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It's more than just a ticket. Today on Radical Personal Finance, live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua, I am your host, and today it's Friday, and on Fridays I do a live call-in show. Whenever I can arrange the appropriate technology, I do a live call-in show. My favorite shows of the week, I hope they're yours too, I hope you at least enjoy them, because we never know what the phone lines hold.

Friday shows are where I open up a live phone line to the listeners, and I go to the phone, and then whatever is waiting there, that's what we deal with. So I hope that you enjoy these shows. Now my life is getting a little bit more stable, my household is getting a little bit more quiet, so that means that my production schedule will be a little bit more consistent with these shows.

We begin today, however, with Andy in Indiana. Andy, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today, sir? Thank you for taking my call. I just had a, I guess, hopefully a quick question about the kind of financial protection for a less financially active spouse. So my wife doesn't work outside the home, doesn't earn an income, and is not super interested in finances, so I guess I've seen a tendency in our lives and our relationship that I end up with more things titled in my name and more things building my credit and stuff because I'm the one doing it.

I guess I was curious if you thought there was any reason to be concerned about that, or specific steps to take to make sure, you know, if I were to pass away or something putting her out on her own, you know, not like handicapping her in the future, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I think it's a big concern, and definitely it's something that you should be thinking about and you should be planning for. Probably the worst scenario is often the death of a spouse. Very frequently relationships will reflect what you've just described, where there's one spouse that's more interested in money.

Sometimes it'll be the spouse who is the income earner, sometimes it'll be a spouse who's not an income earner, but usually there will be, or frequently, there will be a spouse that's more interested in money than the other. And I think that it's probably a good thing that it is that way because I think those of us who are more on the type A, super control, want to have all the control over the budget, want to have beautiful spreadsheets over how everything looks.

I think those of us who are in that situation are more likely, we'd probably be pretty frustrated dealing with somebody who is exactly that same way. Maybe we just have to find peace in the household, we'd have to have two different sets of budgets put together. And if we had two different sets of budgets, two different spreadsheets, maybe we could find peace.

So the situation you're describing is the normal situation where there's one person that is more involved in the money. But it can be a huge problem if one of the spouse, if the person who's involved in the money, leaves for some reason. Sometimes that leaving can be divorce, sometimes death.

Death is probably the worst one because there's an immediate severing of the person's input and whatever exists, exists. So I guess my answer to that question, I would cover two basic things. The simple thing that is the more overlooked thing is actually access to information. And for some people, this could be more complex than others.

Now if you have one bank account that's a joint checking account that you have at your local community bank and you do your banking in person down at that local community bank, then it's fairly simple if you die for your wife to go down to the local branch of that local community bank and while she's there, she can talk to the banker and they can say here's the money and yes, you're on the checking account and they can work it out.

I doubt any of our financial lives are all that simple. Most of us have more than one bank account. At least I encourage people to have more than one bank account. In addition, I encourage people to have a diversified banking structure, not to just have all your banking in one local community.

I think most of us should have a couple different banking relationships that are strategically chosen for maximum benefit. A strategically chosen banking relationship is probably unlikely to be in your town. Maybe your main bank account is in your town, but you might have other funds stashed in other towns and other banks.

I recommend that some of those banks even be international banks. Now that can be much more complex. As you say, what can often happen is for ease of functioning, your name might wind up on more things. I know my wife and I used to register things like cars together, but then if we were going to sell it or do something, I found it annoying to have both of us have to be there.

I came to the point where if a car is registered in a name, it's registered in my name because I would be the one who would go and do it. The same with other assets as well. The same thing can happen with bank accounts. If you're going to go and open up a bank account in the Cayman Islands or in Canada or in Hong Kong or something, are you all going to fly there together and do that or does just one of you go and open the account?

A lot of times it's easier for one of you to go, but now here's the problem. How is your wife, if she's not on the account, how is she going to know about that information? The first thing I think that needs to be done is you need to have a letter of instruction and a clear listing of what we own and where.

That document, depending on your level of security and personal paranoia, that document can be stored in a number of different ways. The first thing is you can resort to the simple paper method where you have a file drawer with clearly labeled file cabinets. In the file cabinets you would have a section marked bank accounts and you have a manila file folder for each of your bank accounts.

Then you put the statements in there so at least then when you're dead she can go to the financial drawer and she can pull it open and find all the information. I think for most people that would be the best way to do it because in general very rarely are many people worried about people having access to their information and this is a good way to have all of it there.

It's just to have a drawer. I call it, it's kind of a cutesy name, but I call it the love drawer to make sure that you have everything stashed aside there so all the information is there. I would ask you if you do the physical paper method, I would ask you to try to make sure it's secure.

Have at the very minimum a locking file cabinet if not putting it into a safe that's a little bit more secure. The risk of identity theft is very significant and when you study identity theft this may be changing now but very frequently the person who steals your identity is somebody who is known to you.

It's often a family member or a friend, somebody who's known to you, sometimes a domestic servant that you've hired, a worker that's working on your house. If you have your paperwork, especially your important financial paperwork, easily accessible to somebody I think that's a risk that in my opinion could be easily overcome by simply using a safe and making sure things are stashed in the safe.

So in that file cabinet you should make sure that you have information on all your bank accounts, information on all of your insurance policies, information on basically where everything is, investment accounts, etc. Deeds to property, titles for vehicles, etc. A good way to do it, what I prefer to do is I prefer to keep that actually as a mobile, I don't like to have it in a drawer with file folders, I keep it in a mobile kit, just a, you can use a couple different kinds of file wallets or varying, you know, a bag of different kinds.

But I keep it as a mobile kit so that if we have to leave the house quickly I can just grab the important documents case out of the safe and we can hit the road and I have everything that I need right there. So that's one thing to consider is if you need to leave the house, if there's a house fire, forest fire, you know, family emergency, something like that, can you just grab it and go.

It's a little bit less useful to file things, but if you bring together having the important documents there with good digitization of things like statements and accounts and things like that, then you can largely minimize the need for filing. You can keep this in a digital format as well.

