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

This is basically part two of the live Q&A show. Created generally I restrict these shows to patrons of the show, but today I open it up to listeners who are on the email list and so we've got a couple dozen callers on the line and we continue in just a moment.

Remember that if you ever want basically guaranteed access to a live Q&A show, you can do that by becoming a patron of the show. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance and you'll get basically guaranteed access to the show there. I had about 50 callers. The reason I do that is because it helps me to meter out the number of callers.

On today's show I had about 50 callers that came in with a general advice, about 20 or so of them, 25 of them, 20, about 20, made it in in time and then I locked the conference and we've just had lots of people turned away. And that's one of the reasons why I use the Patreon program because it helps me with those people who are willing to send a few dollars a month.

It helps me to be able to serve them effectively without being overwhelmed with callers. But today is your lucky day. We've got open phone lines. So Brandon in Michigan, welcome to the show. You're up next. How can I serve you today? Hi Joshua. I really appreciate you taking my call.

How are you today? Very well sir and you? I'm doing well. I'm hoping you can help me walk through a few things. So by way of background, I just turned 25. I make around $75,000 a year and I have $10,000 remaining in student loans. I purchased a single family house two years ago with the intent to house hack for a few years, buy another house, rent the first property and then repeat that strategy into financial independence.

So in my four bedroom house, I had three roommates, actually college buddies for the first year. Now I'm down to one roommate who's covering half of my mortgage payments, but is moving out in the next 12 months. I didn't really know what I was getting into when I bought the house, when it came to repairs, maintenance, that kind of thing.

But I knew the math made sense and I feel I learned a lot about my local rental market and what work is required in general, but I'm not positive I'm ready to continue growing or buy another place yet. So I'm conflicted because the math makes sense for me to continue my initial plan.

So buy another place, rent it out, rent out the first place and continue. But I'm also at a point in my career where I'd like to spend more time developing my profession while also spending meaningful time with family and friends, taking vacations, etc. while I'm relatively young. So I'd really like to hear your thoughts.

If you have, I guess your thoughts, if you were in my shoes or what things you think I should be considering going forward. Yeah, I appreciate it. How much is your monthly mortgage payment? Say $1,000, make it simple math. How much did you pay for the house? $155. How much could you sell it for today if you put it on the market?

Based on the most recent, like, in the range of, I'd say $170, I think. And how long have you lived there? Just about two years. Why have you not rented out the other two bedrooms thus far after the other roommates left? So the idea of house hacking, you know, sounds great and it was financially.

But after, you know, graduating out of college, I was kind of done with the college lifestyle. So you know, just little things like that with roommates that, you know, can drive you up a wall. So that was the primary reason I was content with having each one drop and then, you know, I was, you know, more peace in the house.

So I figure I'd be paying rent anyway, like most people. So the fact that I have half of it covered now is okay. But with my roommate moving out, you know, in about a year, I figured it would be a good time to, if I were to make the move, it would be now, rent out the house entirely and then, you know, continue.

So the problem that you're facing is you're not trying to make a financial analysis. What you're trying to do is justify to yourself a fancier lifestyle. Which if you want to, of course you can. But it's not a financial question. But you're just simply trying to find a way to live a fancier lifestyle.

You want a fancier lifestyle with fewer roommates. You don't want as many people in your house. You want more personal space. You're tired of living like a college student being crammed forward to a little house and you want a little bit of space. You probably want your house just how you want it.

You want the decorations just how you want them. These are all lifestyle decisions though. Basically they're all a matter of you saying, "Hey, this is how I want to live." When you talk about wanting more time, you're not trying to get more time so that you can make more money.

You did say focus on your career. We'll come back to that in a minute. But you're just saying, "I just want to work less. I want to have less time with work. I don't want to always be managing my rental house. I don't always be working in my career.

I want more time." This is a lifestyle decision and not something that is financial. The only thing that you mentioned that is financial would be your career. You have the ability to focus on your career and could you increase your income significantly by focusing on your career. But you're going to have to decide how much do I want to be rich, how much do I want to be rich fast versus how much sacrifice do I want to make in terms of lifestyle.

People who become rich quickly are generally those who sacrifice in terms of lifestyle by going ahead and getting two more roommates or figuring out another solution that helps them to satisfy the problem, to make it sufficient where they're willing to do with it. Or they're people who generate such a massive income that they can satisfy their lifestyle needs and goals while still getting rich quick.

Those are really the only two paths I see. So the income one is certainly the way that you can increase lifestyle and increase your wealth building ability. I teach a whole course on career and income planning and the thing that I always point out is if you want to double your lifestyle and you want to double your savings, the only way to do that is by increasing your income.

And so if you sit down with your career and you say, "You know what? I really want to have," you look yourself in the mirror and you say, "Brandon, I'm sick and tired of living like a college student. I want to have a nice house. Not only do I want a four-bedroom house, but I want a fancier four-bedroom house.

Not only do I not want only one roommate, I want no roommates. I want the entire house for myself. I want to turn one of my bedrooms into a movie theater. I want to turn one of my bedrooms into a guest room. I want to turn one of my bedrooms into my computer room and I want to have my other bedroom just my sanctuary." Well, you could do that, but you're not going to get rich unless you massively increase your income.

And so if you can go from $75,000 a year to $275,000 a year, then you can increase your lifestyle and you can increase your savings, both. But if you're just going to keep it $75,000 a year and say, "Well, I'm making $75,000 a year and I'll get little 3% raises, etc." Then you're not going to get rich that way.

And so you have three choices as I see it. Choice number one is you can say, "My income is probably going to stay about like it is and I'm going to keep just little increases, etc. And I want to get rich quick. And so in order for me to get rich quick, I'm going to give up lifestyle.

And so no, I don't love living with three roommates, but I'm going to go ahead and do it and I'm going to stay on the original plan." Because that plan will help you to get rich fairly quickly even with a $75,000 income. It'll work. Number two is you could say, "I want a nicer lifestyle, but I also want to get rich quick, in which case I've got to figure out how to make more money.

So I've got to move from a career where I'm making $75,000 a year to making $275,000 a year. And so how can I do that? I'm 25 years old. How can I by the age of 30 with what I have, how can I set a target to be making $275,000 by the age of 30?" But if you do that, if you increase your income, then you can also then justify the increases in your lifestyle and you can become rich quick.

Or choice number three is you can say, "I don't want to do the hard work necessary to increase my income. I don't want to change. I don't want to do those kinds of jobs. I'm comfortable where I'm at. I want to have a nicer lifestyle and what I'll give up is I'm just going to give up getting rich or at least getting rich quick.

I'm going to live in a nice house. I'm going to pay my mortgage off for a long time. I'm not going to have any roommates or I'm going to sell this house and just move into a studio or whatever other living arrangement you have and I'm going to be content with getting rich over 40 years instead of over 10." But those are the three choices that I see that you have.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I kind of need to hear that too. So yeah, I appreciate it. It makes a lot of sense. What I would do if I were in your shoes would be I would suck it up on the roommate situation. I see no reason why – are you married, Brandon?

Are you single? Are you married? I had a single girlfriend for a year and a half. So that's something that's on the horizon. Well if you get married then of course things change and you got to do that but I would recommend that you make that decision separately and if I were in your shoes I would say number one, I'm 25 years old.

It's ridiculous for you to be complaining about lifestyle at 25 years old if you care about wealth. Now, you complain all you want but if you care about wealth it's ridiculous for you to be complaining about lifestyle. I wish that I had been far more hardcore at 25 and I was pretty hardcore but I wish I had been far more hardcore.

I wish I had worked a lot more than I worked. I wish I had invested a lot more than I invested. I wish I had lived a lower lifestyle than I lived. You can do a whole lot of things when you're 25 years old and single that are a lot harder to do when you're 35 married with children.

And so I wish I had worked harder and I worked harder than most people. But at this point in time if I were going back, if I were 25 years old I would be working 70 to 80 hours a week. I would be living in one bedroom of the four bedroom house or I would probably have an RV parked out and I would rent out the fourth bedroom because once you see how quickly you can achieve that breakout trajectory when you work hard and you develop your own businesses and you develop your income and you keep your expenses and you do a whole lot of investing fast you're five years away from financial freedom with the right moves.

And if you go to any 30 year old or 35 year old and you ask them and you say, "Listen, if you had the choice to be financially independent at 30 with five years of hard work, if you were to go back and do that over again would you do that or would you take more time off on the weekends and go fishing or whatever your fun thing is?" Now you can do both but you don't need to do both that much.

You can still put in 70 hours a week and take Sundays off and Friday nights off. You can still do that easily and not be overwhelmed and not hurt your health and not hurt your social life, etc. There's so much time that you are wasting day after day after day that you're not paying attention to.

And that's the key. If you learn how to harvest that time and stop wasting that time you can have a very satisfying very rich social life. You can have plenty of time to rest and rejuvenate but you can also be extremely productive. But it will never in your life be easier for you to be financially productive and physically productive and personally productive than it is right now.

When you start adding on the responsibilities of a wife, of children, all of a sudden it becomes much much different. Every single night I put my children to bed at 7 o'clock. Then I have the choice. Do I go to the computer and do I work more or do I go and spend time with my wife?

Every single night. Now 98% of the time I look at it and say, "Well, Joshua, you didn't get it done. Go and spend time with your wife." That's more important than work. But when I go back, when you go back in 25 there's no reason to do that. You can do easily work 12 hours a day, 8 hours a day for someone else and 4 hours a day for yourself and still have plenty of time.

You still have 4 hours. If you work 12 hours a day and you sleep for 8 hours that still leaves you with 4 other hours that you can have for socializing, etc. And so there's no reason in the world why you shouldn't at this point in your time be working 12 hours a day if you are prioritizing wealth, if you're prioritizing building something large.

But as the people in your life start to grow and you start to have more responsibilities to them then it becomes different. Same thing happens in the morning. I get up early but my children also get up early because I put them to bed at 7 o'clock. So that gives me and my wife time in the evening but now in the morning then my children get up.

So let's say I get up at 5 a.m. I have no more than an hour before my children are up. Well now when my children are up do I ignore them and do I say, "No, I'm not going to spend time with you. No, I'm not going to be with you and I'm just going to go and work." Well sometimes I do.

