Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways, and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. 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 a live Q&A show. I've got one caller sitting on the line right now, and I've got several questions, written questions, that we'll get to as well. Assuming that there is time, we'll get to some questions from patrons of the show.

Buckle your seatbelts, these are fun. These call-in shows work just like call-in talk radio, so I open them up to patrons of the show. If you'd like to become a patron of the show, you can do that at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Open up a phone line, anybody who calls in can chat with me about anything that they want to chat with me about.

That's how these work. So we begin today with Andy in Indiana. Andy, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hi Joshua, thanks for taking my call. I wanted to ask you about budgeting and how you're using YNAB. I've heard you mention having like, what seems to me like would be a lot of categories in YNAB, and I was I guess curious if you budget a little bit of money in every category, if what you do with it you'd consider true budgeting or more expense tracking, or how you're using that.

I feel like I'm just tracking with it, and just curious. Yeah, it's a good question. So my relationship with YNAB is, I use it, I still use it. I've been using it for a few years. I am using the previous version of YNAB. It's one of the reasons why I still recommend them.

I think their online stuff is great. But for me, I don't care to have my personal data stored on somebody else's servers. And so when they went to their software as a service model, which is I think a good business move for them, and for the vast majority of people, I think the right move, or as far as the right direction for people to go, but meaning companies to go, then, but I stopped using their, I don't use the newest version, that's all I'm saying.

I use the previous version, which is stored on my desktop. That way, I can do a little bit better job of keeping track of my financial data. Basically, I've come to the conclusion that if you store data online, you can expect in the fullness of time that all data that you give anybody online is going to be hacked.

And so that's one of the reasons why I've stopped putting any of my data into any kind of central repository. I no longer use, I don't use personal capital, I don't use Mint, I don't use any of the online YNAB service or any other services, because now I'm exposing my data to the potential of having all of my data breached, which I would prefer not to do.

Now, the chances of that are, I don't know, I think they're high, but I know that YNAB and all the other providers do a good job of trying to seek to secure the data. But basically, it seems to me that you'd have to be crazy to think that data can be secured.

When you've got the US government, when you have the US government that loses all the data, the top secret data of everyone in the Department of Defense, and when you've got Experian and Equifax losing all their data, and it just seems to me foolish at this point to store data online if it doesn't need to be.

So that's one interesting different thing about how I use YNAB. I use the previous version of the software that I originally paid for when you could buy the actual software, and I have no problem with it. Another weird thing I do is I don't actually use the automatic functionality of downloading transactions.

So I'm weird again, and I spend more time than a lot of people. I think that for the majority of people, I think the automatic importing, the automatic categorization is probably the right move. But I like to take a little bit of time with my data, and I like to make sure that I'm really paying attention to it, and that I'm really conscious of what's happening.

And so I manually enter all the transactions in. I manually categorize them, and I try to think about the transactions when I'm putting them in. So that's another weird thing that I do that is probably not the common thing. So I put all my transactions into YNAB. I keep two different YNAB budgets.

I keep one budget for my business, and I keep one budget for my personal life, and I keep those separate. YNAB is certainly not as powerful as proper business budgeting software, and I think that most people who are running an actual business should go ahead and use QuickBooks. I use or another accounting double entry, you know, just good accounting software as well, which I do use that some as well.

But I've found that YNAB is just so simple, and I try to keep my affairs fairly simple, and so it works out well for that. In terms of budgeting, I do have some weird accounts. I've covered that in past shows, and I try to think about budgeting not in a kind of a strict sense, but more as trying to understand how my, you know, whether I should maximize a transaction or minimize a transaction.

So that's why I use some of the weird categories that I use, and I try to use transactions that are going to help me with the data that I need. So back to, you know, the bane of my existence has always been my family's food budget, and if I just have a budget, that's the biggest, single biggest discretionary expense in our in our budget that's not preset.

And so in trying to improve that, there's a real balance here, because do I want to spend money on food, or do I want to spend money on, you know, medical care in the future? It seems like I've heard people say in the past, I can't cite it, I went looking for data to try to find it.

But I heard people say that, you know, in the past, people spent significant, let's just make up some numbers, 30% of their budget on food and 5% of their budget on healthcare expenses. But today, we spent 30% of our budgets on healthcare expenses, and 5% on food. And so basically, you pick it, do you want to spend your money on food?

Or do you want to spend your money at on healthcare? Now, I could never go through and find the actual data sources to verify that. But I thought, you know what, probably directionally, that's probably true. And so it doesn't make sense for me to try to be super frugal when it comes to food.

But I also recognize that this is a big category. So for the last couple of years, I've actually tracked all of our food expenses by category. And I tried to see because I've always had this impression that what we do, we pretty well, we're pretty carefully. But I broke it down and I keep it in, you know, I have a subcategory of groceries, meat, grains, I'd separate grains from bread.

So meat, grains, bread, fruits and vegetables, non-categorized expenses, sweets, etc. So that gives me an idea of how much of our budget is actually going to different categories. Again, that's a weird thing that I think majority of people don't do. But the way I look at it is, I need the data to get an understanding of what's actually happening.

The first, if you're going to make a good decision, the first thing you need is good data. And so I want my data, not just the average person's data, so that I can have a sense of how much of our money is going to things that are really good versus things that are junk.

And then that helps me if I'm shopping at Costco, and it helps me to pull out food from other expenses, etc. and have a good sense of that. So I keep detailed categories on the things that I care about. And then I segment the budget based upon whether it's a category that I want to spend a lot of money on, whether it's a category that I want to spend just what's necessary, or whether it's a category that I want to minimize.

And I try to keep my in my budget listings categories, I order them in that order. So when I'm looking at the numbers of expenses for things that I want to spend a lot on, all right, I've got it. When I'm looking at things that I'm going to set aside a pre established percentage, I have that in the middle.

And then down below, I have that the other ones. With regard to budgeting, I do some budgeting. YNAB is brilliant because it makes it so doable to budget the money that's in your checking account. But given my geographic instability over the past couple of years, it's very hard for me to make the numbers work in advance.

So what I do is I just simply spend cash and my budget is basically here's how much spending money I have. And I've allocated this to spending money, I put the money in my wallet. And then I look to see how much money is in the wallet. And when the money's gone, well, I go on to something else.

So that's been a helpful way of just managing my spending. And I only have a handful of spending categories, which are largely things like food, that are not predetermined. So what I do is at the beginning of the month, I go ahead and fill in the budget categories with round numbers.

And then I kind of skip out on all the little stuff, all those little discretionary ones. I take X amount of dollars out of the ATM, and I just spend cash. And that's how I keep myself on track. So I guess that's largely, to answer your question, that's probably the best I got.

Those are some weird things that I do. I don't think I recommend those for most people. I think they work for me. I do it, but I don't really recommend it for most people. I guess one other weird thing I do that most people might not think of is I change every, it's been about every year or two, I make a new budget.

And I do that so that I can rejigger all the categories. Because I don't think of categories just as artificial. So I don't want the standard categories. And again, I don't recommend this for necessarily new personal finance novices. But I don't want just the standard categories. I want categories that actually help me.

So every couple of years, I delete the budget. I start completely fresh with totally new data. And I use that as an opportunity to totally redo my categories. So on the business side, that's useful because all of my categories that I've used in YNAB all fit, line up exactly with Schedule C.