I personally think there's a good argument to be made for keeping multiple copies of basically a list of documents, keeping them on, you know, movable flash media, USB thumb drive. I'd like it if those files were kept in an encrypted database, but make sure that your wife has the passwords and knows how to access that.

What I do is I keep it on, I keep the data on some mini SD cards, and so I have all the data and all the documents digitized in a document tree, and then I keep an encrypted container on an encrypted mini SD card, and then that little tiny thing, have a couple backups of those that you update from time to time, and that little tiny thing is easy to grab and go, and it has everything that she would need with instructions of what to do if I die.

So that's kind of some technical stuff. I think most people probably, I would like it if everyone were competent enough to do the encrypted digitization. It's probably unnecessary for most people, but for those of us who are more technically competent, I think that's a good argument as well. The next thing I think is necessary is good instructions of a basic general layout of what you would do.

So for example, I've tried to talk with my wife and say, "Okay, if I'm dead, here's what I recommend. Here's how much money you could expect to have, and here's what I think you should do with it." I try to make sure, "Here are people that you should call," and so to give her the people that she would call on for advice.

And so if you have a trusted financial planner or a friend who is trustworthy with money, if you have parents or people like that, make sure that she knows how to get good advice. Because if you're dead and your wife is dealing with the trauma of your death, it's unlikely that she's going to be in an emotionally stable situation.

So the first thing that she needs is to know who to reach out to for counsel, somebody who is a little bit more dispassionate, not so emotionally involved in the stress of your loss, so that they can give her good counsel. Practically speaking, I think the first thing to do is to make sure that there is an immediate source of money and funds for your wife so that she can defer any kind of important decisions.

The basic advice that most financial advisors would offer to a newly widowed woman or a newly widowed man is don't make any big decisions quickly. And he's going to need to take some time for you to understand what direction to move. It's going to take time for you to understand where you should go, what you should do.

So don't sell the house, don't immediately downsize, all that. There are circumstances in which the financial circumstances are so dire that it's, you know, the circumstances can be so dire that things have to happen quickly. You know, the person has to make changes quickly because they just can't afford it.

But let's not start there. And so I would say number one, making sure that there's always plenty of money available that's immediately available. So this should refer immediately to emergency funds. Obviously, your wife should be able to get her hands on your family's emergency funds immediately, whether that's physical cash.

I recommend that people have substantial amounts of physical cash in a place where it can be obtained fairly readily but securely stored in terms of bank accounts that are just set aside for emergency funds. And then access to lines of credit. I would say the most reliable one being credit cards, having a portfolio of credit cards available with high credit limits that your wife can use for expenditures if she has to pay for bills, if she has to pay for medical expenses, etc.

or for funeral costs, things like that. Credit cards are going to be the most simple way for her to do that. Now I'm assuming here that you also are going to make sure that she has large amounts of money available because especially if she's not bringing income into the house, she needs to be protected either through your family's investments or through insurance, life insurance.

And so as long as you have plenty of that, then it should be no big deal for her to have credit cards to handle the expenses. As long as she's not going to be financially destitute, then because you have insurance policies or because you have significant assets, then I think the credit cards are the best move for her to be able to use that and emergency cash to cover expenses for a while so that she can take time to think and time to breathe.

The reason why having the cash and the access to spending power available is because we don't know when you die. Do you die in the midst of a recession when the market is down 30%? Did all of a sudden your real estate properties decline in value substantially? And so making sure that you have some money so that she can take time to decide what she's going to do, take time to decide how to adjust the family's assets portfolio, etc.

You need spending money for her to get her through from here to there. So those are some of the practical things that I think of that I think solve many of the problems. I guess the only thing I could think of in addition would be making sure that there's no unresolved conflict, making sure that you can die in peace so that without leaving unresolved conflict and hurt feelings and regrets and things like that.

But those are my ideas, Andy. Great, thank you. Do you have any, is there any concern as far as like watching out for credit scores or other things like that besides, I mean I think you know past shows you've done and some of your courses I think are really good topics on those things, but is there anything besides making sure that there's money available and she knows how to access it?

Well I think obviously credit, you need to make sure that credit is taken care of, that somebody's credit is protected. The simplest way to do that is just simply to have the credit open, the credit profiles open when you are going through any kind of financial changes that need to be made.

If you're getting credit cards, getting mortgages, things like that. But once you pass through that stage of life or that phase of your finances, I think the best thing to do is to have all your credit profiles frozen so that nobody can have access to it. Now of course you need to make sure that you store the appropriate pin codes with your important data, that can't be lost.

But it's best to just go ahead and have credit profiles frozen all the time because if your credit profile is frozen, you've largely taken care of the need for, well you've largely eliminated the risk of theft as far as how it could impact your credit. Now if there were a more contentious situation, let's say that you were dying a slow death of cancer and your family is facing significant medical bills, then we might take a more thoughtful approach to how we structured the family debts, the family finances, etc.

Trying to think about what dies with you, etc. But in my mind a lot of that stuff is, I mean that's outside the scope of what you're talking about. If your wife is not earning an income that's measured in finance and money, then there's not going to be, the only limitation that's going to do for her is number one, that's going to cause her to not be accumulating things like social security credits, but she can draw off of your social security profile.

So that's not, I don't think that's worth it for her to work just to accumulate social security credits. But with regard to her credit, you do want to make sure that her credit score stays high. And so think through that. For example, there are strategic reasons why one of you would be on one debt, one of you would be on another debt, etc.

But it's probably a good idea to make sure that her credit score is strong and you can do that regardless of her personal income. That doesn't matter, it's just a matter of if it's important to you to build a credit score for you and to maintain a credit score, then do that.

Make sure it's the same way for both of you and then make sure that the risk of identity theft is very low. So those are my thoughts, Andy. All right. Great. Thank you. Any other follow up questions or comments? I've got time for another one if you got one.