But for the most part you look at them and say, "No, I can never get these years back." And so I guess what I want to impress upon you is you live your life however you want but I wish that I had worked a whole lot more when I was 25, a whole lot more when I was 20.

I wish that I had taken some of those sacrifices because when you can sacrifice for five years and it fundamentally transforms the course of your life for the next 50, that's worth doing. And you can do it without becoming a workaholic. You can do it without sacrificing important relationships.

But I would emphasize that if you don't want to live the way you're living, the answer is make more money. There is no reason in the world that you should not be making $275,000 a year right now. There are plenty of 25-year-olds who've done it. But what I would guess is you probably never set that as a goal and you probably never sat down and said, "How can I do it?" And so if you don't like how you're living, fine, go make more money.

And if you go make more money, a lot of your problems will be solved. You'll have new problems but a lot of your problems of lifestyle versus getting rich will be solved. Yeah, I think that's spot on. I really appreciate it. That's awesome answer. Thank you. We'll keep up the good work of where you're even at right now and then check back in the future and let me know.

All right, we go to Kansas City, Missouri. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, please? Hey, Gordon Josh, working here. Okay. Sounds great. Go ahead. Awesome. After a couple of months of engaging in Toastmasters Weekly, I observed really just that week my personal communication skill set is.

This is regarding questions for a Deb Cawdee training course. It's a 12-week course, three hours a week. I've heard mixed reviews about it. However, as recommended by a trusted mentor, throughout your years of working with people, what are your thoughts on the course and possibly might get the employer education reimbursement for the course?

How much money do you earn every year? $80,000. How many hours per week do you work every week on average, ballpark? 55. 55, you said? Yes. Okay. How much will the Dale Carnegie course cost you in terms of the tuition? $1,800. Okay. How many hours is the commitment per week and for how many weeks?

12 weeks, three hours, 36-hour total commitment. So it's three hours for 12 weeks. So we do the math on this. 2% of your income is 2% of your income. So the first way that I would answer that question is if there's something in my life that I think could solve a problem that I've identified that I have.

You identified a problem. I've realized how weak my personal communication skills are. And if it's a problem that is that foundational and if you could possibly buy a solution to that problem for a mere 2% of your annual income, to me that sounds like pretty much a no-brainer to just do no matter what.

The thing that annoys me deeply is when people have potential solutions to their problem that can be solved with relatively low amounts of income and then they don't just simply take action. I'm not griping at you. I'm just trying to point this out. The thing that has always been the most effective and helpful for me has been to invest into myself.

And so you'll have – I've for years consulted with people who will spend $50,000 on a college degree, but then they get out of college and they have the opportunity to take an $1,800 course and they'll hem and they'll haw and they'll stumble and they'll wonder, "Should I do this?" They have the opportunity to go to a $2,000 conference or a $1,000 conference and they'll just think and, "Well, I'm not so sure." And all of a sudden it's like, "Don't you realize that this is what's powerful?" And the information, the skills that you could develop from an $1,800 course are probably far more valuable than a $50,000 college degree for many people.

So it's a relatively low amount of money. It's a relatively low investment of time. So if you're convinced that there's a decent chance that it might help you with a problem that you've identified, then you should do it because your best investment is going to be into yourself. Now that's my first answer is based upon the money of it.

My second answer is I don't know. I've never taken the Dale Carnegie course. I've read not all but several of Dale Carnegie's books. I respect and admire the Dale Carnegie organization. I would bet that it's probably pretty good and I would bet that the ratio of how good it is is based upon how much a student puts into it.

When I was in college, if you had asked me after my first two years of college how much I was getting out of my college degree, I would have given you a terrible scathing review of my college. I would have told you that the school stinks. I would have told you that the professors don't know what they're talking about.

I would have told you that the education was mediocre and I was deeply unimpressed. Then for me, I went away in my junior year. I studied abroad and that study abroad process was a catalyst in my life. First I met professors that impacted me deeply, that challenged me, that overcame my arrogance and showed me that I should shut up and listen, that also started a spiritual journey that I had previously not engaged in.

Then the following summer I came back to school but at that time I was working hard and I had decided that I wanted to work hard in class. Like what I did in the first two years for my summer, fall and then spring semester, I actually invested. I actually did my readings.

I actually came to class prepared. I studied in advance. I studied for the test, etc. When I left my senior year, the amazing thing was that my school was totally different. The professors that I'd known previously, but all of a sudden the professors went up and they became a lot smarter.

They became a lot more useful to me. The books were a lot better chosen for those senior level courses and my entire college experience changed. It should be obvious to you that nothing about the college experience changed. I changed and I became a dedicated, motivated student. My bet, although I've never looked up reviews on Dale Carnegie's courses, etc., my bet is if you actually went and talked to those people, you would go and find that 50% of the students really invested in the course.

They took it seriously. They did their work, etc. and they got great benefits out of it. 50% of them didn't. I've observed that at all kinds of events, all kinds of classes, that it's you who makes the difference, not necessarily the course itself. That's my second answer. The first answer was it's a small amount of money compared to if you could solve a problem that you've recognized in your own personal skill level and you recognize that that could have a deep impact on your life and your career going forward, that's a small amount of money to pay for a solution.

Number two, the Dale Carnegie course is probably fine and chances are if you apply yourself, you would probably get a great experience out of it. Then my third answer for you to consider, if you're already in Toastmasters, I don't know why you would need to go and duplicate that with Dale Carnegie because Toastmasters will help you to develop communication skills and if you're already there, it's certainly cheaper and there are plenty of opportunities.

And so if you like Toastmasters, I don't know why you would need to go and do Dale Carnegie right now. What I would encourage you is dedicate yourself to Toastmasters and really get everything you can out of Toastmasters. Do the speaking track and also do the leadership track and work your way through that.

It'll cost you less and if you've got a decent club or a decent region, etc., there should be opportunities for you to improve that. And then before you go and buy a course, then at least make sure you've tried a little bit with books. Before you buy an expensive course, you should probably start with books, podcasts, etc.

You're not going to get the same experience that you would get in a course but in terms of trying to be prudent with your money, I generally think that before you start buying courses, you should start with books, you should start with self-study and then after you've applied those things, then you move to courses because they're probably a better use of the money especially for a beginner.

Where I think courses and coaches really help is after you've mastered the basics of the field and you're convinced that you really need more help but most of self-improvement comes down to practice. And so if you buy a book on communication skills or five of them and you start practicing and especially if you have a context like Toastmasters to practice, do that for six months and then after six months, reevaluate and then see if you think you've really gained value from the Dale Carnegie course.

So if you do it, I'm fine with it but I wouldn't necessarily start with it since you already have Toastmasters and you've recognized the need to start with books and opportunities to practice in your personal life. That's my answer. My pleasure. All right, we move on back to Florida, Tampa, Florida.

Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, please? Hey, how's it going? Doing well, sir. Go ahead. All right. So I'll say my question and I'll give a little context. Is it possible to be a financial advisor when you don't really like modern portfolio theory? I've worked in the industry for about a decade now.

I've done some basic financial planning, trading, now I'm in compliance. I love having these conversations and talking about products and all that and I've always thought about one day I'd become an advisor but as you've talked about a lot, the way they get paid and issues with modern portfolio theory, I don't know if there's a way to do it and I'd be curious to get your thoughts on it.

Do you have a specific style of investing that you believe in or that you have practiced yourself, that you really like? I'm pretty compelled by Nassim Taleb's barbell strategy which also sounds familiar to your advice on don't just throw it all in the stock market but go find your passion and get good at something like that.

And then also learning more about different insurance products, they seem to, they get so specific and can fit a lot of situations better than some stock asset allocation. When you say insurance products, do you mean investing insurance, options, etc. or do you mean actual like life insurance products? Both.

So short answer is yes, I do think it's possible and I think that it's more possible today than it's ever been. The pathway in is a little bit more difficult. So if you believe in modern portfolio theory, there are any number of investment firms that you can join and that you can learn.

And the challenges you should see as is obvious based upon your experience in the marketplace, the challenge of the modern world of financial advice is it's an interesting mix of investment management, financial planning and sales. And used to be when I would mentor young financial advisors, I would talk to them about kind of three different positions in the marketplace.

And I would say position number one is investment management. If you're really into investment management, portfolio management, you're going to have to look hard for a job that involves you just simply managing investments and there's going to be very little client facing time in that. Right now as I'm recording the show, I'm providing basically a version of financial advice, but I don't know what's happening with the market.

But this is something where right now as I record this on Friday, February 28, 2020, the market is in shambles and every single this entire week has been a major down week. And so I can't effectively monitor an investment portfolio if I'm with a client. And so you ideally want your investment managers in many cases just to be working on the portfolio, and not to be worrying about a client.

Number two area is client facing financial planning. And so this is a very different function than investment management. Financial planning involves talking to the client about their goals, reviewing their portfolio, doing things like tax analysis, looking at their investments, etc. But that's different than managing a portfolio. And then what I used to say to people in the marketplace was the third thing is simply kind of a support function that you can go if you don't want to sell, if you don't want to manage portfolios, or if you don't want to sell, which is what client financial planning is, it's a form of selling, then you can find a support role and kind of like what you're doing, you're working in compliance.

And so you have a nice salary for managing the financial advisors and making sure that they're compliant with everything that is out there in the marketplace. So the point is that these are different functions, and you're going to wind up in a different firm in a different job based upon these functions.

Now you can do at bigger firms, the roles are relatively clear cut. In smaller firms, you have the opportunity to be hired into a certain role. So you can be hired as a producer, as a financial planner and a producer into a firm that doesn't hold the modern portfolio theory if you can find out where that firm is and how they market themselves.

You could also be hired as an investment manager at one of those firms if you can demonstrate your experience. And so I would say yes, it is possible. And the first thing I would do is if you want to dip your feet into it, find a position that gets you closer to the actual management of investments than your current position does.

So whether you're a junior analyst at some large firm, whether you – that's a supporting role but it starts to pave the way for you to actually establish your investment bona fides, it provides you with the ability to start to move your career in that direction. Or if you want to become a financial planner, then look for a firm that already has that philosophy and it's going to be a lot easier for you to just simply join a firm that has a philosophy that's built upon Taleb's barbell strategy or built upon something that you believe and just join them as a producer and I think that would be workable.

