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It's their lowest price ever. I'm sold. Where do I get it? Just go to blendjet.com. But you've got to hurry. The sale won't last forever. Blendjet.com. Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a 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, I am your host, and today we do live Q&A. And in general, these shows are supposed to be scheduled for Friday, but... Wait about 10 seconds for the music to catch up, and I'll have a special announcement of how you can join me next week.

I have restricted these shows to patrons of the show. That helps me to meter the calls that come in just a little bit. So I open these Friday Q&A shows up to everybody who supports the show at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. But obviously, as I have been traveling, one of the challenges has been figuring out how to record these shows, and that is entirely my fault.

I have done my best, but unfortunately, I haven't been able to keep to a strict weekly show. Sorry, a strict weekly schedule. And so this coming week, which will be the week of... December 17th? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, each day this coming week, I will be releasing a live Q&A show.

So I'm going to give you instructions on how you can join that show. Let me rephrase that. I'm going to be recording a live Q&A show. I will not necessarily release them five in a row. I have a number of other shows that I want to get to next week, but I will be recording them live each day, and then we'll be releasing them over the next couple of weeks.

So if you would like to join for a Friday Q&A show, and if you are not a patron of the show, this will be your opportunity to join me for a total of potentially five shows. So here are the instructions. Each day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, starting on the 17th, December 17th, you can join me at noon Eastern time at 561-440-7362.

That's what you need. Call in at 12 noon Eastern time at 561-440-7362. Each day from December 17th through whatever that Friday is, I would say, I guess the December 22nd. 561-440-7362. That will be your best chance if you'd like to join me for a Q&A show. And then in the future, then this will, of course, revert back to patrons only as all of the callers on today's show are.

So I'd love for you to join me for that special series of Q&A shows. You can call up and talk to me about anything that you would like, any question, any comment, anything related to current topics on the show. Feel free to join in and call in for those series of shows, and your question will be released on the show.

We begin with Anne in Maryland. Anne, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Thank you, Joshua. I really enjoyed your asset protection for the immortals series. And I also want to say that I bought both of your courses for credit card and then for career income.

And I really like them. And so I just want to pass three ideas for the courses. I think if you had a course on asset protection with a little bit more detail of maybe with links to different states, maybe with some ideas. It doesn't need to be extensive, but some people who can click on the links and go and find the information.

And then maybe also an insurance course. I personally have a question about that today. But I am sure there are many people who have no idea about life and disability insurances and introduction to basics and where to start and dig deeper would be great. And on trust, I hear you talk a lot about trust.

I know about their existence, but I wouldn't know where to start with those. So these are just ideas to add to, I'm sure, your very long list of ideas for courses for you. So I have two questions, actually two topics and quite quick questions on each. So the first topic is on asset protection.

And I have three questions. And I can repeat them if you forget which one. So it so happens that I and my husband move quite frequently compared to the majority of people. So I keep an eye on the state and different states. Sometimes we have a choice of a state.

Sometimes we don't. But what I would like to confirm with you first is whether in general, if you move from one state to another, you're essentially starting over with the asset protection plan unless that the new state is very similar to the previous one in terms of asset protection rules.

Is that your understanding? Yeah, in a way. And so that's a difficult question because it would involve a number of different factors. And if your estate and your affairs are very significant, that would be one where you would want to get specific legal counsel. I'll give you what my understanding is of kind of the broad picture.

But that's one where you would want to get specific legal counsel as it relates to your state because there are a couple of important issues involved. Just to be clear, I'm not a lawyer. I'm very interested in law. But I do not consider myself a lawyer. I just consider myself a little bit more capable than most people of reading books by lawyers and then interpreting them into a little bit more of a practical situation.

But I get stuff wrong. And so if I bungle the stuff in today's show, then go and speak to a lawyer. So the first thing that you want to be clear on is what is your domicile? What is the state where you are domiciled? And depending on how your affairs are set up and what your actual moves look like, then you have to figure out how the law will apply to your situation.

Now, often when this type of planning comes in, you look at where your assets are located. So the best example, down here in Florida, we have a lot of people from the Northeast who moved down and retired down here. So from New York, New Jersey, all of the Northeastern states.

But frequently what people will do is they will retain some of their property in the Northeast. And they'll also start to acquire property in Florida. Now, one of the big benefits of Florida is, of course, the lack of a state income tax. And so many people want to change their residence to Florida, but they don't want to get rid of their estate in New York.

They want to keep their nice house in Connecticut or New York. They want to keep their affairs there, but they also want to switch their state down to Florida so they can escape the state income tax. In addition, when planning for estate taxes-- and this has really minimized a lot in the last few years-- what most people don't recognize is how burdensome estate taxes used to be.

It used to be that if you had an estate as small as several hundreds of thousands of dollars at one point, then anything above-- any value of property that you owned above those several hundreds of thousands of dollars was subject to an estate tax rate of perhaps 50% of the assets.

And so that brought many, many thousands-- hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people-- in under the purview of estate tax planning. And that was a real challenge for people because they weren't used to thinking about it. Whereas now, with a $5.5 million estate tax exemption amount for any individual, $11 million for married couples, there's a much smaller percentage of the population that has to think about estate taxes.

So the reason I say that is if you can imagine for a moment when you had a house in New York state and a house in Florida and then some additional business interests, some additional investments, you would find yourself with a very mixed up situation. And you would probably find yourself paying estate taxes in the state of New York and then also in Florida.

And if you can imagine you had $10 million of assets and you had even a $1 million exemption amount, the estate taxes on those $9 million were very significant, even the state level estate taxes. So one of your biggest issues is how do you establish your domicile? How do you move your domicile?

And you may still be taxed on the value of the estate in New York. But if you can keep your New York estate subject solely down to the amount of property that you own in New York and the rest of your estate can be moved to Florida, then that's going to be successful.

But now we have to ask the question, how do you establish domicile in a state? And here, every state is different in terms of what they allow and what they don't allow. So the worst state, from my understanding, is the state of California. If you spend almost any time in the state of California, the state of California wants to get their claws into you, their taxing claws with income taxes and then whatever other taxes are applicable to you.

And so you can't just-- if you live in California and you want to say, I'm going to move to Nevada, you can't just move and buy a house in Nevada and think that that fixes everything. You have to systematically cut off all or most of your ties from California and move those ties over to the state of Nevada.

So one of the most valuable things that you can do in your analysis is look at your assets and try to think about where those assets are located. And each state you move to, you'll need to figure out if you should move assets or if you shouldn't and what your actual situation is.

Now, it may be possible for you to establish your domicile in one place and to keep that domicile in that one place, even if you're not specifically living there all the time. If your travel and your movement is more short-term in basis, perhaps you're just moving for a short-term contract, six months here, six months there.

In that case, I think you can make a very good case that you can just simply set up your domicile in one specific place and then make sure that you adjust your lifestyle in a way that remains clearly your domicile. So for example, if I ever had to do anything in the state of California, I would work very diligently to completely stay out of the state and keep everything possible out of the state.

So I would make sure-- and just to be clear, this is a little bit of a muddled area because it's not just one factor. You can't have a Nevada driver's license and register to vote in Nevada, but then have California bank accounts, a California house that you own. All your vehicles are registered in California.

Your banking statements go to California. You go to doctor's appointments in California. You go to church in California. You can't say, OK, well, then I'm not a California resident. You would clearly lose that case. You are, in that case, a California resident. But if you have all of your affairs established in one particular place, you have a house in Nevada-- and I'm just using that because it's the most-- California is the strongest in terms of their pursuit of taxation.

And you have the very clear line between California and Nevada in terms of a very clear difference of legal system. So if you have a house in Nevada, if you have a driver's license in Nevada, if you register to vote in Nevada, if all your vehicles are registered in Nevada, if all of your banking records are sent to your billing addresses in Nevada, if all of your bank accounts are with Nevada banks, if you go to visit doctors and dentists and to professional business organizations in Nevada, if you volunteer locally in Nevada, if you're part of a church in Nevada, if you go to your country club in Nevada, if everything you do is in Nevada, but then on occasion you travel to California, then California cannot make the claim that all of your assets are subject to their tax system.

Now, they can make the claim that any income that you earn in the state of California will be California-sourced income, and you would owe California income tax on that basis. Now, back to your situation. What I would pursue if I were you is I would look carefully at my affairs, and I would look to see if I could establish my domicile in one place in a state that I know, and then simply treat my moves or my traveling contracts as temporary contracts.