I have a totally different question, if you want a different question. Go ahead. So the question, I guess, I see a lot of advice, kind of about emergency funds, I see a lot of advice from you and other people to kind of build up 10 to 100 to whatever significant amount of cash savings in a bank under your mattress, whatever, and then have that kind of an opportunity fund.

And you make the comment, if you have $100,000, you can move anywhere in the world, you can quit and start a new job, you can make any decision. And I guess I would like to hear your thoughts on kind of how do you go about thinking that? Because if I save up $100,000, which I have not done yet, and then I decide to go make some $50,000 change that reduces my income temporarily, I've very much curtailed that opportunity that I built for myself, if that makes sense.

So how would you go about kind of deciding and not just sitting there and hoarding your money after you've accumulated money? Basically where that came from, from myself. So I was a personal finance aficionado for many years. I always cared about money and I read a lot of personal financial advice.

And I didn't ever hear people talk about the lifestyle stuff. Most financial advice, especially at the simplistic level, there are certainly, I mean, I got to be careful because the world of authors is very broad and there are many people who've given excellent advice on all different topics. But the kinds of things that I read when I was first getting interested in personal finance focused on what I'll call just the stereotypical pattern of modern American life that you're going to get a job and you should save an emergency fund for your personal hospital, in case your car breaks down or you have a medical bill, and then you should fund your retirement account because retirement is the number one goal.

That was largely what I consumed. And the challenge was that that was largely, even when I was working as a financial advisor, that was largely what I taught to other people. And looking back on it now, I'm embarrassed of how little hope I gave people about their personal freedom with regard to their saving money.

And I could say again and again and again, I would have clients who would come in and sit in my office and they would be clients that would have a six-figure net worth, but most of their net worth was tied up in their 401k or in their house equity or something like that.

And they didn't ever really have that spark of joy with regard to their wealth. They're in the top handful of percent of global wealth. If we measure all the billions of people in the world, these people with a six-figure net worth are in the top handful. I don't know the exact statistic, but I would at least the top 10%, if not the top 5% of everybody in the world.

And yet there's no real spark of enjoying that wealth. There's no real spark of freedom. There's no real sense of personal freedom or personal autonomy. So one of the things that was very influential on me was when I finally came across the literature relating to the math of early retirement, primarily through, for me, it was the first influence was Jacob Lund Fisker and his book Early Retirement Extreme that opened my eyes to how the math worked.

I am a certified financial planner and I didn't know how the math, I couldn't make sense of how the math worked. All of a sudden, that spark of freedom became tangible and that changed me because instead of a mindset of, "Oh, I have to work until I'm 65 years old," I realized, "Oh, if I make these other changes, I could work for 10 years." But along the way, I had my own unique journeys.

I got married, I have more children than most people in the personal finance space. I have more of a bent towards entrepreneurship. I'm not one of the models that you frequently hear of, of a single person living on $5,000 a year or a dual income, no kids couple. I have more responsibilities.

Yet, what I realized is as I started to accumulate more money, especially money that was outside of retirement accounts, I realized that my life choices opened up to me. As a father and a leader of my family, when I first had $100,000 available to me in cash, I realized that I didn't have a dream that I couldn't figure out a way to finance with that amount of money.

That was very different than when it was all locked away in retirement accounts and I couldn't touch it, or at least I thought I couldn't touch it because I was drilled with the dogma of don't drain your retirement accounts, don't use your retirement accounts. In terms of a personal freedom, I realized, no, I'm not financially independent as measured by being able to live off of the income from my investments.

But I am financially independent in the sense that there's almost nothing I can dream of doing except stopping working and just quitting and not working ever again the rest of my life, which I don't dream of doing. I realized there's almost nothing that I can't dream of doing that I can't achieve.

It made me protect my cash a lot more than I ever did before. Then in reflection, I realized that it could be achieved with a much lower amount of money. That's where my $1,000, $10,000, $100,000 comes from. They're just round numbers. There's nothing scientific about it. Just to recognize that even on as little as $10,000, a single person and maybe a married couple, it's hard once you start having the financial responsibility of children, $10,000 feels a little bit light.

But of course, there are millions of families that don't have that, that raise their children effectively. But you can change in life. You're no longer worrying about how do I make my first, last and security deposit to rent a new house. You're no longer worrying about can I afford to buy a house because I don't have a down payment.

Once you reach that six-figure level of cash, you can do those things. Then other examples would be starting a business. There are very few businesses that couldn't be started with $100,000. Now, you might need more money than that, but $100,000 could be your down payment or $100,000 could be your living expenses for the first two years until you become profitable.

$100,000 in debt-freeness leads you to a place of a very, very high level of freedom. And yet that's achievable by almost any person within a very reasonable amount of time, a couple of years, whether that means you sell your house and you move into a semi-truck and you live in a semi-truck where you become an over-the-road trucker, that's available to almost anybody without large amounts of education, without large amounts of credentialization.

And you could save $100,000 in two years of doing that. Whether it means you and your family, maybe you have a family, you move in and you take a job being a superintendent of a 30-unit apartment building and you live on nothing, get your free rent because you're the superintendent and save all your money.

You can save $50,000, $100,000 in a couple of years. And then you can pivot almost any direction. So what's the best thing to do once you're there? Is the best thing to do to just drain your bank account and spend it? No, probably not. In fact, I'm very loathe to ever lose the flexibility.

In my credit card course, I even teach this, that one of the worst places to be when you're in credit card debt is to be in credit card debt and have no money. If you have credit card debt but you have money also, credit card debt is not really that big of a deal.

In that course, I go through some of the strategies where if you have $100,000 in the bank and you have $100,000 of credit card debt, you can pay off the credit card debt any day you want. And then thus raising your credit score, you can apply from, you have options.

Now, that would be unusual why anyone would do that. But when you have cash, you have options. You can lower your debt temporarily to enhance your credit profile in some way, and then you can raise it back up and restore your cash. So how you work with it, I mean, I can answer some of the specific questions, but how you work with it is up to you.

