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You may earn up to 8.5% annually while adding diversification to your portfolio and doing your part to help promote solar energy. One of the interesting things that I have observed in pondering and watching the marketing of financial advice is how there's a great deal of marketing done at both ends of the spending spectrum.

On the one hand, we've all seen marketing towards people saying, "Look at the great luxurious lifestyle that you can live. Lifestyles of the rich and famous. Come and check out an episode of Cribs, etc." But on the flip side, today, there's a tremendous press towards marketing the lower expense side of life.

I think there's a tremendous danger in that marketing that we need to talk about. 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. You know what? I market every day in that front little intro, 10 years or less. Let's talk about the danger of low financial expectations. I often have paid attention to how the market, the lifestyles of financial freedom are marketed. On the one hand, I'm sure we can all relate to how financial freedom has often been marketed in the past.

Usually, it looks something like a large palatial home. Usually, there'll be a swimming pool out back, some kind of beautiful view. Maybe it's a mountain villa. Often, there'll be a luxury car associated with the marketing, somebody driving happily down the road in their luxury automobile. Often, there will be some aspect of an appeal to travel, financial freedom bringing the ability to travel.

And those are really valid things. If you go around the world and you look at the lifestyles of the rich and famous, you'll often find a large and comfortable home and a garage with some luxury automobiles in it and a pool out back overlooking a beautiful vista of some kind.

And you'll find that they may travel to exotic destinations. And so when people are trying to get you to set out a plan for financial freedom, they'll often appeal to those things. I remember vividly when I was a teenager, I went to some real estate seminars and everything about the real estate seminars was designed to stoke the desire for wealth.

And so all these pictures and things that were associated with it and the seminar presenter was up front showing off again the pictures of his home, et cetera. But the specific thing that he was showing off was his big old bus motorhome, the big old – I don't know how you say the word Prevost or Provo or however the people say it.

But the big fancy buses like the entertainers will drive, giant motorhomes that cost a million, two million dollars if you buy them new and tens of thousands of dollars a year to keep going. And he was showing how he had his big old bus parked right outside the hotel because he didn't like staying in hotels where it wasn't his bed.

So, of course, his driver would drive the bus down and his driver would stay in the hotel. But he would stay in the bus. That was his luxury lifestyle. Well, we're familiar with that. And I think that we do a good job, especially here at Radical Personal Finance. I try to do a good job of talking about some of the downsides of focusing on that extreme level of wealth and that extreme level of consumption.

But over the last decade, five years – I wouldn't know exactly how to place it. But over the last five to ten years, I've observed that there's a great deal of marketing going on at the other end of the spectrum. Marketing of a lifestyle of frugality, a lifestyle of thriftiness, the ability to live well on less.

In one sense, this is nothing new. There have always been people who have lived well on less. And there's always been an undercurrent, a subculture of people who have focused on living cheaply. There have always been hobo populations, people running around on the rails, living on nothing. There's always been a homeless community of people living out on the streets and camping behind the grove of trees just around the corner from you.

There have always been these people who try to live on very low amounts of money. But what's been happening is there's a promotion of living well on less that's taking great influence in the more modern and hipper culture where this idea of being able to live well on very little is gaining broader acceptance.

It's no longer the fringe movement that it once was. And in certain online communities, there's an easy way for you to go and find out how somebody can gain a sense of notoriety by not spending – by spending a tiny amount of money, by spending very small amounts of money.

I've contributed to this, even the promotion of this. I've had probably one of the more famous, Jacob Lundfisker on the show and he was famous for talking about on his blog how he lives on $7,000 a year. And when I interviewed him on the show, Jacob Lundfisker from earlyretirementextreme.com, when I interviewed him on the show, he said that he was spending less money than that now.

There are other people – I know popular blogger Mr. Money Mustache each year publishes a spending and talks about how in his family, they spend $30,000 a year to live a lifestyle of luxury, etc. And so what's happened – so on the one sense, there's nothing bad about this.

I'm thoroughly in favor of it. To see people focusing on frugality and thriftiness warms my heart because I think that frugality and thriftiness is virtuous. The pursuit of frugality and the pursuit of thriftiness is a virtue. It's a good thing. It's a good thing to be efficient with your expenditures.

And one of my personal goals is I don't want other people who know me to be able to look at my lifestyle and automatically deduce the size of my income. I don't see any reason why income and expenditures should be connected directly. And so this is good to have this marketing and it's especially good to have this marketing happen in a way that is promoting more acceptance of a lifestyle of thriftiness and frugality among more mainstream people.

