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. 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 Josh Rasheeds, and today I want to talk with you about the single biggest lifestyle opportunity that is available to you right now. I'm not going to bury the lead even for an instant. Specifically, the single biggest lifestyle opportunity that you have right now is to develop a work-from-home income.

And in today's show, I'm going to talk to you about why you should do that and then some ideas as to how you can do that. Now, throughout history and times past, this work-from-home income, that phrase, has been very, very popular. There are many people who have made fortunes off of writing newsletters or writing books that are filled with work-from-home opportunities to teach you how to work from home.

There was the classic, all the things that you could do from a kitchen table. I'm going to go through the list of things that you could do. And all of these were probably legitimate to some degree or another. But we are in the middle of an absolute revolution in terms of your ability to work from home.

And yet this revolution may open up the single biggest lifestyle opportunity that you have. And that's why I want you to pay careful attention to it and see if you can harvest it to improve your lifestyle. Now, perhaps you don't need any encouragement or perhaps you don't need any particular reminders as to why you'd like to work from home.

Maybe you just know clearly the lifestyle that you have imagined for yourself. And for you, it's obvious. I know why I want to work from home because it's going to be awesome. Not everybody feels that way though. There are some people who know they definitely want to work from home.

There are some people who know they definitely do not want to work from home. But there are some people in the middle who I think haven't quite grasped how valuable this can be. So in today's show, I want to first sell you on the idea or the value of working from home so that you'll be encouraged to push through the hard things and then give you some strategies as to how you can implement that.

In my work as a financial planner, I look for ways to get a lot of results with just a little bit of effort. I'm always looking for the 80/20 analysis, the few things that you can do that will give you 80% of the results. And I'm convinced that one of those few things that you can do that gives you a massive level of results is to develop the ability to work from home because it will give you much more freedom of your time.

It will give you much more freedom of your location. And it will probably allow you to be far more productive. Time, location, and productivity. Years ago, I was working in a corporate office. And when I was working in that office, I was looking around and trying to figure out how I could improve my situation.

And I read a book called "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It." And that book made a deep impression on me. And the basic concept of the book was that in the future, people would be going to a results-only work environment, an R-O-W-E, results-only work environment, where instead of knowledge workers being paid per hour, instead of them being paid to simply show up, it was going to be what results are you responsible for.

And as long as you deliver on those results, you were set. Now, the book made an impression on me because it gave me hope that I could possibly get out of the corporate job that I was stuck in. I thought it would be successful. Now, time has not proven it to be successful, at least not yet.

There was a trend among many large companies to this kind of results-only work environment. The authors of the book had consulted with Best Buy at the time about how the Best Buy corporate world was going to this results-only work environment. And they thought that the trend was going to continue.

Now, it being of interest to me, I watched the trends, and I observed that they did continue for a while, and then things started to move back the other way. So I remember a number of years ago, Yahoo famously canceled all the work-from-home arrangements that they had. A number of other companies started to roll things back because company culture started to suffer because of the lack of communication among employees.

I was disappointed by that, but by that time I had charted my own path that allowed me to work from wherever I wanted to. And so I just kind of walked away from it. But there was predicted to be a revolution in people working from home, but that revolution did not happen until possibly the year 2020.

Possibly 2020 is the time at which that revolution will happen. Obviously, this is due to social distancing. All the companies around the world are being shut down, and the government says, "You can't work. You can't be open." And so tons of people being laid off. But many workers who previously worked in an office have been able to move their work to home.

If that's you, it's an opportunity. But it's also an opportunity for you if you don't currently work in a job that allows you to work from home. Because although I used to mean to maybe sell a newsletter about here's how you could have a work from home opportunity, today it's not necessary.

Almost any job that involves your sitting in front of a computer can have a significant amount of that work done from another location. Which means that instead of your having to pursue some unusual work from home opportunity, you can pursue a mainstream job that will give you that same flexibility.

And let me tell you, as somebody who has actually developed one of these unusual new incomes, it's tough. And if you want to improve your lifestyle, it's probably far easier for you to get a traditional job in a traditional area of a career that you know and understand, and that gives you all those same benefits of opening the world up to you.

I really want you to understand how revolutionary this is. Let's talk about the benefits. Control over time. The thing that really influenced me when I was younger and reading that book about results only work environment was I wanted control of my time. I didn't mind working. I just wanted to work kind of when I wanted to work.

And the phrase that is grilled into my head was they talked in that book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. By the way, I don't necessarily recommend it. Pick it up for free or cheap somewhere if you want to read it. It was a good book at the time, but I'm not recommending it.

It just made a big impact on me at that time. But they talked about how the modern work environment forces many otherwise honest and hardworking people to turn into habitual liars just to gain a little bit of improvement in their personal lifestyle. So the idea is you want to stay at home and eat blueberry pancakes with your children.

But unfortunately, you're expected to be at the office right at 8 o'clock, right on time. And so you have to say, oh, traffic was bad or make up some silly little lie about why you work because you can't. It's not socially acceptable to say I decided to stay at home and linger over pancakes with my children because my son's got soccer practice this afternoon.

So I'll just work late today. That's what you knew. But you couldn't say that. And I've often thought about it. How sad is it? If you as a competent individual, competent adult have to lie about something so silly like I want to stay at home and eat pancakes with my family.

And over the years, as I've lingered over many pancake breakfasts, I've come to really appreciate the freedom that comes with the ability to linger over pancake breakfasts. And yet that freedom no longer needs to be reserved for the 1% or for the C-suite executives. That freedom increasingly is available for you and for me.

Now, I've achieved it through entrepreneurship. And I think entrepreneurship is perhaps the ultimate way to achieve it. But many people don't want to be entrepreneurs. And it seems that many people are not well suited for entrepreneurship. But you can get some of those benefits by establishing an independent work from home job or career.

Because if you don't have to be there right at 8 o'clock, you can start. You know what I do. I work early in the morning, very early in the morning before my family wakes up. So you can start early in the morning. You can take a break, linger over breakfast, and then start again at 10 a.m., whatever you like.

That freedom over time is so, so valuable. And that freedom over time opens up some of the most important things of life. For example, I find that work often gets in the way of my family life. Many people have children who are in sports activities. Or they got to take their child to the doctor.

Or they want to homeschool, something like that. Well, a lot of times it's not that I don't have time to work. It's just that the times of work are inconvenient. Sometimes it's more convenient for me to work at 4 o'clock in the morning. The other day I woke up at 3.30 in the morning.

I wasn't particularly tired. I got up and I started working. Some people work well at 3.30 in the morning. Some people work well at 12.30 at night. And so if you could take the same number of hours but not be screwed into the same 9 to 5 schedule, a lot of times that opens up a family life that is much richer, much more fulfilling because it allows you time with your loved ones.

That time freedom is really, really valuable. That time freedom can also be valuable to you because it may help you to increase your productivity. All along the way in today's show, I want to talk to you about the value of working from home just simply relating to productivity. If you're going to earn a huge amount of money, which is my goal for you, I want you to earn a huge amount of money.

If you're going to do that, then you need to be one of the most productive workers out there. And sometimes you can achieve that by having more control over your schedule. Very frequently you'll find that successful entrepreneurs or successful executives will work on hours that other people don't work.

You can read articles in a business magazine about how the CEO does all their email at 10 o'clock at night. Now, on the one hand, you can try to shame that person because they work too much or they're somehow doing something wrong. But realistically, it's just easier to do things like email or sometimes deep work when you're not being interrupted.

Deep work is very, very important. The ability to sit down and focus and turn off distractions. So sometimes that work is most effectively done very early in the morning or very late at night. Those of us who do things like write or create some other kind of creative work often find that the early morning hours or the late at night hours, because of the lack of distractions, are our most productive time.

And when you can work from home, and especially if you can just simply be measured on results, you have the ability to open yourself up to be measured on your results, not just on the time in. Which means that if you can produce in two hours the amount of work necessary to keep your boss happy, the rest of the day is yours.

If you have clear expectations of what a work day means for you, what you're expected to do in a work day, well, just simply focus on getting those things done. And if it takes you two hours to get it done, great. Get it done and go on with life.

This is a way of thinking and working that was not available to many people in the past, but it is increasingly available to you. And you don't have to start some crazy business or start some new brand new opportunity. It's just the jobs that we do. And thanks to social distancing and the shutdown of society, more and more companies are being forced in that direction.

They're going to be forced in the future. We have no idea what's going to happen. But if many companies that want to reopen are going to have to put in place differences to maintain some form of social distancing. And there are estimates that perhaps companies can only maintain 30, 40, 50 percent of their workforce in their offices based upon social distancing guidelines.

If everyone's supposed to be two meters apart, well, how are you going to do that when you have a normal office environment that has people really pushed on top of each other? You're not. And so you can either have double the office space, very expensive and very risky, or you can arrange for some of your employers to work from home or have other kind of flex work arrangements.

Much more powerful and much more economical for the businesses to pursue those kinds of opportunities. And so that's why I want you to consider how you can take advantage of this trend to improve your lifestyle. It really is a huge opportunity. These kinds of opportunities don't come along all the time, but they're here right now.

I want to talk now about the flexibility of location. That's another huge benefit that comes from working from home. If you're not required to be in one specific office, that opens up for you the ability to live anywhere in your county that you want to live. It allows you to live anywhere in your state that you want to live.

It allows you to live anywhere in the country. And sometimes it allows you to live anywhere in the world, which can open up to you a huge range of lifestyle improvements and cost improvements that will allow you to get wealthier faster. Let's start with the local level. Many people have to draw a circle around their office and buy a home within that circle because it provides a reasonable commute.

And I think that's wise. I have throughout Radical Personal Finance, I've recommended that it's a good decision to buy a house that's close to your job. If you can buy a house that's closer to the center of the city or closer to your job, even if it costs you a lot more money, and in some cases -- sorry -- even if it costs you more money, and in some cases a lot more money, that's probably a wise decision.

The way I look at it is simple. I can't deduct my commuting expenses as an employee. I can't deduct it. So every dollar that I spend on a commute is very inefficiently spent. I can't deduct it at all. I can't deduct gas, I can't deduct a car, I can't deduct car payments, I can't deduct wear and tear, I can't deduct any of those expenses as an employee.

But I can deduct property taxes and interest on a mortgage. In addition, under normal circumstances, even if I buy a more expensive house to live in, I have a safer investment and higher profit potential under most market conditions. Why do I say that? Well, people who are going and looking for a house -- let's say that you have a difficult economy.

A house that's right in a prime part of town, right in the middle of downtown, is probably going to keep its value better than a house that's way out in the middle of nowhere, even in a difficult economy, or perhaps especially in a difficult economy. It's going to be more attractive to more people.

There's going to be people with more money who want to buy that house. In addition, if you're buying a more expensive house, markets tend to move together. You tend to find one market -- let's say the market overall is increasing at 15%. When you have a house that is in the middle of the city, there's a good chance it may increase by more.

So, for example, perhaps that all the houses in your area increase by 15%. There's a good chance that the property in the middle of the city will increase by 20% because it's more attractive, more attractive to wealthy people who want to be right in the middle of the action.

But also, because it probably comes with a higher price tag, that 15% or 20% move means a bigger change in the increase of house value. So if you're trying to get some investment value from your personal residence, probably better for you to spend more money, if you can afford it, and keep the house during difficult times, but probably better for you to spend more money and to stay in the middle of the city.

A 20% change on a 20% -- a 20% increase in value on a $200,000 house would take your house value from $200,000 to $240,000, a $40,000 gain. But a 20% increase in value on a $400,000 house -- make sure I do the math right -- is an $80,000 gain, so a much higher gain.

And it's probably a higher percentage. So I like the idea of buying a house in the middle of the city. However, that requires you to have a lot of money or to take out a big mortgage, something like that. And so when you're in one of these situations where you don't have a ton of money, it'd be nice to be able to live well on less.

Well, if you work from home, you can live anywhere in your county. So you can choose to live in the cheap side of town, or you can go out in the boonies where property prices are cheaper. And if you're only going to town once a week, it's cheaper for you.

But now it opens up the parts of your state. In almost every state, there will be a region that is outside of where the big jobs are available. So maybe it's -- you live in Miami, but you don't have to live in Miami. You could move from Miami to central Florida.

Well, if you've got to commute to work, you can't commute for work from central Florida to Miami. But if you've got to be in Miami once every few weeks for meetings, you can easily live in central Florida and dramatically lower your costs of living. On your car insurance alone, it'd probably save you the money.

But then all of a sudden, now you open up different states. So you don't necessarily have to live in New York City or New York State or Illinois or California, one of these high-cost, high-tax states. You can live in Indiana instead of Illinois. You can live in Nevada instead of California.

You can live in New Hampshire or Florida instead of New York and just take the early flight up for meetings when you have meetings and then fly back or drive in for the day. And that can save you potentially thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps even more importantly, although a little bit more exotic, if you can work from home, you can live anywhere in the world, which means that instead of having the high cost of living in the United States or the United Kingdom or Germany, you can have a more modest cost of living in Mexico or Mauritius or Guatemala or wherever you want to live.

And to top it all off, it can potentially come with significant tax savings, which could potentially be tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you are a U.S. American and you can move yourself offshore and take advantage of the foreign earned income exclusion by working from outside the United States, that could save you perhaps about $15,000 every year.

A $100,000 salary, perhaps about $15,000 every year based upon a savings of federal income taxes. Add on a savings of self-employment taxes. If you set up the proper arrangements to work as a contractor instead of as an employee, you're looking at $30,000 of savings on $100,000 of income. If you're a Canadian, you can move offshore.

You could potentially save hundreds of thousands. So it's really, really powerful in terms of cost savings. But all of that is predicated upon not having to be in one place to earn an income. Really big improvement. Then, of course, productivity. I find that a house can be a highly productive environment if you do things right.

Perhaps even much more productive than an office environment. Now that's not true in all circumstances, and this is the shakiest of my arguments. There's certainly a lot of value of being physically close to coworkers. There's something about that creative spark of people glancing into each other that seems really important in some industries.

And I think it's worth considering that. But there are some of us who do really well just on our own. And when you work from home, you can just simply work. Over the years, I have thought about doing things like running an accounting practice. Now, is there value in seeing clients face-to-face?

Somewhat. But I could run a highly profitable accounting practice entirely virtually. And I can get far more work done when it's just me sitting at my computer working than if I have interruptions. So consider how that applies to your industry. Those are some ideas on my trying to sell you a little bit on the idea.

Now, if you're one of those who says, "I don't want to work from home," I get it. I understand. Years ago, it was my dream to work from home. That was what I really, really wanted to do. Then I achieved it. And I realized that there were actually some real benefits of going to an office environment.

There were some real benefits of being outside of the house. Even to this day, sometimes I work physically from my house. Sometimes I work physically not from my house. And I think that there are genuine benefits of being able to go into an office. But what I found is that it's nice to have the freedom.

That, to me, is probably the best solution. If you have the freedom to go into an office or the freedom not to go into an office. And if you set things up so that you can be productive at home or productive in your office, it buys you freedom. And then you can choose whatever is best to you on any particular day.

So, some suggestions of how do you actually accomplish this. The first thing that you need to do right now is take advantage of the forced working from home and use it to pour on your personal productivity and be highly, highly effective. If I had a job where I was reporting to a boss and I'm working from home right now, my goal, my personal goal would be for my boss to see a doubling of my productivity, if that's at all possible.

Now, I understand when throwing numbers out, perhaps it's not. But that's going to be my goal. I want my boss to be blown away with how effective I am and how productive I am as I work from home. If I can accomplish that, then it's going to be easy for my boss to want to keep that going.

There's not going to be any reason why they have to say that we can't keep this up. Because there are bosses and managers all around the world who are watching their results. And some people, some industries are getting great results, some people, some industries are getting terrible results. My goal is that my boss looks at me and says, "I cannot believe how much work Joshua has been able to get done.

He's so much more productive and so much more effective working from home. Let's keep this up. After all, we're going to be required to maintain some kind of social distancing in the workforce. So let's just have Joshua be on the short list of the people who can work from home, if it comes down to that." If you will do that and you will keep working at it, then I think you'll open up tremendous opportunities for yourself.

And it's well worth doing it for the reasons previously stated. So what do you need? You need to be highly, highly productive. What else do you need? Well, you need the equipment that's going to allow you to actually make it happen. And so one of the things I'd recommend to you is invest into the equipment.

Now, what is the equipment? Well, you probably need a desk and you need somewhere to put that desk. This doesn't have to cost a lot of money, but it is important. I'm seeing pictures on social media of people trying to work at their kitchen table. Trust me, do not work from your kitchen table.

Your kitchen table is for eating. It's not for working. And if you've got a situation where you've got to pick up your computer and pack it up and unpack it, you're not going to enjoy that. It just doesn't work. Now, a desk can be as simple as, you know, go into your kid's bedroom or go into your storage room, take a door off the hinges, remove the door handle, grab a couple of filing cabinets, and toss that desk down and you've got a highly functional workspace.

A door put sideways, you know, horizontally on a couple of two-drawer filing cabinets is an awesome desk. Works great. You don't need to spend a bunch of money. Maybe you don't even have filing cabinets so you've got to build some wooden braces. But get yourself a desk, some place that you can work, and some place where your work equipment can be set up.

Some other equipment that you need. What I find is really important is I want a seamless transition between my home and my office. And so what I've always done, whether it was paid for or not, is just made sure that I had all the equipment set up. That can be as simple as extra power cords.

I always have extra power cords in my laptop so I don't have to spend the time to unplug my laptop, wrap up the cord, and then take the cord back with me. Keep a cord set up at home, a cord set up at your work, and a cord in your travel bag.

That way you're never dealing with the cords. It could be a dock. It could be if you have a workstation where you can dock your computer, set up a couple of monitors to work on. Just make sure you have it set up so you can go back and forth easily.

Have all the equipment set up all the time if you can possibly manage it. That's really helpful. You, of course, then need some place where you can actually do the work that is required of you. For some of us, that means a place that's quiet where you can focus.

You can work from your spare bedroom, from your master bedroom, from your living room, from your basement somewhere. If you need quiet, what I recommend is look for a closet. Years ago, we had a small house. I didn't want to rent an office outside the house, but that wasn't a great thing.

I started working in the bedroom closet. It works great for someone like me. He records audio because the closet has great acoustics. It's surrounded by clothes. It doesn't work so well for video. If you're doing Zoom conferences and there's video of your clothes in the background, that's probably not the best solution.

Look around and find something. You can take all the clothes out of your master bedroom closet and go put them in some other closet or go stack them in drawers or put them in boxes and throw them in the attic and turn that whole thing into a highly productive work suite.

You need, of course, some place to work and the basic gear of working. Now, to take it up a level, what I'd recommend to you, invest in the tools that make working from home really effective. If you're able to work from home, it probably means a computer. Of course, there are some people who are trying to move from a shop environment to a home shop, but that's a tiny, tiny fraction of people.

It probably just means a computer. But what you need is a really good computer and probably some really good extra monitors. Invest in the equipment. If that means you buy it yourself, get it. If you're not familiar with working with multiple screens, it'll change your life. It's well worth it.

These days, I don't work with multiple screens. I work with multiple devices. People see pictures of me. They see pictures and I have three things. I have two laptops. I have two MacBook Pros that I use and an iPad. iPad Pro has a keyboard as well. I actually really like using multiple devices instead of just simply multiple screens.

Multiple screens is one of the biggest proven increases in workplace productivity. So if your boss doesn't want to buy them for you, buy them for yourself and set up a nice work environment so you can be really productive from your home office. Super, super valuable. Don't forget about the value of the little peripherals.

I'll give you a simple and kind of foolish example. I'm pretty cheap, pretty frugal, and I don't like to spend money on a lot of stuff. I'll tell you, a while ago I bought some of Apple's EarPods Pro, the nice ones with the sound canceling. And they're awesome. They work great.

Are they expensive? Yeah, I don't know how much they are. I think they're a couple hundred bucks. But that little device in and of itself is so superior to the cheap options I've used, I had to hit myself on the back for not doing it sooner. I should have done it far sooner.

Now, don't be scared to invest in other infrastructure if it's necessary. If it's electronic equipment, fine. If you don't have something in your house, maybe you have a backyard. If you have a backyard, get yourself a shed, right? Go to the store, buy, spend a couple thousand dollars and order a shed.

Put an air conditioning in it if you need that. Set it up nicely, decorate it nicely. Give yourself a really nice professional office. I think that those things allow you to enjoy working much more. Something as simple as an easy chair to sit in. Sometimes I like to sit at a desk.

Sometimes I like to sit in a chair. Sometimes I like to sit on a couch. Go ahead and set up your home office to have those things, to have the things that you like. If you're going to be doing professional meetings, set up a professional background for yourself. Set something up that's going to provide you with what you need.

The cool thing is you can set up a mobile work environment. These days, I'm traveling around the world all the time. Everything, my entire business fits in my backpack. It's a very expensive backpack. I worry sometimes when I sit down and calculate the cost of the gear that's in it.

But at the end of the day, it's a backpack. So I can sit down at any table, any library table, any cafe, any random desk anywhere in the world, and I can be at work in 10 minutes with a highly productive environment. I can even do that from a parking lot with modern cell phones and Wi-Fi hotspots and whatnot.

There have been many times where I go and I take a folding table and set it up in a parking lot and go sit out under the trees. People always wonder why they hear birds in the background of Radical Personal Finance. Well, sometimes because I'm working outside and you're hearing the birds.

But invest into the infrastructure. Next, one of the things that I find really important about working from home is be somewhere that you like to be. Be somewhere that inspires you. A number of years ago, we were living in a cheap place, and I just realized one day, I always thought myself kind of better than being a victim of circumstances.

I always thought of myself, "Oh, I'm the kind of guy that I can sit down and I can work no matter where I am. I can just be effective." One day, I was walking around my house and I was just feeling bad about life. And I started looking out the windows, and I realized that the view out of every single one of my windows was ugly.

And I was like, "It just wears on you." It wasn't bad. We weren't living in a slum. It was just ugly. It was kind of the modern, smaller apartment, not particularly great, kind of the same old, same old. And I realized, "I don't want to do this anymore. I want to work in a place that inspires me.

I want to be in a place that's physically beautiful. I want to look out my window and be inspired. And if I look out my window, I want to look and see a beautiful view. I have a beautiful view. And that makes all the difference in the world." And so I encourage you, if you're going to do it, don't just stay living in the same ugly place.

What about a neighborhood? There's a certain energy that you get from living in certain kinds of neighborhoods. For some people, the best move that you could make is move right downtown. And so anytime you want, you want to kind of feel that energy of the city. Yeah, you're working in your apartment and you're all alone, but you want the energy to just go right downstairs and walk out on the street, and boom, you're right in it.

You can go and go to the coffee shop or go to the store or be around people. Some people really need to have that physical presence of other people. And that's one of the best lifestyle moves they could make. For other people, though, it's the exact opposite, being in the country, moving out to a place where you can just go and walk around, be at peace, listen to the birds.

Maybe it's for you moving to the ski resort town. If you're going to work from home, why not work from home in a place you actually want to be? Maybe you make the move from Vancouver to Whistler and go ahead and live full time in Whistler so that you can always get the fresh powder.

Maybe you move from, you know, you pick. I don't need to give you a long list of cities. But there are opportunities to improve your lifestyle. And I find that I'm really inspired to work when I'm in a beautiful place. Now, some people tell me that their experience is the exact opposite.

Some people tell me that when they're at work, they want to sit down and just, you know, work. And I personally don't resonate with that. I personally like to be in a beautiful place. And I found that it helps me. It helps my frame of mind. I enjoy my work more.

And so those are some things that can do. Also, of course, surround yourself with stuff that inspires you. It's kind of remarkable if you actually look at it. Sometimes I wonder, will anybody ever believe when they look at a cubicle farm and if they ever watched our lives, let's say they did a documentary of our lives, would our grandchildren actually believe that dad sat here in a cubicle farm and he, you know, his whole world was this six foot by six foot space?

I don't know. Obviously, there's something really there's something noble and important about being in that kind of environment. I'm never going to shame somebody for doing work that matters. And there are lots of jobs that are great. Right. I'd probably rather sit in a cubicle farm than than many jobs.

But at the end of the day, all of us have more freedom than that. I'd rather be a farmer. I'd rather go be an urban farmer farming in people's backyards. At least I can be outside versus sitting in a cubicle farm. I'd rather be a truck driver where, yeah, I'm sitting in a cubicle, but at least the view is changing outside of my cubicle.

I don't know. That's me. Your mileage may vary, but to me, it seems like there's a reason office space resonated as a movie with so many people. So be somewhere you like to be and be around stuff that inspires you. I do think that there are going to be some major changes coming.

There are going to be a lot of changes. And here's what I believe is the future. Personally, I don't think the future for everybody is for work from home. I believe the future for the productive is work from home. What you will see is I've talked over the years about freedom and how to build personal freedom.

I've talked a lot about how if you go up in the company, you'll build more personal freedom. The CEO of your company does not live and work in a cubicle farm. Oh, if it's a tech CEO, they'll put some cute thing in some magazine about how, look, Mark Zuckerberg is part of the people.

He's right here in the middle of us. That's cute. It's fun. But it's absolutely not true. The CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, sits at home at his gated estate and works from there half the time. And, yeah, he shows up at the office and puts his laptop on a common table.

That's fine. But the point is the CEO has full control over their time, full control over their ability. I used to, when I was a brand new kind of corporate worker, I would go down and to the first floor. I worked on the second floor with all the other drones.

And I would go down on the first floor sometimes for, you know, going to the executive suite. And in the executive suite, I'd be sitting there talking to somebody, doing work, of course, but someone would say, OK, it'd be 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I'm leaving for the day.

And the culture there was normal. It was my first. I was a 22-year-old, you know, brand out of college. And I realized, OK, in the executive suite, you can come in whenever you want. You can leave whenever you want. You don't have to make up lies about where you are.

You can come in at 10 o'clock and say, I went golfing this morning. Because you're responsible for outcomes and results, not for time. That's why. If the executive is running things well, there's no reason in the world why they shouldn't golf every day. The board will not care where the executive is.

As long as they're getting results. That was when I committed myself. I said, I want to be in a job where I'm responsible purely for results, not for time. But that requires you to be productive, to be disciplined, to be focused, and to be effective. You can do that.

But if you are in that kind of situation, if you are working from home, the in-person time actually becomes more valuable, I think. Over the years, as I've worked from home remotely, I've come to really value in-person exposure. Really value in-person opportunities. Really, really important. And what I have found is that for me, the best mix is that mixture.

I go to the industry conferences. I spend time in person with people to build relationships. And that makes working from home much easier. Because we've dined together, we've talked together, we've brainstormed together. And I think that's going to be the future. I think that there are lots of companies, even now there are lots of companies, who are building distributed workforces.

But those distributed workforces are being brought together regularly to build relationships. Now here's the bad news. The good news is you can access that world and you can be productive. You can make a lot of money. You can get all those lifestyle benefits. The bad news is this. You are not in competition any longer with just the people that live in your town.

You are in competition with the entire globe. Now, does that stink sometimes? Yeah. I wish it were different sometimes. I really do. I wish that we could just coast. But wishing something to be different doesn't make it different. The reality is you and I are in competition. The good thing is that those of us who do knowledge work are better insulated than people who don't do knowledge work.

For years we've watched our friends and peers and loved ones who don't do knowledge work, that work with their hands, that work in factories. And we've watched for years as the world has been turned upside down and they've realized that they were in competition with people all around the world.

Well, we were more insulated, those of us who do knowledge work. I would say probably not much longer. Because if the company realizes that they can hire somebody to do this and the work can actually be done virtually, why would they hire you? I think about this a lot.

I don't live in the United States anymore. And as I build my teams, I have no desire to work with people in the United States other than cultural affinity and the fact that that's where the vast majority of my listening audience is from. But you look at the United States and it's such a regulated environment.

It's so overtaxed, overregulated, very high cost of workers, both with the direct costs and also with all of the add-on stuff, the insurances and everything. It just becomes, it's like, why would I go there for workers? Worse than Europe, even worse. Now usually it's language ability or it's skill or knowledge, but the world is changing.

And right now all around the world, there's been a tremendous investment in education. And there are highly educated people with excellent language skills, with good cultural compatibility that are working from around the world, working from home sometimes, that it's a much, much better labor pool. Much more cost effective, easier to work with, less regulation, etc.

So, pay attention. Now, can you wish it were different? Can you change it by wishing it were different? You can't. I wish it were different, right? I wish I didn't have to work hard. I wish I didn't have to compete with the world. I can't change it. That to me seems a nonstop trend.

So what can I do? Well, I can embrace it. And I can lean into the challenge and use it to improve my own situation. To summarize what I've shared, and then I'm going to answer some questions that have come in during the live stream here. To summarize what I have to share with you is simply this.

Right now as I record this, your single biggest lifestyle opportunity is going to be if you can take what was probably intended to be a temporary work from home situation and turn it into either a permanent work from home situation or any time you want to work from home situation.

That will open up the world to you. Want to go live in an RV? Done. Want to go live in an RV and travel around Europe? Done. Want to go live in a narrow boat? Done. Want to go and live in Hawaii? Done. If you work from home. Want to go live in Whistler?

Whatever. You can insert your thing. If you can earn a high income and do that from anywhere in the world, it is life changing in terms of your personal freedom. So don't miss this opportunity. Recognize it. And if you decide, you know what, I really want to go back into an office environment, cool.

Go for it. You'll be happy when you go back to it. But always keep in your back pocket the ability to do that because it will open up life to you in a way that's really, really remarkable. Now I'm recording this show in front of a live audience. I'm just going to take a moment on the recording and answer some questions.

Jim wrote in and says while I was recording, "I began working from home in February after onboarding in the office during January. I'm definitely more productive and relaxed here. Plus the coffee is better." Yeah, the coffee is better. The food is better. You can put on the music, whatever you want.

You can crank heavy metal as loud as you want or you can work in total silence. With everyone working from home currently, it is a bit more difficult because I've lost the quiet home but I'm very happy with the change overall. The biggest challenge is quiet home, Jim, and definitely if you think it's going to continue, invest in something that gets you out of the house.

Build a little backyard shed. Run an Internet connection to it. Install an air conditioner or heater or whatever and that will solve your noise problem. Next, Gander says, "Thanks in part to motivation from you, Josh, I'm beginning my own journey of entrepreneurship." Entrepreneurship will open up to you tremendous opportunities in personal freedom.

I love to hear that. Joseph says, "How early do you start working in the morning?" My answer is it depends and it varies also depending on what time my children wake up. One of the commitments that I made a number of years ago is I said, "I don't like waking up to an alarm clock so I'm not going to use them anymore." Since I began Radical Personal Finance, I've completely stopped using alarm clocks.