But that's basically your funding capital, it's your seed corn that you never really want to get rid of. But with that seed corn and a little bit of thoughtful, creative approaches, again, give me the business, give me the real estate, give me anything that you're trying to do, and I think with that we can have enough to get you there.

And along the way, while you're working towards the ultimate expression of financial independence, which of course is being able to live on the income from your investments in comfort, we can experience the joy and the freedom of having independence of choice, not being stuck, not being stuck at a job we're not well suited for, not being stuck in a neighborhood that we don't want to live in.

So that's my answer to you, Andy. If you have a more specific question about how to actually use it, maybe in your situation, I can help you with that too. But yes, my experience has been that it has opened up the world to me. Cool. Yeah, I think maybe I should have phrased that as, do you think that saving $100,000 cash is a better thing to do before pursuing a business or a lifestyle thing?

So in my personal example, I haven't had less than $10,000 cash available basically since a few months after I started working full time. And I've fluctuated, but I've never really gone above about $30,000. And then we bought a rental house and sunk a lot of money into repairing that.

We're right now trying to buy an arm that we want to live on. And it comes up, and then we do have that freedom from having cash available. And then we use that to go do something. And I guess I'm curious about the counterfactual. I have not pursued that extreme move into a truck and do something kind of extreme for a couple of years to get a bunch of cash and then move on.

And just sort of curious, I guess, if you could comment on do you think that is a better way or worse way? Or should I prioritize more towards blowing up a bunch of cash or just kind of continue making what so far seem to be good and successful choices in lifestyle and business?

Based on what you're saying, no. I don't think there's any reason why you should change what you're doing just to build up $100,000 of cash. And I doubt that there would be any one specific thing that would cause you to, that would cause your life to be dramatically different if you did indeed accumulate that level of savings.

The person, there are a couple of people that I'm trying to reach with my message about even those examples that I gave. First, Andy, your experience of never having had less than $10,000 since you started working is not the common experience either of anybody in the world or of most US Americans.

Most people don't save any money no matter how long they've been working. The few people who do save some money usually don't do so intentionally and there's just a relatively small percentage of the population that actually does have significant savings and you're in that percentage. It's not that hard to do but it's a different mindset than most people have.

And so you were blessed from an early age to have a wealth building mindset and that's clearly served you well. But most people aren't there. And so what I'm trying to do with my message of save $1,000, save $10,000 is to try to get people who are adults earning adult incomes to recognize there's no reason why a half to two-thirds of the US American population shouldn't be able to put their hands, can't put their hands on $1,000 if they need it.

That's ridiculous. It may not be ridiculous if we're working in Zimbabwe but it's ridiculous in the United States of America. And so by giving a very feasible goal, my hope is to inspire them. Then with $100,000, my hope is to help people who are basically working in jobs that they may not have chosen all that intentionally, may not be all that thrilled about, may not be all that well suited to, who are putting most of their money into retirement accounts which are viewed as sacrosanct, who are not experiencing the level of personal freedom.

They're not experiencing freedom of their choices. They're stressed about money. They often don't feel like they can do anything. They don't think they can afford to change jobs. They don't think they can afford to start a business. And my hope is to say, yes, you can. You can do it.

You just need to have some money and then work your way through it. Now, if you're already pursuing that, you're buying rental properties, you're moving to a farm, etc., no, I don't see any reason for you to stop that because the point of the $100,000 is that it can buy you freedom.

So should you stop with $30,000 and just never save cash again? No, of course not. You should continue to build up cash. But if you see an opportunity, something that's going to be a free choice, something that's going to move you in the direction of your vision for what you think would serve you and your family better, then I think you move on it as quickly as you can comfortably do so.

What I would do is I would just make sure that I did everything possible to not lose my cash. I would just want to make sure that I didn't get into a bind where my back's up against the wall where I'm going to lose my cash. So if I had $30,000 of cash and I wanted to move on to a farm, but I had to use the $30,000 of cash to put as a down payment to buy land, I wouldn't do that.

I would lease land because I want the $30,000 in cash so I can get the business going because I'm not going to lose my freedom. I'm not going to lose my ability to pivot and change. For me, especially being a father, that has been the number one thing for me is I've recognized that I can start things, they can fail.

My businesses can fail, my investments can fail, but as long as I keep some cash on hand and as long as I have the ability to work, then I can always provide for my family even if my businesses fail and we're not going to be sleeping on the streets.

That wasn't as important to me a decade ago as it is today. So I guess for me, it's built that security. But I wouldn't change and I wouldn't say no to a good opportunity just because I've got to have $100,000 in the bank, but I would just keep working towards healthy amounts of cash.

My pleasure. Any other questions or comments, Andy? Andy Wertheimer I actually have a whole list of questions I've been building up. I thought I was going to have a full call of callers, but every time a caller jumps on, they just drop off all of a sudden. So right now, it's still you and me.

So go ahead. All right. So this again would be kind of towards your philosophy on wealth building. I was listening to your show on, I don't remember the title of it, but when you did a month or two ago about not retiring and not needing to retire. And you know, I'm talking about it, but you've talked about that idea a lot.

And yet still prioritizing building wealth. And at the same time, I see you from my very limited vantage point, you seem to be pursuing a lot of other non-traditional goals, such as having a larger than average family, your wife being able to stay home and focus on the children, international travel, things like that, that probably reduce your ability to just grow wealthy.

And so I kind of come from the aspect of, I guess I want to be wealthy, like who wouldn't want to be wealthy, but I don't feel like necessarily my wife shares that. And it's hard for me to articulate if I don't want to ever stop working, why would I be making these choices that pamper today and tomorrow and 10 years from now in order to be wealthy, you know, 20, 30 years from now, instead of just focusing on more, I mean, I have lots of non-traditional interests.

I'm interested in privacy stuff. I'm interested in eco-friendly stuff. I'm interested in parenting stuff, like, and all of those to be outside the norm costs money. And I'd like to hear kind of your ideas on how you reconcile those things, if that makes sense of the question. So in my mind, there are a couple of, here's my personal philosophy on it.