In today's world, it is very possible for smaller boutique firms to survive and I think that as modern portfolio theory has become the mainstream juggernaut, there are a lot of people who just simply don't trust the mainstream advice and who are looking for another voice. And so in today's world, you don't need that many clients and it's easier than ever to break through with a specific message.

So you ask me do I think it's possible? My answer is yes and I would just start moving more in that direction with whatever opportunity you can find. You'll find it a lot easier to figure out the right solution if you're working as a junior portfolio manager at a firm that has a philosophy that you like than you will if you're doing compliance for a firm that practices modern portfolio theory and mainstream advice that you don't believe in.

Yeah, that's really good. I've actually passed the first level of the CFA accreditation or credential. So I've kind of got one foot in that realm, but there's not many of those jobs in Tampa, whereas if I wanted to sell financial services, you can do that anywhere. Of course. There's people really.

Of course. So one last question there, what advice do you have on figuring out a firm's philosophy or whether it's a small or a big one? I think start by reading their, what's it called? I'm blanking on the disclosure form. ADV. ADV, yeah. Start by reading their ADV. That's always my first goal is pull a firm's ADV and read it and a well-written ADV will tell you what you need to know.

You can read about their investment philosophy, etc. So that'd be thing number one. Thing number two would just be do interviews. If I were in your situation, I would be doing at least a weekly lunch interview with somebody in the investment management business. You know as well as I do that it's very easy to get those people to lunch because everybody's recruiting.

And so you can start building the connections and the contacts. And what I would do is I would start with whatever your current network is and I would start by trying to figure out how to get referred to the firms in town who already have the philosophy. So if you explain, I'm trying to figure out if there are any firms who are practicing this style of investing.

Have you ever heard anybody doing that around? And in time you probably will be able to find the firms that are in your area that are doing that. And then what I would do is as you get closer to that, then go to those firms and ask them for their advice of how to get into the business.

What can you do? What I would point out to you if you're already studying for the CFA, I think that what you should be doing is probably publishing. Because if you want to build even your own firm, one of the first things that you should probably do is practice your own skills and with your own portfolio, prove your concepts, research the academics of it, and then publish your way to a firm.

I've long admired Joshua Kennan who is a very skilled investor and a very skilled writer. And Joshua Kennan for years wrote on his personal blog. And then recently he started an investment management firm. Well his investment management firm was basically fully subscribed from the beginning because of his, I don't know, 10 years, 15 years of publishing.

So he wrote for about.com for many years. Years ago he wrote the Complete Idiot's Guide to Investing. He's written just various investment articles on his own page. But that allowed many hundreds of thousands of people around the world to connect with him. And the minute he was establishing a firm, then immediately anybody who had long come to be confident in his analytical skills, in his abilities, etc., immediately said, "I want him managing my money." And he's had a very successful launch of his firm.

And so I think that even in today's world that kind of path is very doable. It's not fast, but it is very doable. And if you're really into the investment side, that's what I would do is possibly try to just write your way into your own firm. But you've got to have a platform already set up.

Good enough? Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. Thanks. All right. My pleasure. We move on. Stay in Florida. We go to Ryan in Jacksonville. Ryan, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Ryan in Jacksonville. Hey, Joshua. Can you hear me? Sounds good. Go ahead. Can you hear me okay?

Go ahead. Okay. So I wasn't sure if this was going to the prepping group or the finance group. I actually have a question for both. So which one would you rather field? We've done a lot of finance. Let's start with prepping and then we'll go to finance. Okay. So I've listened to probably half of both your food and your water course.

They've both been very thorough and interesting. So thank you for that. One of the things that a few people in the community have recommended is backing off on drugs like heroin, cocaine, marijuana, coffee. Yeah. For barters, right? No, but like penicillin and antibiotics and whatnot. Those people have pointed to the animal versions of it as just like an emergency store of antibiotics like fish mox or whatever.

And I just wanted to get your opinion on that, especially given that a lot of that stuff's manufactured on prices of the moment, of course, in China. But I mean, overall, and I don't think that you touched on that in the course yet. And if you have, I apologize.

I haven't gotten there. Yeah, I did not want to get your thoughts on that. So first I have to give a disclaimer. I'm not a medical expert, not a doctor. I'm untrained in how to use or administer antibiotics to actually give antibiotics or prescribe them to myself or a family member would be incredibly difficult for me to do because I'm acutely aware of my lack of knowledge.

And so you're getting advice from somebody who has no medical qualifications whatsoever. Having been a researcher, I have found plenty of corroborating voices that say that things like fish antibiotics are the exact same antibiotics that are prescribed to humans. They're just simply relabeled. And I have found many doctors who have confirmed, who have at least been their opinion and their educated opinion, who have said that, yes, this is a worthwhile and a good way to get amounts of these antibiotics.

And so in the United States where antibiotics are very hidden behind prescriptions, it's one of the very few ways to get amounts of those antibiotics. And I would have no, I think it's a good idea to have a stockpile of those antibiotics. The fish antibiotics are usually the proper thing, or sorry, the first thing that people go to.

And so I would see it as definitely a good thing to have a stockpile of those antibiotics, but more importantly, to have some literature written as to what to look for if you're going to prescribe antibiotics. Some of the books, the medical prepping books and things like that have some of that.

Some articles on how to figure out dosages, et cetera, would be important. Because if you're a layman who doesn't have the medical background to just off the top of your head make a proper prescription, I think you should be very, very careful with that. But at the end of the day, if I had the choice, you know, my child, you know, was chopping wood and cut their leg and all of a sudden they've got a vicious infection, and my choice is between watching their leg get worse and worse versus giving them fish antibiotics, I would much rather have the fish antibiotics ready to go.

And then hopefully have somebody who would be an expert. You know, the best thing would be to have somebody who I know, a friend or someone who would have the medical qualifications to do a better job of supervising them and prescribing them. And if you can possibly have the chance of saving somebody's life by having access to a supply of antibiotics inexpensively, I think it's a good move.

It is funny though, because in the United States is one of the few areas, few countries where this is as difficult. Certainly there are prescriptions around the world that are difficult, but there are many cultures in which you can just simply go and buy antibiotics over the counter. And so the other source, if you want to get more generic antibiotics, is often if you'll go to an ethnic store, sometimes if you'll go to an ethnic food store where you have a culture where they're more accustomed to being able to buy antibiotics, it's not technically legal, but you can often get your hands on just generic antibiotics at the, you know, the Mexican food store, the Vietnamese, something like that.

I've not personally done that, but I've heard enough people who've done it that I would investigate that if for some reason you don't think that fish antibiotics are your first starting place. But in addition to the antibiotics, make sure that you also have some of the supporting literature printed out and stored with them so that you can potentially have the ability to, because it's not just having the drug, having the drug is good.

And then if you have somebody who would have an idea of how to administer the drug or in the right circumstances, who would be able to screen the patient and do a better job than you would, that's also good. But at the end of the day, if you're going to do it by yourself, and this is the worst case scenario you're thinking of, make sure you have the supporting literature that you need in the reference manuals.

Got it. Okay. Thank you. Go with your finance question. Oh, sure. So the finance question is, I currently invest fully in a 401k plan. I think the max is like, I don't know, 19,000 for this year or something like that. Either way it's the max. And I've been seriously considering discontinuing the funding that and taking only up to what my company will match, because I'm starting to look down the road and look at where our politicians are taking us in terms of overspending and future taxation and whatnot.

And I'm starting to think that maybe my tax bracket in retirement will not in fact be lower than it is today. And so maybe it would be more beneficial to just take the tax hit now and keep all of my money in a savings account or a brokerage account or some other combination of that rather than crossing the fingers and hope that in 30 years tax rates are lower.

Based on the commitments that we have, the liabilities we have outstanding that we've promised to future generations, I just don't see how we can possibly afford to fund them unless we massively increase taxation. So just wondered your thoughts on taking the tax hit now versus later. How much is your annual income?

Mine personally is around $100. And your household? Probably $250, $250. And is your wife additionally investing into her 401k? She was last year, she did not this year. But our plan would be that she would. So at $38,000 per year on a $250,000 income, that's about 15% of your income that would be going into 401k accounts.

Now depending on your expenses, if your expenses are lower, I'd like to have you with a higher savings rate than 15%. And so let's say that your savings rate is something like 30% which is a more meaningful savings rate than just the basic 15%. If in that situation, I don't see why you have to choose between one or the other.

I think you would have enough money if you're saving something like 30% of your income, you would have enough money to live a perfectly fine lifestyle while still taking advantage of the benefits of the 401k while also having some diversification, not having all of your money in 401ks. So practically speaking, that's probably in my opinion the best idea and the best plan.

The second thing you have to think about is what do you want to invest the money in. If you're just going to invest the money into taxable brokerage accounts, it's really hard to say that you shouldn't start with the 401k because it's just really hard. Now I understand the concern that you have.

I share your concern and your guess is as good as mine. We have the same concern and we're basically just guessing. But when I look forward decades into the future, my crystal ball doesn't work that far and I can't predict reliably exactly where things are going to be. I do think that the American population is less likely to be willing to have those major tax increases on something like a 401k plan than many others.

I think that Americans like their 401ks and I think that the people who are loudest in politics are those who are wealthy and who are 401ks. And so if you believe that wealthy people exert an undue influence on government, which I personally do believe that, then I think it's less likely that 401k legislation and such would pass that would start imposing that taxation on 401ks.

But I don't know. Maybe there's some kind of populist uprising and all of a sudden now the wealthy people can't exert influence on government and on tax policy, etc. Maybe not. I do just think that as an employee, it's hard for me to see the circumstance that you're going to be in a higher tax bracket in retirement.

It's hard to see. And I think that if we look at the past, it's much more likely that Americans are going to try to borrow, keep borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, and then try to default through something like mass inflation, then that they would change, make significant changes to tax policy.

No matter who's been president, no matter what tax proposal has been enforced over the last 75, 80 years, taxation has basically been limited to about 20 to 25% of GDP. And that seems to be a pretty hard ceiling. And so it's my guess that it's more likely that politicians would move in the direction of mass inflation rather than trying to all of a sudden tax 401ks.

Now I don't know. It could be wrong. It's always a possibility. And so if you're really worried about it, I would respect you for not... I would respect that. I wouldn't say that you're wrong. I would just say that I don't see it quite the same way as you do at the moment.

