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My name is Joshua and I am your host and on Fridays whenever possible, I like to do a Q&A show. It's been far too long, we missed the entire month of February, but it's March and we're back and it's Friday. I do love to do these shows because it really helps me to have feedback, direct feedback from my listening audience instead of you being the great amorphous blobby mass out in the hinterbooties.

I actually get to talk with real people, which I really love and talk about real situations. And so I love to do these. I want to do them at least weekly. I really enjoy them. The challenge of course is one technological on my end. We missed February as I was working through some changes in my office environment.

I have to figure out how to make sure that I can be in the right place to do them. And then secondarily, making sure that I have enough calls. I do restrict these programs to patrons of the show. And today we're going to have a great show. I've got, it looks like six callers lined up, which is a good balance for a show, but I need more callers.

So that means I need more patrons. If you would like to interact with me on a show like this, I'd love to have you do it. And by the way, you can interact with me on anything. Sometimes I get angry comments from you guys, comments on the blog and comments where you're frustrated and I always just say, why don't you come and call and talk to me about it?

I really would love to do that. I love to answer financial planning questions and I love to do it in this context because it's so real, it's personal. We can talk about actual situations. It's what I love about Financial Talk Radio, but I'm happy to answer your questions on anything in the world that you want to do.

So if you'd like to join a show like this in the future, come on by at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron, radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron and sign up to support the show there and I'd be happy to have you. The first caller is Mark in Washington. Mark, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. How can I serve you today?

Thank you, Joshua. My situation is that I am unable to get disability insurance. My employer does not offer it and my wife and I will be moving to her home country where she grew up. I've gone to brokers to find disability insurance, but none of them will make a market with someone who's going overseas.

The best I got was a five-year term. It was a 180-day exclusion. It's pretty pricey and they would only pay out for the five years. So that did not seem like the long-term plan that I was wanting and it's pretty pricey. So I'm wondering your advice on what I can do as an alternative to that if I can't get that disability insurance.

I know once we move, I will be trying to look into see if I can get that in-country. I don't know if that's available or not or if that would be an option. That's definitely something to look into. But apart from that, what would you suggest I change in our financial plan if I cannot get disability insurance?

What is your occupation? So I can't say in a public way. It's close to teaching. Okay, so something like that. Okay, got it. Yeah. Just wanted to make sure you're not, you know, you're working as an oil derrick. You're going offshore to work on oil, right? No, no, no.

It's nothing dangerous. Okay, got it. Yeah. Fair enough. So real quick for the audience's benefit, before we get to your specific situation, the very best way to avoid this problem is by getting disability income insurance long before you know of travel plans and especially to get it in the individual marketplace.

When I used to sell individual disability insurance policies, I would frequently emphasize to my customers and clients that if you own an individual disability insurance policy and if at the time of insurance application you can truthfully state that, "No, I don't have any plans to travel. I don't have any plans to change my job," you can be issued a disability insurance policy that is guaranteed renewable to a certain age.

Usually that age would be 65. What a guaranteed renewable contract means is as long as you pay the premiums each year going forward, even if something were to change in your circumstances such as a few years after having the contract, you decided to move to a different country, you decided to change jobs, you decided to pursue a private pilot's license or get a scuba certification or engage in jumping out of airplanes, things like that, as long as you had that policy in force, they can't remove that contract from you.

It's guaranteed renewable. They have to renew it when you pay the premiums. That is very valuable. It's one of the benefits of owning a policy in the individual marketplace versus owning a policy as part of the group marketplace. Now it still needs to make sense financially. In the world of insurance, of course, you're thinking forward and you're saying, "Well, I think there will be things that will happen in the future, but I'm not so sure if I'm willing to pay for them today." You still, of course, have to think, "Is this worth it?" But get the policy now.

If you think 20 years from now or 10 years from now you're going to get rich and you might want to pick up the flying airplanes after you get rich, get the policy put in place today and make sure your policy is guaranteed renewable so that this doesn't happen to you.

Now, frequently, however, we don't think ahead, which is in the situation where Mark is, or we don't know. For all examples, maybe Mark, you had a great group policy. It didn't make financial sense for you to have an individual policy. Now your job is changing and you're in this circumstance.

With regard to your shopping, you said you've shopped with a couple of brokers. Have they quoted it with the specialty companies such as the subsidiaries of Lloyd's of London and companies like that which do market and make a market for these types of specialized insurance programs? That is a great question.

They did not give me a policy from Lloyd's of London. I don't know if they shopped it. I assume if they had, they would have come back to me with a specialty policy like that. I did go to a non-captive agent, so I was assuming that they would search all those options, but I do not know for sure that they did search a specialty broker like that.

Frequently they would. So usually the way that this works inside the insurance business is an agent will work with a broker. For example, a big one is a broker called DI Broker. A licensed insurance agent can call up a company like DI Broker and with their relationship with them, DI Broker will shop it out.

When you have specialty insurance cases, they will shop it out to subsidiaries of Lloyd's of London. Lloyd's is the name that everybody knows, but they write this type of stuff through some of their subsidiary companies. So as an example, a number of years ago I had a client who had a very specialized job as a TV, a part-time TV hostess.

It's the type of, when you get into a world of acting and entertainment, you can't place that type of policy with a standard run-of-the-mill insurance company. Or I had a client who was a nurse and they were planning to move abroad and they were moving to Africa. So of course when they know that they're moving, they couldn't get it.

So I was able to get a quote for them from Lloyd's and from some of their subsidiaries. Lloyd's doesn't only insure movie stars' faces and your cheekbones for millions of dollars. They do work with normal individual people. So make sure that things have been well shopped. But let's assume that they have been, because what you will usually find is when you're moving to another country outside of First World, outside of the United States, outside of Europe, outside of these more stable insurance marketplaces, it is often difficult to get the coverage.

And when they do offer it, they will often control their risk by offering a smaller policy. And so what they offered you was a policy with a term of up to five years of payments with 180-day waiting period. Is that correct? Mark Miller That's correct. That's correct. Which was not guaranteed renewable.

Davey So now we have the challenge and it becomes a basic financial calculation where we say, "Is this worth having?" Now if you were to become disabled, Mark, and not be able to work for three years, would that leave you financially destitute in your current financial situation? Mark Miller If we had to make it without our social network, I would guess we would make it probably in a year and a half before we would need to rely on others.

However, we do have a really, really strong network. And so we would not be destitute in that sense, but we would need to depend on others. Davey So philosophically, insurance works best when it covers catastrophic circumstances that can't be protected by other means of planning. Insurance works best for those needs, not for relatively predictable day-to-day things.

For somebody who's financially prudent, there's very little reason for you to take out insurance on losing your job because you can solve that problem with maintaining a good marketability in the marketplace and by having savings, having an emergency fund. But it's very hard to solve for total lifetime disability by having savings.

It would be an unusual 25-year-old or 30-year-old worker who has the ability where if they were totally disabled and never able to work for the rest of their life to just sit back and live for another 80 years without earning income. So insurance works great for those long-term needs.

Now with long-term disability insurance, when they're offering you a policy like that where they'll only cover you for five years and it kicks in after six months, you're not getting that totally catastrophic coverage and you're still self-insuring for a bunch of the risk. Statistically, it's very likely that at some point in the next five years, you will be unable to work for a week due to sickness.

It's statistically relatively unlikely that you'll be unable to work for more than six months. But it's dramatically more unlikely that you'll be unable to work for 12 months than it is that you'll be unable to work for 12 years. So in this situation, my gut instinct is to say if you could make it a year to a year and a half based upon your own financial resources, and then if you have a strong network that you could fall back on, if the policy is what you consider to be expensive, you're probably better off just simply putting that money into a larger savings program, into self-insurance, than you are into buying insurance, especially if you're working in a relatively safe job, the actual day-to-day characteristics.

So I would probably move in that direction, recognizing, look, they're not going to pay me any money for six months. If they do pay me money from six months, it's only coming in from six months to five years. You can calculate the total maximum benefit of the policy. Let's say that they would pay you, and what was quoted to you, what was the monthly benefit and the total maximum benefit of the policy?

You know, I was trying to pull that up, and I somehow misplaced the policy. My recollection was it was roughly 60% of income, which would have been, well, it wouldn't be making 60 a year roughly, and they're going to cover about 60% of that, is my recollection. - Okay, so $60,000 a year times .6 comes out to $36,000 per year.

So times 4.5 years, or sorry, it would be times five years, 60 months of total benefits under a total disability scenario. So $36,000 a year times five comes out to $180,000. So the total maximum lifetime benefit of this policy is $180,000. That's the total it could pay out. Now take the monthly premium and ask yourself, okay, how long would it take me to save $180,000 with the monthly premium and start to run that ratio?

There is no mathematical answer. This is going to be a gut call from you. How likely am I to get disabled? From what you're describing to me, you might make the decision like I recommended to my client in the past, who it was a very similar situation. In this case, they were going to work as a nurse in Africa.

We got a policy, but it had a five-year total lifetime benefit, 180-day waiting period, and it was expensive. And I just said, "I don't think this is worth it. I think you're better off setting the money aside." So that's probably where you're going to end up. So let me give you some ideas and strategies to protect yourself even so.

Number one, save money, because the more money you have saved, the better off you are. And even if you're saving in things like retirement accounts, etc., save money, because if you have enough to live on for five years, then you've pretty much negated the need for this policy. Of course, there's a small flaw in that thinking, because if you had enough saved for five years, this policy could cover you for five years and then your savings could go farther.

But this is in the range where it's very hard to predict what happens. But the more savings you have, the less insurance you need. Once somebody is financially independent and able to retire and live on their money, their need for disability income insurance is completely eliminated, because they now are covered by their assets.

So when you can't get disability insurance, pursue your assets. Look at building your assets. Number two, while you're saving, make sure that you are extra careful with all of the simple, common, everyday risk minimization techniques. When you are going to look out in your yard and you see that your tree needs to be trimmed, hire the guy for $100 to trim your tree instead of you going and climbing up the ladder, because that $100 to hire the guy to trim the tree is going to be a better use of the money when you're not spending the $100 on insurance.

Put on the safety goggles when you are using a saw. Wear a helmet when you're on a bicycle. Put on your seatbelt when you're in the car. When you go skiing, put on a ski helmet, et cetera. Just pursue all those safety things and become safety conscious, because many of the things that happen to people frequently come due to negligence on their own part, negligence in them wearing proper safety equipment, et cetera.

So wear and use proper safety equipment. If you look at injuries that are likely for your situation, things that would be likely to keep you from being able to work, you may be able to come up with ideas that would help you avoid that. For example, if you have a physical job, then a physical back injury would be something that would keep you from being able to perform that physical job.

If you're in something that's like teaching, a physical back injury, you might be teaching from a wheelchair, but you could teach from a wheelchair. But if you had a physical job where the risk is an injury to your back, then focus on strengthening your back. Focus on flexibility. Focus on good posture.

Focus on protecting yourself with proper safety equipment, et cetera. Good lifting practices, things like that. You can minimize your risk substantially even if you don't have insurance. Then with regard to insurance, look into something to see if there are any small policies that are available to you that are portable, that are with you.

In the old days, I used to recommend that people purchase something called a long-term care insurance cash policy, not an indemnity policy, but a cash payout policy. Since I'm out of the marketplace for a few years, I don't know if these are still available. In the past, there was only one company that was still selling them when I was actively selling these.

But the idea was that in a case of a severe disability income insurance need, a severe disability need, you might be able to qualify as needing care under the definitions of a long-term care policy. In those long-term care policies with a cash policy, they would make the payment to you if you satisfied the policy definition for needing care, whereas most policies only compensated you and reimbursed you for actual care expenses incurred.

So I used to recommend that, but I don't know if that's still available. Check with your disability insurance broker. Then finally, work on good health insurance. Get the best health insurance you can and consider being willing to add some additional bells and whistles to your health insurance policy to cover you.

Those are the risk mitigation techniques that I know of and that I would apply in case of this problem. Also recognize, especially if you're traveling abroad, you may be able to negotiate something with your actual company for them to cover you in some kind of a private agreement, some kind of private insurance agreement.

So if you were doing work for a specific company and they couldn't cover you under that external policy or they wouldn't buy one for you, you may be able to establish some kind of salary continuation agreement with them, which would provide you and your family an additional level of protection.

Those are my ideas. Mark, anything else that I missed? That's super helpful. Are you allowed to say the name of the company that did those long-term care and cash policies? Yeah, I'm allowed to. I just have to come up with the name. It was a company in Florida. It was a little company in Orlando.

The guy that I sold it to was a rancher. He faced the problem that his ranch made him enough money to live on, but it wasn't productive enough on paper for him to actually be able to qualify. So I sold him this policy, but I warned him. I said, "Every couple of years, this company, we need to check on it because I don't know if they're going to still be in business in a few years." Because the numbers didn't work.

They mispriced the insurance. So I don't know the name. And if you do buy one of these policies, caveat emptor. You need to pay attention because most of these companies went out of business, and that was a major challenge for them. But ask your broker. That would be a good place for your insurance broker to earn some money.

That's what they do. Brian in Oklahoma, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, please? Thanks, Joshua. My question dealt with unquantified and unknown risks that may appear sometime in your life. And I think about this as I reach middle age and I have got four kids and a fifth on the way, whether those risks are things that can just happen in the course of life, some can be insured.

It's appropriate based on the last conversation you had. Some can be quantified and insured. Some can be quantified and self-insured. But then there's some that are very difficult to quantify and just the way life is can come at a moment's notice. And I wonder what you would recommend from how you assess those risks, how you self-insure for those risks or think about dealing with those risks if and when they do occur and where those fit into a larger financial plan.

Because one could say you're financially independent, but I think that that's kind of a farce when none of us knows what will happen tomorrow. Right, right. So I can think of a couple of examples that your question sparks, but do you have any specific examples that you were considering that we can work from?

Maybe some could be an unforeseen legal dispute that leads to legal expenses. You could have something like a disability of yourself or someone that you love or care about. Those are things that kind of come to mind. But I think it's anything that's, you know, there may not be an insurance market for this type of risk or if there is one, it might be prohibitively expensive.

Or there, yeah. So. Right. So here would be my thoughts. I think that we should always start by recognizing that we cannot eliminate risk from the world. We cannot eliminate risk. It's just simply not possible. And we cannot guarantee safety. One of the biggest kind of political philosophy issues that I have with many modern conversations is people are constantly looking and saying to somebody, "Well, you need to guarantee my safety." For example, we look to government and say, "You have to guarantee my safety." Well, government can't guarantee your safety.

They can try to help and there are maybe appropriate measures for that, but they can't guarantee safety. And none of us can guarantee safety or remove risk. In a sinful and fallen world, that is the natural result of sin is that our world faces difficulties. So if you're expecting a child, you have no way to guarantee that your next child is not going to be diagnosed from birth with cystic fibrosis or some serious muscular dystrophy and is going to die when they're 15 years old.

We live in a tragic and fallen and sin-filled world with the natural expression of that being risk, catastrophe, storms, etc. It's impossible to eliminate whether you go from the mundane to the ultimately catastrophic. The mundane is a car accident today on the way to work. The catastrophic is maybe Al Gore is right and the world's going to burn up in the next five years and the entire peninsula of Florida is going to be overwhelmed by a giant tsunami wave from the ocean.

So I think it's first healthy to recognize that it's impossible to eliminate risk and to really deal with that because that's where we come into a question of faith. Okay, well, how am I going to deal with this? And of course, many people have no faith and they deal with risk anyway because we're all in it together.

You can't escape it ultimately. Second, I think there are some basic techniques that can be applied no matter the risk. The first one is stability. If you're a stable person, emotionally stable, psychologically stable, you have a stable family life, a stable marriage, if you have a stable business, a stable home environment, if your finances are stable and on a good ground, your job is stable.

If you're a stable person, then usually you can handle many of those things that come at you. There's nothing that'll make an unstable person's life worse than a minor catastrophe, but a stable person can usually deal with those things in stride. I think many of us, even if we're relatively wealthy, many of us can appreciate how stressful it is to have an unexpected flat tire when you have no money, when you're broke, when you're arguing with your wife, your husband, when your child is misbehaving.

Many of us can recognize how stressful that is. Even if it weren't a financial problem, let's say that you're on the road, Brian, you have four children, five children. Let's say you're on the road with your four children that are not in their mother's tummy and your children are just at the end of their rope.

They're tired, they're cranky, everybody's yelling at each other. You've just snapped at them and now you have a flat tire. Well, that's a really stressful situation taken even more stressful. But if you are a stable personality, your children are under control, you've thought ahead about their needs being met, their stomachs are not empty, they're not cranky, they're not tired, you've planned when you're going to travel so that you're not pushing the limits, you haven't been upset and on edge all day, you're not fighting with your wife, and you guys have had a great time, well, the same event can happen, the same flat tire, and yet it can be experienced very differently by somebody who's stable and in control.

And so I think that's very important to recognize that you can't plan for all these things financially, but a stable life can absorb a lot more of these things. And that's one of the reasons why I prefer to take a lower risk approach to life because I personally have experienced and recognized that if I take a lower risk approach to life, it's possible that I won't wind up being as wealthy in the long run with money.

But it seems like there's a very strong argument that I'll have a much more peaceful and happy and joy-filled existence than if I'm always on the edge trying to shoot for the moon, living a high-risk lifestyle. So stability in every area of life makes a difference. Next, stability in terms of money makes a big difference.

You can't, of course, plan ahead for everything, but let's use your example of an unforeseen legal dispute. If you think about the legal system, you can't guarantee that you're not going to have a legal dispute, but you can lower the risk of that legal dispute. For example, you can make sure that you don't make a practice of drinking and driving.

You can make sure that you attend to the maintenance around your home, or your business, thus making it less likely that you'll be found guilty of negligence in somebody's injury. You can think thoughtfully about your finances, and in advance you can study something like asset protection, and you can make sure that your assets are sheltered in legally sheltered accounts.

You can make sure that your businesses are properly set up so that if you have one business that goes bad and you suffer a major lawsuit there, that that business damage is contained. And you can make sure that you are building yourself and just taking good protection, good insurance.

That's why something like good liability insurance on your home is important. A good umbrella insurance policy is always a good idea. Those simple risk mitigation techniques have a broad application, and if you think through those risks and come with them, they wind up having a few things in common.

One is savings, two is low debt, three is proper insurance for your stage of life, and four is good proactive planning and basically paying attention in advance, soliciting the advice of experts before you engage in something new and risky, and then minimizing the risk. Those are the techniques that can be applied to any circumstance in any situation, and somebody who's applying those techniques will seem to suffer less catastrophe.

And if they do face catastrophe, they'll be able to work through it. Many people have worked their way through bankruptcy. Many people have worked their way through legal judgments that were held against them. Many people work their way through, and it's much easier to survive if you're focused and just stable about it.

One inspiring story, just as an example. I've always been inspired by the example of one of my grandfathers who was a farmer. He had a business go bankrupt early in his career because he made a bad decision. It was a road construction company that he started. He made a bad decision.

He took a contract without doing proper due diligence, and the contract destroyed all the value of his equipment. He finished the job, but it put him deeply in debt. His business partner walked away from it, wanting to declare bankruptcy. My grandfather chose not to declare bankruptcy, but it took him several decades to pay that money off.

Throughout the course of his lifetime, he suffered just like what every farmer does. Sometimes good years, sometimes bad years. He suffered legal judgments. Somebody sued them for, I can't remember the details of it, so it doesn't matter. Somebody sued them and fighting different things out. But just by staying on the basics, he made his way through the loss of that business.

He maintained the integrity of his family. He maintained the integrity of his business, and he worked a long and healthy career. He generated and built a beautiful and strong family. At the end of his life, he was fairly wealthy because of those efforts. Disasters aren't permanent. We all face them, but by taking a broad approach and thinking about them, we'll be able to navigate through them.

That's my best answer for you right now, Brian. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. It gave me a lot of good things to think about. I guess one more thought is people often discount the connectedness of life, but it's really, if you fail in any one area, frequently that'll have a resulting effect.

Somebody who is not careful with their finances will probably, and I have no data to prove this. I've not studied this with scientific data, but I have a good sense of what I have studied, and I think this would fit with our common experience. But somebody who's careless with money is also often the type of person who may be careless with what they put in their body or who may be careless with putting on a helmet before they go and engage in an athletic endeavor.

Carelessness seems to be a character quality that goes in every other area. That person may engage in risky sexual relationships with other people. That person may engage in risky business relationships with other people without thinking because there's a habit of carelessness. Now on the flip side, if you bring in and teach your children the habit and the character quality of carefulness as a virtue, and you train them in carefulness with their toys when they're little, and you train them in carefulness with their possessions, and you train them in carefulness with the money they earn, and you train them in carefulness with their moral integrity, and you train them in carefulness with the relationships that they're engaging in, that has a spillover effect into other areas of life.

Frequently, people try to diagnose one problem without taking it in an integrated way and saying what's the virtue, what's the character quality that's necessary? And if you'll teach that character quality, the person can frequently figure it out. But if you just teach the technique such as, "Hey, here's how you save money," and don't teach that virtue, that character quality, I think the actual chance of success is severely diminished.

Ross in Washington, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. How can I serve you today, sir? Hi, Josh. We really appreciate the show. We're a family of seven. We've recently paid off all our debt. We maxed out 401(k) out. I'm fairly new to investing. I'm trying to figure out what strategies I want to apply.

We're really leaning towards dividends. We're in index funds right now. And I guess I'd just like to know how I would get started, books, growing capital, and all that stuff. I'm a little bit of a gambler. I'm a little bit of a gambler. I'm a little bit of a gambler.

I'm a little bit of a gambler. I'm a little bit of a gambler. You currently are invested in index funds, and the idea is how would I identify the best strategy for me? Is that a good summary of your question? Yeah. So multiple answers to this. The first thing, of course, is to learn.

Learning is inexpensive. Lack of learning is very expensive, but learning is inexpensive. And there's never been a better time to learn about a subject like investing in the history of the world. There's never been a better time. There is so much information available for you with no cost. So I would start by pursuing your area of interest.

If your area of interest is dividend investing, there are many good dividend investing blogs written online by competent, qualified people, some of whom I've had on the show in the Archives of Radical Personal Finance, which is search dividends, and you'll find some past shows. There are many qualified people who host podcasts specifically on dividend investing.

If you go on YouTube, you'll find information specifically on dividend investing. First thing I would – next thing – or first or next thing I would do concurrently, I would go down to the library and I would look through all the books on investing and I would check out about a dozen of them on dividend investing, and I would perform an overview of the reading in that area.

If you've never read it, if you've never read consistently in an area like dividend investing, then I would start by just reading one or two books, but then I would read systematically and start to understand what are the themes, and I would challenge myself with that information to say, "Okay, what is it about dividend investing that I like?" List the benefits of dividend investing.

List the disadvantages of dividend investing and try to understand what is it about dividend investing that I like. If you sit down and you read about a dozen books on something, pretty much you'll put yourself in a situation where you understand the different approaches to that subject. My little aphorism that I really love that I think is important is spend as much time learning about a subject – sorry, spend as much time learning about an investment as it takes you to earn the money that you're going to put into the investment.

You do the math, but if you're going to engage in a certain investment strategy, you want to know the risks and the disadvantages. This type of reading is called syntopical reading, which means to go and to understand a whole field. If you are going to engage in dividend investing, I would say that that's a good way to do it.

Now, balance, of course, the learning versus the doing. Some people get paralyzed by learning and they never get to the doing. Some people just jump into doing and they learn by losing money. I think there's a good balance there. I don't know how you can figure out how to advise yourself there, but if you're listening to a couple of podcasts on dividend investing and you're reading about dividend investing and you're reading articles on it and you're talking with other people who've done it that you've interacted with in an online forum on dividend investing, now you're starting to understand it.

Challenge yourself to know the pros and the cons. My next piece of advice would be come back and survey your particular skills, your particular situation, your particular goals, and understand why is this approach to investing appealing to me. Let me give you an example. I don't have much interest in dividend investing, but it's not because there's anything wrong with it.

It's not convinced. It's a perfectly valid strategy. But for me, I don't enjoy the idea of studying individual companies that are publicly traded. I don't think I have any special unique skill in that area. I would either just follow the advice of somebody that I've chosen to or pursue some other investment strategy.

It doesn't really appeal to me personally because of my personal goals. But there are other people who take a great deal of interest in it and it's exactly the opposite. But understand the risks and the problems with it. In my mind, you should be able to defend your investment strategy and say why it's good and why it's good for you.

You should also understand the shortcomings, the disadvantages of that strategy, and understand how to know if those disadvantages are affecting you or not. So learning, reading syntopically is really valuable to make sure that you're well-equipped. Once you have mastered the basics, and let me give this back. So there's a school of education called the classical educational model.

And there's a famous essay that is often referred to as a starting point for people who are interested in the classical education model by Dorothy Sayers. It's called The Lost Tools of Learning. There's an audio recording of it in the archives of Radical Personal Finance, a standalone audio recording of Dorothy Sayers' essay called The Lost Tools of Learning.

But in that essay, she presents the idea that children learn in different stages. There's a grammar stage, a logic stage, and then a rhetoric stage. This is not her idea. This is classical education. This is the three foundations of the trivium of classical medieval educational philosophy. The trivium and the quadrivium.

And the trivium has really come to be very popular in classical educational circles. But the basic approach is that you learn the grammar of something first, which is you learn the words. You learn what the words mean. You learn the basic concepts. Then a child, and so that would be perhaps a primary school child, and then the child should move on to logic.

And so a young brain is not prepared to deal with logic, but a middle-aged or middle school type of brain is prepared to deal with logic. And then the third stage is rhetoric. Rhetoric of speaking about it, talking about it, defending it, et cetera. Well, I think that's a natural approach to apply to any kind of self-learning that you're trying to apply.

You start with grammar. You learn what the words mean. You learn the basic ideas about a subject without judging it, without trying to say what's wrong. You just learn what those arguments are. Learn what those words mean. You can apply this to dividend investing. You can apply this to how to become financially independent.

You can apply it to a political topic, a religious topic. You learn the definitions of the words. And that's the best way to do it is to start with a couple of books where you'd actually read them carefully. Then you move on to the logic stage where you start to interact with the ideas and you start to say, "This particular person is defending dividend investing because of this simple example.

Companies that pay dividends pay out more money. You get richer investing in companies that have dividends." The logical problem is, is that true? And of course, the answer is not necessarily because it's a logical fallacy to only look at dividends and not to look at total return. And so then you come back to the issue and say, "Well, my goal is to become financially independent.

And so the only way for me to become financially independent is to spend dividends." But that's actually logically untrue. Even if you're 50 years old and you're living on dividends, you could just as easily live on the sale of the actual securities. In fact, from a tax perspective, the dividends are somewhat tax inefficient, whereas the sale under long-term capital gains taxes can be more efficient.

So you now recognize I have to look at total return. I can't just look at dividends because I can actually spend total return. And it's not that I can only spend dividends. So thinking through it logically. And then rhetoric would just be teaching others in this case. But the key is study the subject first with grammar, understand the words, understand the concepts, understand the meanings, and then start dealing with the logic and then apply it to your particular life.

That helpful, Ross? Any follow-up questions? No, great. Thank you. Cool. Thank you for listening. And good job on getting out of debt. I hope that you continue to make incredible progress. All right, next. He's off. Let's go to Kevin in California. Kevin, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. How can I serve you today?

Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out what's the, I guess, most efficient way or best way to fund a land purchase. And I was planning on using my equity in my home, whether that was like hard equity or appreciation or whether to just do a refinance or just a flat-out new loan for the land itself.

So what are your thoughts? How much is the value of your personal home? A little over 400. And how much is the current value of the mortgages on the property? I owe 230. So you have $170 of equity available in the home? Yes, give or take. And the land purchase would be how much?

Roughly 80. And do you have any savings that you would plan to apply for or are you planning to finance the entirety of the purchase? I guess that's part of the crux of what I can't decide on. I have a taxable investment account that I could easily purchase the land with.

That would incur a taxable event and I don't know if that's the most efficient way to do it. Whether I can just use a loan to purchase it. What's the game plan for this land? What are you hoping to accomplish by buying it and investing in it? To build the long-term home.

So the idea is you'd buy this land, you'd build a house on it, and then you'd sell the house that you're living on right now and move to this new house that you'd plan to build? That's one option, either to sell this house or rent it out because it's in a pretty desirable neighborhood and a nice little town.

What's your timeline? Well, the land's on the market now and I guess not too long, I guess. But if you buy the land, when would you build? Would you build 10 years in the future or would you start building next year? Oh, probably within two to three, be completed.

So this is fairly quickly. And how much would you be paying for the home? Sorry, how much would it cost you to build the house? I'm guesstimating $350 to $400. $350 to $400, okay. How much money do you have outside of the equity in your house that you'd be willing to spend on the project?

I'd probably be able to cut with another $100 pretty easily. Have you shopped mortgages, interest rates, any of that stuff at this point in time? Very little. I know I think the rates I've seen are around like 4.25 or 4.1, something along those lines. What's the rate on your current mortgage?

Three and a half. So the first thing I would do is based upon this information, I would try to get clear on my different options, which perhaps you've done this, but just in terms of my own thinking process as I try to answer your question. So I would look at it and I would say, option A, I can use the cash investments that I have.

I'm just going to say, pretend I sell them, the investments that I have, $100,000, and I can buy the land with no mortgage. Then you list down on that, what does that cost me? The cost of that is of course the tax liability that you now incur on the sale of those assets.

So you have to calculate that in. And then the benefits of that is I can move quickly and I'm not taking out more debt. I'm not paying interest. So you would calculate those numbers and get clear on it. As you're considering whether you should sell those assets, you need to look and say, what do I expect to happen with these investment assets?

Is this probably a good time to sell? Is this not? You don't want to hang on to an asset that should be sold simply because you have a tax liability. Sometimes it's good to go ahead and sell and take the tax liability. On the other hand, you don't want to sell an asset that, an investment asset that you think has a lot of room to run and really has a strong future, even if you might need the money now.

You're not going to hold it until you do that. So you're going to have to look at that and say, what's best for me there? Say option A is to sell the assets and pay cash for the land. Then the question is, where can I get the money to build the house from?

And in this case, you would investigate, would I take a construction loan? Would I pay for it out of cash flow? Look to see, do I qualify for a construction loan? If I did qualify for a construction loan, would I qualify for a refinance of that construction loan to a traditional mortgage?

And check those numbers. Ask talk to some mortgage brokers and look to see what those costs would be. In addition, then, look at the home equity line of credit and figure out what would be available for you in terms of how much money could you take out on a HELOC, under what terms.

And then talk to a mortgage broker and see if I refinanced my primary mortgage, how much could I take out from that primary mortgage if I refinanced it and what would be the rates at that primary rate. And so lay out your options, A, B, C, D. Calculate the costs of each, calculate the benefits of each, and factor those into your overall plans.

If your overall plan is you want to wind up in a situation where you're going to own both of these houses, one you're living in, two that you're renting, then try to think through what would be the best situation to be in when you get there. My guess, without that numerical data, is it's probably a good time and a good way to go ahead and refinance your primary mortgage now.

If you refinanced your primary mortgage now at the highest amount possible and you put it on the very long fixed interest loan, that would free up cash for you right now, which you could use for the purchase of a home, and would put in place financing that could be maintained should you, two or three years from now, go ahead and rent the house out.

The challenge is affordability. If you're going to build something, how much cash flow do you have? Will you be able to swing it? Will you be able to make payments if you make a construction loan or however you're going to finance that second house in terms of making the transition?

If you do that, make sure, of course, that you wouldn't be violating your mortgage by getting a mortgage by having it on a house that you could rent out. My guess is it's a whole lot easier for you to go ahead and refinance now on your primary house when it is still your personal residence, rather than trying to get financing on it as a rental.

Since this is an idea that's a few years out, it would seem to me that you probably could go ahead and do that refinance since there's no specific plans. You can go ahead and answer all the questions appropriately that, "Yes, this is my primary residence." The only challenge, of course, would be the cost of interest.

You'll have to calculate current interest rate versus new interest rate. That's how I'd approach it. Was that helpful? Yes. Actually, I have one kind of spawned question from your answer. Instead of doing a construction loan or something along those lines, do you have any thoughts on taking out a loan against your own account?

Have you heard of that process? Taking out a loan against your own investment account? Yes. That's collateral, I guess. I get very scared about that, depending on how it's structured. I get very scared because, depending on the investment, are any of your investments leveraged currently? No. Are they derivatives or are they direct securities?

It's just Vanguard index funds. That's simple, of course. I don't want debt against my investments. I'm not sure that I couldn't be persuaded that, as a form of bridge financing, that there aren't a couple of tactical ways to do it, but I'm certainly not going to do it as a long-term scenario.

Here's why. If I take out debt against my investments, I was different. That's why I ask about what kind of investment it is. If you have an account where you're trading derivatives, then it's not, depending on what you're actually investing against, you can get into some things where your account could go to zero without too much trouble.

It's a little hard for a Vanguard index fund to go to zero because there's so many companies involved. There's so much involved, but you should always be prepared with stocks, a pure stock portfolio. You should always be prepared for your account value to decline by 50%. That will happen at some point during a normal average investment lifetime, if the past is any indication of the future.

You don't know when it can happen. You don't know how fast it could happen. The problem is, if that happens while you're in a vulnerable situation, everything becomes worse. If you are using that account and using that financing, and you're putting yourself in a situation where you're using that financing with a margin account on your investments, and you're using that to pay for your real estate, and you're depending on your cash flow to get you through, well, if there's a 50% decline in the market, that means that there's something really bad happening in the business environment.

Something that's really bad happening in the business environment could have a spillover effect which could freeze up other forms of real estate financing, as we can remember 10 years ago. In the same time, your job may be at risk, and you may take a pay cut, or you may get laid off.

Now, you're stuck in a real bind where your investments are down by 50%. They have to be sold at a loss to cover your loan. You can't refinance your real estate, and now you're stuck all the way around. I don't want to be stuck all the way around. I'd rather play it more conservatively and limit the number of moving things that can be moved.

I'd rather sell my assets and take the tax penalty, or pay the tax, incur the tax, especially if there's a gain. You're only paying a tax if there's a gain, and the gain is a good thing, and then use that to go and pay for the house. The second reason I hate debt, and I hate it in these cases, is it's very easy to wind up overspending.

It's much easier to spend more than you should. That's the basic thing, problem with debt. You go into it saying, "My budget is $350,000," but all of a sudden when you're in it, you start thinking, "Well, we'd like to have some upgraded fixtures. We'd like to have the nicer roof instead of the cheaper roof.

We'd like to have these things," and all of a sudden you're in it for 425 or 450. Then you've got cost overruns, and things get out of hand, and now you're in it for 550. That's not unusual. That's not an unusual story. By doing it with minimal debt or constrained debt and not putting yourself in a precarious position, I think you play the safe game, and I think the safe game leads to the happy life.

Agreed. I guess one quick final question is, would you consider doing a show about financial planning or state planning for parents with special needs children, or is that already in the hopper by chance? I have needed to do that show for a very long time. I'm intending to do more financial planning shows.

The challenge is, the reason I haven't done it so far is simply financial planning shows are the least popular with the audience as measured by audience engagement and downloads. They're also the most time-consuming for me, and they have the most limited me to create, and they have the most limited audience.

It's kind of hard as a show host to say, "I'm going to spend 10 hours, a dozen hours to sit down to create this free podcast that I'm going to put out with very limited revenue either from an advertisement placement or something like that, with very limited revenue potential for that podcast and for me to put 12 hours into preparing a one-hour show that's careful, that's precise, that's concise, that's reasonable, that's well-structured, and then to not have the audience really engage with it." It's a lot easier and more beneficial from my perspective as a business to sit down and say, "Well, let me just rant and rave about something off the top of my head," which will have big audience engagement, and it's easier for me to do with 15 minutes of preparation instead of 12 hours.

Over the last year, I've really lost my previous momentum with financial planning shows, and that's why I haven't done it thus far. I want to do it though because I really want to serve the careful financial planning market, but what I've been trying to solve behind the scenes has been the problem of the follow-up item.

So I want to do a show on it, but I want to have a follow-up. I need to have a follow-up sales, something to sell as a follow-up for people who are interested in the show. So if I create, let's say, a three-hour lecture on special needs, and then I release the first hour as a free podcast, but hours two and three can be purchased for X number of dollars by anybody who's interested in the subject and who's interested in it, and I have a few interviews lined up with some special needs experts, things like that, now I have a business case for doing more careful financial planning, technical financial planning stuff.

So that's why I haven't done it so far, but I do intend to do it, and that's the direction that I'm going. So keep an eye on the podcast feed, and hopefully it'll be coming your way as soon as I can make it happen. It's not that I want to do it.

I just got to figure out how to do it in a way that makes sense. In the meantime, if you have special needs children or if you want to talk to me about something specific regarding special needs, feel free. I'm always available for phone consulting at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/phonecall. Matthew in Tennessee, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.

How can I serve you today, sir? Matthew, Matthew. Okay, no Matthew. Ram in Michigan, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. How can I serve you? Ram Ramachandran Yes, Joshua. I have a quick question. Actually, I'm looking for shopping around for a mortgage loan. I'm a first-time home buyer. So somehow I, I mean, somehow I learned based on the internet or whatever, if I do continuous shopping with different bankers on my mortgage loan, there is a chance that my credit score may go down.

And by having this kind of fear, I'm a little reluctant to go and shop around. And I mean, I don't know how can I, without shopping, how can I get a best interest rate? I have a very good credit score right now. So I mean, I'm a little confused how to shop around and get the best interest rate.

So I need your help here, please. Okay. Where are you in the home buying process? Have you already chosen a home or are you in the pre-choosing process? I did not choose the house. I just approached a couple of real estate agents and they asked me to go and talk to the bankers and get the pre-approved for a mortgage loan.

So I'm in the process of finding a mortgage lender and getting my loan pre-approved. Right. So the normal process is for, in terms of this kind of shopping process, the normal process is you need to have the actual property in place before you do the final shopping. But of course, a real estate agent wants to know that you're not just kicking the tires, that you actually are willing to buy.

And also, if you're making an offer with financing, they're going to need to submit that offer to the seller of the house with the property. So the best, the normal way to approach this is to find a mortgage broker that will work with you with a number of different lenders.

And that mortgage broker will then pre-approve you for a certain amount. Let's say, I don't know what you're shopping for, let's just say $300,000. So they'll pre-approve you for that $300,000 amount. They'll say yes, based upon the credit score, the information here, $300,000 is no sweat. Now when you go out and are looking at properties, your real estate agent now knows that you are legitimately qualified for a $300,000 mortgage.

And then of course, they'll show you properties in that range. When you go to submit an offer on a property, let's say you find a property for $200,000, then frequently you'll have your mortgage broker provide for you a pre-approval letter that has a much lower amount. You don't want to submit a pre-approval letter with the offer that says that you're qualified for $300,000 when you're offering for $200,000.

So they'll go ahead and that broker will provide for you a new letter that's saying that if you'll just simply, that you're qualified for $205,000 or something like that. That's all part of the game. So you'll usually pick one broker to work with in that context. Now once you have the actual offer on the property, and once the property is accepted, once the property is accepted, the offer is accepted, then in that situation you will be able to go ahead and start shopping for a loan.

It's not until you actually have the property and then working with the mortgage broker that you lock in the loan that you actually have the final deal. So in terms of the shopping process, you're a little premature to go around and have everybody start pulling credit reports because that can indeed cause you problems.

But what I would do is I would try to find somebody locally that maybe work with you and give you a good deal, and then find research talking with your real estate agent and others, and go ahead and talk with them and see do they recommend. You might want to get an offer from your bank, you might want to get an offer from one of the online places, and you might want to work with somebody locally.

But usually my experience has been that they're really pretty competitive. A good local broker that has multiple banks that they work with will usually be pretty competitive. And unless you have a strong relationship, say with a local credit union or with a bank that you have a strong relationship with, and you know they're very competitive in the marketplace, usually it seems like most people are best served by working with one independent broker who works with multiple companies.

When you get to that situation, it's less my experience and knowledge, and if anybody knows differently feel free to jump in, but my experience and knowledge is that your problem is primarily going to be whether the broker wants to work with you and have you shop with them and shop with them and shop with them, not so much about the actual hard inquiries on your credit report.

Because there is some hand-holding in this process, frequently local brokers will say, "Hey listen, you either need to pick because I've got these 10 companies I can place these loans with, or you need to pick." When you're actually going to the point where you're actually submitting the applications, things like that, those hard inquiries aren't going to cause that big of a problem.

They're going to look at all the other metrics and your credit score. Okay, I got it. So another one simple final question, Joshua. So let's say if I go and get the pre-approval loan from some lender, and then I'll tell to my real estate broker, the agent, that okay, I'm good with the pre-approved loan.

So he'll go and show a couple of properties for me, and I'm interested in one. So once I decide to purchase a property, that time can I go back and shop around again one more time with different people, and then I can go with different lender after? Because let's say somebody else is giving me a better interest rate, that time can I ignore this pre-approved loan and move on to a different guy, or I have to stick to this pre-approved guy?

No, that'll be, you can absolutely do it, you can absolutely work with different people even up until the loan is finalized. So you can absolutely work in a competitive environment. The challenge is simply figuring out how to do it. Because if you're working with three people online, then it's relatively simple.

But a lot of times if you're working with a local mortgage broker, then they're already involved in that shopping process. So my observation has been there's not going to be that much variability in rates. It's a pretty standardized market, and what can happen is because the rates could change frequently, your biggest risk is the actual rates changing across the industry, not so much which particular company happens to have the very cheapest.

They're very competitive, at least that's my observation. >>Steve: Okay, I got it. >>Adam: And then one last tip for you, make sure that if you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to episode 305 of the show called Mortgage Credit Certificates, the coolest mortgage interest credit you've never heard of.

That show is all about the mortgage interest credit, and that is a program where you'll have to investigate to see whether your state offers it, and you'll have to investigate to see whether you would qualify, whether your property qualifies for it. But that is one of the unique focuses, the unique questions that comes up.

If you do qualify for the mortgage credit certificate, you've got to go ahead and make that happen early. And then also go and listen to episode 318 of the show, which is all about how to get the best possible mortgage as well. Matthew in Tennessee, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.

Let's try you again. Are you with us this time? >>Matthew: I am. Thank you, Joshua. >>Joshua: Very good. How may I serve you, sir? >>Matthew: Thank you for taking my call today. So my question is around content creation. When you have a breadth of knowledge in an area, especially one that is nuanced, how do you create content without going into all the nuance every time?

If you were to create a show with all the nuance, it would be like four hours long every time because that is how unique each situation can be. So my question is, how do you know when it's time to stop on a particular subject and just ship the show?

>>Joshua: You are – that is probably the biggest softball setup that – which we didn't plan – anyone has ever offered me to cover one of the most difficult things that I am often challenged to figure out. So here's my thought. Number one, it's hard. And especially that's been a hard lesson for me.

Because when I started Radical Personal Finance, I wanted to provide the depth because I couldn't find the depth. And I'll share this just from my own experience. I used to listen to Dave Ramsey or Clark Howard or Rick Edelman or other people as well. And when they'd answer a question, they would answer the five-minute question and I would be so frustrated because I'm like, "You missed everything.

You could do this, this, this, this, this, this, this." And when I first started, I had a big chip on my shoulder. I'm going to show them how much better it is. Well, what I've learned is that there's a method to their methodology. And I now look at – now with almost four years of experience, I now look at Dave Ramsey and I understand why he does what he does.

And I feel like I was ignorant before of how effective he is. Because by keeping it simple, he actually moves people to action. And the people who don't want simple are not his audience. But there's a much bigger audience of people who want simple who he can serve. And what today I look at it and I used to be frustrated by and say, "Man, why doesn't this guy answer the question actually fully?" Today I look at that and I say, "I need to be more like Dave Ramsey because he moves people to action and he does it by keeping simple." And it's been very hard for me to learn that lesson, but it's also a very real lesson.

And so my thought on it – and the other thing has been that it has to do with personal confidence. I think a few years ago, I probably had more of a desire to show everybody how smart I was than I do today. I was less confident. And so as somebody who knows something about a subject, I often have had the desire to rebut every rebuttal.

And this used to tie me up in knots because I would sit down and I would create this concept, okay, concept A. And I know that in concept A, the way my brain works, I already know the rebuttal arguments to my presenting concept A are rebuttal one, rebuttal two, rebuttal three.

And so I would go ahead and say, "Well, the rebuttal to rebuttal one is rebuttal A1, A2, A3 and rebuttal." And I would create these things. Well, then it becomes an absolute monstrosity. And you lose people and no one wants to listen to a two-hour explication of concept A, rebuttal one, answer to rebuttal one, two, three, et cetera.

And so the audience, well, not no one, the audience that wants to listen to that is very small. And I've realized as I've become more confident as a broadcaster that if I want to serve people, I have to offer content in different ways and in different ways. And I have to recognize that some people aren't going to like the way I offer other content.

And so what I am desiring to do in the future, what I'm not doing as well as I want to do, is I'm desiring to have more variety to reach more people. But the cost of that variety is annoying some people. And it's very difficult for me to be okay with that because I personally am a people pleaser.

I want to make everybody happy. But by way of example, I recently did a show on the example of why I hate pickup trucks. And it was caustic. It was very unusual. I said the word idiot more than I've ever said in my life. It was not my normal tone.

And I knew that it was a risk when you write satire and use hyperbole, that's a risk because some people may not understand it. But when looking at it, I said, "This might cut through." It might cut through to somebody who really wants it. It might provide some additional entertainment value.

It is a real concept and I can try something new. I got all kinds of people who are like, "Joshua, you were such a jerk. You're so arrogant." And I'm like, "Do you not listen to the rest of the show? Do you not recognize that this is something different and unusual that I'm making a point?

But do you not recognize this?" But of course, if I label it as, "This is out of the ordinary," then it removes all of the power and the punch of it. So what I think it is, what I currently try to do is I'm currently trying to say, "How can I package things in different ways for different people?" I want to create something that in some cases is one minute, is five minutes.

In some cases, it's five hours. And to have different things for different people and let people choose because the person who's really interested in a subject will dig in, let's say, five minutes, 50 minutes, and five hours. The person who wants the five hours will also enjoy the five minutes and the 50 minutes.

But if everything is five hours, if everything is over the top, people aren't going to be able to tune in. Many people are going to say, "I can't listen to five hours," and they'll skip it. So it happens to all of us. We have a podcast and if every podcast is two hours long, then sometimes you have two hours and you want it and sometimes you have five minutes.

So I believe that the value is just recognizing that for the person who really needs the concept, they'll dig it through. But if you just do one thing, you'll miss out on impacting as many people as you want. So it's been hard for me to learn that. It's been hard for me to learn to just be okay with people being mad at me, to be okay with the fact that someone's not going to understand, to be okay that when I go into an esoteric subject, someone's going to get all ticked off because I'm talking about guns or I'm talking about this.

Just learn to be okay with it and say, "Listen, you listen if you want, you don't listen if you want. You're an adult. You have a thumb that works. Use it. But in the meantime, I'm not going to be dissuaded from what I'm trying to do because I'm worried about your nasty message." It's not an easy question to answer.

Got it. When you first started Radical Personal Finance, did you have a sense of responsibility in that you were concerned that maybe somebody would come by that podcast and make an incorrect decision? Now, mind you, it is free. So to the individual listeners of Radical Personal Finance or any podcast, they should understand it's not a response tailored exactly to their situation and should treat that accordingly.

But at the same time, did you have a sense of responsibility at the beginning that, "Gosh, I hope that I'm nuanced enough that if somebody comes by, this is actually..." Because depending on how you take personal financial advice, something can be completely wrong in your unique situation and you just may not be, for lack of better wording, may be ignorant to that.

Did you have that at all when you were starting Radical Personal Finance or does it exist today? Or is that something where you said, "I'm just creating a free show and it's their responsibility to follow up further to get their perspective on their unique situation?" I've always felt that responsibility because when I started, I was a long frustrated financial advisor, angry that my clients would spend more time listening to another financial pundit and they didn't ask me for the specific application of what they were doing.

And that was one of my deep abiding frustrations that a client would listen to something that somebody on the radio said and they would say, "Well, this must be true." But the person on the radio was lacking the context of this particular situation. And almost any financial decision could be right or wrong to the degree that there is objective right and wrong based upon the individual circumstances.

And it used to drive me nuts, especially as a long-term... I'd sold a lot of insurance policies over the years. And it used to drive me nuts when somebody would give what I perceived to be careless advice on life insurance policies or disability insurance policies or long-term care insurance policies.

That really frustrated me. And so the way that I tried to handle it was to say, "Let me talk about how to get from here to there." And even when I do the Q&A shows, as I've done in this particular show, what I try to do is whenever I'm answering a question, not to say, "Do this," but to say, "Here's the process of how I'm approaching it, how I'm analyzing it.

And then based upon this method of analysis, here's the answer that I'm coming to." And that's my hope is that that'll help people to think about the method of analysis while picking up a few tips and not just simply go straight to the end answer. That's my personal hope.

Now successful or not, I don't know. I've certainly tried to pull back on some of the intensity of that method of analysis because there's only a small, very, very small number of people who are actually that interested. And I love to serve those people who are deeply interested, but I also have intentionally tried to pull back on the level of detail and to just be a bit more to the point so that my ideas will be impactful on a broader audience.

>>JAMES: You got it. Thank you for taking the time to answer that. >>DAVE: Thank you for the nice softball question. It's always nice when somebody sets it up and says, "Here's a fun question. Talk about yourself." It's a great example for the final teaching moment so that it's not all about me.

It really is a great example of the value of asking people about themselves. If you want to be a good friend, I mean, I do the show, but it's very hard for me to want to talk about myself and what I'm learning and struggling with if someone doesn't ask.

And so the same thing can be applied in social situations as we all try to be better listeners, engage with people by just asking them about themselves. One comment, I'm going to release this as a... I'm going to kill the music. I'm going to give you a bonus speech, which I'm going to...

In that line, I'm going to put the bonus speech here, and then I'll probably cut the audio and release it later. But here's what I want to say. You are an adult. Act like one when it comes to what you listen to. That means multiple things. Number one, it means you actually have to listen to what somebody is saying.

This seems to be a skill that we have frequently lost, lost more and more in our culture. But listen to what somebody is saying. Don't automatically assume that because they're saying X, then they obviously must mean the antithesis. But listen to what somebody is actually saying. Two, listen widely, but recognize that you're listening voluntarily.

When somebody's saying something, don't get mad and write to them and say, "I can't believe you're saying such and such." At least engage with their content. When I say things that I think are helpful and valuable, I'm saying them because I think they're helpful and valuable, not with an intentional goal of making you mad.

I don't care if you're mad. I don't care if you're happy. What I care is that you engage with the substance of what I'm saying. And it's really amazing to me how many emails and comments and things I get from people who are frustrated because I said something they didn't like, but they actually didn't deal with what I said.

And it almost feels like an epidemic in our culture. So recognize this. I'm not asking you to listen. I'm hoping that I can serve you, but if at any point in time I stop serving you, just stop listening. That is your right as a human to walk away and disengage.

Don't send me an email saying, "Well, I just can't believe you said such and such, and that's it, and I'm out." That changes my mind not a bit. I'm not stupid. I know when I say something that is controversial that it's controversial. If you want to make me think, rebut what I'm saying.

Just don't come by the blog page and write a comment saying, "Well, I just can't believe you said that because that was so offensive." Come by and say, "Joshua, you're wrong," and make an argument. Make an actual argument about why I'm wrong. Present your evidence, present your facts, present your reasoning, and argue why I'm wrong.

When I get an email from you writing to me about why I'm wrong, I sit and I read it very carefully, every single line, every single word, and I consider your perspective. I put myself in your shoes, and I stop and I think, "Okay, based upon how this person is communicating, what's the merit of their argument?" I consider your argument.

When you write to me saying, "I just don't like your stuff," I usually respond back and say, "There are lots of other good podcasts." But please, don't waste your time. I want you to go and get what you need. If I can't deliver that, I'm fine. Go. I believe in the free market.

I believe in the freedom of information. I believe in the freedom of ideas. So go and find somebody. But you're not going to change my mind unless you actually make an argument. We've created a culture where being offended all the time is a badge of honor instead of a culture that loves truth.

In the last decade of my life, I have changed many, many things that I believed. But I've changed them based upon argument, not based upon offense. The mark of an adult is being able to listen to somebody that you find offensive or being able to listen to an argument that you disagree with and consider it on the merits of the argument, not just simply based upon the fact that you disagree with it or you find it offensive.

If we can't do that and we can't think, then we're doomed. And unfortunately, if my email inbox is any reflection of that, we're doomed. So I beg of you, if you want to argue me on a point, argue it with me. But don't tell me how mad you are because of something I said.

You don't have a right to not be offended. You don't have a right to control what shows up voluntarily in your phone and on the internet. You do have a right to simply stop listening. And you do have a right, of course, to say what you believe. So if there's something that you believe that you think disagrees with what I believe, feel free to argue it with me.

Or please use your freedom of speech. Start your podcast. Start your blog. I will help you do that. I've done that to many people who say, "I just don't really like radical personal finance." Great, I will help you. I'll help you start a podcast. I'll help you start a blog that disagrees with me because I believe in truth.

And I believe that a vigorous debate about concepts and ideas has value and is a method of arriving at truth. It's not the only method, but it is a method. If there's something that I'm wrong in, tell me I'm wrong. I will read your comment. I'll read your argument.

I'll read your email. I'll read that very carefully. And I'll follow your logic. I'll consider what you have to say. My only request is if you have any interest in understanding what I have to say and why, then feel free to do the same thing. But don't waste your time telling me how offended you are.

It doesn't change my mind. Thank you for listening, for allowing me to get that off my chest. With that, I wish you all the best. Thank you for listening to today's show, You Radical You. Before you go, I have one question for you. Was there an idea in today's show that helped you?

Were you inspired? Were you motivated? Did you get an idea on how you can earn more or spend less money or invest more wisely or perhaps protect yourself from catastrophe and insulate yourself from financial disaster or just improve your life and your lifestyle? Well, if so, I have three requests for you.

Number one, take action. Listening doesn't improve your life. Doing, however, can revolutionize your life. Number two, take the idea or concept that you learned from me and go and teach somebody else. If you want to really learn something, go and teach it to others. That ripple effect of you to someone else will systematically transform your life and the lives of all those around you.

Number three, if you thought there was financial value in what you just heard, I'd ask you to come by and pay for it at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Now however much you want to pay, that's up to you. But if the show is worth a dollar a month, come by RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron and sign up to support the show at a dollar a month.

If the show is worth $20 a month to you, I'd be happy to have your $20. Hey, if it's $1,000 a month, write me a check. Don't send it to me on Patreon, but I'd be happy to have that as well. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron is where you can do that. Thank you.

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