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RPF0476-Pathways_to_FI-Expediting


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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we're going to talk about pathways to independence and I'm going to share with you how you can turn a simple straightforward job of an expediter into a strong foundation for financial freedom. 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. An example of that tagline, I'm just going to talk to you about how you can take a very simple job working as an expediter, a driver of an expedited truck and do expedited shipping and turn that into financial freedom in short order.

Last few days I just returned from watching the eclipse up in the 100% band in Florida, the eclipse on Monday. It took me a little bit longer to get home and get back to work than I imagined. I thought I had planned for the traffic but the traffic was terrible.

It was a remarkable experience though to be there watching the eclipse. I really enjoyed it. I hope that many of you took time out of your schedule and planned for it. It's certainly an unusual occurrence and definitely an enjoyable experience to be there in the 100% band and to see the total eclipse of the sun.

Really, really remarkable. While I was there, I happened to sit down at a cafe and I sat down and started talking to this young man at the cafe and we talked about his job. He works as something called an expediter. Now, if you're not familiar with expediting or expedited shipping, an expediter is in essence a trucker.

But unlike a trucker who drives a larger truck, a larger semi truck or even a larger box truck, an expediter drives a smaller van, a cargo van. Because the expediter drives a cargo van, they are not subject to the same DOT, Department of Transportation regulations that truckers are subject to.

This is of great value and attractiveness to people who need to ship things quickly. It may be somebody may need to ship a pallet of goods or a couple of pallets of goods. Usually these large cargo vans can fit three pallets, some of them two, but usually three pallets.

They call them skids, three skids in the back. So that allows somebody to ship a decent volume of goods. Or it may be somebody who just needs a certain part. Maybe there's an oil rig in Texas that needs a part shipped down from Illinois or any number of things that can be needed.

Because the expediters are not subject to the DOT regulations on having to stop and be weighed, as an example, they can make time more quickly. They can usually drive a little bit faster and they're not subject to the regulations involving how much truckers are required to sleep. If you're not familiar, the Department of Transportation puts a limit on how many hours continuously a truck driver can operate their vehicle.

And so because of that, unless there's a team driving a large semi truck, they have to stop and take certain legally prescribed amounts of rest. And so that's the world of expediting trucking. They take smaller quantities of cargo across the country very quickly, across the state, across the country.

They're shippers on custom jobs. I've had an interest in this because I have various weird interests like this and I've hung out quite a bit on some of the expediters' forums, looking around at what they do. And I was intrigued with how they make their business, how they accomplish their lifestyle.

And just – I've always – it's been one of my interests. But this was the first time I've actually sat down and talked with somebody. Now usually the expediters, if you don't know what – if you know what to look for, you'll see them everywhere. But basically they usually will drive a large white cargo van of some kind.

You can almost always see a couple of them at a truck stop. You'll just see a white cargo van parked in a parking space. A lot of times you'll see them at a Walmart or other places as well. And the reason that they're parked is because usually they're waiting on their next job.

The life and lifestyle of an expediter is very unique because generally they're on the road from – on one-way shipments. They don't necessarily work regular routes. They just simply respond to the call and go wherever their shipment calls them to be. And then in between jobs, they'll be resting.

Most of the time they will stay in their vehicle. They'll either rig up a little bed sometimes right behind the front two driver seats, a little bed. Or this particular man that I was talking to, he was driving a sprinter van that had – it was a chassis cab, a sprinter van with a box on the back.

And then he had a little bunk up above the cab that he could sleep in when he needed to just pull over and stay in a bed. So you'll see them resting. And the job is unique because it is one of these live on the job types of jobs.

And that's why I'm going to use it as an example to talk about how you can use a job like this to launch you towards financial freedom in a very short order. There are a number of different jobs like this where you actually live in the same place that you work.

Of course, trucking or truck driving is certainly one example of that, whether it's a larger truck or a smaller truck. The man that I'm talking to, his name is John. John was – basically was living in his van. He had been doing this work for about three months. He had had an apartment for a short time and then he got rid of his apartment and he lives in the van full time.

Young man, perhaps early 20s, he lives in the van. So when he's not taking a load from one place to another, he has free time to sleep or to go and do sightseeing or do anything that he wants to do. But this is not the only job that's like that.

You could go and work on an oil rig or have a friend that worked in a commercial Alaska ship – fishing operation one time, things like that. There are many variations of this where you can go and do work where you live. You're a mercenary and you go and do soldiering for hire or work for a contractor in Iraq, these types of things.

The benefits of this type of work is you can earn moderate to high wages and have, if you play your cards right, almost no living expenses. This opens up a real opportunity for normal people without extraordinary education, extraordinary training, extraordinary skills. It opens up the opportunity for normal people to break free if you play your cards right.

Many of these types of jobs don't require a high level of skill or at least not to start with. Certainly, in time, you're going to need a high level of skill if you're working on an oil rig or driving a crab boat or some similar operation. But there are often opportunities for people without those developed skills to start.

If you're careful, because of the fact that your expenses are so low, you've got a real opportunity. Today, I want to tell you how – just some ideas on how you can leverage a few years of this type of work to open up a very bright future. I told John as I was sitting having breakfast with him, I told him I was going to do this show for him.

I'm not going to go on your ideas specifically, but other listeners, of course, here are ideas that you can take and you can apply them to your situation. So here's my advice. Number one, you must view this type of venture as a temporary, temporary thing. There are – there is a small percentage of society, a small number of people who would like to do these types of things on the long term.

There are some people who enjoy being alone. There are some people who enjoy this type of work on the long term. But for most of us, this type of work where you are going to be away, away from your family, away from your friends, doing hard physical work and you're living and working on the job, this is something that's best viewed on a temporary basis.

Certainly, this is most ideally suited to people who are single. I would strongly discourage any person who is married or who has children from engaging in this type of work. Almost no marriage would be able to survive work like this, whether it's somebody who's an on-the-road truck driver, somebody who's in the military.

Almost no marriage can survive circumstances like this. If you lose your marriage over your job, the price and the cost is just simply far too high. There is no amount of money that will make it worth it. So this type of approach is best suited for somebody who is single and who can go and engage in hard work.

But it's best to view this as temporary. Here's your first layer of advantage because most people who do this type of work are not thinking all that far down the road. In general, very few people labor with a vision. Very few people think more than for this weekend or for the end of the month or for the end of the year.

So if you're someone who can see beyond that, that puts you far ahead. But when you get into simple, usually menial or repetitive work like this, then the field narrows even farther and it's very rare to find somebody who's a long-term thinker in a job or an approach like this.

But this is not for you. You can labor at this with a long-time perspective. This will dramatically affect how you use your money. It will allow you to take advantage of the savings opportunity by not expanding your lifestyle and spending money on stupid stuff. Many people who are in this type of work make a series of unfortunate decisions where they buy unnecessary things that suck up all of their earnings.

It's not unusual to find a young, low-ranking person in the military who has a big, beautiful $40,000 pickup truck outside. Their entire opportunity to save money because the military can cover their housing is blown because of the truck outside. It's not unusual to find people with serious bad habits that suck up all of their money.

It's not unusual to find that. But it's not required. If you view this as temporary and you view this type of work as giving you a foundation that's going to set you financially free for the rest of your life, you have a real opportunity to make a big difference.

So view it as temporary and deal with the temporary pain. Deal with the temporary discomfort. Deal with the temporary frustration and keep your expenses low so that you can fully reap the benefits of this job. Number two, enjoy the benefits of the work now. Many people who are working in a job like this are not thinking of the benefits.

They only focus on the hard times. That's what I really enjoyed about talking with a young man, John, who I met this weekend or this week. He was – he'd only been doing this for a few months. He was from Tennessee and he was enjoying the opportunity to travel the country.

Even in three short months, he'd driven across 38 states and he was looking forward to being able to take shipments up to Canada as well and drive across Canada when he had the opportunity. So for somebody who wants to travel, you can do that in the context of a job.

But you'll only get the benefits of it if you see it as an opportunity and you focus on the benefits of that job. John was planning to buy a nice camera. He enjoys photography, enjoys hiking. So when he was on duty, he would go and deliver a load. When he was in a place he was interested in seeing, he would ask his boss for a day off and he would then just take his van, very mobile.

He's not trying to drive an 18-wheeler through a national park. He could take his van and go and visit some great site that he would be interested in seeing and interested in photographing. There are lots of benefits of this type of work that if you focus on, you can really enjoy.

Maybe the benefit of travel. Maybe the benefit of being able to be outside and enjoy beautiful weather. It may be the benefit of doing hard physical work that makes you strong. It may be the benefit of doing work that is hard and forges character in you. Or maybe it's the benefit of an adventure.

You're working as a contractor, a military contractor in Iraq. Well, maybe you just say it's an adventure, an opportunity to learn Arabic or some version of it. But count the blessings and enjoy the benefits of it knowing that it's going to be temporary and embrace it with an attitude of adventure, an adventurous spirit.

Number three, when you're doing this type of work, stack the cash and wait. Do as close to nothing as practically possible. Don't feel like you've got to make long-term decisions quickly. One of the great opportunities about this type of work is it can be done usually by somebody who has no starting pay.

For example, the guy that I was talking to, John, the expediter, shared with me how the financial arrangements of his operation with his boss works. His boss owns the trucks, owns the vans that his employees drive. The boss coordinates the loads, is connected with the opportunity to bid on people who want to make these types of last-minute shipments.

His boss owns the van and handles the maintenance on the van and takes 40% of the price of the shipment and the driver keeps 60% of the price of the shipment and pays for fuel and expenses along the way. This seems like a very fair arrangement. John was very pleased with it, but it means that you can start with nothing.

Somebody else owns a van and you just simply do the work and you can pile up money. Many times, this may be the first time that someone in this situation has had a chance to pile up money, any even substantial money. And unfortunately, without our making firm decisions to get used to having large amounts of money, it starts to burn a hole in our pockets.

Don't let this happen to you. Resolve not to spend money in the short term and not to make any kind of long-term decisions for what you should do with the money until you pile up a lot of it. Just stack the cash and wait. Go through the entire season.

Work out the entire contract. Do a couple of years and don't be scared to just simply put the money in the bank and wait. It takes time to train yourself to be comfortable having large amounts of money on hand. And it takes time to train yourself to think like somebody who has large amounts of money on hand.

Far too many people get nervous about the fact that for the first time in their life they have 10 or 15 or 20 or $50,000 in the bank and all of a sudden they feel like they got to do something. And their friend wants to start a business and they say, "Here, I got 20 grand." And they all of a sudden start investing.

Take time and stack the cash. In just a moment, I'm going to give you a bunch of things you can do with the money and they'll be very diverse. But the unifying thread is you have to have the money ready to go. Number four, use this time in your life to educate yourself about things that matter to you.

Use this time to educate yourself and don't waste it. Depending on the nature of your work, you'll have different opportunities for education. If you're working as a driver, driving a van across the country as an expediter, you'll have plenty of time to listen to audio materials. So set aside a budget and buy good quality audio books that are going to teach you about the things that you need to know about.

Find and subscribe to relevant podcasts. Find and subscribe to the appropriate iTunes U channels of learning. Go ahead and figure out a plan so that you can get those videos on courses, buy the great courses or download the videos and get them tuned into your sound system so that you can learn and take those college classes while you're driving.

You can do a tremendous amount of learning with audio. You may not be able to take detailed copious notes on audio as you drive, but you'll certainly retain some of it. You may retain 30%, but 30% of 50 or 60 hours of driving is a lot of learning. So do an assessment of the types of things that you need to learn in order to advance yourself towards the things that you're interested in and start listening.

Other jobs may not involve time for listening, but if you're working on an oil pipeline up in Alaska or you're out on a rig at sea, you're going to have lots of time to read. Instead of wasting your time goofing off online, dedicate yourself to serious reading in your fields of interest.

Become knowledgeable and expert, become an expert in the things that you care about. Take the time to pursue formal certifications, formal credentials. There are all kinds of colleges and universities that you can go through and do your work via correspondence study. Work by a correspondence study is a time-honored technique of learning.

One of my grandfathers did this. He worked on a small cattle ranch up in the mountains of Colorado and he – I forget which degree or maybe it was my grandmother got a teaching certificate. I forget which degree but wound up finishing his academic coursework in a college degree through long-distance correspondence study.

Went on and got a master's in chemistry and became a college professor. But it started with him studying at the kitchen table late in the evening on a little ranch up in the mountains. When you add on the accessibility of the internet, it is so much easier today. So get the books, get the courses and get the degree.

As I was talking with John the Expediter, we were talking about his scenario versus and compared to the financial situation of one of his friends and he was sharing how his friend was $30,000 in student loan debt and had gotten a degree to work as a dental hygienist. But then she had just simply put herself in a situation where she got laid off from the dental hygiene job.

So here she was $30,000 in debt and didn't really like dental – the work of dental hygiene and was – unfortunately, was jobless and trying to figure out what to do. She was asking him, "How do I get started working as an expedited trucker?" If you compare the approach of that versus the approach of, "Hey, I'm going to work hard during this period of my life.

I'm going to live cheap and I'm going to study hard." You can come out of the other side of two or three years on the road with a college degree under your belt and $100,000 in the bank instead of coming out of a four or five-year college program or maybe it's a dental hygienist training program, a couple, three years with $30,000 of student loan debt.

Taking the path of hard work and using the time to study is the better course. There is so much information available today. You could become a world-class investor practically for free through study, listening, reading and application and you hardly need to pay for anything. So as you're piling up money, recognize that you've got to learn new skills.

If you act like a bozo and spend all the money as quickly as possible, you'll always be broke. But if you recognize the fact that, "Hey, perhaps I'm starting from a disadvantaged place and I'm just simply working a simple job, driving a truck," that's a time at which you say, "I've got to learn new skills.

Let me learn to think like an investor. Let me learn to think like a millionaire. Let me understand what the millionaires do and how I can copy them." You're going to need to be successful in life. You're going to need a diverse array of skills. So don't get locked into thinking that it's just one thing.

Yes, you need to study investing. But in John's case, he's interested in photography. You need to study photography. So listen and learn about photography. Take the courses. Maybe you need to study about home building. We'll talk about why in a moment. Well, start studying. Develop a diverse array of skills.

Maybe learn a couple of languages. You can learn languages entirely by audio. I've done this for years, listening to educational audio on various languages while I drive around in my car. Easy to do. You can learn a new language every year that way with the amount of time that people spend on the road.

So if you're interested in anthropology and you're going to go and work in the Middle East, use your truck driving time to study anthropology, learn about anthropology, read the books on anthropology, and go ahead and, why don't you, learn a couple of languages that will be useful to you while you're working in your area of expertise.

And then when you're ready, get out of the truck and go into the classroom or go into the field. So now let me give you some ideas of what you can do with the money. I'm going to use, for my example, the idea of having saved $100,000 as your starting fund.

I've become convinced that this is a useful and achievable goal for any motivated, diligent person to work towards, $100,000. I've also become convinced that this is a good amount of money to work towards as a starting fund. I think that just about everybody should start by accumulating $100,000 before they start making big life decisions about what direction they're going to go in.

Now it's not necessarily required that – there's nothing magical about it. You could do it on 50, you could do it on 150, but I think it's a good, achievable goal. So using my new friend John the Expediter as an example, he said that it's been many weeks that he can make at least $1,000 a week, sometimes more, sometimes less.

But $1,000 a week for someone who's working hard is probably a reasonable amount of money. The reason it's reasonable for entry-level work is because of the lifestyle costs associated with it. The labor market here where I work – where I live in Florida is just for simple manual labor.