So first, I think there are a number of significant and serious risks of focusing on wealth and financial wealth, being rich, as a primary goal. Now this is driven for me primarily out of my religious ideology that is a controlling influence in my life. But there are a number of very serious warnings in the Bible about the desire for wealth.

Jesus said, "Woe to those of you who are rich in this age, for it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven." There are repeated biblical admonitions and warnings against pursuing wealth, against desiring to be rich as a primary thing.

There are also a lot of biblical instructions about wealth being a virtuous thing. There are many proverbs, you know, "A virtuous man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. A righteous man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. And the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous." So some people, of course, would say, "Well, these are contradictory.

Why should we give any thought to it?" Well, I don't take that viewpoint. I say there is something here that maybe it appears self-contradictory in the first moment, but there are truths here. And the way that I've understood those truths and the way that I've reconciled those truths could be encapsulated in the idea that money makes a wonderful servant but a terrible master.

So I want to guard my heart against wanting to be rich against all odds. I want to guard my heart against pursuing the allure of wealth, because I can recognize and see in my own life and in the lives of many people all around us, of course, that when money becomes the number one goal, it has a destructive effect on other things.

An example of this that comes to me. There's a writer who I like and admire. His name is Mark Ford. He wrote for years under the pen name of Michael Masterson. He's written a number of books. He's written a number of books, even on finance, that are quite excellent.

I'm struggling for the names. I think one was called Wealth for Grads or something like that. But if you look up Michael Masterson, his books on money were pretty good. He wrote one called Seven Years to Seven Figures, which I thought was excellent. I had a domain name registered at that for a long time, because I thought it was so good.

And he interviewed people who had set out and were able to become millionaires over a seven-year period of time. So Michael Masterson reports in his personal writings about his own experience. He writes about how he decided at an early age that his number one goal was to become wealthy.

He was attending a Dale Carnegie seminar, and the instructor at the Dale Carnegie seminar said, "You've got to decide what your number one goal is." He didn't really know what it should be, but he decided, "I'm going to become wealthy." And so he went on to become very, very wealthy.

But in his later years, he has written, I think he's in his late 60s now, something like that. But in his later years, he's written about how although he was very successful with that goal, he became very wealthy. He doesn't think at this point that it was good, because it cost him some significant relationships, it cost him a number of trials.

There were just things about it that weren't good about that. So he doesn't write a lot about that. But in that, I'm taking just from his public writing, that sense of regret that when you make money, you're master. When you make money, you're number one goal, you miss out.

And I think most of us in our lives could see this. For example, if I make money my number one goal, and over the past few months, I have been more frustrated with my family than I've ever been, because I feel like I can't do the things that I want to do that would make my business flourish to the degree it's capable of flourishing, that would allow me to experience the professional success that I would like to experience.

It's been tough. Even just finding a time that is quiet enough for me to record a Q&A call has been really tough, really challenging. And I feel constantly hamstrung by the obligations of my young children, and it causes me to not be experiencing as much professional success as I'm capable of.

And I look at that, and I look around, and I think, "Man, this would be a whole lot easier if I were single. This would be a whole lot easier if I didn't have children. I just think we could come and go. I would have no problems whatsoever." But it's in those moments that I remind myself that those aren't my goals.

That's not my life. That's not what I've set out. I've not set out to pursue wealth and financial independence and professional success as my number one goal. And so because of that, I have damage to my wealth, my financial wealth. I have damage to my professional success because my goals are more encapsulated, broader than that.

But when I look at the wealth of my children and I look at the lives of older people, I have known a number of very rich, very lonely, very miserable, very unfulfilled old people. And I have noticed that there is a high correlation between personal satisfaction and happiness, between the quality of one's family as compared to the size of one's bank account.

It's not to say that those who are childless or who are unmarried can't be happy. Of course not. But when I think about me lying on my deathbed and I reflect back, I don't wish to have the biggest bank account. I wish to have a very rich life. So it starts with presuppositional philosophy.

Now, I believe that wealth is a natural result of a life of integrity and wise decisions. I believe that wealth is a natural result of a virtuous life. It's not a guaranteed result. For example, somebody could come and steal your wealth anytime, whatever the nature of that thief is, we don't know.

But a virtuous person, I believe, in time should accumulate wealth. And the only offsetting factor would be if they consciously chose to give away all of their money along the way, which I have known a number of people that do that. They don't have any money to their name, but they're very people of deep virtue and deep integrity who have simply chosen throughout their life to give away all of their money whenever it came into their hands.

And the reason I say that is because there are virtues and personal character qualities that I think naturally lead to wealth. So things like industriousness, being hardworking, being industrious, for me, that's a biblical character trait. It's something that's mandatory for Christians to be industrious, hardworking people. It embarrasses me when I see people who are not that way, who proclaim the same God that I proclaim, but I want to encourage people to be hardworking and industrious.

Well, in a free society, in general, people who are hardworking and who are industrious wind up doing more, and they wind up experiencing the benefits of flourishing businesses or of higher wages because of their higher productivity. I think when you bring the concept of being a servant into it, then it becomes even clearer in terms of the success that I would expect somebody who was an effective servant to experience.

Jesus taught that he who would be greatest among you must be the servant of all. And so the basic ethic, one of the basic ethics is service. The one who serves the most effectively, the one who serves the best, serves the most, is the one who ultimately receives the most rewards.

It's not from coming down from the top down trying to extract, trying to force someone and stick a gun in their ribs and say, "Give me, give me, give me, give me your money." You can go out on the street and put your gun in someone's ribs and say, "Give me your money." You'll get a little bit of money, but you'll get far more if you go out and say, "Here, how can I serve you so that you'll be happy to give me your money?" And so the ethic of service applies in the workplace.

The person who serves their boss most effectively is the one who is very likely to be promoted. And if you're not promoted above your boss, you'll be at least promoted alongside with your boss, so you'll come up through the ranks. The one, if you're in a company, of course, you serve your clients, your customers.

And so the company that serves their clients and their customers most effectively is the company that's ultimately going to experience the most success, experience the most income. And if you add this income to caring for the bottom line and making sure that you're profitable, then you should be ultimately the most effective, the most profitable.

The biggest and best companies in the long run are always going to be the ones who serve their customers the most effectively and who do it on a broad basis. People will tell others about them. So it's the ethic of service, not the ethic of coercion, but service that should guide my thinking.

And anything that I do, then if I serve effectively, serve more effectively and serve more people more effectively, then ultimately that should come in with the highest level of compensation, of remuneration. And then of course you could add in other important ethics, like the ethic of stewardship. Now we can talk about stewardship from a financial perspective, but even just stewardship of the resources that you're given.

One of the most important Christian ethics is just stewardship over what you've given. So if that's your stewardship over your body, stewardship over your money, stewardship over your house, stewardship over your property. So if you think about this, you mentioned farming. So let's use an example of something like farming.

It's not okay to come in and rape the land and destroy it and strip it of all of its nutrients, everything out of it, just so you can make a quick buck. That might work. You might make a quick buck, but you're not going to achieve lasting wealth the same way as if you come in and you steward the land and you take care of it and you build it and you invest into it.

The farmer who comes in and invests into his land and doesn't destroy it, but who cares for it and who cultivates it is going to be established for their long-term, dare I say it, financial security for their entire lifetime, if they care for the resources that are there. So whether that's caring for your land, caring for the animals, caring for the water, whatever it is that you have, you have to demonstrate that ethic of stewardship and care over the resources that you have control over.

You can't go and tell someone else what they should do with their resources until we first demonstrate that we're being effective with the resources that you have. And I think this is reflected in almost anything. I've been convicted in the past about something silly like washing my car. I didn't used to care how dirty my car was and I realized, no, this is valuable.

This is an important component of my stewardship. I need to take care of my car. Yes, I've always taken care of it mechanically, but I need to also just make sure that I care for this car. Does my house reflect the ethic of stewardship? When I first bought a house, I didn't care so much.

But now I've realized, no, this is a reflection of the kind of steward that I am. Well, what happens if I'm going to go and rent from an apartment? A guy I know, very wealthy guy, rents a lot of apartments. The first thing that he does when he has somebody who comes and wants to rent an apartment from him is he goes and he inspects their car and he looks in their car to see how they're caring for their car.

The second thing that he does is he always manufactures some kind of excuse for him to go and see their house, see them at their current place of address. Oh, some paperwork, some signature, et cetera. So that way he can see how is this person caring for their car and for the house that they're currently renting.

And if the person is not being a good steward of those resources, he's not going to rent to them. And now he gives good apartments at good rates, et cetera, but he's not going to rent to them because they're not a good steward. So if I'm being a good steward of the resources that I have, I'm caring for my body, I'm caring for my car, I'm caring for my property, it looks like I take pride.

It doesn't look like a redneck shack. Then that's going to reflect and it's going to be reflected throughout my life. Things like that, these ethics matter. And I see no reason why in a free society that the people who most model these ethics shouldn't be experiencing the most success in its fullest sense of meaning.

Now, these are virtues, these are character traits. But let's flip the coin and study the obverse. Now, what's the opposite of honesty? Dishonesty. Well, if I cultivate dishonesty, if I cultivate a sense of, if I lie to everybody, if I'm known as a charlatan and a fraud, is that going to lead to success?

Clearly not. Maybe in the short term, again, I can run a Ponzi scheme, but in the long term, it doesn't. It prospers for a short time, but in the long term it never does. So integrity matters, honesty matters, truthfulness matters. What's the opposite of industriousness? Laziness. Well, what kind of, who's going to pay a lot of money to somebody who is lazy?

Who's going to pay a lot of money to somebody who is, shirks their work, who doesn't just roll in their sleeves and get things done? What's the opposite of frugality? Well, profligacy. Does anybody want to hire somebody who's profligate with their money? Am I really going to be offered a job as the vice president of a company because I'm known as being bad with my money?

The way that I handle my money is going to reflect on how I handle my boss's money. And so frugality is going to be extremely valuable as a virtue, but no one's going to promote me or advance me because I'm a spendthrift, because I'm wasteful, I'm extravagant. What's the opposite of stewardship?

Destruction. Should I really be destroying something? Somebody comes by and sees that my car is destroyed, my house is destroyed, my land has been destroyed, I've raped the physical resources that I had to start with, I'm obese, I don't care for my body, I don't care for my animals.

None of these things are character qualities that are going to lead to success and advancement. Frugality is a virtue. It's something that is a character trait and a character quality that I wish to cultivate in myself and I wish to cultivate in my children. Well, if you combine hardworking, industriousness with frugality, there should be a surplus of money.

You have income, you have low expenses, so now there should be a surplus of money. What do you do with that? Well, another virtue that I wish to develop in myself and in my children and to teach to others is the virtue of looking for how do you invest wisely.

There are many, many scriptural instructions, which again is where I draw my ideology from, which we're talking about wise investments. And then things like soliciting counsel, so wise investments would involve involving others. So I need to develop a board of advisors, people to help me to make sure that I'm investing money wisely.

Well, it makes all the sense in the world to me that if somebody is hardworking and industrious and they're frugal, they should have money. And if they're pursuing wise counsel on how to invest their money, they should start to make proper investments. And then in time, as that cycle is repeated year after year after year, wealth should be the natural result.

And there are all kinds of ways where I believe that should be enhanced by the development of personal virtue. Honesty, if you become an honest person and are known as somebody who is an honest person, then in time that has certain results. You start to be trusted with larger projects.

You start to be entrusted with larger sums of money. You start to be trusted with personal information. Generosity, becoming a generous person, one who is continually giving to others of your time, of your talents, of your money, somebody who is generous generally will tend to develop relationships in their local community and will generally have other people who are looking to help them.

And that generosity, even under the law of reciprocity, that generosity will usually be returned by other people. So now if you're known as a generous person, other people often tend to reciprocate and be generous towards you. And as you start to work and to labor in the lives of others to help other people succeed, well, many times people want to see you succeed.