So the last five months, I've been traveling around the United States with my family, but I didn't move. Everything is in Florida, so my Florida will under Florida law is still in force. All of my trusts under Florida law are all still in force, and I intentionally am going to be very careful and clear about not setting up a domicile or not even giving indication of moving somewhere outside of Florida because that would systematically change everything in my affairs.

So that's my advice to you is look to see if you can do that. If you can't do that, if you're actually moving every three years, and if you're not willing to establish your affairs in one state, work with a bank in one state, spend your time in one state, and establish that state as your clear domicile, and rather you're just going to simply move, then yes, every three years when you move states, you would need to take a careful look at what accounts are protected or not protected.

You would need to update your will and make sure that if you have anything fancy or special, you would need to make sure that it's valid under the laws of that state. And so in that case, if that's your situation, your only answer is to simplify your affairs. So that-- well, not your only answer, but my recommendation would be to simplify your affairs and focus on planning that would be applicable in all states.

So for example, in the series that we did, I made it clear that 401(k) accounts or other qualified plans are protected from an asset protection standpoint in every state because that's governed under federal law. Now, your IRA depends on state law. Your life insurance protection depends on state law.

But you would be well-suited to carefully focus on your planning that would be protected in every state. And then when we move to things like trusts, for example, domestic asset protection trusts are increasing in popularity. But my understanding of-- for clear, asset protections trust that's built and governed under the law of several United States.

The problem with domestic asset protection trusts is in general, there's no US law that protects a self-settled trust from the claims creditors, which is what a domestic asset protection trust is. Now, there are, I think, about 13 states-- I could be wrong on that number, but I think about 13 states whose laws have been updated and reflected to say, hey, we're going to protect a self-settled trust based upon this specific law that has been passed in about 13 states.

But there's a debate that happens among attorneys, whether, number one, whether it's accurate, or whether that only protects the assets that are held in those 13 states. So if you live in one of those states and you have all of your assets in one of those states, and if your trust is in that state, then maybe it works.

But in your case, that kind of thing doesn't work. So then if you need a trust, you need to look at something that's completely outside of US jurisdiction. You would go offshore with your trust, and you would set up an offshore trust, which would be applicable under each state, because you're completely removing those assets from outside from US jurisdiction.

So that was an extensive answer, but did that get at the heart of your question and give you some thoughts to consider? - Yes, absolutely. I think that's extremely valuable. I just have a couple of comments. When I started to research my state and the states that I know I may move to, and I noticed that laws change in state.

And I have a question for you. From your research and experience, how frequently do you see laws change in each state? It seems like you may have a plan for asset protection. You may stay in the state of Florida, for example, in your case, but in any other state for another person's case.

And then let's say in five years, they change law, and now it's completely different. How frequent is it that the laws change, and maybe to the detriment of asset protection situation? - I'm not knowledgeable enough to give a specific answer to that, and so let me give you a couple of different ways to think about it from my observation.

In general, it seems that there will be a culture in a specific state that is reflected in the laws of that state. And unless there's something happening culturally in the state that's going to change that, then the laws are going to follow along a systematic legal theory. So I'm most familiar with Florida law, so let me speak to that.

In Florida, in the Florida Constitution, there is a culture of protection of assets that has been codified. It's codified in the Florida Constitution. The Homestead Exemption example, it's codified in the Constitution. And that culture is then reflected in the interpretations of the courts of that law. So an example would be the most famous thing about the Florida Homestead Exemption is what I've mentioned on the show several times, that even if you buy a Florida homestead with fraudulent intent, then you are still protected under the state of Florida.

Well, that specific law was based upon a case that was heard before the US Supreme Court, and that case was interpreted based upon the codified law in the Constitution. So the US Supreme Court studied the case. The facts of the case very clearly indicated that somebody had purchased real estate with the intent to defraud their creditors, but they interpreted the Florida Constitution under the intent, or what they interpreted as to be the intent of the legislators, which was to provide virtually an absolute protection for a Florida homestead with the exception of the exceptions that are specifically listed in the Florida Constitution.

Now, that law is not going to change anytime soon. It's constitutional, and it's been interpreted, the precedents have been set in the common law rulings of the various courts. And all of the precedents in the state of Florida that would be drawn on for most asset protection lawsuits basically are on the favor of protecting the assets.

The same thing happened when Florida looked at the protection for retirement accounts. So there was this big question of, are IRAs and Roth IRAs protected from the claims of creditors? And perhaps a Florida attorney would, I think I'm right in this understanding, but what happened was the case went forward with it, and it was starting to be interpreted by the courts, but the Florida legislature actually came along and clarified the issue and said, yes, we protect IRAs and Roth IRAs because that's in line with the philosophy of this state.

Now, let's flip it around and pick on a different state. A different state will have a very different culture of protection of those assets, and you can't change that culture overnight. So a state like California has an entrenched culture of taxation and of minimal protections for assets. So California doesn't allow tenancy by the entirety.

So all of the titling, which we haven't talked about in the series yet, is not available. Tenancy by the entirety protections is not available in California. It is in Florida. California has a very limited homestead exemption, 50 to 50 or $75,000 for a single person or family, up to $150,000 if somebody's older.

That's very different than the unlimited protections in Texas and Florida. California doesn't protect IRA assets. California doesn't protect Roth IRA assets. California doesn't protect life insurance cash values beyond about $10,000 for an individual, $20,000 for a couple. You can go on. California doesn't protect college savings plans like a state like Florida does.

So you can foil those states. You can compare them one to the other, and you can see there is a very entrenched culture in one state versus another state. Now, the specific application of the law will change as more court rulings are found, as a particular technique is tested in a court.

But the general culture of a state, the general legal culture and the precedent, the common law precedent for each state is unlikely to change very much. So my answer is, in general, the specifics of the law might change a little bit. One type of trust may be defeated in court, and so the attorneys would stop using that type of trust to move somewhere else.

But the general theory will hold true in a long series of cases, depending on the culture of a state. And the same thing applies internationally, by the way. Exactly the same thing applies internationally. So there are many jurisdictions that are used very favorably for different perspectives, whether it's banking or tax planning or asset protection planning, and a jurisdiction sets up its laws in a certain way, and then an attorney analyzes those laws and says, "These laws are favorable," and that jurisdiction then continues over a long period of time to maintain that same culture.

So from that perspective, it's fairly stable. - That's very clear. Now I know where to go and look and have an idea. Two very quick questions. I also noticed that sometimes it says that a state opted out of federal statutes and regulations. I understand there is lots of nuances there, probably, but is it possible that the state will say, "Well, we don't care that federal laws protect 401(k)s, we will opt out"?

- It's not that way. So specifically, in each state, a state has to decide what laws it's going to use in its state to govern bankruptcy, and they have a choice. They can just adopt the federal bankruptcy code, the federal bankruptcy exemptions, and many states do that. So you can read the federal code, and you can look, and some states will say, "We'll just go along with the federal code." Or the state can adopt a different state-specific code.

So that's what Florida has done, is they have adopted their own specific code. Now, here, there's a difference between bankruptcy law and asset protection law. They are close together, so that's why I recommend you can study the bankruptcy exemptions and understand a little bit about asset protection, but they are not equivalent.

But it doesn't mean that a state can willy-nilly just say, "Hey, that's it, we're gonna change our laws." That process happens slowly. It's just simply a matter of, has the state chosen to perfectly mirror and simply adopt the federal bankruptcy code, or have they chosen to institute their own version of that?

Now, remember, bankruptcy court is federal, and so it's not clear to me at the moment. I'm not competent enough to explain all of the legal theory there. That would be a question for a bankruptcy attorney. But that's what's happening. So it's not just that a state is saying, "Oh, we're gonna just change this one thing willy-nilly." You can trust the stability of whether a state has opted in or opted out, and you can trust that state to be fairly stable going forward.

- And I don't wanna take more of your time. Just to confirm, I'm reading that 403(b) and 457, well, 457, I don't know, but I assume it's the same, but I'm reading it as 403(b) is under the state regulation, not federal. If that's what you're reading, I don't know.

- I think I saw it either on the IRS website or somewhere on the federal website, and I was surprised 'cause I usually treat 401(k)s and 403(b)s quite similar. I know they're a little bit different, but in general, similar. And then I saw that academic institutions that provide 403(b)s are not protected by federal law.

But I can double check. - I'm not, I can't answer that question on the top of my head without specifically looking at it in research. I didn't prepare that in my preparation for the Asset Protection Series, so I would personally need to research that to answer it. But I would just say the best thing is, yes, read, but the most important thing is to get advice on your specific situation from your specific state.