So everything is categorized according to the Schedule C categories so that at the end of the year, if I have a budget in YNAB that corresponds to a business, boom, it's all lined up and all previously categorized with a Schedule C. On the personal side, I look at it and say, what are my goals and my spending goals?

And as I said, I categorize it based upon what I'm actually trying to accomplish. And so those are my answers. Andy, how do you use YNAB? I think I am using the online version with auto import. I think I kind of use it similar way to what you do because I've found I've not had to use it to dig out from under anything.

I've been over the 30 days of money. It's about the 31st day that I was using it. And so I end up, kind of like you said, generally allocating at the beginning of the month. But then there's a lot of, well, I have this immediate budget and I have an education budget and I put my 20 bucks in both, but then I spent 40 in one and nothing in the other for this month.

So I just move that money around. I guess it seems to me like I use it more as a tracking tool and don't really do much budgeting. And it sounds like you do kind of the same and you actually do your budgeting by just giving yourself cash to spend.

So a number of years ago, I recorded an episode of the show where I talked about philosophies of budgeting. I'm convinced of this. You don't need to use the same budgeting approach at all stages of your financial life. So if somebody is just getting started with money and they're totally broke, I think tracking every single dollar helps.

And doing it to the penny is really, really valuable because you're building a skill. Most people who get in trouble with money usually get there because they're not paying attention to money. So by practicing the skill of very focused budgeting, then they're working their way in building something that they need to build.

So once you've built that basic skill, however, then I think you can grow on. And that's where for you doing some tracking, I don't see any reason why. If your budget is comfortable, if you have a general sense of what you're spending, you could within an hour reproduce basically pretty close data on what you're spending.

I don't see why you need to spend hours and hours doing all of the intricate planning. And if you have enough money and if you're automatically paying yourself first and have automated savings and investing happening up front, I don't see why you should have to take the time and put it into all of that tracking.

Unless you enjoy it. Like for me, it's my hobby. I enjoy it. I think it's fun. It gives me fodder for my show. I enjoy trying different things. For me, it is fun to do wacky financial things and to see what I can do here and how I can change there.

And so it's my hobby. And I acknowledge that, but I would never try to get somebody else to do what I do because for me, this is my hobby. But then as you grow, so you have the beginner stage where you really got to budget every dollar, then you grow to a stage where automated tracking is fine, even if you didn't use the budgeting feature, but you just have a generally right categorization of your money.

And then I think from there, you can very quickly move on to kind of a wealthy person's budget where once a year, you sit down and basically estimate what your expenses are. And if your household income is high and your expenses are low, it doesn't matter all that much in any given month, how things work out with a couple hundred dollars here and a couple hundred dollars there.

So in my opinion, it's a matter of understanding where things need to be. And I would analogize it to say, like somebody who is trying to be an athlete, you know, you start off and somebody's fat and out of shape. Well, they need to do a lot of tracking because they don't know, they don't know their macros, right?

So you do a lot of tracking, then somebody can build a habit, and then they don't need to track things quite so much, but they still generally need to be aware of what's going on. And then once somebody has reached their athletic goals, unless they're aiming for world class performance, there's no need for them to be tracking every little thing at every stage.

So that's my philosophy. I don't think anybody who doesn't care should try to reproduce what I do. For me, it's fun. But I do think that somebody who is getting out of debt and who has never budgeted, man, they need to have YNAB, they need to budget every dollar in advance, they need to have that thing dialed in because they're making behavioral changes in their life.

>> Andy: Makes sense. I can follow all that and agree, I think. >> Jared: Any other questions, Andy? >> Andy: Do you have any suggestions for anything that is an offline tool that's more similar? Basically, if you were to use YNAB as you have it, but do an auto import, because I just don't like copying things over, is there any other tool that does that that's not cloud-based that you know of?

>> Jared: The problem is, so I'm not aware of any. There is Tiller, which is built on Google Sheets, but then again, you have all your data in Google and it's cloud-based. But that was what they kind of built their business on. Tiller, I think it's a great solution for people who don't mind their data being there.

I think it's a great solution because it accomplishes the auto import function, but it gives you just the ability to work within spreadsheets. For me, the data entry is certainly an impediment for a lot of people. I guess for me, I don't have that. I try to minimize the number of transactions and it's just not that big of a deal to me to spend.

It probably takes me 15 minutes a week and I enjoy it. I put on a podcast or listen to something, sit down at my computer, pull all the receipts out of my wallet. I keep a three by five card in my wallet and then so if I don't get a receipt, I just write down the amount of money that I spend.

Because if I'm spending something, all of my, if everything is just automatically done, but if I'm spending something, I always spend cash and just takes a little bit of time. But beyond that, I don't have an answer. I think probably if YNAB were to cancel and not allow me to use their legacy version of the software, because I don't want to be on the cloud, I would go back to my spreadsheet solution and just use a local spreadsheet on my PC.

I'm not a total spreadsheet wizard, but I'm good enough that I can program them to give me what I want out of the deal. Cool, makes sense. All right, thank you for calling in. Anything else before I go on to the written questions? I would be curious to hear about, I would agree with you on the idea that anything you put online is probably going to get leaked at some point and hacked.

I've taken a lot of my life out of the mainstream computer system and followed a lot of Justin Carroll's advice on stuff and I've found it's made my life a whole lot harder. If I am asked to defend why I do things in a more difficult way, it's hard for me to articulate why that getting leaked would actually hurt me.

I don't like the idea of someone having all my financial information, but if they have a million people's financial transaction, I don't have a bunch of embarrassing, I'm not running an anti-pornography campaign and also buying porn and having a porn budget. How would you defend that as being worth the extra time and hassle in general?

You get a sneak peek. I have in my show topics that maybe I'll do someday, I have a category called, I think my working title is, "How Pursuit of Privacy Has Hurt Me." I'll give you just a preview for it. Yes, I would say that if you try to – Justin Carroll's been on the show and he's the co-author of several books on privacy.

I've appeared on the – it's called the Privacy, Security and OSINT Show now with Justin Carroll and his former co-host Michael Bizzell. I did a show on financial privacy with them. And if you go from kind of the normal existence that most of us go where we never know anything about privacy and then you try to start layering on some of the hardcore privacy tactics and techniques that they teach, it certainly does make things more complex, more complicated.

And I think that I've thought about this and I think there have been a number of negative results that I have experienced because of embracing more privacy techniques. Now, by personality, I'm a doer. So, I wouldn't be content with just saying, "Oh, I've learned about this without doing it." I like to try stuff.

And for me, it's fun to say, "Okay, I'm going to go radical and hardcore in this direction. I'm going to see everything that I can do." And then I figure you can always back things off. But there have been some very significant costs to me of doing that. I'll give you the most significant cost.

I had a Gmail account that I used from the time that Gmail first was created, somewhere around 2005 to 2000 and whatever, a few years ago. And it was a primary Gmail account that had everything arranged in it. It was my primary thing. Just like most of us, you have your primary Gmail account.

I decided that I was not happy with everything that Google was doing. And I decided that I was going to take some of my data out of Google. I wasn't at the point where I was ready to just say, "I don't use Google," although that appeals to me. But I wasn't at the point where I could say that.

But I was at the point where I was ready to say, "I'll pull some data out of Google." So, what I did was pull a lot of my personal data off my Google profile. I deleted my address. I deleted basically all of my information off of the Google profile.