Based upon the information that we have, that kind of move to me seems pretty far away. And although I get it, it just doesn't seem quite the best path. And so I think you could probably hedge your bets and use your 401k accounts while still saving into other investments that would hedge your bets in some way.

That'd probably be what I would do. If you were that serious about the future of US problems, I think you should start by making a plan to be free of the United States. That's what I've done. Now, this may be difficult for you based upon where you are in terms of your jobs, etc.

But what I have done when analyzing the problem is I've looked at it and said, "I think that there is a very severe future for the United States." And so what I need in order to be able to fully escape is I need to have a plan that allows me to move to another region of the world.

I need to have multiple citizenships so that I can renounce my US citizenship and so I could cut myself free from a sinking ship. Now I don't think the ship is sinking right now. I don't think the ship is going to sink in the next decade. But I figure if I can arrive at the year 2030 and have multiple other ships that I can just simply step onto, then I can cut myself free from the sinking ship or cut my children free from the sinking ship and then have other options.

And so what I'm trying to do is to establish what I would need to fully extricate myself from the USS USA in case the ship goes down and then simultaneously financially to have investments that are not only in retirement accounts to hedge my bets. Now I do still participate in retirement accounts.

To me it just seems it doesn't seem the evidence doesn't seem strong enough to convince me that I should not participate in retirement accounts right now. But I'm hedging my bets. So that's my answer. Does that help at all or just muddy the waters? Yeah, it helps. So one of the things I've also been thinking of is taking some of that money and buying investment real estate in my region of the country.

Real estate is way overpriced right now. So I'm really I don't see that happening unless we have some type of recession or something where I can buy it on the cheap. So it's just kind of what do I do right now that I'm trying to work through. Well, so that would be notice that would be a good move.

Okay. And the reason notice what I said, I said, if you're just going to invest in stocks, then I think that you should prioritize your 401k. But if you say, I think I'd like to move in the direction of being a real estate investor. Now everything changes, where you're no longer just trying to make an unknowable prediction of what's going to happen with tax policy 30 years in the future.

I cannot, I don't believe that's knowable. I don't see how anybody, we can make arguments with one another. I've made some arguments here. But that's too far to be able to predict accurately. But if you can solve your concerns while simultaneously getting a result that is better in the short term where you can prove it, then I think you've got a really good solution.

So if you say, I'm going to minimize the amount of money that I put in my 401k, and I'm going to become a real estate investor, and I'm doing that so that I can develop this other plan, potentially get a higher return based on leveraged investment real estate, diversify my investments out of stocks, and a side benefit is I'm no longer fully committed to the taxation scheme of 401k accounts, now I think you've got a much stronger argument.

And so I can easily listen to that argument and say, yeah, go for it. And that's been an argument that I have, that's also been something that's been influential on me. I do still participate in some 401k accounts. But at the moment, it's, at the moment, all my funds are sitting in cash.

And that's due to some of my frustrations with general stock market investing. Now in the future, I'll do more self-directed investing, but I've been waiting on a recession. Now it's been a tough week. As I record the show, the market is down again, another 2%, over 10% for the week.

There's a very good reasons to believe that these kinds of events that are happening right now could be catalysts of ushering in a recession. And I've been waiting on a recession for years so that property prices come down so that I can start to make some significant investments. And so your recession might be coming sooner than you think.

My only point is I want to make predictions and decisions that are going to benefit me on multiple levels and only having the level of possibly avoiding this future higher tax by guaranteeing that I've got to pay tax every single year, to me that doesn't seem compelling. So if you can add some benefits, then you can persuade me.

Okay. Can I just really quickly pull on a string that you left out there? You've mentioned it twice in this episode and that is buying rental property with leverage. Is that something that you always recommend or is it situation specific? I mean, if you have the cash, should you buy it outright or do you always recommend that someone have a mortgage on a rental property?

I think it depends on the phase that someone is at in terms of their real estate investment. If somebody has a lot of cash, I talk to my wife about this and I say, we talk about it, I say, okay, listen, if I die, here's what I would recommend that you do.

I give her the list of people, you call these people and you get advice from them and I say, you have this amount of money and here are the things that I think you should do with it. Right? So when I give her advice on that and I say, here's how much money you would have if I'm dead and here's what I think you should do with it.

One of the things that I recommend to her is that she just simply pay cash for some rental houses and that she do that in the town where she is and she just pay cash for it. But that's because if I die, she's going to have a lot of money.

I have a lot of life insurance in addition to our other assets and so she would have a lot of money and there's no reason to take on the risk of leverage for her in that situation. She doesn't need the money. She wouldn't spend it if she had extra money because she could just optimize it.

But what she will really value is the simplicity and the safety of having a debt free portfolio. That fits with her personality and it would work really well. Now that's different if I come to you and let's say that you say, Joshua, I've saved $50,000 and I really want to be financially independent quickly and I want to do it with real estate.

Well, you can't get there with real estate if you're paying cash for it unless you're unique. I know I have one friend who's done it. He became financially independent in about seven years paying cash for real estate. But he's also very handy and he didn't make a lot of money but he's very handle, extremely frugal, and he built his portfolio debt free and he became financially independent in about seven years on real estate.

But that's not the skills that are different than most people. So in that situation, in the United States where you have very easy access to money at very low rates, artificially propped up by the Federal Reserve, keeping interest rates low, etc., it's hard to argue against the benefits of leverage in the United States.

Notice I led with an example where I said with someone who has a lot of money, they don't need the risk, they don't have any benefit of having the more money, then there's no reason to take the risk. But for the guy with $50,000, it's hard to argue against leverage.

The other thing that I've thought of is it's hard for me to see because the US market is so heavily dependent on leverage, it has dramatically suppressed many returns. And so basically the conclusion that I've come to is that it doesn't make sense really, with the exception of what I said, somebody has lots of money that is looking for a stable income portfolio to diversify their other investments, fine.

But it doesn't really make sense to invest in the United States without leverage. And if you're going to invest without leverage, I'm increasingly convinced that it just makes sense to go to another place. You can take the same amount of money in the United States that you're going to invest in real estate.

And if you go to a market where credit is not nearly so available, go to Central America, South America, go to Asia, go to Eastern Europe, now you can move into a market where the credit is just simply not as available, the money doesn't flow as freely in the United States, and you can really use your cash more effectively, where you can control more property because of lower prices, you can get higher yields, and potentially make a lot more money, because you're going where your investment strategy is going to be more effective.

Now I understand that most people don't want to leave their home market, but I'm increasingly convinced that that's the solution. So if I have $50,000 saved, and if I want to invest that money without leverage, it's very hard to see how to do that effectively in the United States and get any meaningful return on the money.

But it's a lot easier for me to see how to do that in other markets, where I can buy in at lower dollars, I can get higher yields, and that money goes a lot farther because those markets are simply not awash in mortgage money like the United States is.

Okay, thanks for taking the time. Good questions, Ryan, I appreciate the call. We move on now to New Jersey. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, how can I serve you today? New Jersey, I hear you're on the road, go ahead, yes, there you are. Sorry about that, how are you doing, Josh?

Very well, sir, how are you? I'm good, I'm good. I just heard your podcast yesterday on donating for Venezuela, and I would like to know what do I have to do for that? Send me an email to joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com, and I'll share those details with you privately. Because of the sensitivity of the work that we're doing, I'm not interested in publicizing that kind of information publicly, and so email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com, and I will give you those details privately.

All right, thank you very much. My pleasure. All right, we move on to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the show, how can I serve you today? Hi, Joshua, can you hear me? Yes, sounds good, go ahead. Hi, this is John. I had a question about mindset between two pretty good options of how I should handle the next few years.

Just as a little bit of background, the last, I guess, about two years ago and the four years before that, I was very focused on saving up some money and quitting, and just had a high-stress job that I didn't really like very much. The things were good enough, and I didn't quit.

What I ended up doing instead was really knuckling down and focusing on a dream job that I wanted. It wasn't easy, but I did actually go through the right moves and got that dream job. It's tough when you get your dreams, because sometimes they don't work out to be the way you thought they would be.

It's a very good job. I enjoyed it immensely. Once the shine wore off after six months or so, I felt some of those old feelings coming back in. I struggle whether or not it's just me and the corporate world not aligning, different things, values, and just how it works gets done.

But then again, I don't feel super confident jumping to entrepreneurship. I've had dabbles in it, or mildly, not unsuccessful, but by no means self-sustaining. My question is, I'm back to this point of deciding whether I should stay or leave. The very good thing that I have going on here is that I do get paid a good salary.

There's a lot of stress and a lot of things that were wrong with the old job, but I do get compensated very well, and I work very hard for that. But the kicker is that for the next two and a half years, part of my compensation, it is variable, not a sure thing, but there's a very good chance that this extra compensation I get for the next two and a half years will not quite double my salary, but it's a significant amount more, let's say one and a half to 1.75 times my salary for the next two and a half years.

So that's nothing to sneeze at, to just dismiss right away. It seems like a prudent thing to stick around for those next two and a half years, but I balance that with having a four and a six-year-old, which I'd like to obviously be at home with more. My wife's already at home.

So I consider having a four and six-year-old at home, but obviously they want me home. It feels like it would be the right thing to do to do that. But then again, six and a half and an eight and a half-year-old in two and a half years, they probably will still also be very excited to have me home.

It feels like it's definitely a question of selling out for the time of my kids for this very... Not everybody gets a chance to earn four years worth of salary in two and a half years. So there's a balance. I'm trying to figure out how to sort that out.

Not that we're so necessary to have that extra money, but it does feel prudent to not let that go. I did work very hard to try to land this position. How close are you to financial independence on your current rate of savings, investments, et cetera? How far away is your financial independence date?

Well, this week notwithstanding. It's been one of those things for the last two to three years. I've probably been right at the edge of it anyways with some conservative thinking, but not to the point where I would quit and then never pursue work again. I feel like it is good and there's always things I'm interested in.

I just never feel confident in my ability to provide with just that. But certainly a little bit of extra income that we would need would be something I could scrub up. It's just maybe I wouldn't be doing the things on the side that I would love to do, but I would definitely go to try out new things.

And then there's lots of good things I get from this job. It's just the stresses and stuff have all come back, but I definitely like a lot of parts of it. If we move forward for two years and you were able to generate that extra income and maintain your current lifestyle, your current plan, are you confident that two years from now you'd be financially independent?

