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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. 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.

Today in the show we continue our financial goal setting series, how to set financial goals and we're going to talk today about counting the cost. Before you start something, you've got to count the cost and don't begin until you count the cost. For who would begin construction of a building without first calculating the cost to see if there's enough money to finish it?

There are two components that I want to talk to you about today, the financial cost and the opportunity cost. But basically it works like this. When you set a goal for yourself, that goal is going to involve a price tag in order for it to be achieved. In the first show in the series, I used the quote by oil billionaire H.L.

Hunt who famously said that in America you only need the two things to be successful. First to decide exactly what you want and then second to determine the price you're going to have to pay to get it and then to resolve to pay that price. And goal setting is as simple as that.

You decide what you want, you determine the price that you'll have to pay to get it and then resolve to pay that price. Now that quote as I applied it in the first show in the series is well applied to any goal, even those goals that have only a peripheral connection to finances.

Something like I want to lower my body fat by an extra 50 pounds. You count the cost of what's going to have to be required and you do it. And although there may be some financial component to it, perhaps changing the amount of money that you spend on food or perhaps purchasing some kind of coaching or exercise, access to a gym, something like that.

Those costs are more peripheral. But most of our goals involve costs that are more direct. Much more direct. Our goals could be things like consumption goals. Let's say you decide I would really like to buy a different car. I'd really like to buy a new car. And so you clarify the type of vehicle that you want to buy and then count the cost.

I would recommend to you that the first thing you should do is trot out and start doing research on the car. Go to the dealership if there's one handy to you. Sit in the car, look at it, get the brochures and go through them and find out what it costs because then you can know what this thing is going to cost me if I set this as a goal.

You need to know that. And that experience can be useful. If you want to buy a house, whether it's a new house to live in of a certain quality or variety or whether it's a rental house of some kind, then you need to go out and start looking at the houses.

You can do this digitally. Look around your county and see what houses cost. See what they're going to rent for. Go out and drive around and look at some. Go to some open houses. Tour some homes, etc. Knowing what something costs is a basic first step because then by having those numbers in your head, you'll start to understand what's required.

Now you might find a pleasant surprise. One of the things that I find fascinating in some of the work that I do is how many people have big dreams about what they want to do and yet when they start counting the cost of that, actually financially counting the cost because they start to move forward towards that goal achievement, they find out that to achieve that certain thing can be far cheaper than they ever imagined.

My favorite example here is travel. I've heard time and time again from financial planning clients, "When we retire, we want to travel. We want to travel the world." Awesome. But my experience, the vast majority of people who say they want to do that don't really know how much traveling the world costs.

Now I'm not saying they don't travel, but they don't understand how much traveling the world actually costs because they're not actively doing it now. There's no reason why you have to wait until retirement to travel the world if you really want to travel. Day in, day out, you will find today in 2019, 2020, you will find couples traveling the world for less than $30,000 per year between the two of them, individuals less than $20,000 per year.

And that's not hyper budget travel. That might not be the most extravagant travel, might not always be staying at a five-star hotel travel, but it's not super budget travel either. And so if somebody wants to go and travel the world, it can be as simple as figuring out how to create an income that supports them on the road or simply saving the money.

If you got a job making $40,000 a year and you can live on 20,000 and save 20,000, well, now you can go travel the world for a year. Or if you can figure out how to make an income of $55 a day from the road, you can afford to travel the world.

There are all kinds of things you can do with just some hourly work online for $30 an hour, two hours a day of work on the road per day and your budget is met. Now you can go and travel the world. And so when you count the costs, sometimes you find that things are far cheaper than you ever imagined they would be.

And that can be wonderful because it can help you to see how to achieve something much faster. Let's say my goal is to drive an exotic supercar. Well, the price tag might be $400,000 or you might look down and say, "How much does it cost for me to lease one?" Here you can lease a Lamborghini for under $3,000 a month.

So if that's your thing, you may be able to accomplish it much faster when you start looking at options. Which of us hasn't actually experienced how effective the salesman is at trying to show us how we can get into that new car today? You go to count the costs, thinking about buying the new $65,000 SUV and all of a sudden you find out from your $682 a month you can be driving out today.

Well, it's a lot easier. If you really want to drive that SUV, it becomes pretty easy when it's broken down into that monthly payment amount. You go and you look at the house and you count the costs and all of a sudden now you realize mortgage payment is $2,200 a month.

I can afford that. So count the cost. Now we do need to stop in the middle of our decision making process and carefully use logic and analysis, see what we're giving up, etc. before we take action. We don't want to just be emotionally impulsed into doing something because it sounds easy.

Talk about what you're giving up in a moment. But some things are dramatically cheaper to do than you would think and you know that by starting to count the cost. The image that just always sticks with me as the very best expression of this is Chris Guillebeau's story of when he sat down and decided to visit every country.

Oh, I think it was that he wanted to start with 100 countries and he sat down and he was figuring out how much it would cost him to visit 100 countries and his calculations were that it would probably cost him about $33,000 to visit 100 countries. So he thought, "Well, that's not unreasonable.

Lots of people buy $33,000 cars. I'd rather just simply visit 100 countries." So when you sit down and start looking at numbers and start pricing things out, start considering scenarios, you may quickly find out that something is far more achievable than you ever thought possible. So get that data.

Look into it. Study it. Go online. Do your internet research. See what other people are paying for this goal that you've set. And you may be pleasantly surprised to find out that you can achieve a goal far faster than you ever thought. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why it may be important to you to be careful how you set your goals.

Example, you might set a goal, "I want to drive a new car. I want to buy a new car." But if you don't clarify how you want to buy the new car, you might wind up down at the dealership, drive out with the car and that new car could be a chain around your neck for the next six years until you get the payments paid off.

What I like to do is, when setting goals, think about how I can comfortably afford to buy something fun without sacrificing my financial goals, especially my wealth accumulation goals. So what I like to do is if I'm going to have an extravagant consumption item, an extravagant consumption purchase, for me those things are usually more experiences rather than stuff, then I want to look at it and say, "How can I position this as a reward so I will simultaneously get wealthy and get this thing?" So just to get the image in your head, instead of saying, "I want to buy a new car," I would say, "I want to buy this specific car with the monthly profit from this new line of business," or "I want to buy this specific car with the monthly profit from my new rental house." So my goal is now to buy a new rental house, get it rented out, with enough excess cash flow to pay the car payment for me on this particular car.

Then while I'm driving the car, I can feel relaxed and enjoy the consumption expense knowing that I haven't sacrificed my wealth goals. Because when you start counting the cost of goals, you see that sometimes they interact. I want to be financially independent in 10 years, but I also want to drive a Lamborghini.

Well, financial independence doesn't come from Lamborghinis. Lamborghinis might be part of your total financial abundance, but you first got to start with accumulating the money. And I would a whole lot rather have the Lamborghini after being financially independent than the Lamborghini first. Your mileage may vary, but count the cost and then stop and think and analyze.

Now on the flip side, when you start looking at things, some things may cost way more to do than you would think. And you might just decide, "I'm not interested in this," in which case you can just toss it away. Years ago when I was younger, I really wanted to buy a Harley Davidson.

I enjoyed riding motorcycles. I really wanted to buy a Harley Davidson. So I set it as a goal. By this date, I will own a black Harley Davidson. I specified it all out. I can't remember at this point. It was the Road King or something. I wanted to be a bagger on the back, but not the top case.

I liked those. I rented one from the Harley Davidson dealership one time. I was like, "By this date, I'm going to have a Harley Davidson." Then I went, I counted the cost on it, and I opened the savings account with the name on the account, Harley Davidson. I started funding it.

Over time, I just realized, "You know what? I don't actually care about this goal. This is not actually my goal." It was a consumption goal that somebody talked me into setting. I was reading some book, and they talked about setting goals. I put it as a goal, and I realized, "No, I don't really care about that." So I closed the account and moved the money elsewhere.

That's really nice, because now you can just give up on a goal because, "That's not actually my goal." A lot better to know that quickly so that you can change quickly than to spend years chasing a goal that's not really yours. You might not choose to throw away a goal, but you might choose to modify a goal.

For example, my Harley Davidson would have been absurdly expensive. I can't remember now, but maybe $25,000 for the exact top-of-the-line bike that I wanted. But there's no reason to buy a $25,000 bike if your goal is just to have a motorcycle. A $2,000 motorcycle would work great in most situations.

You set the goal and realize, "It's just not worth it to me. I'm not willing to work and save and experience all the other costs of that $25,000 goal when I could have 80% of the benefit for $2,000." Some things cost way more than you think, and you can figure that out quickly when you start counting the financial cost.

Count the cost. When you set a goal, count the cost. We've talked about the financial cost, but financial costs are not the most important costs. And the reason is because money is the ultimate renewable resource. You can always get more money. You can always create more money. You can almost always earn more money.

So money is the ultimate renewable resource. But there's one other resource that is the ultimate non-renewable resource, and that is time. Time is the ultimate non-renewable resource. And time is usually what's involved in our second area of cost, which is the opportunity cost. What is the opportunity cost of your goal that you're setting?

Opportunity cost is what are you giving up in order for you to pursue or to achieve this goal? What will you be giving up? Now these opportunity costs are a little bit harder to quantify, but they are no less real simply because they're harder to quantify. The fact that they're harder to figure out and harder to put a specific dollar figure on doesn't make them any less real.

And as time marches forward, you'll find that you can't do everything equally well, so you're going to have to give something up. And as time marches forward, that's the non-renewable resource that you'll never get back. So when you set a goal, you've got to be very careful that you really believe in that goal and that that goal itself is not going to cost you something very important.

For me, many of the consumption goals that I used to set, I put aside because what I realized I would be giving up was higher goals such as financial freedom or personal freedom or lifestyle freedom. I valued financial freedom more than I valued achieving the consumption goal. And frankly, that's basically the core basis of the modern FIRE movement.

You have people who are basically looking at life and saying, "Well, I could have all these things or I could have all these experiences now. I could have these various consumption items. Or if I don't have these now, I could have financial freedom faster." And so, many people choose to lower their consumption because they want to be financially free faster.

Now notice the balance here. What's the opportunity cost of pursuing financial freedom? Well, what you give up is you give up experiences now, you give up purchases now in exchange for things later. Is that a wise move? Probably depends on the person. Probably depends on their goals. Probably nobody gets it completely right.

I think if you talk to most hardcore FIRE devotees, I bet you that some of them would look back and say, "I wish I had spent a little bit more here. I wish I had done that thing 10 years ago or 5 years ago instead of just saving, saving, saving all the time.

Because now I look back and that's an experience I can't get back. Those are years that I can't get back. I can't go back and relive that time." But then of course on the flip side, what's much more widespread is you and I at least have probably experienced this and most of our neighbors have, that many people would say, "Oh, I spent lots of money on an experience or lots of money on a thing.

I wish I could go back and get that back. I wish I had a little more freedom today by having a little more money in my pocket." I doubt any of us are going to successfully achieve that perfect balance. Probably doesn't exist. But at least by thinking about it carefully and consciously, hopefully we can get a little bit closer toward that ideal balance.

And the way that you get there is by counting the cost. You count the financial cost and you count the opportunity cost. What will this goal cost me to achieve and what will I give up in order to achieve it? What will I have to stop doing in order to accomplish this goal?

What will I have to stop spending money on in order to accumulate the money for this goal? What more work will I have to do in order to have the money for this? These concepts I'm giving you today are at the core of most of the modern financial conversation, especially the very loud financial conversation that much of this community is involved in relating to financial independence.

As we sit here at the dawn of a new decade, or I guess the eve of a new decade would be more accurate, as we sit here at the eve of a new decade and consider forward 10 years, my goal is that this be the decade that you achieve financial freedom.

That's my goal for you. So following this formula that I have given to you here, we have to talk about what does freedom mean to you? What does financial freedom mean to you? That's what is the financial cost of financial freedom? Your number may be rather modest. You might recognize that if you can accumulate $10,000, you'll be in the top half of probably Western society, at least American society, given that you could lay your hands on $10,000.

Well, that's a very doable goal. Your number might be far higher. Your number might be $5 million, and your target is to lay your hands on $5 million in order to achieve financial freedom. There be numbers far higher, far lower, but sit down and count the cost of what financial freedom means to you.

But then you have to sit down and think about the opportunity cost. What will I be giving up to achieve financial freedom? Now I'll just give you a little bit from my brain, a little bit from my story, and then you can use it as fodder to achieve whatever you want to achieve.

And feel free to disagree with me, agree with me, it doesn't really matter. Just go through the process for yourself and then hopefully make some intentional decisions for your situation. But here's how I tackled this problem. For me, my target has always been financial freedom. I want to have financial freedom.

That's the goal. Lifestyle freedom. Freedom is a big deal for me. Freedom in all of its variations and permutations. And so when I ask myself the why, why do I want financial freedom? Well, some of the things that happen for me, some of the things that are important to me, are things like freedom over my time.

I like to be in control of my time. I like to feel like I don't have to be somewhere at a certain time. I like to feel like I don't have to go somewhere at a certain time. I like to have control over my time. It's always been a dream of mine.

When I sit down and imagine my perfect day, my perfect day is never involved in the alarm clock going off. So control over my time. Other things that financial freedom means to me, means control over who I associate with. In my opinion, freedom of association is one of the most basic of fundamental human rights that most people never think to capture for themselves.

And yet we all have it. Unless you're a slave in chains, you have freedom of association. One of the, I'll skip the rant, freedom of association. One of the things that's important to me is freedom of speech. The ability to say what I want to say and to be accountable for my words.

Freedom of speech. So these are different aspects of freedom that for me are important. So now we come back to financial freedom. Goal, financial freedom. I have some numerical targets associated with that. But we start counting the cost. What is the financial cost of financial freedom? Let me use some numbers to put some math on this.

In my opinion, the sweet spot for financial freedom is a starting point for an abundant and free financial life is somewhere between $6,000 to $12,000 a month. Median income in the United States, something in the $50,000 to $60,000 range. There's research that indicates that $70,000 is kind of a sweet point of happiness, of earnings, is a sweet point of happiness.

From some perspective, after taxes, you wind up in that $5,000 or $6,000 a month range. I think many people can live comfortably on $5,000 to $6,000 a month. What you miss out on in that budget, and this would depend if you're a single person, married couple, married with children, what you miss out on that budget is some of the experiences that are really fun and expensive.

The weekend trip to New York City to take in a show or two and enjoy the Christmas cheer in New York City. Is it totally extravagant? No, it's not that extravagant, but it'll still cost you $6,000. The week ski trip, the European vacation, the cruise, those kinds of things.

If your tastes are simpler and they run to reading quietly around the firelight and book club discussions in downtown Toronto, etc., then of course you don't need as much money. If you have many children as I do, and if you really prefer the idea of time in Europe and Broadway musicals and taking your children on interesting experiences, etc., then of course you increase your budget numbers.

But I think somewhere in that $6,000 to $12,000 a month range is really in many ways an ideal number for many people. I've done budget analyses. Most people don't ever sit down when counting the cost and talk about what they can actually spend money on. Years ago I did a show called Why You Should Probably Lower Your Financial Goals.

Got a lot of great feedback from that show where I went through different budgets and talked about how when you get to the higher dollar amounts, it's actually really hard to spend money. Many people set very high financial goals without ever sitting down and thinking about what to actually spend the money on.

Let's just say that your number is $8,000 a month as just a plug number here. You multiply 8 times 12 and you say, "My goal is to spend $96,000 per year and let's round it up to $100,000 for easy podcast math. My goal is $100,000 per year." Then you sit down and you begin with the 4% rule.

Let's go with the 3% rule for safety. You multiply 100,000 times 30 and now you know your number is $3 million. Could be $2.5 million, could be $3 million, but you got a range and an expectation of how much money you would need to save to accomplish that particular goal.

You look at your savings rate and you calculate. Maybe you're saving $3,000 a month. It's going to take you quite a while to get there at $3,000 a month. You start working on variations. Now, when I went through this for myself and I thought about what was important, I thought about the extreme savings.

At the time that I first started working through this stuff, I had a high income, I had a good job, my own business, etc. But when I looked it through, I realized that for me, I didn't have to depend on purely finances just to accomplish freedom, but that for me, I could accomplish most of my why, my freedom, by just simply transitioning to a different kind of business.

And that that could be a lot faster way of achieving what I wanted to achieve. That may not be the same for you. If you sit down and you look at your job and you say, "If I work this job for three more years saving at my current rate, I'll be in a situation where I can achieve my personal financial goals." In which case, a sensible position would be for you to work at your job.

Now, remember, of course, also we could play with the investment numbers. You sit down and you say, "All right, in order for me to generate $8,000 per month, I would probably need in my local area, I probably need six rental houses. And if I had six rental houses paid off, then I could achieve that goal." So you start buying rental houses.

But you calculate the number. You think about the why. Then you think about what you give up. So when I went through the opportunity cost analysis, realized that I could achieve financial freedom in a number of different ways. One way was by continuing in the business I was in at that time.

And it wouldn't have taken that long for financial freedom, but it still would have been a number of years. Significant, not insignificant number of years. Well, when looking at it, here's the problem. Money is the ultimate renewable resource. Time is the ultimate non-renewable resource. If somebody really doesn't want to work and they want to be free, then of course, you've got to become totally financially free so you can live on the income from your portfolio.

But if you just want something like I did with freedom, and you like working and you intend to always work, for me, I will always work. I'll never retire. Because I believe that work is important. Some of the most important contributions we make to the world are in our work.

And so work will always work. Now if you work for money, great. If you don't want to work for money, don't charge money. That's your prerogative. But work is something I'll always do. And so I was able to achieve one level of financial freedom fairly quickly by seeking to build ways to earn an income and support myself through building a different business, a business that would allow me freedom.

And I'm grateful to be able to do that. Very blessed. Talk with my wife frequently. Just last night we were talking about, I was talking to her about going into a different line of business and we were brainstorming it out. This other line of business could be extremely profitable.

Something that I knew well. We were talking about opportunities and numbers, etc. I just said, "I can't give up the freedom." I cannot imagine a better situation than I have now. I'm not willing to give up the freedom. With all of the hardship, with all the things that are difficult at the moment, I'm not willing to give up the freedom in order to go back into less freedom in the other situation.

Now don't copy me unless my situation is similar to yours, but do the analysis. I've done this type of analysis for people and the answer is, "Well, what I'll do is I'll keep a job as a firefighter or as a teacher or enjoy or work till I get my military pension." Because what I get is something valuable that gives me a baseline level of freedom and what I give up is not something that is particularly bad for me to give up.

The opportunity cost for somebody who wants to be a firefighter, for example, I've always thought it's a pretty cool job, say, "What's the great cost of my being a firefighter? I like what I do. I like the schedule. I feel like it's important. I feel like it's a service.

I enjoy the physical work. Gives me a great income now that I have lots of time to enjoy. I get a great pension, which really helps my plan for financial independence and financial freedom." It's a wonderful thing. And so I give up a little bit of freedom now. I give up a little bit of flexibility now, but I get all these other benefits.

Go for it. Do your own analysis. But as you work through this process, this is the analytical process that you can apply to your own situation to try to come up with the best solution for you. Set a goal. Dream a big dream. Think about the price you'll have to pay for that dream.

And the clearer that you can get that goal, the clearer you can get that dream, the easier your plan will be. Think about why this is important to you. If your why is big enough, I can promise you, you will find a way to achieve it. Then think about different how, different levels of how.

How can you do this? What are the opportunities that you have? How can you do this in a more efficient way? How can you do this now? Get your creative juices going. Count the cost carefully. Count the financial cost. Work through different ways of looking at it. Look at the budgets.

Think about the math. And count the opportunity cost. What will you have to give up by pursuing this goal? Then we work towards the next step. But that will be in another show. As I go today, I want to make an announcement and give you a plug here. Over the last couple of weeks since my Black Friday sale, I've been totally inundated with doing consulting work.

And it has been awesome. Really really awesome. I forgot how much I enjoyed doing financial planning and consulting. With a lot of extensive travel, new children and whatnot, I couldn't keep a calendar. And I'd have people reach out to me like, "I'm sorry, I can't even commit to a calendar appointment because everything was just so haywire." But at this point, I've gotten my life back onto a smooth, more disciplined track, etc.

Things are functioning very smoothly and so now I can keep a calendar. And so as I've opened this up, it's been just awesome. It's been absolutely awesome. And I so enjoy it. You are the best listener in the world. I've got the coolest listeners. I'm frankly intimidated by so many of you.

And I wonder like, "Why is this person coming to me?" I just want to, you know, I always give one of my pieces of advice is go to people and ask them for advice and ask them what's worked for them. And more than half of my consulting clients, my impulse is just to say, "Listen, can I interview for Radical Personal Finance so I can share your story with the world because we want to learn from you.

I don't have anything to teach. Let's just learn from you." It's been so great. But it's so energizing to me and motivating to me because I love it. So one of the decisions that I have made is here in 2020, I'm going to dedicate a significant part of my weekly schedule to doing some consulting work.

And it's going to be a regular thing. And primarily for me, one of the biggest costs, back to opportunity cost, right? This still fits into the content of today's show. One of the biggest costs that I have found of leaving a more traditional corporate environment is the solitude. I don't want to use the word loneliness because I'm not lonely.

I have a vibrant social network, a vibrant family life. I'm not lonely. But it is a form of solitude and I miss the camaraderie of the office environment. I miss the, I miss it. I miss that sense of being on a team, that sense of purpose. Now, of course, I'm leading my own team and seeking to build that.

But because I've chosen to do what I do virtually, I don't get to enjoy those same benefits of the coffee pot chatter and things like that. It's really a big benefit of working. My sister, you always used to say that she went to work just to see her friends every day and I thought she was silly for saying that.

But I understand more now what she was saying that I didn't understand back then. And so the consulting work has been so encouraging for me to really tap into that same context. And on about, I would say, 98%, I've had one or two calls where I went through it and I wasn't able to give some, necessarily anything that I thought was breakthrough, primarily because those clients are just doing really, really well.

But on the vast majority of the calls, maybe 90%, too much, maybe 95%, I don't know. The vast majority of the calls, we've been able to work together and come up with some really good ideas to substantially improve the speed of goal achievement. And so I love that. I feel good.

And it gives me so much better feedback. One of the great challenges of podcasting, due to the way that you're listening to me right now, it makes it hard for you to give me feedback. You're listening to me while you drive the car or while you walk the dog or while you run in the treadmill or while you wash the dishes.

And due to that, it's hard for you to reach out to me. Your hands are covered in soapy water. You have to dry them and go get the phone and tap out on some dumb little keyboard, an email to me. And I appreciate it when you do that, but it's hard.

Whereas when I speak live in person, voice to voice in real time, two-way synchronous communication, it's just so great. We can have instant feedback and we can adjust the ideas and everything can change quickly. And so that has been really, really awesome. So I'm going to do a lot more of it.

I'm going to do 10 hours a week, no more than that, but I'm going to do 10 hours a week during 2020. So I would invite you. If you would like to engage in a personal consulting call with me, reach out to me and send me an email, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.

And I want to tell you this, here's my biggest disappointment of the consulting calls that I have done over the last couple of weeks. The vast majority of my consulting clients, I didn't sit down and calculate the numbers, so I'm just going with the gut here, 70 or 80%.

The vast majority of my consulting clients are already rich. I've only had a handful of people who were either in tough situations or who were just getting started, et cetera. And friends, it ought not to be that way. And yet it is. It ought not to be that way.

And yet it is. Even some of the consulting clients who were in that just getting started in a difficult situation or in debt and how do we adjust this, we were able to come up with some really good solutions. In one case, I think, I don't need to go through, some really good solutions.

But the vast majority of my consulting clients are already rich. I would guess, I don't keep client records, so I'm not going to go through and do that. I guard my client's privacy very zealously. I shred my notes as soon as I'm done. But I would guess that the median net worth of the consulting clients of that top 80% is probably about $3 million.

Don't need my help, but still just looking for, is there a way to optimize? Is there a way to improve? Et cetera. If you're just getting started, if you are, if you're just getting started, you should start with the information that is the cheapest. You should get books and read books.

You should listen to podcasts that are free. But you can dramatically speed up your time if you consult an expert. You've listened to me for hundreds of hours. And in that time, you can assess whether you think I can help you or not. If you don't think I can help you, go and find somebody who can and get some help to speed up your results.

If you think I can help you, email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com, and I'll help you. One of the things, by the way, I'm a big proponent of voluntary exchange. I have this thing that I tell consulting clients. If you don't think I was worth it, don't pay me. I don't ever want somebody to not feel like they were worth it.

Thus far, every consulting client I've ever had has paid me. I'm a big believer in stand up and lead with value first. But I plead with you. My email box should have been filled. The deal that I offered for Black Friday was insanely cheap. I've raised my prices for next year.

And I knew, just I was like, "Okay, I'll get back in the rhythm of I'll offer big sale." And I'm so grateful that so many of you responded. But my deal that I offered on Black Friday was insanely cheap. And it should have been 80% filled with people who are just getting started.

Because often, you can make, as a consultant and as a coach, you can make the biggest difference with somebody who's just getting started to clarify something, etc. And I loved doing the work that I've done over the last couple of weeks, helping very wealthy people. But I want to help unwealthy people too.

I want to speed up your results. So remember this. Over the years, one of the things that has served me the best, and this is entirely self-serving because I'm talking to you in the context of an ad, it's still true. One of the things that has been most helpful for me is to get and pay for the very best advice I can get and pay for.

And that speeds up your results because it saves you time. Money is the ultimate renewable resource. Time is the ultimate non-renewable resource. And we go through phases in life. When you're just getting started, you have no money and tons of time. And so you value the money more than the time.

As you get older, you start to value the time far more than the money. Only you know where you are in that process. But one of the best things you can do to improve your performance is seek out the best advice that you can get. I think I'll do a...

I'm adding this to my list to do before the end of the year, but I'm going to give in the next week after I finish this goal-setting series, I'm going to give you a series on financial goals that I think you should set. One of those goals is to choose an amount of your income to invest back into yourself.

It is dumb for you to save 10% of your income into your 401(k) if you're not also investing 10% of your income back into yourself. Or 5%. You just don't know the right number. But you've got to invest back into yourself. And so when you're earning in the early years, those numbers are small.

You invest in yourself by buying books. You invest in yourself by buying courses. You invest in yourself by getting just a little bit of help here and there from somebody. And then as it grows, you hire better and better coaches, better and better consultants, and you move up and up and up.

And that's what speeds up your results. So I just want to tell you, I'm booked for the rest of December, but I'm committing 10 hours a week, starting in January, all through 2020, 10 hours a week to doing consulting work. If you're interested in that, email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I'll give you the details.

But you will find it to be one of the most valuable things that you can possibly do if you care about getting results quickly. It's important. It's important that you invest in yourself. Because if you invest in yourself and you get somebody who can see your situation dispassionately, non-emotionally, and help you think creatively, you can dramatically increase the speed of your results.

And that matters. Add over. Email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs. Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value.

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