But I had my username and my password. And I think I had a two-factor authentication on the account with a hardware token. Yeah, I did. I had a two-factor authentication on the account with a hardware token. And so, I thought, "Well, I'm fine. I'm good to go." So, then one day, I decided I was just going to clear out some of my old emails.

And I went through and I started deleting just hundreds and thousands of old emails from the archive, just because I didn't see any reason to keep that stuff around. I've tried to live lightly and decided to get rid of it. And then all of a sudden, Google kicks me out.

I'm in the middle of deleting emails and Google kicks me out. So, then I come back and I try to log into my Gmail account. I thought that was weird. Try to log in. Well, I have my username. I have my password, which is a complex password. It's a good password.

And I have my two-factor authentication key. But they asked me for additional security questions. The problem is that because I had removed all of my data from my Google profile, the only security question that the computer could ask me was, "When did I open this Google account?" And remember, I would have opened it sometime back when Google first came out, which was in 2004, I think, was their first year.

And here it is, I think, 2017, 2018. I think it was 2017. So, I have no idea when I first opened this Google account. So, I start trying to give an answer and I get booted. So, then we go in and we try to authenticate through the google.com/recover and doesn't work, doesn't work.

And the computer is stuck because it has no data in my profile for it to ask me security questions to let me in, except for when I opened the Google account. So, then I tried different dates, different months, and it won't let me in. And that started the most frustrating experience I have ever had with a company.

So, first, try to figure out how do you get somebody from Gmail on the phone, because Google is very difficult to contact. Well, you can't get anyone from Gmail on the phone. So, you wind up bouncing around all the different Google places. Then I said, well, here's what I can do.

And I had the idea to go get Google Business, because if you have a Google Business account, then you can access a customer service representative. So, I can't upgrade the account that I need help on, because I can't get into it to authenticate in. So, I upgrade another one of my Google accounts to a Google Business account so that I can talk to a Google employee.

And so, I talked to them. And basically, after hours and hours and hours, I am told that there is nothing we can do, that there is no person at Google, no one at the company, no programmer, no anybody with high authorization. There's no person at Google that can override the computer.

The only way for me to get into my Google account is to use google.com/recover to recover the password. And I'm stuck. And I can't even upgrade my the account in question, because I can't get in. And so, I wound up locked out for the last few years. I wound up locked out of my primary Gmail account, my primary Google account that had everything in my life associated with it.

Anybody who emailed me, anybody, communications, personal friends, everything, every newsletter, everything I'm locked out of. I found that the most frustrating thing, because I have my username, I have my password, I have my authentication, but their computer doesn't like me. And their computer thinks that I'm not me. And their computer thinks it's going to be so smart, and the humans don't control the computers.

So, that's kind of a story. It's a cautionary tale. I have learned not to mess around with Google accounts. And I've learned to make sure don't clear your data out of a Google profile. I learned the hard way. But that has been unbelievably costly to me over the last few years in time, in money, and in hassle to be locked out of my primary email account.

And it's frankly just flabbergasting to me that a company would be at—we're at the point where people can't control computers, where the computers are in charge, and the people just are servants of the computer. I say, "Sorry, the computer's in charge. I can't do anything about it." And it has strengthened my deep antipathy for Google.

If any of you guys have any help, I've searched help forums, I've called, I've spoken to half a dozen Google representatives. But if any of you are wizards of that, then you can help me out. So, that would be an example of how it's really cost me, Andy. But then there are other costs to privacy as well.

And for me, just to sum it up the story, I don't have anything that I'm ashamed of. I don't have any skeletons in my closet. I've confessed all my sins. I don't have anybody that I've hurt or that I am hurting. There's nothing private. You can't even talk on a microphone and do what I do and basically keep your life private.

But I still want to be a constant advocate for privacy as a human right and as a civil right. And so, for me, it's important to me to be a practitioner of privacy out of an ideological commitment to the cause. I do not believe that it is right, moral, ethical, in any way acceptable that the government of the United States says, "Well, we're just going to read every email.

We're going to listen to every phone call. We're going to record all the metadata." And so, I have a choice. I can either do nothing, which for me, I'm not willing to do that. I can sit around and moan and gripe and complain about something that I can't change.

I can't change them. Or I can take action and I can use the tools that are available. So, I can encrypt. I can conceal. I can remove data. And it's not because I'm scared of anything, although certainly I think there are very legitimate concerns that one could have. I don't worry about those things too much as an American.

If I were in another country where there were much more of a predilection towards tyranny and violence on individuals just because of politically incorrect speech, that would be one thing. Although I think that's growing in the United States, especially in the kind of the public facing world. But for me, it's a matter of ideology.

I want to support people's rights to privacy. You have the right to privacy in your home. You have the right to privacy in your affairs, in your papers, in your persons, in your effects. And because of that, I'm going to be part of the solution. I'm going to be part of one of those who practices private methodologies.

I'm going to be one of those who promotes that, who teaches others to do it. Because until that happens, until we use the tools that we have, I don't see how things change in the better direction. So it's costly. It's cost me time, money, frustration. There have been things that have been harmed.

And I don't think extreme privacy — there's Bazell's newest book — I don't think that extreme privacy is the right solution for everybody. But I do think that if more of us simply made a few of the smaller, easier changes, it would have a dramatic effect on our society.

Thanks. I think that basically is exactly where I'm at. I was hoping you'd have some really encouraging thing to make me get back on the wagon and be more private than I am now. But I do definitely agree with the idea that it's a human right and that if you don't exercise that, you will lose it.

And I think also just look to see where it's hurting you. For example, Sudo is a great app. It's a great app for phones. If I were trying to run a business where I needed to be connected on the phone, there's not a chance in the world I would be doing anything except using a standard cell phone, a standard phone.

You can't reliably run a business on something like Sudo. Things like social media. I have decided — we will announce it on social media — but I have a deep level of antipathy for Facebook. I get annoyed with Twitter. But what I have decided recently after years of frustration and kind of wrestling with it is I care more about my primary mission.

I care more about serving you, my listeners. And I want to make an impact on you, my listeners. And although I don't care for the social media companies and many of their practices because many of the things they do I find deeply offensive, I've decided to not be so ideological.

I'm trying to be less, you know, principled and just focus on my primary mission which is to serve people and to help people to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. So I've decided I'm going to start engaging with YouTube.

I'm going to start creating YouTube videos. I'm going to re-engage with Facebook. I've not engaged with Facebook in a very long time. I'm going to engage in Twitter more because of my higher commitment. And I'm not trying to build a brand on privacy. I care about it, but I care more about impacting and helping people who need help.

So I think I don't see any other solution other than to say if something's hurting you and it's not actually allowing you to fulfill your core mission and those things that are important for you, I think it would be foolish and illogical to do something that's harming you if you have more benefit from the alternative.

>> Andy: Thanks. That's a really good way to put that, I think. >> Josh: My pleasure. Andy, thank you for calling in today. I'm going to move on to the written questions, but I appreciate your live call. >> Andy: Yes, thank you. >> Josh: Next question I will take was written in by a patron of the show on our Patreon page at radicalpersonalfinance.com.

No, it doesn't even work anymore. Patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. John in California writes in this, says, "Joshua, I'd appreciate your comments on this. How do you feel about my taking ownership of a piece of inherited property as a married man, as my sole and separate property? My siblings and I recently purchased a condo with inherited assets from my mother.