Because even if a certain account type is protected in some way or not protected in some way, a good attorney who's familiar with your state law will know how to get the maximum protection for each particular account type. And that's beyond my ability to interpret state by state. And I'm gonna put you on hold and come back to you if we have time at the end, but let's get some other callers and then we'll come back 'cause I know you had another line of questions that you wanted to pursue, but we'll move on here for a moment.

We go down to Nathan in Florida. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, Nathan? - Hi, good afternoon. So I wanted to thank you for all these long format podcasts you came out with over the previous few years. I recently finished my medical training in Chicago and I had a long commute for a multi-medical school in residency, so you really helped me sort through a lot of financial life issues during that commute.

So recently, my family and I moved from Chicago down to central Florida and we have a one-year-old now. So I've been going through a lot of your podcasts about your educational philosophy and how it's changed over the years. And one of the other things that I recently was your podcast in 1999 about your vision and plans for your child's primary and secondary education.

And I believe that was published more than four years ago. So I'm just wondering how your thoughts have changed over the past four years. - What a good question. So what I try to do in any kind of public comment is provide a little bit of creative fodder of ideas that individual parents can consider that might be different than the mainstream.

And I don't publicly advocate for one certain approach versus another, because that would violate what I think is important, which is a personalized approach that's appropriate for each child. The only thing I'm rather vociferous about is simply opting out of the government system, which is almost by definition, with the exception of the teachers who try to individualize it, tries to fit children into one specific system that doesn't serve most children.

The most cognitively capable children seem to do well in that system, but it doesn't serve most children. So in my own personal life, I also have recognized and experienced, and I don't talk much about this stuff publicly 'cause my show is not an education podcast, but you have to look at the individual situation in your life, the individual skills, interests, abilities that you have, the financial capabilities that you have, and then compare that to the specific child.

And the most important thing is to expect in time that things will change. So I'll give you an example of something that has changed for me. I did a show a long time ago where I talked about the teach your baby to read proponents. And there are a number of authors who are very focused on teaching babies who are not yet verbal to read and at a very extremely young age.

Now, I've read a number of books and it's important to note that it's a very controversial subject. Many people think, hey, this is all bunk. I don't think it's bunk, but I recognize that it's a controversial thing. But it was very attractive to me at that time, especially when my wife and I had one child.

Well, we have more than one child now. And so our family circumstances have changed. So even if I wanted to engage in the teach your baby to read philosophy, we're no longer capable of doing it without that being a controlling factor in our life or without my wife and I being extraordinarily motivated and dedicated, and we're not.

I haven't seen any very convincing evidence that that's the most important thing. So I've changed on that perspective. I've changed my opinion just simply due to life circumstances. And I'm leading with this because first, it's the thing I worry most about. As a public commentator, which is, I guess at this point, it's not particularly new, but I've chosen to try to be clear and to make clear statements.

But when you do that, you run the risk of being misunderstood. And I have just made the decision to hope that my audience is mature enough to make personal application to their own life. But there are times in your life where you will have to change. So for example, even though I'm extraordinarily dogmatic against government education systems, that doesn't mean that I couldn't create scenarios in my life or that I haven't been in scenarios with other people where the best thing to do is to put your children into the government schools.

I've been in government schools. When I was younger, my sister died. And one of the things that happened after the death of my sister, she had an epileptic seizure when she was a teenager and died. One of the things that happened is I was put into a government school for a time.

Now, I look at that and it was exactly the right thing to do at the time. And I can imagine many circumstances in which that's the best thing to do. So I think it's important that parents always keep in mind that we're looking to see what is happening, what are the results?

And those results need to be, what are the results for the child? And those results need to be, what are the results for the parents? Because no matter if you have the perfect system that you think is the world's greatest educational system, but if it destroys your family life or it destroys the child's life, it's not.

It's not the perfect system for you. So the normal course of action from most people who are engaging with their children and who are working with them is they'll choose some place to start, something that interests them, and then that's philosophy will change. My eldest at this point in time is just in the kindergarten type years.

Now he's academically substantially ahead of perhaps some of his peers, but he's behind others. But it doesn't matter because my job is to look and to see what's working for him. And even in our recent travels, in the beginning of that, we focused on academics, but then it came a point on our trip where the academics just weren't working.

They weren't working for the child and they weren't working for my wife. And so we just canceled, canceled all of it and said, that's it for now, we're not going to do it. And that's the ability, the precious gift that parents have when they take control is they can look to see what's working, they can change things based upon what's working with the child.

So I'll tell you right now my working philosophy, which is your question, but I feel like I should add that preamble, especially when I bring such, for a time I aired such dogmatic presentations like John Taylor Gatto's work and things like that. It's important to always listen to what somebody says, consider it, but then interpret it for your own situation.

So here are a few things that I believe are important. Number one, I believe that academics are important if a child, especially for a child who is cognitively capable, a child who has a high cognitive ability, I believe that academics are important. In our modern society, academics are an important part of functioning well within the society.

The priests and priestesses in our society are all in the academy and in the extensions of the academy. And so it's important to recognize that if you're going to be a person of influence, you're going to at least have to figure out how to work within that system of academics.

And I see no reason to not encourage a child who is capable to function well at a high point in academics. For me, it's also very important to note that academics, in my opinion, are not ultimate. There are a lot of academics who see themselves as God's gift to mankind or the magical, let's use a non-theistic interpretation, an accidental mixture of organic material that has come together that has created an accidental gift to mankind of knowledge and insight.

There are many academics who believe that that's ultimate, and I don't see it as ultimate. I don't think that that's ultimately important. And so it seems to me that that should be reflected in the lives of our children. With an excessive focus on academics, it's easy to create very boring children who simply come out and they look like everyone else, and they don't have much depth or much interest or much texture to their lives.

And so I look at character development as being very important. That's the cornerstone of success is character development, in my opinion. And academics can be used as a tool in that, but it's not necessarily the most effective tool. In addition, then, I look at education. I say education needs to involve good social training so that a child can work effectively in the society.

And then education needs to involve good business training. And so those are kind of a few basic themes. And at the moment, what I look at, I'm torn between an extreme focus on academics, like I'm the kind of person as an extremist, I'm the kind of person who would be in the direction of saying, we've got to be academically excellent in everything.

So I run in that bent, but then I look at the arguments of the unschoolers and the people who talk about the importance of natural interest, and I find those arguments persuasive as well. And so at the moment, my operating philosophy is you can focus on just a simple core discipline of excellence in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and then everything else can basically fit in based upon the interests of the child.

And then what I like the idea of is, arithmetic is interesting because it's its own language, it's its own discipline. And although there is application to everything in life, it's one of those things that I don't see how it can be learned except by consistent effort. And so to me, that seems the best point for character development.

But reading and writing are skills that can be developed with a careful focus on the child's particular interests. And so the reading, I think a child needs to read a comprehensive library that has been developed with good attention on all of the areas that are important, but then the outlets for writing can be customized to the child based upon their interest to maintain a high degree of interest.

So that's my current philosophy, and my wife and I are just working through it and constantly analyzing it to see, is this working well, and is this working well in the life of the child? To me, the biggest thing is that academics in childhood should not be all consuming, neither should play or simply, and by play, let me differentiate between creative play and a kind of stultifying mindless entertainment.

So I don't like the idea, you go to the Asian model and school children in Singapore, I don't think it's good for children to spend 10 hours a day just doing academics. So to me, it seems like a good fit is to have a few hours a day, perhaps two, three, four, but hopefully no more than four of hard, strong, focused academics, and then the rest of the time be filled with many diverse experiences, many diverse exposures, diverse work, diverse business activities, diverse individual pursuits, diverse hobbies, et cetera, and that seems to me to be the best philosophy to create a comprehensive whole person who does do well in academics, but also maintains their diverse interests.

So that's my current approach. - I know, very interesting, seeing your small thought out and all your plans and the way you present them to your children. I really appreciate it. I've come across most of Mr. Gatto's work so far, and I don't think there was a podcast that presented some of his work as well.

I was wondering what other books have influenced you in this regard, just off the top of your head? - So if I were to cite, the opinions of being anti-compulsory education, being anti-government schooling, is largely influenced by Gatto and R.J. Rushduni with his book, "The Messianic Character of American Education." And Gatto makes the historical argument, kind of tracing through the historical threads based upon his research as a teacher.

Rushduni makes the religious arguments and basically advances the concept and the idea that the educational, the compulsory schooling problem or process is a religious ideal, which has meant that by schooling, you can bring salvation to an individual. And that's the cultural control, and that's what's been most successful in the United States of America.

So he makes the religious argument, which I'm very sensitive to, because I see religion as the underpinning of culture. Culture, I think as Rushduni's comment, he says, "Culture is simply religion externalized." I think that's a valid way of looking at and understanding the culture. Now, so those two things have been inspirational in the kind of just that anti-government school perspective.

I'm currently reading another one right now, a book right now called "Crimes of the Educators." And I always feel it's very hard for me. I don't like to sound like a conspiracy theorist, and it's very hard to avoid that sometimes when you read people like Gatto and you start to see the primary source material.

And what I find maddening is to try to figure out how do you interpret what somebody wrote 70, 80, 100 years ago into the modern age? I don't know the answers to those. So those would be just two things for anybody who's interested in the history of it. Fast forward to what philosophy is of interest.

I don't have a lot of resources. The person that my wife and I have found most inspirational has been Charlotte Mason. There's a large movement in the philosophy of... So Charlotte Mason was a British teacher back at the turn of the 20th century, and she developed this series of schools that seemed to have some really wonderful results in the lives of her children.

And what most interests and attracts me is that she had the concept of education that involves a whole person. If I were to try to articulate something that a philosopher I think is very important to me, it's that, it's that we need to educate a whole person. And you can't, so you can't disconnect the education of virtue from the education in mathematics.

And you can't disconnect mathematics from the philosophy of religion. There is a religion, the religious philosophy that underpins mathematics. There is a religious philosophy that underpins history. And so if you try to disconnect these things, then you wind up with a disconnected person that doesn't see how these things go together.

And so I found Charlotte Mason very inspirational from her concept of a whole person, whole person education. The problem with Charlotte Mason is her books are somewhat meandering and hard to read. It's a different writing style. And so perhaps the best Charlotte Mason teacher right now is, what's her name?

I've forgotten her name, but the leading writer behind Simply Charlotte Mason. She does a wonderful job. I've spoken with her. She does a good job of articulating more clearly many of Charlotte Mason's philosophies. And that has been most inspirational to me. Now, the problem I have with Charlotte Mason and kind of the Charlotte Mason philosophy is it's very teacher intensive.

And the intensiveness of the interaction between the teacher, the educator, usually the parent, most normally the mother, it's so intensive that I wonder if it can actually be done. Sonia, her name escaped me again. Her name is Sonia something or other. It's so intensive that it's hard for me to see how is that practical?

And so then I read kind of the unschoolers, the interest-directed learning, and I see, wait a second, there's really something here, because the only thing that I remember from my education are the things that I was interested in. I passed so many classes that I wasn't interested in, and I don't remember everything.

And so I personally kind of bring those two things together. And then finally, I'll give you one comment. I have not yet found an inspirational educational philosopher who has grappled with the realities of the modern world. And the question is this, how do you educate a child in a world where any fact is accessible or any piece of data is accessible with, okay, Google or whatever Google's name, Alexa, no, that's not, anyway, Siri, Alexa, Google, tell me when did the War of 1812 start?

That's a totally different world than ever before. And so the most important thing I see is to try to teach children analysis, the ability to bring these things together. And obviously that can't be done in the primary school years. But what seems to be missing is a connect, in my observation of many people, is a connected, coherent worldview, a thing that brings these things together in a way that makes sense.

And so I don't have any better results for you. It's a reading project that I need to do in the next couple of years, because I've been occupied with other things. But of course, now with a child heading into those, primary school is straightforward. But once you get past primary school into secondary school, I'm not quite sure what to do.

- Thank you so much for sharing. - My pleasure. And just be, the reason I started with what I said in the beginning, just simply to recognize that things are gonna change is because you don't have to fit into one, just one philosophy. You don't have to pick one thing and then have it be from time to time.

If you try Charlotte Mason and it works for you, great. You put your kid in a Montessori school and it works, try that. Then you go and you try classical conversations, try that. You will change over time. And that's the most important thing. Look at what's working for your child, for you, for your wife, look at what's working and don't be scared to change it if it's not working.

Chris in Kentucky, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Thanks so much for taking my call. - My pleasure. - My overarching question is how do you set financial priorities and plan well when you have an income that fluctuates? So I quit my job about six months ago to start my own freelance animation business.

We shortly after found out that my wife was pregnant. So a lot of change in a very, very short amount of time. Business has done really well this year and I think I should have about $20,000 in cash reserves at the end of the year. It's just kind of in the business.

So my basic, the way I've basically been conducting my business is I've been saving 50% of my business income to cover taxes and business expenses and then taking the additional 50% as like a personal income for our family. So basically I'm trying to figure out, I feel a little bit confused as to what I should be investing in just because of the unknown nature of my future income, some changes, new baby, and then also just life goals.

We initially were really gung ho about paying off our house quickly, but we also have some additional house projects and wanna invest for retirement. So I think I'm at this, a lot of change in the last six months, have some additional cash at hand and trying to figure out how do I set those financial priorities when I'm unsure that I'm gonna get X amount of income every month moving forward.

- Is your wife currently pregnant or has your baby already been born? - She's currently pregnant. - So first, my experience and my observation and my recommendation to you is when you are expecting a baby, I would encourage you to essentially hit pause on any big decisions. And there are a couple of reasons for that.

This is your first child, is that correct? - So we have a foster child who we likely will adopt in the next year or so, but yeah, this will be our first biological child. - Okay, great. So, and that's also if you are fostering and looking towards adoption, that's also kind of the same advice applies.

Let me just focus on pregnancy and you can extrapolate to fostering leading to adoption. With pregnancy and with childbirth, the future becomes significantly uncertain. The first thing that can happen is your goals will change. Your understanding of life will change. Not necessarily immediately with a new baby, although certainly when you are first holding your new baby and looking at that child and just kind of staring at that life and holding those little fingers and just marveling at the incredible creation that is a tiny little baby, there's something deeply impactful about that.

It changes your view on the world in a really special way that's hard to articulate. So that's obvious, but it also changes your goals, your understanding, it changes the things that you can or can't do, and it changes your lifestyle. There's no way around the fact that children will dramatically change your lifestyle.

And so, simple examples. Prior to having children, perhaps your financial goal was we want to go to Europe and backpack around Europe. Well, you can backpack with children around Europe. You absolutely can do that. But what might happen is you look at it and say, I don't really want to backpack with a child this age.

I want to wait a little bit. And so that goal will change. Or you'll look at your house and you say, previously, this particular thing about our house wasn't very important, but now this is more important. Our house is not fenced. But now, with a little toddler running around, we'd like to be able to let them go out in the backyard, and so now we're gonna go ahead and spend the $10,000 on the fence.

And I want to encourage you that that is normal, and that's right. That's absolutely appropriate, and it's appropriate for you to spend money on your children, because they're an important part of your life. But it does mean that things will change in your planning. Now, most of those are longer term.

A new baby, you can put a new baby in a little cardboard box in the broom closet. Make sure that there's ventilation, of course. But babies don't need that much stuff. Now, if it's your first baby, most likely your house is bursting with baby gear. By the time you get to your third or fourth, you'll probably just have two or three little baby things, and by then you've dispensed with most of the gear.

So when they're little, they don't require much. The easy, you know, when they're little, you can take them backpacking very easily. It's when they're three that it becomes more challenging. A bigger thing to be careful of is you don't know how the childbirth will go. And I think it's important to be prepared for that.

So first, you don't know how the childbirth will go for your baby and for your wife. You may have a premature birth, and a premature birth will completely turn your world upside down. If your baby is in a NICU, and you're trying to also care for your wife, then you're not gonna be working much.

And so every bit of cash that's available to you will be helpful. If you wind up, and perhaps something happens that your wife or your baby needs ongoing care, every bit of cash is going to be helpful. Your wife might experience something like postpartum depression. And so all of a sudden, you were, your wife was, you know, physically and mentally healthy, but all of a sudden, she is experiencing depression.

And now you as a husband have to figure out how do I love her and help her through this? And it's hard for you to be as focused on work. And so because of all of these unknowns, I think that whenever you're expecting a baby, the best course of action is basically hit pause on all your big decisions.

Unless there's something that you're pretty confident about, we wanna move, we're gonna go ahead and move, hit pause on a lot of those things, or at least hit pause on big financial things. You know, we've done all kinds of crazy stuff. We moved houses when we had, I think, a two-week-old baby.

So, you know, we've done some of those things, but in general, the philosophy is just kind of pause and wait to see how things go. Once the baby's born, baby's doing well, mama's doing well, you can pick things up and renegotiate going forward. So that's my general advice, is it's okay to pause.

One of the things I hope, one of the messages I hope to bring to people is to recognize that it's okay to just pause and let time pass. You don't always have to freak out about every dollar's gotta be invested today, or every decision's gotta be made today. It's fine to just pause and let life pass, and then you'll make a better decision going forward.

Now, practically, what does that mean practically? Well, if you might be very careful about putting money where you can't get it. Now, depending on if you're gonna make things like retirement account investments, you're dealing with an end of the year deadline, if you're gonna participate in that, you might choose to participate in something like a Roth IRA, where you are gonna go ahead and make that, but you can take the money out.

Or if your baby's expected before the tax filing deadline, you might just wait until next year to make the contribution. If you're dealing with a business retirement plan, you might do it, but you might just be careful about other things. And so I would say, when you're expecting a baby, just pause, and the same thing with adoption expenses.

You don't know what the adoption expenses ultimately are gonna be. You don't know how long the process ultimately is going to be. Depending on your method of adoption and fostering, maybe you might have house modifications that are required. You might need to consider what's best in the best interest of the child.

You might need to build, a baby is easy in a small house, but if you have a foster baby and a little baby, you might need a bigger place. And so I would say, just basically pause. And then now I'll go back to your question of fluctuating income, which was the core of your question.

Before I do, is that, any clarifying questions that you wanna ask about that? - No, I think that helps a lot. I think basically where I was at is, I think you hit the nail on the head. Basically, I had this additional income that I wasn't expecting, and I kind of feel like, man, I really, I should be doing something with it.

I'm pretty new to investing. I've, over the last six months, been listening to your podcast a lot, been trying to figure out some other, yeah, things with investment and just being prudent with my finances. So I think the overall comment about just hitting pause might be totally the right thing with that extra money that we'll have.

I think maybe an additional follow-up is, I do have a Roth IRA. I just opened a Roth IRA for my wife. So that was definitely an option, but also does not reduce our taxable income. So I also have additionally set up a SEP IRA with the potential of funding that after the calendar year, when we know what's gonna happen with the baby, 'cause she's due in February.

And then also, as far as I know, I can contribute to a SEP IRA up until I file for my taxes in 2019. So anyway, that's kind of where my head's at. So I think that was good. And then, yeah, I would love to hear your input about the income fluctuations.

- You are exactly correct. A SEP IRA is a perfect solution for you, especially if your baby is expected in February. You can try to get as much tax prep done in January in terms of your own expenses. Perhaps you'll be waiting on 10 and 99s and such, but try to get your own accounts in order in January before the baby is expected.

Take February off, take March off, and then in the beginning of April, go ahead and finalize your tax returns. And by then, you should have a better understanding of how mom is doing, how the baby is doing, et cetera. And then you could comfortably at that point in time make your SEP IRA contributions and make your Roth IRA contributions at that time.

So practically, tactically, I think that's an appropriate solution. Now, let's talk about irregular income. The hardest financial problem that I don't know the great answer for is living on an irregular income. And I have extensive experience in this because since about 2008, I have lived on an irregular income.

And I was always a personal finance buff, a personal finance nerd, and I thought, oh, it's going to be easy to live on an irregular income. And I found that it's very, very difficult, extraordinarily difficult to live on an irregular income because most of the comments about things like budgeting just totally go out the window.

If you have a stable salary, budgeting is fairly straightforward, and especially budgeting between needs and wants or luxury spending is fairly straightforward. Let's say you sit down and you have a monthly income of $6,000 a month, and you make your savings decisions first, your giving decisions, you decide how much you're going to save and give.

And let's say you net out, that you say, okay, we're going to spend $3,500 a month. Well, you look at your expenses, you figure out how much we're going to spend on housing. And then you say, well, let's assign a fun money budget of $100 a month, let's assign an eating out budget of $300 per month.

So then when the decision comes of, should I eat out? Then you simply look in your budget account, be it an envelope, your wallet, a digital accounting of some kind, and you say, oh, look, we got $300 or $200 left in our eating out account, let's go out. And then when you're trying to decide, do we go to the fancy place or do we go to the cheap place?

You can just simply go based upon what you feel like doing at the time, based upon how much money is left in that account. Now, fast forward, you get a check from a client for $15,000 on January 1. And on January 25, you and your wife are looking at each other and saying, you know what, we'd like to go out to eat.

Question, how much money do you spend going out to eat? Do you decide you're going to go out to eat right then? Or do you decide that you are going to go to the expensive place or the cheap place? It's a very difficult question to answer. And all of the budgeting systems that I've heard and have tried, they've not really ever worked.

For example, one of the pieces of suggestions, which I think is a beautiful suggestion, is set up enough money in a savings account and then pay yourself a salary every month that you can live on. So if you have business income, put it in your business account and then go ahead and pay yourself that salary of 6,000 or 3,500 a month or whatever is appropriate.

And then make sure that that account is always there. Well, that's true. But the problem is as a business owner, you often have big opportunities for investing in your business and you're also making those decisions. So you look down and you say, all right, I've got enough money here in this account to pay three months of salary.

But there's a conference here that I'd like to go to and I think my total expenses for that are going to be $2,000. Or maybe I should hire somebody to help me and that's going to change it. And so it's just basically an ongoing battle and it's very difficult to know the answer to it.

So I don't have a great solution. I'll give you just my suggestions. Number one, don't borrow money. Every time I borrowed money, I got in trouble because I would overspend with borrowed money. So don't borrow money. Make sure that you're paying with the money that you actually have. Number two, spend cash.

And one of the ways that I've always done that is make a distribution into your wallet and spend cash. And then keep your bank accounts fairly static and then make distributions into cash and use that to moderate your spending. And so even today, I don't have a beautiful system in my own personal budgeting.

I kind of just look at my wallet and say, is there a lot of money here or not? And how close are we to the end of the month and how is the money coming in and the money going out, et cetera. And, but simply by focusing on the numbers in the account, the cash in the wallet, where I'm very conscious of every decision, I can usually with my gut, just make a big enough, a good enough decision in terms of sticking to around a spending level that it seems appropriate.

It feels like I'm not being excessive, but not being, you know, miserably cheap. Now, the big thing is keep a list of investments in your business that you think will help you. If you're building a new business, your best investment opportunities are gonna be in your business. Now they may be in employees, they may be in technology, they may be in tools, they may be in connections, they may be in a myriad of things that are related to your business, but don't go investing in other people's businesses until you've fully maximized all of the opportunity for your own.

And in that case, what you should do is start to think, how could I invest productively in my business and keep a list of those things? Because most likely what you will need to do is spend most of your profit reinvesting in your business over the next few years, keep your family expenses as modest as possible and as modest as necessary to be comfortable, but invest all that money back into your business until you turn it into a self-sustaining cash cow, a vehicle, and those are gonna be big dollars, usually.

When you sign up to bring on an employee or an assistant or some kind of a salesperson or a customer service person, then you start to, all of a sudden, $20,000, if you're paying $2,000 a month, $20,000 doesn't go so far. When you're buying investments in software or tools, materials, that $20,000 goes away much more quickly than you're accustomed to in your personal life.

So that was perhaps a wordy way of saying, I don't have a perfect system, but you'll start to get in the rhythm and the groove of knowing how reliable and predictive your cashflow is and stack up money and stack up resources. The best thing that my wife and I have always done is stack up money and stack up resources.

And it sounds silly, but there were times in your regular income over the last more than a decade, or I guess a decade, the last decade, there were times at which I would go months without any income, and there were times at which I would have massive income put together.

And one of the reasons I started the practice, in addition to just it being a smart practice, but one of the reasons I started the practice of stockpiling the normal things of life, keeping extra food on hand, having extra toilet paper, and those kinds of things, buying when they're cheap, is because when you have all those resources, you can pick and choose without, because there's an abundance of resources around.

So this month, if you just hired a new assistant, you just bought a new computer, and you just decided that you're gonna go to this conference that is expensive to get to and expensive to buy, but it's gonna give you access to the right network, you can go and you still have plenty of food in your pantry where you're not feeling pinched there.

But I don't have a good solution. I've looked for one. That's the best I've come up with by experience. - Yeah, that's helpful. I have one additional question if we have time. - Go ahead. - So how do you, and this is a hard question too, but how do you personally balance having that stockpile of cash and also potentially making big personal investments in things that you know are gonna help your lifestyle or just things that you need to do?

To give you an example, we bought our house a year and a half ago. We found out probably about six months after we bought it that there were serious structural issues with the back addition of our house, which basically means it wasn't built on a concrete slab, all kinds of issues.

