Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua and I am your host. I am your fellow traveler down this road we call life, working diligently to enjoy my rich life today while also working on my plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

And I'm very gratified that you are a big part of both of those things. I find it very fulfilling and satisfying to belly up to my microphone and share with you some words that I trust will be helpful to you and will serve you. I find that very gratifying and it also helps me along my own path towards financial freedom by increasing my own personal revenue.

But today I want to talk about your revenue in an effort to work together with you to increase it. Today we're going to talk about increasing income. Over the last four years that I've been building Radical Personal Finance, I have structured everything on the show around what I call the framework for wealth.

That framework includes a total of 10 words and 5 points, or perhaps I should say 5 points with a total of 10 words. And this is the framework into which I organize every piece of financial advice that I give or that I hear. And this is the framework onto which I hang every show that I do.

Before I record the show I always think through this framework. This is original to me, although the concepts of course I'm sure are not perfectly original to me. But these particular points have given me an organizing principle. Let me give you a two minute introduction to the concept by way of reminder.

There are only three things that you can control that will determine the level of wealth, financial wealth that you build in your life. The first thing is to increase income. All else equal, the higher your income, the wealthier you'll be. The second thing is to decrease expenses. All else being equal, the lower your expenses, the higher your wealth will be.

And the third thing is to invest wisely. All else being equal, the better you are at investing, the wiser you become in allocating your capital, the higher the rate of return you earn from your investments, the wealthier you will be. Those are the only three things that you can actually do that are practical.

You can increase your income, you can decrease your expenses, or you can invest wisely. Three points, six words so far. The final two layers are not ancillary, but they're not as direct. Point number four is to avoid catastrophe. This is where you consider a potential risk and how it will affect your life, and you put in place a plan to prepare for that.

This plan can be as simple as making sure that you have savings in case you lose your job. That's a way of avoiding catastrophe. You look at your income and you recognize, "If this income stream were to go away, I would have a problem." That's basic but essential, and that's part of avoiding catastrophe.

Avoiding catastrophe encompasses other aspects of thinking. Perhaps it's putting in place an umbrella liability insurance policy to protect you against unspecified risks to your wealth. Perhaps it's the practice of choosing creditor-protected investment accounts to accumulate wealth, such as a 401(k), because you don't know when you might be sued or go through bankruptcy and somebody have access to your wealth.

Perhaps it's buying a board of directors liability policy in case you're engaged in work as a board of director and you're found to be liability, and so you purchase liability policy to protect you from that. It's as simple as building a food storage program to make sure that you always maintain one year worth of stored food for your family, so that if something happened and the truck stopped going to the grocery store quite so regularly, you wouldn't run out of food.

You'd be able to feed your children. There are many layers to avoiding catastrophe. This week I was advising a consulting client on the importance of segregating and siloing various communications methodologies. If you have a business, you should never mix your business and your personal cell phone. For example, I have a friend of mine who unfortunately, through business practices that if you or I were to judge, might seem a little bit questionable but would not feel illegal.

Unfortunately, the FBI marched into his place of business and scooped up a cell phone. Guess how many pages of documents were submitted to the court? 3.3 million pages of documents were submitted to the court, the source of which is primarily cell phone and computer records. Now I want to ask you a question.

How big of a risk would it be to your wealth if all of a sudden 3.3 million pages of your life were in the hands of somebody who was looking to put you into prison? That'd be a pretty significant problem, wouldn't you think? Now wouldn't it be better if the only cell phone that was available for the FBI's warrant was your business cell phone that only had your business records on it?

Wouldn't it be better if that cell phone were encrypted and not some stupid fingerprint passcode that can be easily bypassed? Wouldn't it be better if you had thought in advance about your data security? We'll leave that show for another day, but it was a rather eye-opening experience for me to watch my friend, who is I would say a good guy, this particular business practice that he is charged with.

If the charges are true, it's not the kind of thing that you would say is really that big of a deal. It's the kind of thing that on a technicality in the law though is costing a huge amount of money and very possibly could result in prison time. So avoiding catastrophe has many different expressions, from the thing that we're most accustomed to, asset allocation, to the thing that we very rarely talk about.

When I've done shows on why you should arrest proof yourself and your children, never talk to the police, things like that, that's all part of avoiding catastrophe. And number five, of course, is optimize everything. Optimization is where you sit down and say, "Can I get more value for the same money?" I currently drive this car and I like it, but can I drive a car that I enjoy more for the same value?

