♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaha Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more. 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.

Today, we round out the Radical Housing Ideas series with part number five. And this series is by no means exhaustive, but I've tried to provide some creative ideas that I hope will stimulate your thinking a little bit so that you'll look around at your own situation and try to put together something that gets you a little farther ahead than the conventional path.

And point number five is rather obvious, but I would be remiss if I didn't address it. And it's simply this. Could you change the nature of the housing that you're willing to accept? I talked quite a bit about this with my wife, and I'm so blessed that she's a very flexible person.

She's not high maintenance. She's willing to think flexibly. After all, she was willing to move into a 30-foot travel trailer with me and our children and our dogs. She's really wonderful in that regard. But there's so many benefits that you gain if you're willing to be flexible in your approach.

And I have so many friends who are great people and wonderful, but they're just not flexible. I don't think you have to be flexible. We're not talking here in the area of morally right and wrong things. But you can choose how you want to live your life. And that's fine.

And of course, you don't have to live like me, and I hope you don't. Just live like yourself. But if you're willing to be flexible, man, there's so many options available to you. There's so many different things that might work for you. And if you can just change the nature of what you think is appropriate housing, just a little bit, the world can open up to you and your finances can really open up as well.

If you've never traveled outside of the United States, I would encourage you, find a way to travel outside of the United States and try to go to a place that is not on the major beaten tourist path. And what you will find is that all over the world, people live in very unique circumstances.

They live in unique housing conditions. They live in unique houses. And what other people would call a house, you might not call a house. Some people live under a cardboard box. Some people take their cardboard box, they stack up a couple of pallets and they throw a sheet of tin on top.

Some people live on a dirt floor. And your ancestors did the same thing. If you go back just a generation or two, you will find that the circumstances that people lived in, that the actual physical outworking of their house was very different than today. As thinking about the Laura Ingalls Wilder books for children, there was a recent kerfuffle over the renaming of a literary award.

And I was thinking about the books as a consequence of that. And I loved those books. One of the things that I really loved about those books and love about those books is how many different ways the housing was provided. So if you think back to the story, if you've never read the series or if your children don't read the series, really wonderful series.

And if you go back to the original series, then the family lived in this comfortable house in, I think it was Wisconsin. And then they moved to the frontier and Paul Ingalls built a house out of logs with his own hands. And he built this frontier house. But then for whatever reason, the family moved and they eventually moved into a dugout, a dugout on the side of a creek basically.

And then they moved, if memory is right, they moved west and they moved into a sod house. If you've ever traveled out in the Western United States and you see these houses just made out of sod, that was what they had to build a house out of, a dugout.

And then they moved into a board house that they upgraded. And there's no question that the board house was better than the sod house. But all along the way, they lived in all these different circumstances and they made it work. If you go back, that's what's in your heritage.

No matter where you're from, if you're from another continent, your heritage, the original housing looked different. But here's what's interesting if you go back. Housing was always a utility. It provided people something basic that they needed for their life, a place to live. It wasn't just a luxury expense.

And if you can adjust your flexibility and thinking, and you can go back to housing as a utility and think about what provides for you, it opens up your options. I love luxury housing. I think luxury housing is cool. I enjoy being in beautiful houses, but I'm not gonna sell my life away to pay for a luxury house, especially at the beginning of life, when I haven't yet established a fortune to support me.

You make your own decision. That's not how I wanna live. I'd rather look first at housing as utility and figure out how to provide housing. (air whooshing) So what are the requirements of housing? Well, you primarily wanna be protected from the elements. That's the first thing. It's pretty miserable to be out in the heat and to be out in the cold.

So you need to be protected from the elements. If you've provided that, do you know how easily almost all of the other conveniences can be provided? Do you know how easy it is to provide some basic water, some basic way to deal with your human waste? It's not tough at all, and it can be done in a variety of formats.

So I don't know what that looks like for you. Some people move into their car. Some people move into a nice van. There are so many wonderful ways that you could change a van to live in and be totally comfortable, be warm in the winter, cool in the summer, provide for water, food for yourself, provide for a way to deal with your human waste.

So doable. All throughout the world, you'll find cultures of gypsies and migrants and people who are nomads. Some nomads move on camels. Some nomads move their yurts by tractors. Some nomads live in wagons. Some nomads live in vans and RVs. But they're living very well and having their housing provided, but in a unique way.

Now you may not want to be a nomad. So look at a stationary form. Why do we live in houses? Well, there are many benefits to them. They're certainly comfortable, but you can also live in different climates very comfortably in things that are not houses. When it's the coldest of the cold or the hottest of the hot, you'll often find it difficult to live well.

But if you live in a temperate climate, you can live very well in a tent. You can live very well in a yurt. You can live very well in a log cabin. You can live very well in a garage. You can live very well in a shed that you fix up for yourself.

You can live very well in a mobile wagon. You can live very well in many circumstances. I wouldn't necessarily trade the comfort of a conventional house for something that's just less comfortable. But if you get something in return for it, for example, what am I getting by moving from a conventional house into an RV?

Well, I'm getting an additional benefit of flexibility and travel, and it happens to be relatively inexpensive. Well, that's great, but I'm not doing it primarily for the finances. I'm doing it for the flexibility of the travel that it gives me. I like that. You may like it because you can live in a beautiful place.

Let's say that you move into a beautiful forest and you set up a yurt. Well, the yurt's only gonna last you for 10 years, but you can set up a beautiful yurt to live in. Or you can buy a big canvas wall tent, and you can set it up, and you can be warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and you can have luxury furniture and live very comfortably, while also recognizing that your house is not gonna last more than five or 10 years.

Now, there are compelling arguments in favor of traditional architecture. The more I study unconventional architecture, the more I appreciate certain things about conventional architecture. But expand your thinking. Test your assumptions. Do a little bit of reading. Do a little bit of looking. Do a little bit of considering. Do a little bit of thinking.

Do a little bit of exploration. Do a little bit of web searching. Just challenge yourself. I don't know if these non-normal ways are more popular now than they were in the past. I think they're always pretty popular. But I think it's easier for you to connect with people who are living less conventional lifestyles than it's ever been.

I think there've always been people who've lived unconventional lifestyles, but it's not been so easy for those people to communicate that to others. Whereas today, you'll find all kinds of people living unconventional lifestyles and sharing that with the world. So explore those things just a little bit. Here's what I've learned.

At the very least, it'll make you appreciate your normal thing, your normal conventional things better than you, more than you did before. I used to, when we used to go on vacation, my parents would joke when they returned home that the point of a vacation is to make you appreciate home.

Hasn't that been your experience at least a little bit? When you go into something different, then you appreciate something about the old. Living in an RV right now, I appreciate some of those things that were nice about an apartment or a house. There are things that I don't have right now that I would really appreciate that you, if you're living in an apartment or house, probably take for granted.

I'm not running away from it. I'm gonna take and appreciate the certain benefits of living in a trailer. But there are a lot of benefits that you just kind of gloss over. And that's really good. Meaning it's good to appreciate those things. I'm gonna close out this mini series with this one, with two closing thoughts.

One, none of these ideas are mutually exclusive. So I could easily see a way to integrate all five of these ideas into one path. And in a way, the ideas are not all that unique. They're not all that original. It's not like I made them all up and it's the first time they've ever been experienced in the world.

But you can learn the skills and build your own house and you can live in the house while you fix it up. And you can rent out different rooms while you're working in that process. And you can live in a trailer in the backyard or set up a nice wall tent.

I mean, even if you don't have a trailer, you set up a nice wall tent on a nice grassy patch outside of a, or let's say you build a deck and the deck's gonna go on the back of the house, but you go ahead and set up a tent there.

You put in a nice comfortable bed and a nice comfortable chair. And you can experience all the same things while being there on the property. And you can put that together with the fact that you're working on that job while you are also managing somebody else's property and you're getting your housing provided at your own house.

I mean, these ideas are not mutually exclusive. So look for some variation of them in your own life and look for some way to synthesize these and just use them as hopefully a little bit of creative fodder to help you figure out some smart move that is appropriate to your context, your city, your town, your country, your climate, your interest, your skills, your goals, your family, and just put them together or come up with something better.

The second thing I would say is with regard to timing. One of the major challenges we have is the ability to appreciate how life changes over time. And so frequently, I think we try to get ahead of ourselves with regard to time and we don't recognize that there are different times in life at which different things are appropriate.

I've observed among my generation that many people in my generation are trying to live their parents' lifestyles without having had the benefit of decades of their parents' incomes. And that's tough. It's tough because if you come along and your parents are established at 45, 40, 40 years old, you start to become aware when your parents are in their mid-40s, they've had two and a half decades probably of earning, saving, investing, and they can live in wonderful circumstances.