Anyway, eventually we're gonna have to tear it down and rebuild it. We've gotten some estimates that say, it's gonna cost us 45,000 to $60,000 to tear it down and rebuild it in the way that we would want to. So I think that, and for us, that seems like a project that's probably three to five years out.

And all the questions obviously come up of, should we even do it? It's $150,000 house, so it's like, we're probably not gonna get that money back, but from a lifestyle perspective, should we do it or not? So I guess my question is, how do you balance that when the stockpiling cash versus, like stockpiling cash in your business versus withdrawing that cash to do something that's gonna be meaningful to your life or just necessary?

- It's a hard question. I would say the simple answer is talk with your wife about it, because you are balancing multiple interests. So having the house work beautifully is probably going and be exactly what you would dream of it being is probably gonna be very important to her, or at least more important to her than you.

And having your business be incredibly productive is probably gonna be more important to you than it is to her. And so you're gonna have to talk it through together and come to an understanding together of what's best for us as an integrated marital unit. And in general, I would say, start by investing in things that make money, and especially start when you're young.

So one of the best things you can do is defer your consumption as long as you possibly can. It's fairly easy when you're young and you have little babies that are easy to stick into a small corner, and it's fairly easy to maintain the habits of frugality and going without that have gotten you to an initial place in life.

Nobody walks into a college student's dorm room and says, oh, you've got furniture here made from cinder blocks and such, what's wrong with you? It's normal for that life stage. So it's fairly easy for you at the beginning of life to put up with things, because all your friends are doing exactly the same thing.

It's a little harder when you're 45 years old and your children are 12 years old, 15 years old. It's a little harder for you at that point to have things look not as nice as they would like to be. And it's a little bit, just emotionally a little bit more difficult.

So logically, start with the business, because the house expenses are just simply a pure consumption item, it's a pure luxury item, whereas the business will make money. And one of the best just simple things is, if you have a goal, figure out how you make an investment in the business, pay for it.

Instead of going and buying a car, simple example. I've never understood why people go and buy cars and then put payments on them, especially if they have money. So if you wanna buy a $30,000 car, don't go and spend the money on a $30,000 car, because then when the car is used up, all the money is gone.

Go invest the $30,000 and figure out how to make it give you $300 a month. And then if you have to get a $30,000 car loan, pay for it with $300 a month, at the end of it, when the car is dead, you'll still have the money. So do the same thing with your business.

Invest in your business, make it very profitable, make it run itself, make it efficient, make it profitable, make it productive. Stack up lots of money. And then in a few years, you'll start to grasp a little bit more of what should change. What you think is perfect for you today will change in the next few years.

And so I would say, I don't have a philosophy beyond, invest in your business, make it produce money for you significantly. And then you'll have what you need to move on to the personal consumption. We'll go now to the state of Washington. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

- Hi, first of all, just wanna say thank you, Joshua, for all you do. Your podcast is an excellent source of information. The credit card is fantastic. If anyone listening who hasn't got it yet should definitely get it. I've already made my money back on it. So thank you for producing such great quality.

- Thank you. I wanted to ask you more on the business side of radical personal finance. I have just a side business that I started a few years ago, but did pretty well doing affiliate marketing. And when the, maybe three months ago, the affiliate links that I used, Apple ended their affiliate program for apps.

And so the main revenue source is gone. And I'm trying to convert that to kind of a membership model using Patreon. Advice you could give having run Patreon campaigns and done it fairly successfully. I know it's not 100% of where you want, but you've done well with that. I was wondering what advice you could give to me of what you did or what you do differently, or what you might suggest in converting an audience from an affiliate model over to a paid membership model.

- So you currently have a content-driven platform and you have people reading your things, listening to you. You currently have an audience, is that correct? - That's correct. So I can share a little bit more detail. So I find basically apps that have gone on sale as well as movies.

There's hundreds of those that go on sale each day, and most are junk. And so I'm curating out just the best that my audience, that I publish those online. So I have an audience, about 1,300 people follow me across the internet and the different places that I publish. And I've got, I think, 10 people who've actually become paid members on Patreon.

- Right. So I am not particularly bullish on Patreon. And it's not that Patreon can't help people, but I think it's best suited for a certain specific type of creator. And it's best suited for a creator whose content or product doesn't, is either entertainment-driven, such as music, or is ideological, such as a certain political ideology, et cetera.

But I'm not particularly bullish on Patreon, even though with my own experience, and I'll explain for you why. I worked very hard to, it's ironic that you are a patron, that's how you got access to this call. And here we are, we are dissing on Patreon. But I wanna answer the question in as clear a way as possible.

I love the topic of, or the concept of crowdfunding. I love the concept of democratization of ideas. I love the concept of individual people being able to support others. I'm very enthusiastic about those philosophies. And that was why for an extended period of time, I really hammered hard on Patreon to try to see if I could fulfill kind of that ideological interest that I have to say, is it possible to build a business exclusively based upon serving your customers?

And my answer is yes, it is possible. The problem is it's not nearly as profitable as other potential opportunities. And so if there's, so earlier in the call, at the very beginning of the call, Anne was saying how much she had benefited from my course, both of my courses that I've released.

And you made some very nice comments about how much you'd benefited from the course that I released. And so those comments unsolicited by me demonstrate that for someone like me, there's a much better opportunity for me to serve specific needs effectively and to provide content or value. Now I'm dealing in a space of money where even as Anne's recommendations, she recommended a course on insurance, a course on asset protection, a course on trusts.

That's effectively what I'm doing. And that's, by the way, that's my business model going forward. Because I wanna focus on creating the highest quality things that will serve people in specific situations. And there's a natural model between someone like me selling financial information to interested people that may not exist if I were creating a podcast on political punditry or religious philosophizing or playing music, guitar music for somebody.

Those things don't have that natural outlet that this has. But yet the profitability of my creating courses and is so much higher than Patreon that it's foolish of me to focus on Patreon to the detriment of courses. I have never seen, I created, I gave a speech at FinCon, I guess it was 17 last year at the Financial Bloggers Conference FinCon.

And it was on Patreon. And basically I had a bunch of my fellow podcasters. And basically my answer to them was, if you have anything that's more suitable to your business platform, don't do Patreon. I have never had more than, I've always been had far less than 1% of my listening audience support the show.

Which I don't begrudge, just to be clear, I'm not bitter about this. But just in practical analysis, I've never had more than 1% of the audience support the show. And I've not found a single platform that ever has more than 1% of the audience support the show. Now I'm deeply grateful, so grateful to the 1% of the audience that supports the show.

I don't wanna minimize that. But you can't build an ongoing business on 1%, unless there's a very high dollar amount involved. And in even my own Patreon earnings, the way that I have structured Patreon, the most profitable component of Patreon has not just been in direct support, it's been when I've been able to offer additional value.

One point I had a small type of, basically mastermind type of call that was very successful for a time. I offer access to these Q&A shows. That's the biggest draw for people, is to access these Q&A shows. And so those people who value those things pay a higher amount.

But if I were trying to eat exclusively on Patreon, I couldn't do it. The other problem with Patreon is it puts your, puts your, your livelihood in the hands of another person who doesn't really care specifically about you. Now, Patreon has had some significant things that happened. There was a couple of years ago, there was a right-wing political commentator named Lauren Southern, who's a provocateur on the right.

And she had a very successful Patreon account at that time. And she did an event over in Europe where she went out on a boat and was basically talking to, and I didn't watch the video, but allegedly harassing migrants, Syrian and other African migrants into Italy. And when Patreon saw that video, they canceled her Patreon account.

And they completely deleted it and canceled it. Now, I get very concerned about that because one of my real concerns right now is censorship, that there is an ideological press towards additional censorship, especially in the United States of America. And so if you don't conform to the orthodoxy of the day, there's a strong press towards censorship, and that's only heated up.

Without going into too many examples, I wanna stay focused on Patreon, but it's become so strong that there's this concept that we've gotta weed out the heretics. So Patreon, I listened to an interview that Jack Conte gave to a conservative commentator named Jordan Rubin, who interviewed him, because Jordan Rubin has built a very successful platform built on Patreon, where he uses Patreon and supports a video talk show, and it's been very successful.

And Jack Conte promised, he said, "We are not filtering people "for their ideological commentary. "We're not filtering, we're not gonna do this. "We're not gonna do it." And so I was very concerned, but I said, "I'm gonna believe Jack Conte. "Maybe he's right. "He sounds like an authentic, sincere guy.

