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

It is New Year's Eve, 2019. Today closes out a year and also a decade. And probably as you're listening to this, we're opening up into a brand new year and a brand new decade. And I am an unabashed fan. The turnings of the years, just the marking of the seasons, I really enjoy that.

My birthday is in June. And so I have this really mathematically organized life where I'm always looking forward either to my calendar year achievements and goals, or I'm looking forward to my birthday year achievements and goals. And in fact, I actually have the blessing of having an even more organized life in that my years line up quite nicely with big round numbers in five-year increments.

I'll turn 35 this year. And so on the 2020, the decade markers, I have a nice round five-year birthday. And then my big decade birthdays come right in the middle of the chronological decade. So I think very much in terms of these five and 10-year increments, one year, five year, 10-year increments.

And over the last few days, as I've encouraged you to do, I have, together with my wife, we've been reflecting back on the last 10 years. And I gotta say, I didn't expect it to be as much fun as it is, and it has been. For us, it's been a really joyful decade.

And I knew that we had done some cool stuff in the last 10 years. I knew that we were living our best life and just really a lot of things are going well. We've had a whole lot of challenges, but a lot of things have gone really, really well.

And I knew that, but it wasn't until we sat down and really made a list, when I realized just how incredibly productive the last decade has been for me and for my family. It's been awesome. And that has helped to give me just a lot more confidence going into the next decade.

It's helped me to dream bigger dreams for the next decade than I was previously. And it's helped me to feel like I can really accomplish some really cool stuff in the next decade. I am constantly missing short-term or short timeline goals, deadlines, targets, et cetera. I'm forever failing on accomplishing things in the short term.

Almost every single day, my to-do list is longer than I can ever get accomplished. Almost every single week, there's far more that I wanted to get done than I actually got done. And so, I knew this intellectually, but just even the last few days, I experienced afresh how what actually is happens is that I focus on the failures of the short term and I don't zoom out to appreciate the major progress in the right direction.

And it's so easy just to reckon, to think of yourself as I'm always missing that and not getting that done. And you know all the things that you wanted to get done this week, this month, this year that you didn't. And so, it's easy to feel behind. But when I've reflected back on the decade though, I realized, wow, no, actually, I'm making tremendous progress toward my goals and that's been deeply motivating.

So, what I thought I would do in today's show is just simply share with you some of my reflections, tell you a few stories about the last decade for me. I'll share with you some of the lessons that I have learned as I've processed some of the accomplishments of the last decade, some of the failures of the last decade, and then talk with you a little bit about what I see in the next decade and some of my big picture goals and some of the personal systems that I'm seeking to have in my life that will hopefully allow me to achieve some of my goals.

So, beginning with some of the biggest impact events of the last 10 years, the most obvious biggest impact events for me is simply that I got married. My wife and I got married within the last decade. And then of course, we went on to have, so far we've had four children.

And being married and having children has basically formed the basic structure of our lives. And as I was reflecting on lessons learned, I have no regrets about getting married. Thankfully, I married my best friend and my wife would say the same thing, that she married her best friend. And so, we've been really blessed.

Many times we talk and I realize that when we chat, I just realized more and more as we get older how deeply compatible we are. And that's a real blessing where I'm more looking forward to the future than I was 10 years ago. I'm more excited about our life together than I was 10 years ago.

And we have a few things that we disagree on, but in general, she and I are highly compatible, which just really is a blessing. I was reflecting with her and talking about, do I have any regrets about getting married? So, I have no regrets about actually getting married. If I do have regrets, which I don't love to worry about things that are in the past, 'cause you can't change it.

I don't like the whole idea of having regrets. But if I were to do it over again, would I do things differently? I think one of the things I would probably do differently if I were doing it over again, is I'd probably get married younger. I wish that we had gotten married younger.

We married at 26, which is not exactly old. It's also not exactly young. It's the exact median age of many of the people who do marry in today's world. It's what all the data would say, it's a good age to get married, where you're old enough and mature enough, et cetera.

But I guess for me, when I look back, I don't know why we waited so long. My wife probably would have been willing to marry earlier. I was the one who dragged my feet. And I think I wish that we'd married younger. Can't change it. We both did fine.

Don't have any regrets about anything. It's not like it's a big thing. I just wish we'd, I think it would have been nice to have had more memories together as a married couple from those years in the early 20s. I've thought a lot about this, and I'll finish off that marriage series that I've neglected for quite a while here, but I'll finish that off here in January, about how to find an excellent wife.

I really think that if you're careful and thoughtful, it has to be careful and thoughtful. You can't just go in and say, oh, I love this person, so I'm gonna marry them. But if you're careful and thoughtful, getting married young is really, really the way to go. At least I'm convinced for me.

So that would be one thing that I would change. Another thing that I would probably change is if I could figure out a way to do it. I wish that we'd done something more radical with regard to our first year of marriage. Now, a lot of people would say we did some pretty radical stuff.

We lived, I'll talk about housing. We lived in our first year of marriage in this tiny little 234 square foot studio apartment that we rented right by the beach. It's about $500 a month, I think, was our rental cost. And it was great. We really loved it, and I'm really glad we did that.

One of the things I would probably change if I were doing it over again is I'd probably stay a little longer in that particular place, instead of moving out into the big house that we did move into. But in hindsight, I've often wondered how cool it would have been to have done something where we took a longer honeymoon.

We took a two-week honeymoon. Seems to be a trend, what I'm noticing, among many of my friends, that some people aren't even taking honeymoons, or they're delaying their honeymoons. I've never quite understood that. We had a nice honeymoon. But I wish we'd done something more radical. If I were doing it over again, one of the things that I would think about would be doing something like buying an inexpensive pickup truck, putting an inexpensive truck camper on that, and doing a long drive, maybe down to South America.

Do the Alaska to Argentina drive, something like that, and do it over the course of a year. Wouldn't cost all that much money. I could probably fit out the rig for 10 grand or under. Maybe do it in a van. I like the truck camper, but 10 grand on a rig, and probably 30 grand on travel expenses.

So you're in it for $40,000. But to go on the road for $40,000 and have a one-year honeymoon, I think would be pretty cool. I've followed some people who've done that. At the time, I didn't have probably the guts to do it. No one brought the idea to me.

No one suggested it. And it was a problematic, difficult time for me in my business, where I was very much trying to build a financial advice business. And so I have no idea how I could have, I don't know how I could have actually done that, because it would have been dumb for me to walk away from building a business because I was just behind.

So the only way I can see that possibly with my children, what I'll try to help them, is I wish I'd had more money saved when we married. I wish I hadn't spent so much money on college. I don't know if I wish I hadn't gone to college. That's hard to say, 'cause I'm the kind of person who's a good fit for college.

But when I think about what I could have done instead, if somebody had come along and given me a vision, I went to college just because I'm not a loser. And in the culture that I was a part of, the school culture, only losers didn't go to college, and I'm not a loser.

