for an investor. The lack of money can be a problem and an excess amount of money can be a problem.

If you don't have any money, you'd better pick an opportunity for investment that doesn't take much money. I described in the last few weeks how my son has made his first successful investment and we did it in the honey business. He had saved and accumulated from his weekly 75 cent allowance.

He gets a weekly 73 quarters every week on Friday and then we put a quarter into his giving bag. We put a quarter into his spending bag and we put a quarter into his investing bag. And so he had accumulated week by week in his investing bag about $5.

And we were trying to figure out a way where he could invest that money. It's five or six dollars, I think, by the time we got this done. And we're looking around and saying, how can we invest six dollars? Interesting problem. Had a couple of ideas. I broached this question in the Radical Personal Finance Facebook group and somebody suggested that we go out and buy a case of water and then we chill that water and go and sell it for a dollar a bottle.

That's actually my favorite idea. We haven't done it yet, but we're planning to. And I want to show that to you as an example to say, if you've got five dollars accumulated, you can take that five dollars and you can invest it profitably. Right now at Costco, they sell a tray of about 30 bottles of water for under four dollars.

You can take that tray, find a way to chill those bottles down, get yourself a cooler and ice and take those bottles of water to a place where people would be happy to buy cold bottles of water and sell them for a buck a bottle, 50 cents a bottle.

Assume you sell all 30 bottles out. You've now made a profit on your investment of $26, turned $4 into 30. That's a pretty good investment. Doesn't require a lot of money. We're going to do this with my son. Got to figure out where to do it and I got to dedicate the Saturday to doing it, but that's part of our plan.

I want him to see that you can always invest just a little bit of money. Now in his case, his investment was he's a family member who's in the honey business. He bought five little honey bears, very small ones, bought five little small honey bears for a dollar each and then sold them to friends and family who were coming to our house to visit the new baby for $2 each.

Well, he invested his money, but he only had a little bit of money and so there was only a certain scale. He could only buy five honey bears. He couldn't buy a truckload of honey. On the flip side, sometimes having too much money is a real problem as well.

Warren Buffett famously has right now approaching $100 billion, over $90 billion, approaching $100 billion of excess cash just sitting in what we'll call a bank account that he's got to figure out how to invest. Investing $100 billion profitably is a real problem because to torture the comparison, it would make no difference in Warren Buffett's $100 billion investment for him to spend $4 on a tray of water and turn it into 26.

It has no impact. So he's got to find huge deals. Now the key is to invest at a level that's appropriate to you. Continuing on with real estate, it may be very possible to create a big profit from buying a $15,000 mobile home and working on it for a little bit and flipping it for $30,000 if you don't have a lot of money.

You could do that profitably. But if you're that busy corporate executive and you have a couple hundred thousand dollars extra per year that you're trying to figure out how to invest, it's hard to conceive of doing deals on a scale of $15,000. So when you are trying to figure out what to invest in, you've got to look at how much money you have available to you and choose something that's going to be appropriate for the amount of money that you want to invest.

During the course of your investing lifetime, this will probably change. So you should be prepared for it to change. These two factors I'm convinced are the two most important places to start. Time and money. And you got to try to match your investments to your time and your money.

Now you'll notice that I'm using the word investment very loosely. I don't know how to escape that in the context of today's show. Investment and business are very much mixed up here in my discussion. But that's okay because investment is also mixed up with job. What do you do when you have a huge amount of time and no money?

Most likely you'll get a job. And what's the best use for that money that you earn? Most likely is to invest it back in your job skills, in your job qualifications, et cetera. If you think about the person starting completely over, Joe got out of the military, he's 20 years old, his tour of duty is done, he comes back, he's got no money, he blew it all, what does he do?

He goes gets a job, then he gets an apartment, and he gets some clothes to wear, then he gets transportation, then he works on improving his training. Maybe he'll go to school, get some certifications or get a diploma or something else. Those are all reasonable, reliable investments. But let's say our friend who is a successful advanced physician with a major specialty, earning a lot of money, has advanced training, has all the clothes he needs to perform neurosurgery.

Does our physician benefit from going and buying another medical degree? You reach a point which you can't invest anymore in your education. You got to look at something else. So it's valuable for you to invest your time, invest in a way that's appropriate to your time and to your money.

And you want to choose something that will help, that will profile your strengths. In investing, you always want to play to your strengths. One of my frustrations with mainstream investing is in the example I painted earlier, opening a Roth IRA, buying an index fund, you have no strength. You are one in hundreds of millions.