It might be interesting to study the lifestyle habits of hobos but most of us don't want to go and live in the woods under a tent. Most of us, if we do want to go live in the woods under a tent, at least want to have a fancy new iPhone with an unlimited data connection to go with us.

And on the whole, I think this marketing of living well unless is good. It's been helpful because it's reaching a new segment of people and opening their eyes to the fact that you don't have to just consume, consume, consume in order to live a satisfied and contented life. But there's a big danger in this.

And the danger clearly stated is if you build your life and your lifestyle around the pursuit of early financial independence and a fundamental feature of that lifestyle is you're assuming that you'll always be able to live on a, culturally speaking, tiny amount of money. You run a major danger of having your plans go awry.

I see this very frequently online. Somebody gets very enthusiastic about pursuing and achieving early financial independence in their life. They calculate their expenditures at their current level. Let's say that they are a Jacob Lund Fisker acolyte and they're saying, "Well, I'm able also to live on $7,000 a year." And then they learn about the 4% rule, which roughly stated says that you can live on 4% of a portfolio into essentially perpetuity but for the long term.

And so you need to save 25 times your annual expenditures in order to be financially independent. And they run the math and they say, "Well, if I can live on $7,000, 25 times $7,000 is $175,000." Then the goal becomes in order to achieve financial independence, I simply need to save $175,000.

Then I can retire, declare myself financially independent, and move on. This is a dangerous concept and let me explain why in the context of today's show. Before I get into the explanation, first, Wunder Capital. I had a phone call with the Wunder Capital folks a few weeks ago when they were coming on to do their advertisements here on the show and I really enjoyed the phone call.

It's really interesting to hear about what they were working towards. Let me tell you the Wunder Capital story. They're looking around and looking at the solar landscape and seeing that there's a tremendous growth in the personal usage of solar energy. Individual homeowners putting solar panels on their house, setting up a battery system or doing a grid-tied solar system.

Also, there's tremendous growth in the solar market at the big-scale industrial level. A lot of big companies engaging in it. But there wasn't much growth happening in the mid-tier, the small to medium-sized commercial projects of solar. So, they tried to figure out what's going on. Well, the number one thing they found was lack of financing.

For a mid-scale company to put in a large solar array into their company or into their business, it's going to require a tremendous amount of capital up front for them to do. And so most of the time, they will try to finance that capital, but the financing was not easily available.

It was just kind of a niche business and either too small to be of interest to many banks and financing companies or too specialized to be in their wheelhouse of skills. And so they thought about how they could put together the – solve the problem. And with some twists and turns, they've built Wonder Capital.

Wonder Capital is W-U-N-D-E-R. And essentially what Wonder Capital does is brings together people who want to invest in solar energy projects in order to get a return on their money. They want to finance solar energy projects and individual business owners who want to build solar energy projects and have them financed.

But they have a really compelling way to do this. So individual investors invest in the fund and the fund puts up the capital for the businesses. So the investor is getting a stated rate of return on their money in exchange for the financing function. And the investor's investment is secured by a solar array, by the equipment that's actually been purchased for the business.

But the business owner is financing a solar project and they have a rule where they only invest in solar projects that are actually going to be a net positive return where the energy savings and electrical costs are going to be higher than the financing costs for installing the solar array.

And so it's a really win-win-win project all around, win for the business owner as well. More to it, but I think they're really doing a great thing and I was impressed. They're seeking to be very transparent, very straightforward. You can earn one of their funds. You can earn up to 8.5% with one of their funds by investing in solar energy projects.

So if that's something that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to check it out. Go to wondercapital.com/radical. Wondercapital.com/radical. You can invest as little as $1,000. Set up an account for free at wondercapital.com/radical. A few reasons why it's dangerous to think that you can live on the small amount of money.

Essentially, they all boil down to an unrealistic idea of how the future of your life will unfold. If you think that by accumulating $175,000, you'll be able to live on $7,000 per year for the rest of your life, very likely you don't have a broader exposure to the many things in life that can and probably will happen.

I've thought of this topic for a while because this is something that's concerned me for a while. But I've had a few interesting examples in my own life and in my own finances. Yesterday, I took my dog to the vet. My wife and I, we have two dogs. One of them has had some significant problems with his ears.

