The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. You could do a classic herb roasted turkey or spice it up and make turkey tacos. Serve up a go-to shrimp cocktail or use Simple Truth wild-caught shrimp for your first Cajun risotto. Make creamy mac and cheese or a spinach artichoke fondue from our selection of Murray's cheese.

No matter how you shop, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace all your holiday traditions. Ralph's fresh for everyone. It's Friday and today live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua. I am your host. Today it's a live Friday Q&A show. These Q&A shows work just like they do on the radio. You call in. I got several callers sitting on the line right now. Patrons of the show get a chance to call in. We do these live, ask questions, talk about anything that is on their mind.

If you would like to join me for a live Q&A show, I would love it if you would. The way that you do that is go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, sign up to support the show there on Patreon, and then that gains you access to these live Friday Q&A calls.

I really love doing them and that's just a good way for me to meter the number of callers that come in. If I open it up to the whole audience, I'd have hundreds of callers. This allows me just to cut down on the numbers a little bit. If you want to talk to me, I guarantee you it's cheaper than any other possible way that you could possibly talk to me.

I invite you to do that. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. We begin with Jason. Jason, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, Joshua. Thanks for having this format and letting us call in. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. I'm new to the format, new to finding you a few months ago.

You've already had a huge influence on my life and our personal finances and my family. I just want to thank you for that. A couple of quick questions. I take it you're no longer in the U.S. and I haven't heard you say what part of the world you're in.

Is that public knowledge? That is not public knowledge. You are correct. I'm no longer in the United States. I've done my best to keep it off the Internet. I'm probably not nearly as cool as maybe some people think I'm trying to be. I'm not trying to be cool. But one of the things I've learned over the years is that when so much of your life is exposed publicly on the Internet, there are some unique risks and threats that come from that.

So it's been really nice. I've just tried my best to keep things off the Internet as best possible. So no, I don't talk about where I am right now, but I am outside of the United States. That leaves what, 218 other sovereign territories to pick from? Something like that.

Thank you for sharing that. Next question is, where do you think the U.S. economy is headed? That's an interesting question. I'll give you my opinions and I'll give them clearly. But of course, that's a hard question to answer. So, let's start with reasons to be optimistic and hopeful and let's be realistic.

Because I think that a lot of times when people answer this question, they're just simply unrealistic. The United States has the world's largest economy, very significantly, the world's largest economy. And the United States has a lot of things right with it. For example, in the United States, it's very easy to start a business.

You don't need to file a bunch of forms. You don't need to. It's simple. I mean, anybody can start any business, any random day of the week. And they don't have to do a single thing. You don't have to file a single form whatsoever. You can just simply start a business and then you file a Schedule C at the end of the year.

And that was your business that you started. If you want to open an LLC, you can usually do that in about 20 or 30 minutes on most states and their website with very, very modest fees, modest paperwork requirements, etc. And so the U.S. is very business-friendly. Many of the laws in the United States are fairly business-friendly.

And so, on the whole, I think that the United States offers a lot for business. The justice system is fairly predictable. There's a stable culture, more or less. Generally, there's not a lot of risk of cultural uprising, not a lot of risks of major kind of civil war type of things.

And so those are good reasons to think that the United States has a bright and optimistic future. If you look at the inherited capital that the United States has, of the intellectual capital, and even just the culture of innovation, the culture of invention, it's pretty powerful. When you look at the United States and you start looking at major inventions, major companies, the United States is an absolute business powerhouse.

But as I see it, a lot of that strength is inherited strength, and a lot of those things are in decline. And so when I study history, what I see throughout history is that countries often follow similar paths to companies and families. Almost every language and almost every culture has some variation of the English saying of "shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves" in three generations.

The idea being that the first generation earns the wealth, the second generation watched the first generation earn the wealth, and they developed some skills and some knowledge, and they kind of maintained the wealth. But by the time the third generation came along, they were so far removed from the hard work and the savings and the frugality that the first generation needed, that unless that family was able to institute a very special culture, by the third generation the wealth is squandered.

And that seems to be a global phenomenon. Well, if you study history, I see the same thing happen in countries and also in companies. Now companies are a little bit different. There are companies that can extend on for a long time, and there are countries that can extend things on for a long time.

But when you see countries start going through a set of changes in their culture, then I think in time it's almost inevitable that there will be a downfall or a sliding down. And so although currently the United States is still the top dog, I don't think the United States is going to be the top dog over the coming decades.

That's my personal opinion. I don't think anything's going to happen in the next few years. But in the coming decades, it's very hard for me to see how the United States stays on top in the business world, etc. Taxes in the United States. The United States up until 2017 with President Trump's tax reform, the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017, the United States had the highest corporate tax rate in the world.

U.S. personal income taxes are not the highest in the world, but they are extremely high. And what worries me is the reason why those taxes are high. There was formerly in the United States a culture of admiration and respect for those who are entrepreneurs, for those who are business people.

There was an appreciation of wealth and a respect of wealth. In the United States, one of the best ways that you could gain respect was to build wealth, and that was a culture that honored the hard work and the sacrifice necessary to build wealth. Or at least that's how I see it.

Now, what's happened, though, is we've gone from really respecting wealth as a culture to wanting to tear down the wealthy. There's been a strong political movement in the direction of anti-capitalism, the direction of kind of a leftist socialist type of set of ideas and a set of ideals. And that's very, very unfriendly to business.

That's very, very unfriendly to individuals. The U.S. legal system is incredibly dangerous for individuals and companies. I live in fear as a U.S. American when I'm in the United States. I live in fear of being locked up in prison. Not that I'm doing anything. I live a scrupulously clean and as perfectly legal life as I'm possibly able to do.

But the United States has the world's highest prison population of individuals in prison. When you look at the litigious environment, it's stunning how many companies are sued, how many businesses are sued in the United States, how much liability there is in it as a culture. And then I think you see a number of markers of – I hesitate to use the word cultural decline, but just cultural malaise.

For example, you look at the United States and you see the birth rates are below replacement rates. That's a very worrying indicator. It indicates basically a culture that has lost its forward confidence, its willingness to press forward and build. When people stop having babies, one of the reasons they stop having babies is just they don't have anything to build.

And so they say, "Well, we don't need many more of us." The United States itself has lost that. The United States is not really a leader in anything that I can see other than in prison population. There's not really anything where the United States is saying, "This, we're going to do this." When's the last time there was any kind of meaningful reform?

I can't think of any meaningful reform or any kind of meaningful social change or social issue. The things that the United States is the leader in, we murder more of our babies than any other country in the world and have the world's most liberal abortion laws. We commit more wars and spend more money on military spending than any other culture in the world.

These are not positive effects. And then you look at the legal environment, you look at the erosion of freedom. The things that I used to appreciate about the United States was the stand for freedom. You would always grow up as an American, you grow up in this context where people say, "Support the troops because they preserve our freedoms." I can't find a single freedom that hasn't been basically destroyed if not just continually eroded of all of those things that our forebears took for granted.

Right now, people's freedom to assemble, freedom to protest, freedom – I mean, it's crazy what's happening right now in the midst of the pandemic. And so, not all of those things are financial. But I think that there is going to be a financial component of them. And then when we turn to things like government finances and just the finances of the people, the wealth in the United States is held in a tiny handful of pockets.

The majority of the people in the United States are living paycheck to paycheck. I think that's not a systemic problem, but I respect those who disagree and argue that it is a systemic problem. I see that as a cultural problem that many people have not been told and taught how to accumulate wealth because the virtues that lead to wealth have not been emphasized.

And so, you see the same thing happening in the corporate environment. Right now, when you look at the middle of the pandemic, I think it's stunning just how exposed all of the major companies in the United States seem to be. Now, there are a few who are doing well, but the basic culture in the United States of business culture, especially among large public-traded companies, has not been a culture of careful, long-term planning, of multi-century thinking.

It's been a culture of quarterly to quarterly results. And you've got financial firms that come in and perform financial leverage operations and take a perfectly good company, buy it up, split it up, debt it up, and then it goes bankrupt. As you see companies all over the place going bankrupt right now.

Big name brands, right? You've got Neiman Marcus and J.Crew in the fashion industry. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, we could go for dozens of – there's going to be so many companies that have become bankrupt. Why are they bankrupt? Well, the same culture that's expressed in the personal culture is filtered over to the business culture.

And so, these are not firms that are run with a multi-century vision. They're not firms that are run carefully and conservatively and prudently. These are firms that are run quarter to quarter for maximum profits for the minimum time. That's not a culture that lasts. Those are not virtues that last over time.

And so, when I add on to that government debt, when I add on to that massive overspending, when I add on to that massive political move in the direction of spending other people's money, as I see it, the basic principle behind most politics today is greed. It's greed for other people's money.

And it's just a matter of how much of other people's money we're going to take and what we're going to take it for. The Democrats want to take people's money and give it to poor people for health care. The Republicans want to take other people's money and spend it on the military, right?

The same saying. At the end of the day, it's other people's money. There's no basic principle of respect or of limited government. And it's basically just the continuation of the last century of progressivism. So, for those reasons, I look at it and I say, "I don't see a bright future here." And so, what I've been doing over the last few years is seeking to systematically disconnect myself and disconnect my children from the need to be dependent on the United States.