So obviously, I'm the kind of person who's gonna go to college. That was it. I never thought about not going to college. It was just simply just kind of a default option. But what I didn't have was I didn't ever have somebody who came and said, "You can choose not to go to college "and not actually be a loser." So I didn't see clearly what the opportunity cost of college was.

I didn't know what I was giving up. No one had done a financial projection of what my financial life would look like if instead of taking four years off from work and going and spending tens of thousands of dollars on a college degree, I had simply gone and started work.

No one had talked to me about how I could achieve the same goals with, or the same things with self-education. No one had given me specific ideas and plans, and so I went to college. And it's fine, it worked out fine, but what it meant was that I was behind, and I was behind on my money earning too in those years too.

Nobody told me that I could save 50% of my income. So I thought saving 10% of my income was a good thing to do. No one told me I could save 50. No one told me I could save 90% of my income. No one told me that I could save and pay cash for my first house.

And so if somebody had come along and given me more of those ideas at a young age, I think I would have been inspired and actually accomplished those goals. But I didn't have the creativity to pursue those goals in those years. And if I had, then I probably could have been in a situation where I could take a year off and take a year-long honeymoon, something like that.

But there was just no way that I could do that for myself. So those were some of my reflections on getting married. Glad I did it. Probably wish I'd done it sooner. Probably wish I'd taken a longer honeymoon. Other than that, I'm pretty happy with how it all went.

One of these days I'll record a show on weddings, but I think my wife and I did a pretty good job. We spent a little under 10 grand on our wedding, if my memory is right, which was much more than we had to spend. We could have done it cheap, but we didn't cheap out on it.

But it was far less than what we could have spent. And I feel like that was a pretty decent thing to do. It was important to me in those times to have some of the nice stuff. I wasn't as content with frugal decisions and whatnot as I am now.

On the children, obviously children have shaped the course of our lives. We've had four children. Our eldest is six, so we've got four children, six and under now. And that's been awesome. I wouldn't change it a bit. Being a father has been for me a completely transformative experience. Not in kind of the hokey trite way where I was, hey, held my first baby and my life flashed before my eyes and I saw myself completely differently.

I've never had any of those flash of epiphany experiences like that. But it has changed me as a man. And I think that it's helped me to mature significantly being a father. And it's a role that I feel born to play. And it's helped me when I think about even just the coming decades of my life, it's influenced all of my goals.

It's influenced the vision that I have of my life. And it's really helped me to have a long-term anchoring point in my life. And I feel like it's very psychologically healthy to have those long-term anchoring points. I have some friends of mine who are the same age, people I went to school with, people that I'm close to who've taken a very different path.

And I'm not married, no children, but I've just pursued the kind of the single earn income, build a business, enjoy the fruits of income lifestyle. And they're different. Some people really want that and don't want family and children. Some people feel like they want family and children, but they just feel like they haven't found the right person.

Those things are totally fine. But as I try to look through their eyes about their lives and compare it to my own, one of the constant impressions that I come away with is how hard it is to have a long-term quest if you don't have children. Where when I have children, I'm looking forward to my great-grandchildren and thinking about, all right, what am I gonna do?

What kind of great-grandfather am I gonna be? And that gives me this anchoring point as I look forward over the coming century. It gives me an anchoring point for my vision. It gives me an anchoring point for my desires. It gives me an anchoring point for my finances. I'm thinking about how do I invest to build a family legacy?

How do I build a family business that can be passed on? How do we buy assets and then transfer those assets down through three or four or five generations in a way that is going to be, where they're not just not gonna be spent all of a sudden? And how do we do it in a financially efficient way?

You know, doing some decent financial planning and estate planning along the way. And how do we take advantage of investment trends when you've got a hundred-year investing lifetime? In terms of my own investment horizon, everything that I'm thinking about is 60, 80, 100 years. Because my ambition is never to draw from my investments, but purely to use those investments to build a family fortune that can be passed on through the generations.

I don't ever wanna stop having and generating earned income. And so the earned income can be something that will provide my lifestyle. And so if I don't ever have to stop earning earned income and live off of money, then it completely changes the investing focus. And so that's my focus right now as an investor is thinking how do I invest over a 60, 80, 100, 120, 150 year horizon to build a family legacy?

And then that anchors even just the things I do day to day. Because how do I develop children for whom money can be a blessing and not a curse? How do I develop children who are strong of character, who have the things that they need to build stable lives?

And it just gives me this long-term perspective that some of my friends don't have. I've achieved the majority of the hedonistic things that I've ever wanted. And I've never had a fancy car, but that's not really ever been important to me. Maybe someday in a few years, I'll go and rent an exotic car in Miami, something like that, and say, see what it's like to drive a Lamborghini on the beach.

But I don't care for the flash. That's not, I would probably be embarrassed and wanna put the top up so no one could see me, frankly, 'cause I don't care for that kind of attention. For Christmas, I took my family to an all-inclusive resort on the beach, and we stayed at a beautiful resort on the beach and had a great time.

So I've achieved almost all the lifestyle things that you dream about when you're 13 years old. And so I imagine, what would it be like if I were 35 years old, and I were in the situation that I had right now, but I didn't have children? What would be my goals?

And it's hard to know. Obviously, I would have business goals and hopefully have some social goals and some other things. But children really have helped me and anchored me very deeply. Looking forward over the next century, and that's been extremely important to me. So have no regrets about having children.

What would I do differently? I don't think I'd do, well, the only thing I would consider doing differently is that being now an expert on birth tourism, I kind of long for the lost opportunities of all the passports I could collect from my children and all the residencies for them all, if all four of our children had been born outside the United States.

We did birth tourism for our last baby, but at this point in time, but that was just for one child. And that now the obsessive part of me has all, I've got it all worked out and all the countries all around the world. And I can give you a list of all the countries that I would have a baby in if I were gonna have four babies over again.

I told my wife, if we have four more babies, then I've got it all worked out. But I honestly don't think that's realistic. I don't know. There are people who, for their first child, are willing to go and do birth tourism. There certainly are. I guess Mike and Lauren are the ones who have a YouTube channel where they've talked about how they did birth tourism.

They went to Costa Rica to have their first baby. My hat's off to them. I don't know that my wife and I could have done it. I don't know if we would have been adventurous enough. Having a baby for the first time is so, it's such a new thing, and there's so much emotion and so much planning associated with it, et cetera.

So to add on to that, the internationalization, instead of being, okay, we're gonna be home in our house, in our hometown, but now we're gonna go to the other side of the world and have the baby, that's a hard sale to make. So I just don't know how we could have done it up until now.

For our fourth child, it was not easy, but it was very doable. But by that time, we didn't have any real concerns or misgivings about the process of birth. And so it was more about some of the logistics of the travel, et cetera. And it was easy for us because we were moving from living full-time in an RV to just simply moving into suitcases and moving across the world.

So that's about the only thing I would change with children. Over the coming decade, though, basically some of my most important goals involve the education and the nurturing and the training of my children. 10 years from now, 20, 30, if I'm sitting here talking to you, in 20, 30, I'll have a 16-year-old, which basically means that I'll have my first adult child moving out of the house.