Perhaps I can trade in this mundane, boring Econobox for a vehicle that I enjoy pulling through the gears with. Or perhaps I can move from this side of town to the other side of town and the finances will be the same, but I'll have a shorter commute. Or perhaps I can adjust my income stream and I may make $80,000 a year from this old job but maybe I'll switch over to this new job where I make $80,000 a year but I actually enjoy going to work or I like the people that I work with.

Or my favorite saying, "I'm going to be working where I'm celebrated and not merely tolerated." That's optimization. Now those five things, 10 words total, increase income, decrease expenses, invest wisely, avoid catastrophe in five, optimize everything. Those 10 words encapsulate an organizing framework that you can put into place and this is the structure that I use for Radical Personal Finance.

But today I want to talk about increasing income. I'm not certain that income is the best place for each person to start. And if you are already in the top 5% of income earners, if your income is in the top 5% of income earners for your country of residence, the United States of America, that means that your income is about $225,000 per year or higher.

If you're already in that top 5% then there's a good chance that income is not the most important area of optimization for you to focus on. For many people, expenses and decreasing expenses is the easiest area to focus on. But the problem with decreasing expenses is there's ultimately a limit as to how low you can go.

You can cut your expenses today probably by 10%. You may be able to cut your expenses today by 20%. If you have a large enough motivation, you may be able to cut your expenses by 50%. If you have a huge motivation and you've developed incredible skill with spending money, you may be able to cut your expenses by 75%.

But you can't cut your expenses by 100%. Decreasing expenses gives us big wins. It's valuable. I talk a lot about it. I've developed a whole philosophy around decreasing expenses. In the future I hope to sell you a course on that philosophy that you can put into place on decreasing expenses.

But not today. Because while expenses can be cut until you arrive at a limit, increasing income does not have a limit. There is no limit on how much money you can earn. If you bristle at that statement, I challenge you, take your occupation, take your job, take your career, and go and research it to find somebody else who's involved in it who's earning 10 times as much as you are.

I guarantee you there's somebody in your career who's earning 10 times as much as you are. If you were to ask that person, "Is there a limit to how much we can earn in this career?" I would bet you the answer would be no. There's no limit on how much income you can earn.

What about investing? Is there a limit as to how much of a return you can earn on your investments? Well, sort of and sort of not. Investing is the hardest nut to crack because in theory there really is almost no limit. There are investments that return massive multiples of the original value, so it can feel like there's no limit.

But if you were to judge the feasibility of finding one of those investment opportunities, qualifying it, timing it correctly, and sinking enough capital into it at the right time, if you were to compare the feasibility of that entire process to the feasibility of increasing your income by 10x in the next 10 years, the feasibility of the investment process is very small.

The feasibility of increasing your income is very high. And if you were choosing between those and you didn't have income or you didn't have assets, you would be well served to first focus on income because without investment capital you can't invest. So the capital comes from your work. Now catastrophe and optimization are things that are done all along the way, scalably.

You can avoid catastrophe on the small things, but if you're earning a minimum wage income there's no reason for you to be shopping and studying the market for board of director liability insurance policies. On the flip side, if you earn a million bucks a year because you sit on 10 different boards, you better know the market for board of directors liabilities policies and make sure that you have fully insured yourself and you probably need to worry a little bit less about your six month emergency fund at that stage of life.

So first, income is one of the most important areas to focus on. It's possible for you to live a great lifestyle and also build wealth. Many people feel like they have to give up one or the other. They feel like, "Oh, if I want to save more money and build more wealth, financial wealth, then I have to decrease my expenses." This is why so many people bristle at the idea of creating a budget or of following a budget or of cutting their expenses because they view it as a form of punishment.

They view it as a negative thing. Well, my experience is most people who save more money don't view it as a punishment. They view it as a positive thing. They would rather have the freedom of being rich versus the misery and bondage of being poor. And that's why they cut their expenses in order to save money.

But many feel like they have to do one or the other. But you actually don't. You can do both if you increase your income. Let's use this example. Assume for a moment that your household income is $100,000 per year. Because you are a prudent person, you always work to spend half of your income and save half of your income.

So your baseline level is to spend $50,000 per year and to save $50,000 per year. Now this plan of approach is good. You have enough money to spend and enough money to save. And if you continue this practice for a couple decades, you'll be financially independent and able to stop working if you don't want to.