Through endless research and through endless consultations, we finally have figured out that basically he has some kind of allergies that cause him to have problems with his skin. It's expressed most acutely in his ears. The process of figuring out his diagnosis was a long and expensive process until we finally found a canine dermatologist who was actually able to figure out what was going on.

And his treatment has not been cheap. It's neither cheap to treat his acute symptoms nor is his preventive drug program cheap to maintain. On the one hand, I am very thankful that we've been able to figure out a medical protocol and treatment plan that helps him to be healthy.

He's a good dog and he was in such tremendous pain at one point with his ears bleeding and filled up with junk and it just took us forever to try to figure out what it was. So I'm tremendously thankful that he is healthy and happy at this point in time.

But I'm extremely bitter about how much money he costs me and how much money he has cost me over the last couple years of his life. I don't know if bitter is the right word. I'm annoyed with it because I have this monthly expense where he has these pills that are $2 a pill and he gets one a day.

So I have this monthly ongoing treatment expense that is that plus some other medications that he has that I never planned for. I never thought I would have. I just kind of figured, well, you have a dog. And earlier in my life, I was pretty cavalier about animals. I always liked animals but I'm a pretty practical, practically-minded guy and I would laugh at people who would spend thousands of dollars to give their dog surgery or they would go through these elaborate cancer treatments for their animals.

And my philosophy when I was younger was just simply this. Well, you have a dog and you enjoy the dog and the dog is meaningful to you and you have a good relationship with the dog. But if the dog starts costing you thousands of dollars, that's just unreasonable for a dog.

Give him a good steak dinner. Take him out in the backyard for a walk. Give him lots of scratches. And then he'll meet his end at the end of your .22 rifle and you put him in the ground and you go and get another dog. That was my philosophy when I was younger.

Unfortunately, that philosophy hasn't stood the test of time. Unfortunately, this dog has wormed his way deeply into my heart and into my affection. He's a good dog. He's one of the most gentle dogs I've ever met in my life. He's a good sport even when he's in tremendous pain.

He's patient. He's kind. I can trust him implicitly around my children and my baby. So he's just a world-class dog. He's good-looking. He's kind. He's low-maintenance. All he gives is love. He's a world-class dog. And my love and affection for him has grown tremendously in the years that I've had him.

And he's certainly an integral part of our family. And what makes the situation even more challenging is not only is he integrated in my life, but he's integrated into my wife's life and now our children's lives. And so I don't get to just think about me and what I should or shouldn't do.

Now I've got to think about other people. And at this stage, it just isn't a viable option for me to think about walking him into the backyard with my 22 just because he's costing me money. That's just not a viable option. Now I'm not saying that it would never be a viable option if the bill were $10,000 today because he had cancer or something like that.

Then certainly I'm not going to write a check for $10,000. And this dermatological issue has come nibbles and dribbles, a few hundred dollars here, a few hundred dollars there. But over time, it's added up to be serious money. But there's never been that $10,000 question. Certainly it's a viable option if the life and the well-being of my children were at stake, if I were concerned about my children being able to eat.

Now we're in that heart-wrenching condition where we didn't have enough money to feed my children or something like that. Well, in that situation, the dog's the dog. But that's not the situation we're in. We're not in a starvation society. We're not in that desperate circumstance. And as I was sitting in the vet's office yesterday thinking it through and just considering how naive I was a decade ago just to think that you'd never spend money on a dog and vet bills and thinking about how naive I was, I realized that this is just a perfect example of the danger of low expectations.

Because this dog is so important to me now that I would rather go and work more and make more money and be more financially productive just so that I wouldn't have to make that heart-wrenching decision to end his life just because he's costing me money. I would rather do the work so that we can enjoy him for another decade.

That's the type of expense that doesn't fit well into a "hey, look how little money I'm spending on a monthly basis" type of presentation. But that's a real expense. Now, of course, you could avoid that by never owning a dog, and maybe you should do that. Dogs are way more expensive than I ever thought they would be.

But once they wriggle their way into your life, you're pretty glad that they're around, and you find all of a sudden that your financial arguments about how everything's about the bottom line don't quite hold up in the face of those lovable little creatures that are part of your family.

Another example of unexpected expenditures are things like dental expenses. My wife had some significant dental work done recently. It was a couple thousand bucks by the time we worked our way out of it. Now, was it necessary? Well, she certainly needed the help in terms of she had a toothache.