But so many people of my generation, because they're raised in opulence and affluence, tend to forget the fact that their parents probably didn't start there. Their parents probably started in a starter home, not an estate home. Their parents probably started in a small place and as their family expanded, they expanded their space.

But what that happens is if you come along or you're the youngest like I am in my family and you've always lived in a big house, you haven't known what it was like. I remember a time when I was growing up when my parents had four boys in a tiny bedroom that was just big enough to take two bunk beds and a dresser.

I can visualize it, but I didn't, I lived there just, I know I lived there because it was a historical fact, but I didn't actually live there such that I remember it. All of my life, I lived in a giant house. But in hindsight, I can go back and analyze and recognize that, wait a second, it wasn't always like this.

And so that helps me to feel better where I don't feel like a loser because I'm not living at my parents' lifestyle. I didn't see my parents when they were at my stage of life. So recognize that you can't compress what other people have in several decades into what you can have right now.

And also recognize the fact that life will change. You don't always need little places to live and you don't always need big places to live. I was naive and did not recognize this fact a decade ago. I thought in the sense, I thought constantly with the idea of permanence.

I remember when my wife and I bought our first house together, I thought it was gonna be a 40-year house. I planned for it to be a 40-year house. It wasn't a 40-year house. But I didn't know then what I didn't know. Obviously I was naive, I was ignorant.

But in hindsight, I see now that it's valuable to be able to recognize that life requires different options at different times. And so you don't always need the same thing. You don't always need the big place, the little place. But things expand and contract. I've joked, but it's not a joke.

I just haven't seen anybody able to do it. My ideal way to live would be if somebody could figure out how to bolt together housing modules. I would like to live in modular housing. And I would like everybody to live in modular housing. So picture this, you're young, you're single.

Well, why not have little modular houses? Let's picture a small shipping container, not the big long Connex boxes, but the short, the 20 foot, I think the 20 feet, not 40 feet. Picture a 20 foot shipping container. That's 200 square feet is everything that a single person needs. And I could put in that little house, it could have a place to sleep and a place to live.

And you could put together a little commune of those with 20 or 30 or 40 of my friends. Just we all have a little houses. And then we pick up and move. So we just hook up that little housing unit and we move that housing module from one side of the state to another side of the state, from one city to another to take a job or to move something else out.

So then I go ahead and let's say that I marry and now I'm living with my wife. And I go ahead and now let's bolt on, instead of having just a small little cooking module, let's go ahead and bolt on a kitchen module. And let's bolt on another bathroom module.

And then we have a baby. So let's bolt on a second bedroom. And then as your family grows, you just bolt on a couple of additional bedrooms, a couple of additional bathroom modules. And then as time grows, then you don't need them. The kids move up, they grow up, they move out.

Well, you go ahead and unbolt that module from there and send them along with their own first housing module. And instead of that bedroom module being connected to your big house, then that bedroom module goes with them. They hook it up to the back of their truck and they drive it or you drive it for them across the state so they can go to college.

And they live in their housing module and the process continues. Now, I don't know if anything like that will ever be invented, probably not. And it's not necessary that it be invented, but I think a lot about that concept. And I've come to embrace that idea of seasonality more than I ever did in the past.

I think there's value of recognizing that your needs are different. And depending on the phase of life you're in, you can adjust the modules of your housing. And it doesn't have to be one American housing dream. It can look different at different phases of life. So my plea for you is don't take any of these things that I've talked about in this series and think that one of them is perfect for you, but look critically at the circumstances around you and try to figure out if there's a way where you can mold those circumstances to help you hit your life goals more efficiently and more quickly so that you can indeed live that rich and meaningful life now, enjoying comfort, enjoying beauty of surroundings, enjoying a tranquil retreat, enjoying a comfortable and secure place that keeps you secure from the elements, secure from predators, so that you can enjoy those things now while also building your plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

And so that you can provide for your housing throughout your entire lifespan. Hope these ideas have been helpful to you. - 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, $5 a month, $10 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. - Hey there, treasure hunters and bargain seekers. Are you on the lookout for a local thrift store that has it all? Look no further.

PixExchange is your thrifting paradise right here in the heart of Torrance. PixExchange offers a wide variety of new and used clothing, shoes, new scrubs, uniforms, new and used furniture, all at low prices. Don't miss out on the ultimate thrifting experience at our PixExchange parking lot anniversary sale at our Torrance location.

Visit pixexchangehhh.org for more details.