But let's assume that you want to increase your spending. Perhaps there are some things that you'd really like to do, you'd really like to have. And you decide that you want to spend $75,000 this year instead of $50,000 per year. And you think about it, you judge it, you research it, and you say, "No, I really value this additional $25,000 of savings." Well the necessary component for you to achieve that level of spending is to decrease your savings.

So if your income stays the same but you want to spend $75,000 this year, you'll have to decrease your savings to $25,000. And your wealth plan will suffer. Because an increase to spending will result in a decrease of saving. On the other hand, let's assume that you've decided, "I want to save more aggressively." Well if your income stays the same but you want to save $75,000 this year, you're going to necessarily have to decrease your spending to $25,000.

Because an increase to savings results in a decrease of spending. That may be challenging. Because when you cut your spending from $50,000 to $25,000, you may find yourself in a situation where your lifestyle suffers. And because we want to live a rich life now, while also working towards financial freedom, you might find that there's a tension between these two.

So what's the solution? In an algebraic equation, if income is on the left side of the equal sign and expenses and savings are on the right side, if we want both expenses and savings to go up, we increase income. If you increase your income to $150,000 per year, you can spend $75,000, which was one of your goals.

You wanted to increase your expenses from $50,000 to $75,000. So you can spend $75,000 and live a richer life now. And you can also save $75,000, which means you'll get richer faster now too. Higher income allows you to increase your spending and to increase your savings. It allows you to have both.

This is why it should always be a priority for you to raise your income. Because the higher your income, the higher your lifestyle now and the higher your wealth in the future. Perhaps this seems obvious to you, but from my experience working with flesh and blood clients, it's not obvious to most people.

Most people spend more time thinking about their annual vacation than they do about how to increase their income. Most people spend more time griping and moaning about what's on their social media feed than they do preparing themselves to be worth more money in their workplace. Most people spend more time thinking about how they can get out of work than they do thinking about how they can put more into work.

But work is the magic key to a high lifestyle and high wealth. Don't miss the importance of this point because you're blinded by the simplicity of it. I ask you today, what are you doing today that will result in your income increasing tomorrow? What's on your calendar this week that will result in your income increasing next year?

What kind of planning have you been doing this year for your income to be higher a decade from now? If you just bump along randomly, your income will bump along randomly, sometimes up and down. Sometimes you'll get a cost of living raise, sometimes you won't. And you'll always be stuck in a world of scarcity.

But if you'll focus in and be intentional about building your income, you can live in a world of abundance and an ever increasing abundance. The magic key to living a rich life now while also becoming wealthier is to make sure that your income is always going up. You want to get a little bit richer each and every day and you fund that with income.

What can you do? Well, you can put in place a plan to increase your income. That's what I'm here to help you with, but even if you don't want to work with me on my plan or on developing your own plan with my input, here's one very simple action step that you can make.

From now on, whenever your income increases from where it is, devote yourself to this simple practice. Save half, spend half. Save half, spend half. If you want something else that you don't have, figure out how to earn more money and save half, spend half. This is what I teach to my children.

My oldest child has three bags of money. One bag is a spending bag, one bag is a giving bag, and one bag is an investing bag. His financial plan is very simple at this stage. One third of every dollar that comes into his life goes into giving. One third of every dollar that comes into his life is spending.

One third of every dollar that goes into his life is investing. Now at the moment, those dollars come from me, but we're working diligently with him to help him transform that investment bag into more money. Recently he had a toy truck that he wanted to buy, and one of the benefits that I get out of giving my children a small steady allowance at this young phase is that I can automatically always say when he wants something, instead of having to decide yes or no, I just say, "Well, do you have enough money for it?" It's very helpful as a parenting tool.

The answer is no, he didn't have enough money. So the question was, "Well, what can you do? How can you earn more money?" Well, the particular plan, we've worked on a number of different plans, but the plan for this last week was you could bake some bread and sell it.

We had found a bread maker on the side of the road that my wife trash picked, and we brought it home, plugged it in, worked great. So he's not quite capable of kneading a loaf of bread, but he's at the stage where he can measure out ingredients. So we found a bread recipe.

He measured out ingredients and pressed start, took the bread and sold it to a family friend for $2. We charged him 50 cents for the ingredient cost, which left him with $1.50 of profit. Well, his 50 cents for ingredient cost came out of his investment bag, and then the $1.50 of profit was split up three ways.

So he had another 50 cents towards the purchase of his toy truck. He had another 50 cents towards giving funds to give to people who are in need, and he had another 50 cents of investment money. By earning more money and allocating the growth to those categories, he is richer now in both money and life because he has money to give to others and he has more money to spend for himself, and he'll be richer in the future because his investment funds are growing.