You bring nothing to the table except a few thousand dollars. Doesn't mean you can't profit, just means you're not going to profit very much. There still are valid reasons to do that, but recognize you're not going to profit very much because you are one in hundreds of millions. Your $5,000 in a Roth IRA is not going to move the needle, and it's also not going to move the needle in your life.

So you got 5,000 bucks. Great. How much can you earn on it? Let's say you weren't 10%. Wow, that's $500. Is your life going to be magically changed between $5,000 and $500? Sorry, $5,500 because you earned a 10% growth? It's not going to make a difference in the short term.

Long term it will, but it's not going to make a difference in the short term. Now compare that $5,000 and let's say that you just use it going and trying to find and spend that on finding properties that you can flip to an investor for a bird dog fee.

Let's say you get your fee of $5,000 per property. Oh, could you find five properties? You could. Now that you've got five properties, could you go ahead and invest in one mobile home that you double up? Yes. Those things take a lot of work, a lot of time, but because you're investing the time and the work, they can also be far more profitable.

So the first two factors are time and money. How much time do you have to invest and how much money do you have to invest? If you've got a lot of money to invest, don't waste the opportunity by going and competing with people who don't have money. If you've got a million dollars of investable assets, that puts you in a much rarer class than the people who have 40 hours a week they can spend learning about something or studying something, et cetera.

Factor number three is knowledge. You should consider your knowledge as it's applied to an investment opportunity. Do you have a unique knowledge of a market? Yes. Years ago, I knew a guy here in Palm Beach who I used to teach, or I used to drive a boat, teach as, I did teach, but I taught kids.

I used to teach wakeboarding and water skiing. I'd drive a boat sometimes for some of our clients. And there was a guy who used to come out and ski with us. And he was just a real, really a great guy. His first name was Dick. And he would come out and trick ski when he was in town in Palm Beach for the summer.

He'd come out and trick ski with us every day. Trick skiing is a really interesting form of skiing. Unlike their three major disciplines in skiing, there's slalom, trick skiing, and jumping in the kind of the traditional water ski world. And Dick used to really enjoy trick skiing. So he'd come out.

And one of the things just so funny in trick skiing, you don't wear a life jacket usually, unlike all the other forms of skiing. He'd come out in his Speedo and his trick skis. And he was in his mid to late 80s. And he was in good shape. He would trick ski every day.

He used to do this one trick in his late 80s, which I always admired him for. His closing trick was he would put the, take the ski rope, put it over around his head, around his neck, and then lean back on his skis, cross his arms across his chest and ski across the water.

The way that you do this safely on a ski boat is you have an emergency release. And so you make sure the rope is on this emergency release. So you got to watch them like a hawk when they've got this, because if they fall, you got to release it.

Otherwise they could be seriously, seriously hurt. So Dick was a great guy. He lives on Palm beach and pretty wealthy. And he wrote his autobiography and it just wasn't published or anything. He wrote it out for his family and friends. And he gave me a copy and I read it.

And one thing that was so interesting was learning how he made his money. It was a Texas in the oil business. And he would go out and in the early years he was trying to find oil. So he was all over the Texas oil industry back and forth, searching for wells, et cetera, but he acquired a great deal of knowledge about the Texas oil business.

This allowed him to effectively employ that knowledge into making good investments. He had no money when he started off, but he acquired knowledge by working in the industry and knowledge from traveling extensively, knowledge from inside connections in the industry. Then he started to borrow money from people who had money and invest that money for them.

They were happy because they had the money, but no time and no knowledge. Dick on the other hand, didn't have any time, sorry, didn't have any money, but he had the time and the knowledge. And so he could invest other people's money profitably and it made him his fortune, the basis of his fortune.

Knowledge is important. One of the most valuable things you can do is acquire specialized knowledge. And you often will find that this is in the context of your job or in the context of a business. The last three years doing podcasting, I've acquired and built a tremendous amount of knowledge around multiple new fields that I didn't have a few years ago, which means that I could now invest profitably in new fields.

Now, some of those things I could have to do the work myself or work as a consultant, which are limited, but I've also acquired skills and knowledge, sorry, knowledge that can be applied and you can do the same thing. So back to Joe, Joe has a lot of time, not a lot of money and based upon the email, not much knowledge.

So the best place to focus at this point is to buy knowledge. That's the best place to, sorry, that's a, that's a YouTube culture joke there. That's the best place to focus right now is to buy knowledge. How do you do that? You choose an area of interest and you become an expert.

It takes time, not much money. You start reading, you start learning, you start exploring, you start talking and you build knowledge in a particular area. That brings me to point number four, skill. Again, one was time, two is money, three is knowledge, four is skill. You should consider your skill when it comes to your investment activities.

This last weekend, I sold a dog crate that I found on Amazon. I sold a dog crate that I found on the side of the road. My wife and I like to go trash picking, curb diving on the side of the road. And I found this dog crate in a neighbor's trash pile and I hauled it home and I sold it on Craigslist for a hundred bucks.

That's a pretty sweet profit. Got it for free, sold it on Craigslist for a hundred bucks. I'm convinced that I could make a full-time business, finding stuff in dumpsters and on the side of the road and flipping it on Craigslist and eBay, et cetera, for money. I could develop that skill.

I haven't proven it, but I could develop it. I could dedicate the time. It doesn't take much money. I have all the basic tools of money. I have the knowledge of how it's done and I have the knowledge of some of the markets. I immediately knew when I saw this dog crate that it was worth a few hundred bucks and I could probably make a quick and easy hundred bucks.

And I could build and acquire the skill. I know people who do this to great effect. But usually they have a real skill in working with their hands and fixing things up. It's one of the big benefits, whether it's fixing up washing machines and dryers, like I previously interviewed people here on Radical Personal Finance about.

I know somebody who does this with lawnmowers. They'll go and they'll find weed eaters that don't run and lawnmowers that don't run and just a few little bits of work here and they'll fix them up and get them running and flip them for a couple hundred bucks. I know people that do this with cars, find old cars, can fix them up, flip them and make some money on them because they just find them, fix the things that are wrong, motorcycles, et cetera.

These are skills. They have those physical skills. I'm quite confident I could have developed those skills. But those are not my skills that I want to develop. My skills that I want to develop are in a different area. The ability to communicate with you verbally right now is a skill.

The ability to write is a skill. The ability to analyze something is a skill. My ability to create a taxonomy of investing here in the context of this show is a skill set. Not many people have that skill set. So you want to focus in an area where your unique skills are allowed to shine.

The number of people who can make a business, finding things on the side of the road or fixing up old lawnmowers and flipping them is very large. The number of people who can do what I do is much smaller. So I always try to focus on the areas where I have skill.

Skills have to be acquired and honed. Some of them, I believe, are late. You know, they may be latent. Some of them are kind of built in, but a lot of them are developed and honed with practice. But you can develop skills. There's a lot of money to be made in flipping computers that you find.

Find or build cheap ones or build custom ones, et cetera. Takes some time, probably not much money, a lot of knowledge, a lot of skill. So if Joe came out of the Navy and had a lot of time, a little bit of money, knowledge and skill in computers, he could make a business on this.

And it's a legitimate investment. But as time were to go on, as investment activities were to change and he were to mature as an investor, he would probably find it necessary to change his investment strategy. It may be possible to invest a few thousand dollars into computers and to flip them profitably.

I don't know how to invest a hundred thousand dollars in computers and flip them profitably. So these four variables, I'm convinced, are very, very important. And if you start thinking about them and looking at opportunities around you, use these four variables as a matrix. Time, money, knowledge and skill.

And try to find opportunities near you that are close by that lead to, well, give you options and that would give you a good investment opportunity. I do have four more, and I don't claim that this list of eight is exhaustive. In fact, if you've got additional factors, I ask you to give them to me.

I think those first four are the most important, but these additional four are also important. Number five is temperament. Am I well suited for this particular activity? I, Joshua, I am not well suited for an activity of fixing up lawnmowers. I don't enjoy the work. I would be bored stilly.

I don't see the challenge in it. It doesn't appeal to me. It doesn't match my temperament. I can't think of how, like you would max me out on that money and on the investment opportunity, and I'd rather just go take a job that interests me and put all my money in the stock market.

It doesn't fit my temperament. That's different than other people. Some people, it really does fit their temperament. Some people have the temperament where they like excitement or they like a challenge. Some people's version of real estate investing involves them traveling the world, putting together global deals with financing from here and permissions from there, et cetera.

That's their temperament. Some people's temperament with real estate investing involves them buying the house next door, fixing it up and renting it out to a young family. That's their temperament. Time, money, knowledge, and skill play a factor, but you know what? If you're real focus, if you don't have any money, you have time and you have knowledge and skill and real estate, but your temperament is well suited to going and doing that multinational deal-making, don't buy the house next door.