We all took ownership individually without our spouses, which has created some hard feelings. Was this the right thing to do, as now we understand this condo would now go to our children rather than spouses, since they were all required to sign a quitclaim deed? Would we now be able to place the asset into our individual trust and leave it to our spouse, or does the quitclaim deed preclude that?

Thank you." So, John, I will tackle this in the best I can. To the specifics of the situation, I'm not competent to address. I am not an attorney practicing in California, and perhaps there's some wrinkle in the California law that I don't know of. So, let's talk about it from a general perspective.

I'll probably be about 80% right on this error, and then you can find some other person in your area who can point out the 20% where I'm wrong. First, the context, the idea of separate property versus community property. California is a community property state. So, of course, being a community property state, all of your property and your wife's property is considered to be owned equally by you.

However, even in a community property state, there are exceptions. In a community property state, you have marital property and you have separate property. The thing that makes a community property state different than a non-community property state is that all marital property is understood to be divided, owned 50/50 by each spouse, even if it's only titled in one spouse's name.

That's different than a non-community property state. Marital property is any property that is acquired during the marriage. So, even though you live in a community property state, you still do have separate property. So, for example, if you had a boat that you owned before you were married, that's not community property.

That's your separate property, unless later after the marriage you title the boat into both of you and your spouse's name. And so, that's one thing. Now, it is very easy in a community property state to wind up accidentally having separate property commingled to become part of the community property.

So, if you have a bank account and you put money from your bank account into a joint bank account and you had the money before marriage, it's automatically now community property. Now, an inheritance that you receive during marriage goes back and forth depending on the specific state. And I'm guessing the California law probably requires you to establish a separate transmutation agreement in order for you to keep the property as separate property.

So, if you, generally, the way that inheritances work is if you inherit something from your family, it's not considered to be your wife's property, it wasn't marital property, it's your separate property. But, generally, you have to have it in an established transmutation agreement, which is basically like a post-nuptial agreement where each of you, you and your spouse, agree to keep your property separate and outside of the community estate.

And if you have that knowledgeable, that consent, as you stated that you have in the question, you have that transmutation agreement, then you can make sure that you keep the property as separate property. So, the question here is why would you do this? And then we'll get to, was it a good idea?

Why is this important? I don't see many reasons to do this outside of the concept of divorce. I'm trying to think if I can think of any reasons for estate planning, why this would be important, or for any kind of tax planning, but I don't get the sense here that we're talking about that much of an amount.

You're talking about a condo here. It doesn't seem like we're talking about millions and millions of dollars. So, to me, then we could say, why did we do this? Again, I'm not good enough on California law to know quick claim deed. I don't see how a quick claim deed would come into the affair.

It seemed like it's a transmutation agreement, but maybe I'm just ignorant. So, why should you do this? Well, the reason most people do this is to protect separate property, and the obvious thing that can happen is when we come into the world of divorce. If your mom dies, leaves you $500,000 of cash, and you use that to buy a condo, then, and that would be, that's the line of legal reasoning here.

If you use that $500,000 of cash to buy a condo, then that condo would now be part of your community property. So, now, if you and your wife divorce, and if the judge splits your estate 50/50, now your wife has a 50% claim in that condo. So, what you're basically trying to do in the arrangement that you've set up is you're saying, I've got this 50% asset over here.

I've got this asset, this $500,000 inheritance from my mother, and now I'm going to change this from being cash, which as long as I kept it in a separate account, it was clearly identified as separate property because it was an inheritance, but I'm going to turn it into a condo.

And because we're acquiring the condo during marriage, if my wife doesn't sign the transmutation agreement, then we don't have the clarity that this is definitely my separate property. Well, I can certainly understand why that would create hard feelings on your wife's part, certainly. And you can imagine it too.

If your wife had a half a million dollar inheritance, and she said, I'm going to take this inheritance and use it to buy something that I'm not going to put your name on, why would she be doing that? Well, it's going to come down largely to divorce. See, if you're talking about this as some kind of estate planning thing, I don't see any benefit.

Unless you have a big estate and we're trying to deal with taxes, that would be one legitimate thing. But in that case, I would guess that why would there be any hardship? Why would there be any hard feelings? Because you would understand. But there's not going to be any tax considerations here.

Your estate tax situation is basically going to be exactly the same, whether it's your property that you own a separate property versus community property. So I don't see any benefit here from an estate planning perspective. So we basically just come down to the possibility of divorce. How do you protect the asset in case of the possibility of divorce?

And that's the really thorny issue. I've been asked many times, and I need to address it, about things like prenuptial agreements prior to marriage. And it's one of the most difficult decisions, difficult conversations that I can think of, because it's very hard to answer. On the one hand, I question why, if you are worried about the need for a prenuptial agreement, I question if anybody should marry.

And yet, on the other hand, the risks of marriage, especially the financial risks, are so great that it almost seems foolish to marry without a prenuptial agreement. And I will at some point do the shows on prenuptial planning and prenuptial agreements, so you're educated on it. And I think I'm mostly against them, because if you have to have a prenuptial agreement, I don't think you should marry in the first place, and because I think they violate the spirit of marriage.

But on the other hand, I do see that there could be a place somewhere. But I don't think you're going to get through them without some hard feelings, or some at least questions, and good, open, honest questions. Now, it's a lot easier if you do that before you're married.

For example, I think that spouses before, or engaged persons, or at least people who are in a serious relationship and engaged, I think people who are in a serious relationship and engaged to one another should do a background check, should hire a private investigator to do a background check on the person that they propose to marry.

But I think you also should talk about it. And it's one of those things where that's not a popular opinion, but I look at the, when you look at the cases, you look at the stories that you read, and I realize just how much could be solved with a simple background check by a professional investigator for many people.

It seems short-sighted and very risky for me for someone to marry without a background check, especially, and my caveat would be especially if somebody is older. If you grew up in the same town as your fiancé, and you went to high school together, and you started dating at 17 years old, and you're 21 years old, and you're getting married, I think it's not that important.

But a lot of people are not in that situation. You met your spouse or your fiancé two years ago, and now you're 36 years old and planning to marry, I think you need to do a background check. And then when it comes to the assets, I think you need to talk about divorce and talk about things and say what's the situation.

But it's a lot easier to do that before marriage versus after marriage. If you're doing this with your wife, basically the only financial thing that I can, any financial reason that I can see why you would be working very diligently to keep this as separate property would be to reserve it for your benefit in the case of divorce.

So if I'm wrong, am I missing something, write me back and tell me. Tell me about some little financial thing that I'm not aware of. But the only reason I can see for you to have done this was because you want to make sure that your inheritance is not commingled into the community property that is kept as your separate property.

And the only benefit that I can see of that is to protect you so that you can maintain the full ownership of that asset in case of divorce instead of losing 50%. Now, will the... So, it's a tough conversation. And if you're just... I don't see how I can go any farther.

Now, will the condo automatically go to your children? Well, I would say that the asset will now pass according to your will. But it would be the same even if you and your spouse had community property. The place where I think this kind of planning makes the most sense and where it's usually the easiest is when you're seeking to work with blended families.

Husband and wife both have married and divorced, both have children from their first marriage. In those situations, most of the time, once somebody has married and divorced, they are distinctly conscious of the fact that their marriage may end again. And because they have children from their first marriage, they're often seeking to protect their children.