But the point was that money wasn't – getting the cheapest thing wasn't necessarily the best option. The cheapest thing to do, of course, with the toothache that she had would have been to simply pull the tooth. But who wants to have a missing tooth if you can avoid it?

And this is the problem that a lot of times we face when you start to accumulate money and you look at certain expenditures. If you didn't have the money, then having a rotten tooth and needing to have the tooth pulled would certainly be just I guess the most reasonable thing to do.

After all, throughout human history, that's been the way that many people have dealt with toothaches. But in our modern society where image is certainly important, where your smile is certainly important, I don't want to save a few bucks and then have my wife be missing a tooth if I have another alternative.

You can't look down and say 150 bucks will pull the tooth, but $2,000 will fix it so that it's not – there's not a big old gap in your teeth. These are very fluffy judgment calls, but they're important. How do you put a price tag on the value of your family pets?

How do you put a price tag on the value of your wife having all of her teeth and them looking beautiful and the confidence that having a great smile gives to somebody? How do you put a price tag on how much money you should or should not invest into your children's education, into the opportunities and the advantages that they have in life?

How do you put a price tag on the cost of their orthodontian, whether you should have their teeth fixed for their own benefit or whether they should not have that because you don't want to pay for it? That's just the tip of the iceberg. How do you put a price tag on the peak experiences of life, many of which cost money?

You can go to the Grand Canyon and you can do it on the cheap and you can enjoy the beauty of the Grand Canyon. But my purchasing a helicopter ride across the Grand Canyon is one of those peak moments in my life. You can go to a big famous city and enjoy the city on the cheap.

I'm perfectly happy to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on a park bench in many great cities of the world. But sometimes going up to the top floor of the – going up to the Sky Bar in Hong Kong and sipping $15 martinis while you look out over the skyline, that's a peak experience.

It doesn't fit into a $7,000 a year budget. You can watch Phantom of the Opera or Les Mis on Netflix or YouTube from any number of stage productions. But there's something about watching a great show from great seats on Broadway. I cook a mean steak on the grill, but there's something about dressing up and taking your wife out to a five-star steakhouse.

If you put yourself in a situation where you're limited because you've given yourself a hard budget of a low dollar figure and you've said, "I can't go work because I got to be financially independent," you're setting yourself up for missing out on many of the great things in life.

It takes money to underwrite the trip of the local speech and debate or robotics or science or whatever local club and the trip that's going to make such a tremendous difference in the lives of boys and girls. It takes money to adopt the special needs baby with Down syndrome whose life was snatched from the jaws of the executioner's forceps.

It takes money to support the widowed mother who is left penniless and to support her financially while her family gets back on her feet so that she can have time to spend with her hurting children and not spend 60 hours a week at a job just to make ends meet.

It takes money to underwrite the cultural production or art that should exist but is not going to find great commercial appeal. It takes money to stroke the check and pay for the building for an orphanage for the street children of Nairobi or it takes money to subsidize the startup costs of a local farm that's going to fundamentally transform the food quality in the local neighborhood.

It takes money to write the check and take your children and grandchildren on the once in a lifetime summer tour of Europe or the cruise of the Mediterranean or whatever it is that comes in that day. All of these things take money and yet all of these things are for many people some of the peak things in life.

The biggest risk you face of cementing your future and sealing your fate into a lifetime of poverty is the risk of regret. If you set low financial expectations for yourself you very well may live a life of regret. When you face the end of the day or the end of the week or the end of your life and you look at yourself in the mirror you're going to be faced with the sum total of all of your decisions for that day, that week, or that life.

And one of the ways of considering the outcome of those decisions is to think about whether you gave them your all, whether you gave it your best. I have found for me that if I don't give something my best I experience a profound sense of regret. If I give something my best then no matter what the outcome I can rest pretty satisfied with my effort.

I shared that story of my dog and it obviously is an emotionally charged scenario that I outlined. Some of you will have chuckled at my naivete thinking that I wouldn't care about a dog and that I would just willy-nilly say, "Wow, I'd rather have my money than my dog." But I really did think that at one point.

Others of you would be recoiled in horror that anybody could think that way about a dog and the reactions, your reaction would be very mixed. But I shared the story because it was real to me. It was something that for me was a recognition of the fact that number one I was naive to realize that my values have changed over time.

It's very important to me in my current context to do everything I can within my current capability to make sure that my dog is healthy and happy. It's important to me, it's important to my wife, and because it's important to my wife it's important to me. Obviously my children are still pretty young but it's important to them.