So you might get the phone call about the good job or you might get the phone call about so-and-so is selling his farm, etc. And then by being an honest person, the friction of your investment activities can be diminished. If you need money and you're known as an honest person who is not a thief, you can call up somebody who has more money and say, "Listen, I've got a deal over here to buy this farm and I need money.

Will you please lend me money?" And that person will say, "Yes." And you don't have to go through all of the systems that are necessarily built for people to try to figure out who's honest and who's not honest. If you've cultivated these personal virtues and characters, then they have a multiplying effect throughout your life.

And so now you can say to somebody, "I need money. I can't tell you what it's for." And they'll say, "I trust you. Your word is your bond. You're a man who stands good. You're not a thief. You're a man who will pay back." And that person will give you money.

It's happened to me. Been there, done that. It happens the same thing with employment. When I was in college, when I came back from Central America in college, I dropped out of school and I didn't have a job. I picked up the phone and I started calling former bosses of mine.

The first boss I called, I said, "Hey, I need a work. Will you hire me?" He said, "Yes." And gave me a job. And to this day, I believe that at every single job I've ever had in my life, save one that ended badly, at every single job save one, I could call any of my former bosses and get a job today.

Well, that's not... I don't say that to toot my own horn, just to say that that's something I can prove, that if you're hardworking, if you're honest, if you're a man of character and virtue, then you can develop these strings of benefits and privileges behind you that start to insulate you.

Now, extrapolate that out over years, wealth should be the natural result. So I expect throughout my lifetime to become increasingly wealthy, financially wealthy, wealth in relationships, wealthy in experiences, wealth in time, etc. I expect that to continue throughout my entire lifetime. Now, it's possible that a different plan might be ordained for me.

It's possible that everything will be taken from me. That's happened to many wealthy, virtuous people where everything has been stolen from them. Okay, if that happens, that happens. I'm not going to worry about it. It's possible that I could be called upon to give everything away. That's happened to many people that I've respected who have become very wealthy and the Lord has told them, "Give it all away." Fine, I'm okay with that.

But for those reasons, I see that if you develop virtue, if you develop character, and if you develop those qualities that lead to successful relationships, etc., then there shouldn't be any reason, barring some of those extenuating circumstances that we can't control, there shouldn't be any reason not to become increasingly wealthy throughout your lifetime.

And then if you cultivate the next generation of your children, of communities, etc., and you consistently invest in your children, you invest in your community, you invest in your friends, then now there are many more opportunities. And so, it doesn't have to be an either/or. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

It's just in moderation. I'm not going to let my personal hobby consume all my money, because if I spend all my money on my personal hobby, then I'm not going to have these other benefits. But I think in most things, even that you're talking about, there are ways in which you can wisely invest and spend money on the things that are important to you, and do it without harming your overall wealth accumulation.

So, that's my philosophy. Andy, did that answer the question? Any follow-up questions? Thanks. I think that's good. I kind of would have guessed that that was about where your philosophy was, but I didn't feel like you'd ever fully lay it out. So, thank you. I appreciate that. And I guess as a word of encouragement, I can't speak for any other listeners, but I know for myself, it is evident to me that you are prioritizing things that you value more than being rich, as far as family and things, and that that does interfere with business growth, and that you choose to continue focusing on what you value.

And that, to me, is something that I admire about you, and one of the things that makes me want to support you and listen to your advice. So, I don't know if you hear that encouragement often, but hopefully you hear that from me at least. I appreciate it. It's certainly been something that I have wrestled with, because even today, I'm sitting here wrestling with… I just think… You look at it and I certainly do struggle with how do I do this.

And at the end of the day, the thing that I always look at is maybe it's not good for my bank account, but I always just think about what am I going to be more satisfied with on my deathbed. Am I going to be satisfied because I have an extra zero… Sorry, an extra comma or a couple of extra commas on my net worth statement, or am I going to be satisfied because of the impact that I was able to have on the lives of a few people that I love and the lives of a few people in my local community.

And to me, when we start with the end in mind and we recognize that at the end of our life, when we reflect back from that place on our deathbed, you read the books. There are a lot of interesting sociologists who've gone and who've interviewed old people and people in their deathbed, etc.

It's crystal clear that money is never the number one thought that anybody has. And so why would any of us be so foolish as to prioritize money and personal riches over those other things that are important? And then I imagine myself standing before the Lord and saying, "Give an account of yourself." It's very hard for me to, in that circumstance, say, "Well, I didn't say what I felt needed to be said because I thought it would hurt my wealth," or "I didn't say what I felt needed to be said," or "I didn't go and love that person or encourage that person or give to this thing over here because I wouldn't have enough money." It's very hard for me to want to stand before Christ and say that.

So I think we can all, I think most of us, regardless of if you share my background, I think most of us, when reflecting on it, would recognize that to be the case. But in order to be there, it's a lot easier to say that when you have money.

There's a proverb that, I can't quote it perfectly, but that I've always liked, that basically, "Lord, may I neither be poor lest I steal, nor rich lest I forget." Anyway, being poor and being very poor and being very rich are both really difficult. And so I think most of us are blessed to be in that middle range where we don't want for anything, we're not worried about anything, we have no personal concern.

If the tire blows up, it's not a big deal. And that allows us to have that more long-range perspective. It's a lot harder for those who are living on the poverty line to have that long-range perspective. >> Andy Winkler Yeah, I like that proverb as well. I also can't quote it, but I've always appreciated that one.

>> Dave All right, I got time for one more. If you got any more, Andy, otherwise I'll wrap it up here. Any other questions or comments to round us out? >> Andy Winkler All right, yep, I'll give you one last one. So I have taken your career and income course, which I would definitely recommend to other listeners.

I will admit I have not followed the advice super well yet, but I feel like I've been focusing on other things. One thing that I don't feel like maybe was addressed in there that probably is something specific to me and I've never really heard anybody talk about is I don't feel like I personally am a leader, an entrepreneur, not to say that I can't do those things, but I don't think that I am the type of person, and there's any evidence in my life, particularly that I'm the sort of person that wants to run out and start my own business and be the commanding, in charge, do it this way, start the business kind of person.