My hope for him, come back in 20 years or 30 years and let's see how it works, but my hope for him is every single day for the rest of his life, he will always, always grow wealthier. Why? Because that investment capital is never to be spent. It is only to be invested.

It's only there to provide capital to buy ingredients to bake bread. It's only there to buy capital to buy things to sell at a higher price. It's only there to invest. Now that's for my four-year-old. What's your plan? I commend this simple plan to you. From now forward, put in place a plan to grow your income and for the rest of your life, make sure that as your income grows, you always save half and spend half.

Save half and spend half. Don't let your spending cost your savings. Think back to our algebraic equation. If I equals S plus S, let me come up with another letter here. I on the left-hand side of the equation, I as income equals expenses. We'll go with expenses for spending.

E plus S, so expenses plus savings. If you want expenses to go up, don't rob from S. Rather, build a higher I. I, income, equals expenses plus savings. Make sure by focusing on the I, the income on the left side of the equal sign, make sure that your E and S both go up.

Help keep the I constant and rob from savings to have higher expenses or to rob from expenses to have a higher savings. Increase your I and you can live a richer life now and get richer for the rest of your life. I'm very excited to you to announce that I am opening registration today for my guide, my course, to help you with this process of increasing income.

My intent with Radical Personal Finance is over time to build a virtual university of sorts. I often imagine myself with my children at perhaps the age of 15 or 20 years old. So I think of my son and my daughter at 15 or 20 years old and I pretend that I'm dead at 15 or 20.

I had a big car accident. I'm dead and I'm gone. And I think, "How can I put together a curriculum, an educational program, a university of sorts that will teach them what to do about money?" That's my personal motivation. That's my personal driving factor and that's what I'm endeavoring to build for you.

I found this process to be about 10 times harder than I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be easy and fast. Well, it's not been easy nor fast. Perhaps that was my own naivete showing through. But I'm getting better. A year ago, I launched the beta course of Radical Personal Finance.

And in that beta course, I accepted 100 students to help me go through the first process of this. And I promised that to those particular students who joined me at that time, I promised that I would keep working on it and I would make it the very best that I could for them.

That I would try to give everything that they need to do to know how to increase their income. I think the beta version was okay. I had a lot of good feedback from students. I had some negative feedback. I had a lot of things in my own, like it was a lot harder to do than I thought.

So the feedback I got, I think I would judge it as okay. But we finished through version one and then I worked through and I've created now version two, which I am opening to you for registration for the next four weeks. The next four weeks only. For this particular course, at some point in time, it might be a standalone thing that people can join at any point in time.

That'll be the plan for some variations of products in the future. But for this course, I want it to go through with a particular time that it is open. My hope is that all the students will be able to go through over the course of 12 weeks. But for the next four weeks, registration is going to be open.

Today is May 9, 2018. Registration will close on June 6, 2018. So for the next four weeks, this particular course will be open. There are a total of currently 104 modules in the course. It is loosely organized, I mean, rephrase that, it's tightly organized around the things that I think are the most helpful.

I have a module in there called Income Strategies for Desperate Situations. In that particular module, I seek to help somebody who's out of cash, broke, out of work, etc. I hope that none of my students need that, but it's there so that they can help other people. We have a module called Daily Actions for You to Take to 10X Your Income in the Next 10 Years, which is extensive and it's all about how do you take the opportunity you're in right now and develop that.

I have an extensive philosophical module called Why Your Income Matters, more than just about anything else in your financial plan. What you've just heard on today's show was one tiny little section from that about how if you increase your income, you can build more lifestyle and become wealthier. But there is a lot of content there because if your motivation is high enough, you'll figure out what to do.

And so there's an extensive amount there. I have information on transition plans, on how to transition jobs, careers, etc., both practical and philosophical. How to choose work that's right for you, lots of philosophical and practical tools there. And then how to earn a high and always increasing income, lots and lots of practical structural things.

My ambition, my ambition with the content that I create is to focus in on timeless principles. I'm not a big fan of the short-term tactics, partly because, well, my mind just doesn't work in that way. I see plans in any context and their tactics will change depending on where you are.

I'm interested in principles that will stand the test of time. My hope is whenever I finish up this financial planning career, I don't know how long I'll do it, but whenever I close this down and move on to another phase of my own personal work, my hope is that I'll be able to make an impact with principles, things that will stand, not just a few hot stock tips that'll work for today, but rather here are some principles that will stand the test of time.