And those financial planning conversations are generally a lot easier to negotiate because it's a matter of we want to make sure that these assets go to protect our separate children. And we don't want to try to make my new spouse's assets go to inherit my children. And so, it would seem simple, simpler.

Hopefully, I've given you some thought on the question. If I'm missing something, if I'm missing any other benefits of this, just any listener, send me an email, josh@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I'd love to know. But certainly, I can see why it would be a touchy conversation. If my wife came to me and she said to me, "I've just inherited $500,000 and I'm going to make sure that I'm very careful to keep it as separate property rather than for us to manage it and use it together," I would find that—and I'm going to do it legally with all kinds of legal protections—I would find that a really offensive thing.

I do think that I would—like, if that were to happen, I do think that it's right for me to be very quiet about the direction and to let her have the lead in terms of the use of the money because of acknowledging that it's her family's estate, her side of the family.

But when we married, I gave her everything and she gave me everything. And so to all of a sudden start on that foundation and then to introduce this concept of yours and mine and ours in the middle of marriage would, for me, break the fabric of the basic meaning of marriage.

So I can understand your wife's offense. How you navigate that, though, I don't know. I would talk with her openly about it and work to resolve any offense that there is. Joe writes in with this question, "Joshua, advice that you've given me in the past about focusing on my economic engine has been incredibly inspiring.

Right now, our economic engine is our ability to earn. With that, we're piling up money and working our way through some debt. We look forward to deploying the capital into rental properties, planning our first residential rental next year." Joe, attaboy. Good job. "My question today, we would like to start keeping a modest supply of food and water in case of emergency.

Can you give some advice on how to begin prepping and what type and sort of food you recommend to start with? I understand a lot of freeze-dried food requires not only potable water, but also heat. What about the canned route? Also, do you have any tips on emergency medicine for beginners?

Any advice or pointers to existing sources would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Joseph." Well, Joe, as it just so happens, I have a podcast on that. So the first thing you can do is on your phone, wherever you listen to your podcast, whatever RSS feeder you use, scroll way, way back in the archives of Radical Personal Finance.

You will find episode 384 is called A Sensible Approach to Food Insurance, aka Home Food Storage. That show is a little bit about the philosophy behind food storage, reasons for you to store food, etc. It was released on October 14, 2016. Then the next episode, October 14, 2016, episode 385, A Sensible Approach to Food Insurance, Home Food Storage, two of two, wherein I talked about a sensible way to actually build food storage.

And following that, you will find the audio of a seminar called Sensible Food Storage by a lady named Wendy DeWitt. And that would be a good place for you to listen. Then again, you'll find audio of something in the archives there called, in October 14, 2016, audio of Stephen Harris's Family Emergency Preparedness Class, which is a family emergency preparedness class that is filled with very practical tips on basic emergency preparedness.

And then you will find episode 381 of my show is called Simple Cheap Practical Tips to Help You Prepare for a Coming Hurricane, where I talk about the basic, really simple things to do to prepare for a hurricane, which of course is very timely as Hurricane Dorian threatens Florida, as I record this on August 30, 2019.

So all of those shows will get you started in the right direction. Now, here, in answer to your question, I want to give you just a brief overview, though, afresh of what you can do, because I don't remember what I said in those shows. I would imagine that it's probably about what I think today, because I haven't changed much on the subjects, but I'll give you kind of a useful way to approach it.

What I like to do is I like to think of preparedness, preparing, prepping, in terms of a phased approach based upon the amount of time that you need to prepare for. If you stop and think about a hurricane, or maybe in your case an earthquake or some kind of thing like that, you have an ideal mental picture of what could happen.

Let's stick with a hurricane, because I'm most familiar with hurricanes over earthquakes, but basically the same. You get more advanced warning with a hurricane, so it's a benefit. If your hurricane comes through town, it blows all the trees down, knocks out the power, and knocks out the basic services for a week, you stop and think, "What would I need for a week to provide for myself and my family?

What would be the basic needs?" Your needs will be different based upon who you are and where you're located. In Florida, we don't worry too much about preparing for ice storms, so backup heating is not a thing for Floridians to worry about in terms of prepping. We don't think about kerosene stoves and wood fireplaces and such like that.

The coldest it ever gets can be easily solved by two blankets on top of your bed. But if you are living in Minnesota and you're worrying about a winter blizzard, backup heating is going to be very high on the list, higher than food, higher than water, because you could freeze very quickly.

And if you don't have some sort of backup heat source or some way to trap the heat of your bodies and such so that you're comfortable, then you could die very quickly. And so you stop and think about your particular scenario, and you think about, "What would happen if I lost services?" Now, whatever seems the most intuitive to you to do, do that.

So freeze-dried food, for most people, is not intuitive, unless you actively use the stuff because you go backpacking all the time. But I don't think it makes any sense for you to buy and store freeze-dried food until you just buy some extra of the stuff that you're normally accustomed to buying and owning.

And if you do that, you will start to lay in a supply of the stuff that you usually use. If you eat canned food and you eat canned chicken and canned tuna, then buy canned food. Buy canned chicken and canned tuna. If you use saltine crackers to put your tuna fish on, then buy a couple extra boxes of saltine crackers.

And in just one or two trips to the grocery store, you can have enough food to protect you and to make sure that your family can eat for a week or a couple of extra weeks. And I think for the first few weeks, you really shouldn't do anything different than buy your normal stuff.

That's really it. Now, the other thing is, of course, water. Well, it's very easy for anybody to simply store water to get them through a week or two. What I do and what I recommend, go to Costco, buy a bunch of those flats of 24 packs of water bottles, individual, what are they, 24-ounce water bottles, 18-ounce water bottles, just the standard packs that you use if you're going to a picnic, and buy a whole bunch of those and stash them aside.

It's water. They're $3.72 for 24 bottles. It winds up being, the numbers are faded for me at this point in time, but I think it's about five gallons of water per tray. So in general, the advice is store about a gallon per person per day. So if you've got a family of five and you're planning for seven days, five gallons a day times seven, 35 gallons of water.

Well, that's pretty simple. It's only seven or eight or 10 of those trays of water bottles. The reason I like that is because those water bottles are super useful. They're, of course, super useful in an emergency because they're individual servings. And so unlike trying to hoist a five-gallon jug up somewhere and pour water out of that, or go and tap a 55-gallon barrel of water, you've just got bottles of water and they're easy to drink.

You take one out, you drink it when you're thirsty and you're done. They're also really multifunctional. So if your neighbor doesn't have water, you can easily share now. And one of the most important reasons to be prepared is so that you can help your family and your friends and your neighbors who are probably not going to prepare.

And you need to make sure that you've planned ahead so that you have enough to help others who are in need. That's your responsibility to be a good neighbor, a good family member, to take care of those who are in need. And so things like that are really easy to share.

It's hard to share a five-gallon jug of water. It's hard to share a water filter, but it's easy to share a tray of water bottles among people who are thirsty. The other reason I like to start with that is because it's super easy to use those things. After maybe a year, a couple of years sitting there, water's not going to go bad.

It's totally fine. But you go ahead and just toss it into a cooler and take it to the beach and just cycle it out. It's probably unnecessary, but of course you wonder about the water and the plastic leaching in. You certainly don't want them to be in heat because of course water and heat and plastic is not good, but if they're in a cool dry place, it's fine.

And so you go to Costco and you buy 10 trays of water and then you do it again a week later and buy 10 trays of water and you make a stack down in the corner of the basement, a little stack here, a little stack there, and you've got water.

From there, you can go to something like shelter. And when they talk about prepping, you'll often hear prepping teachers talk about food, water, shelter, and security, personal security. And you can debate around what's more important and how do you approach it. You'll often hear people talk about the rule of threes when they teach preparedness, disaster preparedness, where they say you can survive for three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food.

So when you think about that, it gives you a priority of where do you start. Now air and oxygen is certainly a little bit more unique, but it does play a role. And so that's where you make sure you have things like masks, dust masks, et cetera. Shelter is where, hey, if I get caught out in the cold or if I get caught out in the wind, et cetera, what do we do?

What do we do if the roof gets ripped off of our house? So shelter means different things to different people. In the cold country, it's going to mean how do I make sure that if we don't have any source of heating that how do we maintain body heat? So can we build a tent in the living room?

Can we put extra blankets around so we all sleep together on one mattress and keep ourselves warm? There's no need for me to go into all those details, but you start to think about that. And then of course, water and food line up. So what I say is start by thinking about a couple of weeks, say a week, two weeks without shelter.

And then the next thing that you'll quickly go to would be to something like energy. And with energy and that show, I've talked about what I think it makes the most sense for people is to start with making sure that you have a battery backup system in your home.

The teacher who is most popularized this and made it very accessible, Stephen Harris, who's been on the show. And he has a number of different things about that. He teaches and sells a course on how to set up a home battery bank. I think it makes all the sense in the world.

Super simple. Make sure that you have a deep cycle battery or a handful of deep cycle batteries or golf cart batteries. You make sure that you have a battery charger to charge those. And then you make sure that you have an inverter to connect to those chargers. And then you also have the ability to pull direct 12 volt power off of that.

So the last hurricane, when I was working with a friend who was not prepared for the hurricane, I took him to Costco and we bought food. We bought water, just the random packaged food that was there from Costco, jerky and nuts and whatever else is there, granola bars and cereal, et cetera.

Bought shelf stable milk so he could drink cereal, bread, kind of the typical stuff that all leads out of the grocery store. Bought some water. Then I made sure to go and buy him a deep cycle battery. A deep cycle battery from the battery department, a hundred bucks, an inverter off of that battery, and then a battery charger to charge that battery.

And so the basic concept here is how do you create and develop a source of electricity so that you can run your phones, so that you can run a TV, so that you can run a radio, so that you can run radios to communicate with people, radios to listen to radio signals, et cetera.

Keep the kids, if your kids play video games, how do you keep video games going, things like that, and lights. And then what I have done and taught is to standardize everything off of 12 volt power. So when there's a hurricane coming through town, you put a deep cycle battery on your kitchen counter.

You put off of that a couple of clips so that you have some USB ports so you can charge up all the devices that all run on USB. You have an inverter that you can use to charge up anything that runs off of 110 volts. And then you have battery chargers to charge up AA, AAA batteries.

And pretty much that solves most of your needs for a week or two. Beyond that, you don't need much. You can run lights at night. And then you look around and think. So for example, if you, what I, best investment I ever bought for emergency preparedness, I was at Costco and they were selling these decorative candles.

And the decorative candles are little LED flickering candles, but they run on three AA batteries. And the things run forever on AA batteries. Well, I have a massive supply of rechargeable AA batteries that I can recharge from everything that's available. And, and, and they, you, you take those, you screw them around your house, and now you have a source of light in all of your rooms.

And those things, I did the calculations one time, they can run hundreds of hours on one set of AA batteries. So you can leave them on day and night when your shutters are up and your house is dark and everything is squared away. Now you can go beyond that.

And you think about how do I keep my food fresh? And so that's where you think, how do I run my refrigerator? Well, there, the first step is of course an inverter, because you can use your car as a primary power source, run your engine, take an inverter on your battery, plug with an extension cord, your refrigerator into that, run your car for an hour, and it'll charge your refrigerator.

Then you naturally, of course, move into the world of generators and say, how do I run a generator? And what kind of generator do I have? Generators have become very inexpensive, bunch of options there. I'll show you, share with you just a few of my favorite tips. And I'm trying to compress this into a 15 or 20 minute answer, but frankly, I probably can, I could teach a 50 hour class on this.

And cause I think obsessively about it. And so how do I convert compress 50 hours to 15 minutes? I have no idea, but you're getting the best I got. So with an generator strategy, what I think makes a lot of sense is to start simple, start small. So a few things that you can do.

Number one, start with your car as an inverter. It's not a great long-term solution, but it can keep your deep freezer and your refrigerator going for a few days until the power comes back on. Then you move to a generator and there are a number of different generator options.

What I prefer that's the easiest, I think for most people is a relatively small generator that will run on dual fuel. And so what I think works really well is the champion dual fuel generators that come from the factory, ready to run either on gasoline or on propane. You can get great deals on them.

Now there are other good, there are lots of good generators out there, but what I think you should do is if you have the money, buy an inverter generator. They're a lot quieter and they're more fuel efficient than the big loud ones. Of course, those are cheaper, but get an inverter generator because you use it in a lot more circumstances.

My recommendation, go to a website called supergenproducts.com. And what they sell on that website is they sell all of the returns to Costco. And so they're a champion refurbisher, and you can go on there and buy a champion 2000, 3000, 4000 watt generator, but get one that runs on dual fuel from the factory.

The reason I like dual fuel is because you can store propane and you can store it in a way where you don't have to cycle it. Now, I of course think everybody should store gasoline. So as part of prepping, you should store gasoline. You should store minimum at least two tanks worth of gasoline from your car.

So most people should store, if your car has a fuel tank of 20 gallons, you should store 40 gallons of fuel. It's not hard. That's five, sorry, my math is broken today. That's eight little five gallon fuel containers, which anybody can store. But what that gives you the ability to do, if there's a hurricane coming to town and the stores are sold out of gasoline, then you have 20 gallons that you can use to fill up your car.

And then you have another 20 gallons that you can take with you strapped to your roof rack or put into a little bumper hitch or put onto a trailer. Or if in worst case scenario, you have to put inside the car, better of course, and safer to keep it outside the car.

But if you have to, then you can carry another 20 gallons with you so that you can now have basically with most vehicles, an effective range of 800 to a thousand miles of range. Now, just the ability to fill up your tank one time will get you out of range of the vast majority of things.

But if you have two gas tanks worth of fuel, it's almost inconceivable the disaster that you couldn't get out of if you got 800 miles of driving range with your vehicle. I mean, we're talking super hardcore zombie apocalypse stuff, if you can't get out of danger with 800 miles of range.

So simple suggestion is store gasoline. And then of course, you use gasoline for a generator. If you could only have and afford a cheap 2000 watt generator, but then you can go and buy eight or 10, five gallon gas cans and keep them full of gas. That's what you should do instead of buying an expensive generator and not store any gas.

The biggest problem that people with generators face is they don't store gas. So the problem is that when you store gasoline, it has a very short shelf life. It, after a year, a couple of years, it starts to go bad, even with fuel treatment stabilizers in it. And so you have to constantly rotate gasoline.