But I do feel like I've seen throughout my life that I am a very good supporter. If I have a boss that I understand and can get behind and push or even just a small job helping and volunteering something, I feel like I do a much better job as kind of the number two guy than the number one guy or the number one million guy.

And I'm curious if you have any thoughts on how to even identify where you could find that sort of job where you're, I guess, the medium fish in a small pond. A lot of the resources I was saying, you're a good example of someone who has gone out and built a business and is not hiring.

I can't come, "Oh, I'll just go work for Joshua and he'd be the sort of person I'd want to work for," because it seems like most of the people I read about and hear about that do that sort of thing are entrepreneurs, want to do their own thing, don't want large organizations or medium-sized organizations.

Does that make sense? It does. I'm not sure that I'm best suited to be in the number one slot either. And I think, I can't remember if I put it into the outline for the career and income course or not where I talked about being a number two. But I think being a number two guy is a wonderful strategy for success.

I think it's a fantastic strategy for success and it can be very rewarding. It can be much less stressful than being out in front. It can be very remunerative. It's really, really wonderful. I think there are a lot, it's an unsung benefit to being the number two guy. And I think that it's something that many of us would be wise to recognize and just simply pursue being somebody who is alongside of one of those people who has that kind of push for leadership versus not.

I'll tell you just a short story because you talk about coming along with supporting a business, etc. There is a well-known, very popular personal finance personality who was in this space long before I was, who I really like, I respect, and I get along with very well in terms of philosophy of money, etc.

And I didn't really have any personal problems with him. He's free-thinking enough to embrace some of the things that I embrace, etc. And I talked to him even before I started Radical Personal Finance, right at the very beginning. And he offered me a job to work with him as a quasi-partner.

We didn't spell out any details of exactly how we were going to work together, but basically he said, "Listen, come and work with me. I've got this large established brand. I've got all this infrastructure in place. I've got all these readers. I've got all these listeners. I've got all these people who are calling me.

You and I could go far together. We have skills that are compatible, etc. And we could go a long way together." And I very, very seriously considered it. And to this day, I'm not sure whether I should have told him no, which was eventually what I told him no.

But basically what happened is I thought it through and I realized that if I was going to go through the very excruciatingly expensive and difficult decision to walk away from the business that I had already built that was going to provide me, that was, you know, in order to gain something that was more free, I wasn't going to be content with a halfway level of freedom.

And the biggest thing for me was having to censor what I thought about certain subjects. When you are working for somebody, you owe your boss a duty to either support them and to censor your own opinions that don't align with the duty of, or with the overall structure of the company, or you owe it to them to leave.

It's very hard for me to see how it's right for you to be disloyal to your boss, to your company, and to publicly say things that would be in contradiction of the company philosophy. And I recognized that that was always the problem. When I worked for a company, then I always had a duty and a loyalty to the company, to the industry, etc.

And so I had to censor my opinions, censor my thoughts out of respect for the company and the industry that I worked in. But yet, to leave that with the, again, the expensive decision and difficult decision to do, and then to not be at that place of ultimate freedom where I would either live or die by my own words, to me just wasn't going to work out.

I decided not to do it. But to this day, I'm still not sure that was the best decision. And even today, I think that there are people in, I think that I would be well served, me personally, by not being at the front of the line. Even today, I have thought many times when I get to my thousandth episode of Radical Personal Finance, do I keep doing Radical Personal Finance or do I do something else?

When I started this show, I could not go and work for, I couldn't have gone and worked for someone like Dave Ramsey. Today, I could go and work for Dave Ramsey. Dave and I don't have to agree on the value of cash value life insurance. I'd happily kiss that goodbye and never talk again about cash value life insurance.

But when I look at organizations like his in the personal finance space and I see how much support they bring to people, someone like me, I have very seriously considered reaching out to people like him or to his team or to other, I've thought about talking to other radio people, etc.

Because when you're on the front line and you're trying to do it all, it's not a good, you can't do it all. You have to specialize. And so then you have to build the team yourself. And then the question is, is that one of your skills, is building the team one of your skills?

And for me, it has not been a skill that I have shown that I'm very good at, to build the team. The very best teams, and you can read about this in some of the entrepreneurial books, but I think the very best, most successful opportunity is when you have maybe one person who's the visionary, who's the front line, but you've got to have somebody alongside who can handle the administrative stuff.

And what has hurt me in my business activities is I have not found or developed that person on the side. And it's, so to your point that yes, I think that being that number two would be great. And if you have skill sets that are complimentary, a lot of times people who are out in front desperately know they need help, but they just don't know how to do it because their skill set is being the visionary or being the loud mouth in my case.

And they know that they can't do both very well. So yeah, I think it's a good strategy. And to this day, I think I would be much more able today to give up some freedom in order to make a bigger impact than I would have been a number of years ago.

So that's my personal story and I think the number two strategy is an excellent one. We lost Andy there at the end, but I think that's enough. Andy, thank you for calling in. I really enjoyed all the good questions. I hope that the audience, I hope that you listen to them.

I guess I should say if any of you are, I don't really, I'm not looking for a job today, but if any of you are in the Dave Ramsey organization or other, there are a couple of the media organizations that are large that my brand could fit under, then feel free to reach out to me.

You never know what a couple of years from now might hold. So here I'll close with reading the proverb that Andy and I alluded to. This comes from the Bible Proverbs chapter 30 verses seven through nine. Two things I ask of you, deny them not to me before I die.

Remove far from me falsehood and lying. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me. Lest I be full and deny you and say, who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. That's the proverb we were alluding to.

Thank you so much for listening to today's show. I hope that you enjoyed it. I wish you a very happy Friday and an excellent weekend and I'll be back with you very soon. The LA Kings Holiday Pack is back. The perfect gift for the hockey fan in your life.

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