It's Friday and today, live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, insight, education, and encouragement that you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua.

I am your host. I am your fellow journeyman. I am with you on this path towards financial freedom. And these Friday shows are where we get together and discuss the details of how to actually do it practically today. Each Friday that I can arrange the technology in order for me to host this call, we get together for a live Q&A call.

I really enjoy doing these. They are my favorite show of the week because I get to interact with you on real circumstances, on real questions, on real things that you're facing. This is your opportunity to drive the content of the show. So if that means that you'd like to ask me advice on something in your own personal life, something in your own finances, you can pump me for a little bit of low-cost financial planning I guess.

If you want to ask me some tactical, technical question on anything related to financial planning or if you want to talk about some bigger picture thing or some philosophical question, if you want to agree with me, disagree with me, that is up to you. I just go to a phone line and open them up to you.

So I'd love for you to join me for a Friday Q&A show if you would like. I don't publish the phone number publicly to every listener. Rather, what I do is I restrict these calls to patrons of the show, people who go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron and sign up to support Radical Personal Finance there.

And I would love for you to do that if you would like to do that. It's your best way to get some interaction with me, the best way to have your questions answered. And over the years, I guess I've been doing these now, over the years people have asked all kinds of interesting things.

So there are currently 274 individuals just like you who support Radical Personal Finance at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. I would love for you to join that program and in doing so to be on the next call. Let's go first to Matthew. Matthew, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. How can I serve you today?

Absolutely, Joshua. Thank you for taking my call today. So on the Facebook group, I think a few months back you mentioned that you had finally made the change from the PC world to the Mac world with the acquisition of a new Mac computer. And I have been interested in making that change as well, but I've lived in the PC world my whole life and I feel very rooted in it.

But I would like to think about making that change. But from a productivity standpoint, what have you noticed from that change, pros and cons for making it? Good question and a fun one. So I'll share just a short bit of my background and why I made the change and then answer the question straightforwardly.

For my entire computing lifetime, I have been a PC user and a Mac admirer. But because the cost of entry for the Apple platform is so high, I never could find the ability to really justify it. So I admired some of the usefulness of the Apple ecosystem for many years, but I just couldn't justify the money.

And I always struggled with that because I want to make a good purchase decision. I really want to be frugal with my money and I want to do a good job and it just seemed so hard to justify, especially because I was not in media production for most of my career.

I wasn't producing video or doing artwork where I really needed some kind of tool in the multimedia environment where the Apple approach really shined. So when we're talking a decade of being an admirer and never pulling the trigger on it, what finally forced me to move was there were three things involved.

The first thing was that my laptop was just simply really slowing down and it came to the point where I finally concluded that it was hampering my ability to actually produce more work. I find it very easy to tell other people that they should invest money in quality tools in order to produce more work.

It's easy for me to tell other people to spend their money. I find it easy to make that intellectual argument very strongly towards others, but I find it a little bit harder when I have to actually open my wallet and put down some hundred dollar bills on the counter.

I find it a little bit harder to follow through and spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on good tools for my business. But I finally reached the point where I could see that it was slowing me down and I needed to upgrade the computer. The second factor that had been influential for me was Windows 10 and the complete loss of privacy that Windows 10 afforded.

I previously had not had a lot of problems with Windows because it was relatively easy to lock down some of the privacy arrangements, but after they came out with Windows 10, after Cortana was fully integrated, after all of the data started being sent to Microsoft and basically every other publisher, I came to the point where I just said, "This is absurd.

This is obscene and I don't want to do it any longer." So I stayed with Windows 7 for quite a while, but I eventually came to the point where I said, "I can't, in good conscience, I can't participate in this insecure environment. It's wrong for all of my data to be sent back to Microsoft." I just didn't want to participate.

And then the third thing was in the media business, I made a decision that I was going to produce more types of media, especially more video work. And I finally said, "Okay, well if I'm going to do that," because basically everybody in the common advice-giving landscape in the world of media, audio creation, video creation, et cetera, because basically everybody uses Apple, it's very easy for me to get good advice in using Apple.

And I would frequently find a Windows program that would work so-so, but because all of the other podcast producers, all the video creators, because everyone else uses Apple, they just automatically go and say, "Look, here's the Apple solution." A simple example would be a program like ScreenFlow. ScreenFlow is, to my knowledge, a Mac-only application, but it's the program that everybody uses to create great and easy screen recordings on their systems.

And so I would have to go and find some Windows version of that to make things work. And so I came to the point and said, "Well, if I'm going to do more video, do video editing on my computer, it's worth it for me to go ahead and just go ahead and move to Apple." And then the same thing applies in the world of privacy.

If you care about your data security, then it is a lot easier to be more secure in an Apple environment than in a Windows environment. And there are kind of multiple levels to that. Let's talk about data security for a moment. Windows being the big player, there are many more threats that are targeted towards Windows users than towards Apple users.

That ratio used to be much stronger because Apple was such a small market share. So it used to be that most Apple users came to the point where they just said, "Well, I don't have to really worry about viruses. I don't have to worry about attacks to my computer because it's not a PC." And PC users were the ones who had to protect against all those.

That seems to have changed, but it still seems that there are fewer threats for the Apple platform than there are for the Windows platform. But especially if you want to move into the world of being a little bit more secure than the standard user. For example, for a long time, the Mac operating system has allowed you to encrypt your computer with a built-in encryption software.

Now you can do that today. It's called FileVault on the Mac system. You can do that today on Windows. I think the application is BitLocker that works on Windows. But it was a little bit easier to do in the Mac environment. And there are all kinds of little interesting applications that you can use in the Mac environment that could work in the Windows environment.

But most of the people who are interested in greater privacy and security for their computer seem to gravitate towards the Mac. And with that being an increasing concern of mine, I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger. So what I did to try to minimize the problems as far as the transition was to try to get something that was good enough, that was good at what I needed to do, but to get a deal on it.

So what I wound up doing is I was able to buy a scratch and dent laptop that had been returned to a retail store. So it was the latest. It was a good MacBook Pro. But I was able to get a scratched model. Somebody had bought it, had returned it, had some scratches on the bottom of it.

And I saved a significant discount from getting that. As far as the transition, the transition I have found to be very easy. It required the purchase of a few new applications, which was fine. I was intending to buy those applications anyway. And it's required learning a few of the peculiarities with the Apple system.

But it's been relatively simple. There's not a big learning curve. For somebody who is a native or almost native computer user, it's not like you can't figure it out. It's relatively straightforward to set up. So I've had no problem with the productivity in terms of learning how to do it.

It has measurably and massively increased my own personal productivity by just having a faster machine. It takes so much less time for me to process audio files and do some of the work that I do on a daily basis than it did in the Windows environment. However, that's not due to moving over into the Mac OS.

That's due to upgrading the computer. So I could have gotten those exact same things from just simply upgrading into a Windows machine. There wasn't that much of a difference in terms of it's not the Mac OS that made me more productive. It was the upgrade in processor speed, etc.

So I'm very happy with it. Those privacy and kind of just OS security features are valuable enough to me that I'm happy with it. However, I do think that I'm going to move on to at some point in the coming years, I think I'm going to move on from the Apple ecosystem and go ahead and upgrade my own skills and move into the Linux system in the future.

What I find deeply frustrating is how everybody wants my data. It used to be, in my understanding, it used to be that the Windows platform was a little bit stronger. Sorry, was the worst and Apple was much superior. But now I can't open up my computer without again and again Apple wanting more of my stuff, wanting me to integrate my phone in my computer, wanting me to connect and send back all this stuff to the home office.

I can't download an application from the App Store. I can't install something from the App Store without being totally verified through the whole system. I think that's just unacceptable with the increasing risk of hacking, with the increasing risk to data security, with the constant and never-ending breaches that we're all engaged in just again and again.

I'm coming to the point where I'm fed up with it. What I've realized is I'm not going to complain about it. I just need to upgrade my own technical skills and move into the future. I guess I left the 80% and moved into the 20% with the move to Mac.

Now I guess I'm going to move into the 1.1% of the computing population at some point moving on to Linux. That's the direction that I'm going. I've been happy with it. It's been really good, but I'm probably not going to stick around too long with some of the changes even that Apple is making from the perspective of privacy and security.

Awesome. Thank you, Joshua, for taking that. You made a point earlier in your talk that talking about investing in productivity tools, I wish that I just recently made the change from being a standard W2 employee to being a business owner. That's one thing that I wish I would have known as an employee because I think most of the times whatever company we work for, we just get whatever productivity tools they have.

There are so many tools out there that come in at very low cost that help increase your productivity so much that I even think as looking, even if you look into it from a personal employee standpoint and you can't "ride it off" or whatever, I still think it's worth your time to even look into that.

That's something I wish that I would have paid more attention to, but thank you so much, Joshua, for answering that. I've been quite curious in making that transition because you hit a great point too halfway through the talk or another great point that it is difficult when you actually go to look for tutorials and the moment that you say that it's in a Mac environment, you have to "Okay, I can't pay attention to this.

I've got to go find something else." From a creative standpoint, it does seem like most of the tutorials are in the Mac world, but thank you so much for answering my question. It seems as though the thing that finally got me is anytime you switch platforms, you say, "Well, what am I going to lose?

Am I going to lose the ability to run an application that matters?" Some people will lose that. For example, there are Windows applications that are required in order for you to function. If that's the case, if you are in a situation where you have to use that platform, then you better stick with the Windows.

But basically, I came to—and the same thing with Apple. There are programs that only work in the Apple ecosystem. But the advantage that's been around for at least the last decade—I'm no Mac expert—is that if you run a Mac, you can run Windows within that and you can run Windows applications.

To my knowledge, that's not possible in the other direction or at least it wasn't in years past. You can usually do that and you can move over into Mac and still retain some of your Windows options. I haven't needed to actually do that. I thought I was going to go ahead and set up Windows, but there hasn't been a single application that I haven't found a superior option for in the Mac environment.

Back to tools, I know that it does make a big difference and it's hard to swallow it, but if you actually look at it, in the early years of a career especially, investing in tools is perhaps the best investment that an individual can make. Because if you buy a $500 tool that allows you to produce an extra $100 per week of output, your return on investment of that over the course of a year is huge.

It's absolutely massive. So if you think about it in terms of—I like to use the example of somebody who is a tradesperson where their acquisition of tools is fundamental to their work. Somebody is a mechanic on vehicles or they're a carpenter or they're a specialized type of construction person.

In this situation, the tools are required in order for you to do your job and they're one of the best investments in the early years because they speed things up. Now it's harder for me to look at my computer and see in it the value that a specialized set of wrenches can make for an automobile mechanic or a really great set of saws and specialized tools would be for a construction worker, but it is exactly the same thing.

And it's one of those things that should be done early because it leads to big impacts in the short term that will create more productivity down the road. And the earlier you invest in those, the more you can enjoy them and the longer that it'll work. So I recommend it and keep in touch.

Ask me that in a couple of years and we'll see if I actually make the transition to Linux. Matthew, you got another question? We'll come back to that at the end of the show. Zach, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. How can I serve you today, sir? ZACHARY LITMAN: Thanks.

So I have a blog about CLEP and studying for CLEP exams and I haven't done much to work on it, but I'm getting a lot of emails from people, new subscribers, comments, and all sorts of questions. So I'm not doing that much, so I'm kind of wondering, like, people seem hungry for this, so what should I be doing to take advantage of this?

DAVE SMITH: Zach, I mentioned you on last week's show. Did you hear that? ZACHARY LITMAN: Yeah, I heard that. I did. That was so cool. DAVE SMITH: Yeah. So just for a little bit of background for new listeners, Zach has been a longtime listener to Radical Personal Finance. I think I've recorded two episodes based upon your email questions and you wrote in to me about the question of saying, "I'm a 13-year-old young man.

What tips for success would you have?" And I talked about how I would use that foundation and encourage you to build towards financial independence by about the age of 30. And a primary component of that that I recommended to you was to focus on your education, on building education, and on doing it in an intelligent way.

And so as a component of that, you decided to work and to build towards trying to achieve your bachelor's degree by the age of 18, primarily through distance learning. And this is doable for you because you are educated at home. And so you've been writing about that. And what's your website about that, Zach?

What's the URL, please? ZACHARY LITOWSKI: bachelorsby18.wordpress.com. DAVE SMITH: Great. So bachelorsby18.wordpress.com. And there, you're talking about you're chronicling your journey and you're laying out the approach that you're taking towards that goal. So the goal is to finish an accredited bachelor's degree by the age of 18 with a total amount of money spent on it of about $10,000.

So that's the background for new readers. So you're starting to get a little bit of traction. You're writing about this publicly. And the question is, how do you grow it? Is that right? ZACHARY LITOWSKI: Yeah, exactly. DAVE SMITH: Right. So the king in the world of the internet, the key thing to always focus on is service and just simply providing something that is useful and helpful for people.

There are all kinds of-- I don't like the word tricks. Let me use the word tactics and techniques that can be applied to decent content to make it better. You will become familiar with terms like search engine optimization and different approaches to that. Here's my analysis of those circumstances.

It is possible to use techniques such as modern search engine optimization techniques to market a mediocre site and to draw a lot of people to it. And there are some approaches where that really makes a difference. But at the end of the day, it's more satisfying and easier just to produce something that's good.

And if you'll produce something that is good and that is useful and that serves people, in time, the internet works. People will find it, and they'll refer people to it. And that's basically-- that gives you a good strength where you know that if it's good, it'll stand through as search engines change, as the way people use the internet changes.

It will go on over time. It'll actually work. So I've come to the conviction that if I could only focus on one thing or the other, I'm going to focus on trying to produce something that's fundamentally valuable. And if I produce something that's fundamentally valuable, each person that finds it valuable will share that.

That's the approach I've taken with radical personal finance. I've just said, I'm going to focus on doing the very best that I can and let my audience help me by publicizing it. And that has worked. Now, I don't think it should be done all of one or the other.

And that's one mistake, because I've erred too much in my own work. I've erred too much on just trying to produce something that's good and not enough on publicizing it. But the best course is just to focus on providing something that's good. And so when you want to do that, you've got to focus on who am I trying to serve and what is my purpose.

And the best way that I know to do that is to teach, is to focus on teaching. And so if you are, you're currently 14 years old and you're working on this goal of bachelor's degree by 18, what I would recommend is the easiest and the best thing to do is focus on teaching somebody who's just a little bit behind you.

So pretend that you're speaking to your 10-year-old brother and you're trying to say, "Okay, with my 10-year-old brother, what would I encourage them to be doing?" And that way, you don't have to worry about trying to reach somebody who's old. So for example, you at 14 years old, if you set out and say, "My goal is to write to a 65-year-old grandfather and to try to teach that 65-year-old grandfather what they should do with their grandson," that's going to be hard for you to do.

But if you'll just focus on teaching somebody who's just a little bit behind you, a 10-year-old, a 12-year-old, and share with them what you're learning and give your advice to them, what happens is the 10 and 12-year-old will find you, the 35-year-old parent of the 10 and 12-year-old will find you, and the 65-year-old grandparent will find you.

So all three of those will find you and they'll appreciate the simplicity. So the first thing that I would focus on is, one, serving somebody. And the easiest way to do that is just to imagine somebody, a sibling, a friend who's two years behind you, three years behind you, something like that, and to teach them what you're learning.

And not to put on airs about it, but just to teach them what you're learning. And so when you write an article, let's say that you are working on CLEP exams. A CLEP exam is an exam that you can sign up to take, which will allow you to basically quiz out of a semester of school.

Well, there are, how many CLEP exams are there available, Zach? 33, I think. Okay, so there are 33 CLEP exams. So if you think about a concept like, okay, there are 33 CLEP exams, and if you're trying to give advice to somebody who is two years behind you, then you would write an article and you would say, "Here are the 33 CLEP exams," and you would explain what they are.

And then you would analyze those 33 exams and you would say, "How many of these 33 exams should be taken or could be taken?" And you would perhaps rank them in order of easiest to hardest, and you would explain how to intelligently proceed through them. You would investigate any scheduling and say, "If you're going to take these at 14 years old, if you're going to start at 14, you would need to take these exams in your 14th year, in your 15th year, in your 16th year, you take these," and you lay those things out.

And so basically what you do is you answer your questions, but you phrase them in terms of advice to somebody else. And I've found that to be one of the most effective ways for you to learn is by teaching. If you study educational philosophy, one of the things that I feel like we've really lost is the value of the so-called one-room schoolhouse.

If you were to go back 200 years and look at how students studied, they studied in the one-room schoolhouse, and again, that's kind of proverbial one-room schoolhouse. It was literal in some contexts, but it wasn't literal in others. And the idea was that you had, instead of having age-segregated learning where the 10-year-olds are put with the 10-year-olds and the 12-year-olds are put with the 12-year-olds, you had age-integrated learning where you had older children and younger children working together.

This is the way it was in my family's schoolhouse when I was growing up. I was the youngest of seven children, and we were educated at home, which meant, and my mom was a trained teacher in the normal teacher education systems, and so she ran her homeschool in a very structured way.

She would have her desk. We all had our own desks, but it meant that I could hear what was happening with the older students and they could hear what was happening with me. If I'm studying phonics to learn how to read, one of my older siblings would have also been studying biology at a high school level.

And the best way to do this in the way that it was done previously is once somebody passed through, let's say, the third grade, they would also, as part of their work, they would help somebody who was in second grade or first grade do their reading. And I think this is really valuable as an educational philosophy because it helps to cement the knowledge and the learning.

I forget the numbers off the top of my head, but there are statistics that educational researchers and philosophers have used that identify the amount of learning, amount of things you retain if you read, the amount that you retain if you speak, or sorry, if you listen, and the amount that you retain if you teach.

And the highest way to retain is by teaching. And so in any context, anything that you want to learn, one of the best ways to do this is to teach it. I've used the advice of in studying for something that if you want to study for something, go and teach it to others, or if you don't have that opportunity, teach it to the wall.

So if you're going to take an exam for, let's say, you're going to sit for the CLEP exam in chemistry. Well, let's say that chemistry is a difficult subject for you. One of the best ways that you can handle that and learn it is to say, "I'm going to study this chapter of my CLEP preparation textbook.

I'm going to learn this about chemistry, and then I'm just going to, in the privacy of my bedroom, I'm going to stand up and I'm going to deliver a short lecture on what this chapter speaks about." And if you can close the book and just with a few written notes, lecture that chapter to the wall, you will cement that learning in your brain in a much deeper way, and you can be confident that you've mastered the material.

So when you go and sit for the actual exam, you'll find it very easy to do. So philosophically, this is one of the most important things of ways to learn is by teaching. You can do it individually like that, lecturing to the wall in your bedroom. You can do it in writing.

You can do this in really any subject. But what's happened in... The reason I'm going on about this is because we've lost this in much of modern US-American systems. What we do is instead of expecting others to teach, we expect each person just to sit and learn from an expert.

So instead of everybody interacting with their fellow learners, we constantly look to experts. And this is a problem in education. It results in one teacher lecturing to 20 to 100 students, but those 20 to 100 students don't really grasp the material, most of them, because they're not involved really in teaching it to others.

It results in challenges in business where everyone's always looking to the expert. It results in a collapse in churches. If you look at the way that many modern US-American churches function, it's one person standing and lecturing to hundreds of people, and those hundreds of people are passive participants... Or sorry, passive onlookers instead of being active participants because they're not involved in teaching others.

And this leads to a very weak, structured society. So let me bring it back to your specific question. Focus on teaching the things that you're trying to learn. And that's essentially what a good writing assignment is. And what I would recommend to you is that you view your blog as an outlet for your writing, as an outlet for you to say, "What question do I have?" One of the most valuable ways that you can train yourself throughout your lifetime is to make a habit of journaling.

And many people look at journaling in a flawed way. I used to try to sit down and say, "Dear diary, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's what happened today." And I've never in my life been able to keep that kind of journal. It has never been interesting to me. And I've had a dozen times where I would say, "I'm going to journal every day," and I just didn't have anything interesting to say.

Same. Right. And it's not to say that that's not important. In my own family, one of my sisters died when she was 14 years old. And one of the things that we always appreciated is that she was a faithful and committed personal journaler. So when she died, we had a stack of her notebooks for, I don't know how many years, but many years, up to the time when she was 14.

And it was a great joy to be able to read those journals and get to know who she was based upon her dear diary entries. And so when I was growing up, knowing the value of those journals to my family, I tried to do that. I just never did it.

Here's what I've learned, is that I can journal well if I tackle a problem. And so I learned to just say, "Write at the top of a page what the problem is that I'm working on. And then write below that what my solutions are." And that's basically one of the functions that a blog can be.

And that's what my podcast is. Frequently I'll choose a topic and I'll say, "Here's my topic. Here's my premise." And then I'll prepare the show notes in advance that are essentially me talking through the problem and trying to prove or disprove my premise or my thesis. And so if you approach your blog in that way, you'll produce valuable, helpful content.

It'll be most helpful to you if nobody reads, but it will have the side benefit of helping others. And I think if you do that consistently and effectively, that'll cement the foundation for your platform to grow. And then after you have that habit, then you can come back and say, "Well, what else can I do to share that with others?" The short answer is you just interact and make friends with others online and you say, "Here's what I'm doing." And then if you read a question that somebody has, instead of responding to it there on their website or writing them an email, you write it with your own public answer to that question.

And what I encourage you, Zach, is don't be scared of the question. So for example, if you are trying to... If you're focused on earning a bachelor's degree by the age of 18, you should think about the problems with that plan and you should write about them. So you should say, "Well, what's the downside if I am able to successfully accomplish my goal of earning a bachelor's degree by the age of 18 through distance learning for a total of $10,000?" Then you should then say, "What am I giving up by doing this?" And you should write about that.

And that's a good, valuable public blog post that you can share with others. And what you'll learn is that as you share these ideas in public, and what I would encourage you, Zach, at 14, is I would encourage you to be very cautious, to keep your public sharing of ideas focused on a specific topic, such as bachelor's by 18, rather than things that are very personal.

Because the internet can be a wonderful place, but it can also be a very dangerous place. But if you write about the problems of gaining a degree by distance study at 18 and what you're giving up by not going to the local government college from 18 to 22, then you'll start to get comments and feedback from your listeners and they'll ask good questions.

And then you can take that, develop it into the next question, develop it into the next point of contact. And the person who will win from that approach is you. Your listeners will benefit, but the one who wins the most will be you. Wow, thanks. Any follow-up questions or is that enough for today?

I think that's it, but it's really cool because as I've been writing on there, I get emails from people who are like, "Thanks, this is so helpful. I see your blog everywhere." Or someone on the forum was like, "I'd like to thank Zach for helping me pass this exam." So it's just cool to be already seeing people passing exams from the blog.

My operating mindset is very simple. I believe that these words are absolutely true. Jesus said this, "The greatest among you will be the servant of all." And if you just simply focus on serving, as Jesus taught, being a servant to all, if you focus on serving, everything works out.

And a good writer, I think, focuses on serving their audience. It's hard to hit that 100% because you don't know whether what you're saying does serve the audience or not. And I have found that to be very challenging in my work. You don't know in advance if what you're doing is serving.

But if you just have that servant's heart and you maintain that attitude of saying, "How can I be of service?" If you do that, that will be helpful to other people. And as one of my favorite quotes by Zig Ziglar, as he rephrased what Jesus said in this way, he said, "You can have everything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want." That's just a rephrasing of what Jesus taught, that the greatest among you must be the servant of all.

If you keep that philosophy, what you'll see is it's really true. At every stage, the person who serves the most people is the one who gains the most benefits. And you can see this work out on the macro scale. Even in capitalism, you can see it work out in basically every area of our society.

A company that serves the most customers effectively is a company that, in a free market system, absent government coercion, that's a company that will, over the long term, be built on a strong foundation. So just focus on serving, and what you'll find, I think, is that everything becomes simpler and you always have a foundation to go back to.

Andy in Indiana, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. How can I serve you today, sir? Hi, Joshua. Thank you for taking my call. I really appreciate this opportunity to call in and get some advice. I have a young friend of mine who is in an excellent financial position, and I've kind of wanted to get your input on if there was anything special you'd recommend that he be doing at this stage.

So he's 18, graduated from high school, has a job with a local company where they will pay for his college education, basically whatever he wants to do that's related to the work that they do, which he wants to get an engineering degree, which is related, up to $7,000 a year as long as he's an employee.

And then he also is working full-time with them, making about $40,000 a year, and is able to live with his parents. So I guess kind of the Mr. Money Mustache thing would be just throw it all in a 401(k) and a Vanguard account, and I wondered if you had any more suggestions for somebody that has that kind of income and low expenses.

What a phenomenal situation to be in. How did he find... Do you know anything about the background? How he found this job? What he did to come to his boss's approval? Were they willing to approve this tremendous situation he's in? I actually work for the same company. I'm actually finishing the same apprenticeship program he's in.

I'm just quite a bit older. The company across the board will pay for any of their employees to get education. That's just a standard employee benefit. And then the program he's in is an apprenticeship where he's apprenticing as a drafter. So he does CAD drawing for this engineering company.

And then four years of on-the-job training, certain educational requirements that they have, which are part of a Bachelor's of Engineering degree, and then you work full-time in that apprenticeship. That is wonderful. If I could just wave my hands and rearrange the US-American culture without forcing people into a certain path, but rather encourage just a complete transformation of the normal process, what you're describing is, in my mind, ideal.

It's what I hope that my children would be able to find and develop in the future. I see so many benefits in what you're describing. Let me just quickly enumerate those before answering your advice, just from the philosophical perspective. Well, there are a few major problems that I see that face young men and women in this delicate transitional age, 18, 16, 19, 20.

It's an age at which there are a lot of questions, and it's an age at which either major mistakes can be made or major benefits can be had. If you look at them and analyze them, they fall into a few key areas. And so let's talk them through. One would be educational, in terms of what's the education that people are getting.

Our current society has big questions about it. It's really messed up in the way that we approach education, because education usually lacks context and meaning. If a young man or woman is not trained in, is not active in a specific area, they usually just go based upon, "Well, what sounds fun to me?

What job would sound interesting? What career sounds fun?" And you see kind of an increasing aimlessness amongst young men and young women, especially as it relates to college. Frequently, people will be undeclared in their major, "I'm just kind of exploring things." But exploring things in a college class can be either helpful or non-helpful.

For your college career to be based upon exploration can be unhelpful. But if you have a career that's established and defined in purpose, then taking a little bit of exploration with things that interest you and enjoying the benefit of learning at that age can be really helpful. But educationally, there's a lot more value in study if it's connected to a career, if it's connected to a purpose.

And so for somebody who is currently working and is apprenticed in an engineering firm, they're a junior drafter and they're learning on the job, that gives them the ability in their formal studies to apply what they're studying and actually have context and reason for it. And in the way that our culture is structured, where many firms don't want to work with people who are students while they're in school, really the traditional area of this was agriculture, where a farmer would send his son off to agriculture school.

Well, at least he could come home and say, "Dad, here's what I'm learning," and they could start to apply the different techniques. But that should be in most businesses. So I love the apprentice model from an educational perspective because it allows there to be meaning and context with learning as related to the job.

So the job gains because the firm is getting the benefit of the current academic knowledge and the student gains because they see meaning and application in what they're learning. One of my biggest regrets about my personal degree, my final, my cumulative bachelor's degree was in international business. I never found any relevance in studying business.

It was always intellectual knowledge that didn't have any context. But when I got my master's degree in financial planning, I used that information every day. And for me, the educational balance of my bachelor's degree and my master's degree were night and day in terms of their impact on me.

The second, of course, is financial. And what you described, I really love because instead of being an unproductive leech where the only benefit that a young man has here in this context is to spend money, spend money, spend money, then there's actually an earning component as well. So they can retain that self-worth of actually earning and being productive while also learning.

And because they're earning, it gives a balance to their ability to interact normally financially with the world. If you take somebody totally out of the workforce and they have no income, it leads to challenges of how do you actually structure your life? How much money can you afford? How much money can you not afford?

When I was in college, one of the great mistakes I made, my first year I worked my way through, but most of my work was spent paying for tuition. My second year, I stopped working and I started borrowing. But what happened was because I was borrowing, I kind of felt like, "Well, it's no big deal.

When I graduate from college, I'm going to have this great high-paying job, so I might as well just spend as much money now as it takes for me to enjoy my life." And so I spent, I dramatically overspent because I was spending free money, money that I got on student loans.

And so if you can avoid that and you have somebody that's earning, then they're able to still put constraints on their budget and have the benefit, of course, of all of the financial benefits, which we'll get to, of their situation. And then the third thing is just the moral aspect of a young man's life.

It's very, very bad and destructive for young men and women to have 168 hours a week available to them, of which only perhaps 12 to 18 hours are committed in class. That leads to so much free time and it's fundamentally destructive to most or many students' lives, where it leads to idleness, it leads to bad choices, it leads to just a very, very bad indulgence of hedonism frequently, which leads to moral rot.

And so one of the most important things, I think, for young men and women is to maintain themselves very busy. And I find for myself that if I put in structure for myself, a busy structure, it helps me to stay out of the ditch, it helps me to keep on the straight and narrow.

If I remove those time constraints, if I remove that busy structure to my life, then it's very easy for me to wind up in a ditch. So I love everything that you've said without my actually answering your question yet. I love what you're describing, Andy. I did think, Joshua, while you were speaking, one comment that you asked about how he was able to get into that position.

And I think it may be helpful to put this to mention, like the job that he has is not a blue-collar job, or I mean, sorry, it's not a white-collar job. It's not a guy who's doing an engineering job. He's in a union apprenticeship that if he does everything right and works really hard in 15 years, he'll top out making $70,000, $75,000 a year.

And almost everybody in that program, because I'm actually in the same union program at the moment myself, is from a blue-collar background, has no aspirations to get a college degree, has no aspirations to move up within the company. They just are intending to top out in that union job, which is a very good job, don't get me wrong, but where he's looking to maybe get an engineering degree and move on, he will have to leave the union.

So to get somebody from a white-collar background looking for a good job in this company, I very much doubt any of them would actually look at the program that he's in. Usually you need somebody younger to take advantage of that, but there are so many opportunities right now for people to get great jobs, earning good amounts of money if they're willing to work and if they're willing to get their hands dirty in the nature of their business.

And so as far as career advice, what I would say is basically the perfect approach for somebody like him is one, do good work and keep your job and learn on the job and study whatever's necessary on the job so that you actually can just excel at the requirements of your work.

Two, get the engineering degree, because an engineering degree is a hard science degree, which is very valuable in the marketplace. It's valuable because it imparts practical tools and it separates and sets apart the student from somebody who's pursuing some random degree in sociology or communications theory or something that doesn't have very much practical application.

Engineering has a basic corpus of academic knowledge that can be applied in various specialties, and so that sets him apart in terms of his basic, the value of that education. Number three is I would do self-study in business, and the best recommendation I would have for him would be pick up Josh Kaufman's book, The Personal MBA, and read that book as just a pithy, hardcore summary of basic business concepts, and then in personal reading, work through his suggested book list of the Personal MBA book list.

And if I were him, I would probably, after finishing the MBA degree, I would go ahead and take advantage of my educational velocity and just finish some distance learning MBA. There are a number of MBA programs that can be done entirely through distance learning without interfering with the day-to-day career, and they're inexpensive to get, but an engineer with an MBA is a very marketable individual in the job marketplace.

That would be kind of my suggestion for him. Any comment on that before I go on to financial planning? No, that sounds like a great plan. So here would be my comments on financial planning. We're in the world of, is there anything wrong with this plan, for example? Is there anything wrong with this young man putting the majority of his investments into the Vanguard Total Money Index Fund, as my friend Jim Collins would recommend?

No, there's nothing wrong with that. Is there anything wrong with this young man buying a house and living in it or renting it out? No, there's nothing wrong with it. So the first thing we would need to do is identify what are his interests and what's his natural bent?

What is he naturally drawn to? That would be important, because in terms of identifying what's the right move for his money, he can't do that without knowledge of who he is. If he's a handy guy, he's working in a blue collar trade, and he's a handy guy and he has a good amount of money, he could be a great fit for buying a semi-dilapidated duplex, triplex, quadruplex, moving into one bedroom of a quadplex, renting out the other three units and one or two of the bedrooms in his own personal unit.

That could be a tremendous use of his money. He could put himself in a situation where a couple years from now he strokes a check for $150,000 of cash and buys that, and it would be a tremendous use of his money. But if he has no interest in real estate, has no desire to learn about how to do it, then that's probably not a good move.

If he's entirely interested in his corporate career, it's not bad for him to put all his money in a total stock market index fund and just to focus on his corporate career. That's a really simple, easy process. On the other hand, if he has interest in entrepreneurship, he may be able to use his engineering degree to get in with maybe somebody else that he meets and they want to start a new company.

In that case, he finds some outlet for the money in his personal life. You can't really give good financial advice without the context of the individual nature of the investor or the individual nature of the person. Some people are well-suited to stock market investing. They have nerves of steel.

They're knowledgeable about it. They're not going to sell when the market dips. They're not going to get greedy when Bitcoin is shooting off and the S&P 500 is stagnant. They're good fits for the stock market. Some people are good fits for some unique trading strategies within the market. They enjoy it.

They study it. They want to spend their time doing it. Some people are not good temperamental fits for that, and they're really best at buying local houses and fixing them up. You have to know about the investor individually. Let me give you the things I do think are important.

Number one, I think the first thing for a young man to focus on is, to the best degree that he knows, to choose location. In the current situation, he's able to live with his parents and he has a great job and a great college. He probably shouldn't make any changes.

That's the perfect scenario in my opinion. But if he does want to live in a different location for some reason, it's best to make those transitions as early in life as possible because locational stability is very valuable, but it has to be started at an early age. But the earlier it starts, the better.

A 50-year-old who's been in a local community for 30 years and who runs a local business and who's been active in the local community will have a much stronger base to their life than a 50-year-old who just moved into the town two years prior. If there's any uncertainty about location, then the person should choose that as clearly as they know.

With regard to money, the first focus with money should be to save and to establish for that location, to save and to figure out what needs to be done to be in that location. The second thing is career choice. What career choice is available to them? If somebody is not well-established in a particular career, then they should focus on exploring that career.

Now, it sounds like he's got a good start, but there may be more things to do with money related to that career in the days to come. And so if he needs to pay for his own MBA or if he needs to pay for something outside of what's provided for this job, he should be available and aware of it and have money saved for that goal and for that benefit.

The third thing is personal relationships. So one of the best focuses of his time should be into establishing his personal relationships and making sure that he makes few decisions without having those big things squared away. I've come to the conviction through personal experience and through study that to encourage somebody to invest in any kind of outside investment until they have the basic structure of their life established is probably unwise.

And I don't know any way to prove any hard numbers, but I'll tell you the two that I've shared on the show that I think are really important. The numbers are $10,000 and $100,000. The first goal, I don't think any investment should be made until a young man or woman has $10,000 cash in the bank and is debt free.

If you have $10,000 cash in the bank and you're debt free, there is almost no life decision that you couldn't make. You can move across the country, you can change jobs, you can change careers. You'll be scrambling a little bit. $10,000 might only cover your income for a few months, but you can do that if you're $10,000 and debt free.

So that should be his first goal. The better goal, I think, is $100,000 and debt free. If you have $100,000 of cash in the bank and you're debt free, there's no limit on your ability to marry. There's no limit on your ability to buy property, to start businesses, to change location, anything.

And in terms of the strength, the emotional strength that somebody has by having $100,000 in the bank being debt free, I don't think you can match that with the fact of somebody being having the money in a mutual fund or having the money in real estate or really anything.

So those would be my first pieces of advice to him. Clarify where he wants to live, the career that he wants to be involved in, and what the prospects are for his marriage relationships. Set a clear goal of building the first $10,000 in the bank and then $100,000 in the bank and debt free.

And then once those goals are met, to apply that diligence to figuring out what the path to financial independence is going to be. And here I'd recommend episode 460 of the show, which I did, which was called How to Decide What to Invest In, which walks somebody through that thinking process to say, "Okay, I've got this base, this foundation.

Now where do I go?" In the early years, I made the mistake of following basic financial planning books, which said, "Put all your money in a Roth IRA, put all your money into mutual funds." And I didn't enjoy the stability of life that I would have if somebody had just told me, "First $10,000, then $100,000 in the bank." And now in my early 30s with a young family, I wish I had followed a different path.

Because although I made a little bit of money on stocks and although I made a little bit of money on various other investments, the emotional and life security gained by having money in the bank and being debt free, those are things that I would not trade for a slightly higher rate of return in stocks at this stage of life.

I'm against basically all of financial advice in that, but it has been a source of great satisfaction and peace to me to go against it. And all I can do is speak from experience and from a little bit of analysis. Those would be my thoughts, Andy. So this is a rough map in my head with what he's able to save of $1,500 or $2,000 a month.

Would you recommend he basically puts that all in a savings account in the bank for the next four or five years until he's got $100,000? Am I understanding that correctly? Basically yes. And here's where I think it is valuable to say, is this a hard and fast rule? No, I don't think so.

So what could I imagine in terms of, let's say, fast forward a year. Because if he doesn't have, absolutely it should be $10,000 in the bank. Every young man or woman should maintain $10,000 in cash in an emergency fund as quickly as they can. But there could come a point where, let's say, two years from now he realizes that this company, although it's a great deal and he's enjoying it now, two years from now he realizes this company and this industry is not for him.

Well, he should cut bait and move on to the next thing that might be for him. He should go explore that as quickly as possible. And just because they'll pay him an extra $7,000 for tuition doesn't mean he should stay there if he realizes that the career is not for him.

Time's a wasting. He may need to go and try something else and something different. So I wouldn't stick with the career and stick with the college plan just so I could get to the financial goal. I would say, let me fix that because that's prior to the financial goal.

So another example would be, let's say that he takes an interest in something like real estate investing. Well, I wouldn't encourage him to go out and buy a house if he doesn't have $10,000 in the bank. But let's say, fast forward two years and he's got $35,000 in the bank.

And he and his dad are looking around. They find a property and he's studied. He's been reading his books, et cetera. And he's figured out, listen, here's what I can do. Dad will lend me $20,000. I've got $20,000 here. We'll make a $40,000 down payment and the owner will hold the financing.

This would be a great place. I'll move in there and I'll put a bunch of buddies from college in the other units. Then I wouldn't say that he has to wait to make that decision until he has $100,000 in the bank. But I would caution him to do it too fast.

And that's where I don't know how to put more – I don't know how to make a hard line. I don't think a hard line should be drawn. It's a matter of what's the current goal. Same thing with like let's say that he meets a girl and he wants to get married.

He should get married. He shouldn't wait on saving until I have $100,000 in the bank. If he decides, hey, this is a girl I want to marry, he should marry. And so maybe he takes money from his savings to buy a ring, pay for a wedding, have a nice honeymoon, whatever they decide is important.

That's more important than reaching the $100,000 goal. But conceptually I'd want to move towards that foundation as quickly as possible over time. But not put significant assets into Roth or 401(k) or other mutual funds until you've got that. So I wouldn't focus heavily on it. And here's where you get into a little bit of nuance, which is hard.

If his company has a 401(k) and if he gets a match on the money, then I think that would be worth participating in up to the match. That's fine. That's usually a small amount of money and that's relatively meaningless. Using a Roth IRA, should he put money in a Roth IRA?

I think so. I don't see any reason not to. If he puts $5,000 into a Roth IRA, there's no problem. There are no penalties for him to withdraw his original contributions at any time. And so I would encourage him to use a Roth IRA. But I would be slow to invest all the money into stocks until I really had built up savings.

And so there's nothing wrong with those things. I'm trying to lay out what I see as the big picture goal. And then those just simple tactics come in. Yeah, that's fine. Use a Roth IRA. Use a 401(k) if you have it. I don't have any problem with that. What I have a problem with, let me clarify.

What I have a problem with is focusing first and foremost on the Roth IRA as a way of leading to wealth rather than focusing on life stability because that's what I did and I regret. When I was 18 years old, I had read a book. I read various books and they said, "Put money in a Roth IRA." And so on my 18th birthday, I sat down.

I filled out the paperwork. Of course, I could have done before 18, but for me, that 18th birthday was just a day that I did. So I filled out a paperwork for a Roth IRA. I opened a local mutual fund and I started putting, I think, a couple hundred dollars a month into the mutual fund with a mutual fund company in the Roth IRA.

The problem was I didn't have a purpose for that beyond retirement and retirement didn't matter to me. What I came to realize was that by viewing that as retirement, yeah, it was fine that I saved up some money and I have some money in a Roth IRA. And yes, I could go and take the money out and use it for my own personal expenses.

But what I missed by focusing only on age 65 retirement, I missed having the money available for myself to make intelligent career choices, to make intelligent choices with my marriage and having a clear financial goals early on in my marriage. I missed having the foundation to pursue some personal things that I could have pursued.

Now I look back and I realize a few different occasions where I was feeling pinched financially, but I wasn't going to touch the money in the Roth IRA because once I put it in, I'm going to leave it alone. There were times at which I should have used gaps in my life to further my long-term career ambitions instead of just having money in a Roth IRA.

That was a very verbose way of answering the question, but that's what I want to protect young people from. I want to teach young people how to use money, but to use it not just for this ultimate goal of till 65. I want them to apply that focus and to adjust it not from 65, but to apply it to now, which will lead to 65 working well.

I was very disciplined about putting money in a mutual fund for retirement because I knew how compound interest charts worked. But what I found is that just because I could look at the compound interest chart and see, "Well, look, I'm going to be so much richer at 65 because I started at 18," I made a lot of mistakes from 18 to 20, till now.

I'm not immune to mistakes, but I made a lot of mistakes during that 18 to 25-year timeline that I now regret. I wish I had done things differently knowing what I now know. That's my answer. All right. Thanks, Seth. Thank you. My hope is that he's a learner. The only way I know how to handle those things is to encourage him to be exposed to different ideas and to think carefully about what he's working towards and why, and then go from there.

Matthew, back to you for your final question, which I didn't expect to be so appropriate given that previous call. But go ahead with your second question for today's show, please. Absolutely. The one question that I run into all the time when I'm reading a new blog or a new book, and I continually find myself asking, "Who has had a significant influence on the author's life while I'm reading?" Now you can typically find out after reading a little bit of their writing, but it never is really explicitly stated by the author.

Also know that most people have thousands of different influencers that have shaped the way that they think. However, with the Pareto principle, there are only a few influencers that make up the 80%. My question is, who would be the top five people that have had the most influence on your life?

I don't know if five is the right number, so feel free to choose three or ten or whatever works out better for you. So here, it's a good question, and it lines perfectly with what I just went through on the previous call. Let me lay out five, because of course we all have hundreds, and I could trace things that I appreciate about all kinds of people.

One thing I am good at is I'm good at reading people that I disagree with and trying to just learn just a little bit and gain from that. I don't think that anyone... I don't have a monopoly on wisdom, and so I try to plunder the Egyptians and take anything I can from anywhere I can, take wisdom and insight from anywhere.

And I also think that it's hard to overstate the importance of timing. A lot of people's influences come down to the time at which they're exposed to something or to somebody. And so I'll restrict this to finances, but explain just a few influences. So the first, and I'll do this chronologically in terms of my own thinking.

Some of my early influences on wealth and kind of wealth building were get-rich-quick gurus. When I was younger and in high school, I wanted to get rich, and of course it's relatively easy to find the get-rich-quick gurus at that stage. And so from the shady ones, I'm going to intentionally avoid naming names, just because I don't wish to...

Well, I'm going to avoid naming names. But from the popular ones at my era, there were a number of gurus that laid out certain things that said, "I'll name... It's not that all bad." So examples from the early days would be Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Robert Kiyosaki was extremely influential.

He came to his height of fame right at the time at which I was paying attention to finances. And so I remember I was with a whole group of peers that were reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It was passed all around everywhere. We were all thinking about, "How do I move into the B or the I quadrant, and how do we get rich with these things?" That led me to the world of real estate gurus.

There were other people as well, the multiple streams of income, Robert Allen, kind of the gurus. I moved into the real estate guru world from randomly going to a seminar and starting to move into that world. And everything was about, "How do you get rich, and how do you get rich quick?" And that was a big, big focus of mine, is how do I get rich, and how do I get rich quick?

And I'm very appreciative of some of the things that I learned from many of those people. But today I look at it, and I realize that I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't know how to spot danger. I didn't know how to spot charlatans who were just seeking to defraud me, and who were painting it as so easy to get rich that I didn't know.

They painted it so easy, and they focused on the lust for wealth rather than the principles that would lead to wealth. I remember this so clearly. When I was in my early years in college, I went to a real estate seminar down in Miami. It was a three-day seminar that I had gone to, and this was a big and very fraudulent industry during that time period.

But I went to this seminar down in Miami, and the presenter of the seminar was a—it was for a Russ Whitney seminar. Russ Whitney's organization was huge at the time. It later went on to collapse. He ran into some legal trouble. I haven't heard—I haven't followed the cases that have come since then.

But it was a presenter in the Russ Whitney seminar world. I remember so clearly, in hindsight now, I can analyze what was done at that seminar, where everything that led was about, "Look at me. Look how rich I am." The presenter came in and looked sharp. He was wearing his beautiful suit and red tie, just the power suit.

He looked sharp. Everything that started the seminar was all about how much money he had. It's printed clearly on my memory, the picture that he showed of his provost or prevo, his big old provost coach, these million-dollar bus motorhomes that he owned, and that he parked in front of the hotel.

His saying at the seminar was, he said, "My driver drives my bus down. The driver stays in the hotel, and I stay in my million-dollar prevo bus because I don't want to stay in the hotel room. I'm more comfortable in my own space." Now I can clearly understand the psychological manipulation that was happening there, because the point of that seminar—it was of moderate cost—was to go on and sell the $30,000 real estate coaching package.

But I didn't see it at the time. I didn't have the filters. I was gullible and naive. I was looking at this, and then they start showing the deals of, "Here's the picture. I bought this house for $60,000, and then I flipped it and fixed it up, and I sold it for $180,000." It's just this ongoing lifestyle salesmanship that really was influential on me.

It was only by the grace of God and the intervention of my dad, who, when I was about to sign myself up for $30,000 on my credit card, to join the real estate coaching, who forcefully put his foot down and said, "Joshua, that is stupid. Don't do it." Thankfully, I listened to him and didn't do it.

I'm so grateful for that, because I went on and watched a number of my friends who pursued it, and two that I've had contact with that went into the real estate business. Both of them went bankrupt. One of them fought his way out of it, and one of them didn't.

It was a difficult time. But there were a bunch of gurus at that time that had an influence on me. The next person that was influential was Dave Ramsey. In the midst of all that guruness and all the get-rich-quick, then I was given by my brother a copy of Dave Ramsey's book, The Total Money Makeover.

I was at the time a finance and accounting major in college. I read the book, and it was a transformative influence on me, because what Ramsey said was, he presented a simple plan. The statement that that book focused heavily on was peace. His first book, or one of his earlier books, was Financial Peace.

He made the point, he said, "If you don't have any payments, how much money do you have? If you didn't have any payments in a month, how much money would you have every month?" At that time, I had put myself deeply into debt with credit cards and student loans, and that statement just really made sense to me.

His plan was so simple that I understood it, and it spurred me to action. To this day, I don't think there's anybody better than Ramsey in his ability to give a simple plan that stirs people to action. I say that after a decade of combating him as a ...

Not a decade, excuse me, that was a wrong timeline. After a decade of influence, I spent six years as a financial advisor, and I was really disgusted with Ramsey during that time, because I would have all kinds of technical arguments with him. I would be upset at the technical financial planning statements he would make about investments and investment returns, or about insurance.

I sold whole life insurance, and he hated hates whole life insurance, and different things like that. Those technical things are relatively meaningless in the grand scheme. He is brilliant at creating a simple plan. In my earlier years as a financial advisor, I thought, "Well, the technical argument is the key one." Like in the previous call, "Well, it's all about putting money in the Roth IRA." No, it's not.

If you just put some structure in place, you can use a Roth or not use a Roth, but that's not the thing. His baby steps were so influential in my life. They led to my getting out of debt, which was really important at a certain stage. Without his baby steps, I couldn't have become a financial advisor, because I would have been in debt and not been able to make the lean early years as a financial advisor.

His influence was really, really important. To this day, Ramsey does so much good. If somebody just followed the Ramsey plan, it's hard to see the error in it. It's really hard to see it. The technical side of me wants so much to argue with him and to talk about, "Look, I can make it better, and I can do this trick and that trick." What I've learned is it doesn't so much come down to tactic and technique.

It comes down to behavior. He does so much good. I've wondered at various times if I should go and work or try to go and work with him. I don't have any contact. I met him a few years ago when I was in Nashville and talked with a couple of his team, but I have no contact with his organization.

They do so much good that today, even though I might have a good friendly argument with him in terms of his approach and some of the technical things, he's brilliant. I love how he helps people focus on behavior. If people just followed his plan, there aren't a lot of errors in it.

He was very influential to my financial philosophy. As a financial advisor, in interacting with people, I started to see how the solutions weren't technical. They were behavioral. For a long time, I would buy his books by the case, and I would give them to clients that were in debt that I couldn't afford to help.

They didn't have any money. I couldn't help them, so I just gave them a book and said, "Here, maybe this will help you." The other influence in the financial perspective was Tom Stanley. I'd been aware of Tom Stanley at an earlier age in terms of—I forget the year in which Millionaire Next Door became popular, but it was about the time that I was paying attention to this, maybe a little bit before me.

That was one of the canon of personal finance literature that was influential with me. What I went on to do was I didn't stop with The Millionaire Next Door, but I started to read his technical books. He wrote three books prior to Millionaire Next Door, or I don't remember the timeline, but he wrote three books.

One was called Marketing to the Affluent. One was called Selling to the Affluent. One was called Networking with the Affluent. Those books, as a financial advisor, were helpful to me in seeking to build my—I tried to use them as a platform for my business to try to understand who is the millionaire next door and try to work with those millionaires next door.

In doing that, I came in contact with a lot of millionaires next door. I realized that what I wanted in terms of their wealth or what I wanted in terms of finance, I didn't want to be the ostentatious, flashy real estate guy. I wanted to be the guy who—I think so clearly of a friend of mine.

He was a real estate investor. I've tried and tried to get him on the show. He refuses, but he was a real estate investor. He just basically lived his life in a pair of cargo shorts and a polo shirt and a pair of boat shoes, has a nice yacht, has a nice normal house that he lives in, but he's insanely wealthy.

I know a bunch of these guys that are insanely wealthy and their life and their lifestyle of freedom based upon true frugality and outward frugality, it changed me because I recognized that's really, really valuable. They don't have the baggage of public wealth. Rather, they have the enjoyment of wealth without it coming with any curses.

Usually, they do it in all different businesses. They do it in all different industries, but I learned that from Stanley. Stanley and his profiles of people were really, really impactful. His later work was also really good. I wish that he were still around. It's my regret that I never, although I had a little interaction with him, I really wanted to get him on the show and oh well.

Stanley was helpful to me. Someday soon, I'll do a show. The title is Lifestyles of the Frugal and Obscure because that really is, I believe, transformative. The next person who was influential in terms of a chronological impact for me was a man in Gary North. I stumbled across Gary North in my interest in economics when I was a financial advisor.

This was probably almost a decade ago. I stumbled across his website and I started reading his stuff. Because I was interested in his economic analysis, I became familiar with his work. In reading his work, he would make allusions to things that didn't make sense to me but that I was attracted to.

Specifically, his hardcore writing on the intersection of Christian theology, economics, and personal finance, that that intersection to me was fascinating because I'd always had an interest in economics. I had enjoyed economics classes in college, although I was trained from a mainstream Keynesian perspective, just like most college economic students are.

I'd always had an interest in personal finance, but much of the personal finance work was outside of Christian theology. And then much of the personal finance work in Christian theology was so mediocre that it's just, I had a hard time relating to it. Larry Burkett, for example, was a long-time Christian guy in the world of Christian financial advice.

He did a good job. I'm not accusing him of being mediocre. But it seemed like most of my interest would wind up with secular writers or writers who didn't explicitly appeal to Christianity. And I always felt like there's something more here. There's something deeper. When I read the Bible, it's like there's something that I want to understand a little bit deeper.

But I couldn't find, it was hard for me to access. And it seems like the trouble with reading the Bible and reading any particular verse is you can often find any verse or two that lays out what you want to believe, that appeals to your own confirmation bias. And it's much harder to take it as a whole and say, "Well, what's happening as a whole?" And so I started to learn that from North, and I started to read his economic commentaries.

He wrote, so his background, he started when he was in his early 20s, in his mid-late 70s at this point. But he started writing an economic commentary on the Bible in his mid-20s, and he's worked on it for 50 years. He's written something, I mean, he's written 60 books, something like that.

But he's written a verse-by-verse commentary on the economics of the Bible, and he wrote 30,000 pages to prepare for his ultimate last few books, which he's been writing, which are basically the capstone books, summarizing and synthesizing what he learned from his 50-year study of economics. And his work was very helpful to me philosophically and financially because of various philosophical conflicts I had.

When I was in college, I had socialist professors, I had some conservative professors, but conservatism as a political philosophy has never made sense to me. I can't understand it having a firm foundation. So I had a bunch of socialist professors, but I also started reading in libertarianism. And I didn't know how to interact with these things.

And North wrote extensively on an interaction with Jim Wallace, who is a prominent Christian, a mainstream Protestant Christian who is very prominent in an aspect of Christian theology that's called--not liberation theology--anyway, very prominent in kind of a socialist Christian message. And I always struggled to figure out, how on earth do I integrate that with what I see in scripture as well?

And so North's writing through that was influential to me and helpful to me. I have struggled with a lot of what he has written because he exposed me to a number of things that I disagreed with but couldn't argue against. And I still struggle with that. I've read his recent books on Christian economics, and it's kind of one of those things where I wanted to believe, I want to--my confirmation bias wants me to accept what he says, but I have a hard time embracing it fully for various reasons.

I've been intending for a long time to get him on the show and ask him some of my questions, and I intend to do that if he'll grant the interview. But he was influential for me in a period of time, kind of buttressing my willingness to defend intellectually things that I believe personally and not to shy away from basing everything on a biblical worldview.

It was through North's writings that I wound up being exposed to an aspect of Christian apologetics that was championed by a man named Cornelius Van Till, who defended--he's dead now, but he defended a method of Christian apologetics that is called presuppositional apologetics. And that led me--I'd studied other apologetics methods as well, but it was the work of Cornelius Van Till, which was popularly championed by Greg Bonson before he died, that led me to kind of a deeper interaction with the intellectual presuppositions of political philosophy, and especially as it relates to finance.

So you'll often hear some of that in my discussions, and those are the influences that were helpful to me. Let me move on. Finally, the fifth probably very influential person for me was reading Jacob Lund Fisker's book, Early Retirement Extreme, and his website. Because what Fisker unlocked for me was the mechanics of how financial independence could be achieved without relying on get-rich-quick schemes.

And it's hard to describe how stupid I felt--I've described it in previous shows, but I felt so stupid when here I was, a financial planner, the CFP and a master's degree in financial planning and blah blah blah, I know how to run a financial calculator, and I had never sat down and understood the chart of two financial freedom and financial independence.

And that was basically the final--that was one of the most influential things on me, where I understood the separation of income and expenses and how that related to wealth. And his work was so influential on me. It was also influential because I appreciated his engagement with other topics. His engagement with conservationism, environmentalism and conservationist approaches, his engagement with a bunch of things.

And so Fisker was very influential to me and really, really helpful because he kind of made that final unlocking of things. And so if I were to go back and I were to trace my own--the development of my own personal opinions, those would be the intellectual thought leaders or the intellectual people that had profound influence on me.

One was all the get-rich-quick gurus, two was Dave Ramsey, three was Tom Stanley, four was Gary North, and five was Jacob Lund Fisker. And then that was all buttressed by my academic studies in financial planning, where I was exposed to new areas as well. But those would be the five people that I would trace as having been deeply influential on my own financial philosophy.

Oh, that's--yeah, that's an excellent way of actually thinking about things chronologically too. It's encouraged me to sit down and actually make a note of that as well, to think about it from a chronological perspective. Because if you were thinking about just a top five right off the top of your head, you would not think of the earlier years, because that's obviously--it's shaped and molded who you are today, but it wouldn't be who you would choose if you were telling me, "Here's the five people to go study." You know what I'm saying?

It's an excellent way of looking at it. Right, right. And that chronology, I could trace the various challenges and struggles that I've had in different areas of my own philosophy. Let me give you an example. When I was younger--let's start with the Get Rich Quick guys, Get Rich Quick gurus.

The Get Rich Quick gurus advertise hedonism as their primary advertising mechanism. It's all about, "Look at me, look at the car I drive, look at the house I live in," et cetera. I was raised with Christian parents who were not hedonists. My parents always gave a huge amount of money, gave significantly, and they met the needs of their family, but they never focused on consumption.

But in that normal kind of adolescent and post-adolescent reaction against that, I was interested in getting rich so I can have fancy things. I used to make my lookbook of my $150,000 cars and my mansion on the water and all of that stuff. That was important to me. But then there was a time where, going through college, when I was born again towards the end of college, that my heart totally transformed.

And then at that point in time, I was left struggling, saying, "Well, I don't have this desire anymore to get rich quick, but I don't know what to do." And so that kind of naturally led into some of those other influences. And so it was in understanding that frugality, for example, that I could be very content with frugality, but recognizing that there was no reason in the world why I couldn't earn $2 million a year, live on $50,000 per year, and give away or invest intelligently the other remainder.

There wasn't any reason why I couldn't do that. And that solved for me some major personal, intellectual, and philosophical inconsistencies, things I struggled with to try to figure out, "How does this reconcile? How does this go together?" And so basically, how I have found that I learn is, when I have a question, I start studying the question.

And then all of a sudden, I'll often find somebody who speaks to that question. It may have been somebody that's speaking today, or it may have been somebody that spoke 1,000 years ago. But often, before you ask the question, you didn't need the answer. And so it's once you ask the question that you come along and there's, "Oh, okay, I see this.

Here's how this can work out." And so for me, each of those people, I can identify for you now, post hoc, I can identify the specific struggle I had, the problem that I couldn't fix, that each of those men influenced me in, that helped me to reconcile the seeming contradiction.

Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time today to explain that. And thank you for taking my call. My pleasure. Well, thanks for calling it, and we'll look forward to your questions in the future. Thank you for being a faithful caller to these Friday Q&A shows. I always enjoy the interaction that we have here.

As I hit the music, my closing comments would be this. If you are facing a question or a challenge, don't be scared of it, but lean into it. Don't be scared of questions. Now, I say that out of a philosophical conviction that truth exists. It exists outside of the human experience.

And so that means that there should be nothing that it needs to be scared of. Truth exists independently of human knowledge and independently of human existence. That's given me that philosophical and religious presupposition has given me always the confidence to press forward and try to say, if I'm having a problem understanding an interaction with something, I can fix it.

It can be solved. I just need to understand what the question is. So in your own intellectual journey, I have many questions of my own still today. And I think everyone I've talked to who's old and learned usually winds up at the end of their life, they wind up learning that they have many questions.

You don't ever resolve all your questions. And I don't expect to ever resolve all of my questions. What you can do is you can use the study of the questions that you have, of the contradictions. You can use the studies that you have to help you to look at your questions, help you to answer them, and help to advance the total knowledge of humanity and help to lay a marker down for others.

If you come along and if I were to trace some of the influential thinkers, whether it's religious, financial, philosophical, whatever, you can come down and you can look and you can trace the threads of conversation over thousands of years that have influenced who you and I are today. Now some of those threads are true and valid and some of them are not.

Don't be scared of them. If you have a financial problem, lean into it and start studying. And I think that you'll be able to trace those thinkers for yourself. I wish you all a very happy Friday, a very good Friday, a very happy good Friday. And thank you for listening.

I look forward to speaking with you on next week's Q&A call. Call into RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron and join us next week for our Q&A call. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Hey there, treasure hunters and bargain seekers. Are you on the lookout for a local thrift store that has it all? Look no further. Picks Exchange is your thrifting paradise right here in the heart of Torrance.

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