"He's committed to people being able to use his platform." Well, a little bit, about four or five months ago, there is a researcher and an academic named Robert Spencer. And Robert Spencer is an expert on Muslim theology and specifically jihad. Now, he's a controversial figure because he has strong-winded, very strong perspectives on Islam and the integration of Islam with violent jihad.

So Robert Spencer created a Patreon account that was instantly, very quickly funded. But Robert Spencer, and by the way, Robert Spencer is a very impressive person in terms of his academic knowledge. There is a legitimate debate to be had with his interpretation of certain facts, but he's a very impressive person.

He was, for many years, with the Department of Homeland Security and many national governments, he was a consultant on, specifically on Islam for the US government. So he's not a lightweight. He's absolutely not lightweight. He started a Patreon account, and what happened was, within a couple of days, he was banned from the platform.

But Patreon's defense of it is they said, "We're not going to, we didn't ban him, "but MasterCard banned him. "MasterCard didn't wanna do business with him "because he's viewed as an anti-Islamic person, "and because of that, "because MasterCard won't do business with him, "and Patreon uses MasterCard to fund their pledges, "because of that, he's not allowed on our platform." Now, the accusations that they made against him were, in my opinion, in my research, completely unfounded.

And this is the problem that we face, especially with companies like Patreon. And it's been more and more. There've been other figures as well, but this was the most high-profile. Now, I reached out to Patreon. I asked for a comment. I never received personal comment. I am not sure if they've publicly commented on it, but I've absolutely lost any confidence in Patreon because they are going the way that many other large brands have gone.

And the problem is not simple. It's not as simple as saying, "Well, there should be freedom of speech." Obviously, there is a component, and this is where people like me who support, I support the right of discrimination. I believe that you should be allowed to discriminate for any reason that you want against anybody.

Now, obviously, that's illegal in current law, but ideologically, philosophically, I support the right of discrimination. So I support the right of Patreon to discriminate against anyone they want to for any reason they want to, and they don't have to give accountability to me. That's an unpopular view in most of the world, but that's my personal opinion.

But the problem is there's such an intense groupthink that's happening around these platforms, and if you give your brand over to one of these platforms, you run the risk of them basically squeezing you and cutting you off in a moment, and I consider that an unacceptable risk. The same thing has happened with platforms that went over and used Facebook.

I consider Facebook to be entirely untrustworthy at this point. You cannot trust a company like Facebook because every time they come out with something, every time they've come out with a tool, they create this tool, they use it, and they try to incentivize people to come and use the tool so people say, "Okay, I'm gonna take you at your value.

"I'm gonna believe that you're acting in good faith, "and I'm gonna use your tool. "I'm gonna build an audience on my Facebook page. "I'm gonna build an audience with your Facebook tools." And so they invest in it, and they invest in it, and then all of a sudden, Facebook decides, "Okay, now we're gonna start charging you." And it goes all the way back to charging for views on a Facebook page.

You look at the debacle with journalism of how they basically destroy the online journalism setup. Unfortunately, so you cannot trust them to behave in good faith. And so all of these platforms, if you're going, in my opinion, if you're going to have interaction with a platform, with a provider, first of all, you have to be very, very suspicious of them, and you have to ask, "What's the business model, "and how am I gonna actually do this?" I don't trust people that I don't pay.

That's the current thing. If I'm not paying you for your services, I'm not going to trust you. So I'm not gonna trust Facebook. I'm not gonna trust Patreon. If I'm not paying for a specific service, I'm not going to trust it. And then the second thing is you have to think about, "How do I protect myself if this particular company "decides they don't wanna do it?" Now, if you're doing apps, you're not involved in the cultural wars of today.

You're not talking about-- - No, I'm not. - This is far away from you. And so you say, "Well, I could just kind of skate along." Well, yes, maybe, but those are my concerns with it. So with Patreon specifically, number one, you can expect a very, very low level of participation, very low level of participation.

And with that low level of participation, unless you have a massive audience, 100,000 people that are listening to you means 1,000 people supporting you on Patreon. That's great. But if you have 150 people supporting you, then that means one or two people supporting your Patreon page. So you have to have a massive audience because you're going to get a very low level of participation.

Number two, you're putting the future of your business in the hands of an entity that has proven that they will take action if they agree or disagree with you. Now, I think Patreon is better than Facebook, right? But the problem is all of the press, the movement is in the direction of the companies are supposed to make ideological discriminatory positions because that's what's right, 'cause we're on the right side of history kind of thing.

And so even in your own personal life, if you have a website related to app development, but you hold personal opinions and positions that are not the orthodoxy of the day, you run the risk of having your business shut down. And I think that's an unacceptable risk. So with a few exceptions, the people that I think are, and the exceptions are, if you don't have a natural normal outlet for services or for your own products, then Patreon can work.

I support a couple of Patreon creators. One of my favorite, there's a guy named Andrew St. Pierre White, who's a four-wheel drive enthusiast. He creates these wonderful four-wheel drive videos of overlanding, et cetera. He's very good. And that's really the only natural outlet for him is crowdfunding. And he does such a good job with it.

I love his stuff. I support him on Patreon. Or if you support somebody ideologically, you pick somebody and they're a political provocateur or they're a preacher of some kind, or they're an artist, then in that case, I think Patreon's a really good fit. But in general, it should be basically the last thing on your list because you have a very low profit, you have low participation.

So unless you can't find any other superior monetization model, I discourage you from Patreon. Was that clear enough? (laughing) - That's very clear. That's very clear. There's some good thoughts on that. There used to be fantastic alignment to monetization 'cause I'm providing apps. - Exactly. - I've added the revenue and I'm just dying because Apple ended that program.

So need to explore other options. So this is good thoughts on Patreon, especially that 1% number is a really great reference point for me to have and think through. - Do the research. - I researched that before I ever started a Patreon account. I hoped that based upon my, at that time, my demonstrated commitment to my audience to produce massive amounts of what I did my very best to make high quality, massive amounts of content.

I said, if there's ever a content creator who can get higher than this number, I think I could do it because I've demonstrated my value already to my audience. And at that point in time, so at that point in time, I thought maybe I could get higher, but I did the research.

I looked at all the big brands on Patreon. I looked at their audience size with YouTube subscribers and I came to the presumption it's gonna be a small number, but I gave it everything I had and I came to the conclusion, we're just not really wired or accustomed to specifically crowdfunding something unless we have a strong connection with it or unless we're getting specific value.

That's why I focused on political provocateurs or political ideological teachers of some kind. Those are great people for a platform like Patreon because there's not really a natural other way to do it other than to support that philosophy. And so if you support a left-wing ideology, a right-wing ideology, a no-wing ideology, and if you can find your person who's preaching your gospel, then you can support them and you'll be happy that they're doing well.

But if you don't have that, then you're not gonna do the same thing. And in general, I think there are better ways. So hopefully that helps. And in the future, just for clarity, I guess I don't have to do it. It's hard for me, I don't wanna discount Patreon because I deeply appreciate everyone who supports me on the show.

But in the future, I think I'm probably going to cancel my Patreon account 'cause I don't love to do business with people who are not, I don't love to do business with companies like that and I've lost trust in them. I thought when I heard Jack's interview with Jordan Rubin, I said, "Okay, well, I can understand "why they made the decisions they made, "but the Robert Spencer thing really bothered me." And so we'll see what happens in the future.

But first, I'm still working on the thing. I misspoke a moment ago. I said, number one, if you have a position where people wanna support you, or number two, if you could have great bonuses, the most helpful thing to me of Patreon, or the thing that's helped the most people support me is this Q&A call we're on right now.

And that has turned out to be the best bonus that I could come up with that has been effective at building a Patreon campaign. So if you can create great bonuses, which involve some measure of service, maybe it's you providing specific consulting services to your customers in some way, and you can market it on the Patreon platform, then I think you can use it.

All right, last caller of the day. Wow, what a Q&A show. We go now to Alabama. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hey, Josh, my name's Brian. I was calling because I'm interested in evaluating new healthcare options for our 2019 plan. We run a small company with five employees, including my wife and me.

We currently pay roughly between 25 and $28,000 a year to our local monopoly insurance provider. My wife is a little scared about doing any type of HSA or medical sharing program. And I'm trying to, I'm wondering if there's a middle ground. So as the company director of these finances, I'm trying to figure out, is there a way to administer a savings account where we could take the savings that we would normally pay to the insurance provider and keep them in a form of asset that we could pay out to the, like a MediShare or an HSA scenario for the benefit of the employees that are here.

So if theoretically we could save $15,000 a year using a MediShare type program, would it be possible to let that money stay in the company and then have the company pay those personal medical expenses rather than just prepaying for the possibility of needing medical treatment? - What an interesting question.

So I need to start with my disclaimer. I have not worked in group medical insurance in almost a decade. I spent a little bit of time in that marketplace, but things have changed so much. When the Affordable Care Act was passed, I completely got out of the business and I said, there's no reason for me to deal in this world anymore.

And I never really sold much group insurance and so I am not your best resource, but I'll try to point you in the right direction by at least asking a couple of hopefully helpful questions. So to be clear, you currently have a mainstream health insurance program, right? - Mm-hmm, that's correct.

- And the two things that you mentioned, you said starting potentially an HSA, a healthcare sharing account, or you mentioned the idea of moving to a Christian ministry approach, like a MediShare, the medical sharing plan. Those are two very different things. So you could just simply add an HSA account onto your current plans, if your current plans offer you a high deductible health plan, for you to move to a medical sharing plan using a Christian healthcare sharing ministry, that would be a very different move and a very big move.

So those are two big different questions on it. Is there any reason why you think you shouldn't just go ahead and add the HSA? Is there any downside to the HSA? - It looks like maximum deductions and maximum out-of-pocket expenses would be fairly similar within a rounding error of what we currently pay versus the worst case scenario for paying the HSA premium and then paying the maximum amount of out-of-pocket expense.

So there isn't a huge downside there in that particular case. And then of course you have the added value of hopefully growing assets in an HSA plan. What we were hoping to do though, is even with that very different option than the medical sharing program, there's still an annual savings that the company would see.

Now, granted, we could just keep that, we could take that as a distribution, we could do whatever we wanna do with that difference. But what I would hope to see is if there's a way to, I don't know, and that's less obvious than the medical sharing option, where there's such a significant contribution savings that we're trying to find a way to perhaps keep the burden on the company so that we're not paying income tax against this and use the company assets that would normally go to the mainstream healthcare provider to pay whatever related cost associated with it.

- Would your company qualify based upon the ideological and religious screenings of the Christian Healthcare Sharing Ministries, would your company qualify for a group healthcare sharing program? - At least for the highest paying, most expensive family, which would be for my wife and I, I can speak for us personally.

- So that's your problem there. And you'll have to research it. So there are organizations that would qualify if your organization, for example, has some statement of faith screening that your employees have to subscribe to, then you could qualify for a healthcare sharing ministry. But most companies wouldn't qualify for that because most companies wouldn't be able to discriminate against employees one way or the other.

And so you could offer it. You're not required to offer it. You could offer it if somebody could participate in it. But most companies, in my understanding, couldn't do that collectively. So on that, you'll have to research that and talk with them and see if you would qualify. If you would qualify, and if your employees, your three non-related employees would be interested in it, I think it's a really wonderful option.

I love the outcome of the Healthcare Sharing Ministries plans because they just do such a good job. They align, number one, they can save you money out of your actual pocket in terms of paying for premiums 'cause they're so much less expensive. They do a really good job, in my opinion, of starting to change the medical marketplace.

I was very excited when under the, I think it was President Bush, George W. Bush, when he passed the legislation that brought in healthcare sharing accounts because I was very excited about the high deductible health plan. From my reading, it was about the only option that could start to change medical costs because with a high deductible health plan, you had an incentive to change, to negotiate with your provider.

Well, my experience with the Healthcare Sharing Ministry has been that incentive is much stronger because now, not only do I have the incentive of saving money, but I'm with a group of ideologically like-minded people, which means I see myself as part of a group of people that I wanna help, I wanna see them succeed, and so I drive a harder bargain with my medical providers, and then I just pay cash, and then that's right, that's good for the doctors because they can spend less time paying people to work through the billing, and they can just take cash payment, and then I have total flexibility also by not being limited to what's in network versus out of network.

Now, we can pit the free market against one another, and I can go where I'm treated best with whatever physician is better, whatever state is better, anywhere in the world that's better, and so you open up things like medical tourism for, I mean, there's just so many options, so I love what Healthcare Sharing Ministries can accomplish financially and for everybody, where everybody benefits.

I benefit, the doctors benefit, my fellow plan participants benefit. I think it's a really good option, but I don't know how you can apply it in a company unless there, I don't know the answer to that. I don't see any reason not to do the HSA. I think in that same vein of what's effective, the HSA is really good for most people.

Unless you have an employee that has ongoing chronic health conditions where they need a plan that has a low deductible, if you can offer a health deductible health plan, high deductible health plan that's qualified for an HSA, for the majority of people, that's gonna be the best solution for them because they can get their preventive care covered under the high deductible health plan, and yet they can still enjoy lower premiums.

Those lower premiums can be for you, good for you, and then what you can do as a company is you can just put some of those savings and match them or make contributions to their health savings account for them. So that, in my mind, is a great use for the money.

Now, I think you could create some additional supplemental health plan if you're willing to create your own private plan, usually in supplement. I think you could create a plan that would allow you to spend more money on it, but that's out of, you'll need to find an appropriate consultant on that, and I don't know.

But I don't see any reason not to do the HSA. I don't see any reason why you shouldn't just go ahead and make contributions to the accounts for the employees and then allow them to also put their money in for them. I don't see any downside to that. - Okay.

Yeah, I think that was what I was defaulting to, just for simplicity and familiarity for the employees, to be able to basically give them the same premium amount month over month, but then they have the benefit of seeing an HSA account value grow compared to just, yeah, if they don't use their insurance all that much, that's just money spent, which is one of the frustrating things about insurance.

- Right, right. And you can, yeah, exactly. It's the thing that is the very best way to help them. And when they understand the power of the healthcare sharing account, where they, I'm sorry, the health savings account, where they understand the power that the money can be contributed. If you do it as a payroll deduction, they can avoid the employment taxes on their contribution.

That's really great. If they understand that if you don't use the money for health needs, you can take it out in retirement. It's a really powerful account, and you can match the money, you can put the money in for them, make contributions, and that'll be good for them and good for you, allow you to do that with them.

So I think that's probably your best option, because although, if you ran some religious organization where you had a doctrinal statement that your employees had to assent to before joining, then the healthcare sharing ministries would work great, but you can't do that in just a private for-profit business. So I don't see how that would work for you.

- Well, I think in this particular case, we're such a small company, we would be able to let people who chose not to be in the healthcare sharing program to still continue with their current plan. So in this scenario, I was looking at keeping the other two employees on just a small two-point contract with the healthcare provider, and perhaps moving my family to the medical sharing program alone.

- Okay, maybe so. I would just say, I'm sorry, you've reached the end of my knowledge. (laughing) I'm not good enough, but hopefully maybe there'll be a listener who knows something about it and can get in touch with me, and if so, I'll forward the info on to you.

If you do, send me an email, do that. If a listener has a suggestion for you, you can email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com, and then you can go ahead and send me an email, and that way I have your email address and can pass that on after the show. But it's an interesting idea, and I appreciate your doing a good job.

Employees really do value medical programs, especially the appropriate caliber of employees. I hate how ridiculous the marketplace has gotten. Unfortunately, I don't have a solution. I don't see how it can be solved in the short term. But for now, take care of yourself, take care of your employees, and may your business continue to grow.

That's it for today's Q&A show. I'm gonna skip the music as we go. I will just simply close with three things. Number one, the healthcare sharing ministry that I use, the Samaritan Ministries, love them, they do a great job. Check 'em all out. I intend, back to the courses, my goal is to create a comprehensive course on that and at some point, and so that you can kind of work between 'em, 'cause I love them.

They do such a great job. We have such a great experience. But if you wind up joining Samaritan Ministries in your research, go check out the past series that I did on the podcast, and if you wind up joining, let 'em know Joshua Sheets sent you. Number two, several listeners made unsolicited good words about my courses.

I'm so grateful for that. If you'd like to check those out, the career and income course is not currently available for sale. I may be launching it. I'm still deciding. I'm changing a few things and trying to update it and make it better, but I may be launching that again in the new year.

I see it's the number one thing that can be done, but for now, go and buy the credit card course, radicalpersonalfinance.com/creditcardcourse, and then closing, number three, join me next week, Monday, December 17, Tuesday, December 18, Wednesday, December 19, Thursday, December 20, and Friday, December 21. Join me at 12 o'clock, noon Eastern time for a Q&A call.

That phone number is 561-440-7362. I'll do about an hour of Q&A each day, and then I'll cut things off, so it behooves you to get in early. If I don't get to you, just call in again, but 561-440-7362. Join me on Monday at noon Eastern for a special week-long series of Q&A shows.

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