Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, insight, skills, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Today on the show we tackle a thorny financial planning problem.

This week I was working with a consulting client of mine, someone that I have worked with here and there over the years, and this particular client is a very young man. He is financially competent and he was unexpectedly diagnosed with a very significant and serious form of cancer in his middle 20s.

He originally wrote to me after his initial diagnosis and said that he wished that he had taken my advice to buy more disability income insurance, but that he thought it really would never relate to him, so he had chosen not to. So I tell that to you, if you have heard me give advice or if there's something in your personal financial plan that you know you should do, as in buy disability insurance, buy life insurance, get it done, because this particular young man was diagnosed with this serious and aggressive form of cancer in his early 20s.

For the last few years he has battled the cancer and at present the prognosis is good. The cancer has gone into remission and he has recently married his long-time girlfriend who was with him through the medical trial they have recently married and are now building their life together as a married couple.

But of course this particular type of health diagnosis and this particular type of health history changes the normal tone of a relationship a little bit. It brings mortality much more quickly into view, causes a more intense seriousness, and brings with it a couple of challenging circumstances for financial planning.

If you've ever personally experienced an ongoing health problem or you've ever worked with somebody, you know how important good insurance is to somebody in that circumstance. There are many people who have severe medical conditions and the only reason they work is to maintain a good, solid, low-cost health insurance plan.

There are many people who have severe health histories, and when that happens, the existing insurance portfolio, life insurance, disability income insurance, and health insurance, really make a big difference. Now thankfully my friend and client is doing better now, so I'm very pleased for that. But we spent some time working to say, "How do you plan for your wife as a husband?

How do you plan for your wife and potentially children in the future when you can't get life insurance?" And this is something I've thought a lot about and I thought it would be interesting for me to share with you the advice that I gave to him. Now I hope that you'll listen to this with two things in mind.

One is of course, well three things. One, get life insurance. Life insurance is the simplest and easiest way to do it. An average healthy 20 or 30-year-old man or woman could get a million dollars of term life insurance for under 50 bucks a month, anywhere from 30, 40, 50 bucks a month.

It's simple and it's inexpensive. Get life insurance. And also take my advice on life insurance seriously. When I talk about why I shy away from things like 10-year level term insurance in favor of other approaches, it's stories like this. As a financial planner, it's really frustrating to know of a circumstance where good planning that allowed options in the future would have made the difference.

And that's why so much advice, especially around life insurance, is short-sighted. It assumes things don't change. The weird thing about, just like if you work as a firefighter, you see a lot of people broken, a lot of dead bodies and hurt bodies because people don't wear their seatbelts. And so you probably are an advocate for seatbelts and airbags in cars and safe driving.

If you're a police officer, you encounter so much violence on a regular basis that you become an advocate for people to prepare themselves against violence. And the same thing as a financial planner. If you've worked as a financial planner, as I have, you become an advocate for recognizing that life will change.

And so these small probability events, like a healthy mid-20s male getting a serious and aggressive form of cancer and almost dying, these small probability events take on much more significance. And it changes you. It has changed me as a financial planner. I don't deny the unlikely probability, but here's the problem with probabilities.

Although something may be statistically unlikely, as measured of percentage, number of people affected per 100,000, very statistically unlikely, but if it happens to you, it's devastating. So many people can go through their lives never having life insurance, never having homeowner's insurance, never having car insurance. Many people can go through their lives and never have a problem.

But if it happens to you, it's devastating. That's the whole problem with insurance. So one is I encourage you to think carefully and properly insure yourself now while you don't need it. You may be glad you do. And even in this particular case, this young man didn't have parents, or sorry, he had parents, but wasn't married at the time.

He had a girlfriend, I think, when he originally had his initial cancer diagnosis. But people ask me, "Joshua, why do you recommend to single people they get life insurance? They don't need it." No, technically, I agree, you don't need it. But I tell you what, when you have been living with your parents, fighting cancer for a few years and they've been paying your bills, taking you places to treatments, when you've been with your girlfriend and she's been sticking by you in difficult times, and then if you knew you were going to die, it may help you to feel a little bit better to be able to just take out your half a million or million dollar term life insurance policy and make sure that that beneficiary designation is sending some money to your parents and to your girlfriend.

No, it's not technically necessary because they're not reliant upon you for your income. Technically, that's true. I admit that. I concede the point. But I just put myself in that situation and I would feel a lot better. And if I knew that my parents were going to go through grief of my dying because I had cancer, and I knew they had incurred heavy financial costs and lifestyle costs from their multi-year care for me, and then if I knew I were headed for death, I would feel better about at least knowing that when I die, a couple hundred thousand dollars will help them to be able to perhaps take a little time to grieve for me and yet not to feel financial pressure and to repay them in some small way for some of the financial costs that they have incurred.

So life insurance is very, very useful, and it's why I'm such a steady advocate of life insurance. It's just so helpful. So that's one thing to listen to. But also, listen in the context of today's show, listen for both this particular unique creative approach to how do you plan when you can't get life insurance, but also think about financial independence and financial freedom.

Because many of the things that I'm going to describe to you in this show are basically the same things that you do for financial independence and financial freedom. In essence, we're trying to solve the same problem here. We're trying to say, "How do I make sure that somebody's able to continue on when I die, but knowing that I can't leave money behind?" So that's the problem that we're going to solve.

So first, for anybody who is in this situation, if you can't get life insurance, the first thing you need to know is it may actually be possible for you to get it if you shop hard enough. And here I would refer you back to episode 204 of Radical Personal Finance.

That episode was titled, "A Behind-the-Scenes Look into High-Risk Life Insurance Underwriting." It was an interview with a friend of mine named Todd Simpson, who specializes in high-risk life insurance. Let's go back and listen to episode 204, because sometimes what one agent may not be able to get done, another agent may be able to get done.

There are hundreds of life insurance companies that are all competing for business. And there are some companies who may not want your business because of your personal medical profile, but there are other companies that may want your business. Now generally with cancer, if somebody has had a recent cancer diagnosis, the answer is no.

The company will take that. At least for about five years is the industry standard. What life insurance companies get very concerned about is being confronted with medical change. They don't like change, because change is hard to predict. So they don't like somebody who's recently had a health condition diagnosed, and they don't like somebody who's recently been cleared of a previous medical diagnosis.

They want time, because time brings stability to the diagnosis. So with cancer, if you have survived a cancer diagnosis, frequently you may be able to go ahead and get a policy, but usually it'll be at least about five years after your diagnosis. But reach out to multiple life insurance agents.