Now you may be the kind of person who's willing to do it. I am, and I recommend it, but many people aren't. And so the best solution I have is use propane because propane, you can buy propane canisters and you can set them aside and store them in a shed or your garage out back somewhere.

Think of the fire risk, of course. So store them somewhere safely. The propane is stable for decades. So you can just as simply, simply systematically, if you have a dual fuel generator that runs on propane, you can put that aside. You can buy each week, you buy another just standard 20 pound barbecue cylinder.

What I would do is buy them new, use them a little bit on your standard barbecue and then refill them so that they're maximally full. And you can put aside another 20 pound cylinder per week until you have as much propane as you feel you should have. You can also buy larger cylinders.

You can buy 30 pound cylinders, which you can manhandle, look to a place like Tractor Supply. You can do that there 40 pound cylinders get pretty heavy, but they're still movable. Once you get beyond 40 pound cylinders, they start to not be movable. But you can then of course go to something like 100 pound cylinder.

You can buy those from your local propane company. And there's a kind of kind of cylinder that they put on the back of a food truck or concession truck, or you can bury a tank in the backyard. And so now you move to a situation where because you can bury a propane tank from the, you know, few hundred gallons, even thousand gallons or whatever, it's standard throughout the US, you can put an above ground tank or a below ground tank.

And if you create a generator that can run off a propane, you now create basically an inexhaustible power supply for yourself, which is really, really powerful. But my plans are building in in terms of finances. Yeah, you can go all the way to a propane or natural gas, big giant tank or multiple tanks and a whole house generator, but that's not strictly necessary.

You can start simpler with the with the portable model that I'm describing to you. So get one of those. And then the other benefit of propane is, in my experience, you never have to worry about your carburetors becoming varnished like you do with gasoline. The basic problem that happens with a generator is you get a generator, you use it with gasoline, you use it during the storm, and then you let it sit.

And then the gas goes bad in the tank, but worse, the carburetor gets varnished, because the gasoline in the carburetor just turns to lacquer. And then next time you go to start up the the generator, it won't start because the carburetor is broken. Now sometimes you can fix it, you run some seafoam through it, and you may be able to fix it.

But in my experience, running a generator on propane, you never have any problem. So I can run my generator on propane, leave it sit for six months, go out, fires right up just just like it did right away, and I don't have to worry about the same problems. So I think propane is a really good solution for you to create and set up a generator.

Now, moving on, and I promise we'll come back to food. Once you think about power, and if you're going to have a generator, you expand your options immeasurably. And then you can think about how do I standardize my equipment? How do I provide for myself? If, for example, you have an electric stove in your house, well now you don't have a way to cook if the electricity is out.

So how are you going to cook? There are an inexhaustible number of ways that you could do it. You can have a solar oven, you can cook on a propane or a butane camp stove, you can get an induction hot plate, you can cook over an open fire in your cast iron dutch oven, you can get your volcano stove and cook on that, you can build a rocket stove.

I mean, there's just no limit to the number of different ways that you can do it. But one of the basic recommendations I would make is if you store fuel and you have a generator, then standardize a lot of things on electricity. So then you think about tools. Well, standardize your tools on rechargeable batteries.

My tips on rechargeable batteries. There are a couple interesting things that you can do. First, the rechargeable batteries. I'm thinking here your 18 volt or your 20 volt or whatever, you know, think your DeWalt screw gun type of thing. If you standardize on those, there are actually a lot of really interesting things that you can run on those.

So you can have an emergency radio that runs on those. You can have lights that run on those, which can be helpful for your emergency preparedness. DeWalt has a system where you can use a bunch of those batteries and turn it into a battery pack. So you can do that.

What I like the idea of is Home Depot has a system where if you buy the Home Depot brand, I think it's Rigid, but check me on that. I can't remember right now. But if you buy the Home Depot brand of tools, they have a lifetime warranty on the tools that they sell, including batteries.

But the trick is you have to register it when you buy it. But I think it makes a lot of sense to standardize on something like that. Home Depot likely to be around for quite a while, register the tools and they will replace the batteries whenever they go bad.

And that's usually the weak link in your tools. So, but the point is you have a generator, now you have the ability to charge batteries. Now you have the ability to have tools. So when your roof gets blown off, you have a saw that you can still use with a circular saw that runs off of batteries.

You have the ability to use your screw guns to go and put your roof back on and cover up a shelter. You have the ability to get a battery operated nail gun if you need it. You can get battery operated chop saws and table saws. I mean, the sky's the limit.

So think about how you create shelter for yourself. Similar things with things like emergency preparedness for showers. If you have a generator, one of the best things you have the ability to do is to run an immersion heater. And so you can get an immersion heater, put it in a bucket of water, warm up some cold water to warm water, and then use a little battery operated shower to dunk the little pump in there and turn the pump on.

And now you and your family can have a shower, even if the power's out. And all of that is predicated based upon having electrical power. Now you can do it other ways. We've bathed our children tons of times in buckets or those bins, the big plastic bins, rubber made bins.

And now the common ones are the black ones with the yellow tops. And that works out well. Maybe you keep aside a camp stove that runs off of propane, and you can heat up a big bucket of water, put it in the water, and then add some other water, and you can bathe in that.

You can pour it over your head. So there's lots of ways to do it. Just think about how you would do it. Now let me circle back to food and water, and I hope that this is clear enough. As you start to expand, first, you think about it, you study it.

And then as you start to expand your options, you'll probably go through different phases of types of foods that make sense. If you're thinking about preparing for a hurricane, it makes all the sense in the world for you to have canned tuna and saltine crackers in your pantry. It makes all the sense in the world for you to have Campbell's tomato soup or whatever, just the normal things that you buy that are shelf stable.

But when you start to go to a longer term plan, where you think, "What if I had to do without power for a year? How would I do things? I have no refrigeration for a year. I'm going to run out of fuel for a year. How would I do it then?" You start to move into a different sphere.

And you just have to think about, "Am I the kind of person who wants to save money, do it on the cheap?" In that case, you're buying wheat by the 50-pound bag. You are packing it yourself in a Mylar bag in a bucket with dry ice to get the bug out and oxygen O2 absorbers and all that.

Or you can go down to Costco and buy a pallet of freeze-dried food. There's no right or wrong. And in fact, the freeze-dried food options that are available are really incredible. I would recommend looking to Meals in a Jar. One of the coolest things that people are doing with freeze-dried food, there was a, I think her name is Chef Tess, but I'm not sure about that.

But she wrote a whole cookbook about Meals in a Jar. And so, you can use all these freeze-dried food options to be able to make whole meals that are ready to go in a jar just to add water. And this opens up, this is the kind of thing that you could use even just things like your family vacations.

If you try to be frugal with your food when you go on family vacations, it can be frustrating and annoying because you may not have any time to cook, but you don't want to eat out at a restaurant. You can prepare your meals in a jar with all your freeze-dried food.

It's totally shelf-stable. It's just sitting there. You can go for years. So, you can take a bunch of these with you. And then when you are ready to, when you're on the road and you think, "Okay, I want to have a hot lunch or a hot dinner ready when we get to our destination," you just simply heat up water.

I've talked about that in a show I did on cooking on the road. Make sure that you always travel with the ability to at least heat water. Simple butane stove, 20 bucks at Walmart, canister of butane, works great. You can use an instant pot. Lots of ways that you can heat water.