Now let me describe one other dog related scenario and how it applies to money. Then we'll wrap up with talking about the value of being able to spend a small amount of money and we'll be done with today's show. Earlier this year I read through William Fortune's One Second After trilogy.

I'd read One Second After a few years ago and I saw that he had published his third book in that series. I went and read the first, second, and third one. The premise of the books is pretty rough. It's basically the premise that there's an electromagnetic pulse that is activated over the US mainland leading to a long term destruction of the electrical power grid and any kind of electrical equipment components, etc.

It's pretty much the worst doomsday scenario that can be imagined for the modern US American or global society which is built upon the power of electricity. It's great. One Second After is a really well done book. The second and third books weren't as good as the first but well done.

So I reread One Second After and there's a scene in One Second After where the protagonist's family has been through tremendous trial and tremendous loss. Everybody's going through starvation, a time of starvation. People have died left and right and the central protagonist has done everything he can for his family and for himself and for his community, the town in which he lives.

He's done everything, poured his life out and yet still they're starving. And in that family they had two faithful dogs who had been with them for a very long time and the dogs were starving as well. At the end of the book, the protagonist, spoiler alert, the end of the book the protagonist finds himself in a situation where he has to kill the dog in order to save his daughter's life.

Last scrap of food to save his daughter's life. Now the book struck me because number one it's a horrific and gripping account. I balled my way through it and I just got to the end of it and it put within me just this sense of determination to make sure that I and as many people as possible never have to face that type of scenario.

But it just – it struck me as the difference that was a matter of effort. If you've given your full effort, I don't think you'll experience much regret. If I were in the circumstance of that father and I had poured myself out for my family and my dog had to be sacrificed in order to give enough protein to my – she was pregnant, my pregnant daughter to get her through the pregnancy.

I'd do it in an instant. That's probably not true. I would hesitate. I would consider it. But I would do it. No question about that. But for me to sit back in a sense of selfishness because I don't want to pay the vet $525, which is what I paid yesterday, for a bunch of medicine and his consultation and whatnot to keep on working with this issue.

That's very different. If I chose not to do that, it would be from a place of selfishness because I certainly have the capacity. And I don't want to reach the end of my life and regret any of my decisions. And I don't want you to reach the end of your life and regret any of your decisions.

So here's my closing counsel to you. If you are building your financial life around the concept of being able to live on a very low amount of money and as such being able to achieve financial independence very quickly and your entire goal is to save up just a small amount of money so you can live on this tiny budget of income – or sorry, budget of expenses, be very, very careful.

I think it's entirely appropriate to do something like that as a transition plan, meaning for a temporary period of time, we're going to buckle our belt in tight so that we can get out of debt or so that we can start our business or we can move from one country to another or from one side of the country to another or so that we can change from this career and this job that isn't really a good fit to a job and a career that's a better fit.

But we may have to take a pay cut. All of those things are fine and I recommend them on a temporary basis. But please don't build a plan that locks you into a lifetime of low expenses because you may miss out on some of the greatest, most fulfilling opportunities of your life.

You may not know what they are today. You may not be able to see them. So move forward with a short-term plan. Go with what you can see today. But don't make any decisions that are going to lock you in on a long-term basis and force you to have your back up against the wall because financially, it's way better to be in a place of financial abundance than to feel poor and broke because you don't have enough income and you've made decisions that cut off your income.

I hope that's appropriate and encouraging to you. Remember, I'm not saying you got to spend it all. I'm not saying you got to do consumption. I'm not saying you can't retire early. I'm not saying any of those things. I'm just saying be careful that your naivete doesn't cause you to make decisions that you might regret.

That's a little bit of what I've learned from my perspective. If you've got comments on today's show, happy to hear from you. Come on by RadicalPersonalFinance.com. Leave those comments on the website if they are related to the show, please. That is the best place to interact with me and with the site.

Thank you so much for listening. I'm doing my best to get some of this career and income stuff rolled out. I really struggled the last few weeks. My apologies. I'm doing the best I can, but I have struggled to get this done and to make progress. It's been a really tough few weeks.

I'll have more on career and income as quickly as I can get that done. It's a new learning process for me, and it's been really tough. My apologies. I'm doing the best that I can, but I will be back with you very soon. Friday Q&A show coming soon, and I'll be back with you all soon.

Cheers. This show is part of the Radical Life Media Network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. 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 at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones.