Struggling with your electric bill? Get an energy assist from SDG&E and save. You may qualify for an 18% discount. Visit sdge.com/fera to find out more. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we continue our "Pathways to Financial Freedom in 10 Years or Less" series with a discussion of my idea of working as an RV mechanic.

Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, encouragement and inspiration that 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 Sheets. I am your friendly financial philosopher and fellow traveler down this road of financial freedom.

Today, I'm going to sketch out for you a blueprint that I think you can use and adapt to your situation. Today's episode is – well, I guess we'll call it the second in a very occasional series that I'm calling the "Pathways to Financial Freedom in 10 Years or Less" series.

The first episode in this series was episode 476 in which I talked about pathways to financial freedom in 10 years or less and I used the idea of working as an expediter, expedited trucking and other live-on-the-job opportunities and I sketched out how you could use a career such as expediting as a way for you to achieve financial freedom very quickly, especially in that 10-year or less time frame.

This is something I say to you every day when I open the show. I say financial freedom in 10 years or less and I want to consistently paint these pathways out for you. Now, there's nothing easy about any of these paths but they're very, very doable and today I'm going to share with you a new one that I think will be illustrative and instructive for you and that is as working as an RV mechanic.

But I want to emphasize this point. As you listen to me go through this idea, don't listen just for the specific idea. You may care nothing about RVs. You may care nothing about working as a mechanic. You may not like this specific idea at all. But listen for the themes in the progression of this business that I'm about to describe for you and listen to what you have to actually do to build financial freedom.

Listen not just for RV mechanic but listen for how you increase income, decrease expenses, invest wisely and then optimize lifestyle. We're not going to talk about avoiding catastrophe today, just optimizing lifestyle. Recently I had somebody come over to do a little bit of work on my RV. I have an older RV and I try to do a lot of the things on it myself but sometimes it's just intimidating to do things you've never done and also often you don't have all the tools, you don't have all the supplies.

I needed some stuff done especially I had a leak in the roof and I had it planned to work on it, planned to work on it, planned to work on it. Finally I just said, "I'm obviously not getting to it. My time has been utterly consumed with my radical personal finance projects and my family obligations and some of my other personal areas.

I just wasn't able to get to this in a timely manner." So I decided I was going to go ahead and hire the work done. So I called a couple of local RV repair shops and the ones that I trusted, the one that I trusted especially, was booked out for a couple of months.

They couldn't even get me in for a couple of months and so they referred me to a local mobile RV mechanic. Now the work of a mobile mechanic is something that I've thought has a huge value as I've looked at it in other areas. For example, a mobile auto mechanic I think has a lot of advantages.

There are disadvantages to working as a mobile auto mechanic. You give up some of the niceness of having a shop but there are advantages especially in the decreased expenses and the more adjustable work schedule. And of course that same thing can be applied to many other mobile businesses. There are mobile dog groomers.

There are mobile farriers, the people who shoe horses. There are mobile boat mechanics and boat repair people. There are mobile cleaning people. It's just about any business can be taken and turned mobile. And in this case we were talking about a mobile RV mechanic, somebody who could just work on the systems of my RV.

So the guy came by and of course as I always do, I tried to talk to him, hear a little bit about his story, hear a little bit about the industry. And I noticed all of these themes that for me are very, very valuable. First and foremost, you should know that for the repair work that he did for me, he was charging $95 an hour, offered a flat fee the way he priced his services.

He just charged a flat fee of $95 an hour plus the cost of parts if he needs to use any specific parts. $95 an hour is not a bad rate. $95 an hour would be if you worked a 40-hour a week over the course of a full year, that would be a total income of about $200,000 if you could do that 40 hours a week.

Now of course I'm ignoring a few expenses, but what expenses are there? This guy was driving a middle-of-the-road van, just a standard cargo work van, a couple thousand bucks, a few thousand dollars of tools, really not that much, gas. And most of his work was pretty simple. He just had a cell phone that I called and coordinated with, a simple calendar book.