Immersion heater works fine too. So, but you heat up water. You add the boiling water to the can and make sure you put it in an insulated cooler or maybe you use a thermal cooker or something like that. Then leave it there. It rehydrates. It cooks the food. And then when you get to your destination, you've got a hot meal ready to go.

It's really, really wonderful. Now, I can't tell you what to do. What I would say is that most people probably in time will put to use all these different techniques. If you're serious and committed to preparedness, you're going to use all of these different techniques. You can't have enough food to feed your neighbors by putting aside cans of tuna fish and saltine crackers.

But you can have enough food to get yourself through a week without power by just simply deepening your pantry and then using freezers, of course. The other thing I would say is that the reason why a generator is important is because some of the easiest food storage methodologies involve your freezer.

And so if you can have a big deep freezer that's full of food and you can make sure that that freezer is not going to get warm so you have a backup power source. Now, you can get a freezer that runs on propane itself. That may be a good idea.

Or just simply make sure that you have a generator or yeah, a generator is the best. And you have an extended ability to do that, then that's one of your simplest ways. Just have frozen food. It'll last for a long time if you can keep it cold. But you can fill up your freezers and that can get you through weeks and weeks if you just simply use frozen food.

You can can food yourself. I've done it. We have a big pressure canner and I've canned a bunch of stuff. I like to can meat. You buy, go to the food restaurant supply store, buy a giant 50-pound box of chicken and then can the chicken, can the beef, etc.

It's a lot cheaper than buying it and it's really useful just to have and it lasts for decades. So you can can food yourself. And you can can vegetables if you have a source of vegetables as well, either to buy them in bulk at the farmer's market or grow them yourself.

Canning I'd say is cost a lot. It takes a lot of time and it costs a lot to get the infrastructure to buy a good pressure canner, to buy if you don't have a stove that will work with it already, to buy all of the jars, etc. But it's certainly a wonderful model.

And so you'll probably do some of that yourself. It makes a lot of sense for everybody to have some freeze-dried foods, especially if you have the ability to turn them into meals like the meals in a jar concept. But those freeze-dried foods can add up. They can be more expensive, although when you actually do the cost calculations, they're pretty good.

It's just that they feel more expensive when you're paying massive money for a number 10 can. It makes a lot of sense to have some MREs, meals ready to eat. They're not that expensive. And one of the things I like about meals ready to eat is that they're not very healthy, but they are really calorie rich.

But many times having MREs in the car will allow you to avoid having to make a stop at restaurant food, etc. And so just it's a useful thing because they're packed and they're ready to go at all times and they taste okay. Then it's useful to have those set up as a backup.

And then when you start to get to the bulk storage and you think about how do I get my family through a year or multiple years, and more importantly, how do I get my extended family through? Because I've got, you know, this big extended family or my neighbors. That's when you really get to the bulk storage options.

How do I have buckets and buckets of food and wheat and corn? And then you can kind of level up to there. But I've given you a lot of words and I don't know that I've given you an exact answer. So I'll point you in simply this direction. Start by simply thinking yourself about what you would need.

And I want people desperately to stay practical. It is certainly true that maybe you have to go five years. Maybe there's World War III and for years you can't, I don't know, that's even that, I can't even believe that. But maybe there's a global flu pandemic and you got to stay quarantined for six months or a year.

Like that stuff happens. But the vast majority of disasters are hurricanes, ice storms, and they're solved in a week, couple weeks, etc. So just start by preparing for that and that will put you far ahead of everything else and you won't wind up making a $10,000 MRE purchase and then find out you don't like the MREs.

So go slow and you put together the plans based upon your situation, based upon the food that you eat and the things that you like. I will commend to you a book, the best book that I think people should start with on this space would be Tess Pennington's book on introductory prepping.

It's called The Prepper's Blueprint, the step-by-step guide to help you prepare for any disaster. I think that's a pretty good one and it goes through the basics and she starts you with two weeks of food and water and then tools and emergency medical supplies and emergency communication and pet preparedness, then 72-hour bags, then evacuation, home security, emergency sanitation, emergency medical supplies, dental preparedness, and she goes deep, deep, deep all the way in, then you move up to one month supply of food little by little and then you move on to even longer term stuff little by little.

So I would commend that to you to be a good place to start. I think it's a very practical book, it's a well-done book, lots of useful suggestions. I don't think you'd go wrong if you haven't read Tess Pennington's The Prepper's Blueprint, I would recommend that you start there.

The key is to study, learn, and then customize things to your situation. I work from home, thus I don't have a get-home bag, but if I worked in the city and my family were in the suburbs, I'd have a get-home bag at my office, I'd make sure I always had a bicycle, for example, and the simplest things that can do if you work far from home, one of the simplest and best things that you could do is buy yourself a fold-up bicycle and keep a fold-up bicycle in the trunk of your car or stashed somewhere at work, etc.

so that if you ever needed to get home and the roads were full or fuel were scarce or something like that, you have the ability to get on a bicycle and get yourself home much faster. I mean, that's the biggest fear as a father, that's the biggest fear I have is if I'm separated from my family and can't get home.

But simple things like having cash, cash solves the problems. Whenever I travel, I make sure that I have enough cash to get home from wherever I wind up being, even if my credit cards didn't work and even if I, you know, something happened because I need to get, I need to take care of my family.

So your situation is different if you live in the city, if you live in the country, if you work in the city, if you work at home, if you live in the north, if you live in the south, so you will have to adjust things even to your space and adjusting to your threats that you're concerned about.

And I think that you have to consider your budget and prioritize things. If I lived in Kansas, I would spend a couple hundred dollars on food and water and then I would install a tornado shelter if my house didn't have one, just because to me that is a much more fearful threat than somehow running out of food.

The chances of needing more than a couple weeks of food is minimal compared to the risk of not having a safe shelter to go through, to go to a nice tornado shelter that I can get my family into to prepare for that. Now that's different than the risk of tornadoes in Florida and that's different than Minnesota.

So adjust to your things and then just simply allow your budget to grow from there. I hope that was in some way helpful. I commend you for asking the questions. There's no excuse for any of us not to be able to at any time be able to take care of ourselves and take care of those that we're responsible for for minimum a few weeks or a month.

It's too simple to ignore. It's irresponsible to ignore. Thank you for listening to today's show. Thank you for the questions. If you'd like to participate in a future show, sign up and become a patron of the show. You can do that at patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Next week I will be talking with you about...

It's not good to do an ad and then you forget what you're talking about. Recession. We're going to talk about preparing for the coming recession, how to prepare for recession, and certainly prepping is a component of that. Prepping is a component of that. You'll find many stories. I found after the 2008 recessions, I started studying and looking into it and I found several stories of Mormon families who talked about how having their year of food storage saved them when they lost their jobs and it really makes a big difference.

When you have the ability, when you have a year of food set aside, which is simple to get to. If you don't want to buy Tess Pennington's book, just download the LDS Preparedness Manual and do what they do. Go to the LDS cannery and can your foods. It's all there.

The LDS church has done a wonderful job of preparing those things for you. But if you have a year of food supply, that's a year that you could go without buying food if you lost your job in a recession. So it really, really has a strong, strong... I mean there's no downside.

As long as you can work out the storage space and do it intelligently, there's no downside whatsoever. Very, very important. Check out those episodes I talked about and get together. patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable Kids Day presented by Pear Deck.

Family fun, giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones.