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Don't miss out on the ultimate thrifting experience at our Pix Exchange parking lot anniversary sale at our Torrance location. Visit pixexchangehhh.org for more details. Beginning very soon perhaps, in as few as a couple of months, my family and I are packing up our RV and we are going to take a grand tour of the United States.

And we'd like to come see you, if you'd like to see us. Today I'm going to tell you about that. 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 I'll tell you about our 2018 plan. Yes, I know it's February, but hey, you got to get things at least somewhat settled before you start talking about them, right? At least I feel like I do. Today's episode of Radical Personal Finance will be very focused on just a little bit of personal story, me interacting with you, a little bit of background.

I don't have a formal teaching outline that will be a lot of story, but if you care to listen to the story, it should help you with a little bit of analysis, some ideas that you may apply to your own life. I don't claim to do everything well, but I don't think that that is the basis of being able to share with one another and being able to help one another.

Sometimes it's helpful to hear somebody else's thinking and their own method of analysis and you can either see something good, which you can take and apply to yourself, or you can see something bad, which you can take and apply to yourself in avoiding something. Frequently, if you listen to other people talk about their plans, you'll notice in their own mistakes and in their own problems, you'll notice some things that you can put in place to protect yourself.

So as I share with you a little bit about my analysis and my family and life and a little bit – a few of the things that we're doing, I hope you'll find it instructive in a positive sense, but if not, I hope you'll at least find it instructive and you can learn from our mistakes.

So let's get right to it. Short story up front, we are planning this year in 2018 to do some major traveling. We intend to do a multi-month round-the-country RV tour. I'll be loading up my family, my wife, my three children, our two dogs, and we'll be hooking up to our 30-foot travel trailer and pickup truck and we're going to travel around the country, which we are very much looking forward to.

I'm going to be a little bit vague with you on dates and details because – mostly because they're not set in stone at the moment. But my intention is to leave here in the springtime, perhaps as soon as April 1, and to be on the road for – throughout the spring, summer, and probably fall, maybe shorter, maybe longer.

But that is our intention as far as our traveling dates. As far as the itinerary of where we're planning to go, that also is very flexible. I'll tell you a little bit in a few minutes about how you can help us set the itinerary. But in short, we'll be starting at our home here in South Florida and we at least want to wind up in the Mountain West to visit my family who lives out in the Mountain West.

I want to visit my 103-year-old grandmother who has not yet met two of my children. So we'd like to take them out and visit her out in the Mountain West. So whether we'll go straight up through the country on a diagonal tour from Miami to Seattle, I don't know.

Whether we'll cruise up through the Northeast and go up the East Coast and then go across the middle of the country and then come back down and do the circle tour, we haven't decided those details yet. But you can help us decide those. We do have a good long list of friends that we want to visit and destinations that we have planned.

But we will be, as I'll explain to you in a moment, we'll be traveling slowly and flexibly, which is about the only way that I think that parents can handle a trip like this with young children. Now, a little bit of background for you. On Radical Personal Finance, I talk quite a bit about unusual lifestyles and I've talked a lot about people who engage in long-term perpetual travel, either long-term trips or even of many months or many years.

I've interviewed plenty of people, especially families who've done this. Many people who are pursuing early retirement are traveling in this way. And so it's a theme that I have featured many times on the show and talked about how to do it. I've appeared on various travel podcasts and talked about the financial planning aspects of it.

But for my family and for me, travel hasn't really been a big goal for our life at this point in time. And so this planned trip that we have here in 2018 is not the culmination of a long-planned big goal really in any way. Sightseeing is not a major goal for me at the moment.

I've been very fortunate, very privileged to travel throughout much of the United States. At this point in my life, I think I've been to either 46 or 47 of these United States. I'm missing Hawaii, North Dakota, and Minnesota. I think other than Hawaii, North Dakota, and Minnesota, I have been to all of these 50 United States.

So we'll try to make up at least North Dakota and Minnesota on this trip. So I can make it up to 49. At some point we'll wind up in Hawaii, but that's never opened up. So I've been very fortunate in my life, though I am in my early 30s.

I haven't yet – I mean, I've been very fortunate to travel with more than many people. I've been very fortunate to travel to many international destinations as well, to at least a couple dozen countries, which is far more than the average person and certainly far more than the average American and the average global citizen.

And so because of that, I have been very blessed and privileged to see many sights. And I've recognized that although I enjoy sightseeing, sightseeing isn't a core motivator for me. There are very few sights that I really want to see that I feel like, "Oh, if I just see these things, then my life will be complete." I have enjoyed seeing many great sights.

It's really remarkable to stand in the Sistine Chapel and look up and see the painting on the ceiling or to stand in the Duomo and admire it or to stand in the Colosseum – just using some examples from Rome – to stand in the Colosseum and imagine what happened there.

I've been very privileged to walk on the Great Wall of China and to consider what thousands of years of history has produced and to see that. I've walked in Tiananmen Square and seen some of those incredible things. I've been to some really out-of-the-way places too. My wife and I, when we were newly married, we traveled to Haiti.

And I always loved – in South Florida, we have a massive Haitian population of Haitian immigrants and I always enjoy being able to talk with them about all the interesting places I've been in Haiti and the sights that we've seen there. So whether it's from the well-known, such as the Sistine Chapel to the Basson Rue in Haiti or to the Palace of Saint-Souci, all of these little places, I've been very fortunate.

But still, I don't have a list of sights I want to see. And I've never really been that interested in perpetual travel either. In many ways, me personally, I see travel and perpetual travel as in many ways problematic. There's difference if I just travel and there's problems if my whole family travels constantly.

But although you can build communities on the road, it seems very transitory to me. And I think that one of the major benefits of life is to put down roots in a community and to build because when you can build with people and in a neighborhood and in a community, you can really have an impact, really have an impact in that place.

And as a society becomes very much transient, we lose our connection to a place. And so this is not a moral argument that it's wrong to travel. Just for me, it's not been something that appeals to me very much. For me, what I find the most impactful about travel is when travel has meaning and purpose that goes beyond just simply taking in the sights.

Now that meaning and purpose can mean different things. It can be travel that involves work based upon the work that you do. If you go and travel to a city to do an assignment there, whether it's to give a speech or to research and take local water samples to test the environment or to go into to make a sales call, then I find that the associated travel with that, as long as you're not on too tight of a schedule, can be very enjoyable and very meaningful.

It's great to fly and schedule meetings on Friday and Monday and take Saturday and Sunday and take in the sights. That's really ideal. I find that travel is really impactful if there's a purpose to the trip. That purpose can be the work involved in the trip. We're going to deliver something to a certain place or we're going to preach and to interact in certain churches or we're going to engage in a humanitarian project in a certain place.

Then that greater meaning, to me, has real purpose and there's an output to the work where we don't just come home with a photo album filled with photos, which is great, and a mind full of memories, but we come home with the satisfaction of having worked and having accomplished something significant.

I think travel that's part of a quest or a big goal can be very meaningful. For example, whether it's to travel the length of the Pan American Highway or to do some great challenge when I was younger, I really wanted to participate in the Mongol Rally, which is this utterly ridiculous thing that started probably a decade ago where these people will buy a – will either take a – will drive from London to Mongolia to – what's the capital of Mongolia?

I think it's Ulaanbaatar. They'll drive a car from London overland to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. But as part of the Mongol Rally, part of the design is that instead of driving a reasonable vehicle as in a four-wheel drive, put-together, kitted out expedition vehicle, you have to drive a ridiculous vehicle. In the old days, it was an old, cheap, underpowered little compact car.

I always wanted to participate in the Mongol Rally when I was younger because that quest, that challenge, that adventure really appeals to me. So all of those things for me have meaning and I love to travel when it has a greater meaning but not just for a sightseeing perspective.

In other ways also at this stage of our life, travel hasn't been a big deal simply because our children are not at a great age for traveling in the sense of they're not at a great age to be able to appreciate the benefit. For years, I've planned that when my children are later older in life and able to embrace the educational opportunities of it, I've for years planned to take a year or two and load up an RV and travel all around the United States and show my children all of the 50 United States, go to all the 50 state capitals and interact with the history, the rich history of the United States of America and in a way that's meaningful for them.

So I've long planned to do that. But at this point in time, a dirt pile in Florida is about the same as a dirt pile in Maine and has about as much attraction. The touring Appomattox doesn't exactly have the impact at this stage of my children's lives. And there are many challenges of traveling with small children.

So that was an extensive way of simply saying that travel has not been a significant goal, at least not at this stage of our life. It's not been something that has been long planned. So why are we traveling this year? Well, there are personal reasons which involve my family and business reasons which involve you.

But the personal reasons are a fewfold. Number one, my wife and I have a number of friends that live across the United States that we would like to visit and that we've wanted to visit for quite a while, people that we've wanted to keep in touch with. I don't do very well at keeping in touch with people virtually.

I don't enjoy writing emails. I don't enjoy interacting on virtual mechanisms. I don't enjoy talking on the phone. I'm a face-to-face kind of guy. But it's hard to justify the time and money to just trot across the country, the drop of a hat, to visit somebody, especially given the size of my family at the moment.

When you have many people that you're trying to coordinate together, airplane tickets become significantly costly. And with the age of my children, road trips are not as easy as I imagine they'll be down the road. So we have a number of friends that we'd like to visit, but there hasn't been a good opportunity.

And so we've seen the opportunity right now to go and to visit some of our friends and be able to renew relationships that we've had that are important to us. Additionally, perhaps more pressing, we have outgrown the house that we're living in right now. Now, about a year – no, actually, two and a half years ago, we sold – my wife and I, we sold a house that was larger and more comfortable for us.

And we sold that house for a number of reasons. Number one, it was a lifestyle choice to allow me to build the business of Radical Personal Finance with fewer financial pressures by removing the obligation of a mortgage, lowering overall expenses. We moved from a middle-class to upper-middle-class neighborhood into a lower-class neighborhood rental apartment.

And it's been great for us. It's been really, really good. There was also a guess on my part with regard to market conditions. When I was analyzing the local real estate market, I looked around and I said this was a good time to sell when we actually sold. And I was anticipating a few things.

Number one, we'd lived in the house long enough to be able to take the proceeds from the gain in the property, income tax-free, which is always nice when you've lived in a place for at least enough years to take that gain income tax-free. I love tax-free money. When you can give money that's free of income taxes and free of payroll taxes, I mean I love that.

And that exclusion on increase in value of a personal residence is extremely valuable. And so we had built in a nice little bit of equity. We had bought right. We had bought at a deal and we bought at a low point in the market. And in my analysis of market conditions, I felt like it was a good time to sell.

I was expecting – my prediction at the time was that some point towards the end of 2016 or during 2017, it was my prediction that we would be into a recession in the US American economy. That was my expectation and there were good reasons for it. There were good symptoms of it and good indications of that.

And I was wrong. I was flat out wrong on my timing, which is important to always acknowledge. When you predict something and get it wrong, it's important to look and say, "Well, why was I wrong?" You should not expect the growth of growing economy to continue as it has.

Now, it could be that recession is right around the corner. We are long overdue for recession. But my particular timing of my crystal ball was not appropriate. The second concern that I had with local market conditions is that where we live in Palm Beach County, Florida, local market conditions have become disconnected from the broader economy.

This led to a major problem here in our local housing market, just like it has for many of you who are listening. In general, housing should be connected to the labor market. If you have a local market where people are earning wages, they need a place to live. And so housing should have a connection to wages.

But in localized pockets, that normal connection, those normal markets become disconnected. It can become disconnected due to heavy impact of high-income earners, especially if there are significant regulations. For example, if you were to go back about 60, 50 to 70 years and you were to go into a place like Manhattan in New York, you would find that a plumber could live right next to a banker because housing was very much connected to wages.

But as New York and other major cities have kept very tight codes on the ability to expand and to build more buildings, what's happened is that as the local population center has grown and wages have become more specialized, you've had many higher-income earners become concentrated in that specific area.

And because builders have been restricted by zoning regulations, et cetera, from building more affordable housing units and meeting that market demand, then the lower-wage workers are pushed out from the city center. And so as those lower-wage workers are pushed out from the city center, that leads to the process of gentrification.

The city center starts growing up more and more and more and you get into these unusual situations, whether it's Seattle, whether it's New York City, whether it's Boston, whether it's Los Angeles, San Francisco. And the very high-income earners continue to raise that – those local market prices and it makes it hard to analyze the market.

And I couldn't of course hope to analyze every market. What's happened where I live in Palm Beach County is we've had a similar effect. But that similar effect has not been due to wage growth and income growth but due to retirees coming down. So Palm Beach County is not – South Florida is not part of the south.

The further south you go in Florida, the more everything looks like New Jersey and New York. So southern culture has basically fallen apart. If you get south of Orlando, you don't have southern culture anymore. You have the northeastern culture because the huge amount of our residents in South Florida are from New Jersey and New York and other northeastern states, Maryland and Delaware, et cetera.

Connecticut, places with high taxes and high cost of living. And so it's led to a very unusual and strange market where if you come down to South Florida – and this has only happened along the coast. It doesn't happen on the interior of Florida. But on the east coast of Florida and the west coast of Florida, you'll have so many people who move down from New York and New Jersey and they're moving out of very high real estate price – very high real estate – areas with very high real estate prices due to the significant buildup in the high population.

And they're looking at South Florida real estate prices and saying, "Man, this is a steal." And when you compound that with the second factor, which is the removal of state income taxes, it's not unusual for a New York or New Jersey resident to move down to South Florida and to put themselves in a situation where they're saving tens of thousands of dollars per year on income taxes.

It's very easy for a wealthy northeasterner to move down to South Florida and because there are tens of thousands of dollars per year of savings on income taxes and they can cut their house cost in half and still finance the entire thing and still be out as a net gain.

Commuting between South Florida and the northeast is very easy. There are constant cheap, easy airplane flights. You can get there in – there are direct flights everywhere from South Florida throughout the northeast. In a few hours, you can be there. So it's easy to commute back and forth for business and this has led to a real change in our local real estate market.

What's happening though is the same process that's happened in many other places where for those who are not involved in living off of their retirement portfolio, which is the huge amount of people, for those who are younger people, working class people – I hate that term and here I am using it – blue collar, low and medium wage earners have been systematically frozen out and the housing market locally where I live has systematically changed.

The median house price if we go by listing prices in Palm Beach County is about $340,000. The median rental price for a rental unit is about just under $2,000 a month. When you start translating those out – and again, those are median prices. Remember, 50 percent higher and 50 percent lower when we're judging the median price.

That leads to major costs, major increases in housing. Now the question of course is where can that go? What direction does housing go? When you try to analyze the local market, what it means is you can't connect it to wages. Wage growth is slow. If it exists – I wouldn't say it's nonexistent but it's very, very slow in most wage-earning occupations.

So you can't connect housing to wages. Now you're in a situation where you're connecting housing to immigration trends and to portfolio values. It's a lot easier for a retiring Northeasterner with a $3 million investment portfolio to pay more and to buy a nicer house when they have a $3 million portfolio than when their portfolio is cut to $2 million due to a recent stock market decline.

So these are the factors that make analysis of economic conditions where I live very difficult and make trend prediction very, very challenging. You're dependent on the stock market, dependent on immigration flows. You're dependent on retirees, the number of people retiring, et cetera. Those have a major effect because most of even the actual wage occupations in South Florida where I live are built around that retirement occupation.

We have no heavy – very little heavy industry. Most of the wages are service wages that are related to serving the affluent retiree. So that's the economic analysis at least that I have applied and it's led to a giant question mark. What does the future hold? Well, it's hard to predict that when you can't look at trends that are trackable.

You can certainly look at trends of immigration, look at trends like that. But when you can't look at trends from – of wage growth and business growth, et cetera, it makes it very challenging. I don't think it makes sense to try to make personal decisions, personal financial decisions based upon market analysis.

I really don't. For example, when we sold our house, I didn't sell it because I thought the real estate market was going to go down. If we had wanted to live there on an ongoing basis, we would have kept it regardless of whether it goes up or down. But if you make a decision from a personal lifestyle perspective, then I think it makes more sense to look at the market and say, "Now, let me integrate this with the market." If you want to sell because you want to move, then go ahead and look at the market and say, "Is there an advantageous time or an advantageous way to sell?" Because our personal decisions to sell our house were to – were personally based about – around improving our lifestyle.

At this point in time, our – and our personal decisions for moving out of the apartment that we're living on are also personal lifestyle. The simple reality is we've outgrown the apartment that we rented. The biggest influence is actually with my work. When we first moved into this apartment, we had just had our second child and that child was a baby.

Most of the sound was able to be contained. Children at that age slept for longer – sleep for longer periods of time than older children do. It was relatively easy to engage them in one of the distant bedrooms so that I could record my show and I could work with relative quiet.

So at first, it was fine. Then as the children got louder, it became worse. So I made some improvements. I put in some soundproofing curtains in my office and that helped me to continue to do the show for you and continue to work. But as the children have grown older, then of course their geographic range has increased.

So at this point in time, they're much less content to be confined to one bedroom during the time when I'm working, which can be anywhere from an hour or two to record a show to extensive hours if I'm trying to record other audio for other products – projects. So it's gotten bad.

And even the layout of the apartment has resulted in the way for the children to access the backyard is right through my office. And so over the past months, there have been systematic growing pains and at this point, we need to make a change. It's not – it doesn't have to be done.

We found workarounds but in the sense of – there's not – it doesn't have to be this week. But the writing on the wall is very, very clear and we need to change. The problem is I can't really stomach the idea of moving right now where we live in Palm Beach County.

I can't stomach the idea of buying a house at current real estate prices. The value for the dollar, especially for someone like me whose income is not connected to geography, the value for the dollar is so low. The prices in our local area have increased so significantly on cost of living that it's hard to see the value.

The local culture, it's hard to want to commit to purchasing a house in the local culture just given the constraints of Palm Beach County and the uniqueness of where it is and what is happening in the local area. And in looking at the rental market, it's hard to see the value in the rental market.

It's a little bit stomach twisting for me to think about what's available in the local market at the current prices. That said, I don't have any clear indication that we should move or that we want to move to any other place. And so it's kind of been in a limbo, a place of limbo for us in many ways.

Our reasons for living in Palm Beach County have never been financial. Financial for me is secondary consideration as I'm sure it is for you. You can move to the cheapest place in the world, but you're going to be there for some reason other than financial. I found – I was recently looking at a traveler who was showing videos of an apartment that you can rent in Togo for $20 a month.

This would allow you to live on – with all costs of living, housing, food, everything, on nothing more than a few hundred dollars a month. But you're going to be living in Togo. Now, I've never been to Togo. Maybe someday I'll have the chance to go. And if you're in Togo, I'm so glad you're listening.

But this particular apartment, I doubt that many of you would want to live in even though it's $20 a month. So we don't choose where we live based just on finances. We choose where we live on other reasons and then we do a financial calculation and every place has advantages and disadvantages.

I want to do a separate show on recognizing the resources of where you live. But it's important not to think that the grass is greener in another place. It's important to start by recognizing that everywhere you live, you have certain advantages and certain disadvantages. You live in the middle of Kansas on a giant farm.

You have certain resources that are there that you don't have in other places. If you live in downtown Manhattan in a little bedroom – one-room apartment, you have certain resources that you don't have when you're in Kansas. So my reasons and our reasons for living in Palm Beach County have never been financial in analysis.

Quite simply, for all of my adult life, I have been here in faith. I've had the faith that this is where God wanted us to be. I've lost that faith. But I also don't have faith to move anywhere. And so in the interim, we've decided to go and to travel and that has seemed to be the best course of action.

Those are the primary reasons for traveling. Now let me go to the business reasons which is hopefully where we can connect with you. One of the major costs that I have learned is a major cost for me. Taking the path in entrepreneurship that I have taken has been the social isolation and this is reflected in a couple of ways.

Number one, it's reflected in my actual ability to interact with listeners. I appreciate the interaction that I get but it's very different for me to be able to sit and talk with you face to face and to see you and to get your measure and for you to get mine in a face to face format versus at the other end of a digital point of communication.

Now I'm so blessed that the vast majority of my interactions with you have been positive and I hear your heart when I read your emails and your interactions. It's so helpful to me but it's still different and those types of interactions are often overwhelming to me. It's often so much that it's hard for me to emotionally commit to that whereas if I can see you face to face, it makes a big, big difference.

The thing that I have most enjoyed over the years is meeting you when I've been out and about. When I've been out at an event or been out and you've come to South Florida and we've interacted, that makes all the difference in the world because it allows me to really – well, to see you.

It makes all the difference in the world. The other thing that has been a major impact is the challenge of working alone in the sense of as a solopreneur as they're often called and also just working physically alone in my house. There are challenges to both of those. When I – for all of my adult life, I desired to have a business and a job where I could do my work alone from my house with nothing more than a laptop computer.

That was a goal of mine since high school. Now it took a circuitous path for me to accomplish it but I have accomplished it. I was naive in thinking that it was without its own challenges. I thought that it was always going to be great and I had some opportunities along the way where I learned that it wasn't necessarily as great as I thought it was going to be.

But working entirely alone, physically alone over the last few years has confirmed that it's very, very challenging to do. It's challenging in the ebb and flow of my house. It's very challenging to be working at home in this mixture of being available versus not being available. There is a great, great benefit for men to be able to go out of the house, a great benefit for my wife for me to be out of the house.

This is a great benefit for me to go out to an external location which of course I could do. I could rent an office and I've investigated and considered doing that at different times but it hasn't seemed the right path. But in the future, I think I will. I think I need an office that is physically outside of my house in order for me to be the most effective and the most productive.

The second thing that's challenging is working alone without the presence of physical co-workers. It makes my – when you lack physical co-workers and I have virtual co-workers that work with me but when you lack physical co-workers, it makes it very challenging to get a sense of the value of your ideas and to weigh them accurately.

I am an idea person. I have dozens of what I think are brilliant ideas on a daily basis. The challenge is to filter those ideas effectively and narrow them down and then to stay committed to the ones that are truly going to be the most effective. This is very challenging without a team to help, without a team of people who have other ideas and who can say, "Well, that's a good idea but that's not a good idea for right now." I frequently – my mouth overloads me again and again and again and I've learned to be more careful with it after falling through on some of my ideas.

I keep most of them to myself. I've learned tools of challenging my ideas but still, it's very challenging to do alone. So I either have to – in the future with my business, I either have to build a team of people who can help me with that feedback, who can help me with that accountability in the sense of following through on the ones that are the best and who can help me with that perspective.

It's very easy for me to get lost in my own head and to lose perspective on what's actually important, what's actually useful. I was speaking with an advisor of mine the other day and we were talking about this and he was bringing it back to the action orientation and his comment to me was, "Joshua, let's talk about how effective are you with helping people take action." This is I think one of the major challenges that I've recognized that I'm not as effective as I want to be at helping people take action.

I am intensely philosophical as a person and I think a lot about the philosophy and I get excited about ideas less than I get – more than I get excited about actions. The example that I gave to my business advisor was I said, "I am profoundly intrigued by weird topics that have no relevance to my audience.

I am – I was writing this outline for gold and silver investing one time for a course that I want to teach on gold and silver investing. So I went through and I researched all the laws on which types of gold coins and silver coins can be purchased in which ways with reporting to the US national government and which can be bought privately, which can be sold privately and all of these weird, arcane, totally impractical ideas." Now I was thoroughly enjoyed that process of figuring out how to unlock that little nut.

I thought that was so interesting and so fun but it has zero practical value for 99.9% of you. And so I need someone often to keep me accountable and say, "Joshua, how are you giving something that's action?" And so I want to continue to develop that because I'm not – I don't want to just talk to make myself feel good or just talk to explore interesting concepts that I think are interesting.

I'm here for a purpose. I'm here to make a difference. I want to make a difference in your life. I want to help you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement that you need to actually practically, actionably live a rich and meaningful life now and actually practically, actionably build and execute on a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

That's my mission. And so I need that feedback. I need those feedback mechanisms. Now there are many ways it can be done. I have people who help me with that, who help me with that feedback, who give me a good slap in the face when I need it and say, "Joshua, wrong direction." That's really helpful.

But what I want to do more of is I want to interact with you. And so what we've decided at this point is we're going to do some traveling and we're going to integrate some of our personal goals and also some of the business goals. And we want to accomplish as we travel some business plans.

So here's what we have planned. During 2018, we will be traveling the country for an extended period of time. I'm thinking spring, summer and fall. But we are not on any tight schedule. We'll put all of our things at home and in storage so that the future is not committed to – we don't have any specific dates that we want to specifically come back to.

And in fact, in order to be able to survive this adventure, which I will share with you, one of our strategies for surviving it at our current stage of family life is to have a very small number of commitments on dates. Give you two examples. We'll give you an example of what I'm saying.

As we travel, it's important that we be able to enjoy the day-to-day function of our family, that we're able to enjoy the day-to-day reality of travel, the place that we happen to be, to interact with the people with whom we come in contact. But I also have many commitments to you, to work with you from a business perspective.

And my primary commitment is to work with you in this way, in this digital format. I'm not trying to say I'm going to stop doing all of the digital work that I do and move it to entirely physical. My primary focus is digital because digital interaction allows a scalability that is not possible in other ways.

But in order to survive that process, it's very important to us that we not be locked into a rigid schedule. So we will be going a few days at a time, planning at most a couple of weeks in advance, and be very much flowing with the ebb and flow of daily life rather than a big commitment of specific places to go.

I could, for example, I could organize a tour of the United States with – we're going to do – here are the top 30 cities where I have listeners and I'm going to do a seminar in the top 30 and interact with you in that format and schedule it all out months in advance.

That could be done very profitably and very effectively. That's not something that I wish to engage in at this point in time because of the simple stress of hitting those dates and committing to those dates and doing that. I don't have any interest in that. But we will be traveling and along the way I'll be working with you continually here.

You as a listener will notice very little change in what I'm doing with you. However, along the way, I am going to interact with a lot of people who I've wanted to connect with in person. I want to record and find more interesting stories for you, more interesting interviews with people who are doing interesting things.

I like to do those digitally and I will continue. I haven't canceled interviews on Radical Personal Finance. I've just canceled them for the last few months. They will be back in the future. But I also do them in person and I want to do – I want to learn how to do a little bit more effective storytelling with some different audio techniques as I'm able to.

I want to bring you interesting stories and interesting interviews with the type of person who is unlikely to easily appear in a digital format. I believe this is a major missing piece in the modern world. There are so many people who come out and run the podcast circuit. But this tends to be a certain type of person.

The people who come out and run the podcast circuit and get on all the personal finance podcast tend to be younger rather than older. They tend to be very tech savvy and they tend to have a one way of thinking about it. But financial independence and financial freedom is not fully populated by this person only.

You may get that impression because that's all you hear. But the reason you hear that is because that's the type of person who is interested in promoting themselves and their work. For example, a blogger who is promoting their personal finance blog is much more likely to appear on a personal finance podcast than the wealthy independent person three doors down from you that you've never talked to about money because they have something to promote or the person who is promoting their course or their product or their service or their financial work or whatever it is.

They have an incentive to appear on a podcast. Very few people want to expose the personal details of their life and very few people want to go and be interviewed on a show like mine unless there's some personal benefit for them. So the second thing is they tend to be from one stream, this type of person who is doing it.

So that's why there's kind of a sameness to many of the types of guests that we get. But there are so many other interesting people out there. There are interesting people with interesting stories to share. My grandparents on both sides of my family were financially independent in a way that many people are financially independent.

On the one side, my grandfather was a schoolteacher. He taught school and he taught at the college level. My grandmother was a schoolteacher, taught at the primary and secondary level. As teachers, they developed teachers' pensions and they had income and they were financially independent and retired based largely upon their teachers' pensions.

I had a number of clients who were financially independent upon teachers' pensions. That's a very viable way to path towards financial independence but you don't hear a lot of that on a podcast. Those types of people have an interesting way of progressing forward. I've shared before the stories about my grandfather who was a teacher.

He retired three or four times but every time he retired, he found that it wasn't for him. He worked until his mid-80s and when he did finally retire, that was a major mistake because then he got old and sick and he died 10 years later. But he was old and sick along the way in a way that if he kept working, if he figured out ways for him to continue working, he wouldn't have been old and sick.

Those are the stories of your neighbors. That's a very accessible story for you. Now on the flip side, my other side of the family, my grandfather on the other side of my family was a farmer. Farmers have this interesting problem of financial independence. They can become wealthy but all their wealth is illiquid.

It's basically tied up in land. The way the farming business works, at least traditionally, is you work so you can make the payments to the bank. But in terms of lifestyle, there's a difference of lifestyle. It can be financially lucrative or financially non-lucrative but there are independence of lifestyles.

Those are the types of stories that are harder to get without going and getting them in person. So I want to bring you some of those interesting stories. I also want to interact with you both collectively and individually. As we travel, we'll do a number of small meetups. I'll announce those from time to time and we'll do them very informally.

I'm not interested in trying to build something where we have giant events with hundreds of people. I don't enjoy being with hundreds of people all at once. It takes a lot of energy to do that well. But I love to sit and talk with half a dozen of you or a dozen.

That's my favorite. So I'll share with you from time to time where we're going to be and we'll have some informal meetups and if you can come and meet me and hang out with me and my family, we'd love to do that. In addition to that, I'd love to schedule some small seminars along the way.

What I would think would be really effective is to get together for about a day and I have various curricula that I've developed that on various topics. Just to get together for about a day and give you a one-day boot camp on a particular area of finance, whether this is from a planning perspective, whether it's from a technical perspective, etc.

And then give extensive time to Q&A and give extensive time to interacting with you personally, working on some of your personal problems to help you develop a roadmap to that. So I'd love to schedule some one-day seminars along the way and I think that would be really, really, really, really productive.

What it would also help me to do is that feedback of what's actionable and what's not helps me to edit the type of ideas that I share with you here on the podcast to make them more actionable. There's a place for philosophy and there's a place for action. Over the years, I was deeply frustrated with other commentators' obsessive focus on action and I felt like somebody should articulate the philosophy a little bit better.

I've done that in many areas, trust me. You haven't even scratched the surface of it in other areas. But I've gone too far in the direction of philosophy and not enough in the direction of action. And I want to adjust that and come back to that balance that has been missing in some of my personal work because I want to hold those together.

If you only have philosophy, you got a problem. If you only have action, I think you've got a problem. But action buttressed by philosophy, to me, that's the most powerful. So that's our outline. In short, we're not going on this particular trip that we have planned simply for personal reasons of sightseeing, although we look forward to much sightseeing.

We're not going on this personal trip simply for the purposes of visiting our own friends and family, although we look forward to visiting our friends and family that we've wanted to interact with. We're not going on this trip simply to interact with you, whether that happens individually or in a group format, although we look forward to that.

We're not going on this trip simply to do seminars and make money on the way through doing a one or two-day seminar with you, although we look forward to doing that as well. But on the whole, the combining of all these things together has come together in a way that I think we're really excited about.

So we're going to be doing the grand tour of 2018. Now, as I go, a few comments about how you can help and exactly what we'll be doing. I haven't decided the extent to which I will share with you everything that we're doing. It will probably be in the middle.

I won't keep – I won't relate all of the work of Radical Personal Finance to our traveling. To me, that would be counterproductive and it would cost me in terms of the things that I want to accomplish. But I'll also not share everything that we're doing and everywhere we're going simply because that's a very stressful way to live and my family's privacy is important to us.

So I will share with you here on the show and in other venues what we're doing and the types of things that we're doing, but it won't be totally digitally available to you. What I would like you to do is follow along. I hope you enjoy the adventure. I know that many of you have shared with me that you enjoy a little bit of the personal finance discussion, the financial planning context.

But what you most enjoy is hearing a little bit about our story and I've tried from the beginning to share with you very transparently the good and the bad so that you can learn from our good example and from our bad example. But what I would like you to do is share with me a few things.

Number one, and the format for reaching me is either to use the contact form on the website or email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. Please in your note put in that email either in the body of the email or in the subject line use the hashtag #2018roadtrip, so 2018 road trip for me.

That will help me to filter and to collect things from the spam filter. It'll also help me to organize the communication on this topic with me. But here are the things that I would love for you to take a moment and provide me feedback. Number one, if you know of an interesting story, an interesting person or an interesting thing that you would like me to see and to do, then let me know about that.

Let me just give you one example. For years I've intended to interview the urban farming guys from downtown Kansas City. Their story, a group of families who I think were originally connected if my research is correct, I think they were originally connected through a church in Olathe. A group of families decided that they would move into the inner city in Kansas City to one of the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods in inner city Kansas City.

They moved there intentionally and they started living there and they started working to bring new resources to that local community. They lived in the community. Some of them worked outside of the community. They started to build urban gardening and urban farming initiatives. They began working with various types of new – some of the modern farming technology that's been developed, whether it's aquaponics and some of the other things that are really intriguing.

They built a maker space, a large workshop for the community and they've just started trying to meet the needs of the community. Over time, more families moved in. They bought more property and they bulldozed some old houses. They fixed up other houses and they really have made a tremendous difference in there in the local community.

So such – and a tremendous difference on some of the metrics, the measurable difference in crime in the local area as well, etc. I'd love to go and visit those guys. I've been wanting to get them on the show for years. I just haven't gotten around to it. I have hundreds of people on my list of people to interview.

I'd love to go and visit those guys and see with my own eyes what has happened because it's one thing to hear from somebody. It's another thing to see. I want to see those types of things that are happening because these are the ways that individuals can make a difference.

I get so tired of the collectivism in the US American culture, the idea that you have to go and start some big organization or get some government initiative to make a difference. You don't. That's the worst way to go about it in my opinion generally for most problems. Collectivism doesn't work.

Going and trying to get your favorite politician in will not work. It will not make a difference. What does make a difference is you and your friends choosing something wrong in your area, whether that's a question of injustice that needs to be solved, a victim that needs to be defended so justice can be served, whether it's a specific problem that you see in your local area.

That's what makes a difference is you as an individual saying, "I'm going to work on this problem." When you start working, a couple of your friends and your family will get involved and people will start to notice and things will change over time. I want to profile those types of stories because those things are important.

I want to see big changes happen. I don't just want to see you and me get rich. I want to see communities continue to be transformed. But collective government action is not going to make the difference. More welfare programs will do nothing but drive more and more people into poverty.

A higher minimum wage will do nothing more than result in higher unemployment as it always has done. I'm sick and tired of seeing the people and the communities that are impacted by this negatively. I'm not going to start on that. I get tired of it. So I want to see those things.

You know of something interesting. You know of somebody who's doing something really impactful, a cool work, a cool person, especially if they're the kind of person who doesn't often get media attention. I'm not interested in having newspaper stories written about people. I want to do real – I want to expose you to their story.

So if it's the type of – if you know of something that we'd like to be – that you think would make for good interaction, please tell me about it. Write me an email and tell me about it. Tell me where it is. Put the city and the town in there.

If possible, put it in the subject line or right up front so I can organize things. And then describe to me a little bit about the person that you know or the project that you know of or the initiative that you know of and pique my interest on it.

So I'll put those things on our travel schedule as we can fit them in. I'll look for those interesting stories and try to shine a light on them, whether it's in an audio format, whether it's in writing. I don't know whether it's in video. As I'm able to, I'll try to shine a light on them.

For you to know about them and for you to take those ideas and to look in your own local area. If you know of an interesting story, let me know. No matter where in the country it is, just write to me and let me know. If you would like to see me and my family along the way, write to me and let me know.

Again, use the hashtag #2018RoadTrip and let us know. If you'd like to invite us to come and to see you and stay with you, we'd be happy to consider doing that. We are self-contained. I have a 30-foot travel trailer and a pickup truck, so probably about a 50-foot long rig total.

So just need a place to park that. But let us know. If you'd like to invite us to come and say, "Hey, come and see us and stay with us," most likely the answer will be we'd love to, but we're obviously not going to be there. But I'd love to know where you are and I'd be happy to interact with you personally.

If you would be interested in getting together with me for something like a one-day seminar, let me know that and how I would do it. Let me just give you an idea of how I would do it. Number one, I have structures of things that I can teach. When I go to – I have a portfolio of speeches and outlines that I developed over the years.

And so when I'm asked to speak to an event, I spoke to a Kiwanis club recently, I just go and I say, "OK, what can I put together that's a 20-minute version?" And everything is infinitely expandable or contractible. So we can take a 20-minute version or the two-day version.

Just depends on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to get on a subject. But what I'm anticipating is I would deliver to you something like a half-a-day seminar on prepared outlines. And then if I were – let's say I'm in Kansas City and I say we're going to do a Kansas City seminar, I'll write you an email before that and I'll – let's say 20 people are going to come.

I'll write you an email to the 20 of you who are in Kansas City who are going to come to a one-day seminar and ask what questions you want to talk about. We'll work that in. There will be an extensive amount of time to interact, ask your questions, et cetera.

I'll charge you for it. I don't wish to try to deliver high-priced seminars but I also wish to not deliver low-priced seminars. So I'm thinking something like a couple hundred bucks in that range to come to a one-day seminar. Schedules are to be determined at this point in time but that's about what I'm thinking.

That gives me room enough to make it worth my while to find a facility and to make it worth my while financially for me to disrupt other schedules for that seminar. So if you would be interested in coming to a seminar, write to me and let me know and let me know the kinds of things that you would enjoy learning or the kinds of things you would most like to see in that.

And based upon audience feedback, I will look forward to putting that together. And finally – well, before finally, depending on the number of responses I get with interest in a seminar, I will adjust our travel schedule accordingly. Let's say I'm going through North Carolina. I will come to Charlotte and spend some time in Charlotte where I might otherwise avoid the city.

Not that there's anything wrong with Charlotte. I've just been there many times. But I'd be happy to come to Charlotte and do a seminar in Charlotte if a bunch of you are in that area. I will look at that geographic location and try to communicate with you on that.

One thing in terms of expectations, I have no idea how many listeners will write to me or not. I have no idea. It could be a handful. It could be many hundreds. But I would just simply caution you and I'm sure you know this but I do think it's important to say.

If I say, "Thank you so much for the invitation but we can't come, please in advance determine not to be offended by that." I am – we have not yet decided our travel schedule. Now it may be that we're not coming to Maine. I don't have any intention to come to Maine right now.

Although I have been to Maine and I think Maine is a great place. We don't have any intention of coming to Maine but I may come – who knows? I may come there in the future. So I'd love to hear from you. If you'd like to just write me a short note, it can be as short or as long as you want.

But I would love to hear from you. But just please know that two things. I of course won't be able to come everywhere. I of course won't be able to respond to every kind of invitation. And number two, expect me not to commit very far in advance because in order to make this particular approach work the way that my wife and I want to make it work, I will not be making commitments long in advance.

I'm not going to say, "Here's where we'll be in June." In June, we'll see where we are and we'll be adjusting the pace of our travel as we go through it. That's the whole point of an RV is not to be locked into a specific schedule where I've got to hit these marks that are scheduled out.

If it were just me traveling by myself, that type of travel is no problem. You can sketch out your marks and I would tell you four months in advance. But that would destroy me at this point trying to hit that type of schedule. That would be so stressful. I probably wouldn't even embark on that type of trip at this point.

And that my friends is all I wanted to share with you for today. So I invite you to write to me. Use the hashtag #2018roadtripplease so I can organize your note. But pique my interest. Pique my interest on your story. If you'd like to be on the show, tell me a little bit about your story.

Pique my interest about your neighbor next door or the guy down the road that has a cool story but who would be the kind of person who would be unlikely to want to come on a podcast. I'll bring you shows from a campground. I mean, tell you what, there are a lot of wealthy, financially independent people traveling the country.

I'll bring you some of their stories from the local campground. If you'd like to come to a seminar, let me know that. If you'd just like to see us, let me know that. Write to me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com or use the contact form in the website. My wife and I are very excited, very much looking forward to this trip and I will, of course, share it with you here and more in other formats as well.

Thank you for listening. It's an honor and I do pledge this to you. My commitment to you is primarily to you, not in person but to you who give me the honor of your time and attention for many hours. I will be here to continue to serve you in this format for many days in the future.

This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at radicallifemedia.com. and bargain seekers? Are you on the lookout for a local thrift store that has it all? Look no further. Pix Exchange is your thrifting paradise right here in the heart of Torrance.

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