Yeah. I mean, we do have high exposure to the markets, which I could adjust. But I can also just adjust that with making supplemental income that's not in a very stressful career. But yeah, I think it would put me in a more comfortable position where I wouldn't feel like I really needed to make something work like a side hustle or it wouldn't be a side hustle, it would be a new venture.

I would feel less pressure on that and maybe that would give me some relief. Do you and your wife have any ideas? Because I'm kind of jumping right into it because we've got a long history of your calling in Q&A shows. Listeners will know John in Pittsburgh, he does a good job of calling in.

John, you're a hero. Do you and your wife have any kind of proposed lifestyles that are unusual, that are outside of just living in your current house, I don't know, traveling around Southeast Asia or buying an RV and taking your children across the United States? Do you have any of those things that have ever been attractive to you?

You know, all of those things at different stages have been things I've thought a lot about and probably my wife has had different aspects of. But I wouldn't say any of them have been something she's been voicing. All in all, we've made so many adjustments, mostly from listening to you and making these micro adjustments and changes and being confident in this or that, that we're very happy where we are.

A lot of it comes down to the fact that we aren't in a big need of any drastic lifestyle changes. We have a very modest house in a nice area. It's the smallest house in the block, but it gets by. I mean, other than making little things in our house, creature comfort a little bit better and upgrading things and adjusting my frugality, and I'm doing a good job of that, is spending on things that make value for us, whether it's exercise classes or something for my wife and trying to build more time for myself to exercise rather than be stressed all the time.

We don't have a lot of big dreams like that. Yeah, of course, it'd be nice to take more vacations and think less of the money, but everything's, again, everything's so just good enough that... Again, the kids also make our lives happier at home, and just being fulfilled with that, at least at this phase of life, is very fulfilling.

I do get fulfilled from my work as stressful as it is also, so it's something I don't want to quit and then regret quitting to be with them. Maybe I enjoy being with them so much on the weekends now because it's a treat for me. I've made a lot of other lifestyle improvements where I never really go out, I don't drink.

There's so many things I've changed in the last five to six years that just makes home life so fulfilling. But yeah, everything's just so good enough, but it's hard to decide what to trade off. Here's my instinct. I think my instinct is I think you should stay at this job for another two years.

That should be your plan. And I could see a few things happening. So first, this job is something that you thought a couple years ago was going to be your dream job. Now, everything that glitters is not always gold. Sometimes you move in and you try something and you realize, you know, this comes with its downsides.

I don't believe there's a job in the world or a business in the world that doesn't come with downsides. Radical personal finance is my dream job. There are things that I just flat out don't like doing. And that's one of the reasons why I continue to pursue financial independence because I often wonder, well, if I were really financially independent, am I sure?

I say I would still do it. I really think I would still do it, but would I really? Maybe I wouldn't. Maybe I just don't know myself. Maybe I would sit around and hang out on the beach 168 hours a week. I don't know. Like, I don't think I would.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't. Every bit of it, self-analysis and introspection, every bit of logical thinking has convinced me that I would keep on working, that I would keep on doing this or variations of this. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I don't actually know it. And so the point is that even the – and I feel like what I do is a better fit for me than anybody I've ever met in my life and there are jobs for them.

But it still has its downsides. And so I think that you should focus on the fact that you thought this was a dream job and you do find it very fulfilling and meaningful and recognize that everything in life is going to have some things that are frustrating. Now when you get to things like stress, I would say that if your concern is stress, you probably could gain by just simply identifying that and learning ways to eliminate the feelings of stress, learning ways to insulate yourself and using your strength as a person to minimize that.

Now how do you do it? I don't know. It could just be recognizing that the end doesn't really matter and I'm just going to ignore the stress. I've gotten better at minimizing some stress that I face just by recognizing this is all a game. This is all in my head.

And this thing that I used to let stress me out, it doesn't actually matter. I'm just going to let it go. And I've gotten better at managing stress. And I think that especially if you look at most people's career growth, if you're going to grow in your career and move up in jobs, move up in responsibility, one of the key skills that you have to master is recognizing that this is simply stress and this is fake.

It's not that it doesn't matter, but it's that I can't let this affect me. Think about how much stress on a daily basis the president of a country faces. President Trump, just think about the stress that he's under every single day. That would break me. That would break any of us who hadn't proceeded through it.

Think about what the president of a company or the leader of an organization faces when all of a sudden your organization is going into bankruptcy. One of the key skills to advance is to recognize that I have to learn how to deal with this stress and how to let it not affect me emotionally.

And so it could be that you could engage in learning, study, and personal growth in order to minimize some of the things that you don't like. This could also be helped by your simply seeing yourself as stronger than you've previously thought yourself to be. For example, if you have lots of money and you know that you're thinking about leaving this job, just stop doing some of the stuff that you don't like or go tell your boss and say, "Boss, I don't want to do these things anymore.

They're not a good fit for me. I want to do these other things," and figure out how to renegotiate it. And if they tell you, "Well, you could do that, but you got to take a $20,000 cut in salary." Okay, fine. I've got my salary, $20,000. I don't want to do those things.

I want to do these things. Now, I'm clearly being flippant in that tone, but something like that might be able to be possible. You can renegotiate almost anything in life. And if you've got the comfort of knowing that you're wealthy, that you are practically financially independent, knowing that you have other options if you lost this job, it should give you the strength to be able to renegotiate the constraints of your job in some way.

You might also just simply do something like use your money to hire more help, whether you do that informally or formally, outsourcing some of the things of your job you don't like, hire your own personal assistant out of your own salary, and split your job with somebody. Renegotiate the constraints of your job would be one thing.

Now, when you're this close to financial independence and this close to being comfortably financially independent, and given the fact that you've never really wanted to pursue entrepreneurship, it's more like, "I could see how I would do it," but it's not been something that's been burning for you. I think you stick it out for two years.

I really do. And here are some other things that I think would be meaningful. So with a four-year-old and a six-year-old, you are definitely on the cusp of where your presence as a father will be increasingly valued. But you already have your wife there with your children all the time, and so they're already being well cared for.

Now, if your wife were working a job and they were being raised by other people, then that would be more pressing. But they're already getting substantial attention from mom. And your presence two years from now is going to be more important than it is today. Should you be there today?

Sure, of course. But it's going to be different working with an eight-year-old and a six-year-old in terms of the types of things that you can be involved in and the type of help that they need. Children need their mother much more in the early years, and they need their father much more in the transition years to adulthood.

And so if you are financially independent two years from now and you're with them 24 hours a day two years from now, it's going to be more important then than it is now. And if you're this close to being fully financially independent and you have an opportunity to make quite a bit of money, to me it makes sense to just see it through.

Now the other flip side that I would say is look at where we are economically. Now especially this week has been an interesting week, and obviously that's affected your investments, which affects your confidence in your financial independence numbers. Well, time will take care of that. But I think there's a very decent chance that we're heading into a significant recession.

I don't prove that. I don't have any numerical scenario, but we're overdue for a recession. And when I think about the potential economic effects of the coronavirus, et cetera, I think there's a very decent chance that this could go ahead and be a triggering event for a serious recession.

Now maybe it's not. Maybe next week a vaccine is perfected, coronavirus is cured, and everything changes. Even so, still, the last three months have been so disruptive to the Chinese economy and to many other, and are currently so disruptive to many economies, I still think it would be a significant recession.

But maybe it all goes over, in which case things are different. But if we're going into a period of recession, this is a time where you want to try to keep the job that you have. It's a time where if you can keep your earning ability, you should have more opportunities to invest at good deals.

So whether that's to buy more stocks at depressed prices, or whether to buy some real estate or other investments at depressed prices, if you can keep your high income and you can stay on track for that extra 1.5 to 1.7x of compensation, then you have opportunities to buy investments.

On the flip side, let's say that your company starts to face problems and the recession starts to affect you personally, you may be able to get yourself laid off. If you get laid off, maybe you get a nice layoff package, a nice severance package. Maybe you can use that as an excuse to do something different than you would have otherwise done.

Maybe you go ahead and say, "Well, I got laid off, and I was thinking about leaving anyway, but I got laid off in a time where just about everybody else got laid off, and what we've long wanted to do is we've wanted to go and spend some time in Mexico and study Spanish.

So let's take our children to Mexico, and we'll go and hide out there for six months, wait for the recession to pass, and lower our expenses so that we can really enjoy something like this, rent our house out, something like that." And so I think given the uncertainty of the moment and how close you are to being really comfortably financially independent, so that even if you did start a business, you knew you didn't have to run that business, I would stick it out.

I would focus on the good, try to renegotiate what I don't like about the job. I would stick it out and wait to see, because I think this next couple of years is going to be a very interesting time. If you get laid off, you know, let's sit down, do some financial planning, take a look at everything, decide what do you want to do.

Do you want to try to get another job? Do you just want to stay home with the children? Do you want to – what do you want to do? If you can keep your high earnings right now, and you can buy some investments at discounted prices, I think that'll help you.

And so I don't see any reason why I think you should quit today. I would stick it out for another year and assess, and then stick it out for another year and assess, and then around that time, depending on what happens over the next year or two, go ahead and make those longer term decisions.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate that. That gives me confidence in the things I was unsure of and doubles down on the things, a lot of what you said I was already thinking, so that gives me a lot of encouragement there. And on the leveraging my ability to have confidence here in my job, I've already given the benefit of that to my manager.

The new one I have is a first-time manager, and I feel like I've been able to be a very easy employee to him because of my position, not being especially needy for career growth, et cetera, and all these other things that are demanded of managers to do for their employees.

And I haven't turned that lens on myself to say, "How can I make a little easier on myself and maybe just take things a little less stressfully?" So yeah, that's all great stuff. I've really enjoyed your recent Seven Rings of Freedom series. We've established a lot of those, and it's great to have a goal for something other than one, so I appreciate it.

And I've also been... In the ones that you've established, do you agree with my assessment of them increasing your freedom and the quality of your life? Yes, absolutely. We never really had a lot of debt, but having cash positions and especially about two years ago, two or three years ago, my wife decided to take the leap, and we gave up a substantial salary for her to stay at home.

And it's not been all wonderful in every dimension. She's struggled just like anybody that has to deal with small kids all the time. We try to be very mindful of giving her her own time and space, but that's been a huge benefit to both of us, I think, and especially to the children.

So that one especially rang true with me, and I don't think we would have... We very much saw the value of each of us through our salaries before a couple years ago, and I think you're a big part of turning that around, so I appreciate that. And by the way, if anybody's wondering the back catalog, if you've already listened to everyone, you should go back and listen to everyone again.

I've been through them about two and a half times, so you're a different person when you listen to them each time. So we'll check it out. I so appreciate that, John. Thank you. And I'm so glad you've been here, a long-time listener, and it's such a blessing, and I'm glad that my work has been helpful to you.

So all right, we move on now to the Beehive State, Brigham City, Utah. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show today. Hello, Joshua. Yes, sir, go ahead. Hi, my name's Kevin. I'd like to thank you for your show. I have purchased two of your courses, and I highly recommend them.

I'm calling today for your thoughts on citizenship for... and flag-planting theory for my children. You prepared to answer that? I'm ready. I love the topic. Let's go. Okay. So I'm looking to provide either second or third citizenships for my children, primarily for their career and job opportunities when they come of age.

I currently have two children aged two and three, or two and almost four. We are big fans of self-education and homeschooling, which I believe would limit general work visa applications to other countries. Birth tourism may also be an option here because we may be adding to our family, so that may provide a citizenship or an option for them.

And with our existing citizenships, I'm actually Canadian, and I'm in Costa Rica right now, but that's just a vacation. My wife and I are our Canadian citizens, and her parents are Portuguese citizens, which through their family citizenship program, we are going to obtain. We are frugally financially independent, which gives us time to fulfill residency requirements as another option if we don't pursue birth tourism.

I'm just looking for your thoughts here. So to confirm, both you... so your entire family, all of you are Canadian citizens. Your wife's parents are Portuguese, and you're in the process of establishing her Portuguese citizenship, and then by extension, possibly you and your children's Portuguese citizenship. And so you're working through that process, but that's just simply a matter of time, and then you'll have Portuguese citizenship for the whole family.

Is that right? That's correct. Okay. In addition to Canadian and Portuguese citizenships, do you have any other options in your family tree for citizenship by descent? No. Okay. And you are financially independent, you're able to live on your investments, so you're willing and able to relocate to another country, live there, especially if it would lead to a citizenship, and you don't have to have a job in that country in order to support yourself.

Did I understand that correctly? Yes, that is correct. Okay. So the major idea, the major reason why you would like your children to have a citizenship option that is in addition to Canadian and Portuguese citizenship is for their economic opportunities, their ability to work in other regions of the world.

Is that right? I believe that, yes. Yes, that and possibly asset protection, but would also be for their benefit. Okay. So is there a region of the world that you think has strong growth prospects in the future? That's where I'm looking for your thoughts. From what I take, Asia and East seem to have a population that is quickly becoming a good opportunity for us in our position right now.

I have not been there. I've been to Europe briefly, and I'm currently in Central America, and we're working on our Spanish, but it's kind of a blank slate at this point. Got it. So it's an interesting thing. So first, with regard to flag theory and with regard to your position as it now stands, you already have an extremely strong foundation that many people would be envious of.

As a Canadian, you have the ability to access the country of Canada. Canada has major benefits from the perspective of long-term security. Canada has the benefit of tremendous supplies of water, massive natural resources, a fairly stable culture and economy, and so in many ways, Canada is an extremely safe place to be.

And so the ability to access the Canadian job market is great. There's a very strong economy. It's obviously centered along the southern coast, but when you go through the cities in Canada, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, I mean, all across Canada, you have major opportunities. So you're already in good shape with regard to being a Canadian citizen.

In addition, in many ways, you have a superior benefit that if you wanted to leave Canada fully and completely expatriate from Canada, the Canadian government will largely leave you alone. They'll largely allow you to just go and do something else. And you can become a Canadian non-tax resident and move elsewhere and thus completely eliminate your obligations, financial obligations to the Canadian government if you go through the process of becoming a Canadian non-resident.

Then you could still visit Canada, visit family and friends. All of that is possible. So Canada has a lot of benefits. In addition, the Portuguese citizenship is going to be extremely valuable. The Portuguese citizenship gives you access to the European Union, which certainly is a vibrant economy and has a lot of growth going to it.

There's a lot of potential. The ability for your children to be EU citizens, to study, to live, to work anywhere in the EU, in my opinion, is extremely valuable. Now if you think about diversification there, you don't really need access to another modern Western economy. Even if your children wanted to enter the United States in the future for job prospects, it's simpler for a Canadian to enter the United States than for many other people.

And because of the closer relationship between the United States and Canada, they would have the option to enter the United States probably fairly easily if they wanted to do that. And of course the United States is an economic powerhouse. There are good options with the different tax treaties and alliances with Canadians for some of the other countries, Australia, New Zealand.

Basically throughout the Queen's realm there are really good options that you gain access to with a Canadian passport. And the Portuguese passport has some interesting connections. I'm not fully up to date on all of them, but interesting connections to Brazil and some options there. And so I think that if we consider your passport portfolio and your citizenship portfolio, your big good high quality travel documents, check, check.

Portuguese passport, very strong. Canadian passport, very strong. So you can travel fairly freely. You have the ability to expatriate from both of those places. So that's good. So where the weakness is I think in your passport portfolio and your options is regional. What region of the world would your children be able to access?

And the second weakness would be that the countries that you're involved in are fairly large countries. So if you're interested in freedom, as I understand that you at least have some interest given that you're even interested in flag theory, one of the disadvantages of large country passports is that large countries can pursue you around the world.

So is Canada better than the United States with regard to pursuing you around the world? Yes. With regard to taxation? Yes. With regards to spying on you? It's a little bit better, but unfortunately Canada is part of the five eyes. And so they're going to follow you around the world.

And so could there come a day in which Canada does what the United States does and they say we're going to impose citizenship based taxation or we're going to impose all of these onerous rules on you because you are a Canadian citizen? Yes, there is. Canada and Portugal are participating in the CRS system and so they're going to track your tax residency all around the world.

They're going to want to investigate your bank accounts. Where you start to get some diversification in your plan is if you can bring in some other smaller countries. So you're in Costa Rica. Costa Rica may not have as strong of a travel document as a Canadian passport. Costa Rican passport is less powerful.

But there is one thing that's for sure. If you're a Costa Rican citizen, Costa Rica does not have the money or the resources to follow you all around the world like Canada does. Now Portugal of course has less money than Canada, but they don't have the resources. And so you could get some diversification there by bringing in a citizenship from a smaller country versus a larger country.

That would be one benefit. The other thing to think about is if you're primarily thinking about economic opportunities for your children, I think that you want to think about regions of the world where there is likely to be growth. I don't see a lot of long-term opportunities for growth in the United States and/or Canada or Europe.

Now I'm not saying they're not going to grow, but what I'm saying is I don't see how they're going to grow. When I look – I agree. And I think there are two big things. First, there's already a very high standard of living in these countries. And so given – by the way, apologies for the sniffing.

The only thing I don't have in my recording set up is a mute button, and I would, but maybe I've got coronavirus already. Who knows? I hope not. The only thing that – the only place – so I think that if you look at the difference between the standard of living in Canada or the United States or Portugal, and you compare that to the standard of living in – well, where do we go?

I guess in Cambodia or in Costa Rica or in Brazil or in Argentina. Many of these places are very sophisticated, right? There's very sophisticated cultures, but there's a much higher room to grow in some of those countries, to come up to global standards, which means, I think, more economic opportunity.

The second big thing that I think is going to be an extremely compelling thing in the future is going to be where is population growth happening. Population growth in the United States is below replacement. I think it's – off the top of my head, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think current population figures are 1.74 children per woman, which is below replacement rates in the United States.

I don't know what it is in Canada, but I think it's probably below replacement rates as well all throughout Western Europe. Go ahead if you know it. >> Steven: It's just over 2. It's a very slowly growing population. >> Adam: Interesting. And that could be due to significant immigration into Canada.

Obviously there's been over the last decade or two just massive levels of immigration into Canada, and new immigrants are more likely to be fecund than native-born people, but that's changing as well. So same thing in Western Europe. Population growth rates are – they're not growing. They're in decline. And globally there's a very good chance it will be in a significant population decline in the long-term future.

So I think the places where there is population growth are really interesting, and those areas are somewhat in South America, somewhat in Asia, Southeast Asia possibly, although I would even need to look at each country by country, and then different parts of Africa where there would be massive levels of increased population.

And so if we're thinking about long-term, I would think about some of those markets. So now let's go back to analyzing kind of the problem. So you've got Western Europe taken care of. You've got Canada, and I'll just say North America, taken care of. So you're trying to figure out where are opportunities.

Do you think culturally would you be – you haven't traveled in Asia. You're traveling in the Americas right now. Are you fairly culturally comfortable in the Americas right now? Yes, it's a slight culture change. Everyone's happy. I mean, you can still get all the amenities. They're nowhere near what we've experienced in Canada, and we've frequented the United States for long periods of time, and everything's just at your fingertips there.

So we're a little spoiled with that, but I understand – yeah, the culture seems fine, and I think we're looking to – anyway, where the next checkout is, where to see – I think we're – yeah, we're comfortable with the culture in Costa Rica right now. Are you engaging in long-term perpetual travel, or do you live in Canada and you just travel for short periods of time?

I guess we're in Canada. I'm trying to kind of maximize it. We're in Canada for 183 days. Whatever it is I need to maintain my Canadian citizenship. We've been spending a lot of time in the United States, and we're looking at spending at least whatever the countries will let us into.

I think most of the countries will let us in for 90 days in a spot, sometimes as low as 60 or 30 days. So we're not perpetually traveling, but we are slow traveling for extended periods. Are you continuing to be a Canadian tax resident? Yes. But you want to do that in the future, or do you want to become a Canadian non-tax resident?

Because we're living off our investments, and we're quite frugal with our expenses, I'm kind of below the radar on any high taxation from Canada. Understood. That's what I thought as far as you're being financially independent. Why do you feel like you need to be physically in Canada 183 days?

There are benefits. So I've paid a lot of taxes in getting into financial independence, and Canada has some very good child benefit laws, child benefits. I'm kind of taking advantage of those to kind of get some of my money back out. And yeah, that's why. Okay, that makes more sense.