Because while the United States is in decline, as I see it, I expect that decline to be fairly slow. But there are a lot of places in the world where countries and cultures and individuals are looking and they're saying, "We understand why things work and how they work." So, while the United States is adding constant new taxation, there are countries in the world that are limiting taxation.

There are countries in the world that you can go to right now and pay no more than 10% on your income, no matter how much you make. Of course, there are tax havens where you could pay 0%, but those are very few. But there are tons of very livable places where you can go and pay 10% of your wages in taxes.

You can pay nothing in corporate taxes or pay much lower in corporate taxes. There are places where they're building cultures that are stronger. So, as I see it, unless there is a strong religious revival, and I use that term thoughtfully and carefully. What I mean is, the reason I say religious revival is because if you look at the United States, much of the growth that has happened in the United States came from religious revivals.

And there was a Christian culture in the United States that built a framework for prosperity. And we talk about the Protestant work ethic, it's the Christian work ethic. You talk about respecting your neighbor and minding your own business. Those were values that flowed from the religious character of the early American pioneers.

And then, as there have been various religious awakenings, the various great awakenings in the United States, those things had a big influence. Well, as I see it, we've mostly trended in the direction of selfish humanism. Basic idea is that I need what I need. And when you move in the direction of humanism, you don't have any good answers for some of these frameworks.

The political systems can vary depending on your background, depending on your opinions. You can try to make data and say, "Okay, we're going to study the data," but the data is hard to make those arguments on. And so I think there's just going to be, unless there's a broad scale religious revival, a broad scale transformation, a broad scale rediscovery of some kind of really productive ethical system, I think there will continue to be a long term malaise.

I don't think there will be a collapse personally. I think that's unlikely. I think you're just going into a long term malaise. And I don't see the growth prospects for the United States generally. That lines up with a lot of analysts when they talk about stock market and long term growth prospects for American companies.

There are challenges all over the world. The population of the world is going to be contracting in the coming decades. That's really worrying when you have a system that's built on constant never ending expansion. But there will still be opportunity, right? I'm not scared to live in the United States.

I wouldn't be scared to take advantage of the opportunity of the United States. But generally speaking, those are some of the reasons that I look at it. And I'm pretty – when we stretch out over decades, I'm fairly pessimistic right now. Not in the short term, other than – I mean, obviously we have to deal with this pandemic.

But I don't think these are short term things. But when I look forward 30 years, I don't expect 30 years from now the United States to be nearly so dominant as it is today. That's not necessarily a bad thing. If we look, a good analog would be the British Empire.

If you were to go back a couple hundred years and you were to be part of the British Empire, you had a global empire. The sun never set on the British Empire. And if you were to look at the United Kingdom of today, it's a shadow of its former self.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a changing thing. And so that's kind of what I expect for the United States over the coming decades, at least as I see it right now. You unmuted yourself, Jason. Those are my thoughts to answer your question. Awesome. Thank you.

Thanks for the thorough answer. That's great. Anything else to follow up? Nope. That's it for today. Thank you. Well, now you've got to tell me what you're going to do with that information. What do you think? Oh, man. I'm trying to take myself out of the little world that I live in and look at the bigger picture.

Sometimes that's hard to do. So that's one thing I really enjoy about your content is looking at a bigger world picture of what's happening. And you seem to have a lot of knowledge about other countries, cultures, economies, and I always enjoy hearing your feedback. Well, we'll see. I just think that a lot of times people have this idea that, you know, for example, my favorite, right?

There's always the phrase, don't bet against America, right? There's always the phrase, don't bet against America. And I appreciate that. I think there's a real truth to that. And what you're talking about when you say don't bet against America is you're talking about this tremendous culture, this tremendous tradition of stunning success in so many ways.

Now, what are the reasons for that success? Well, some people would argue they're accidents of geography. For just simple examples, if you look at the United States, the United States has a stunningly productive network of rivers. That was a major thing in early development of early American industry, the fact of the river system in the United States.

If you look at other large countries, you look at Russia, you look at Canada, you look at Brazil, all of them have much, much bigger just impediments in the simple geography versus the United States. The United States had a tremendous resource of natural wealth, of natural resources that many other countries simply don't have and tremendous diversity.

You can, some people look at cultural things, right? You had the constitution or you had the founding cultures of the United States. That's, I think, really relevant. I don't think that those cultural things are not relevant. You have the tremendous energy that came from this incredible culture that built a free culture that welcomed the greatest people from all around the world with an open immigration system.

I look at it like if you want an example of decline, just look at the challenges with the immigration system in the United States. It's the hardest country in the world to get into and it's crazy. To me, the entire idea of that is a crazy, crazy idea and yet it's become so politically entrenched now that most of the right-wing Republican part of the United States political system basically is almost totally against immigration.

Now, they say we're against illegal immigration, but it doesn't – the whole concept of illegal immigration was a socialist concept from the early 1900s. It's just crazy for a country not to welcome in the best and the brightest that want to come there. To me, that's a sign of the times.

That's one of the many indicators that you look at and you say this is not a self-confident culture that's pressing forward. This is a culture that's scared, that's on retreat, that's trying to build walls around itself to keep people out. Why do people want the wall? To keep people out.

Well, because they're abusing our system. It's not true. But even if it were true, we'll change the system and make a system that rewards makers rather than takers. But nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to cancel the taking system. They just want to keep people out of the taking system.

And so, just not really serious. On these issues, there's not really any meaningful difference between the political factions in the United States. Everyone is trying to retreat and build walls and it's not a self-confident culture or a self-confident country that's pressing forward with a bold vision. And so, when you look back, to me, I think some of the things that made the United States so prosperous are pretty clear.

That they're pretty obvious and yet on almost all of those metrics, we're going in the opposite direction. And so, I don't expect any kind of short-term thing. But if I'm 50 years from now and I'm in my 80s, I will be shocked if the United States is still the top dog.

I mean, even – sorry, I'm going on and on. But I'm just giving you examples of things that you see. When's the last time the United States won a war? The United States hasn't won a war since World War II. And that war in and of itself was incredibly destructive.

One of the reasons the United States prospered so much though is because none of the fighting took place on American soil. So, Europe was destroyed. Asia was practically destroyed. The United States, none of the fighting took place on American soil. And so, the United States gained with this massive financial expansion.

But that's the last time the United States has won a war. Since then, just never-ending war, trillions and trillions of dollars and never a single victory. Never – the US military can't win a war anymore. And so, like when you start going through these things from – once you get out of the patriotic bubble, once you get out of the, you know, we're the best and we're always the best and don't bet against America, you got to look and say, at some point in time, that just doesn't hold true.

I think of it like this and I'll wrap up with this, Jason. I think of it like this. If you – let's say there's a world-class fighter, a boxer or a UFC fighter or someone like that, a world-class fighter. And they're in their prime. And you see somebody who in their teenage years is just, you know, working – they're working hard.

They're lifting weights. They're running. They're training every day. And they start to put together a string of victories. And they get into their 20s and maybe their 30s, whatever the prime of life is for a fighter. And they're tough and they're strong. And they win this string of championships.

Well, what if they stop training just the way that they did? What if they start saying, "Well, I'm a world champion"? They're going to start to suffer a little bit. And they have this whole wealth of experience that because of their experience, because of the years of fighting and the years of training, they have a lot that can be drawn down, a lot of reserves that can be drawn down, a lot of goodwill from their body.

But at some point in time, those things are going to be depleted. Unless they're brought in and constantly growing, they're going to be depleted. And then at some point in time, there will be another fighter who comes along who has not been depleting, who has been working and working and who has been studying what made that first fighter so great.

And then they'll come up and they'll say and they'll go up against that fighter and at some point they'll beat him. There's nobody that's unbeatable forever. So a country doesn't have to age biologically like a fighter does. But I think the analogy still holds true, that if a country is conscious of what made it great, the protection of individual liberty, the protection of business liberty, the elimination of onerous regulation, a solid financial system, a system of governance that rewards people for risk and punishes people for business failures, then you could expect that a country could continue to grow.

But what's been happening is the United States on many of those metrics has turned away. And so for decades we've been kind of pulling on the results of that, pulling on the years of success, pulling on the fat pockets, pulling on the status of being the world's bully with the biggest military and all of that to kind of throw our weight around the world.

We've been pulling on those things. But in the meantime, other countries have been studying, studying what's worked, what's been effective. And they've started to say, "We're going to be training." And meanwhile, the United States looks like an aging drunk fighter who says, "Well, I'm still big and tough," but he sees himself as lean and mean, but in reality he's fat.

He's still got some muscle underneath the fat, but he's fat and he's old and he hasn't trained much at all. And yet nobody is willing to come along and say, "This ain't going to work." So that's the world as I see it. Do with it what you will. To me it just seems, especially with the probable imposition of significant new levels of taxation, to me it just seems wise to recognize where we are, use the United States for where it's good for you, but then make plans where your wagon is not hitched just to the United States.

With $4 trillion of massive overspending, make sure that you and your children are not on the hook to pay that money back unless there's some kind of reward. Go to Andy in Georgia. Andy, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Andy in Georgia. All right, Andy, we'll come back to you.

Denver, Colorado, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Lost Denver. All right, we go to Washington State. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi, Joshua. Thanks for taking the call here. I know you're concerned with whole life insurance. You've talked about it a little bit in the past.

