Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast, Episode 8. I'm your host, Joshua Sheets. Today's show is going to be a conversation. I want to give you an update on the show, an update on some of the technological components of the show, and then I want to give you a little bit of a vision into some of the ideas and some of the places where I'm hoping that this show will go.

Thank you for listening this morning. I hope you enjoy this morning's show. I'm going to walk through a couple of ideas that are compelling to me. First of all, updates on the show. Thank you so much to those of you who are listening. I've been having a blast putting this thing together.

Be patient with me. I'm learning as I go. There are so many things that need to be done for this show, and I'm doing them little by little just to give you a little insight into what's going on with the show. Trying to get some of the technological stuff worked out.

Finally got the logo updated and put into iTunes. That feels good to get done. I know I've got lots of work to do. One of the things that's on my list of things to do is figure out how to improve my audio quality. I need to get a better microphone set up.

I will do that as soon as I'm able to. I also need to bring, I'm hoping to bring a little bit more professionalism to the, bring in some theme music and some of the intros and the outros and things that make these types of podcasts more interesting to listen to.

I'm learning as I go. First of all, I hope that that's not too big of a turn off for most people. I personally love consuming podcasts and I enjoy the ones that are incredibly professionally well done. I think that's awesome and I hope to get this show to that level in the future.

But I also enjoy great content talking about great ideas and I hope that today I can provide some great content and talk about good ideas. And I hope this can be valuable for you. I hope you enjoy the interviews that I've been doing. I hope some of the ideas and things that we discussed and the education is helpful.

So I'll try to provide great content and then improve the production quality over time. I'm learning as I go as well. It's interesting. I'm learning what to do and what not to do. I was listening the other day to one of my shows that I recorded last week and many of these shows, most of these shows, I'm recording them early in the morning.

For example, at this moment as I record this, it's 4.59 AM and I get up and do these about four in the morning. I listened to one of the shows the other day and right at the beginning I was, I couldn't, I could hardly stand the first 30 to 60 seconds of it because I was speaking so slowly and the reason was that I was recording it at about 4.06 AM and I had woken up at four.

I was just sitting down with my first cup of coffee and I would start hit record and I said I got to get the show done. As I started recording I realized it's not good to record at 4.00 AM. I need some time to wake up, get a couple of cups of coffee, get my energy level up.

I was, it was boring and slow to listen to so stick with me. I'll learn how to do this quickly and better as time goes on. So this morning I waited an hour and worked on some other stuff, got my mind cranking, got my creative juices flowing and have a couple of coffees.

I have a couple of cups of coffee. You'll hear me often times if I pause for a moment and take a sip of coffee. I hope it's not too annoying but definitely doing that. Coffee makes me think better in the morning. So this morning I want to talk about some of the connecting themes.

As I build this show out, as I've stated in previous episodes, I'm running a balance in my head of how much to, of the type of content to bring you. I don't want to just bring, you know, this show is called Radical Personal Finance. I'm going to bring you technical content that I hope is interesting and educational but I don't want this to be the financial planning textbook show.

It's way too boring. But on the other hand I don't want it to all be fluffy so I'm trying to run a balance between those two things. And I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to strike the balance. I've got some shows planned about some fundamentals that I think are valuable, fundamentals of financial planning.

And I've also got lots of philosophical concepts and ideas and things that occur to me that seem like smarter ways to do things. So kind of winging it as we go forward over the coming days, weeks and months. And I hope that this content ultimately becomes coherent and cohesive but just working on it as it goes.

As far as the interviews, there are going to be interviews, my plan, from all across the spectrum. From people who are just killing it, doing awesome. People who are struggling. People who have achieved all their goals. People who are just getting started. People with radically diverse and different backgrounds.

I'm doing that intentionally and I'm hoping that as time goes forward that speaking with other people and hearing their story and hearing about the things that they're doing and their successes and their failures will help you figure out what's right for your financial plan. I find that just learning from other people's experiences is so valuable.

It's wise to learn from our own experiences and not repeat our own mistakes again and again but it's so much wiser I think to learn from other people's experiences. Why repeat all the mistakes that they've made? Why not simply learn from the things they've done well and the things that they've done poorly?