That's my personal ambition. So 90 to 95% of the content in the course is timeless. It's intended to be applicable at any time and it's intended to be applicable in any context. I have to modify that slightly to say any capitalist market-driven context. I say very clearly in the course, I can't help you if you work in a system of bureaucracy.

If you're a government bureaucrat where you get paid more for simply staying there for longer, there's not a lot you can do except stay for longer or leave, or if you are in a closed economy, if you live in a communist system where I can help you when you're working in the free market, aka the black market, but I can't help you in the official system.

Those systems are broken. They'll eventually fall apart. But I can help you if you live in an open free market economy. So if you have any interest in increasing your income, I would invite you to come by and check it out. The website for you to go to is RadicalPersonalFinance.com/IncreaseIncome.

Again that's RadicalPersonalFinance.com/IncreaseIncome. Link also in the notes for today's show. Here is my desire for you to, or here is my recommendation for you for how to join the course and what I intend to do. The launch window, it'll be open for the next four weeks. Today again is May 9.

Light registration will be open through Wednesday, June 6. However, each week the price will increase by $100. Currently the price for this course is $395. That is the initial introductory price. One week from today it'll go up to $495. One week after it'll go up to $595 and it will close out this particular launch cycle at $695.

So my desire is to incentivize you to purchase now very quickly. In the next week until Wednesday, May 16, the price is the lowest that it'll ever be. I'll never sell it for less than this in the future and that price is $395. If you are a patron, log into the Patreon site and there is a discount there for you as a patron.

So log in there before signing up for the course. But if you have any interest in working through this course with me, there are again about 104 lessons currently there in the course. Also I have weekly and bi-weekly conference calls scheduled over the next 12 weeks. So those calls will be extensive.

You'll have extensive time to interact with me and other students. I will be very, very busy there in the comments answering all of your personal questions, seeking to help you to take the information from the public pre-recorded lessons and make it personal to you. I'll also be taking your feedback along the way as I tell the students in the actual course.

I'll be taking your feedback and if something is unclear, I'll rework it. If you feel like there's something that's a little bit light and you'd like more information, I'll add additional components and modules to the course as time goes on based upon the audience feedback. So come on by radicalpersonalfinance.com/increaseincome if you have any interest in this.

Oh, also, unconditional 30-day money back guarantee. So if you would just like to try it, check it out, come on by and purchase the course. Again, radicalpersonalfinance.com/increaseincome. For any reason, all of the information is there. All 104 modules are ready today. You don't have to wait on anything from me except those conference calls.

But the first conference call is already scheduled for this coming Tuesday, May 14. So it'll be ready to go for you on Tuesday, May 14 for the first conference call. So you can buy today and you can be involved in the course for the next 30 days and with no questions asked, no reason, if you feel like for any reason you want your money back, you just send me an email.

I won't ask a question. I will just simply make a refund your money within 30 days of the purchase price. So for the next week from today, May 9 until the end of the day on May 15, the price of the course is $395 and it will go up to $495 on Wednesday, May 16.

Come on by radicalpersonalfinance.com/increaseincome and check out the course. I would love to work with you and to serve you to develop a plan to increase your income. As I close, my final pitch to you is this. Consider your lifestyle. Consider how much money you spend. Consider how much money you save and ask yourself this.

If over the next three years I could increase my income by about 50%, what kind of difference would that make to my lifestyle and to my wealth plan? I guarantee you, you can put a plan in place to increase your income by 50% in the next three years. You can go higher, but I want to be modest with my, when I say I guarantee, I want to be modest with the use of that term.

You can increase your income by 50% and along the way, you can also optimize your income. So how would that affect your life? Have you ever known anybody else who's increased their income by 50% in the course of three years? I've known a lot of people. What if you could double your income in the next five years?

I'm very confident that you could double your income in the next five years. What if you could quadruple, quintuple, sextuple, septuple, octuple, 10X your income in the next 10 years? How would that increase and affect your lifestyle and your income? I'm convinced you can. I've done it. I'm still too close to the beginning of my career to say that I have fully, I've done it sort of.

I'm almost there. I'll be there soon. I will have done it a few years from now and I've known a lot of other people who have done it. So that's enough of my pitch for today. If you want to get a great deal on a great course and you want to work with me to put in place a specific careful plan to help you increase your income dramatically while also simultaneously building your lifestyle, gaining more enjoyment and satisfaction from your work, come on by radicalpersonalfinance.com/increaseincome and buy today.

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