I haven't heard you talk a whole lot about it, though. I've recently been, in the last year, looking into the finance aspects of whole life policies, and I'm curious on your thoughts on using dividend-paying whole life insurance as a place to store money, as less concerned with the death benefit and more concerned with the cash value and essentially financing your life from the policy rather than from a savings account.

There's a whole world out there about that, but I haven't heard you speak to it at all. So, I'm interested in your comments on the subject. When I used to sell whole life insurance, I always tried to be thoughtful in how I positioned it in the specific way that I sold it.

The reason I did was it was actually a major impediment to me of joining the insurance industry. Prior to joining the insurance industry, I had been fully convinced that buy term and invest the difference was the only way that any rational person would ever get involved in life insurance.

I was a Dave Ramsey acolyte. I was a personal finance aficionado. If you survey the world of personal financial advice, you will generally find broad agreement that buy term and invest the difference is the superior way for someone to own insurance. Because I was convinced that it was the superior way that someone could own insurance, it was actually a moral and ethical question for me of joining the insurance business because I didn't know if I could ethically sell something that I didn't believe in, to use the language of belief.

So I undertook when I was interviewing around in the insurance business, I interviewed with a company, I interviewed with Primerica at the time. I think they're still called Primerica. It was A.L. Williams Life Insurance Company that became Primerica. I interviewed with them and Primerica is well known for being exclusively a buy term insurance company.

They don't actually offer any type of policy other than term life insurance. There might be another company or two out there that does that. I'm not aware if that's true, but certainly Primerica made that their marketing shtick. And so I talked with the Primerica representatives extensively. I'd read A.L.

Williams' book on the subject. A.L. Williams back in the, I think it was the '80s, made his entire business on arguing against permanent life insurance. Along the way, I also interviewed with some of the companies that do a lot of whole life insurance business. And I wound up joining Northwestern Mutual, which is one of the biggest whole life insurance sellers in the business.

And as part of the interview process, I questioned all of the different representatives that I interviewed with extensively to try to understand the product. And in that interview process, and as I studied it, I became convinced that whole life insurance was not an unethical product, that it was not an immoral product, that it wasn't a question of morality of selling whole life insurance versus selling term life insurance.

I became convinced that most of the time, the reason that people were unhappy with whole life insurance was because there wasn't a good fit from the fundamental attributes of the policy and what people expected it to do. And over the years, I wound up becoming pretty deeply knowledgeable about life insurance.

I have a chartered life underwriter financial designation, which is a specialist financial designation in life insurance. And I sold a lot of life insurance. And I studied a lot of policies. And along the way, as I went through that process, I kept that conviction and I maintained that conviction, that there was nothing that was ethically superior of one thing versus another, but there was a matter of a good fit for the financial planning circumstances.

And most of the frustration that people have with permanent life insurance is a frustration about it being oversold and sold to do something that it just doesn't do well. Now, thus far, I've not addressed kind of the bank on yourself world or the infinite banking world. I've over the years, I've kind of gone back and forth on my opinions on the infinite banking or bank on yourself perspective.

On the one hand, there's not really anything that's technically wrong about the infinite banking concept. When the representatives of that concept sell the concept, as I see it, they're largely correct in what they have to say. They don't let me from a technical perspective. Can you buy a large, overfunded cash value life insurance policy?

Can you put a lot of money into that policy? And then can you use the money that's in that policy to be in some way a form of financing for other things in your life? Yes, everything that they describe is legal. It is correct. It's not wrong. You can do it.

But as with the argument of buy term and invest the difference, I feel that the biggest downside of something like infinite banking is the opportunity cost. So let's explain it. What many people don't understand when they start getting into arguments, both just intellectual or philosophical arguments or arguments over business, over an investment product, is the importance of opportunity cost.

The importance of what you're not putting your money into if you choose to make a certain choice. So for example, if you are putting your money into the bank, into your bank, what you're often giving up is the opportunity to put the money into your Roth IRA. If you put the money into your Roth IRA, what you're often giving up is the ability to put money into your own business.

If you put money into your own business, what you're giving up is the opportunity to put money into a life insurance policy. If you put money into a life insurance policy, what you're giving up is the opportunity to buy gold coins. If you put money into gold coins, what you're giving up is the opportunity to buy rifles.

It just goes on and on and on and on. And so always what we need to do is talk about opportunity cost. And this is where, when people talk about buy a term and invest the difference, the argument, what they usually point out is the opportunity cost of purchasing whole life insurance is investing in the stock market.

And so what they'll often do is they'll often say what you should do is not buy a whole life insurance policy but rather put the money in the stock market. I think that's a fundamentally flawed argument because the performance metrics of cash value life insurance as compared to the stock market are radically different.

They're very, very different. And so you cannot ethically compare, in my opinion, you cannot ethically compare a whole life insurance contract to something like a stock market index fund. They are just radically different asset classes in terms of their basic function. If you're going to do that, then you should – you say, well, why would – it would be like comparing a stock market index fund to investing money into your own company.

You should know that this is a comparison but you can't compare the risk and the return potential of investing money in a stock market index fund in large publicly traded US securities versus investing in your own company. And so now we come down to the same problem of overfunded cash value life insurance policies and kind of the whole life approach.

When I sold whole life insurance, the way that I positioned it – this was the sales language I used to use – is I positioned it as a good place for somebody's longer term safer dollars. I would say to a client, I was like, listen, a whole life insurance policy is a good place for some of your longer term safer dollars.

And those caveats are really important. Now, the language is elegant especially in the context of a well-run sales presentation but it's technically accurate. So where is life insurance – where does life insurance break down, whole life insurance break down? Well, it breaks down, number one, if it's done as a short term decision.

Like some other types of investment classes, the costs of life insurance are front loaded. So an example would be buying a house. The costs of buying a house are generally front loaded. When you buy a house, you'll usually pay real estate commissions on the transfer. There may be recording taxes.

There may be financing fees. Often when you get a house, you may have to invest money into it, fixing the roof, painting the walls, replacing the septic system, redoing the landscaping, fixing the drapes. And so from a pure financial perspective, houses usually don't work out very well on a short term basis.

And that's the same risk that whole life insurance policies have. Whole life insurance policies have a lot of money that's front loaded, a lot of costs that are front loaded to them. Where somebody winds up paying heavy commissions, the insurance agent gets a huge portion of their commission in the first year.

Commissions for the insurance agent range from about 50% of the first year premium up to as much as -- well, with whole life insurance, it would generally never be 100%. With term life insurance, sometimes it's in excess of 100% of the first year premium. But it can be basically up to 100% of the first year premium depending on the company.

That's a heavy commission rate. And so all those -- the insurance company takes those costs out up front. And you pay for that in terms of a very slow cash value growth in the beginning. Also, the mortality and expense charges are very heavy in a life insurance contract in the beginning years.

And so because the insurance company has to take a huge amount of that money and set it aside in reserves in case you die. And so when you're looking at a life insurance policy from a purely cash value perspective, it does not work well in the short term. And that's why when you say to me, "I'm going to ignore the death benefits.

I'm not that interested in the death benefits," I get concerned. Because you got to care at least a little bit about the death benefits. Otherwise, life insurance doesn't really work. Because fundamentally, life insurance is about the death benefits. Now, once you get into a policy a few years, once you get five years, eight years, ten years into a whole life insurance policy, the numbers can start to get better.

But it's frustrating in that short term to have whole life insurance policies. Now, do the companies that market the infinite banking or bank on yourself perspective, do they do a decent job of mitigating it? Yes. And they do a decent job of mitigating it by using overfunded policies where you put excess premiums in.

And the benefits of excess premiums are what's called additional premium in the lingo of life insurance. The benefit of that is additional premiums either completely bypass commissions for the agent and/or they substantially limit commissions. So the commission rate on additional premiums might be 1% or 2% instead of 50% when the policy is structured with a high level of additional premiums.

So they mitigate that, which is good. But you can do that in any whole life insurance policy. There are reasons why you wouldn't want to do additional premiums. But additional premiums are a nice thing. And you can mitigate those cash value effects in the early years. What's the other thing though?

Longer term, safer dollars. The benefit of life insurance is that it's very, very stable. With a traditional whole life insurance policy, I'm not talking here about a variable whole life insurance policy. I'm not talking about a variable universal life policy. With a traditional whole life insurance policy, the actual performance of the cash value is very, very stable.

You'll generally have two numbers that you look at. You'll have the guaranteed cash value performance, which is generally horrifically bad in terms of its growth. But it's guaranteed growth. It's going to go up. And then you'll have the dividend performance or the projected performance based upon the performance of the insurance companies, which is generally okay.

But it performs more like a fixed income portfolio than it does a stock portfolio. And so you don't really have the opportunity for big growth in a life insurance policy. You have the opportunity for decent growth like you do with a fixed income portfolio. You don't have any opportunity for spectacular growth if you've got a bond portfolio.

You've got, okay, it's going to go up and down. It's generally going to be okay though over time. And that's how it works for life insurance. So how I view it is life insurance is not appropriate for the aggressive, really big wealth building that most people need in their lives.

It's just appropriate for the longer term, safer dollars, the safer money. Now, I love having life insurance. I own a not insignificant amount of whole life insurance policies on every member of my family. And I really like it. I really value having that life insurance money. But with regard to my overall financial portfolio, it's not everything.

It's not all my money. And the reason that I do it that way is because I get really nervous about not having lots of really aggressive things that I can do with money. I get really nervous about not having opportunities for the money to grow big time. I want the money to grow much, much bigger than I can be provided in a life insurance policy.

And so does the life insurance company or the representative who's selling an infinite banking concept, do they address that? Yeah, they say that I should use life insurance policy as a form of financing for those other more aggressive opportunities. I think that can work in some situations. For example, pretend that I have a life insurance policy with $400,000 of cash value in it and I want to invest in real estate.

I'm going to go to that life insurance policy and let's say I want to close quickly on a property. I can close quickly and take out $150,000 loan on the policy and I can take that $150,000. I can pay off and I can use it to pay for a property.

But then the question is what do I do then? Do I refinance the property or do I just keep the money out of life insurance policy? I don't want the money out of my life insurance policy for a long term. I want it out for a temporary period. And so my concern is that most investors who are pursuing that strategy don't understand the real cost to a life insurance policy of having the money out on loan all the time.

And so they're often far too aggressive. And many times I think the insurance agent is far too aggressive with regard to the amount of money going into it. You can understand why they would, right? If an insurance agent is paid a commission based upon a percentage of the premium, it's in the insurance agent's pecuniary interest to make that premium as high as possible.

But what I learned doing that business is that I was really good at selling and yet I wasn't really good at keeping things on the line for the long term. And I found out that a lot of people, I could be very motivating and a lot of people would sign up for big premiums.

But then six months later or a year later something would happen in their life and they couldn't keep it up, which brings me to another downside of life insurance. Life insurance is fundamentally inflexible. Now you can buy flexible types of life insurance such as a universal life policy. I don't think they're the best fit for that kind of concept.

I think you lose some significant safety with a universal life insurance contract that you have with whole life insurance. And so a whole life insurance policy is fundamentally inflexible. It's got to be, the premiums have to be continued on schedule according to the plan that's set out in the beginning.

And so when you combine these things, you can position them as benefits. The money is a great, grows well long term. It has some life insurance benefits. It's safe, right? It's guaranteed to go up. It'll go up, change the amount that it goes up, but it's guaranteed to go up.

And it's a forced savings plan. There are other benefits of life insurance that I'm just skipping over. The tax benefits, the fact that the inside buildup of cash value is not taxed on an ongoing basis. The fact that it'll eventually not be taxed if it comes out as death benefit, and it won't be taxed if it comes out as a policy loan.

However, also the creditor protection benefits are substantial if you live in a state that privileges life insurance policies such as the state of Florida. Those things are really, really beneficial. But for each one of those benefits, there's an offsetting opportunity cost. Longer term, well what about the shorter term investments?

And so what I worry about is I worry that people are putting money in life insurance contracts that would be better invested into their education. Or better invested into coaching to help them succeed in their career. Or would be better invested into their own business, starting their own business.

I worry, what about the safer dollars? Well safer dollars are valuable, but I worry that people are putting money into safer dollars that would be better invested into aggressive dollars. I worry that people are putting money into life insurance that would be much more efficient and much better creditor protection in their 401k or in their Roth IRA.

And so for these reasons, I'm neither a full-throated advocate nor a full-throated enemy. I view it as let's come down to the individual and walk through the options. And so I think that whole life insurance has a pretty decent place in most people's portfolio with some amount. For example, I keep most of my emergency funds in a life insurance contract.

I think life insurance contracts work really well for emergency funds. I keep money in the bank. I keep money in cash, in physical currency. But I keep the bulk of my emergency fund in a life insurance contract. Why do I do that? Well, number one, if I need the money, I can always just take it out.

I can do a withdrawal. I can cancel the policy and just take the money out. I can also take a loan against the policy. So I have ready access to the money. But chances are I'm probably not going to need the money. I'm pretty good at having enough other savings and I'm pretty good at foreseeing emergencies that I could probably cover most emergencies with my other cash savings, especially because I try to live pretty frugally.

I try to eschew debt whenever possible to keep my cash flow needs just to the absolute minimum. So I probably would never need it. But it's there for me if I did need it. What next? What if I did really come into an emergency? Well, I would go and use credit cards and I would use 0% credit card financing because to me that's a very, very safe form of financing that provides me the ability to spend money, to buy groceries, to pay for gas in my car.

And then if I needed to take the money out of life insurance policy, I can just go ahead and take it out and pay off the credit cards. And so I have a good backup for the life insurance. In my credit card course, which you can find at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store, I talk about how the worst place to be when you have credit card debt is to have lots of debt and no money.

And so you always want to avoid that. If you're going to have credit card debt, make sure you also have money. The mistake that people make is let's say they have $10,000 in the bank. They spend down their $10,000 and then they go into credit card debt. Well, that's bad because then you have no wiggle room.

Keep your $10,000 in the bank, go into credit card debt, and then use the $10,000 to wiggle your way out while you keep your financing at a very low rate. And a life insurance contract is a really good way to do that. And so what I love about it is it gives me a good source of emergency fund financing and it also has the benefits.

It's protected from taxes. It grows at a whole lot more than my savings accounts do or my money market accounts do. It's also protected from creditors. I don't want to have a ton of money sitting in a savings account unless it's there for a temporary period of time. Because if somebody sues me, they could get at that money.

Well, money in my life insurance contract is protected from the claims of creditors. So I like life insurance for many of those reasons. Also, financing, it does work really well as a financing vehicle, but it works well as a short-term financing vehicle. Let's pretend, as I said, $400,000 in life insurance policy or $200,000 in life insurance policy.

I can use the money, close quickly on a property. It doesn't show up as additional debt. It's my money. There's no credit report. There's no request as to why are you taking the money out. It's far easier to take money out of a life insurance contract than it is to take money out of a bank, shockingly enough, even though life insurance companies are also regulated as financial agents.

But you can take the money out. You can do whatever you want with it. So I can buy a house. I can fix the house up, and then I can refinance the house and go ahead and take the mortgage and then pay the money back in. So in summary, I'm all okay with life insurance having a place in somebody's financial arsenal.

It's a really useful tool that offers unique benefits that nothing else really offers. But it also has unique drawbacks that other types of things don't have. So if somebody is well-educated, they can use it in the right situation. But I don't think the right situation is for you to take your $4,000 salary and buy a $3,000 a month life insurance policy and put it all into that.

I don't think that the full-throated infinite banking concept is practical or advisable. I think there's too much opportunity cost. I would rather people invest their money more aggressively, buy more stocks, invest in their own businesses, buy land, buy rental houses, etc. And I'd rather the life insurance portfolio be kept a little bit more modest as a percentage of someone's income – sorry, as someone's wealth – because it does have some significant disadvantages that some other solutions don't have.

So there's my answer to you. I appreciate that. That's good thoughts. For my personal finances, I'm against stock market investing for largely the same reasons you are. So when I think about what to do with my money, my go-to is I'll pay extra on the mortgage. That's kind of a safe thing.

I don't know what else to do with it. When I discovered the infinite banking concept, I considered the whole life policy as essentially a – I don't want to use the word "risk-free" – but it's a vehicle to put money into that it's not going to go down. Like, my house has the potential to go down in value.

I can always take a loan against the house or sell the house or refinance HELOC in the future. But there's the risk of the equity market going down, whereas the insurance policy won't. I appreciate the comments on the opportunity cost. I just want to mention, too, I appreciate the holistic answer because my frustration with the life insurance lingo out there is comparing term and whole is completely different because at the end of 30 years, I either still have life insurance or I don't.

It's completely different. There's no question. I want to say one more thing. If I could get your comments on one more thing, a little bit more theoretical. Whole life insurance as a 100% reserve system – so in the United States and most banking around the world even, fractional reserve is the standard.

And from an economics perspective, especially Austrian, depending on where you come from on that, it's immoral, frankly. It's an unjust system. And using the whole life insurance as a 100% reserve system feels more ethical to me than a bank account. I don't know if you've thought about that at all or could comment on that.

Yeah, Nelson Nash, I think, did a good job. He was – when did he first start writing his books? I mean, he went through however many editions. First published in 2000. Yeah, I think he found an alliance there with kind of the Austrian school in talking about the fractional banking system.

I don't think it's wrong. I don't think it's necessarily wrong. That's one I haven't tried to take on for myself. I have so many weird hang-ups that I actually consciously put my head in the sand sometimes because I don't want to be aware of one more thing that's got to make me – give me some weird moral quandary that I don't know what to do with because I have so many of them.

It just makes my life difficult. So sometimes I confess that I choose to remain willfully ignorant. So to the point is I'm sympathetic to the arguments against fractional reserve banking, but I'm – just seems like the system that we live in. What I do think is interesting is there are other ways.

You don't have to just do it with life insurance. There are other ways where you can – there are other ways. Like, for example, a number of years ago, there was a guy that I followed. I think it eventually failed, but there was a guy that tried to bank in silver, and he created a silver bank.

There are people who've done gold banks, and you can still do this actually. You can establish gold deposits with an institution, and they'll give you – they'll do fractional amounts where you can access your own gold with a spending card, with a debit card. There are starting to be some real elements of this with cryptocurrencies.

Now that some of the cryptocurrency providers are coming out with opportunities to link a debit card to your crypto accounts where you can actually just swipe a card and go through the mainstream payment system, that's really exciting to me. There was some e-gold things, people doing that before, but those have mostly faded away.

So I'm sympathetic to it, but I guess maybe this is just an artifact of my formal training that I don't think much about those arguments myself. I think more about it in kind of a mainstream context of how does this investment asset work, what are the benefits of it.

What I would caution you is the reason I said longer-term, safer money. The most that your money is going to grow in a life insurance contract over time is basically going to be tied to fixed income rates of return. Because the vast majority of your portfolio with a whole life insurance contract is going to be invested in fixed income securities.

That's why people make those comparisons between whole life insurance to stock market, they don't understand. The life insurance company is fundamentally in the business of paying claims. And so in order to do that, they have an actuarial expectation of when they're going to pay claims. And they have to make sure that when a death claim comes in, they're ready to pay it.

Because that's their basic fiduciary responsibility is paying claims, be it death claims, hurricane claims, etc. Because of that, the life insurance company cannot take the risk of massive volatility in their portfolio. Just imagine you're running a life insurance company, and all of a sudden a global pandemic comes into play.

And now with that global pandemic, you have a plummeting stock market. And now all of a sudden you have massive numbers of insureds dying. You cannot take that risk if you're a portfolio manager for a life insurance company. You need a portfolio where the actuarial expectations are carefully tied to the performance of the account.

And you get there with primarily fixed income investing. Now what the big life insurance companies try to do is they try to find a little edge on the margin. So they say, "All right, we've got to have 80% of our portfolio invested in fixed income. But we can go ahead and do some big real estate projects." And so they'll finance a $642 million mortgage on a big shopping mall.

Or they'll buy a skyscraper, and they'll fix it up, and they'll flip it and try to make a few hundred million dollars on a flip of a skyscraper. They'll also do some stock investing. They'll do a little bit of stock investment. They'll do some private placements. Like they will do some to try to enhance their overall investment return a little bit.

But at the end of the day, the bulk of their portfolio is going to be invested in fixed income securities, treasuries, corporate bonds, investment-grade corporate bonds, because that gives them the ability to tie the actuarial expenses, the expectation of expenses for their portfolio to the investment returns. And so you're going to be fundamentally limited to interest rates on fixed income plus perhaps a little bit of a benefit.

And then you go in your life, and you say, "What does that mean? Does that mean 3%, 4%, 5%?" Well, it varies on the interest rate, right, depending on what rates are right now. But in a low-rate environment like we are right now, try to do a financial plan where you put the bulk of your life savings into a scenario where you've got 3% or 4% or 5% maybe max expectation of return of your money.

It doesn't work, and it especially doesn't work in an inflationary system where you know that over time, the Federal Reserve is going to do everything they can to goose inflation back to 2% or 3%. There's a war on savers right now, and if you're in a life insurance policy with the majority of your money, you're just flat-out a saver.

Now, does that mean that you have to go to stocks? I say no. It doesn't mean you have to, right? We have our concerns. I have my concerns. You have your concerns. I think those concerns should be honored. But that's not the only investment option that you can go.

The world of investments is wide open to you. You can invest in farmland in Ohio. You can invest in teak forests in Nicaragua. You can invest in a skyscraper or a condominium in Singapore. You can invest in rental houses in Miami, Florida. You can invest in private stocks of a friend of yours who's starting a technology company in Seattle, Washington.

You can invest in gold mines in Canada. Just because you say, "Well, I'm unsure about this general investing environment, and I'd like to think a little bit more carefully about where I put my money," doesn't mean you automatically have to go to life insurance. The world is open to you.

You can invest in gold coins. You can invest in guns. You can invest in your own business. There's nothing wrong with saying, "I'm going to start a business, and I'm going to start a string of pizza franchises, and I'm going to buy land." That's a perfectly functional investment plan.

Now, let's say that I had a guy who said, "I'm going to start a string of pizza franchises," or Jimmy John's or Subway's or whatever your franchise of choice is, a frozen yogurt franchise. Well, in that kind of system, we probably have enough return that now that guy could afford to put a huge amount of money in life insurance.

But if you're an employee, you can't take that. You cannot do that. Because if you're an employee, you've got to have more room to run for your investments or you're not going to build wealth. So either you've got to have a big income or a big kind of primary cash flow investment and then shelter that money on the side, or if you're going to be an employee with modest earnings expectations, then you're going to need more aggressive investments to build wealth.

I see no way that you can just – you can't build wealth if you're just an employee and you are with modest earnings expectations while simultaneously putting all your money in life insurance. I think you'll wind up being poor. Thank you for your comments, Joshua. I'm continually impressed with the breadth of your knowledge.

I appreciate your listening. Thank you. All right. We go to Dan in Zurich. Dan, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? I can hear you well, sir. Go ahead. Okay. So I'm turning 26 this year. And before the crisis, I applied for a master's abroad, which in Europe doesn't cost too much.

It's about 4K. So no need to go into debt there. Now with the current situation, I'm struggling to decide how much I should change my plans. Let's say to go extreme, I would just stick around where I am right now, defer the studies for a year, which is possible, and just work as much as I can to get more cash.

Because what I did so far is in between, I moved back to the parents because it's possible. I'm still single. So that was an option. So I cut the cost. I also have around 10K to my name. Some of it is invested. The rest is cash. And over the summer, I'm finishing the uni in about a month.

I'm still currently part-time employed and looking for full-time or even more than full-time, like additionally on the weekends over the summer, and then hopefully start the master's in September. The idea is to, as you said in your course, to have a higher starting income, the higher the education is.

So that's the situation at the moment. I don't know if that's enough. If you were to take a master's program, what would your area of study be in the master's program? It's pretty specific. It's human movement science research. It's two years. It's a selective program, so only about 20 people get in.

Alternatively, I could switch to a one-year master's, which is also human movement science, but not research. You're living in Zurich right now. Where would you anticipate studying? This is in Amsterdam. Okay. Can you work simultaneously with that master's degree program? It is unlikely. Are you making a lot of money with your job, or do you think there is a job opportunity right now available to you where you could make a lot of money?

If I dedicate my time to it, potentially yes, because in Switzerland there is plenty of opportunity and plenty of potential to earn money. Is your ambition to leave Switzerland at some point, or is your ambition to build a life in Switzerland? I'm not very much tied to here, although I grew up here.

I see the rumblings around here in Europe, especially now. Now it's accelerating, and maybe similar to why you moved away from your country. If you were to get this particular master's degree, does that qualify you for a career that you're really interested in? Yes. Do you have high earnings potential in that career?

It's pretty broad. From that particular master, you can go many different paths. You can go to consulting. A lot of graduates have built their own company. Other ones have gone actually into research. So yes, there is potential. Okay. Well, I don't have a perfect answer, but I'll give you the way that I would look at it just to speak practically.

Generally speaking, I think it's short-sighted for young people to go immediately from an undergraduate degree, a bachelor's degree, immediately into a master's or doctoral program. Because most young people have spent so much time in school that they don't actually have a firm idea of really what they want. Many people just become professional students.

Is that always a bad thing? No, in my mind it's certainly not. There are some people who know exactly what they want, and the course is laid out before them. Commonly you see this with something like a medical physician or somebody who has a real interest in a unique area of academic study.

They want to study philosophy or ancient Semitic languages or something like that. And they want to be an archaeologist. Well, the path is fairly laid out, and if they have an intense personal interest, then they're willing to press forward. But for somebody with more general interest who has just simply gotten a college degree and they chose something that seemed right, but it's not a real passion, I think getting a little bit of life experience, a little bit of work experience is really advisable.

There's real benefit, I think, in doing a gap year, in going traveling. In your case, you've been around Europe, going to South America or North America or Asia and spending some time getting some exposure to things that are different from your normal level of experience. Because I think that life experience helps to build somebody into a more mature, more realistic person where they have a better understanding of who they are.

Even if it's not something like traveling, I think work experience is particularly valuable. So those are my arguments against just going directly into a master's degree program. You see even that reflected in the entrance requirements for many master's and doctoral programs. Some programs really want somebody to have some experience.

Usually this comes in with a business school. A business school, especially an elite level business school, doesn't want somebody who's 21 years old and just graduated from their bachelor's degree program. They generally want somebody who's got some life experience, some business experience. So that's an argument against going immediately to a master's degree.

Now on the flip side, an argument in favor of going for a master's degree is that it's generally easier to do it when you are young than when you are older. It's generally much easier for you to finish a master's degree or potentially a PhD program before you are married.

If you're married, it's generally easier for you to finish that before you have children. If you have young children, it's generally easier for you to finish it when you have young children than when you have older children. And this is the challenge that a lot of people face when they think about going back to school at a later age.

For example, someday I'll probably wind up getting a PhD someday. I'm also interested in possibly getting a law degree at some point in time. The problem is that I don't really care about those things from the practice perspective. Like my interest in the law is to study it and find out all the ways that I'm wrong, my legal opinions, and I think it'd be fun.

Yes, it does add some career interest, but I'm more interested in being an entrepreneur. I don't know that I'll ever take a job again in my life, but I still want to get a law degree. But when I lay up the cost of the cost to my family and my children and my wife of the time that would be required for me to do that, even if I did independent study, there are schools that will do independent study.

I can get a law degree from a European school and do it through independent study rather than having to go and do it full time. It's just I cannot justify the expense of time. Similar things with something like a PhD program. I'm interested, but when I say, Joshua, you could just read about this stuff.

You don't need to go into a formal program and spend the thousands of dollars that it costs for a formal program. I can't justify the time. It's too high of a cost. Now, if I were 26 and if I were unmarried at 26 and I'm really interested in the subject, I would do it.

I would do it at night just because I would be interested in it. What else are you going to do with your time? So that's an argument in favor of going ahead and getting the degree. Now, let's go to an argument against getting the degree. An argument against getting the degree is what's the cost to you in terms of what you're giving up?

And what many people give up with pursuing academic schoolwork is they give up the opportunity to earn. And I think this is more expensive than most people understand. The argument that people posit is they say, listen, I'm going to be getting a higher income because I get the degree.

But then that's not always true. And that's often not true depending on the career choice. For a specialist, it is. For an engineer or for some kind of specialist who's able to get the degree and come out getting into a high-income job, it is true. But for most people, it's not as true as they think.

I ran the numbers one time. I don't have them in front of me. But I went back and I calculated what could an aggressive 18-year-old, somebody who is knowledgeable and aggressive, what could they earn from 18 to 22? And how far ahead could they be from 18 to 22 as compared to the 22-year-old who goes to four years of college or someone like you who's been three years of college and now you're 26 getting out?

I think it's better to get the job and start the earnings. Now, you can discount that if you're willing to go to school at night. So if you told me I can get a good job, I can earn a lot of money, and I can go to school at night, I think you should do that because that allows you to earn money while also finishing up the master's degree while you have the time to do it.

And I think that you could do that. Would it be hard? Yeah, it's hard. It's a big-time commitment. But you can do that. So I get nervous about people deferring their earnings, especially if they're not really sure about a school, in favor of get a job. Now, if you said this is something I'm interested in, this would improve my career prospects, well, now we're back to an argument in favor of it.

So one more thing. What about the timing of the economy? Right now, I would imagine it's more difficult for most people in most industries to get a job than it was six months ago. And so if you're looking around and you can't find a job and you can't get one easily, well, then getting more education is kind of a natural fit.

Many people in 2007, 2008 did that. They went ahead and got the master's degree, and they spent time in school doing it. The advantage that you have is it wouldn't put you into debt to get the degree. You could at least work enough to make your living expenses, pay the $4,000 for school in Amsterdam, and at least do that.

So that would be a good thing. If you can't find a job, there's no reason not to go ahead and take more training, especially if it's something that you're interested in. But, you know, I would try first. So in order, my preference, number one is I prefer you have a job and go to school on the side.

I think most people have the time that they could do that. Even if you can't do 40 hours a week, even if it's something like 30 hours a week, I think you get more out of your education when you're actually working in the field. At least do an internship.

Think carefully if you feel like you need more experience and test the job market out. If the job market is kind of frozen to you right now, then, yeah, I would do the master's degree. But if the job market is open to you, there's a real benefit of starting to make some money.

And unless you see, you know, you have a marriage prospect in mind right now, and you think that right away, you know, you might marry next year, I think that there's probably time to finish out the master's degree, even if it takes you three years instead of two. That's the best I got for you.

Right, right. So in terms of what you said about marriage, no, I think not. You're serious about the marriage and wife and kids really resonated with me. So I'm kind of changed paths there. And really, in the future, I know I want to have a family. I'm married right now.

So I'm staying single for a while. You mentioned the gap year after high school. I took a gap year, went to South America, did that during. I also started my studies in Canada. One year there was working during that year. Also here, when I came back to finish up my degree, I was working pretty much all the time.

So I got some experience, but these are always jobs that, you know, you can get if you work full time, you can earn 40, 50, $60,000 a year. But that's it's not a. I don't know, it's not a great job. It's just you work and you have a job.

You know, it's a very simple job. And that's my old self thinking, but I'm not sure how much different the whole situation is right now. How much obviously nobody knows, but this is a struggle to just keep thinking with the old mind or just switch it up completely. Here's what I think I would do.

Number one, you've already been accepted to this program. Is that correct? That's correct. And I have, I do have the possibility to defer for one year. And they're pretty choosy. This is a fairly specialized program. They don't take a lot of students, right? Yeah. Okay. So I wouldn't walk away from that.

I think that you have some work experience. You've got some random jobs. You've had some life experience. You've done some traveling. This is something that you're interested in. I think I would pursue it. What I would do simultaneous is I would test the job market. So go ahead and see.

Apply for some dream jobs. Maybe, I don't know what that looks like, but think about some dream jobs and know that, hey, my backup is I'm going to school. Like I'm going for a master's degree program. And see if you get a job offer. My guess is the job market is going to be very constricted for a good amount of time.

And so I think that you might find that. And it might be a very good time for you just to go ahead and take more training, especially because you've already been included in the system. The only other comment I would make for you is as you are at this stage of life, if you have interest in potentially in the future being able to be outside of Switzerland, then go ahead and consider that in the infrastructure of your overall life.

And so think about is there a way that I can do, you know, if you've studied in Canada, if there's a job opportunity like this in Canada, you know, move to Canada for a few years after you finish up the master's degree program and become a Canadian citizen. So you have an alternate citizenship.

You have an alternate country that you can move to or, you know, other places in the world as well. So think strategically and creatively because those are also things that you can do more easily at this stage of life than later. But I think I would, for the reasons you stated, I think I would pursue the master's degree program.

And then if you don't work, if you can't find a job that fits in well with it, at least pursue something, right? Pursue a little idea, a little hobby. At the very least, do what I described in the career and income course, which of course other listeners can find at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store.

But build your career website while you're working your way through college. Make sure that when you come out of this specialization, you've got 10 job offers from the plum job offers the world over. Because if you can use this time and you can use that to establish your professional reputation with a career-related website, with a career-related brand, a podcast, a blog, journal subscriptions, networks, etc., that very well could be and should be your part-time job while you're in school.

And so don't waste it. Don't just, don't do what most people do, which is just go to school and goof off the rest of the time. Really build it. And in that situation, a year or two to get the master's degree, especially when the economy is down, I think there's a good opportunity on the other side to come out with a good job.

So I think you should go to school. Okay. Thank you. One last thing. Will I be able to re-listen to this? Will it be uploaded? It will be on the podcast feed in about 30 to 40 minutes. Okay, perfect. And another thing, in terms of the Patreon and Facebook group, is there such a thing as an irregular program or is that an old description?

That is an old description that needs to be updated. So for now, just go to Facebook and search Radical Personal Finance Community Group and you can join the community group there. Okay. Thank you very much, man. I appreciate it. Thank you for being here, Dan. I appreciate your being here.

Thank you. All right. In conclusion, we go to Andy and George. Andy, I've got two of you on the screen. Did I get the right one? Hi, Joshua. Can you hear me? I can hear you well, sir. Go ahead. You got the right one. Sorry about that earlier. So I have sort of a, I guess maybe a little bit bigger picture question.

I have been kind of working through goals stuff. I read the goals book you recommended. I've been trying to think about that stuff, journal that stuff. And I have realized one thing that is missing in my life that I would like to have more of is to have relationships with people where I want to discuss big ideas with really smart people.

I don't have a lot of that in my life. And it seems to me that the best way to move towards that is to create content publicly in one form or another and sort of establish myself as somebody who likes to think about big ideas that smart people might want to talk to.

So my quest, I guess my first question would be, do you agree with that? And then how would you go about that as far as, how would you go through thinking about at this point in history medium, whether or not to try to do a side hustle or professional thing and make money or just have a blog for fun, that sort of thing.

Can you give me an idea? Do your interests go in a one specific direction or are they more broad? Extremely broad. So that's what's tough because is it possible to be a person of broad interests and create some kind of media that is interesting to other people? Certainly. You think of a broadcaster like Joe Rogan.

He's a man of incredibly broad interests, very learned, very smart. And he's been able to take his interests and build a massive media company that has exposed him to this incredibly broad network of people. It's amazing what he's done. Or you take maybe another, let's go with men who you would probably connect to, someone like Tim Ferriss.

Very smart man, very broad interests and has been able to take something of media and relay it to an area of to build a large media brand that has enhanced his reputation, enhanced his brand and allowed him to connect with fascinating people all over the world. Those are probably the examples of the kind of pinnacle people of what's possible with media.

Realistically, if we understand though the normal expectation, the normal expectation is you say, "Well, I'm going to create a podcast." It's probably going to be 22 people who are going to listen. And I would never, without a pre-established brand, I would never try to build any kind of media platform that was not very, very specific.

Radical personal finance, as I've previously discussed publicly, is far too broad in today's world. If I started radical personal finance afresh today, it's just too broad. It's not narrow enough to stand out in a more crowded marketplace than when I started the show. And so if you're going to create media, then I think you should focus in on one area that you're really interested in and exercise that one area because that's the only possible path I see to building the kinds of connections and relationships that you're interested in.

It's got to be one specific area that's going to grow. Now, that area could be many things. So let me give you one of the things that I have, one of the ideas that I've had. If I move to a new town and I were going to be settled in that new town and we're going to live there, one of the first things that I would do is start a media platform related to that town.

Now, if it's New York City, that's far too broad, right? There are too many people. But if it's a small little town and you live in a small town in wherever, then that town needs a media opportunity. Years ago, there was a guy in West Palm Beach named Aaron.

He had a platform. I assume he's still doing it. But his thing, there's a famous well-known street in West Palm Beach called Clematis Street. And he started a brand called A Guy on Clematis. And it started, I think, with a Twitter account, A Guy on Clematis. And Clematis is that one street in downtown West Palm Beach.

But he lives downtown. He worked downtown. And he would just wander around downtown and post things to his Twitter profile. And he would post things to Instagram. He would post things to -- he later started a blog, an email newsletter. And he started attending restaurants. And I don't know.

He's never talked about all the benefits he gets from that. But I tell you, number one, if I wanted to do something in West Palm Beach, the first person that I would reach out to would be him, Aaron, A Guy on Clematis. And I would immediately say, "Who do I need to know?" Because he is the guy in downtown West Palm Beach who's more likely to know or at least know where to send me more than anybody else I know.

And his network, his personal network is massive. He'll -- friends with the mayor, friends with all the business people. And I guarantee you he gets tons and tons of free stuff, free meals, free everything because of his media brand. And so if I moved to, you know, West Palm Beach, I would immediately start something like that.

I would start a media brand related to the specific place that I were involved in. And I would use that media brand as a way of getting to know people. I would do interviews. I would do little stories. I would, you know, just get involved in the local Twitter network, the local Facebook network.

And I would just be the guy who publishes other people's things. What that kind of media platform does, and I would encourage you to look at his to see what he's done over the years because that's just a -- it should be -- it can be an inspirational example.

What that kind of media platform does is it establishes you as a super connector. If we use Keith Ferrazzi's phraseology from the classic book Never Eat Alone on networking, what you want to -- the power of networking is when you become a super connector. When you become the kind of person who is interposed between different people and can connect people of a diverse -- from a diverse background.

That's a tremendously valuable business skill. I've talked about on the podcast how inspirational for me how to network with millionaires was by Thomas Stanley and so useful in my sales career. The ability to connect people is incredibly valuable. And so the way that you can do that is you can build that on a local basis.

So if I had broad interests and I wanted to meet people but I wanted to meet people in person, then I would do something like that. I would build a hyper local media brand. Very simple. It might be a podcast. It might be a YouTube channel. You can do the whole thing from your cell phone.

You're not talking about fancy stuff, just your cell phone, Instagram videos, Twitter videos, Facebook Live. Just -- but building a local thing, highlighting local people, exploring those local things. One of the things I considered doing years ago is I thought about starting a brand related to children. I got annoyed because I got all these children and I got annoyed that the majority -- if you read the weekly paper and you go and say, "Okay, Friday, what's the entertainment?" Very little of it is relevant for parents of children.

Very little of it is relevant for me. And so I thought, "You know what? I should start a brand in West Palm Beach, Florida with parents of children, stuff to do." And in that kind of thing, I would go around and I'd basically be a food critic. I'd be an activity critic.

And I would be able to create the kind of thing that I would want, which would help other parents, but I'd get free food. I'd get free activities. I'd get a great network. I'd make lots of great friends. And it would be awesome as a way for me to connect and build a network in a local area.

So if I had broad interests, that's how I would make it specific. Now let's flip and pivot. Let's say that you do choose one specific interest. You're interested in this smaller thing that could actually stand out in the media space. Well, I say go for it. Go for it.

But here's what I would do. So as soon as I record this show, I finish recording this show on Friday, May 15th at 3.30 p.m. Eastern Time. I'm going to publish this show to the podcast feed, and then I'm immediately going to record the inaugural episode of Radical Personal Finance en Español.

And I have a number of different reasons to doing it. I'm not going to let it take me away from my primary interest here in Radical Personal Finance, the English version, but it's something I've wanted to do for a while. So I'm going to start Radical Personal Finance en Español.

And I've been thinking a lot about, okay, here's a fresh start, a fresh brand, a totally new market, right, Spanish speakers, everything's going to be in Spanish. How do I do that and what would I do? Knowing what I know now after however many years of doing this show and building this brand, what would I do in the new brand?

And some of those things that I would do differently, I've actually brought over to what we're doing here. So I'll give you some things that I would do differently. The first thing is if I were starting over with nothing today, I don't think that I would start with an audio podcast.

Now, I'm glad I started with an audio podcast. And this is a little bit tricky because an audio podcast is still an awesome, awesome format. What is tremendously powerful about an audio podcast is the ability to connect very, very deeply with your listeners. Andy, you have a much deeper connection with me personally than you do with many other content creators that you know of because of the amount of time that you've spent listening to my voice.

If you had found me on something like YouTube or writing blog articles, you would have enjoyed some of what I had to say, but you wouldn't have had the deep level of connection that you have with me because you wouldn't have listened to the hours and hours and hours and hours of Radical Personal Finance that you've listened to.

And so that's what's really remarkable about an audio podcast is it allows you to create a really deep connection with your audience. But there are some real problems with an audio podcast from the perspective of building a brand. Let me give some other advantages, though, before I give the problems.

An audio podcast is easier to do well than something like video. There's a lower barrier of entry. Video requires more complex equipment. To do video editing well requires more complex skills than editing audio. It requires a lot more time to do something like video well. And so audio podcasts is good.

Let's say you're going to start that local, hyper-local brand. You can grab your cell phone, plug a microphone, a decent microphone into the bottom or just grab a decent audio recorder, go down and sit with somebody at a table in their office, and you can put that audio recorder right there, and you can record the audio and boom, you're done.

You can do a little editing, add an intro, and you'll have a great little podcast. Those are great. Audio can be consumed more broadly than other things because people can do things while they're listening to it. All of those who are listening to our conversation right now, they're doing something else.

They're driving, they're washing dishes, they're running. They're doing something else. They're not just listening, which is why they've stayed through now for 1 hour and 24 minutes because they're able to do something else while they're listening. So audio is great, but the problem with audio is it's not nearly as findable or shareable as other media.

Another problem is also that it's hard for people to take action. So let's talk about findability and shareability. Podcasts can be found pretty easily by people who are looking for podcasts, but podcasts are very hard for people to stumble into. Anybody who goes out looking for personal finance information, they're going to find my podcast, but every single day there's somebody who loves my show, who would very much like to share it with someone else, who has no practical way to share that show with someone else.

Because their family and friends just aren't podcast listeners. The number of podcast listeners is far higher than it once was, but it's not as big as the number of people who know how to watch YouTube videos or the number of people that watch Facebook. It's just not. And so because of that, podcasts are actually very hard to make go viral.

I'm not aware of really any podcast episode that ever goes viral. There have been a couple of shows that have gone viral. The most famous one, of course, was the podcast Serial. It hit the market at a unique time. But even there, it's far less viral than something like a video.

Last night I watched some random video that had been seen on Facebook. It was a guy making art on his back porch, and he drilled a hole in the bottom of a paint can, set the thing swirling over a piece of over a canvas and made the coolest looking art piece I've ever, a really cool looking art piece.

I don't want to be too hyperbolic. Really cool looking. Had something like 151 views, 151 million views of the little video. That's something that a podcast simply cannot get. There's no podcast out there that's got 151 million listens on a podcast episode. And so with video, there's a bigger opportunity to go viral, to meet people.

It's more shareable. But it's a different format. It's different than long form audio. And so what I've decided is I've sought to grow Radical Personal Finance. The thing I basically became committed, convinced of is if I were going to start over today, I would lead with video and back that up with audio podcasting.

Now what I don't think works really well is sending just long form audio to video. For example, I'm posting, the goal is to post every episode of Radical Personal Finance onto YouTube and onto Facebook as video, not just static image with audio, but actually as video. But that's not great content for those platforms.

Better content for those platforms is a two minute video, a six minute video, maybe a 20 minute video, but not hour and 20 minute long videos. But it's still better to have the video than not to have the video. I have lots and lots of listeners who exclusively listen to my show on YouTube.

I don't understand that. To me, that makes no sense. But that's what they do and I want to serve them. And yet the audience is much bigger in the world of video. So if I were starting over today, like with my new brand Radical Personal Finance, I would not exclusively do audio.

I would start with video as well. And that's what I'm doing with Radical Personal Finance in Espanol. It's going to be video in addition to audio. The next thing I would do is I would vary the forms of content. And so I think a really good quality media brand is going to have varied content.

Over the years, I've tried to focus on my major skill set, which was long form audio podcasting. Was that a right decision or not? I don't know. I've become a lot better at it than most people because I focused on it. But because I've not also supplemented that with other areas of exposure, everything from 60 second Instagram videos to 15 second TikTok videos to Snapchat when that was a bigger thing to YouTube to written content, etc.

I've just not had as big of an impact as I could have had. Now, that was my mistake. Not really a mistake. I just didn't feel like I could handle it more. But if I were starting over again from the beginning, I would not do just long form audio.

I would do long form audio, but I would have a very diverse array of media. And so I think it's much more important for you to build a media brand that has all of the offerings in the different ways that people want to consume than just one thing. Because my podcast listeners love my show.

But the number of people who love long form podcast is really, really small compared to the number of people who will consume other varieties of content. So what I decided last year is I said, all right, well, I want to serve people. And that means I can't just go with what I'm good at.

I got to serve people with what they want. The next thing is about what about people taking action. So a podcast is really strong in terms of consumption where people will consume significant amounts of time of it. But it's really weak with regard to taking action. Only a tiny percentage of my listening audience actually takes action on anything that I ask them to do.

If I ask them to leave a review, which, by the way, I would ask you if you've not left a review for Radical Personal Finance, please do it. But the number of people do it is tiny. Or if I say to buy something, the number of people to buy something is very, very small.

And it's hard because generally people are doing something with while they're busy. Right. They're listening to the show while they're driving. They're listening to the show while they are running or something. And they can't take action. I can't stop while I'm running and all of a sudden go and leave a podcast review for Josh or I can't go to Radical Personal Finance dot com slash store.

And buy his stuff. But if you connect with people on multiple platforms, then now all of a sudden you can serve up ads. And so the best way to do it if you're starting a new brand is to provide all the different varieties of content. But to provide them in a way that people are going to connect with you on multiple platforms.

So you want to make sure that you have a good website. You want to make sure that you have a good email list and an active email list that people care about with unique content on the email list. You want to make sure that you have a podcast. But you also want to make sure that people are connected with you on Facebook, on YouTube, on Twitter, on Instagram.

And then what can happen is now you can leverage a podcast where it's really powerful with long form audio content to build that relationship. But you can also be connected with people in those other formats where you can market to them effectively. So it's much more effective if people are listening to your podcast which they can find on iTunes or Spotify everywhere that they're listening.

It's also better if they're also following you on Facebook at facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Because then when that happens, when you have something to sell, a new offering, or you're advertising a meetup, or you're selling a course, or you're advertising a book, now you have the ability to buy a Facebook ad and target that person much more effectively.

And so what I would advise you is first niche down really, really small. If you have broad interests, then express those broad interests hyperlocally. Otherwise, choose one area of interest and then express that niche interest, that hyper niche interest broadly. Either of those are good, but don't just start with the Andy show, you know, when no one knows who Andy is.

You can't do it. Tim Ferriss can do it because everyone knows who Tim Ferriss is. You can't do it with Andy. I couldn't do it with Joshua's name. So that's number one. Number two is choose one kind of primary area to excel in. Say, what am I going to do?

Am I going to write stories? Am I going to create really interesting audio work? You can do audio and you can do it so well. If I were going to do that hyperlocal thing, I would study the storytelling, use the NPR storytelling techniques, right? Do what? Do, create a This American Life presentation.

Just awesome, awesome stuff that they can do. And you can do it too. There's actually NPR has a great website. I forget what it is right now, but they have a whole training site for people who want to be NPR style reporters. And they tell you what equipment to use.

They train you on how to do it. It's all free. You can find it if you go looking for it. But plan to build out. So while you are building an audio podcast, simultaneously go ahead and make sure that you're also active on social media. Make sure that you're also doing live video.

Simultaneously, make sure that you're recording at least some video of your conversations so that you can publish that to the places where it's more likely to be found than just the audio podcast. Because, you know, a number of years ago, what's his name? The guy who runs the brand, Sam, not Sam.

The guy in California who runs the big brand about helping people make money online. Blanking on his name. Anyway, he wrote a book called Be Everywhere. And his book, Be Everywhere, is basically the argument was you got to be on all the platforms. I resisted that for a long time.

I was wrong. I didn't see how I could do it. It wasn't that I didn't think it was a good idea. I just couldn't do it. I didn't think I could do it. But still, at the end of the day, I was wrong. And so with my new brand, that's what I'm doing.

I'm going to be everywhere. And if you're choosing a format, as I record this in May of 2020, what I would say, if there's any possible way that you can do it, I would encourage you focus on live video. Live video is heavily promoted right now by the various networks, Facebook and YouTube, very heavily promoting live video.

So you can test, you can engage with that a little bit. And live video also has some benefits of being a little bit more forgiving as a medium than pre-edited video. People are willing to put up with a slightly lower production quality than pre-edited video. And so with Radical Personal Finance en Español, I'm leading with live video.

I'm good at speaking extemporaneously. I've just spoken for an hour and 34 minutes extemporaneously, and it's been pretty decent. So I'm good at speaking extemporaneously. It's a skill I've built, and so I'm going where I'm good. If I weren't good at that, I would do something else. I would write or I would edit.

But if you have the ability and if it fits in at all to your idea of a brand, I think what makes sense right now, May 15, 2020, start with live video. That gives you video and also audio that you can pull, and it's a format that you can do some really interesting things with.

And then supplement that with all the other stuff as well. That's my advice, Andy. That's how I would handle it if I were starting over. Thanks, Joshua. I think that's really great advice for starting a business or media brand. I guess maybe I wasn't super clear with my question.

I am not sure I want to do all that much work for a hobby, and I am not sure that I want to have a media business. I do want to have more relationships with deep thinkers. Just for example, the first two topics you covered today, I've read multiple books on those and thought about them.

I've never really discussed it with anyone because no one else, everybody else I know, I'm like, "Hey, here's this complex topic that I've read five books on. What do you think about it?" And they're like, "Well, the nightly news said," and that's all I care to say. I guess I have started a blog once in the past.

I didn't get much traction, probably mostly because I quit writing on it. But I did develop a little bit of a friendship with Justin Carroll back when he was doing the Privacy and Security podcast. And to me, that was an excellent outcome from that is that now I have this connection to this smart, deep-thinking guy that I can email with questions and talk about things and whatnot.

And I would rather have got that than have 200 people that I don't know, or 2,000 or 10,000 or whatever, giving me thumbs up on Facebook, if that makes sense. So, do you think that advice still kind of holds? So, then here's what I would do. Do you want those people to be local?

That would be nice. I'm not sure there's enough people in my area with similar interests to have much of a group of friends like that in this area. So, if you're not wanting to do like a big media thing, I wouldn't bother. I would just join the Facebook groups that are relevant and join the other people's platforms that talk about the issues that you care about.

I don't think you need to create your own media just to do that. What I think is most important is to try to do something locally because for all of the benefits of international distribution, which is awesome, right? I love it. At the end of the day, what I crave is local.

The things that I enjoy the most about radical personal finance is hosting meetups because then I can see people and I can talk to real people. And media, for all of its benefits, and it does have tremendous benefits, it does not replace an actual flesh and blood relationship. And that's far more important.

And so, if your interests are diverse, what I would do, if you have the time, is just start, try to figure out some way to start a social club of some kind in your local area to talk about the issues. One of the things that I think is generally missing, maybe it's out there and I've never found, just looked for it, but it's a little hard for me right now with children.

But if somebody next to me, a couple miles down the road, started at the local coffee shop, they started a weekly or a biweekly kind of intellectual club where they brought in a speaker to talk about a specific subject. And they brought in a college professor or something like that, a philosopher's club, so to speak.

I would be there as much as I could. Now, there are some of those that I think have been done well. But if you could find a little coffee shop, a little co-working space, maybe a cigar bar, something like that, a quiet bar, a quiet pub, something like that, and set up a sound system and invite people to come and listen to those.

I think that would be the kind of forum that I would build because I'd be interested in it. And I believe that forum, that kind of forum, it was well, those kinds of things were well attended in the past because people would be interested and intellectually curious on a specific topic and they would go and look into that.

And so, but today a lot of that in-person like social night out has been replaced by a digital equivalent. Now, in the era of social distancing, I don't know if that works, but that's the kind of thing that I would try. I would get a sound system. I would arrange somewhere that I could do it.

I would probably have it. I would put all three together, right? If you can find a little downtown area where there's a cigar bar on one side, a coffee shop on the other, and a small pub where people can order drinks and appetizers, it's perfect. And just kind of create it and publish it with meetup.com.

Promote it in a local area. Try to get some college students. Try to get some philosophy clubs. Plug into what you can find and then present interesting topics. And then I would go ahead and create the media from that. I would record it. The reason I would set up a sound system would be so that I could make sure that there were microphones to help people listen, of course.

But then now I can easily record it. I can create a podcast. I can easily create a video feed of that. We can easily put that on live and we can harness the value of that on a hyper-local level. So, that's what I would try. But if your vision is different, then go with your vision.

But I think those things are worth doing and they have the possibility of building some local relationships, which I think is ultimately the most valuable. Okay. Thank you. That's good. My pleasure. All right. That is it, my friends, for today's show. That's it for the questions. Let me just close out with a little bit of self-promotion, which I would love for you to help me with.

Number one, I am getting ready to go. I'm going to go and record Radical Personal Finance en Español. There will be a podcast feed. That podcast feed will be up in a few weeks. So, if you're listening to this in, say, June, then that podcast feed will be available for now.

Find the page on Facebook or on YouTube and subscribe there. It will be a live video there on Facebook and YouTube. So, if it's working right, it should be facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinanceenespañol. But better is to search Radical Personal Finance en Español. The website for the new project, which is not currently live, but if you're listening to this in June, will be live.

It's radicalpersonalfinance.es. radicalpersonalfinance.es for Radical Personal Finance España. And then, connected with that, review the show. And if you'd like to purchase some of my courses that some of the little questioners today, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store, and you'll find those courses that are available for you. radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. For all the details, make sure you're following me on Twitter, twitter.com/joshuasheets, facebook.com/joshuasheets, or find the community group at radicalpersonalfinance.

I'm going to stop. I'm everywhere. Find me there and connect with me there. Thank you for listening. Peace out, y'all. If you're looking for an exciting role in customer service, food service, or retail, connect with a job at the airport. Get started in a role that offers competitive wages, consistent schedules, and fast-tracked management while you work in a vibrant, exciting environment where security is a priority.

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