Go do the multinational deal-making. You find somebody to work for, you work for them for possibly a base salary, or you work for them for a cut or for a commission, and you can go and develop that skill using your temperament of putting the deal together, and you just work on commission.

You don't have to have the money. Is that a good investment? Absolutely. It's a good investment. It's a great investment. Some people's temperament suits them to reading annual reports for publicly traded companies. They love to do that. In that case, there may be opportunities in the broad-based publicly traded capital markets for them to invest in.

Some people really enjoy watching stock indicators and following the markets on a regular basis and following prices and movements and things like that. If you wonder why I don't dig into more of that on radical personal finance is because it doesn't match my temperament. I'm not interested in it particularly.

I don't want to trade stocks. I don't want to sit there in front of my computer. I don't even want to read annual reports, at least not on publicly traded companies, many, many of them to really understand and follow these companies over time to work as a value investor.

I don't want to, that doesn't fit my temperament. My temperament is very different. So I know what I would do, what I do with my temperament, but you've got to study yours. Some people say, I don't want to be a landlord. Well, the fact that you do or don't want to be a landlord isn't necessarily an indication of whether you should or shouldn't invest in real estate.

I've been giving you lots of real estate examples. I like to use real estate because we, most of us get it. We see it, we live in it, we rent it, we own it. We dad and mom owns it. Our brother and sister-in-law have been foreclosed on. Like we've, we've known real estate investors.

So I like to use real estate examples. That's why I use so many for you. Don't, don't think that there aren't about a gazillion other opportunities. But some people's temperament is not well suited to being a landlord. That's fine. There are lots of ways that you can invest in real estate that aren't related to being a landlord.

Some people's temperament doesn't fit big risk. Well, you got to find a way that allows you to invest that doesn't ruffle your risk feathers. Next factor is timing. Timing matters. If you have the wrong idea, sorry, if you have the right investment idea, but you employ it at the wrong time, your investment idea won't work.

Now the right time will depend on the market. The right time will depend on the product. The right time will depend on, on a bazillion factors, but you've got to be investing at the right time and you've got to look around and sometimes you may have a great idea, it's just the wrong time.

But you might also look and say, ah, I see an opportunity that will work now at this time. We'll go after those. Try to match those things up. I have a love hate relationship with the phrase, you can't time the market. That's a phrase that comes out of the broad-based larger stock market.

And we say, you can't time the market. You can't time the market. Well, I have no problem with that statement for most of us when it comes to stocks and to the broad-based large US stock market, I do have a problem with that when it comes to the markets that you know, because you can time your market.

What happens in many market changes is the information is there. The evidence is available, but most people don't proactively change anything. Most people don't change until circumstances force them to change. It just seems to be a common trait of human beings. We don't change until circumstances force us to change.

So you can see something that's going to provoke change and you can time your market, just because you see something doesn't mean that everybody else does. A lot of times people are just unwilling to make a change. They're unwilling to change their routine in order to take advantage of something.

Many people who get laid off from their job knew that there were problems for their industry. You think, well, if you knew there were problems coming for your industry, why didn't you leave the industry? Why didn't you get out a year ago or two years ago? Most people don't want to change.

So you can time your investment opportunities and timing is going to make a big, big difference. If you're looking at a market, you're looking at a sector, you've done your homework and you see you have an opportunity with timing, go after it. On the flip side, if you have a great idea, but you don't see the time, that investment is not going to work out.

You need to figure out a way to wait for an appropriate time. Sometimes you take all your money out and you pour it into building a big commercial building because you're going to sell it. Sometimes you look around and say, I'm just going to pay some option. I'm going to lease option this land and I'm just going to pay my option fees and wait for the next business cycle, wait five years, wait for that road over there to get built, wait for this neighborhood to come up.

Sometimes you bide your time and you don't put any money into it except for the option price. Factor number seven, opportunity. What opportunities do you actually have? I have family that's in the farming business and one of my family members, young person, had tremendous opportunity at an early age to start investing their money into agriculture.

The way this starts is in your late teens, if you grow up in a farming community, then you can go and you can lease some land, whether you lease or rent a section of land and you start growing your own crops. Well, you need some money to put up, but you have the ability to invest a few thousand dollars that you've saved by working for somebody else.

And you have the ability to rent your dad's tractors, use the farm equipment, et cetera, and to profit from your own farming activities. This is common in agriculture. So my family member did that. That's an opportunity that I don't have. I don't have around me thousands of acres of farmland where I can just go and rent a section to plant corn on.

My dad doesn't have a barn full of tractors that I can borrow and rent from him in order to work with. I don't have the opportunity for that knowledge to be able to apply. I don't have the opportunity. It just doesn't exist for me. So I'm not approaching that and calculating how much money I can earn from growing corn because that opportunity just does not exist for me.

But for my family member, for whom it does exist, that is a great investment. And it's far better for them to take $5,000 and buy seed and put gasoline in the tractor and diesel in the tractor, sorry, put fuel in the tractor and pay the rental fees and buy the crop insurance and everything.

That's going to have a much better opportunity and be a much better investment than is putting money in the stock market just like everyone else. There's no point of differentiation. There's no unique opportunity. So look around and see the opportunity that you have. When I was a financial advisor, I met with a person who was a college professor and this college professor was a computer science professor.

And I was talking to him about investments, trying to get him interested in my investment opportunities and my mutual funds and things that I had for sale. And so we were talking about what he invested his money in. He said, "I'm sorry. I invest all of my money back home." Well, he was from, I forget which specific, it may have been the Congo, but from a small country in Africa, not one of the more prominent ones like South Africa, but one of the Central African countries, and he was investing all of his investment dollars into internet cafes back home.

And he had the opportunity to invest there. He had the local network of people where he had people who could keep an eye on his investment. He had the technical knowledge to put together an internet cafe and make the connections to be able to purchase the computers and get them set up, et cetera.

And he had the money to do it, the knowledge, the skill, the temperament worked for him because he's working in a cultural context that he understood. The timing was good. Cafes were a good business at that opportunity and he had the opportunity. I don't have that same opportunity. It would take years to build the connections of people that I could trust to work around a business like that.

But he had that opportunity. You might have an opportunity like that as well. So don't neglect the opportunities that are right in front of you. Subway shops are a great business. They don't cost that much to open. You can build a fortune on the back of a sandwich shop.

If you have an opportunity like that and it fits your temperament and you see an opportunity, you see an investment idea, then it fits the timing and you can build the knowledge and the skills and you've got the time and the money, et cetera, that may fit you and you're going to have a unique and competitive advantage there that other people don't have.

I enjoy watching the empires that certain savvy business people, certain athletes put together when they change from athlete to business owner. Shaquille O'Neal is fascinating to me. Very, very smart man. Well, he has had an opportunity to leverage his brand and this is the way it works in athletes.

If you're an athlete and a well-known athlete, you have the opportunity to leverage your brand. So you leverage that brand for publicity that brings money in and then you leverage that publicity for all of your other businesses. I don't have Shaquille O'Neal's investment opportunities. Mine are different and yours are different.

Finally, factor number eight is tools. And with this, we're done. What tools are necessary for your potential investment opportunity? If I were a high school student, I'd probably have a side business fixing people's broken iPhone and Android screens. I do it on the cheap and do it on the side.

Well, you got to have a little screen tool and little screwdriver, et cetera. And you got to have the ability to get online and buy a fresh screen and swap it out for people. But I can start a little business like that. Just got to get the tools, a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of skills, not much money, not much time might fit the temperament of certain people.

Timing is good. Opportunity exists. I have a broad stream of potential clients. I just need a few tools. What tools do you have that other people don't have? I'm a physically large man. It's smarter for me to move in the direction of personal security and use my size as an advantage than it is for me to move in the direction of horse jockeying, kind of crossing the barrier here with opportunity and tools.

But what tools do you have? You will have unique tools that you have or that you can acquire that other people don't have or can't acquire. So recognize those things and search them through. Having a great internet connection is a valuable tool. It sets things apart. Not having an internet connection on the other hand, you might also be able to figure out a way to turn that into a valuable tool.

I think these factors, number one, time, two, money, three, knowledge, four, skill, five, temperament, six, timing, seven, opportunity, and eight tools. These factors are important in your investment activities. And I think that if you'll pursue them and consider them and filter your investment, desired investments through them, you'll have an opportunity for success, but you got to recognize this.

Nobody else can do this for you and nobody else can answer the question of what you should invest in because they don't have the information about how much time you have available, about your money, about your knowledge and skill and temperament and timing and the timing of the market and the opportunities that you actually have in the tools.

You can't answer that question. I find this to be frustrating all the time. I recommend investment ideas to other people all the time. Nobody takes me up on them. Now, most of the time, I think people don't take me up on them because people don't really care. Most people don't want to be rich.