It'd be interesting, maybe we should schedule a standalone episode and talk to you about how you've achieved financial independence in a Canadian context and how to maximize the options there. It'd be an interesting discussion. But so back to kind of citizenship. To me, I would spend this time traveling, and I would travel, do some traveling and try to think about where you thought there were more options in the world, where you think growth is going to be, where in your travels do you look and say, "You know what?

There's a lot here." I think there are some compelling development opportunities and just things happening in South America. And there are some interesting citizenship options in South America, depending on how much time you're willing to spend on the ground. Nothing is fast, but in South America, I think one of the big benefits is Mercosur.

If you're able to establish a citizenship for your children in a Mercosur country, that opens up basically all of South America to them. And there are a number of different countries that would serve very effectively in that context. You have Argentina, you have Paraguay, you have Uruguay, Brazil, obviously the powerhouse of South America.

If you are going to do birth tourism, Brazil is very high on the list of countries to consider for birth tourism. Brazil offers currently a fast track to citizenship for family members of a Brazilian citizen. So if you have another child, and if you have that child in Brazil, that child would be Brazilian by birth, a Brazilian citizen.

And then you and your children would qualify for Brazilian permanent residency, which you could just maintain residency. That allows them at any point in time to live and work in Brazil at any point in the future. The key thing I would point out to you is you don't have to have citizenship to have economic opportunities for your children.

You need residency. And so even with just with permanent residency, you could open up those doors to your children. Now in Brazil, the law is that after you acquire residency, which is relatively immediate after the birth of a child, the law is that if you're a resident, a permanent resident for one year, then you can file for citizenship.

I don't know how long they're going to have that law, but that is currently the law. The practice, however, Brazil being very bureaucratic, is it's more of basically a four-year process than a one-year process. There's a major difference between the efficiency of the Canadian government and immigration processes versus Latin American governments and immigration processes.

But Brazil, I think, would be a really interesting and exciting opportunity. Brazil also has benefits because it's a very diverse society. So if you're white, you can fit in well in Brazil. If you're black, you can fit in well in Brazil. If you're brown, you can fit in well in Brazil.

There are tremendous opportunities and there's a very strong Brazilian, European communities in Brazil. Now one thought is there's a special relationship, obviously, between Portugal and Brazil. So what I would do before I would do Brazil is I would investigate the future opportunities of somebody with a Portuguese passport and how easy it is for them to immigrate to Brazil.

It's probably easier on a Portuguese passport than anything else in the world. I don't know the details of that. There are some other interesting countries in South America. Colombia is one of my favorite countries in South America. Colombia is just an incredible place and has a very really powerful economy.

I really love Colombia. So you can set up, if you're willing to take some money, you can get Colombian residency just simply through purchasing real estate in the country. I think that can lead to a passport in time through naturalization. Now you need to be thoughtful about your tax obligations here.

But since you're living on investments, those tax obligations should be fairly minimal. And since you continue to be a Canadian tax resident, they should also be minimal just regard to what you have with Canadian residency. But I think Colombia is a really interesting option. There are other countries in South America that are also interesting.

Chile has a wonderful economy. It's a really incredible country, a really diverse country. You could use, because Chile is in South America, if you wanted to set up a lifestyle where you spent half the year in South America and half the year in North America, you could either choose to live in perpetual winter or perpetual summer, whichever you prefer based upon the difference in seasons.

You can live very inexpensively in Argentina, especially southern Argentina. And so if you wanted a place that had a high quality of life and low cost of living, that would be a country to consider and you can become an Argentinian citizen in time. Almost all of the countries in the Americas offer citizenship by birth, birthright citizenship.

So all of those could be options for another child, but not all of them offer a fast track to citizenship. But you have the years and so you could become in time naturalized for your entire family in South America. And there's some very high quality of lifestyle places. Uruguay is a very modern European culture.

You would probably feel very comfortably in Uruguay, a lot of benefits. Don't ignore Mexico. Mexico has tremendous benefits, extremely powerful passport, fairly simple immigration procedures. You can naturalize in time. If you have a child in Mexico, the child will be by birth Mexican and then you and your entire family can qualify for permanent residency in Mexico.

And so again, you could naturalize as a citizen, but you don't need to. You could just simply have a permanent resident visa and gain access to the Mexican marketplace in the future, which I think will be very powerful. Now let's move out of the Americas. You have obviously the Caribbean.

There's certain benefits of the CARICOM alliance there, but that's less interesting to most people and you can always buy yourself a Caribbean citizenship if you think it's worth the money. Europe, I think has some interesting options and here's where we get to diversity. One of the things that where your passport lacks or your passport portfolio lacks diversity is on big countries versus small countries.

That's not too bad with Portugal, but still EU, big country, big government, etc. It'd be nice if you could develop a passport citizenship from a place that had a smaller government influence and it also would be nice if you could develop a citizenship from a country that was friendly with a different set of countries.

So if you look at the world's countries, there are often groups of them that are friendly with one another. So the United States and Canada, very friendly with one another. If you, you know, you commit a crime or something, US and Canada extradite people all the time. Now that's different than the relationship between the United States and China or the United States and Russia.

And so different regions of the world control and exert influence on other areas. The US influence is almost impossible to escape throughout all of the Americas, especially Central America. You just can't believe that the United States is going to let something happen in, you know, I don't know, Costa Rica, right?

Costa Rica famously doesn't have a military, which is great, right? But one of the reasons why they can get by without a military is because the United States has proven time and again that they're just not going to let anything happen that they don't want to happen in Central America.

And so in some ways the Central American governments, yes, they are independent and they do their best to be strong and sometimes bristlingly strong a la Nicaragua. But at the end of the day, they're pretty much subject to what the United States allows to happen. There's long proof of that.

And so one of the things that I would consider would be to go and establish myself under another government that would be interesting in a different part of the world. So for example, Russia would be a really interesting thing for you to do to emigrate to Russia. The Russian economy and the Russian state is a really fascinating place.

Moscow, one of the world's great cities, really. Very advanced culture, very just high culture. You can do—Russia is such a huge country, you get tremendous opportunities. Depending on what you're willing to do, you could emigrate to Russia. Russia has some economic immigration options that can lead to citizenship in fairly short order, potentially as short as three years.

And so if you were willing to make some investments in Russia and move some money into the Russian economy, that would be an interesting thing for you to consider. And there are a lot of nice things about Russia. You can live very inexpensively in Russia and it would be pretty neat if your children had the ability to access some of the Western nations, but they also have the ability to access a nation like Russia.

Russia has a very low tax rate. It can be a major tax savings for some people. Again, that's not such a big concern for you, but that is a real option. You could also think about some of the countries that have access to Russia very easily. So for example, Serbia is a really interesting solution.

The Serbian passport is one of the very few passports in the world that gives you visa-free access to both Russia and to China, which is something that you don't have with either of the passports that you currently have options to. You don't have visa-free access to either of those powerhouse nations.

And so a Serbian, you could establish residency in Serbia, leading to citizenship in about five years within Serbia. Serbia also has Belgrade as a really neat city, very cultured. If you wanted to live less expensively, there are many suburbs and whatnot outside of Belgrade that could be just really nice places to be.

And so you could think about a place like Serbia. Then we move towards kind of the Middle East and to Africa. So in the Middle East, there are really minimal options for citizenship. The Middle East and Asia are much more race-focused than Western nations. And so it's much harder, if you're not born Saudi, you're not going to become Saudi.

Like Dubai, right? Incredible city, could be a very tax-efficient place for an expat to live, but you're not going to become a citizen of Dubai. The best you can get is establish permanent residency and keep it. And that's fairly open, but you've got to stay there and you've got to keep it.

But you could investigate that because there are economic opportunities in the Middle East. I think the most interesting place to consider going in the Middle East, it's not technically Middle East, kind of on the border between Europe and the Middle East, but Turkey has a citizenship by investment program that requires you simply to buy real estate.

So if you're willing to invest in $250,000 of real estate inside Turkey, you and your entire family can become Turkish citizens. And that's the kind of opportunity that would start to diversify your passport portfolio, because although it may not be super helpful with regard to travel privileges, you've already got travel privileges, where your passport portfolio could benefit, would be working with a smaller country and also potentially working with a country that's not quite in the same kind of Anglo-Western United States, Great Britain sphere, like you are with Canada and with your Canadian citizenship.

So Turkey is kind of on the border of the EU, wants to be part of the EU, but it's still different. It has more of a connection to some of the Arab cultures. And that potentially could be something that could even make you money. So you go to Turkey, you purchase $250,000 of real estate in Istanbul or elsewhere.

You can rent that real estate out. You don't have to live in it, or you could live in it and just enjoy living in Istanbul, traveling around that region from a home base, doing slow travel. And the citizenship process is very quick. The requirement is that you purchase the real estate, $250,000 of real estate or $500,000 deposit in a local bank.

And then three years of, you maintain it for three years, then after three years you can sell. And so if you can buy inexpensively and then sell at a profit, you could possibly make a profit by adding another citizenship to your passport portfolio. Then we move to, from there let's move into Africa.

Now Africa is interesting because I think there are, there's potentially a lot of opportunity. If you look at the areas where population growth is likely to come in the next few decades, most of it is from Africa where you have a very high birth rate. And I think it's going to be really exciting to what happens in many different African countries and cultures.

There are some challenges. Now in most countries, many countries in Africa you can immigrate and you can naturalize to be an African citizen of that country. So you would have South Africa would be one to seriously consider, a South African citizenship. There's obviously a stronger connection between, are you and your family white?

Yes. Okay, so there's an easier connection of being a white South African than necessarily being a white citizen of Namibia. There are far more white South Africans than there are white citizens of Namibia. So South Africa would be something to consider. But there are other interesting countries in Africa as well that have a lot of longer term potential.

What I think would be one of the very interesting ones to consider would be off of the African continent itself, but a country like Mauritius. There are lots and lots of South Africans that are moving to Mauritius, given the economic troubles especially for white people in South Africa. Many white people are leaving South Africa and looking to go to other places.

The reason I say Mauritius is because Mauritius is also an interesting option for a passport. It's one of the other very few nations in the world that has visa-free access to Russia and to China. And it would be a real diversity of a passport for you and for your children that is an African passport.

