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 Sheets. I am your host. And today I want to create for you a short episode, just a simple conversation on the subject of safety.

Received a comment on the previous show where I talked about how to move to Mexico and why you should. I received a question, which I think is certainly quite widespread. The commenter asked, "Well, no discussion on safety? I'm interested in moving to Mexico, but my wife really doesn't like the sound of it." And of course, we hear so many difficult things about Mexico.

And I definitely do think it deserves a conversation. In fact, I've already recorded an interview, which will be released in a few days, where we do, I do mention it with another guy who was living in San Miguel de Allende also. But I thought this is important enough for me to just talk with you firsthand, straightforwardly about the topic of safety.

And I think it's definitely an important component of good financial planning. The older I get, the more important safety is to me. I've talked about this throughout the annals of the show. I've talked about the importance of safety gear. I did a show on just simply wearing the safety gear on how if you're going to be involved in something and you're going to go and do something as simple, put on a helmet, right?

Put on a skiing helmet, put on a bicycle helmet, don't work on ladders. It's silly to build wealth and then wind up hurting yourself in some simple way. When I was younger, I did all kinds of, I worked on roofs, I re-roofed houses, et cetera. The older I get, the more I look at it and just say, "It's just not worth it.

Why would it be worth it for me to go up there and expose myself to some physical danger?" And so I've done shows on that. I've talked about how it becomes more important for you to invest in safety, things like driving a safer car. I think that one of the values of having money is that you can afford a safer car and it's worth having.

Driving is one of the most dangerous things that you and I probably do on a regular basis and having a car that has active safety features, collision avoidance systems, et cetera, and passive safety features, high quality airbags, high quality construction. To me, it's worth it. There was a time in my life where I drove a cheap car and then I realized that I didn't really want to drive my cheap car because even though it gave me a great story, "Look, I've got this super reliable $500 car.

My old Toyota Corolla that I paid $500 for," I realized that it wasn't ideal for me from a safety perspective. So now that brings us to travel. How should you think about safety when it comes to different places in the world that you can go? My answer is I think you should think about it, but I think you should think about it accurately.

One big benefit of building wealth is that you can move from an unsafe place to a safe place. And here you'll have to define what those terms mean. But I do often wonder, there are many places, even in the United States, there are many places where people go to bed at night wondering if a stray bullet is going to come through the walls of their house and hit one of their children in the bed while they're sleeping.

You can hear stories of New York City back in the 1980s when people would put their children to sleep in a bathtub for protection through the walls. Now is that true or is that apocryphal? I don't know. But certainly there's a sense in which it rings true. You see the number of people killed every weekend in a city like Chicago and you know that some of them are just simply accidental deaths.

And I've often wondered, why don't people move? Anybody can move. Anybody living in a bad neighborhood in Chicago can leave a bad neighborhood in Chicago and go to a place in Indiana or just in a different neighborhood in Chicago. Number of reasons people don't take action. But one reason people don't take action is economics.

And so one big benefit of building your wealth is that it opens up to you more economic possibilities. You open up for yourself the ability to go from a place that is unsafe to a place that is safe. I think that this can and should be part of your personal planning even in the city where you live.

I keep a list of things that over the years I've changed my mind about and things that I've been wrong about, things I've changed my mind about just so I can kind of have a good track about them. One of the things on that list, things that I have changed my mind about is the usefulness and importance of a gated neighborhood.

Now I'm still a little bit loath to admit this one, but I certainly think a lot more about it, especially as I watch what happens in my home country, the United States and the increasing levels of violence, the increasing levels of tension, just the things that you see on a news program quite regularly.

If you had asked me five years ago if I would ever live in a gated neighborhood, my answer would have been an unequivocal absolutely not, never, because I don't want to deal with the additional restrictions, the additional constraints that come with that particular style of living. However, as I watch what has happened in the United States over the last few years, I don't want people marching through my street right in front of my house.

I don't want to wake up in the morning and have my house surrounded by people yelling at me and people blocking intersections and whatnot. This is one reason why people move to a gated neighborhood. I think there can be a substantial increase in safety by simply choosing to move to a gated neighborhood, and it's worth considering.

There are expressions of this. Now is it necessary to do that, to be safe in a little town in the United States? No, it's not, but it is the kind of thing that happens. I think that that particular trend will grow significantly in the coming years. If you go to a country that is generally considered to be less safe, you will find that living in a gated neighborhood is basically the standard for anybody with any particular level of wealth because it provides you a significant level of safety and protection at a modest cost.

Virtually everybody lives in a gated neighborhood where there's a guard at the front, a wall around the set of properties, and then of course sometimes you have a guard on your own personal property. I think that trend will continue to grow in the United States for people who have wealth as well as you see some of the increasing levels of violence and increasing levels of disruption in society.

What about Mexico? I think when you get to safety of traveling, you get into a different world because there's just a different perspective on what's safe and what's not. Over the years, I've been on various sides of this issue. I'll tell you a couple of stories. I remember when I was just graduating from college and I wanted to take a trip somewhere, wanted to travel abroad, didn't have very much money.

I sat down and I said, "Where can I fly?" Spirit Airlines had a flight to Haiti that was cheap and Spirit Airlines had a flight to Colombia that was cheap. I didn't know much about both places, but of course I knew that Colombia was unsafe. After all, it's a drug country and a terrible place to be, etc.

I knew that Haiti was a little bit questionable, so I pulled up the U.S. State Department, looked at their travel advisory warnings, and they warned against traveling to Haiti. I said, "Well, I'll take a risk on Colombia." I bought a plane ticket to Colombia and showed up, didn't know much about it, went to a hostel and had a great trip.

Had a wonderful time, didn't get robbed, everything was totally fine, and really enjoyed my time there. That was one time when I started to say, "Wait a second, what's going on? Why are there all these warnings? Why do I have this wrong view of Colombia? Why do I think that Colombia is this godforsaken hellhole, when in reality this has just been an awesome trip and this is a wonderful place to be?" It changed me.

Earlier than that, I'll tell you another example. One thing I have learned throughout my life is that virtually every country that I've ever been to doesn't trust its own neighbors, whether they're racist towards their neighbors, or whether they just don't like them, or whether they have arguments against them.

Virtually every country I've been to has a hard time with their neighbors. When I was in college in Costa Rica, we went to Nicaragua. All the Costa Ricans start warning you about Nicaragua, about how terrible Nicaragua is, how unsafe it is, be careful, it's just full of crime. Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans have a very difficult relationship.

They don't really like each other very much. All you hear is just how bad Nicaragua is. Well, then you go to Nicaragua and it's nothing like what the Costa Ricans warned you about, at least your experience of it is not. I didn't get robbed in Nicaragua, I did get robbed in Costa Rica.

Yet the Costa Ricans would never hear that. I've seen this again and again throughout my life. When my wife and I were on our honeymoon, we had a honeymoon in Hispaniola. It's not abnormal to go to the Dominican Republic, as we did and go to a resort. What is abnormal is we also went to Haiti.

I remember when we told people in the Dominican Republic, "We're going to Haiti. It's terrible. The Haitians, you can't trust them. It's dangerous. Be really careful. It's super dangerous." While we did not like Haiti, which I'll talk about in a moment, I didn't find it particularly dangerous. I think there was more danger there, certainly, but we didn't get robbed, we didn't get hurt.

We escaped. It's just again and again and again, almost anywhere I go, I find the same thing. I've come to basically distrust most of those opinions. What about Mexico? Mexico certainly has a reputation for violence and for lack of safety. I don't personally think that reputation is unwarranted. I do think it's important to pay attention to.

I remember a number of years ago, I was listening to a presentation by a guy who was a celebrity bodyguard type. His comment was, "Don't ever go to Mexico. Don't ever go to Mexico. If you don't ever go to Mexico, you're going to be safe." You file that stuff away in your head and you think, "Man, that sounds really bad.

I don't want to be dumb. I don't want to die. I don't want to be locked up in prison somewhere. I don't want to be robbed. Maybe I just won't go to Mexico." But in reality, I've been in Mexico for some time, traveling all around. I've been in Mexico City over the last week, Mexico City, Cuernavaca, San Miguel de Allende.

I'm in Cancun, Playa del Carmen right now. I haven't once thought about physical safety. I haven't once been concerned about physical safety. I want the same for you. Let me give you my formula for how to think about physical safety. The first thing is you should be aware of what the statistics indicate because data does tell an important story.

But data only tells an important story if you actually understand how to read the data. I'll give you an example from the United States. The United States has a much higher level of violence than many places in the world, a much higher level of murders, a much higher level of violence than many places in the world.

The challenge is that the vast majority of that violence takes place in just a handful of cities, a handful of large liberal cities where there's the most violence. Now you notice I put the political commentary, I said liberal cities. You can do this because you can study this with things like gun violence.

If you're ever looking at gun violence in the United States, one of the first things that you want to look at is say, "Where is this gun violence happening?" And the gun violence in the United States happens in large democratic cities that have strict gun laws, that's where all the gun violence happens.

And people argue and argue about this, but the reality is if you take those handful of cities out of the United States, you take those handful of cities such as Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., you just remove those from all the statistics, the United States drops to one of the safest countries in the world as long as you get rid of those cities.

So let's say that somebody's planning to come to the United States. You can tell them and they say, "I'm concerned about violence in the United States. After all, there's tremendous levels of violence and I'm not sure, am I going to be safe?" Well, a good statistical answer would be, "Yeah, you can be safe, but don't go to Chicago, don't go to New York, don't go to Washington, D.C., don't go to Baltimore.

Stay out of the big cities and you'll be fine." Now is that true? Statistically it's true, but you also know there's a whole other side to the story. You know that that's not all of it. You know that it's more important to think about what parts of those cities.

You can go to Chicago and you can have a wonderful time and never once see any indication of violence anywhere in Chicago because you simply don't go to certain neighborhoods. You stay in the places where there's not trouble. Same thing in any city. And so I would be happy to tell a tourist to the United States, "Yeah, go to Chicago.

Just pay attention to what the people say." And you know that if somebody's going to go to Chicago and they ask, "Hey, is it okay for me? I'm a visitor from England. Is it okay for me to go shopping in this particular district?" The answer is almost certainly yes.

Almost certainly it's absolutely fine and you can definitely go and shop there in that district. So you want to pay attention to neighborhoods. But what's also important in terms of safety is... Well, let's go first just listen to people on the ground. Let's talk about a city like, say, Portland.

Is Portland, Oregon known for being a particularly dangerous city? I would say no, it's a beautiful city. It's not known for being a particularly dangerous city. But if you were to go to Portland, Oregon today, would it be wise to talk to the concierge at your hotel and say, "Hey, I want to go check out the city.

Should I do that?" The concierge would say, "Absolutely, you can go check out the city, but you want to stay away from this particular square at this particular time of day." Walk through at noon day around the federal government buildings where all the protests are. Absolutely, you're fine. Walk through at 11 o'clock at night, not so good.

And so one of the most important things is always local knowledge. Virtually everywhere in the world that you go, there will be some local knowledge. Some local people will understand what's happening and when and where you can be in a certain place. And every type of crime differs. A train station in Paris is going to be an extremely high crime area for petty crime, for pickpocketing.

But that's going to happen during midday, midday during the crowds. And so you would be very well advised to carefully protect yourself, carefully protect your pockets, make sure that you engage in good anti-theft measures if you're going to be going through a train station in Paris at midday. There's a different risk profile though to going through at midnight.

And so local intelligence is what you rely on when traveling. And you rely on it in Portland, Oregon, in New York City, or in Mexico City, Mexico. You just simply talk to the local people and find out what's going on. Get the intelligence of what's happening in those local areas.

So let's expand our metaphor here for a moment. Pardon the sniffing, I apologize. But as I record this, I can't pause it at the moment. Let's go back to our metaphor, back to our example. Let's say that you have a British tourist who's traveling to Chicago, staying at a normal hotel and talks to people and says, "Hey, is it safe for me to go and be in this certain neighborhood?

Is it safe for me to go and be there?" And they go, "Yeah, everything's fine, everything's fine." But let's say that the British tourist now takes that information about safety and says, "Okay, well I'm safe to go to this neighborhood and I'm safe to go out at this particular time." But then they walk out of the hotel, they go to that neighborhood and they decide to buy some drugs.

Does their risk profile change? Answer is it changes dramatically. The vast majority of people who are killed in Mexico or in many places are involved in gang activity. Gang activity is often drug activity, often related to it. You're going to be far less safe if you go to Cancun and you buy drugs and start doing drugs with your buddies than if you just simply go to Cancun and sit on the beach and drink alcohol from your hotel bar.

Your activities make a big, big difference in your safety. It's not that Cancun itself is safe or unsafe, it's largely a matter of what your activities are. And so if you're going to go and you're going to engage in illegal purchases, buying drugs, you're going to go and get involved in a gang, you're going to do something that's going to bring attention to you, advocate for some political cause or something like that, then your safety profile changes dramatically.

These are the factors that are the most important. I do think that there are places in the world that are genuinely unsafe, that you genuinely need to need to plan with tremendous care and caution. I think the handful of those places are the number of those places is extremely small.

I could probably only name a couple in today's world. If I today, I'm not scared of going to Afghanistan. I'm not scared of going to Iraq today. I follow actually trip reports and whatnot of travelers who go do the visit those countries. Places I am concerned about Venezuela, very concerned.

It's not impossible to travel safely in Venezuela, but it's very difficult right now. Somalia, right? I'm concerned about Somalia and just because it's difficult in some of these places, you have to take many more precautions. You have to be very thoughtful. Sometimes you hire security. Sometimes you make sure that you get the local guy who knows what's going on.

But the risk is far lower than a lot of people think. Back to Mexico. In my travels in Mexico, I've not really ever once thought about safety. That's not to say that there may not be places in Mexico where I would not think about safety. Here's how it sounds to me.

Imagine somebody coming to you and you live in Miami, Florida, and they're watching the people burning the city of Portland down. And they're saying to you, don't you feel unsafe living in the United States? You say, bro, like that's Portland. That's not Miami. And that's these riots and protests.

That's not Miami, right? That's not the business district. That's not the W Hotel in Miami. That's Portland. And that's totally different. Well, at this point in time, I've come to see that that's basically the same about everywhere in the world. Mexico is not inherently unsafe. It's just simply not possible.

And you do this to the numbers. It's just simply not. Maybe they have a higher statistical crime rate. But even that in and of itself doesn't make it inherently unsafe. It's all a matter of where you're going, what are you doing, and can you pay attention to the advice that you get, pay attention to the activities that you engage in?

So what I have learned in my lifetime is that most of these places are simply scary because you don't know them. You don't have an idea of what they are. I mean, do you understand, for example, Mexico, do you understand that Mexico City is what is it, something like the third or fourth largest city in the world?

Tokyo, of course, is number one. Delhi is number two. I have to recheck the data, but it's in the top 10, certainly. Something like nine million people in the city proper, something like 20 million people, I think, in the central area. That's a lot of people. And it's a huge and kind of world-class city.

And so in the same way that you can be completely comfortable walking around downtown Manhattan, you can be completely comfortable walking around downtown Mexico City. Bogota, another world-class city. I think what is it? I can't remember the number. Something like six or nine million people in the central area.

You can't let your perceptions of what a place actually is like be formed without accurate information. And so I used to worry about traveling to Mexico. I don't worry about it. I just don't see any indication. With the things that I do and the places I go, I don't see any indications of safety.

I do know that there are areas where I am going to pay attention. So if I hear of an area that's experiencing a lot of cartel violence or something like that, I'm going to steer clear. But I'm not going to steer clear of the entire country because of that.

My final comment, so my point there is simply this. Go check it out. Go check it out. And what will happen is as you check places out, you realize that your perceptions were very different than reality. Go check it out. The final comment I would make is this. When you think about safety, recognize that you can always leave.

That is one of the tremendous privileges that you and I enjoy. We can always leave. Back to the Haiti trip. Remember, I told you my wife and I went to Hispaniola on our honeymoon. And we went to the Dominican Republic, went to Haiti. After a day and a half in Haiti, we were ready to leave.

I did not enjoy Haiti. I had a terrible time there for a variety of reasons. And we were planning to be there for almost a week. But after a few days, I just looked at her and said, "We got to get out of here. I do not want to be here anymore.

I'm not having fun. I don't want to be here anymore. I want to leave." And we literally booked a ticket there. We literally took a taxi to the airport in Port-au-Prince and tried to get out. Now we were trying to get back to the Dominican Republic, so we were trying to fly back there.

But basically, I was showing up at the airport with a credit card and I was like, "Get me out of here." And I wasn't able to get out that day back to the Dominican Republic, but I got from Port-au-Prince and I bought a plane ticket on the spot to another place in Haiti, I think that was Cape Haitian.

And we flew to Cape Haitian and had a much better, had a wonderful time in Cape Haitian and then took the bus back the next day back to the Dominican Republic. And so if you get to a place and you don't like it, you can always leave. And you can apply this at the local level, right?

If you're walking down the street, walking through a market and all of a sudden you get that tingly feeling in the back of your head, "I'm not in the right place." You stop, you call a taxi, you ask for help, you book an Uber, you do something, you call the hotel and say, "Come get me," and you just simply leave and you get out.

If you're in a country or a city and you don't like it and something's going wrong, then you leave and you get out. But that's only been, for me, necessary really only one time and that is in Haiti. And I'm not scared to go back to Haiti, I just didn't have a nice time there, I didn't enjoy it at all.

And so I don't particularly want to go back to Haiti. So that's how I would handle the question of safety is I would simply say, "Let's go check it out." And if you are a person with at least some means, is it more risky for someone? In some ways it's more risky for someone who's a penniless backpacker, taking a local chicken bus across the country.

But in some ways it's not because they're not necessarily a high profile. But if you're kind of what I would call an average, normal, middle class person, get on an airplane and you fly, you call up Enrique and you fly to San Miguel de Allende and you book an Airbnb and you walk around, I mean, there's no crime.

I saw nothing to be concerned about in San Miguel de Allende. If you go to resort town, it's just not unsafe. It's not. With those caveats that I said. Here's something that I always think about, something that encourages me. Years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who is a reporter and we were talking about the news and I was bemoaning to him how the news was just so full of bad things, so full of violence, so full of problems, et cetera.

And he said to me this, said, Joshua, you should be thankful that the news is full of those things. You should be thankful the news is full of kidnappings and rapes and violence and whatnot. Because if it weren't full of those things, you would be in a worse situation than if the news were full of those things.

He said it's news by definition because it's abnormal. Back to the classic kind of funny joke. Dog bites man is not news. Dog bite. Man bites dog, that's news. And so if the news is full of killings and rapings and kidnappings, et cetera, then recognize that's news because it's abnormal.

It's if that stuff is not in the news where you need to worry or you need to be concerned. And so here's the basic problem with news information. It is usually bad and it's sensationalistic, but it's sensationalistic and bad because it's abnormal. And the fact that it's abnormal indicates that it's not something that should be statistically expected to happen to you.

I'm not, even though I watch the news from Portland, Oregon, right, but I'm not unsafe going to Portland, Oregon. As long as I avoid certain times and certain situations. It's just that's the news because that's different and unique. And this is what makes it so hard in the modern world because we're exposed and subjected to so much news that is genuinely important.

It is genuinely newsworthy, but it's not going to affect your life. So there's a bombing at some hotel. Well, it's probably not going to affect your life to go to that place. And so the news is valuable to know. It indicates something. You pay attention to it. You talk to local people and find out about it.

So there's my conversation on safety. I would just say that what I've done is say, what's the worst that could happen? And let me just avoid that and go and check it out and trust your gut. But I don't think that I am quite confident that I can travel to Mexico.

I'm quite confident that I can live in Mexico and be totally safe. I'm just going to be smart about it. And if the situation changes, then I'm going to be ready to change myself. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that helps you. The more time I spend traveling to different places, the more accurate understanding I have of how the world works and the more confidence I have in what's right for me and my family.

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