After all, that's why we have parents in the initial stages of our life to guide us through the pitfalls and the traps that are available for us. Also by learning from other people's experiences we can have hope and encouragement when we see people that are facing more difficult circumstances than us and we hear their thoughts and their attitudes and that encourages us when we're struggling.

Then also when we hear people that are struggling that helps us to realize that it builds empathy in our hearts where our hearts go out to other people and we can reach out to them and realize that our own situation is probably pretty good. We can try to look to how to encourage them.

The human heart is one that when we're encouraging others that helps us to be encouraged ourselves. I'm also trying to figure out how to balance the tone between my ideas and the things that I'm interested in for my personal life and being objective. I don't know how to strike this balance so bear with me as I learn.

I think that what I love about the world of podcasting is the authenticity of a host. I love being able to listen to somebody and understand who they really are and have it come out unfiltered by the 11 minute segment on commercial radio and unfiltered by the polished professionalism of the show.

To me that's a major benefit of podcasting but on the other hand I don't want to just be hammered sometimes with a host's opinion on something. My opinions are going to change over time so I also think that if we're just purely doing opinion shows and things like that, that can be a bit pigeonholing.

But this morning I am going to share some of my opinions and some of the things that I look at. Some of this is going to include my dreams, my ideas and these things are largely in flux. You'll get a concept of this morning a little bit more of who I am and the types of things that I'm into.

I hope that it's helpful and I hope that it challenges you. I hope that some of the ideas that I talk about are ideas that frankly when you hear them they grate against you because they're out of the ordinary. To me that's good. That means that those ideas will germinate and you'll figure out maybe some variation of that idea and it might be helpful to you.

Again, this is the Radical Personal Finance, not the mainstream personal finance show. When I look also with respect to all of the international listeners that we do have and I'm sure we will have in the future, I live in the United States of America and this show will have a US-American focus but I don't think that the concepts are only able to be implemented in the US-American context.

It's just that this is what I know best even though I've been privileged to travel more than many people. Each culture is unique and you can't necessarily apply what works in one culture to another but you can apply kind of a similar design process to multiple cultures. When I look at US-American society I see so many things that are just wonderful.

I am a diehard optimist. This may sound like a contradiction but I promise it's not so hear me out. I am a diehard optimist. I believe that's fact-based. It's not coming just simply from some pull the wool over my eyes and look to see what -- and look to see -- it's not let me blind myself to the facts.

By looking at the facts I am a diehard optimist. Here's what I mean. I believe that things have never been -- life has never been better in the United States of America than it is now. Now if that statement shocks you I'll get to the flip side because in many ways I think that life has never been worse than it is now but hear me out.

There's never been a time in the history of the universe where opportunity has been greater, freedom has been greater, technology has given more access to information that can be life changing than right now. Wealth in the United States of America is extremely high. Opportunity is extremely high. Without question some of the ancient barriers that keep people divided whether that's religion or race or any of those things that keep people divided those walls are lower than they've ever been.

Technology has been an incredible game changer. Even though the far-reaching scope of government gets consistently larger and larger freedom, personal freedom is incredibly high. This is going to sound like a cliche but the internet has been absolutely just a phenomenon that has changed every aspect of society and is just getting started.

It's an absolute baby. There's more technology in the cell phone on your hip than existed in the world when they put a man on the moon. Think about how great the future is. Think about the wonderful ways that we can apply these technologies to the future. On the same hand, even though I believe that the facts show that life spans are longer, we know more about the working of the human body, more and more people are coming out of poverty all around the world, millions of people coming out of poverty in formerly extremely poor countries.

Now there are still millions and millions of people in poverty but those people are coming out. Innovation is high. In the United States of America, what's a person who is defined as poor, those definitions of poor are better than a poor person in the United States of America today usually has according to the government data line and the numbers that they use.

A poor person usually generally has a place to live in that's reasonably safe, transportation that's amazing, color television, air conditioning. Go back to the richest person in the world 100 years ago, 200 years ago. The richest person in the world couldn't buy air conditioning, couldn't buy entertainment from all over the world, couldn't buy instant access to information and education and inspiration and now it's freely available, absolutely 100% free down at the local library.

The knowledge of the world at any person's fingertips. So with the tools that we have now, money is becoming less and less relevant as a barrier to people's learning. Think about the breadth of experience that comes from the internet. Think about the fact that somebody, pretend you're homeless and you don't have a dollar.

Think about the fact that today you can walk into any public library, every public library that I'm aware of has today a large bank of computers that are available for the use, completely for free. Run into a computer, get a pair of headphones, you can pull up a free online, you can pull up YouTube and access information from all around the world, free.

You can see what somebody in China is doing, filming it on their iPhone and putting it on YouTube. That's incredible, absolutely incredible. And a lot of times all this information to me doesn't seem like it's being applied as efficiently as it could be. Now I'm more optimistic about the future than I ever have been, but at the same hand, look at the reality of the current situation and we're not applying the technology as broadly as we could to improve our situation.

Financial stress is high. Why is financial stress in our country so high? Why do many people live paycheck to paycheck? Well, obviously there's lots of reasons. Part of it could just be that no one's taught them how to not live paycheck to paycheck. Part of it could be that their circumstances seem overwhelming.

Part of it could be that their income is very low. Part of it could be that they've been wracked with personal tragedy, disability, death, sicknesses. But why is it that so many people are in such financial stress? Why is it that so many people are in such heavy debt burdens?

Now the facts show that the debt burden in America is much lower than it was 10 years ago. That's the facts. The economic challenges of the last five years have been great for people to realize that it helps to pay off debt. People are more aware of it than any time in the past.

But yet still, why is it as high as it is? There's so many, what's the term for it? Maybe, it's a word, kind of like dichotomy, where it just doesn't seem to be, it seems to be conflicting, where one fact on one side and one fact on the other side seem to say exactly the same.

The facts seem to be woefully different and you can't really reconcile them. How happy are most Americans? To me that's a major question. How happy are most Americans? I think in reality, many Americans are pretty happy. But yet, ask yourself, as I ask myself, are they as happy as they could be?

You know, I went through in preparation for this show, I was trying to think through and try to browse the interwebs, coming up with statistics and things. As far as, what percentage of people love their jobs and love their lives and are totally happy and totally fulfilled with what they're doing?

Problem with statistics is you can make them say everything that you want them to say. I literally found two studies, I found a Gallup poll that was recent, I've got it right here, reading the PDF from the Gallup organization, this one is 2013. The state of the American workplace, employee engagement insights for US business leaders, this is 2013, no this is 2011, it looks like, it was their data.

It shows that 70% of American workers are not engaged or actively disengaged at their work. Now on the same hand, I was Googling around and I found a CNBC study that shows that 70% of Americans are satisfied with their work. So who do you believe? The title of the article is Americans don't want to shove their jobs, survey says.

So what do you believe? I've got no idea. But these economic challenges are entirely 100% solvable, but yet we've got to change the way that they're solved and I'm going to go over some of my ideas and some of my strategies for that today. What about the health? Health of Americans seems like in some ways it's better than it's ever been.

After all, look at the facts, people are living longer than they've ever lived. That's a fact. Lifespans are incredibly long and yet more people are suffering from ongoing chronic illnesses and more people die from preventable causes than anything else. I was looking at some statistics on the CDC website.

25% of Americans on average, 25% of Americans die from heart disease. So in 2008, CDC website, percentage of all death caused by heart disease in 2008 across all ethnicities, 25%. My understanding, if you ask most physicians, my understanding is that heart disease would be almost entirely preventable. Almost entirely preventable.

I'm sure that there are some aspects that are not, but it seems to me it's almost entirely preventable and yet 25% of Americans die due to heart disease. Stress related illnesses are incredibly high. So anyway, enough of the problems. I'm so optimistic, but enough of the problems. Let's talk about some of the solutions.

I believe that good sound financial planning can solve some of these problems. That financial planning, I'm going to apply that more broadly than here's the percentage that you should put into a retirement account. Our lives, our financial lives are stressed out needlessly and we bring it on ourselves. These are choices.

There are many influencing factors. You always know you're getting dumb advice or you always know, in my opinion, you always know you're getting dumb advice or a dumb perspective when somebody says this is the one cause. There's never one cause. Why do you get cancer? I don't know, but it's not just from this one cause.

The example I think that most people could relate to because you probably have spoken with people is smoking causes lung cancer. Well, is that true? I don't think so. Now, do many people smoke get lung cancer? Absolutely, but we all know that story of the 98 year old lady in the Tennessee mountains that smoked a pack a day and drank whiskey for breakfast and lived to 98 years old and died a happy death of old age and was totally healthy.

Can you say that smoking causes cancer? Yeah, but that's not the only factor. You have to look at it a little bit deeper. Here would be how I'd look a little bit deeper. If somebody is highly stressed, overweight, lives in a toxic environment, lives under a state of perpetual stress where their body is frustrated and upset, is dramatically overweight, takes a lot of drugs for various conditions, and that person smokes cigarettes on a daily basis, I think, going out on a limb here, it's more likely that their bodies would not be able to fight off the cancer cells than the person, the proverbial old lady in Tennessee who wakes up in the morning, walks outside with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, looks at the mountain, totally stress-free, relaxed, surrounded by friends and family.

I'm painting a utopia, I understand. But relaxed, surrounded by friends and family, has clean air to breathe, clean food to eat from her garden. Her body is able to keep those cancer cells in check. So it's never just one thing, never just one cause. And so there's never just one solution.

There's so many things that are brought together. In general, this is a generalization, but in general, my observation is that most Americans don't seem to be so incredibly satisfied with what they're doing. And I believe that they should be. Many people love their work, they love their jobs, but many people seem to exist in this state of in-between.

Well, there's two extremes. So many people love their work, love their jobs, are living their passion. We hear a lot these days about living your passion, and I'm into that. Cool, I get it. Why do you think I'm up at 5.20 right now when I could be asleep? This is fun, I enjoy this.

I value it, I enjoy this time spent talking to you. I want it to be valuable to you. So that's an example of me kind of living my passion. So many people do that, and those people are inspiring to us. Those people are people that we hear them talk at a speech, and our lives are impacted because of them.

Many people exist in absolute desperation, completely fed up with their lives, completely fed up with their circumstances. And those people, because they're desperate, because they're changing, they take action. Some of them take negative action, they commit suicide. There is an epidemic of teen suicide going on in this country right now.

This is a by-point, but it's a major social problem that's got to be improved. But many people commit suicide. That's action. It's action because they're so fed up, they can't take it anymore. Some people take action and they change their job. I quit, they move. Some people get so fed up that they leave the country, they go on a trip, they do something, they change something.

But it comes at the point of such extreme pain. But many people exist right in this in-between state, where it's not so bad that I have to change, but it's not so good that I would keep doing it if I didn't have to. How else do you explain the popularity of bucket lists and the sites and blogs and things that are associated with that?

Now, usually, the sites and the blogs are written by people who are doing it, but what about all the people that are drawn to that without doing anything? So there's an epidemic of just general malaise. I think that financial planning is a tool that can get people there. Now, here's my evidence.

I can't prove this with numbers, but when you talk about things like retirement with people, most people want to retire. But I question that sometimes. And I try to ask people and talk to them and say, "What would you do if you were retired? What would you do?" And a lot of times, as people get closer to that magic date, they tend to make different choices.

"Well, why wait to make those choices until you retire?" I ask people sometimes, "What would you do if money were not an object?" And usually, we're conditioned to respond first in our society with some sort of consumption-based answer. "I'd buy this kind of car. I'd do this expensive thing." That's fine.

But once you get past all that consumption, ultimately, there's usually an answer. I should look it up, but I'm not going to because we don't need the statistic. Such a high percentage of people say that they would love to write a book, yet they don't write one. Such a high percentage of people say that they would love to produce art, yet they don't produce it.

How can we fix this? How can we produce the art and produce the...I guess just the...I don't know how to say it. Produce the art. Produce the things that bring more lasting fulfillment. The dots connect in my mind. I'm going to try to connect them for you. There's so many aspects to it, but I'm going to try to connect some of them and tell you where my mind goes and how I would achieve it.

I don't know how to communicate this perfectly. This is rambly. I know that. But here are my thoughts. First of all, we've got to see through the illusion of happy consumption. I'm going to paint two pictures for you. This is a straw man argument. I recognize that. It's never going to be this extreme.

But I'm going to paint two pictures for you and you tell me which one appeals to you. And I'm going to...these are not mutually exclusive, but go with me for a moment. See in your mind's eye a beautiful, expensive, perfectly designed beauty of architecture house that you live in.

The house is large. It's in the finest neighborhood in your town. It's well landscaped. It's manicured. You don't have to do that. Somebody else does that for you. The house has beautiful furnishings from all the bright brand names. The house is well appointed in every way. It's comfortable. It's beautiful.

And the driveway is parked. The most ideal vehicle for your situation and status in life. Your dream car is parked right in the driveway where you can see it every day and all your neighbors can see it. House is freshly painted. The grass is green. There's grass. The flowers are beautiful.

It's large. You have plenty of room for family to stay with you. You have plenty of room for friends to stay with you. See that in your mind's eye. Okay, now on the flip side, picture a different house. This house is on the edge of town, whatever your town looks like.

Maybe that's a semi-rural neighborhood. Maybe it's just a small, it's on the edge of town. House is small. It's a cottage. I don't know, 500, 800, 1000 square feet. Just got just enough bedrooms. Maybe one or two or three depending on how many you need for the number of people.

Has a simple living room, simple furnishings. It's simple. It's not dirty. It's not run down. It's not dangerous, but it's simple. Now question, which house would you rather live in? And there's not a wrong, right or wrong answer here. Just an interesting thought experiment. Which house would you rather live in?

Now you pick the answer to that and let's go on. Now house A. You get up in the morning feeling tired because you went to sleep late the night before because you had to stay up late working on a work project. Your work is something that is very challenging, that drains you.

You stayed up until midnight and you had to get up at about 6am to get into the office early. Now you know you're supposed to work out in the morning, but you don't quite have time. So you grab a cup of coffee, several cups of coffee to keep you awake and you rush out the door.

You jump in the car. You don't have time to see your family in the morning, but right as you're leaving, your spouse or your children, if you have them, mention something to you that is just even more stressful. They mention to you about a financial expense that's coming up or a problem at school or something.

So you rush out the door to a job and you're there at the job and you're stressed out. You didn't have time for an enjoyable breakfast. You're stressed out and you rush to the job and as you're at the job, things come all day long. This problem, that problem, the third problem, the fourth problem.

You're working with people you don't like. You hit traffic on the way to work. You sat in traffic for maybe 30 minutes, maybe an hour. You got to the office. You worked all day. You escaped for a few moments at lunch to regain your sanity. Scarf down some food.

You get home late at night, 7.30, 8 o'clock. There's no dinner there. So you had to pick up something on the way. You sit down. You have just a few minutes with your family. Your spouse is upset with you. Your kids are upset with you. You don't see each other.

You don't speak to each other. And you drown your sorrows in a, I don't know, a glass of alcohol. Now that's option A with a nice house. But you got the nice house. Option B. You wake up in the morning without an alarm clock. Sun comes up. Your body naturally wakes up.

You feel good. You had a good night's sleep. You get up. You get breakfast if you're into that. You have a cup of coffee. You walk outside, look at the flowers sitting. If you're a coffee drinker or a tea or whatever your morning routine is, you look at the flowers and you just admire the beauty of the day.

Spend an hour over breakfast with your family like you would on a Saturday. Maybe eat blueberry pancakes. That's your family tradition. You spend that hour together. Then you go and you sit down at your work. Your work is meaningful to you. You don't need to drive anywhere. Your work is right there.

There's no need to go anywhere. There's no need to face traffic or commute. You get to work on work that matters to you. You get to be close to your family and those that you love. You have time throughout the day to take the call from an old friend.

You have time to walk outside and go for a walk at lunchtime. You have time to eat healthy food. Life is peaceful. It's lower stress. You have time to exercise. You have time just to be a human being. You finish the work that you need to do for the day and you work on some sort of artistic project and expression of your creativity.

In the evening, some close friends come over. Maybe you visit with your neighbors. You have a relaxing evening. Maybe read a book, watch a movie. Be with people that you love. Play a game with your kids. You go to bed at a healthy time. Now I know I'm painting two pictures but here's the question.

Which of those days would you choose? I got to believe that whether or not I did a good job describing it, many people would be drawn towards the second option. I feel pretty confident about that because when I talk to people or when I read online of what people write about what they would like to do, it's usually going to sound more like the second option than the first.

So my question is, is it the big house? Is it the car that is really motivating or is it the lifestyle? Now big houses and cars are great. That's awesome. Good for you. But that doesn't bring the happiness. You got to get the happiness first. Let the big houses and cars come with time.

Consumption doesn't make us happy. Consumerism is not the answer. Now the mansion is awesome if you want to live there and if it's easy for you to live there and you can live that kind of lifestyle. I know people who live in mansions and their life is exactly what I laid out in the second day but they do it in the first type of environment.

That's awesome. But don't stretch for the first type of environment and get the life that's associated with that. There are options where we can do it differently. So one of the things that my guiding principles, consumerism is not the answer. Production is the answer. A lot of times what people view as pain is not actually pain.

Consumption doesn't ultimately bring us happiness. Having extra unused rooms that we heat and cool every day by working at a job that we don't like is not what brings happiness. Having rooms that are comfortable for us to live in, that are spacious enough for us to be in and doing work that we enjoy will kick us farther down that road.

Now I have a personal bias towards minimalism. Not because of any specific amount of stuff that's right or wrong but here's my example that makes sense to me. Do you enjoy going on vacation, walking into a nice hotel room, looking around at the furniture, looking around at the bed and just simply existing?

Which of these two things gives you a greater sense of peace? Picture yourself walking into a well-appointed hotel room. Not opulent, not expensive, just well-appointed. It's a beautiful Saturday morning, you walk in with a small bag of your clothes. You set that bag down in the corner and you turn to your family or the people that you love that you're with and you ask, "What should we do today?" Or scenario B is you walk into your garage.

Need I go further? Now for those whose garage looks like it could be on the cover of a book about garages, you're already doing it so why listen to me? But for many people, the garage would probably be a source of stress. You got all your stuff in the garage in the hotel room, you don't have your stuff.

So because you don't have so much stuff in the hotel room, you can be. You can go, you can explore, you can go to eat, you can be with your family. So does the stuff make us happy? I would say it doesn't but that's my opinion. I would say that the right stuff helps life to be a little bit better.

Living with 32 things that you own may be great for some people, for some people it's not but I would say less clutter and minimalism is a big factor. I think doing work that you love and are passionate about is a big factor. I try, I look and I look and I look and I never see people that just simply quit life that are really happy.

If you wanted to quit life and that's what makes you happy, you can do it today. There's homeless bums in every city in the country. They don't work. Are they happy? Some of them probably are. Many of them probably aren't. But I see a lot of people who could quit that don't.

They continue working at things that they're interested in, that they enjoy, that they're passionate about and they continue working at these things long after they have to. So why not understand that early on? I'm going to try to sell you in this show on the concept of getting out of debt.

Not that it's not something that you don't, many people don't intellectually grasp but that it's such a greater lifestyle and there's almost nothing worth borrowing for. Especially nothing consumption related that's worth borrowing for. Picture this, picture the difference. Think first about your situation. If you had no debt, no payments to anybody for anything including no monthly bills, no monthly utility bills, no monthly bills which most people aren't going to believe is possible and it's probably not possible but I'll come back to that in a second.

Say you have no debt and no bills. How much stress would you have every month? How much stress? Now also pretend that you have no debt but you just have some ongoing bills. How much money would you have every month? Quite a bit, right? To me that's the reason to get out of debt.

There's nothing that's worth bringing that stress into your life. Now I have a mortgage. I'm not walking away from the financial realities of life but conceptually that's got to be motivating. To me it's very motivating. I hope to sell you on the concept and why that's something that's worth striving for.

I hope to sell it to you as something that is desirable rather than something that is self-sacrifice. If you view getting out of debt as pain, having to curtail your spending and being unhappy, you won't do it. But if you view it as something that's worth achieving because it ultimately brings you greater peace and satisfaction and happiness, you'll work towards it.

It's not a sacrifice. It's a pleasure. I think there's great value in having lower expenses. Let me paint again these two concepts for you. Forget about the numbers. Pretend that you have three scenarios. Scenario A or scenario 1 is you earn X dollars and you spend 105% of that number.

Just 5% more than you bring in. Scenario B is you earn X dollars and you spend 100% of that number. Scenario C is you earn X dollars and you spend 50% of that number. Which of those budgets would feel more comfortable? Most people are at maybe spending somewhere between 90 and 110% of their money.

It's hard to spend 110% on an ongoing basis but it's easy to spend 100% on an ongoing basis. Many people save. Most people save. I reject a lot of the statistics that show that nobody saves money. That's not true. Lots of people save money. It depends on how it's calculated.

Most people save something. What if you had 50% expenses? So I believe it's possible and it's possible without sacrificing much lifestyle. Now we've got to apply some different technology and some different ideas to the question. And this show is about exploring ideas. There's so many great ideas and so many great technologies that are available to us.

If we were designing lives, if we were designing financial lives, would we design them the way that they happen or would we design them differently? I think we'd design them differently. And there are technologies available today that have never been available before. And we can access those technologies and we can profile them and we can see them from all over the world.

Take all of your expenses and there's technologies for eliminating them or for improving them. I'm personally passionate about making housing a smarter choice. So I love, you know, we can have a standard looking American house or we can have a standard looking American house that works well for us.

Why do our houses suck money out of our budgets? Why don't our houses keep money in our lives? So why don't we improve the efficiency of our houses? Not because of some environmental guilt trip but because it's simply better. Why are our houses not more efficiently run, more efficiently made, more efficiently designed?

Why do they cost so much to build? The technology exists for us to build and create houses that are, provide for us. There's so many non-traditional options for housing. There's the tiny house movement. There are people who live in RVs. There are people who don't own houses because they travel whole time.

There are houses that you build with your hands out in the woods. There are houses that you build with your hands in the city. There's so many options for housing. Why is it that I have to have a 30 year mortgage for a house? Why is it that we have to pay for all of our food a la carte?

Why don't our houses make food for us? Why are all the medians in our highways and our towns planted with non-productive trees? Why not replace some of those with fruit trees? Why do we pay for things like apples? Why do you buy apples if you're in a place where you can grow apples?

Apple trees are easy to plant. Just plant them out on the street and go out and pick some. I live in the south here. We don't grow apples, but why do people buy avocados and mangoes? Why aren't the roadsides decorated with avocado trees and mango trees and orange trees and everything that's freely available for all to come and get it?

The reason why is because people may or may not pick it up and the maintenance people don't want to deal with the "trash" of the fruit under the tree. Seems a little silly, but that's the reason. Why can't it be better? Why can't ... I guess I'm going off on a tangent here, but I probably should do a whole show about this.

Technology exists today to provide for all of our needs cheaper and better. There's zero reason for all of our budgets to be consumed with buying food and energy and water and transportation and all these things. All of these things have solutions, and we're going to profile those solutions. There's zero reason why our houses have to be such a money pit, why we have to use these expensive technologies when there's simpler solutions.

You can heat water with an electric hot water heater, with a gas hot water heater, and with the sun. Why do all of our homes not have a solar hot water heater on the roof? Again, I'm not coming at it from the perspective of to save the Amazon rainforest.

I'm coming at it from the perspective of dollars and cents. One of my projects is I'd like to build a solar hot water heater in my home. I haven't done it yet, but I've seen the technology. It's so doable. Why do we not use the energy that's raining on the house all day long to heat our water?

Why do we pay for it? For that reason, why do we pay for water? Water falls freely in most parts of the United States. Why do we not capture that water and use it? Why do many people pay $100 a month for their water? I was talking with a friend of mine.

I asked him. I don't have a water bill per se. I live on a property with a well, so I have an electricity bill for the well. I was talking with a friend who's on the municipal water supply. His water bill is about $100 a month. I said, "Why on earth do you pay that?

I live in Florida. We have more rainfall than ... We have a lot of rain." If you step back, it seems crazy that anybody in Florida would ever pay for water. Why don't we have a home that captures the rain, stores it for us to use? Well, you say, "We'd have to have a way to do that." Yes.

Why don't we? Some people do. I think we all could. Why do we have ... Go on and on. I don't mean to, but why do we have houses that have to heat, have to cool? It's possible. The technology is out there. If you live in a place where it gets cold in the winter, I have seen ...

There is technology out there. I hope to profile it, but the technology exists where you never have to use any kind of outside heat other than the solar heat that falls, even in the middle of winter, in some of the coldest places. I've never lived up in the Arctic tundra, so maybe you'd have to have some supplemental heat there.

I've certainly seen houses in snow country that you never have to heat, 100% on solar heat. Why aren't all houses designed like that? There are houses that are designed to be very, very cool. This to me seems more challenging, but the technology exists. What if we actually applied our heads to it and provided it and said, "We're not going to go with the ...

I live in Florida. $125 a month AC bills." Why doesn't the house cool itself? If we put our head on that and we put our brains around that, our houses should be able to do that, whether it's geothermal, whether it's natural air drafts. I don't know what it is, but there are options.

We're going to explore some of those options. Why don't our houses make energy for us? Instead of having to pay the electric bill, why don't our houses just simply make energy? Whether that's solar panels on the roof or whether it's some other form of energy production. I love the fact that I don't have any solar panels at the moment and they're very expensive as per cost of electric hour.

I get that. I love the fact that prices are dropping. I love the fact, my prediction at 10 years, it'll be standard. Let's get going. Let's make it happen. Why do we have to pay anywhere from $200 to $1,000 a month for food that's not very good, that makes us sick?

Why don't our houses create food for us? Why don't we have computer controlled growing systems in our houses that provide the optimal growing environment for the fruits and vegetables and plants that we need? There's so many solutions and I want this show to be about solutions. Solutions exist. I'm passionate about finding them for me and for my family and I'm passionate about profiling them for you and yours.

These things don't often seem like, it doesn't seem like a financial topic. And yeah, I could talk through about how do you, and I will, but how do you create this from an investment plan, things like that. But let me ask you a question. What ultimately is the purpose of having a large investment portfolio that provides income for you?

Is it not to pay for your daily living needs? To me that would seem to be the answer. Investment portfolios purpose is to provide income for you. Now there are a couple ways to achieve it. You can build the portfolio that provides income or you can just simply provide the needs that you would spend the income on.

Now the right answer is probably a combination of the two. We got to talk always about the combination of the two. You can either buy a house that gives you a place to live or you can build an investment portfolio that pays you income over time. Either one is okay.

They both do the same thing. You either have to pay rent or you own a place to live. So there are multiple ways of solving this. There's lots of options that we can do and we're going to talk about those. But just realize there's always a couple of choices.

Now the right answer is again a combination of the two. I don't think most people would ever really want to have where 100% of their needs are provided. You can build a completely self-sufficient little piece of property somewhere and never go anywhere and never do anything beyond that but your property provides you with heat and cooling and food and water and that's great.

But it sounds a little boring to me. I'd want to go some places. But on the same hand, if you don't have to come up with X thousands of dollars per month to provide for those living expenses, you have more money to pursue to do the other things that you can't provide for yourself.

So a little bit rambly but I'm going to wrap up. That's kind of the concept that I want to explore. I want to explore the concept of just building systems, systems that work, systems of support, systems that provide for our needs. I want to talk through building those things in a flexible way.

So many cool options. I've got tons of ideas of ways to do things. I'll try to sell you on my ideas and I want to hear your ideas back. We'll try to find the people that are doing radical, interesting things and figure out how we can apply what they're doing to our situation.

I think that's it for today. I'd love to hear some feedback from you. Leave a note in the show notes. Again, this is episode 8 of the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. Shoot me an email, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I'd love to hear from you exactly what you're interested in. I'd love to profile all of the interesting technology you can find.

I'll be clear. I can't say to you that I'm out ahead forging the path and having it all done. I guess I am out ahead forging the path. I don't have all this stuff done but I'm fascinated by it and I really feel that this is, even though I've struggled to communicate it this morning, I really feel that this is an underlying theme.

I really feel like using the techniques that we have, such cheap technology, such cheap options for how to live, combined with good understanding of investments and financial planning and taxes and the different vehicles that are available to us, combined with never before better opportunities to improve our income and make and earn high dollar amounts, combined with opportunities to provide systems that provide for our needs.

There's such amazing options available and we can craft lives that are free of the stress of providing for those daily needs and that are where we just simply enjoy living the way that we're meant to live. Come on by the blog. Leave show notes. Leave a comment in the show notes.

Shoot me an email. Hope this is helpful. Look forward to another conversation tomorrow. Again, with that, Joshua Sheets. This has been episode eight of the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. Have a great day.