The labor market probably shakes out to about $12 an hour is basically the minimum wage for somebody who's working as a laborer. If you're going to go and work in retail or something like that, it will be less. There are certainly plenty of teenagers making $9 an hour working at a fast food joint.

But for somebody who's able to do a full day's work, $12 an hour is pretty much the minimum. If you go and you hire some people to work as day laborers, that's about what they're going to work for. Well, that comes out – $12 an hour, 50 hours a week comes out to about $600 a week.

When you start adding in the lifestyle considerations of being on the road full time, missing family, missing friends, in order to get people to do that, the employers have to pay higher wages. There would be no reason for you to go and live on the road if you could stay in your hometown and be home with your family and friends and make the same amount of money.

So they have to pay more for a lot of these types of work. If you're going to go and work on an oil rig, they got to pay you more money to be stuck out at sea. If you're going to go and ship out to Iraq for six months, they got to pay you more money to be stuck in the big sandbox.

So consider that that's a reasonable assumption to say you can make a thousand bucks a week. Maybe it's a little bit less. Maybe it's a little bit more. But what that means is that in under three years of work, if you keep your living expenses light, you could accumulate 75, 50, 75, $100,000 with two or three years of work.

Anybody in the world can stay focused for two or three years on hard work, especially when you've got a clear goal and a clear idea. Anybody can do that for two or three years. So let's say that you can stay focused for three years and you can save a hundred grand.

What are the things that you can do with it? What can you do with that? Here are some examples. Number one, you can move from employee to employer in your field of work. John the expediter should seriously consider what his boss has done, buying a van, putting it on the road.

His boss gets to sit at home and collect 40% of the revenues in exchange for his capital that he was able to use to buy a van and also his help with the scheduling services. So as you go from having no capital and hiring at your labor to having – excuse me.

As you go from having only human capital where you're hiring at your labor to drive on the road to having financial capital, you should look closely at your current line of work and see, "Is there an opportunity for me to profitably employ this financial capital?" Maybe you employ it in buying your own van, buying your own truck.

That allows you to capture more of the earnings yourself. Or maybe you go ahead and employ it in purchasing your own vehicle and then having somebody else drive for you part of the time or all of the time. That's the first place that most of us should work. Might be hard for you to do this if you are working on an oil rig.

You may not have a couple hundred million dollars sitting in your back pocket, but maybe it's time for you to buy your own fishing boat. And now you can move up to be the captain of your own fishing boat instead of being a crew on someone else's. But don't restrict yourself to that.

It may be that as you've accumulated this capital, you've developed an interest in some other type of business. A hundred thousand dollars is certainly enough to buy a franchise fee for many of the very profitable franchises that are available. You may go ahead and say, "I'm going to open a Subway restaurant here in this town." A Subway sandwich stop can make quite a bit of money, but you've got to have the franchise fee.

But with your hard work, you've developed that or some version of that. Or maybe you're going to open your own thing, open your own store, but you need to buy the inventory and you've got your idea. A hundred thousand dollars will inventory most types of businesses. A hundred thousand dollars opens up almost any kind of reasonable business for you to start.

And that means that you can continue your work and start to reap the benefits of being a business owner and an entrepreneur. And you can do this with those few years of hard work. Most people who go out to start a business are flat broke. They're borrowing on their credit cards to start it.

They're scrimping and saving. They're trying to support a lifestyle, etc. You have the opportunity to come in well capitalized. Quick sidebar, my recommendation to you is don't start any business until you've worked in it. If you want to open a restaurant, make sure you go and first work in a restaurant.

It's a lot cheaper for you to go and hire yourself out for an hourly wage for three, four, five, six months. Before you start buying a business, you'll learn a lot more and it'll be a lot cheaper. You may decide, "Hey, I don't actually want to own this business after all." But a hundred grand will open up just about any kind of business to you.

A hundred grand is enough to purchase living accommodation that will provide for you essentially for the rest of your life if you like. Couple ideas on how to do it. I have to start first with unique ideas. For somebody who's been on the road, maybe that mobile lifestyle appeals to you.

A hundred grand will buy you a sailboat and provision it very well and you can use that and sail the world. One of my favorite thrillers, if you're into thriller novels, Matthew Bracken's book called Enemies Foreign and Domestic is fantastic. The whole trilogy is great. But the hero of that story is a young man who worked on the oil fields.

His name was Brad in the story. He worked on the oil field, saved up his money, then he bought an old sailboat and then used his saved money to purchase the necessary equipment and then used his labor to fix up and refit the whole sailboat so he could wind up having a paid for livable ocean going sailboat to live on and have enough money to have it fully outfitted.

Well, he bought his freedom on that sailboat with a few years of work in the oil fields. So you could do that with a boat if you're interested in that or an RV if you're interested in that. But you could certainly do that also with any kind of normal traditional house.

There are towns all over this country and all over the world where you could go in and pay cash for a nice little house with a hundred grand and have a paid for debt free house to live in. What would that buy you? Well, it buys you the ability to do just about anything you want because you've taken away many of your living expenses, many of your housing expenses at least.

Buy it right, fill it with some roommates, and now not only does it remove your cost, but it gives you a source of income, revenue. I've always found it interesting for those who say, "Well, $100,000 isn't enough to buy the kind of house that I'd like to live in." That's true.

But is $100,000 enough for you to build for yourself the type of house you'd like to live in? If I were going to go back and do it all over again, I'd love to have some older person come along and give me an idea like this and say, "Joshua, why don't you take, say, the first few years, 18 years old, why don't you go and work?

But work in a job that'll allow you to learn while you're on the job, learn while you're driving across the road. And then take that money and come back and start working in some of the trades and apprentice in a few of the different trades, work six months in carpentry, work six months in plumbing, et cetera.

And then use your off time and go ahead and build your own house for yourself. Got $100,000, learning the skills, applying them. I saw a news story a couple of, some months ago where a woman had built for herself a house and she ostensibly had learned it all on YouTube.

It's incredible the opportunities that are there, but you're going to need some capital. You create the capital with work and then you may take and apply the labor. Buy the piece of land, build the house, live in a tent if you need to, keep your expenses down while you're building it.

But think about where you come out the other side. You can do this at relatively any age, but I'm thinking especially of young people like John the Expediter. You come out at say 25 years old, you've got a nice house, paid off, gives you tremendous flexibility. Keep enough capital to start a business, make sure you have sources of income so you don't spend it all on a place to live, but you've got tremendous flexibility.

Another big picture area of focus, remember I started with business, then housing, is education. You can use the money to purchase for yourself an educational accreditation that can be helpful in launching a significant career. Maybe that's an area of specialty. Maybe that's you go ahead and get your degree from long-distance study while you're saving up money.

Then you sit for your board exams or sit for your MCATs or the LSATs or for something like that, medical school or physical therapy school or law school or business school. You go ahead and now you have the money that you can use so that you come out the other side debt-free.

Much more powerful place to start than being $100,000 in debt. Use those years of hard work to home in on what you're interested in. Get some experience in the field to make sure you're sure about it. And then go ahead and buy yourself the educational accreditation you need to open a market that moves you from earning $50,000 a year to earning $500,000 a year.

I'd much rather see someone do that than come out the other side with a six-figure student loan bill. Much more respect, and I'm convinced the lifestyle is much better for the person who's worked their way through. And these are ideas on how you can do it and how you can use this type of work that, again, has simple entry requirements to open up an entirely different world of educational opportunities for you.

In some ways, I did a certain version of this myself. When I was in college, I worked my way through my freshman year of college with scholarships and earned income and didn't borrow money my freshman year of college. Then in my sophomore year of college, I got lazy and I started borrowing money on credit cards to pay for my living expenses and student loans to pay for my school expenses.

That continued on my sophomore and my junior year. In my junior year, I said, "This is crazy," and I decided to get out of debt. I worked like crazy to get out of debt my senior year of school. I was able to graduate. I checked with Sally May two weeks before I graduated and I was able to graduate debt-free from college.

On my resume, when I was applying for jobs and talking to people, I put at the bottom "graduated debt-free," I phrased it appropriately, but something like, "Paid for my own school and graduated debt-free." People would skip over the rest of my resume and they would home in on that and they would ask me the story.

I had various people that I interviewed with really appreciate that and it opened a lot of doors for me. If you followed a path like I've laid out here, it would open a lot of doors for you. Number four, investments. Obviously, when we've developed this amount of money and savings, we need to think carefully about how to invest it wisely.

$100,000 can open the world of wealth if well invested. $100,000 of starting capital is enough to capitalize a real estate empire. $100,000 is enough wealth to capitalize a profitable trading business. $100,000 of wealth is enough to capitalize private investments and private businesses. $100,000 is more money than almost anybody puts their hands on.

Depending on which data source we use, about half of US Americans can't come up with $1,000 cash. About half of Americans can't come up with $1,000 cash. By saving anything more than $1,000, you move yourself from the bottom 50% to the top 50%. Here's one that's even more sobering.

About 75% of Americans who reach retirement age, what we usually consider to be retirement age, have less than $100,000 saved. That's why I don't take people who talk about retirement seriously in this way, meaning that most people will not retire because they just don't have the money saved. If people do have the money saved, they don't have it liquid.

Usually it's tied up in home equity. If you can accumulate for yourself $100,000, you move yourself into essentially the top quartile. Not only the top quartile of all Americans, but even the top quartile of retiring age Americans. Think about the impact on your life. Yet, is there anything complicated about this plan that I've laid out?

Is there anything that requires some kind of special skill? John the Expediter seemed like a very nice man, but the basic skill is to go and get a job in this type of field, to get rid of his stuff that's costing him money at home to lower expenses, and the ability to keep your bottom planted in a seat and keep the van headed between the little white lines.

Those aren't very unique skills. You don't need to be a special fancy person, but you do need to consider it and you do need to have the idea and you do need to work about it. If you're struggling to get ahead and you're struggling with trying to figure out what to do, consider just the example of John the Expediter and consider these simple examples I've used to see how they can apply to your situation.

You'll need to calculate for yourself your own path. I would not do what I've described in this show at this point in time. The cost would be too high. I'm married. I have children. I would never take the chance of losing my family to go and sit behind a wheel.

But that may not be you. You may be in a situation where you don't have those responsibilities. You could take two or three years of work and apply this type of mindset and put yourself well on a pathway to financial freedom in ten years or less. That's all I want to share with you today.

I hope this has been useful to you as a practical, real example. John, as I promised, I told you I'd do the show for you. Thanks for sharing your story and sharing just some of the stories of the business with you. By the way, John and other listeners who are in driving businesses, you need to think carefully about the future of your market.

If I were in a driving occupation as a job, working as a taxi driver, working as an Uber driver, working as a truck driver, working as an expediter, anything that involves just driving, I would not be planning on a long-term career in that. The writing is on the wall.

Most of those jobs, I don't know if it would be a decade, who knows, a decade and a half, but I would not be making plans beyond a decade for my job to still exist. So you need to be using this time to retool, use this time to earn, and transition to something else.

There are always opportunities available. Hope you've enjoyed today's show. If you'd like to get more in contact with me, remember the website's always there at RadicalPersonalFinance.com. Thank you for those of you who signed up for the class, the Career and Income Guide class. We sold out in the first week, so I closed it down over the weekend a week early.

Thank you to those 100 of you who joined that. We're kicking that off this week, towards the end of this week with the first session. If you didn't get in for the beta launch, I'll be happy to have you in when we launch the full version, and I'll be back with you soon.

Thank you for listening. This show is part of the Radical Life Media Network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. Don't just dream about paradise, live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs.

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