Most people won't want to do any hard work. Most people don't want to actually pursue it. It's hard to get rich. It takes a lot of work, but sometimes they just don't want to pursue them because my suggestion wasn't right for them. It doesn't fit something. I don't know any way that you can outsource this, but I do know if you'll start looking around you, start thinking, take an interest in the things that you see, take an interest in the people that you see, things will start to shake out and you'll see them.

It's important to remember when it comes to investing, saving money is not a waste of time. Don't ever fall prey to the idea that you're losing money just because you don't have a savings account. Just because it's sitting on a savings account. Yes, you do need to consider the corrosive effect of inflation.

I hate it. I hate inflation. I think it's, but in the short term, even a few years, it's not going to be that big a deal. Over the course of a few years, you can look around, you can study, you can find the things that will work for you.

In that context, it'll be helpful to you to have more money. More money is almost always a benefit. I don't know how to solve Warren Buffett's problem, what to do with his hundred billion dollars, but I do know this. You'll figure it out. And it's not such a bad problem to have.

It's one of the worst problems. I'm sorry, one of the better problems on the scale of problems to have. The perfect investment for you is going to be one that uniquely fits your unique variables. When you're playing in the space that you're uniquely qualified, you're not going to have a ton of competition and you're going to do fine.

I just closed with just a final example. You're listening to Radical Personal Finance. I'll just point out how in some of my decisions, this is what I have applied to me. Now, in the context of Radical Personal Finance, I like to use it as an example because some of my approach has been haphazard.

Some of it has been very calculated. But let me show you how these eight things lead to Radical Personal Finance having been and being a unique opportunity for me, a unique investment. I have other business opportunities as well, but Radical Personal Finance is the core of what I'm doing right now.

Number one, time. I have the benefit being and I figured out a way to set things up that I could use the time available to me to create something like Radical Personal Finance. And due to some of the decisions that I've made and the things that I have planned, I have been able to devote a lot of time to this endeavor.

Other people who are in this space don't have as much time. I did. I had a lot of time, didn't have a lot of money available to invest when I started. So I chose something that didn't require a significant investment of money. I chose something that had a low financial cost of entry because all my money was tied up in dumb things I'd done in the past.

I was changed, but that was the situation I was facing. So I chose an opportunity that fit more time, less money. Number three, knowledge. I had a tremendous head start on other people with my knowledge specific to the topics of finance, financial planning, et cetera. So my moat of safety in this particular business investment is significant.

Other people know more than me, certainly, but it would take somebody who's brand new quite a long time to study enough to beat me in terms of knowledge. So now I've lined up time, money, and knowledge. Well, what about skill? Well, again, I had a good head start in terms of skill.

I had unique skills and unique personal attributes that fit what I was doing. Number five, temperament. Doing this fits my temperament. Now there are a couple of mistakes I've made, I've realized, and I'll be changing even the format of the show again going forward in the future because I got to fit my temperament.

I got to fit what's going to work for me. But this fits my temperament. It deals in the world of ideas, deals in the world of classification, deals in the world of analytics and analysis. But it doesn't cause me problems of trying to do stock analysis every day, which would drive me nuts.

Timing. There was a timing in the marketplace that I was seeing, still see, and have watched very carefully to try to strike at the right time when the concepts were proven out, and yet the market was not saturated. It would be much more difficult for me to do today what I did three years ago.

I watched the timing and I made the decisions based upon the timing. Number seven, opportunity. I had the opportunity available to me. I could see it. Other people couldn't see it. Almost nobody could see it. I could see it. And the tools, not a huge factor on the tools, but something as simple as having a stable internet connection was important for me and I had that ability.

Something as simple as having the ability to sit at a desk for extended periods of time and work and not traveling constantly, or all of these are valuable tools. So when you start to apply these, you may not see them in advance. I didn't see all that three years ago.

I saw some of it, but I didn't see all of it. But today I can analyze what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and I can see the tight fitting connection to me. And now this is the framework that I use to apply to other opportunities. I have other investment opportunities that come along or other business ideas, etc.

I'm looking at them and saying, how does this work with regard to the time, the money, the knowledge, the skill, my temperament, the timing in the marketplace, the opportunities that I actually have, and the tools that I have available. So Joe, I can't do it for you, but I can promise you saving money is a good idea.

Paying out of debt is a great idea. Not having any fixed obligations is a great idea. Now, get busy studying, learning, talking, reading, listening, searching for opportunities. Don't be in a hurry. There are plenty of investment opportunities out there. No matter where you live, no matter when you live, there are plenty of investment opportunities.

But don't let the fear of action keep you out. Don't know what it is for you, but I do know that that is how I would tell you to invest your money. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com.