So his expenses were very, very low. And as we got to talking, we started talking about the careers and he shared with me some things that I have noticed again and again and again every time I talk with people in the trades. Number one, I noticed that he has a very hard time finding good work, workers, finding good workers, very hard time.

He talked to me about how many people he's tried and he says every time he brings a guy in, a younger guy, he says either number one, they just don't want to work, they want to hang out on their phone the whole time instead of working, or two, they don't want to continue doing the work because it's hard work.

You're out in the sunshine sometimes, you're working in a hot RV, you're actually doing hard work and he says, typical older guy, the kids these days just want to sit around and play on their phones. Guess what? It's true. And I've heard that again and again and again from people in the trades.

One of the big opportunities coming up in the coming decades is going to be for skilled tradespeople. Skilled tradespeople are getting older, grayer, and they're getting out of the business. And yet while many of the professional jobs are being shipped overseas, it's relatively easy if you are working as an accountant to have your job shipped over to a foreign country and you have the global population that's competing with you for your work.

It's not so easy to ship your plumbing work overseas. It's not so easy to ship your electrical work overseas and it's not so easy to ship your RV repair work overseas. So he starts talking to me about how he'd like to sell his business and yet he doesn't have anyone who's interested and he doesn't have anyone who will do the work.

Now this guy came from a career in boat repairs but then he moved into RV repairs and he's done it for many, many years and has good skill and he's very honest. That was why I got the referral from the RV shop that I called, was because he said he's honest and that's what you're looking for when someone's going to come and work on your stuff.

You're looking for somebody who's honest. So let me explain to you how I would pursue this career and what I would do. And I'm going to do it for you in the context of let's pretend that I had – let's pretend that my oldest son is – we're 15 years old and I was giving him advice, something like that.

Well, if my oldest son were 15 years old at this point in time, this is the type of career that I would encourage him to pursue during his teenage years. Any time from that 13, 14, 15, 16, anywhere in there where it works out conveniently, this is an ideal time for a young man to start apprenticing in a business like RV repair.

Now again, remember, this is in some ways a metaphor. You could do this in boat repair. You could do this in almost just any kind of skilled trades. But this is a good one for that age of young man to apprentice in. What I would do is I would have my son do his schoolwork in the morning.

He'd do about four hours of specific class instruction from say 8 AM to noon, have a quick lunch and then I would have him working from 12.30 to 5.30 every day if he could, if I could arrange the details with rides and all of that with somebody like this other man.

Now, with this older guy, he can go and basically where you start on these things is you start as a helper with very little skill. I did this when I was about 13 years old. I started working as a helper in the tile business. You go and you mix up the mud and you cut the tiles in that business.

But while you're around the business, you start to pick things up quickly. Once the older – what they call mechanic – once the older skilled mechanic starts to notice that you're interested, then you can learn things very, very quickly and then you start to do more of the jobs yourself.

So I would apprentice my 15-year-old to somebody like this older guy for a period of years and he would work as his helper. Along the way, that 15-year-old would build the skill over the course of an apprenticeship over two, three years and with some side study – they're actually courses in RV repair that somebody could take – would build the skill to do the work themselves.

Now this guy that came and worked on my RV wants to sell his business but he can't find a buyer for it because he can't find somebody who has the skills. Well, the business that he's selling is the customer lists. Let's pretend that my son grew past 15 and now he's 17, 18 years old, has a driver's license, is able to get himself around, has a few years of experience and finds that the business is helpful and useful for him and it works with his skill sets.

He's developed the necessary skills. He has interest in running his own business, et cetera. Then I'd encourage him to go right to work full time in that as a business. Don't waste years and years studying a specific college course at that point in time. Go ahead and go right into the business.

Why? Well, because a skilled RV mechanic as affirmed by the guy I spent some time digging into details with could very conceivably make a profit, a straight profit of six figures per year, one guy working out of one van. If you have the choice between spending six figures to get some non-important degree that may open the door for you to get a $35,000 a year job or making six figures in a skilled trade, chances are you should probably go right to making money because those extra few years of productivity will make a tremendous difference.

So I would encourage my son to go ahead and start the process of buying them out, whether he starts his own independent business and has to build up his own customer list or buys out a business owner like this guy. I didn't talk to him about what he'd want to sell the business for, so I don't know.

But go ahead and pursue the business full time. Now what are the benefits of a business like a mobile RV repair service? Well, number one, it's flexible. It's big time flexible. So even if my son did want to go to college and then this type of work can easily be scheduled around a college class schedule.

I would guess the average service call in a business like mobile RV repair would be a few hours, a couple, three hours. Most RV repairs are going to be relatively simple. And so this type of business is a very productive, very financially profitable way for somebody to earn an income and you can do it on your schedule.

When you're going to show up at your customer's place of residence or place of business, they're not so concerned about exactly what time you're there. So if you're taking college classes and you're working this business that you've now built the skill set in and you have college classes on Tuesday mornings from eight till noon, you just tell your customer I can be there Tuesday at one o'clock.

Does that work for you or is Wednesday better? And you schedule your work around your classes. So it gives you the opportunity to earn at a very high rate of pay because you've invested time into skill. Instead of pursuing some dead end bird brain minimum wage job that doesn't have opportunities for skill advancement, you're just a cog in a machine, you pursued something that you have unique skill and you can charge $95 an hour.

That's a better move. So the flexibility of the career helps in those early years. Now what we would do if I were advising my son in this path is we would generate that huge amount of income through a lot of hard work. Whenever there's an opportunity to take paying clients, we take those paying clients with the goal of stashing as much cash as possible, keep living expenses low, hopefully he can live with family.

If not, keep living expenses low. Why don't you get a cheap RV and fix it up and live in it while you're fixing it up? And with those low expenses, you start to develop significant amounts of investment capital. Now with that investment capital, what do you do? Well, you look first close at hand to find the best investment opportunities, which probably in this scenario that I'm painting, would be opportunities in fixing up and flipping RVs for profit.

Finding RVs that somebody doesn't want anymore and shining them up or remodeling them, whether that's working out in the custom shop, finding some 1955 Airstream and completely renovating it for a very nice stack of cash or fixing just some minor cosmetic damage or minor water damage or whatever the opportunities that are found on modern ones and then flipping those again on Craigslist.

The benefit of working as an RV mechanic would be that you would come in contact with a lot of RV owners and you would come in contact with a lot of RVs. If I were doing that job, there would be a couple of things I would do. Number one, I would always take a few minutes to talk to an owner while I'm doing the work for them about if they have any interest in selling.

And I would make it clear that I'm always interested in buying older RVs. I'd always leave a card, a very simple card to say, "Hey, I'm interested in buying older RVs if you know anybody who's selling them." Just by telling people that you're interested in buying older RVs, just like by telling people you're interested in buying older houses or just by telling people you're interested in buying older fancy watches, you'll start to get some leads on ones.

And then many RV owners are frustrated because they don't really want to own their RV anymore. A lot of times they're either fixing it up because they want to sell it or they're fixing it up and it's constantly taking money out of their pocket. Just like boats, RVs constantly take money out of your pocket.

And so now you have the opportunity to make offers, lowball offers on RVs and see if you find owners that want to sell. The way to do it is simple. You always explain to the person you're buying something from how much you think it would be worth if you fixed it up.

For example, if I were doing this work, I would go and I would say, "Hey, do you have an interest in selling?" "I don't know. What do you think it's worth?" "Well, if this RV were fixed up, you could probably put it on Craigslist and you might be able to sell it for $10,000.

Do you have any interest in selling it now as is without the work done?" Somebody is looking down and imagining a couple thousand dollar bill and say, "Well, maybe. What do you got?" And so you make them an offer and the most simple way to do it is to say something like this, "Well, I'm probably not the best buyer for it.

After all, this is kind of what I do for a living. You could probably make more money if you went ahead and shined it up and then put it out of the retail market. But if you want to sell it fast, I mean, I give you five grand. Take it right now." It's a very honest and straightforward and effective way to buy things inexpensively.

Language is simple. Again, you'd probably get more money for it. You may be able to sell it for $10,000 on Craigslist if you can shine it up and fix everything and get it going. But if you want to sell fast, I'd be willing to give you five grand for it.

This is what car dealers do all the time. When you take your car in and you trade it into a dealership, you know you could shine it up and show it to 10 people on Craigslist and have one of them maybe buy it and give you a bad check and then resell the thing again and you might get a little bit more money.

But what's the value of your time? That's not the business that you're in. And every time you're trying to arrange a showing to somebody who wants to buy your car on Craigslist, you got to take time off from work or drive home and keep the car shined up and keep the battery going and you don't have a license plate for it and it goes on and on.

So you take it to the dealer and you know the dealer is giving you less money than you could in the open market but you're happy to take it because, well, I'll go ahead and just sell it quickly for cash. So you put the same thing to work for you.

Now as an RV mechanic, you're not going to be booked 40 hours a week every single day. You're going to have time. So if you're not working with a paying customer, then you spend your time fixing up your own RVs and then selling them and flipping them on Craigslist and building up a good investment portfolio.

Now continuing with the theme of the business being flexible, because you can decide your own calendar, you have the opportunity and the ability to simultaneously pursue other businesses and other lines of investment and other lines of business activity while you're doing this process. Just because you're fixing up RVs doesn't mean you can't also fix up a car if you come across it or just because you're fixing RVs doesn't mean you can't also go ahead and fix up a rental house.

After all, if you were an 18-year-old young man making $100,000 a year living on 20, a year or two of work and savings, you could flip a bunch of RVs and all of a sudden move into a different market where you're working with cash and you're doing other projects.

If you keep your expenses low, then this flexible income is great for you because you don't have to work 40 hours a week. You can keep your rates high and along the way, while you're keeping your rates high, you can put all of your time to good use, whether that's in your business hours or in your investment hours.

You still retain the benefits of the flexibility of your income. Now the RV business has a few other advantages that you should also look for in whatever business you're pursuing. For example, when you're working with people who own RVs, most of the time you're going to be dealing with a wealthier clientele.

RVs are toys for most people and yes, many people will stretch to buy one. They can't perfectly afford, but a lot of people who own an RV have significant amounts of money. When you're working with people who are wealthier and providing a service that they want, that can be a good market to work in.

In many ways, it's easier than dealing with say, auto repairs. If when you're working on lower end cars, you're going to have significant constant price pressure. But an RV owner is probably more likely, yes, they want a good deal and they want fair work, but they want it to be done right.

So that's good in terms of the business model. You're also working in a business that's largely unregulated. Whenever possible, I always try to steer completely clear of any industry that is licensed or extensively regulated and I encourage other people to do that as well. It's one of the reasons why I was so glad to get out of the financial industry because the financial industry is hamstrung by just awful constant regulations and licensing and it's the same in every industry that's licensed.

Whenever you get a group of people together that can force the government through the power of collective lobbying to impose some kind of licensing scheme, they're doing it so that they can freeze out the competition. That's the idea. Well, freezing out the competition has the effect of making it harder for you to get in and break into that business.

It also has the effect of wrecking most industries. So in any industry you're in, you look for the least regulated part of it and you probably get a better business structure. Well, I don't know. Maybe they are. I haven't done the research, but I'm not aware of any RV mechanic cabal of licensees, which means you can set up a great business and actually compete in a free market.

Doesn't mean there are no barriers to entry. Think about the different types of barriers to entry that you may have. One barrier to entry would be skill and this is the best advantage of the RV industry. You're dealing with skills that are not common. Lots of people work on cars.

Lots of people develop the skills to work on cars. Fewer now than in years past, but still a lot of people work on cars, but not many people work on RVs and not many RV owners. Many RV owners do complex repairs to their RVs. So you've got good protection from other people because of the skill set and your benefit however is there's not a huge cost, not a lot of overhead to get into the business.

Now compare an RV business with something like a lawn care business. Lawn care businesses are great. Lots of people build them and they're very, very flexible, but you have a lot of competition and so you have intense pressure on prices. Why do you have a lot of competition? Well, you have a lot of competition because it doesn't cost all that much to start a lawn care business.

Any 12-year-old kid with a push lawnmower can start a lawn care business and you don't have any protection because of skill. Anybody who cuts their own grass would consider themselves perfectly capable of going and also cutting the neighbor's grass. So if you work in an industry like lawn care or like snow shoveling or similar industries, yes, you can gain wages and income because of the work, but you don't have any protection from a skill or investment perspective.

So in my example of my son, if my son were in this age group, he wouldn't have a lot of money so therefore he's not going to go into an industry where there's big financial barriers to entry. But we do want to go where there's barriers to entry based upon skill.

That's why you can earn higher money, because of the skill. Other benefits of the RV business model, very low overhead which means a very low risk. You're dealing in largely a cash business. There's low overhead there. You don't have a huge amount. You don't have to have a big shop.

You don't have to have a lot of financial risk. You don't have to go into debt. You just need a vehicle and some basic tools and equipment. That's good. You also have a very movable business. If the RV market in Florida dries up because the economy tanks, well, guess what?

The RV market in Arizona is probably still pretty good or other places. You also have diverse skills that can translate over to different things. Somebody who can fix up RVs is using practically the same technology as somebody who can fix up boats. There's a lot of translation between that and somebody who can fix up houses.

So there's a good diversity of skill sets and you can use these skill sets. Now a few other wrinkles on the RV business that I think bear close focus with regard to financial freedom. I've described here the pathway. Remember, I tell my 15-year-old son, "Hey, why don't you go and apprentice?" He goes and apprentices for two to three years, let's say from 15 to 18.

While he's finishing up his formal academics, he apprentices for four or five hours a day, builds the skill set and puts himself on track to buy out the business owner, buys the list, the customer list, the referrals, buys the phone number, et cetera. So he has additional sources of business, builds the necessary skills.

At 18 years old, he puts himself in the position just like this RV mechanic that I spoke to, to earn six figures per year profit on a very simple business that depends upon his input. Let's say I'm wrong and at 18 it's 80,000, 19 it's 80,000, then at 20 it's 100,000.

For a moment, let's ignore personal expenses because of course I've trained my son, hopefully we'll find out in a number of years, but I've trained him to live cheap until he's wealthy and even then to continue living frugally on a comparative basis to his wealth and his income. So let's ignore for a moment personal expenses.

He's living at home, minimal expenses and just saving as much as possible. Will you do the math on $80,000 earned and saved for the course of seven years? Just do the math. 80,000 times seven would be $560,000. Can you think of a bunch of ways for a diligent 25-year-old to build out a good way to invest $560,000?

I could list dozens and what I would guess is the investment opportunities would grow. If I were out doing that business at 18, I bet you he could buy an RV a week. Or an RV every couple of weeks. Well, you flip $5,000 RVs, you can turn a lot of money pretty quickly.

The biggest challenge becomes when you're flipping cheap RVs and then your capital starts to outgrow your ability to do a certain level of business. So you move to more expensive RVs if there are good margins there and you start to flip those from time to time. You have the benefit of selling something that people would really like to have.

Having done extensive shopping in the RV marketplace as it stands currently in 2017, the RV marketplace is hard because it's dominated by either the new market and it's very tough financially to buy a new RV because they depreciate so fast, or the used market where many of the units aren't very reliable and they haven't been used.

The problem with buying used RVs is they usually are being sold by an owner who didn't use it anymore and they sit. And RVs sit just like boats, everything falls apart just like cars. Everything falls apart and they become very dangerous to own. So the best type of RV to buy from a financial perspective is one that has everything working, that's been worked on by a good mechanic, but that's not brand new.

It depreciates less but you have the confidence of it being functional. So I think somebody who is skilled and used their time when they weren't working for paying clients to fix up their own RVs and flip them, I think could make a lot of money in something like this.

And again, because of the flexibility of the RV business, they could continue to work in something like fixing up old houses and starting to accumulate some rental houses. So you do the math. Let's say with a $500,000 investment portfolio, slowly invest it, just buy one house a year from 20 to 25, somebody owns five rental houses.

I would call that financially independent. Even at a time when many of their age group competitors are just coming out of school, saddled with student loan debt, getting entry-level jobs, which is what many people do when they go through just a standard four-year career and it takes them a few years to find themselves.

I think our enterprising young adult would be in a pretty good situation. But a few other bonus ideas of the RV lifestyle. Remember this. There are RVs all over the place and there are RV owners who would like to have their work done on their RVs all over the place.

And many people, one of the reasons they pursue something like financial independence is so they can do things like travel the country in an RV. Here's what I would do. If I had the desire to travel the country in an RV, I would do it. What I would do is I would put a small little magnetic sign on the side of my tow vehicle for towing my RV and I would do mobile RV mechanic work while I'm on the road.

Every place that you are in a campground, you have a whole bunch of potential customers. Certainly, you're not going to be working every day but there are a bunch of people in a campground who if they saw somebody with a sign that said mobile RV mechanic, 10 years experience and that doesn't perfectly fit into the young man model here.

I'm thinking about somebody with more experience and more age. They would be happy to say, "Hey, listen. I've got this problem. Do you think you could help me fix my water heater? Do you think you could help me figure out what's going on with my roof? Or do you think you have the time to help me diagnose my electrical problem?" A lot of these problems that we have on RVs are things that are not permanent.

They don't mean you can't use it at all. They're just annoying little obnoxious repairs that I need to get around to it sometime. But somebody could make some money in a campground. Here's one to go at one better. I see no reason why a career like this couldn't be connected to other opportunities in the RV business.

If you live in an RV, one of the things that many people who want to travel long-term in an RV will do is they'll take a job working as a campground host. Now frequently, campground hosts are seemingly wealthy people in their 60s, usually a couple, usually have a big old fifth-wheel trailer and a couple of dogs and kennels and things like that.

The task of a campground host is to go and welcome everybody, help in some parks. They help with assigning a certain site to people who come in and they often will do things like clean the bathrooms. It requires usually perhaps a few hours a day of work, maybe three.

It depends on the host, depends on the campground, depends on a bunch of different factors. They do some minor cleanup at a campground as well. But what they get in exchange for that is free rent, free lot rent. So they have a place to park their RV where they're not paying nightly campground fees and then depending again on the park, they'll get the amenities of that park.

That might be an electrical connection for their RV. It might be full hookups, which would mean electrical connection, water connection, a sewer drain set up for their RV and cable TV and also internet. So somebody who has an RV, if they live and work as a camp host, could put themselves in a situation where their only living expenses are personal food and they're working off their rent, their utilities, etc.

from their camp hosting duties. I also don't see any reason why if somebody had skill as an RV mechanic, they couldn't put up maybe a smaller sign and indicate that they also work on RVs in their off time. I can't imagine, although I've never seen anyone do it, but I can't imagine as long as you were low key about it, why you wouldn't be able to have your personal customers to work on their RVs in the afternoon.

So now we've put ourselves in a situation where you've got free rent in exchange for your few hours a day of work as a campground host. As a campground host, you are often connecting with many of the campers. Some campgrounds, it's every camper. Other campgrounds, it's more of if you need us, we're here.

Depends on the setup. And you've got a side business that you can do on the road wherever you go and earn a good hourly wage. If you did it that way, you wouldn't even need the seven years of hard work and the half a million dollars. You just need the skill with RVing, with working on RVs.

You need a rig to live in and the will to make it work. And you've built yourself a career that can go on the road. That's not dependent on an internet connection. That's not dependent on you being the next big blogger. It's actually a highly skilled industry and a real service.

Now that idea of building an industry or building a business and a skill set around the place that you want to live in your dream retirement is common. That's common in the cruising circles where if you're a diesel mechanic or if you are a sail maker or sail repairer or if you know how to work on boats, then you can go and you pull into a marina and you advertise your services.

If you're the teak guy or you're the underwater barnacle scraping crew, you can figure out how to earn your living while you're in that marina living the lifestyle with the other cruisers. Many people do that. This is just taking that idea and bringing it over to dry land. I think for a lot of people, the barriers to entry, doing it on dry land are a lot lower than they are in the marina environment.

One final advantage I forgot to mention of the RV mechanic lifestyle, especially given that flexibility of business. We often underestimate how valuable it is to have control of your time and flexibility in your location. Again, by this I mean if I were scheduling work, let's say that I could figure it out that I could fit in two or three customers a day.

Average repair may be two hours, two to three hours. I could fit two to three customers a day in and then there's time for me to travel between them but I've got flexibility here. I can adjust my customers and fit an extra hour in the day or if I know I'm going to be up in the north of the county or the south of the county, then I've got the flexibility and the ability to go places because I'm out and about and I've got some control over my schedule.

That allows me to save a lot of money on the other stuff that's associated with life. One of the reasons why people work a job, people work a job, get sunk every which way. You get the worst tax code, unlike a business owner and our friendly mobile RV mechanic has his vehicle as a deductible expense.

Certainly of course only his business miles but come on, when you're an RV mechanic, the vast majority of your miles are business miles. His cell phone is a deductible business expense. His gasoline – there are other – basically a lot of his personal expenses become business expenses and he has a huge advantage in this context over somebody who's an office worker.

An office worker who's working a standard salaried job of course doesn't have a deductible car expense. They don't have a deductible cell phone expense. They don't have any deductible expenses because they're a salary worker. The only deductible expense that you get when you're a salaried employee is you get a 401(k) maybe.

Of course our business owner can set that up for himself anyway. But the other benefit is you get the flexibility to be able to go after deals and save money on things. If you need a new washer, washing machine or if you need a new appliance or a new piece of furniture, you can hang out on Craigslist and you can watch for something to be posted that's inexpensive and then you can react quickly and go and pick it up.

But if you're working at a job, let's say that you are a medical office clerk and your job is to be there at the dentist's office welcoming the clients and taking care of the medical billing and making sure that everyone is squared away. Well, if you need a new washing machine, the only time that you have available is Saturday morning and there's a lot of competition on Craigslist on Saturday morning.

And so thus if you need a new washing machine, you're going to be much more likely to go down to the local appliance store and pay full retail for a washing machine. Well, $650 versus a hundred bucks or maybe you pick it up for free because it doesn't work and then you got a little bit of time to fix it.

Those things added up make a big, big difference. So if you can build a career or a business or a lifestyle that keeps your flexibility with your time, it's not that you won't work. You're going to work. I work a lot. But it's that you can work with a little bit of flexibility.

You can choose when you work to a degree. You aren't telling me exactly the time of day that I have to record my podcast. And because I'm not accountable to you in that way, that means that if I want to record it first thing in the morning or if I want to record it late in the evening, I can assign and allocate the hours of my day as I like.

That frees up time for me to do things that help to save money. This is why the dual income household with two wage-earning, salary-earning jobs is the most awful way to design an income stream from the perspective of financial freedom. It's the absolutely best way to design an income stream if you're trying to maximize tax revenue to the US federal government or to your country of residence.

It's the absolute best way to lower wages if you are in charge of massive corporations and you want the lowest possible per capita wage. Well, take everybody out of the house. Put everybody into salary jobs. Their taxes are going to be carefully tracked by their employer, the big companies.

We can threaten big companies. Going a little bit into tax evasion world here but this is the destruction of it. The guy – when I paid for my RV, I always prefer to do business in the free market whenever I can to encourage the free market. When the guy worked for me and he fixed a couple of things on my RV, he didn't give me an invoice and I didn't give him a credit card.

I handed him little stacks of green bills. Now what he does, that is up to him. But there's a pretty good chance that that money went right into his pocket and it's not going on a tax return to Uncle Sam. And there's a pretty good chance that a high proportion of that guy's clients do exactly the same thing.

That's standard operating procedure in the world of small business. But that's not standard operating procedure in the world of salaried employees, which is why people are encouraged – get a big – one of the reasons and I'm not trying to say it's conspiratorial. I'm saying it's practical. When everybody gets a big job, you're locked into a world of paying retail for all of your expenses and earning in the highest tax system possible.

It's a very inefficient way to set up your life. Much, much better to set up at least one of your family's income streams. If you can't handle all of them, make sure at least one of them is set up to take advantage of the business tax code. You have a deductibility of expenses that are related to business income and the ability to be flexible on when you go and pick stuff up for cheap on Craigslist and then have the time to fix it up, have the time to use it.

If you found a deal on a couple thousand board feet of boards that somebody was getting rid of and you go and pick them up because you're on your way to a job and you're out and about and you're not stuck behind the dentist's desk answering phones, you can go pick up those couple thousand feet of cheap or free boards and then use them to make your floor.

You saved yourself $10,000 instead of going down to Home Depot on the weekend and buying all of the fresh off the rack laminate flooring with all of the associated sales tax and paying for everyone's health insurance. So there's a little just of a mini discussion on the power of flexibility with a job like this.

I hope that you can see the principles. The principles are to increase income and in this case, you increase income by going into a skilled trade that's in demand. And if you have children, you had better make sure that you're carefully analyzing your children's inclination and personal skill sets because there is a huge opportunity available in the skilled trades right now.

If you're a plumber, if you're an electrician, if you're an air conditioning contractor and many, many other aspects of that, you can charge a very high hourly rate and young people, young men and women are walking away from these trades because they involve hard work. So you go into a trade that earns you a high income because of your differentiation with skills.

You keep your expenses low while you're accumulating investment capital and then you invest close to you. You invest in what you know. The RV marketplace is an incredibly inefficient market and it's a market that you can manipulate. You can shine up a trailer and sell it. You can take advantage of the things that your customer is looking for.

They're looking for an RV where everything works and you can certify that everything works. You may choose to offer your own little mini warranty on the RVs that you sell. That'd be valuable to me. And then you optimize your lifestyle. You build a business around something that keeps your freedom with your time, your freedom with your location, even your freedom to pursue other businesses along the way.

You may have a real estate license and sell some real estate here and there while you're doing your RV work. You may have a car dealer's license and you go down to the auctions and buy a car cheap and sell a few cars here and there. You may have dozens of lines of income.

But you can build resilience, you can build flexibility, and you can achieve financial freedom in 10 years or less. It's not a pipe dream, but does require your careful analysis and your being willing to go against the grain and think about what your skills are, what your opportunities are, and then take the ideas I've presented here and adjust them to your situation.

Thank you for listening. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. Ready to check one off the bucket list? SlotZilla is the world's ultimate zipline at Fremont Street Experience in fabulous downtown Las Vegas.

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