Yes, that's not the legal age of majority, but I think that the legal age of majority, 18, is dumb. The whole United States of America has no idea. There's no cultural coherent philosophy on what makes an adult. It's just this crazy mix-up of certain things that you can do at 16, certain things you can do at 18, certain things you can do at 21, et cetera.

And I don't place much stock in the age 18 number. I think that the most important years from a parent's perspective are basically from five to about 12 or 13. You basically have about seven or eight years. And it's my opinion that basically by the time a child reaches about 13-ish, 12 or 13, that's the traditional age of adulthood throughout many traditional cultures.

The obvious example of that, the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah, was not always just a religious ceremony with no actual meaning. It was a rite of adulthood, a rite of passage. You can find some tribes of Indians who would have rites of passage into manhood at 13 years old.

And then if you think about what happens physiologically by, for the child in their teens, in the US we call it adolescence, but it's a term that's denoting major changes. And those changes are where a child is moving into adulthood. And obviously there's a transition period, but my ambition is to hold for my children a vision to where about that age there's a rite of passage into adulthood, where I wanna treat them in many ways as adults, starting from about those early teenage years.

Now you kinda gotta work around some of the restrictions in the modern society, they can't drive. It's a little easier today in a world of smartphone apps and probably by the time they're 13, they can just, if they were living in a modern culture, you can just call up the autonomous taxi to come and pick you up.

So that solves some of the problems. You have major problems with figuring out how to work around all the child labor laws that make it very difficult for children to be employed, but entrepreneurship solves most of those problems. So, and children still need protection in those teenage years. But the point is that by the age of 13, I think a father's role changes.

And the vision that I have is that at this point, I am a parent, and which means I'm in control of my children. But starting at about the age of 13, and that time from say 13 to 20, I wanna be in more of a coaching role, not in a controlling role.

I don't want to control my children's decisions, I wanna coach them to make good decisions. So we'll see how that works out in the coming decade. But for me, the next decade is going to be very involved with my children. And a major component of that is education. I have big educational ambitions for them.

And I'm not quite sure how all those things will work out in the next decade. I've got a lot of ideas, but I think that it's easy to, I wanna be very careful to just look at what's working and what's not working day by day. And be open to change and not, and I wanna be careful not to impose my big ideas in a kind of a controlling way where we've got to do it this way.

I wanna be open to the feedback and be very careful to be open to the feedback. That said though, I want to hold a vision and hold, I think that if you have a vision to start with, then that can be useful. There can be a danger if you don't have a vision, then you would probably get subpar results.

So there's a danger of not having a vision. Then on the other hand, there's a danger of having such a vision that you don't look to see, are we actually getting good results? And so I wanna find that healthy balance, but I do wanna give, I have a vision for myself and I do have a vision for my children.

I want my children to be academically excellent and to have an educational process of academic excellence, but I don't want those academics to dominate their life. I want it to be a small and very important part of their life, but I want many more practical skills to be every bit as important.

So what I see in the future is, I want my children to do about three hours of academics, three to four hours of academics every day, right in the morning, and then I want their afternoons to be taken up with things like entrepreneurship or working, building practical skills. And it's such an exciting time to be a young entrepreneur because there's so many opportunities available that previously were more difficult.

So many entrepreneurial activities in the past required either a really big local market or required huge amounts of capital. But today there are opportunities available for young entrepreneurs that don't require significant financial capital upfront and yet are really big opportunities. And so I wanna help my children to work a lot during their young years, to develop businesses.

I want them to build the skill and the practice of doing some things well, of failing at lots of things so they get used to having success and failure. And I wanna do that where it's a very safe environment. I don't quite know what the educational environment is gonna look like a decade from now, but my ambition is that by the time my children graduate, for say about that age of 17, 18, 19, 20, that instead of just having a high school diploma, if the educational system looks something like it is today, my ambition is that they have a college degree or something close to that.

I see no reason for academically competent children and young people to not just simply swap out a college degree program instead of high school. High school has become so stupid and college has become so stupid that if your children are academically competent, they don't see any reason why they shouldn't just do the college level work during those teenage years and skip high school.

So we're still a long way away from that, but we'll see how that works out over the coming decade. It'll be interesting to see. And it'll be interesting to see if I change my mind on that. I changed my mind on early child education, so maybe I'll need to change my mind on the college and trying to pursue the college level stuff.

I just look and see where if you can launch a child, and with homeschooling, you certainly can do this. If you can just simply launch a child at 18 or 19 years old, and if they wanna go to college, they just go right into a master's degree program instead of into an undergraduate degree program.

I see it's hard to see the arguments against why you wouldn't do that. And with the ability to get an accredited degree through distance study, with CLEP exams, et cetera, it just seems very doable. It's what I could have done it if somebody had given me that vision back in those days.

I think the biggest danger of that is probably the challenge of socialization is an 18 year old ready to go into an environment of master's degree students if they're gonna go pursue a master's degree? Is there some damage that comes to a child because they're not around people who are going through exactly the same program they're going through?

I don't think so. I think that you can handle the socialization challenges without socialization having to come in the context of academics. Many people just have this one idea that, well, the way you socialize your child is in class. I thought the point of going to class was to learn.

So I don't see why socialization would have to be the primary goal of schooling. The primary goal of schooling should be education and skill acquisition, and then socialization can happen in many different forms. I don't know whether I'll still believe that a decade from now, but at the moment, that's what I currently think.

I would like to definitely make sure that I expose my children to lots of travel. I wanna make sure I raise them to be multilingual, if possible. We're finding that very challenging right now, but we're making progress. I think it's just challenging at the beginning. So I wanna raise my children to be multilingual, and that should be helpful to them in time.

I don't know exactly what all the travel should look like. I definitely want to, at some point, take a year off and do another year, or at least going around the United States and Canada. It's just such a beautiful place to travel, so much rich history, and I want my children to feel culturally connected to that.

So I don't know exactly the year that will be the best to do it, but I do know that we spent six months full-timing around the US last year, and doing it with a, let's see, we were traveling with a one-year-old, a three-year-old, and a five-year-old. That wasn't the time.

It's not that we didn't enjoy it. We enjoyed it a lot, but all the educational stuff was just, woo! They didn't pay attention. They didn't read the signs, et cetera. So I have an idea that basically seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, these are the right years to do something like that.

I think we'll do quite a bit of international travel as well, but I want that international travel to be a mixture of some fun, some luxury travel, some vacation stuff, but I really want there to be a much deeper work associated with that international travel. I'm still working out how that can look like, and what can be the anchoring opportunities.

I am starting to enjoy doing business travel with my children. I tested that out this last year. Took my six-year-old son to FinCon, and really enjoyed that. He was right on the edge, where he did a pretty good job. It was a little bit of a hindrance to me, and he gained some of the stuff from that trip, but I definitely wanna do much more of that.

I want my children to be a part of all my personal business travel, so that they can be exposed to that world as well, and then figure out how to support them in their ambitions. As they work to develop their skills, I wanna figure out how to invest into that.

It's my basic operating philosophy that investing for college expenses is dumb, and that investing into your child is smart. I think that the idea that the single best investment to your child is to open a college account is a giant scam, and it's far better to invest that money into your child at a young age, and then if they wanna go to college, let them figure out how to pay for it than to do it down the road.

So I'm thinking constantly and looking for opportunities of how do I invest into my children, and hire tutors, hire lessons, give them experiences, give them exposure, help them buy tools that they need for the things that they're interested in. Those tools can cross the board, but that's, to me, much more important, and I'm convinced it's much more effective and a better investment than just saving for college.

Who knows what it'll be 10 years from now. So those are kind of some of my reports in the last 10 years, and looking forward over the next 10 years with children. Don't know if we'll have more children. I'd probably like to. My wife and I, we talk about it.

Just a busy time in our family. So we'll see. God knows. I'll just take it a day at a time with regard to that. But it'll be an interesting decade. I certainly feel, when I sit at my dinner table and I see my wife and my four children, I feel accomplished and successful, and I feel pity for people who don't have that, for men who don't have that.

I feel pity for them because it just seems to me that that is such a profoundly impactful part of my life. I wouldn't give it up for anything, and it seems just deeply healthy. It seems to be the, it feels, it seems right. Now, I have theological arguments and whatnot that could be brought to it, but just from an emotional perspective, I'm proud of.

Proud of my children's probably the thing I'm most proud of. And I want more people to experience that. I want more men to experience that satisfaction. I could work very happily at some dead-end job that I don't like if I come home and feel like I'm doing it with purpose to support my family.

It would bring me a great deal of satisfaction. Last two decades, or sorry, last decade, let's see, dogs. My wife and I were talking about, we have two dogs that we got. Dogs are kind of in a mixed bag, where unfortunately, I've grown to really love my dogs. And I say unfortunately 'cause I never anticipated that I would love my dogs as much as I do.

I was never really a dog person. Now I always looked at dogs as fairly, I don't know, they're there or they're not. My wife really loves dogs, though. So we got dogs before we had children. And at the time, it seemed like a really good decision. We were living a fairly stable life.

We lived in a house that we owned. And we had a big yard, and it just seemed like the right thing to do. So we didn't plan to get two dogs. We planned to get one dog. But then while we were looking for a dog, we were going around visiting shelters and looking for a dog, we stumbled across a neighbor who had some puppies.

And we're just there and looking at these little puppies. And my wife fell in love with one. And I liked another one. And well, one thing leads to another. And a couple days later, we went home with two puppies. So it wasn't a whole lot of thoughtful planning and analysis.

And then they just become a part of your life, and you grow to really love them, et cetera. If I were to do it over again, though, I don't think I would do it exactly that way. Having two dogs is in some ways a real blessing. It's nice for the dogs that they always have a friend.

You know, they always have somebody to play with. The biggest problem with the dogs is that when there are two of them, it really does change the dynamic of other aspects of life. For example, the dogs are a real hindrance to my geographic flexibility. And the fact that there are two of them makes it very difficult to find people who are willing to dog sit.

It's far easier to have multiple children than to have multiple dogs. If you have one dog, you can ask almost anybody, "Hey, would you be willing to take care of my dog?" But when you have two dogs, you're basically limited to people who are dog people being willing to do that, or who have a really good yard, because the two dogs just, they take up more space, they're more boisterous, require more control, et cetera.

And so that really limits the number of people who are willing to take care of our dogs. And so that's been challenging. The other just practical challenge is that I've reached a point at which, as much as I love renting houses, the rental market is not kind to people with four children and two dogs.

Four children is, you face a little bit of discrimination. Again, let's see, let's make up a word that makes us sound pitiable. Large family discrimination. The world is not really set up for four children. If we have more, you're totally not set up for it. So that makes potential landlords, mainstream landlords, raise their eyes a little bit.

But when you bring in dogs, because of the potential destructiveness of dogs, and you have two of them, it just changes things. And so it makes it much more challenging, much more expensive for a family of my size to be able to go and do something as simple as renting a house.

That's one of the expenses that I didn't think much about with a dog. And again, if you'd asked me, I guess I probably could have come up with reasons against it. But what I thought was that, I thought, well, I own my own house. And when you own your own house, then what does it matter?

Well, it's still, those things do add up over time. The other thing about the dogs is just simply, I underestimated how expensive their medical costs can be. I've got one dog that was totally healthy, and she hasn't cost me a bit, but her brother has had just this, all kinds of chronic skin conditions and allergies.

And I'm a pretty practical guy, love my dogs. But if you came to me and said, "Hey, this dog's got cancer, and we could do surgery, "but it's gonna be $5,000." I'd say, "Hmm, love the dog. "He's gonna have to either make it on his own, "but I'm not gonna spend $5,000 on it." Well, the problem is that I've had these chronic health issues with this one dog, and trying to figure out how to get him healthy.

It doesn't come out 5,000 bucks at a time. It's come out 500 bucks at a time, and 700 here, and then 300 there, and 600 there, et cetera. And it just really bugs me of how much money I've spent on this dog. And yet it's just this deep, kind of these deep emotions where I really love the guy, you know, especially I've spent so much money on him, I really love the guy.

And he's wormed his way into my heart, just like dogs have a tendency to do. So my relationship with my dogs is somewhat conflicted. But in hindsight, I probably wouldn't get two of them. And when these guys die, I don't know if I'll replace them. But I probably, if I do replace them, I'd probably replace them with one.

It's just excessive. Now, if I had, and the biggest change is simply the change of conditions, that there was no problem when I had a big house, big yard, et cetera. But then as soon as I tried to move into other conditions, and I sold my house, moved into a house without a yard, et cetera, as soon as I started to do that, then all of a sudden those two dogs became more difficult.

And I'm not the kind of person who walks away from dogs. I mean, I just never, I guess some people give up their dogs or put them up for adoption. I would never even, I've never even considered that. It just seems like a dereliction of responsibility. But those are my thoughts on dogs.

What about houses? Well, we've had quite the interesting housing journey over the last decade. I lived at home with my family until I married, which I definitely really am a fan of, strongly recommend. It really bothers me, the kind of the anti-living with family thing that exists, at least in the United States, where the idea is as soon as you're 18, then you're supposed to not live with family.

It's lonely, it stinks. There's a good chance you make some bad decisions in those circumstances. I don't like the idea of adult children being a leech on their family members. I think that's a really bad. So if an adult child is irresponsible and you're just milking mom and dad, and I don't think that's healthy at all.

I think they gotta be kicked out in that situation. But I do, I think that the ideal circumstance to be in is to live with family, to be though a productive and contributing member of the household, and then to, until you form your own family, get married and move out.

I think that's a really great way to do it because you get so many social benefits. You can maintain these close relationships with family members. You're not lonely. You don't have to stare at some empty apartment all the time. There's a useful restraint by having still that family influence on, it's less likely to engage in immoral behavior, et cetera.

If you have your families nearby, I think it could be a real blessing to parents. I thought seriously about moving out, but I was paying rent. So like, why wouldn't I want my rent to go to my dad? Why wouldn't I want him to have the rent money instead of it going to somebody else?

So I lived with family until I got married. And then for the first year that my wife and I were married, we lived in this little tiny apartment. Going back, what I'd do differently, I would probably stay in that apartment longer. We lived there for a year, and then we bought a big house and moved into there.

And it seemed like a good decision, and it was. It seemed like a good decision at the time because of, well, we could afford it. I was very careful, I'm very careful in buying the house. And the house worked out great. We lived there for a few years, made a lot of money when we sold the house, and it was a good deal.

But I think if I were to reflect with some detachment of time, I think I was still trying to prove that I'm not a loser. I was still going down the checklist of, go to high school, graduate high school, go to college, get a college degree, get a job, buy a house, get married, get a dog, have children.

I was still going through the checklist. Now, it wasn't a clearly articulated thing, but in hindsight, I can see that I felt this pressure not to be a loser, to buy a house because I'm not a loser. Losers sit around and rent forever, and I'm not a loser, so I'm gonna buy a house.

And the house was nice. It gave us some nice opportunities. But it also resulted in such an immediate increase of stuff to maintain a house, and it became the time sink that, of course, it is, that it just, it definitely cut down on my freedom and flexibility. And when I sold the house and started renting an apartment again, I was very pleased with that.

And currently I rent, and I'm very pleased with that. So I'm glad that I bought the house because I could experience all of those emotions and all of those financial costs, et cetera. I'm glad that I had that experience. But looking back, if I were optimizing things, I would have stayed living in the $500 a month apartment longer, and I would not have bought a house to live in.

I would have bought a house to rent. The biggest financial mistake that I made over the last 10 years was probably not buying a long string of rental properties every year. And it's become my go-to thing, where I've realized that if I had just done one thing differently over the last 10 years, just simply for the first five years of marriage, my wife and I had done something as simple as buy a house, just conventional house, conventional financing, et cetera, buy a house, move into it, live in it for a year to satisfy the requirements of an owner-occupied mortgage, and then go ahead and put a tenant in it and move out.

If we had just done that over the first five years of our life, that would have been one of the best things that we could have done. And it's not that, we're not broke, we're not hurting, but that's something that I wish I had done. Once again, someone hadn't sold me on the idea, and I wish you'd done that strategy.

That's a strategy that I think would have worked for us, and we could have done house hacking, put somebody in the house with us too, but that's a strategy that I wish I had done back then. So if you are getting married and you're 26 years old, I beg of you, don't buy a house to live in in the first year, don't buy a house to rent, and just move for, do one a year.

It doesn't have to be a lot, it doesn't have to be a full-time thing. Just buy one house per year until you own five or 10 of 'em, and then let your tenants pay off the mortgages for you. It's the most profoundly simple and effective financial plan that I can possibly come up with.

It's a plan that works the best in the United States because of the financing market, which is very unique, and so it works really well in a US context, but if I could get young couples to do that, it would just be a big, it'd be well worth doing.

One of the reflections that I've had of things that have changed for me over the last 10 years is I've come to appreciate more than anything how at certain times of your life, certain things are important, and they're just not important at other times in your life. And the key is to get real clarity on those time changes.

And so, for example, one of the things that when my wife and I bought our first house, we didn't go extravagant with that, but again, I do think there was a bit of that, well, I'm gonna prove that I'm not a loser. I'm gonna prove to my wife that I'm not a loser.

I can buy her a fancy house. I'm gonna prove to my friends that I'm not a loser and show them that I can buy a fancy house, et cetera, but I was rushing something that we didn't need. I didn't need a big house. We didn't have any children. Even if you got one baby, stick the baby in the closet.

They just don't take up that much space. They're babies. They have a lot of stuff, but you can avoid that and grab a dresser drawer from the side of the road and put a pad in it and stick 'em in the closet. It's not that big a deal. And it's so easy in that phase to just stay living that way and it makes such a profound difference down the road.

Now, you move on to the phase that we're at right now with a six-year-old, and now all of a sudden, you need some more space. You legitimately need more space. You don't legitimately need more space to have a baby, but you do legitimately need more space with a six-year-old and with a 10-year-old, et cetera.

And so, I wish that I had done a better job. I didn't do a bad job, but I could have done a better job of delaying that gratification a little bit longer, not trying to live my life based upon this societal script, but really focusing on investing in the early years.

I could have done more on that. I wish I had. Now, what ultimately saved my finances was that I've had profitable businesses as well. And so, do you have to make money on everything? No, and at the time, if I were coaching the Joshua of those years, I would have said, "Well, Joshua, you've got plenty of economic opportunity in this high-income job or high-income business, so you don't have to do all these things." But looking back, I just, if you have the ability and it's not that hard, why not?

Why not maximize those investments? Why not go ahead and buy five houses during the first five years of marriage? I think it would have been a better move, and I wish I'd done that. So going forward, I'm doing it going forward. When we're talking 10 years from now, I won't be saying, "I wish I'd bought five or 10 houses.

I will own five or 10 houses," because it's just a profoundly simple and effective plan. I'm still working through whether I'm gonna buy more real estate in the United States or outside the United States, et cetera, but just 'cause something was a good idea back then doesn't mean it's not a good idea now.

Other interesting things, we full-time RV'd during the last decade, which was pretty cool. I don't often give myself a lot of permission to brag, but I gotta say, it was pretty cool. We did some stuff that was pretty cool and that most people simply don't do. We got rid of all of our stuff.

We bought an RV and we moved into an RV, and we had three little children, and we traveled all around the United States. The only reason, I thought we were gonna do it for a year. We wound up doing it for six months, which was a little bit short, but the only reason we cut the trip short was that we did something cooler.

We had a baby and moved outside the United States and wasn't gonna RV overseas. So we didn't fail at RVing, and I loved doing that. It just has a special place in my heart. It was, in many ways, a fulfillment of a childhood dream. I always wanted RVs. I've owned a couple of them over the last decade, and we really enjoyed it.

I really enjoyed traveling around the United States that way. It's the best way to see the United States. Such an awesome place, such an awesome country, and the RVing infrastructure is so strong. It's just a really cool way to travel. And maybe someday I will. I could happily move back into an RV and do it again.

The thing that wasn't awesome about it was just simply that our children were very young. We were traveling with a one-year-old and a three-year-old and a five-year-old, and that's a lot of work. It's a lot of work when, especially the one-year-old and three-year-old, in an RV there's not a lot of physical space.

And so if the children are older, you just say, "Get out of here and come back at dinnertime," and they disappear for four hours. But when the children are younger, you can't do that. You say, "Get out of here and go play," and three and a half minutes later, "Mommy, will you help me move this?" And so we had a big enough RV that it wasn't terrible, but my wife wasn't sad to move into a house again.

I, on the other hand, did miss it. I don't know why. It seems so dumb to even admit, but it was just such a cozy way to live that I genuinely liked. In the beginning of our trip, we mostly stayed in campgrounds, but towards the end we were doing more just traveling, and we wound up staying in Walmart parking lots.

And I genuinely like pooling into a Walmart parking lot and going into my house and setting up. And it's something really special to me, really cozy, and I really enjoyed it. I think we'll do it again when the children are older. I definitely think we'll do it again. I'm not committing to a specific timeline because I did really enjoy it, and I wanna do it more, especially when they can really engage with a lot more of the activities and a lot more of the educational opportunities of that kind of travel.

I don't think I'll do it again soon though. And the biggest cost of that RV trip was just simply in my own productivity. I thought that I was gonna be able to be very productive from the road. My whole podcasting setup, my laptop, and everything just fits in a backpack.

And so I thought that I was gonna be able to be very productive and do my business and that it wouldn't be a major problem. I underestimated the cost though of how much help my wife needed and how much it took to care for her and to make sure that she had what she needed and to care for the children.

And so that just simply cut into my work time. And because it cut into my work time, it was a major cost to me and my business of the stuff that I didn't get done that I should have gotten done. And so it was in many ways, that year was in many ways a lost year financially.

It was a lost year in my business. And that, it was an expensive trip from that perspective. It didn't cost us a ton of money with the simple cost of living. We spent about the same amount of money traveling as we did sitting still. But it was expensive in what I couldn't get done in my business.

And so that was the problem. So I've learned that I need to be more stable in order for me to get more work done, which is important for me at this point in time. So it's not gonna happen, I'm not gonna go back to RVing in the next couple of years until I can get my business more systematized, get more help, so that even if I did RV, that my business continues to grow.

'Cause I don't like it when things shrink. I don't like losing money, I don't like it when things shrink. Glad I did the RV adventures. One of the biggest things that I've learned is I've bought and sold a bunch of stuff over the last decade. And that's not something I did when I was a kid.

I wasn't a wheeler and a dealer. My dad wasn't a wheeler and a dealer. I didn't grow up in a wheeling and dealing household. And so I've had to intentionally embrace buying and selling stuff. And in the first kind of transactions, it was scary to me to buy stuff because I didn't wanna make financial mistakes.

But now I've come to the point where I trust myself a lot more. And like even my RV adventures. I've basically broke even on all of my RV adventures. And there's a bunch of vehicles thrown in, a bunch of trailer, a motor home. And I've come to trust myself and my ability to buy and sell intelligently.

My ability to buy a deal and to just be willing to say, that's a good deal. I know it's a good deal and here's the cash and I'll just buy it. And then my ability to sell on the other side and make a profit. I've made a profit on some transactions.

I've only lost money on a handful of transactions. But overall, that's really helped my personal confidence. And the neat thing about it from a financial perspective is it opens up opportunities. The retail market for toys stinks. You know, the idea that, listen, we got a dual income household and we want to, so that's a brutally dumb financial perspective as well.

So, but we got two jobs in the household, but we want an RV. So let's just go and we'll go buy a new RV and put it on payments and we'll buy it and we'll use it for a few years. And you turn around and sell it three years later for 50% less.

And that's just a terribly expensive decision because you lose so much money on the depreciation and you can't be losing that much money and actually be on a, gonna have a breakout trajectory on wealth building for financial planning, for financial freedom I mean. But if you change that out, and let's say that you have a capital account.

Let's say you got 50 grand or 100 grand. Let's make it 100 grand. You got 100 grand and this is the 100 grand that we spend on stuff. We're gonna have $100,000 worth of stuff whether those are cars, boats, RVs, motorcycles, airplanes, et cetera. Then, and you just say this is the amount.

You can do things in a totally different way. Or you say, hey, let's own an RV for a few years. And so you wait for, you do your research on what you want. You wait for a good deal. You buy the thing at a deep discount. You use it for a few years and then you flip it.

And whether you go and buy it at a repo auction and flip it, flip a new one, whether you buy one from where you take over the payments from somebody who's in distress and you bail them out. Who knows, like everything is different. Or you buy something old that's just gonna maintain its value.

You buy an antique that's gonna go up in value. Whatever the deal is, when you can buy cheap, hold, and then sell at a profit or only a small loss, it totally changes the ability to access toys and to have a bunch of fun stuff without it hurting your finances.

So for me, that's been a big change that I've learned over the last decade. Where I'm willing to have just about any toy, but I'm not trying to say I'm gonna have this certain thing forever. And I'll just buy the thing. I'll make sure that I'm super careful about getting an awesome deal on it.

And we'll enjoy the toy for a time and then we'll flip it. And the goal is always make some money. But not to be a lot of money, but make some money on the flip. And that allows me to have all the fun stuff without feeling like I'm harming my wealth building.

And so I wanna help, one of my parenting goals, I wanna help my children to wheel and deal a little bit and help them to have the confidence of doing some flipping themselves. So that they can have the fun toys that they want for themselves and their families. And be confident about it without them feeling like they have to go out and pay retail.

We've built some pretty cool photo albums over the last decade. We've traveled a bunch of places. We did the math. I've been in the last decade, I think, to a dozen international countries. So that's a pretty cool accomplishment. It's such a blessing to be able to do that. And I have never, never set travel goals.

I don't have any formal travel goals about the number of, I wanna go to this country, et cetera. I have a list of destinations I'd like to go to and I look for opportunities. And I'm always attracted to the idea of, I'm gonna travel to every country in the world.

And then I try to rope myself in and say, Josh, you don't really care about that. But we've just done some awesome stuff. We've been so blessed to do big fishing trips and camping trips and just some really cool stuff. I went to see the solar eclipse. That was one of the things that I wish I'd taken my family, just didn't work out.

But I went and I was right in the black zone, I think Georgia, I guess it was in Georgia, for the solar eclipse, which was really cool. And the next one, I'll definitely make a real event out of taking my children and making sure that we're right in the middle of that zone for the solar eclipse that's coming up in a few years.

And there's more I could say on some of that stuff. In business, pivot to business now, it's been a great decade. In the beginning of the decade, I was a financial advisor and I was building a financial advice business, which was a really rewarding experience. Then I left that to start Radical Personal Finance, which has been a transformative event in my life.

Probably, obviously probably one of the biggest things that has allowed me and provided me with the opportunity to live just a really awesome lifestyle. It's allowed me to level up my freedom, my personal freedom, really substantially. And it's been a very difficult road. You know, it's interesting. I often believe that people can do things.

And so I wanna be an encouraging person. Then sometimes I reflect on how impossible some things are and I get scared and I was like, nobody should ever do this. Like it was, starting Radical Personal Finance was just flat out stupid. I have no idea how it worked, but it did.

It was a lot of work, a lot of work, but it's worked. And I've achieved many of the things that I thought I could achieve. It's been probably the most rewarding thing for me is that I feel like there's a near perfect alignment between my skills and my interests and my daily work.

Today's a little bit rough. I've got this weird cough and congested sinuses that my family has had it for the last couple of weeks and just trying to kick it. But it's, so I'm a little off my game today. But in general, when I turn on a microphone, I feel like I'm doing something that I'm very good at.

And that's really rewarding to do something that you're very good at. And I have the opportunity to use a huge amount of knowledge that I've built and use it to help people. I was reflecting on my educational accomplishments in the last decade. In the last decade, I got a master's degree in financial planning.

I got my CFP designation, Certified Financial Planner, became a Chartered Life Underwriter for life insurance, Chartered Financial Consultant with the American College. I became a Chartered Advisor in philanthropy, which was a really cool set of courses that I did with a bunch of other professionals. I became a, let's see, a Registered Health Underwriter, a health insurance specialist, Registered Employee Benefit Consultant.

I got a certification in long-term care planning. I think there was one more, I can't remember. And I had to go find all the diplomas in my attic. But that stuff helped me qualify to be an accredited estate planner. Never got the designation, but I had all the qualifications.

And that stuff was pretty cool because it helped me to have this really interesting set of knowledge, of facts and information. And then to do what my dream was, which was to show people how they can achieve their goals more efficiently with this formal technical knowledge that is just really boring.

And so to do that just feels really good. And so it's really, I see, I have tremendous alignment between what I want to do, what my unique ability is, and what I do on a daily basis. I'm personally convinced, at least for now, that my unique ability is to be a taxonomist of ideas and information.

The thing that I do really well is I can take a subject, I can start to study it, I can consume a vast amount of information about that subject, and then I can organize that information in a way that leads to solutions really, really quickly. And this comes naturally to me.

It's what I've always done. My friends joke, you want a 10 minute answer? Just ask Joshua a question on something and he'll tell you. But the problem is, yes, it may be a 10 minute answer, which I always say, do you really want, do you want the answer or do you just, do you care?

But the 10 minute answer should, ideally, if I know what I'm talking about, it should lead to saying, here's what you need to know now. Here's how you go through this in an orderly way that's not stupid, so you don't make a bunch of expensive mistakes. And here's where you do this.

It was with somebody yesterday and we're talking about buying gold. And so many people approach these questions in what I think is a really dumb way. Should I do this or should I not do it? Well, it's not a matter of should you or shouldn't you, it's a matter of when should you?

When does it make sense for you to do this certain thing? And so we need a few facts about your situation, but here's the basic timeline at which this particular thing makes sense. And I've grown in my confidence in that a lot. Simultaneously, I've grown to be, to feel like I'm falling behind.

One of the big ambitions that I have for the next 10 years is I, over the last few years, especially with all the travel and the work and the children, et cetera, is that I still read, I still study, but I'm far below what my former good study habits were.

And so there are a bunch of new areas that I wanna bone up on, that I wanna be able to help people in. And I often get intimidated by the things that I'm getting rusty at. I've gotten rusty at some of the things in financial planning. I've lost that working knowledge of some of the important facts, et cetera.

And I don't wanna be rusty. And so I'm gonna majorly, over the next decade, I'm gonna majorly tackle a bunch more, just studying. I'm just gonna be studying a lot more. So, why did I get into that? It's exciting to me because radical personal finance has given me a huge amount of freedom.

And that's been really rewarding. And it's so gratifying to get the stories that I get, the emails that I get, and to feel like my work is making a difference. As a human, we're gonna spend the vast majority of our life working. That's what we do. So, when you get to feel like your work matters, then it just gets even better.

And that's how I feel. I feel like my work matters. Changes though, there have been a lot of growth pains over the last 10 years. My biggest frustration is just my lack of excellence in a lot of things. I don't like to not do things well. It's frustrating. And of course, I know that you have to do not do things well to do them.

Better done poorly than most things but not done at all. And so, I've practiced that. But it does get really frustrating to not do things really well. And probably the biggest change over the next 10 years for me, when I started radical personal finance, I was looking basically to escape, to get out.

And I wanted to build a lifestyle business. And how I defined a lifestyle business was, I wanna build a business that provides me with a comfortable income that I can do from my laptop without anybody else. I didn't want employees. I didn't want a business, a big business. I just wanted something that I did with my laptop that made a comfortable income.

My goal was $100,000. I'm just gonna make $100,000. If I can make $100,000 from my laptop, that covers what I need to do. And I did not want a big staff. I didn't want a big infrastructure. I just wanted me and a laptop and I was okay with it being small.

Well, I did that. I built that business. And then I sat down and I said, well, I realized that it didn't feel right. It didn't feel like I was doing what I felt called to do. And so what I've come to realize is that I need to build a much bigger business.

In order for me to do what I want to do, to have the impact that I want to have, I need to build a much bigger business. And that lifestyle business thing dogged me for years of basically saying, that's not your goal. You'd stay small, stay small. But it's just not, I basically came to the point where I said, no, I gotta build something bigger.

So in the coming decade, I'm going to build a much bigger business, hire more people to work with me, to expand my ability to keep me working in my unique ability and to expand out or to deliver more excellence. I want people to get results faster. I wanna get better results and I can't do it by myself.

So that's probably the biggest thing. And it's been, I had to look for a number of different things before I was willing to commit to that in my head. You know, a few years, sorry, a few months ago, I traveled back to the United States and I went and look at a farm that was for sale.

And my ambition for a number of years is to be a gentleman farmer. There's still my ambition is to be a gentleman farmer. I may wait till I'm old, I don't know. But I wanted to have a farm and live on a farm and not a big commercial farm, but just a small little hobby farm.

And, but I didn't want to make, like I've never wanted to make farming my full-time thing. I think it's an awesome lifestyle for some people, but it's not for me. Just wanted to live on a nice little farm out in the country in a nice little community, et cetera.

So I went a few months ago, I traveled to the United States to look at this small farm, about 20 acres, it was for sale. And it's just sitting out there. It's out in a rural area of the United States, one of my favorite areas up in the Rocky Mountains, Northern Rocky Mountains.

And I was sitting there, I walked out in the pasture and this place had basically everything. Big house, the family had been there, raised children in it. They were moving on, their children were grown and they were moving to another farm. You know, they'd been self-sufficient, they raised beef cattle and chickens and a bunch of big garden, et cetera.

You know, a bunch of Mennonite and LDS neighbors and just like big homeschooling community and whatnot. And it was perfect. And I just sat out there and I sat in the pasture and I thought like, is this me? Is this what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna buy this farm.

And I came to the conviction that like, I can't do it. I couldn't do it in faith, that it just wasn't, it would be Joshua running away and hiding and disappearing and does nobody any good, which is not how I'm interested in living my life. So I've abandoned that and I'm focusing on building a business.

And so one of the things that I have realized with that is the importance of having good local infrastructure. Back to RVing. RVing was very damaging to my business and my ability to be productive. Not because I couldn't have leveraged it. You know, I could have leveraged it for publicity.

I could have posted all our pictures on social media and done the like, hey, look how cool we are. We're doing these things and here's how you can do it too. I could have done more with it, but I just didn't necessarily want to. And it wasn't that it just hurt me with like the things that the foregone opportunities.

And now living outside of the United States, I tell you, like I love where I live, but everything is easier in the United States. That's the biggest thing, that if you're an American living in the US, if you're ever tempted to complain about something, just reach out to me and I'll set you straight.

I'm happy to do that. Everything in the US is so stinking easy. It's so cheap to live there. Everything is cheap, everything is easy. And you think I'm being hyperbolic there. I'm not, like it really is that way. Now I've complained plenty, just like you do, about the things that aren't cheap and the things that aren't easy.

And there's a long way to go. But when you compare to so many places around the world, there are places that have a few things better, but on the whole, things in the US are just cheap and easy. And so when it comes to running a business, there's this major challenge that I haven't figured out the answer to yet.

If I go back to the United States, which my guess is that I'll probably wind up back in the United States in the next year or two. But if I go back to the United States, it comes with this whole set of benefits. Raising children is easy. Homeschooling is easy.

Business, having the business infrastructure and what not is relatively easy. But it's not necessarily the best in the world and it's not necessarily cheap. So I could go to another business location and set up things in another place. But then it's hard. Some things are cheaper and some things are not cheaper.

So I haven't solved all those problems yet. But my point is just simply that I just came to the firm conviction that I can't play small. I'm not gonna play small. And so I am devoted to doing as much as I can to serve as many people as I'm capable of just with the skills and abilities that I have.

I still struggle to figure out the progression of how to do those things. I don't want to... I've learned as I get older, I'm learning to be more careful with the words that come out of my mouth. The classic entrepreneur problem is having a billion ideas and not being able to execute on them.

And that's been always the challenge of my life is there are so many ideas. And then I struggle to execute mostly because I haven't built the right team that helps me to execute on them. And I get embarrassed when I say, "Hey, look, here's this great idea. "Here's this thing I'm gonna do." And then I don't execute on it.

So I'm gonna... I was going to talk about kind of what I'm planning to do over the next years. But I'm just gonna be quiet on that for now and work a focus on executing and not talking about stuff. So we'll see. I don't, if I think about a decade, I don't think I'll be doing radical personal finance a decade from now.

I just don't think I will. My goal is to do, is to create something. And I'm still a year, probably a year away from my thousandth episode. But my goal is to create something in a set of somethings truly useful to help people. And that's gonna take me at least several more years to do that and to really expand.

And who knows, maybe I will keep going for longer. But then I think I'm gonna change to something else probably within a decade. So I don't know exactly how that's gonna look. Maybe it'll look like I'll do this business for another six years, seven years, eight years, and then I'll close it.

And we'll buy a sailboat and spend a few years sailing around the world with my family. I don't know. But I do know that I'm not done yet. So, and I've got a lot of work to do over the next few years. And I'm excited about that work. Most of what I've done in the last months and what I'm gonna be doing in the coming months is just simply orienting myself around my work is that I really take great joy in and I wanna produce better work, more helpful work, more useful work that serves more people.

I'm not gonna be a workaholic, don't worry. I'll still do plenty of fun stuff. But when I think about and dream about my future, I just still feel a responsibility and a burden to produce more useful work here in the context of radical personal finance. There's some other brands, other things I'd like to delve into.

I got a whole bunch of domain names. And so we'll see. And I don't wanna just do information publishing. I like info publishing, but there's basically a set ceiling of info publishing. And I wanted to use that info publishing to help people develop more things. 'Cause I've come to think there are certain benefits of online businesses, there are certain benefits of information publishing.

They really do open up a lot of options. But if I were starting over again, I can't say that I would start with online business. I've come to see so many more opportunities with local brick and mortar businesses, et cetera, than just doing everything online. And maybe we'll dig into that some other time.

I think I've shared with you most of what I intended to share. It's been an awesome decade for me. I'm excited. And I guess probably the most important thing would be, maybe this is common to all people. I don't know. I've never been this age before, but I do know this.

That I feel like I'm hitting my stride. And that's really, really a great feeling. Having lacked self-confidence so much in the past and having felt like I was in these places that I wasn't a good fit for, et cetera, it feels really good to feel like I'm hitting my stride and to feel confident in my skill, my ability, and my clarity of thought, et cetera.

And that's really gratifying. And so that's a place of confidence I think we all should operate from as much as possible. And it just leads to a totally different set of experiences. Now, not to say that you can't mess it all up. Obviously you can. But I've solved most of those problems with good financial planning.

So it's just really exciting to feel that way. And when I think about the phase that my family's at, when I think about the phase that I'm at, it's exciting to me. And I'm incredibly excited about the future. You know, this is gonna be such a fascinating year in our cultures.

It's gonna be such a fascinating year in the United States, an election year. That's gonna be quite the ride. And it's gonna be, you know, there's so many big financial stories going on. There's interesting, you know, the stock market, the decade from the wonder decade. You've got these tremendous financial numbers, but yet also incredible angst and concern.

You've got an incredibly more and more polarized society with just increasing public battles on just crazy stuff. Politics and cultural arguments, et cetera. It's gonna be a remarkable decade that we're gonna live through, I think. And yet in the middle of that, there's never been a time that I've seen more opportunity for individuals.

As noisy as the world is, and as many things pull at you, it's never been easier to be free, to live freely, as far as I can see. I'm anticipating here in the beginning of January, I'm gonna lead the year off with this series called "Seven Rings of Freedom." Where if you care about being free, you can do it.

And I'm not gonna steal my thunder from that, but it's gonna be an amazing decade. And when I look around and see the opportunities for making money, just that in and of itself, for making a difference in the community, local community, there's just so many opportunities. And so it's a very exciting time to be alive.

The world is getting flatter and flatter all the time, and it's exciting. And one of the things that I want very much to do, one of the reasons why I didn't buy that farm, is I just sat here and I said, "You know what, this is just gonna stick me out "in the middle of nowhere, and I'm gonna be, "yeah, I'll have the benefit of the local community, "but I won't be involved with where the growth is "in the world, and I can't run away from people.

"I can't run away and be a hermit. "I need to be where the growth is." And so even just in my travel, in my investments, in my business activities, I wanna be more involved, especially with an international focus. And so I'm gonna be trying to figure out how to do that, 'cause it's totally new, it doesn't involve, go buy a mutual fund, I gotta figure, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm gonna try to learn.

And I wanna engage my children in that. And when we think about what's happening culturally all over the world, when we think about what's happening with the big empires all over the world, when we think about what's happening with the religious trends all around the world, it's gonna be a pretty cool decade with a lot of stuff happening.

And so I'm excited to be there with you and to be doing it with you. Thank you, I just wanna close today's show with just a simple thank you. Thank you for being here. I've said it already, but I find this work to be enormously gratifying. And it's deeply encouraging to me to know that my thoughts, my ideas have had an impact on your life.

And I get so much feedback that I just, it's such a blessing. So thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you and I appreciate your being here. Happy New Year, 2020. - The Fremont Street Experience in fabulous downtown Las Vegas is home to over 100 amazing bars and restaurants and the world's ultimate zip line, Slotzilla.

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