Try to reach with somebody who specializes in high-risk life insurance cases and who has personal expertise. So if you have diabetes, if you have heart disease, if you have a cancer history, if you have some other medical condition, and if you need life insurance, then remember to go and just work hard and work with multiple agents.

It's worth the search. Don't just go to some website. Go to an agent and do your best to get life insurance. You may be able to do it. The next suggestion for you is go ahead and try to get insurance when there is no medical underwriting required. Now here's where you get the value of a group insurance contract.

With many companies, many companies provide as a package of their benefits a group life insurance contract. And frequently a group life insurance contract will either be issued with no medical underwriting or simplified medical underwriting. The norm here is one-time salary. But depending on the business that you work in or the company that you work with, there may be a larger number.

I've worked with a number of clients over the years who have very high amounts of group life insurance as a component of that firm's benefits. So you should look for any kind of life insurance that you can get without medical underwriting. Don't despise it even if it's a relatively small amount.

You might like to have a million or two million dollars of life insurance, but you might only be able to get $50,000 of life insurance. But $50,000 goes a long way towards giving your spouse a few months to recover, towards wrapping up some medical bills, towards getting some breathing room, etc.

So don't despise a small amount. Also remember that group contracts can be changed. So if you have a position of influence and you would like to change the group contract, you could always try to work with somebody to see if they could enhance the group contract. The chances of that happening are low, but you might be in a position where that could happen and a reworking of group benefits could qualify you for an additional amount of insurance.

And don't despise small bits of life insurance. You may be able to join an organization or an association, and frequently an organization or association would entitle you to be able to get a small amount of life insurance, and that could be very helpful for you. So obviously try to get life insurance and try to get it in any way that you possibly can, even if it's in small amounts.

If you have $0 of life insurance and you can put together a $10,000 policy that was guaranteed issue, no underwriting, it's a little bit expensive, but that covers you, and then $25,000 from joining some organization that was marketing to you, and then a one or two-time salary at work, you may be able to put together enough life insurance to be meaningful for your family.

Next, before we get into the creative approaches that don't involve financial products, let's talk about some unique financial products that might help you and are worth your paying attention to. So let's start with other insurance programs. Life insurance, if you think about what it's designed to fund, there are a number of things that it's designed to fund.

One is debt. One is paying off debt for a surviving spouse. Another would be providing income for an ongoing period for a surviving spouse, and another example of what it would fund is taking care of things like medical bills. Frequently somebody will acquire medical bills towards the end of their life, and so life insurance can be helpful to pay off some of those medical bills.

But if you think about that, you may be able to substitute an alternative insurance product that would help with that. Here's where you get the value of a strong health insurance contract. So you may not be able to get life insurance, but can you make sure that your health insurance contract is the strongest you could possibly get, or a disability insurance contract is the strongest that you could get?

If you think about a health diagnosis like cancer, somebody who has a severe form of cancer, they are weakened by their cancer treatment, they're unable to work. If somebody has good disability income insurance during that period of time, they can at least have an income, and that income can go to help their family.

So don't be scared if you're in a situation like this. Don't be scared to change jobs or change companies just based upon the overall package of benefits, the overall package of a strong group long-term disability insurance contract that doesn't require personal underwriting and medical qualification, or a strong health insurance contract that will result in relatively low out-of-pocket costs for you.

Those types of products can help to minimize the potential for you to have large medical expenses. The next type of financial product to consider is something that has a death benefit, and that death benefit is not individually underwritten. The most obvious example here is something like the value of an annuity contract.

One of the recommendations that I made to my client was that he consider transitioning some of his investment dollars out of traditional mutual funds and into an annuity contract. Let me explain to you why. There are various kinds of annuities. In essence, an annuity contract is an insurance contract issued by an insurance company that is designed to function as the opposite of life insurance.

A life insurance contract is a financial product that's designed to pay out a sum of money at death. You make premium payments into the contract, and then at death that contract pays out a large lump sum of money to a survivor. An annuity contract is, in its most traditional sense, designed to take a large amount of money as a lump sum and then to pay it out for somebody's entire lifetime.

A traditional annuity contract, something that would go under the classification of what's called a single premium immediate annuity, would be a way for you to say, "Here, Mr. Insurance Company, I have $500,000. Will you please take my $500,000 from me and in exchange guarantee me a monthly payment of $4,000 per month every month for the rest of my life?" or some variation of that.

That is a traditional annuity contract. However, that basic concept has been expanded into dozens and dozens of flavors of annuities. That traditional single premium immediate annuity can be affected in a number of ways. The two ways that are important in this context are these. First, you can change a single premium immediate annuity into a deferred annuity.

A deferred annuity is a contract with a life insurance company wherein you can systematically either put in monthly payments or you can transfer in a lump sum, and then you can defer the receiving of money from that contract to the future. That's why it's called a deferred annuity. That can be very helpful.

The second reason it can be helpful is in this way. You can take an annuity contract and you can choose to have it either be what's called a fixed annuity, which is a guaranteed fixed rate of interest that's guaranteed by the insurance company, or you can have what's called a variable annuity.

A variable annuity is an investment product that features an underlying investment account or group of accounts, and that performance of that underlying account or group of accounts creates within the context of the annuity contract an underlying investment return. In the world of annuities, these are called variable subaccounts. They function in basic equivalence to a mutual fund.

A mutual fund in the open marketplace just simply is taken and brought under the wrapper of the insurance contract, and it's called a variable subaccount. Frequently, if you're working with a large annuity provider, you would have the ability to purchase shares in exactly the same internal account. The big mutual company growth and income fund could be labeled publicly and privately.

You'll frequently see if you look at an insurance company, you look at their subaccounts, you'll see the names of the management companies, and you'll also see the specific products listed. So it allows you to own mutual funds inside of an annuity contract. Now sometimes, this is a bad idea, frequently these types of variable annuities get a bad wrap in the personal finance space because they're more expensive.

The reason they're more expensive is because an annuity contract adds an additional insurance charge onto the underlying investment fund expenses of the subaccount. If you think about the structure of an annuity contract, and you think about the fees that are paid, the first problem you have is the fees of the underlying subaccounts.

If you have a fidelity fund that is in your annuity contract, and you have a fidelity fund that you're purchasing as an open-end mutual fund in the public market, you still in both of those cases have investment expenses. You have all of the fees for administrative costs, all of the fees that are paid to the investment managers, et cetera.

And so those fees are going to be identical in your public open-end mutual fund that you purchase in the public market versus your individual subaccount that you can fund your variable annuity contract with. Those fees are going to be the same. And because frequently the funds that are in a subaccount are actively managed funds, those fees are high, just like all actively managed mutual funds are.

But the second set of fees that get placed onto a variable annuity contract are what's called mortality and expense charges. And these fees can range from very small to very large, depending on the individual feature of the contract that is being offered. So some fees are simple and normal.

We're just going to charge a small mortality and expense charge because we're an insurance company and we're going to make you this promise in the future. But then inside a variable annuity contract, sometimes you can add on additional enhanced benefits. The most meaningful in the context here of our financial planning scenario is what's called a guaranteed death benefit or some form of enhanced guaranteed death benefit.

So the way it works is essentially this. Let's pretend that my client had $100,000 in a mutual fund. Well, he may be concerned about keeping that money in a mutual fund if he's concerned about providing that money for his wife. And in that context, here's the danger. If he keeps the money of $100,000 in the mutual fund and then he gets cancer, what happens if the market has declined by 30% when he gets cancer and has declined from $100,000 of value to $70,000 of value?

That could be very problematic because if he dies of cancer and his wife needs the money or if he needs to access it for his own expenses, he just can't afford to take the risk. And if he can't afford to take the risk, then he can't afford really in the long run to get the return.

So how does he keep the money invested? It would be unwise for him to have all this money invested if he thought he were going to die relatively soon. But a death benefit and annuity contract can elegantly solve this problem. There are a number of different approaches to death benefits, and I'm going to give you just two very simple ones that are relatively inexpensive, and there are other annuity contracts that charge more for fancier death benefits.

There's a whole line of annuity products that have a ratcheting death benefit that's beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today. But one form of death benefit is just a guaranteed return of the amount of money put into the contract. So in this case, if you put $100,000 into the contract and then the value of the underlying subaccounts in the contract decline because the stock market is declining, let's say the value declines from $100,000 to $70,000, and then you die, the insurance company will pay out your initial contribution of $100,000 to your beneficiaries.

That can help you to keep your investments invested aggressively because you can know that at least you'll always get the return of the money that you've put in. That's the cheapest death benefit, and that's basically a standard option on almost all variable annuity contracts, at least that I have ever seen personally and studied the paperwork for.

There are other benefits. One example of another type of death benefit that you can purchase is a small, what's called a ratcheting death benefit. The way that works is you have a death benefit on the contract that always goes up, and it always goes up at something like your policy anniversary.

So in this example, if you invest $100,000 into the contract, and then a year from now that contract has grown to be $120,000, and then four years from now that contract has grown to be $150,000, each year on the policy anniversary, whatever the contract value of the account is, that becomes your new death benefit.

Now after your new death benefit has reached $150,000, perhaps there is a recession and the value of your underlying investments decreases. You go from $150,000 to $100,000. The death benefit doesn't ratchet down, it only ratchets up. So you know that that $150,000 will always be available as a death benefit for your beneficiary.

Even if the market is down for three or four years, at least you have that death benefit. That's the type of product that can be really helpful to somebody in this situation, because it solves the problem of allowing you to invest for the long term, allowing you to invest in potentially volatile assets like stocks, but to also make sure that you have a death benefit.

And that can be a substantial benefit for someone in this circumstance, especially if they are someone who has a shortened lifespan. This may even help to engage in a little bit of adverse selection against the insurance company, because if you purchase a contract with this type of death benefit, then you personally have an incentive to perhaps consider investing the money as aggressively as possible.

After all, if you're not going to use the cash while you're alive, you don't think, or you think it's possible that you might not use the cash while you're alive, then why not go ahead and invest in an aggressive portfolio, trying to aim for the largest growth, knowing that if the portfolio declines, at least you have the death benefit, and at least your family will do well.

So that can work for someone in this circumstance. That's the best example I can think of as the value of looking at other types of insurance products and looking to see, is there a potential death benefit that I can get? And so you should seriously consider that if that plays a role in your plans.

If I were in the type of situation that I'm describing, I would move many of my investment dollars out of open-end mutual funds. If I had open-end mutual funds, I would move them out of open-end mutual funds, and I would move them into an annuity, variable annuity, with a sub-account in order to get the benefit of that death benefit.

Many people, it's not a significant benefit, and it can be a significant cost. Those additional mortality and expense charges can be significant, but that death benefit can be very valuable in a circumstance like I am describing. Now here would be another example of something you should consider. This would be appropriate if you were at an older age, not my mid-20s client, but if you were at an older age and you had something like an annuity or you had something like a sum of money, you should seriously consider your distribution plan from an annuity.

Now if you are in a severe medical state, there do exist enhanced risk or increased risk annuity contracts, which are actually, the annuity payout is actually medically underwritten. Usually if you have a sum of money and you're trying to get a sum of money out of an annuity contract, usually there's no medical test for that.

But there are increased risk products where they'll come and they'll say, "Okay, you have cancer. We think you're probably going to die at an early age, so we'll pay you an extra amount of money out of this annuity because of the fact that you have cancer." But in this context, if you knew that you were going to die soon, you would have good financial incentive to carefully consider what annuity payout you're going to choose for the benefit of your spouse.

And you might choose a benefit that had the highest ongoing benefit for your surviving spouse so that instead of having something that was, for example, an annuity payout plan for you, a single life income only payout. That would be unwise because there's a good chance that the insurance company would keep all that money.

But in the other case, if you were likely to die soon and your spouse were likely to not die for a long time, you would be wiser to, say, purchase a life income payout that would be the same amount for you and the same amount for her for the rest of your life.

So carefully consider the various benefits and think of this in mind. Now let's get back out of the weeds of financial products, although hopefully those suggestions are helpful to you. Before we get out of the weeds, there are other potential products. Sometimes you can purchase a, you can consider things like a combo product.

Sometimes there are life insurance and long-term care combination products. Usually those wouldn't work for somebody who's already had a medical diagnosis because of their, they wouldn't be able to qualify either for the long-term care or for the life insurance. But if you already have a product, sometimes you may be able to adjust the product that you have in order to fit your needs.

So now let's get out of the weeds. The basic plan for finances is, basic plan for how to solve this problem is to try to figure out how to protect your spouse. And it depends, there's a big difference here depending on if you are already in a strong situation or if you're not in a strong financial situation.

The ideal circumstance is you're already financially independent and you should be working towards that. Because if you're financially independent and then you die, by definition your spouse will continue to be financially independent. So I'm going to describe to you how I would do this if I received a cancer diagnosis and I had an expected lifespan of five to ten years.

I'm going to explain to you how I would do this. First let's pretend that I get this diagnosis and I'm in a very difficult financial situation. If you know someone in this situation, I want you to learn this information so that you can go and help them and teach them, possibly refer them to this show so they can at least improve their circumstance the best way possible.

Let's pretend that I am very financially unhealthy. I have a lot of debt, I'm having income problems, we have some assets but not a lot. This is common because by the time somebody gets a diagnosis, they frequently are already pretty deep in the hole. They frequently are accumulating credit card debt to pay for living expenses while they try to figure out what's wrong with their health situation.

They're frequently accumulating credit card debt and draining down assets to pay for additional medical costs, co-pays, medications that aren't covered under health insurance, etc. And so frequently by the time somebody gets a terminal diagnosis, they are in a deep place financially. So let me describe what I would do if I were in a situation.

The first thing that I would try to do is I would try to figure out how I could minimize the burden on my wife, who I would expect to survive me by a long period of time. And I would use every trick that I know to try to make sure that she is not liable for any debts, if at all possible, and to make sure that she has as much money as possible set aside for her.

Now you need to be careful in some of these circumstances because you face the risk, if you are structuring your transactions, you face the risk of a court coming back and undoing your work. An example is this. I know I'm going to die next week, and so the last thing I do is go and take a cash advance on my credit card.

Let's say I have a $50,000 limit and I take out a $40,000 cash advance for my credit card. I take that money and I give it to my brother, thinking that when I die, that at least he'll have the money and that debt, well, they're never going to collect it.

That's a pretty big risk. That's a pretty significant potential problem. And I think there would be a good case for the credit card company to sue your estate and try to claw back that money from your brother. That's a serious and significant...that would be...I think they would have a good legal case there.

I'm not aware of any case history, but I think they would have in that circumstance a good legal case. However, you can use the same approach yourself in perhaps a more practical way. The basic thing I would first look at is I would look at all of our assets and I would try to say, "What is the ownership of our assets?

What is the ownership of our house?" If we own a house, are we both on the deed? What's the ownership of our vehicles? What's the ownership of our personal assets? What is the ownership of our accounts? How are our accounts structured, our bank accounts, etc.? If all of those things are joint accounts, I would do my best to start a process of transferring assets from joint ownership into my wife's ownership exclusively.

Again, in my scenario, I'm pretending that I'm going to die. I've got a few years of a diagnosis and my wife is going to survive me. I would try to transfer all of my assets out of my name and into my wife's name. As best we can, I would try to make a clear legal distinction in the ownership of assets and I want to move the assets over to her.

I want to do this early, as early as I possibly can, so that we don't run the risk of right at the end trying to make some kind of transfer and then somebody sues us as a fraudulent transaction. There is no reason in the world why I can't give my wife everything I own.

It's not a fraudulent transaction, but in the way that I do it, I should be wise and circumspect in the actual approach that I use. So I would work on that. I would go so far as to say, if I own something and it's already jointly owned, can I make an intelligent trade so that my wife will wind up owning whatever the next thing is?

So an example here would be a house. In a moment I'll talk about making sure that the house would be financially sustainable for my family after I die. But if we own a house together and I can't just quit claiming and get that out of my name, which would be hard because of the way that at least most houses would be owned, I would consider selling the house and I would say, can we downsize into a small house, but when we buy the next one, can I make sure that my wife is the one who owns it fully?

And then I'm moving things out of my estate. The second thing I would try to do is I would try to transfer all of the debt in the house under my name. Oh, anything possible, I would transfer liabilities into my name. When you die, your estate has to stand good and pay your debts.

But just because that is true doesn't mean you have to have a big, healthy estate of lots of assets to pay lots of debts. So I want to disconnect, as much as we can figure out how to do, I want to disconnect our asset ownership and move everything that we own into her name and then refinance and move all the debt into my name.

If we have joint credit cards that have balances, I'm going to apply for new credit cards in my name and I'm going to use those new credit cards to pay off the balance of the old credit cards. The goal is that my name is on all the debt and her name is on all the assets.

That will help to make sure that when I die, she's not stuck owing a lot of money. Additionally what I would do is I would try to make sure that our assets that we do own are held in protected accounts. The most important types of accounts here are retirement accounts.

This sometimes cannot be workable because of the high expenses. If you have high expenses to keep yourself going, it may not work. But I would try to make sure that any money that we have is moved into retirement accounts. So if, for example, we have $100,000 in the bank and we have $0 in a 401(k), I'm going to divert as much of our income into that 401(k) account as possible and minimize the number of money that we have in the bank.

This helps me to move assets from insecure places, as in the bank, into more secured places, into my 401(k) accounts, which are protected from the claims of creditors. This will help to protect my wife, especially if I have a significant account balance. She will be the beneficiary of that account.

That account is secure from the claims of creditors. And even if she owed money, let's say that I weren't able to get all the debt into my name so that it would die with me, even if she owed money, at least the money that's in the 401(k) would be secure from the claims of her creditors.

And that would help to assure her future retirement. She may need to declare bankruptcy after I'm dead. She may have to go through that process. At least the money that's in those accounts is protected. A 401(k) account, an IRA account, hopefully in your state, it has that same level of protection.

These types of accounts are very helpful. Also things like annuities. If you have them, you can fund annuities. That gives you some creditor protection. It's not quite as strong as a 401(k), but it's going to do the job. And fund these accounts and move the assets as much as you can out beyond the reach of your creditors.

In addition, make sure that you minimize the ownership of money that's in accounts. So move money out of the bank, move it into cash. Move money out of the bank, move it into hard assets. Assets that can be owned by your wife and are not as easily traced as money that's sitting in a bank account.

Don't waste the opportunity to make sure. Your number one goal in this situation should be to care for your loved ones. Long-time listeners of Radical Personal Finance know I very much want you to always stand good for what you owe. I want your debts to be paid. But I want people who are in a difficult situation to be equipped with knowledge.

I despise hearing about families who are facing cancer and their credit card companies are calling and they start cashing money out of the 401(k) in order to pay the credit cards. Usually that's the wrong plan. Don't pay the credit cards. They knew what they were going into. It was a business deal.

You'll pay them when you can, but while you're dealing with it, keep your protection in place for you. So big picture, transfer liabilities into the estate of the sick spouse, transfer assets into the estate of the healthy spouse. Hopefully you've avoided debt in the first place. I would not.

If you're in a strong financial position, don't go out and just start racking up debts. That's not a good plan and you put yourself in legal jeopardy, especially if you've done it intentionally with an intent to defraud the insurance company or the financing company. Don't do it. Just avoid debt in the first place.

But if you're already in a difficult situation, try to protect yourself as much as possible. Second, try to move your debt from any kind of secured debt to unsecured debt. If my wife and I own a car and I know that I'm going to die and we owe $10,000 on the car, I'm going to try to move $10,000 of car debt off of the car onto a credit card, which is an unsecured debt, so that at least my wife will have the car and not worry about the car getting repossessed.

If it were feasible with a mortgage, example in the state of Florida, where I live, in the state of Florida, all of your homestead is protected from the claims of creditors. So if I had a $40,000 mortgage balance remaining on my home and if I had $40,000 of credit line available on my credit cards, I would do a cash advance and I would take the money from my credit cards and use it to pay off my home.

You need to be careful there because of course that comes with massive difference of fees and charges, etc. But conceptually, if it's possible to do that, conceptually I want to pay off secured debt. My goal is when I die, I want my wife to own as many assets as possible.

Next, plan your assets so that the debt is sealed off as much as possible. Pretend my particular client has a portfolio of rental properties. Let's say that you have five houses, six houses, and on your six houses, each of your house has a 50% loan to value ratio. So you have 50% of the value of the house is mortgaged on each of the properties and that's spread across all of the assets.

If I were in the situation, I would try to renegotiate and refinance the houses so I could move the debt from each of the houses onto half the portfolio. I would rather have three houses owned without mortgages and three houses owned with mortgages than have six houses with 50% mortgages.

That way, hopefully my wife will be able to continue paying everything. We can pay the mortgages off, she'll continue to own those rentals, et cetera. But if we get into trouble and we can't pay them, maybe our finances are drained because of our medical condition, if we can't pay those mortgages, I want to make sure that if at all possible, we don't lose all the houses.

We'll only lose a couple of the houses. So try to seal off your debt as much as possible. If your family owns three cars and they all have car payments, consider refinancing them and moving the financing onto one of them. So at least two of them are owned without debt.

Managing debt and assets properly, I think will make a big, big difference. Now in thinking further about the situation, I think it's important for us to start and to think about what would we need life insurance for? What would I do if I were diagnosed and someone says, "Joshua, you have five years to live.

Could be longer, could be shorter, but we think you're going to have five years to live." I would think very, very carefully about how do I provide for the family's needs knowing that I can't get life insurance. By way of inspiration, I remember when I was a young child, my family visited a family who had, the father had died.

By my memory, the family was large, they had a large number of children. But I was impressed even as a child that although the father had died early with a house full of young children, this family was in a good situation. Why? Well, they had moved to a rural area with a low cost of living.

They had built from scratch their own home, a beautiful log home. This was in Montana. We were visiting a beautiful log home in Montana. The home was built with no debt. They had developed a family-run business. And when the father died, the family was able to continue on because they had no debt, they had low expenses, and they had a family-run business.

Even at an early age, I appreciated that testimony. That was a father who took his responsibility seriously. Life insurance is a wonderful invention, but thoughtful people have been planning for the well-being of their families since long before life insurance were ever invented. And the way you do it is to go back to those fundamentals.

What are those things that a family would need? What are they fundamentally? So let's talk through them. The first thing would be obvious expenses like burial costs. Well, if I knew that I were going to die, I would go ahead and have my plywood casket built. I would build it myself or have a buddy build it so that when I died, my casket were sitting right there.

My wife didn't have to deal with going and finding that. Archives of Radical Personal Finance, we talked about how to get buried inexpensively. If I knew I were going to die, I would figure out where is my body going to be buried, and I would do it as cheaply as possible.

If the laws allow us to just plant me under the oak tree out back, then I'll figure out who's going to talk to my buddies. "Hey, you two, when I die, you come over and you dig the grave. I need to go in there. I'll buy the book on how to care for the body and make sure that there are people who have been trained and who have learned how are we going to care for my body when I die so that my wife doesn't have to be the one to do that." If we get to the funeral, I'm going to plan out the funeral, and I'm going to say, "Here's what's going to happen.

Here's where it's going to be. We're not having some ridiculous $10,000 funeral. Here's where we're going to do the funeral cheap. What's the building we're going to use? Who's got a house? Who's got a backyard?" I would work to arrange those circumstances as much as possible. I would do everything possible to minimize burial expenses and minimize emotional trauma for my grieving wife so that she doesn't have to face those things.

And here's where good planning will result in a lower outlay. By planning in advance what would be necessary for the funeral, by going ahead and getting the coffin, if we buy it at Walmart or have it shipped in or build it out of plywood, let's get the coffin squared away, let's get the burial squared away, let's get the people assigned, let's figure out what's going to be done so that when the number gets filled in on the exact day of my death, then it's just a matter of, "Here's the book.

Here's the manual. Here's what you do." That lowers burial expenses. That's a big deal because frequently a grieving spouse just lost their husband, just lost their wife. A grieving spouse will look at that and say, "Well, I've got to provide for this funeral," and frequently all of a sudden there's $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, $30,000 out of pocket.

If you want to go a more traditional route, you tackle it head on, go meet with the person, make the burial arrangements, buy the plot, whatever the situation is. But I would personally take the cheap route. I don't want people spending $1,000 on a coffin that's going to rot in the ground, build it out of plywood, ask a couple of buddies of mine to do that.

So that's the first thing. The second thing is what about immediate expenses, immediately following my death? Not funeral expenses, but immediate expenses. Well, that's where I've talked about assets already. I want to make sure that assets are transitioned. I'm going to make sure that we have no money in the bank.

All of the money that was in the bank has been turned into cash and hard assets. For example, food. How is my family going to eat? Well, you can solve the eating problem more directly than just saying, "I need $10,000 of life insurance to solve the food." I would go ahead and get busy and say, "Here's how we're going to solve the food problem.

First thing we're going to do, we're going to store food." I would feel a whole lot better. If I've got five years to prepare, I'd feel a whole lot better knowing that our family has a couple of years of food stored up in reserve so that my children aren't going to go hungry and my wife's not going to starve.

Then looking at an empty pantry. Well, guess what? If you get serious about food storage, a couple thousand bucks can buy enough food to keep my family going for a few years of just simply stored food. You better believe I'm taking my credit card down to Costco. I'm buying bags of rice.

I'm buying bags of bean. I'm buying flats of vegetables. These are hard assets. I'm going to make sure that my family's need for food is met. Now, another context would be food production. Do we have a way to produce food? If I've got small children, how am I going to make sure that my children are going to be able to eat?

Now, with my family's approach, I would want very much my wife to be able to fulfill the vision that we have for our family and not to immediately have to say, "Well, she's just got to go and get a 40 or 50 hour a week job." I would work really hard to figure out a new living situation that would allow our family to produce more of our food.

Children can be very, very helpful in the garden. So I get busy and say, "How can we get the garden planted? How can we turn our—let's rip out the lawn in the front yard, rip out the lawn in the backyard and let's get the garden in so that my family can eat." Simple things like shelter.

I would change whatever circumstance necessary in order to have shelter. If I knew I were probably going to die, let's say that we were living in a fancier house, perhaps we have a mortgage, we're living in a fancier house, but we know that there's a good chance that that was based upon our higher income with me working and being productive, but now I might die.

Well, let's move into a small house. Perhaps we can own that house debt free so that way I can at least know my wife's not going to be evicted from our house. Now if we don't have money, I'm going to work really diligently to try to figure out what relationship capital can we use to make sure that my family's cared for.

Do my parents have an ability to take us in or to build an addition or put a mobile home out back of their house? How are we going to make sure that a shelter is cared for? If you look at the problem and you disconnect it from life insurance and you study it in the context of shelter, now you have an opportunity to fix it.

If your problem is shelter and you approach it as shelter saying, "How can I get shelter?" then you can start your creative juices going. We might just be buying a big fifth wheel trailer and parking it out back of mom and dad's house, but at least my wife and children aren't going to be on the street.

We might be building a tiny house. We might be parking a single wide trailer out back somewhere, depending on a friend or family member who has some rural acreage, but at least I can plan for shelter. How do I provide shelter for my family? Education. One of the major costs that when I do a life insurance analysis that I plan for is education.

Frequently we sit down with the parents and say, "Well, how much money do you want for college, for high school? How much money do you want for college? Do you want to plan for private school, public school, et cetera?" And usually there's some amount of money there for education.

Hold on. If I don't have the ability to buy life insurance to provide for education, that doesn't automatically mean that I can't provide education. I've always been inspired by the example of a man named Art Robinson. Art Robinson is an interesting guy. I first found him when I found his website, which is at the, it's called robinsoncurriculum.com.

It's a really interesting story, but Art Robinson, he and his wife are both research scientists, both PhD holders, research scientists. He researches a bunch of things, especially relating to blood and a couple of other things, nuclear stuff beyond my scientific knowledge. But he and his wife had a large family, six children.

And when their youngest child was a baby, his wife contracted a very strange illness and died within something like 24 or 48 hours, leaving him as a surviving widower with six small children. They had been homeschooling their children, and that was very important to them in terms of the educational heritage and the family values that they were seeking to instill in their children.

And so here he is as a research scientist, a busy research scientist, unexpectedly, completely out of the blue with no time to transition, facing six small children trying to figure out what do I do? Well, one of the things that he did, he was blessed by his wife's foresight and planning with regard to their children's homeschool curriculum.

She had worked for years on developing and planning ahead with homeschool materials. So when she died, his wife, her name was Laura Lee, when she died, his wife, Laura Lee, left behind multiple filing cabinets with all of the materials, all of the books, all of the curriculum prepared for a complete K through 12 education.

What he did was he moved his desk into his children's schoolroom or moved his children's schoolrooms into his research laboratory, and they figured out a way to care for the baby. They figured out a schedule where his older children were able to help care for the baby, and they continued their educational plan just like they had done from the beginning because his wife had worked so hard and had left a legacy in that complete curriculum.

They later went on, and his children, while they were in their high school years, later went on and developed the Robinson curriculum. They took all of the materials that their mother had put together. They scanned them, collected them, and sold them and created a business out of selling those materials to any other homeschool family that was interested, and they sold them as a set of CD-ROMs.

They still sell them today. For $200, you can purchase from them all in, $200, you can purchase a complete K through 12 educational curriculum for $200 total, one time, no matter how many children you do, no matter how much you need. You can buy it, and you print out the materials.

Some of that curriculum is dated, but you could start, and I would have no fear whatsoever if I were dying of saying to my wife, "We're going to buy this curriculum," and the secret to it is you print everything out. "We're going to buy this curriculum. We're going to buy the printer.

Now, at least we have the necessary school materials." His children, of their six children, had some very impressive educational outcomes. I think four of his six children have PhDs. All of them are extremely competent with regard to their learning. He has continued on to do his scientific research, and they let a lot of things go.

If you listen to him lecture on it, and he tells a story, it wasn't the most, shall we say, traditional of households. They certainly weren't able to do everything the way that he would have been as a couple if his wife had survived, but as a single widower with six small children, they were able to come out with a loving family, stayed together.

He continued his work, his productive work. All of his children were educational stars, and they continued to maintain the family of image that they had planned for. If you break it down into education, instead of funding it vaguely with life insurance, you could say, "What are we going to do?

How are we going to provide for education?" Now, perhaps homeschooling is your thing, and you would do something like I've described here. Perhaps, if I were in that situation, I would say, "We're going to take our money, and we're going to turn it," since if we had debt, and hopefully, again, hopefully we don't have debt, but I'm trying to make this show accessible to a listener who is in a tough situation, I would say, "How can we make sure that we assemble homeschool materials?" At the very least, everyone in the world has 200 bucks to buy the Robinson curriculum, a printer, and a stack of paper to print out the materials.

At the very least, everyone has 200 bucks. Or you might go with more than that, but assemble the materials for your children's education. Or perhaps another consideration, in a moment, I'm going to talk about income, but another consideration would be, you might say, "Well, we can't afford, we don't want to homeschool, or homeschooling is just not going to work based upon the capacity of our family.

But we do need income, but education is serious." So I would look at that and say, "How can we get my wife a job at a private school?" If I could help my wife to get a job at a private school, then now as a component of that overall education, we could now send our children to the private school with a reduced or eliminated tuition cost.

Frequently, many private schools will provide for their employees the benefit, instead of paying out a higher salary, they'll provide a benefit that a certain number of their children can attend that private school without paying or by paying a reduced rate. There is a mother that I've known for many years who was left as a single mom, and one of the things that I deeply honor her for, her husband left her, divorced her, she was left as a single mom with four young girls to care for.

One of the things that she did is she always worked at a local private school, and she worked very diligently. She drove school buses, and she worked in the cafeteria. She had very limited job skills. She didn't have the intellectual or background to be a high-income earner, but by working for the local private school, she was able to earn enough to keep a roof over her girl's head, to keep food on the table, and to provide for a very strong private school education for all of her daughters.

That would be a way of saying, "How do we solve the education problem without additional money?" A similar type of thing can be done with college costs. By researching and helping our children prepare to pay for their own cost of college, we can mitigate the need for that life insurance.

Let's talk about income. The other aspect of life insurance planning is income. How can we provide an income for the family? Usually when doing a life insurance analysis, you simply sit down and say, "Well, we want to have $4,000 a month into the family for 20 years, or for the rest of my wife's life," or whatever context that is.

"Well, if I can't get life insurance, I've got a problem. So I need to figure out what can we do to provide income when I'm gone?" This is where we get back to ideas like a family business. One of the things I most appreciated about that particular family that we visited when I was a child was they had done the hard work of developing a family business where the children could contribute.

This allowed the surviving wife, the widow, to be able to still be involved with the children and for them to keep their family together in a very difficult time. So if I'm facing a five-year diagnosis, I'm going to look very diligently to say, "What skills does my wife have?

What resources do we have? How can we establish a family business that will be enough to provide an income for the family?" Now, here's where you would look at the total package. Do you look at where somebody is living, what the situation is? How do we provide for this?

I use by way of example, let's say that we decided, "Okay, we need to move to a slightly more rural area." We could find potentially some rural area that had enough proximity to hospital and medical providers for me to continue my oncology treatments. But we could then also look at providing for the family.

We could have a big garden, we could buy a single-wide trailer or a double-wide trailer. It would be inexpensive. We could own it debt-free so that my wife wouldn't have the concern of paying a mortgage. So now, what business could we develop in this context based upon the skills and the resources that our family has?

That would be one way of providing for income. Another way would be a more traditional job. So I would look at my wife's job skills, my children's job skills, and say, "How can we enhance these?" Back to that financial planning, one of the things that I would seriously consider doing is I would seriously consider turning money into job skills.

Let's say that my wife would benefit from an additional certification. Maybe she needs to get training in a certain area. Perhaps that training costs money. I'm going to work really hard to take our money, use it to buy the training so that we can establish her in a high-income earning career so that when I die, she'll have the income necessary.

This is especially important many times for if a father or husband is going to die. Frequently, a mom who has given up her income earning outside of the home will be left with slightly rusty job skills and a little bit out of step with the job market. That can make it hard for a new widow to go into the job market and earn at an appropriate rate, especially if you have children, to earn at a rate that makes it worth her leaving the children who would really benefit from her presence.

So if necessary, take the money and use it to buy upgraded job skills, certifications, specializations, etc., so that she can earn enough money in order to have a high hourly productivity so she can still have time with children. This is another similar problem that many time newly divorced mothers face, is that their job skills have grown rusty as they've cared for their children.

And so when their husband leaves them, they're faced with, "Well, what do I do?" And sometimes their earning ability is only a very small percentage of their capacity. And that can be a real problem, because then that newly single mom has to spend many hours per day away from the children, and that would be the most valuable place for her would be to be with the children.

Well, you can't do without income, but perhaps what can be done is upgrade the hourly earning ability with whatever appropriate plan would solve that, so that she can earn sufficient amounts of money while being away from the children for a minimal amount of time. So with income, income can be solved, or at least improved, in ways that don't require a life insurance payout.

Now back to investments. What if you have investments? Hopefully you have investments. And here's where we want to structure things in a way that they're going to be in their best...they're going to be done well after I'm gone. I don't know how to speak to this generally. I've already spoken to mutual funds, investments, being held in creditor-protected accounts.

There's not a lot of skill related to mutual funds. But I would work very diligently with my wife to, especially me, I'd work very diligently with my wife to make sure that she has the knowledge that she needs to be a successful investor, to make sure that she knows the source of trusted advice, etc.

With other investments, my client that I was working with was a heavy real estate investor, and one of the pieces of advice that I gave to him was it's very important that his wife is very involved in that real estate business. Usually there will be one spouse or another who is involved heavily in a business and the other spouse is not so heavily involved in the business.

That can work okay as long as the spouse who's involved has taken the time to put together a manual of how the business operates, some instructions, etc. so that if they died unexpectedly that their surviving spouse would be able to continue on. But if you know that you're probably going to die in a few years, then you really got to roll up your sleeves and make sure that your spouse is fully involved in the investments.

I would very diligently make sure that my wife was fully involved and actively managing our real estate portfolio, actively managing our business, etc. You've got to make sure that she is knowledgeable about every aspect of the money and that her skills are up to the task. One of the most vulnerable places that a woman can be in, especially women, is if they're newly widowed.

And frequently a newly widowed woman is caught unaware and caught with poor planning. And because her husband handled everything, she doesn't know where everything is, how it's all done, etc. I think that's a major dereliction of duty for husbands. If you are a husband, do not leave your wife in that situation.

Make sure that you've left instructions. Make sure that you've left layout. Make sure that you've helped her and taught her to know what's going on so that if you are unexpectedly removed from the scene that she's not left not knowing what to do. And here, I think fundamentally when you look at the problem of how to solve these issues, I think you have to go back and look at relationships.

Relationships and community. As I thought through this, I realized that I personally would have no fear of being in this situation. I would have no fear of if I couldn't, didn't have life insurance, I were diagnosed with a terminal disease, I would have no fear of my wife and children not being okay.

Even independent of any of these things I've described. And one of the big reasons is because of the strong family, community, and church relationships that we enjoy. I would have no fear about my wife being put out on the street because I know that I have many people in my life who would immediately say, "Come and live with us." There are many people in my life who would say, "Come, I'll buy a single wide trailer and you can be there so you can have your own place with the children and we'll park it on our property." There are many people in my life who would say, "Come, I'll tell you what, here's an apartment.

I know you can't afford all of that rent, but I'll subsidize it by 50% and I'll do that for the next decade." That all comes back to relationships, strong family relationships and strong community relationships. At its core, when there's a strong community, a strong family of people, these financial things are less necessary.

But with the modern US American society, these financial things are more necessary because of the fracturing of relationships. Let me give two examples to drive this point home. I have an interest in understanding the Amish community. I've never lived in Amish country and I always thought it'd be fascinating to drive through Amish country.

But I've had an interest in studying how the Amish handle finances. First I respect and appreciate them, that they were able to get out of the debacle of Social Security and unfortunately, Protestant Christians were not, which I have a deep grudge against Protestant Christians for not towing the line on that one.

But the reason that the Amish have been able to stay out of things, Amish not participating in financialized insurance programs, not participating in Social Security, even not participating in much of the commercial credit markets, is because of the strength of the community. Everything is based on the community. And it works well.

I have more confidence in the strength of my local community than I do in any financial institution. But that community has to be developed and exercised in advance. There are communities in which if you're going to have a house raising or a barn raising, you could have dozens and dozens of people there.

But yet the lives that many of us lead in the modern society would be that if a house were needed or a barn were needed, many families couldn't get a single person to show up. Now you think about that. So you're familiar with the traditional barn raising. This was in the old, in the more agrarian society.

If somebody was going to have a barn, there would be a community event. And so the landowner would prepare ahead, they would put together the materials, the raw materials, and then they would schedule it and all the community would come together. And then they would do the heavy work of raising the rafters, raising the walls.

All that would be done together because you need a lot of manpower. And then traditionally it would be a big party at night, perhaps a dance in the barn or whatever was necessary. That's a barn raising. Same kind of thing with the house raising. So I've reflected on this question.

I realized that is one of the biggest weaknesses in our modern era. If our house burns down, we don't have anyone to call except an insurance company. And they might send a check, hopefully, and we might be able to buy those things. But there are communities where if the house burns down, everybody comes together.

Some people load up a truck, bring a bunch of wood. People have knowledge, they have skill, everyone gets together and a week later the house is built. If you have the strength of relationships and community, strong families, I say large families, strong churches, strong community organizations where people are built together, you can have a high degree of confidence in this.

The story that happened this last year that I was aware of, in my mind it shows the ideal scenario, it shows the value of this. There was a man this last year who unexpectedly drowned. And this man and his wife, they had adopted, I think it was a total of seven young children.

And all of the children were very young. So unlike a family that may have by natural birth seven children where the children are split out in ages, they had adopted seven young children. That's a heavy burden, heavy burden on a mother and father. The man unexpectedly drowned while they were at the lake and it was totally out of the blue and the family didn't have life insurance for whatever reason.

And so here you have a young widow, a mother of seven small adopted children who've just lost their father. Take a moment and imagine the trauma on a young adopted child, the potential trauma of previously being orphaned through whatever circumstances and then being adopted into a loving family and now all of a sudden losing one of those adoptive parents.

Sorry, but that is a situation that is a big, big deal for those seven children. And what I was so gratified to hear was in the circumstance Juan, the community, took up collections of financial donations, which was of course helpful. But there was in that community somebody who went ahead and provided for that lady.

It was a man who was a wealthier person. He had acreage, he had land, and he established on his house, I think they brought in a double wide trailer or something like that, and he bought a double wide trailer. He put it on his rural property so that that mom would be able to care for those seven children and not have to immediately put them into an institution.

If you want to talk about using your money to make an impact, that's the way to do it. If you want to talk about the value of community, that's a pretty good example. So make sure if you don't have that in your life, get busy and find it or build it.

Because at the end of the day, financial institutions are great. I've tried to talk about how to use them, but relationships and community, strong families, strong communities, strong churches, strong networks, that's ultimately what gets you through is people. I hope that's encouraging to you, and I hope you are able to use that and to be the catalyst for change in your local community.

Hope these ideas are helpful. I hope that this show serves you and serves somebody who's in this difficult situation. If you understand the things that I talked about in the beginning, especially if you understand things like ownership, use the financial system to your benefit. If you've gotten a diagnosis, like I said, if I got a diagnosis, I would do every one of these things.

I would make sure that we took, in the time that I had that I was alive, I'd make sure that we took every bit of money, and I would make sure that I very carefully structured all the assets for maximum protection. And I would take the money and I would use the money to buy those things that will provide for my family.

And even, there may be other circumstances in which you can do it, but just consider that. You can buy educational materials, and if you are in a situation, you're going to leave, if I were going to leave my wife and children behind, it's pretty hard for me to imagine, let's say that I had started off deeply in debt and I had problems because I wanted this show to work for someone in that situation.

It's easy to imagine the creditor coming and hooking up the car out front. It's easy to imagine being sued by a credit card company. But if you pay off the note on the car, the car will sit there. I can't imagine the credit card company sending the police out and searching through our file cabinet of educational materials and saying, "We're going to take these educational materials." They're not going to go and search through the pantry and say, "We're going to take all this food that's going to feed your family for the next few years." They're not going to come through the house and find that we bought a commercial, we bought some homemade bread from somebody recently who had put this very nice cottage industry from homemade bread.

They're not going to find the commercial quality bread machine that we've built for a family business that my wife and our children could do and sell artisan bread in the local community. So that's the way that you need to think, is you need to think if you're in a situation like this, how do I use the financial system to provide those other things for my family?

In closing, make sure this doesn't happen to you. I repeat, make sure this doesn't happen to you. If you're already in this situation, hopefully these ideas will help you or will help you to help someone else who's in the situation. One of my missions is I want to equip you so that you can go and help the people who are never going to sit and listen to radical personal finance.

Only a tiny, tiny percentage of people will go and sit and listen to something like this. I probably lost with talking about financial products and annuities and single premium median annuities and variable subaccounts and annuity units, I lost the vast majority of the population. But my friend, there are people that are struggling and that are hurting, and you can go and help them.

You can take this knowledge and go and sit at their kitchen table and help them. That's my mission. There are a lot of people who will never sit down and listen to my show, but you're listening to my show, and those same people who would never sit down and listen to my show, they will sit down and listen to you.

So I hope these ideas serve you so that you can go and help somebody who's in a situation like that. Be back with you soon. Thank you for listening. You've honored me with your time and attention, and I'm grateful for that. And I hope that I've effectively served you today with some ideas and strategies and tactics and techniques and tools that will help move you towards your goals.

Before you go, three simple requests. One, if there's an idea that's been helpful to you in today's show, make a plan to take action on it. Listening does lead to learning, but learning in and of itself doesn't automatically lead to a life change. It's action that leads to a life change.

So take action. Two, take something that was helpful to you in today's show and share it with somebody that you care about. I'm depending on you to be a co-laborer with me in helping me to propagate the message that I'm seeking to share. That helps the person that you are engaging with, and it also helps you because teaching others is one of the most effective ways for you to learn and for you to cement your learning.

Three, if there's an idea that's been specifically helpful to you, and if you're gaining financial benefit from Radical Personal Finance, I'd be grateful if you'd consider paying me for this work voluntarily. Come by RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron, and you can sign up there to support the show at whatever level you feel is right for you.

This is a voluntary support. That's my Patreon page. You can support me with a dollar a month, five dollars a month, ten dollars a month, any number that seems right to you. But if you're gaining financial benefit from this show, and if it's achieving financial results in your life, I'd be grateful for your financial support at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

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