Now Africa is not particularly difficult to get to for the passports that you already hold, but it would be interesting to have an African passport and especially that African passport could open up more interesting opportunities for your children. What are the economic prospects of Mauritius? I don't know. Not nearly as exciting to me as something like the economic prospects of Nigeria, but there's a big difference between an island tropical paradise in an African island versus a place like Nigeria.

Nigeria certainly has much more powerful economic prospects, I think, in the coming decades, but it would have a very different lifestyle. So do you actually want to live in Nigeria? Do you actually want to pursue that or do you actually want to pursue naturalization in Kenya or an African country?

Those things are much more difficult. Now to wrap up, I missed whole swaths of Asia. Malaysia is, I think, a really neat option for your children if you want to expose them to some Asian influence. Thailand is obviously a place that lots of people like to be. In many ways the world is open to you, but those are just some thoughts that occur to me and so you're going to have to consider what you and your family actually like.

If you don't actually like a certain culture, let's say you just don't like Russian culture, you don't want to learn Russian, well then Russia doesn't seem like a great place to pursue, but maybe you would love living on a tropical island of Mauritius. On the other hand, those places are far from Canada and so if you're going back and forth between Canada and there, you got a lot of money in plane tickets, it's quite a ways and so it's a lot easier for you to set up shop in Costa Rica or Panama or Mexico than it is for you to go back and forth between Mauritius and Canada.

But those are just some ideas talking through some different regions. What I would emphasize is you don't necessarily need citizenship for your children in order to open up economic opportunities for them. You can do that with residency and so you can establish residency with birth tourism and that can be a part of the overall package.

So if you're going to pursue citizenship, I think it makes sense for you to think about the diversity and to focus on a region of the world that you think has genuine economic prospects and then move in that direction. Thank you very much Joshua. That was very thorough and I believe you can consult on this.

Well good, I do enjoy the topic. It's interesting because it's so fascinating when you start to sit down and think about where do I think the world is going, what opportunities do I want for my children to have and then how do I balance that with all of the practicalities.

But I do think I love the topic and whether it's through financial independence or through remote lifestyle, through homeschooling, it is pretty cool in the modern world to be able to establish multiple options all around the world. All right, we've got two callers left on the line. Let's go to Abilene, Texas.

You've been extremely patient. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Sorry man. Hey Joshua. My name is Corey. Can you hear me? Yes Corey, sounds good. Go ahead please. Hey, so I had a question about long-term care insurance. I recently, I've been a long time listener but this is my first time to call and based on some of the stuff that I've learned from you over the years, recently I actually quit my job as a principal because I read John Taylor Gatto.

Thanks for that. Great. And we thought about homeschooling for a long time and after I was actually in the public school system, I decided that the position I was in, it wasn't going to be socially acceptable for me to stay and to homeschool. So we decided we're going to try something different.

So I got out of the public school system and right now I'm trying to flip houses and we've got plenty of savings to tide us over but we're trying to keep our expenses low because I'm trying to get this business to actually make money. But basically my question, my wife asked me to call you.

I'm 34. I'm in good health. I'm married with three kids and should I buy long term care insurance? Like is that something I need to be thinking about and looking at and if so, what do you recommend? About how much is your current net worth? I'm in about a half million dollar range.

And other than just simply being a prudent forward thinking planner, you're not, there's no current reason to think that you would need long term care insurance at an early age. Correct. So nothing that I can think of. It's just thinking of risk planning. Yeah. Right. I don't think it makes sense.

Now ironically I'm 34 and I own some long term care insurance but that was more to do to the fact that I sold it and when I sold long term care insurance there was a change happening in the marketplace. When long term care insurance was first designed you could purchase very generous policies with unlimited lifetime benefits.

So you could say I want $5,000 a month and then if you got early onset Alzheimer's at 40 years old and let's say you needed 30 years of care, you could potentially get millions and millions of dollars out of the benefit. Now when I was actually an insurance agent what I found is that again and again, what I found was that the marketplace was changing and so one by one all of the companies that sold long term care insurance systematically dropped their lifetime benefits and then the change that happened before that is you could actually purchase something that was called a cash, blanking on the name, a cash purchase or a cash balance payout.

So let me explain. Generally the way the long term care insurance policy works is that the policies, cash indemnity that's the word, the policies are reimbursement policies. Let's say you buy a policy and it has $5,000 a monthly benefit. The way those policies work is if you have $3,000 of expense they'll reimburse you $3,000 but they won't reimburse you the other $2,000 if you qualify based upon the activities of daily living which is the triggering language in the policy.

If the policies also, if you have $5,000 they'll reimburse you $5,000 of expenses. If you have $7,000 of expenses they'll reimburse you $5,000 of expenses. But they're reimbursement policies that reimburse you for actual expenses incurred. Now those policies have the ability to, you can sometimes use them in some interesting ways.

So for example it is possible that if I got, let's say I get early onset Alzheimer's disease, it is possible that my wife could go and get a license to be a nursing aide and she could go and get a job with a home health organization and her job she could be paid by that company to live in my house and to provide my care.

There's nothing illegal about that as long as the money funnels through a nursing home agency. It would have to be paid to a company. And so obviously it wouldn't be a huge amount that she would be getting but there are some ways that you could use it for that.

Now that's a reimbursement policy. There were, especially in the early years of long term care insurance, there were cash indemnity policies that were available. And so the way the language in those works was if you qualify for long term care based upon needing help with two of the six activities of daily living, which is the contract language in a long term care policy, if you actually needed help and care, then the policy would just simply pay you out a stated sum of cash regardless of how the cash was used.

So if your policy benefit in that situation were $5,000, then no matter what you would get $5,000, whether you spent $3,000, $5,000 or $7,000. So the first wave was those policies didn't work out. They didn't underwrite them properly and so what happened is they phased, they pulled most of those policies from the market.

When I was an insurance agent, there was one company on the market that still had one of those that I sold I think twice to, and I sold those policies to wealthy young business owners who couldn't get disability insurance and basically it was kind of a stopgap disability insurance policy where if they got disabled, then they would possibly qualify for long term care benefit.

It wasn't as sure as a disability policy but since they couldn't get disability, this was kind of a stopgap thing for them. And so that used to be available but since I haven't been involved in the marketplace a number of years, I don't know if those are still available.

But what I told those clients when I sold those policies, I said, "Listen, these policies are generally not underwritten well and so you need to view this company and this policy with suspicion and every single year, you need to just say how's this company doing because it was an abused section of the marketplace." So even when I sold it to them, I said, "This is probably only a temporary deal for you." Now back to reimbursement policies.

The change that happened was the company started to experience such severe adverse selection that they started to pull those lifetime benefits from the marketplace. And I was actually an agent at the time and we got advanced warning that they were pulling them and I sold, I don't know how many.

I bought one but I sold, I mean, dozens of them. Maybe if I won, in one month I sold, I don't want to exaggerate but something like 50 or 60 long-term care insurance policies. I just called everybody that had ever been interested and I said, "Listen, this is being pulled from the market.

You can still buy it for another few weeks but that's it." And I sold dozens of them. To my knowledge, I'm not aware of any company that's still offering them. If anybody listening is an insurance agent and you know of a company that's still offering this kind of policy, then reach out to me and let me know please.

But to my knowledge, all of those have disappeared. Now that was an extensive background to say that the circumstances have changed. So now the way that long-term care insurance works is it's basically a certain amount of money that you want to insure against this specific need. And so the way it works is let's say you're going to protect $3,000 per month of expenses times 12 months for a total of 36 months.

So the total benefit of the policy is 3,000 times 36 or $108,000 or it could be $6,000 for 60 months. Now your total benefit of the policy is $360,000. And so what the policies do now is they largely hedge your savings against that amount of drawdown. So if you buy a policy that has a maximum benefit of $360,000, what that means is you don't have to spend $360,000 of your assets first.

You first go to the insurance policy, you take the money out of the insurance policy and then you go to your savings. So it's just hard for me to see that that's necessary for you being this young. I every year I look at my policies and I think – I have one for me and one for my wife and I look at them and I think, "Do I really need this?" The problem is that I know it doesn't cost me all that much.

It's deductible through my business. Long-term care insurance is the best double deductible business benefit. It's deductible as a business expense and the benefit is totally tax-free. That's the only insurance payment that works that way in the marketplace, in the tax world. It doesn't cost me all that much. I started with a very modest benefit.

Mine continues to grow with inflation. The premiums grow little by little. I look at it every year and I think, "Well, I probably don't need this but I do like to have it and it just makes me feel good." I can't get disability insurance because of the nature of my business and my travels and whatnot.

So if I had disability insurance, would I still have it? Probably, but because I don't have disability insurance and I can't get it, even though I'm the world's biggest fan of disability insurance, I just look at it and say, "Well, I'll keep this." But would I tell you to do it?

Probably not. Now, that was so I don't think you need it. What I would say is focus on getting wealthier. If you are going to, if you are still interested in long-term care insurance, what you should do is you should investigate a hybrid product. So what has happened in the marketplace, the long-term care insurance has gone through a couple of iterations and one of the things that's happened is there's been a development of a lot more hybrid products that mix a life insurance policy with a long-term care insurance policy and I think those are interesting.

I don't love them because I like insurance to be a little bit purer, but for someone in your situation, if you are genuinely interested, I think you should investigate something like a hybrid policy because there's far less of a chance of you just paying out, paying out, paying out and then never being able to get the money because it'll go out in some form, either in the form of a long-term care benefit or a life insurance benefit.

But long-winded way of saying, "No, I don't think you need it. I would just focus on getting wealthier." >>Toby: Awesome. Thanks so much. That's very helpful. Yeah, that's exactly what I needed to know. You've been talking for three hours and I have a second question. >>Toby: Go ahead. >>Jeffrey: If you wanted me to ask it, I will.

Are you sure? >>Toby: Go ahead. Go for it. Yep. >>Jeffrey: All right, man. Okay. So I'm investing in real estate now since I'm doing the house flipping thing and we've already got a couple of rental houses and I was thinking about, I listened to your asset protection series. They're currently both in my name because they wouldn't give me a loan unless they were in my name.

So I'm going to go ahead and ask you a question. >>Toby: Okay. >>Jeffrey: I'm going to go ahead and ask you a question. I'm going to go ahead and ask you a question. I'm going to go ahead and ask you a question. I'm going to go ahead and ask you a question.

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