Now, it was also convenient that as I've gotten older, my internal clock has changed. As you get older, you naturally wake up later. But I go to bed on time but I don't use an alarm clock and haven't, with the exception of catching early morning airplane flights, I haven't set an alarm clock in years.

I just wait for my body to wake up. I go to bed at the same time. I go to bed by 10 o'clock every night and then whenever my body wakes up, then I get up. Usually that's around 5. And so usually I start working around 5 or 5.30.

What I find is really important for me to be effective in my personal work is I need to read in the morning. If I read in the morning, I'll be inspired for the day. And so if I don't read in the morning, then what will happen is if I do that for too many days, then I'll start to just kind of deteriorate.

And so I spend time reading in the morning. I read books to help me in my work. I read some for pleasure. I read in foreign languages. I read my Bible. And then I also goal set and journal. So I write my goals out in the morning. I look at my goals.

I think about those. And then I go over my to-do list and kind of get organized. If I can have the picture in my head of what I need to do, I can have a great day. If not, then I don't. And then usually my children wake up. My children wake up pretty early because I put them to bed pretty early.

And so I usually get them to read in the morning as well, although the younger ones that are not reading yet usually just sit by me and snuggle while I read. And so my morning routine has changed quite a bit. Then I'll usually get breakfast for the family, and then we'll go and get started.

But the answer is I just start when I wake up. And what I try to do is have something productive to be able to get things going. All right. I think--oh, here's another one. Where can you find this high income? Basilio writes, says, "Where can you find high-income jobs where you can go live in another country and get paid a U.S.

salary?" All over the world you can find it. But what you'll have to do is you'll have to choose an area of specialization. There's no reason in the world if you can do work that can be transmitted through an Internet signal or through knowledge work of some kind, you can compete almost anywhere in the world.

But in order to compete, you're going to need to be specialized in some way so that you can find a market where your skills are being sought after. The single biggest problem that most people have in their work environment is they're not specialized. And yet if you just specialize just a little bit, then you can increase your earnings and be in much more demand.

I'll give you an example. On Saturday, my wife went and had her hair cut. My wife has curly hair, and she's been trying to embrace the curls and learn how to do it. She's frustrated with it. So what does she do? Well, she wanted to go and find someone to cut her hair.

But she--this is the second time. She uses someone who specializes in cutting curly hair, cutting curly girl's hair. And so this specialty allows this hairdresser, whatever you call him, hairdresser to be in much higher demand, to charge more money, and to be more busy because he specializes in curly hair.

Something very simple. And yet you see salons all over the place where people just sit there and wait for whoever comes in. Years ago, I watched a guy--this guy online named George Bruno, and I found him when he did a lot of beard work. And he grew out this big, huge beard, and he specialized in cutting men's beards.

And he had this big beard himself, and he understood when men are growing out big beards that they're looking for a barber that understands how a beard works and are looking for a barber that's not going to butcher their beard that they've invested months and months of looking bad into growing.

And so he was just booked all the time. People from him come from multiple states around. So something as simple as being a barber, but a barber who specializes in beards or in whatever other specialty is so valuable. Now, when you move into knowledge work, the same thing applies.

You have to have some specialty. So maybe a specialty could be I'm a social media manager, but my specialty is bilingual social media. That's a tremendous benefit because let's say you're working with a global brand, and you live in Romania, but you want to have access to working as a social media manager.

If you can be a bilingual or a trilingual social media manager for a big company, that can allow you to be worth more, a lot more, than your U.S. American-based counterparts. And so specialization is the key. Once you choose what you're going to specialize in, then you can go and find the market for it, and then you can compete for that high global salary.

You can do it anywhere in the world. Next, let me see if I've got any more questions that I'll answer on the last -- Okay. So the last thing I'll say is a question came in as I've live-streamed this. It says, "Can we get the recording of this live?

Are you posting it later?" So what I'm doing right now is I'm trying very hard to build a system that prioritizes video. So the audience of Radical Personal Finance has traditionally been an audio podcast, a long-form audio podcast. There's 700-and-something episodes of about an hour-long audio podcasts. And I love audio podcasts, and I want to continue to serve the audio podcast market.

But what I'm seeking to do is to bring in a video option of that audio. And the goal is that all the content will be available in all the places. And so if -- for my listeners who prefer the audio podcast, yes, all of the video audio is going to go to the audio podcast feed so that those people don't have to try to go and watch the video.

And then in addition, sometimes I'll just record just audio, and I want to make that available to all the video platforms as well. But right now what I'm doing is I'm live-streaming the recording of all the shows. Right now, at least Monday, Wednesday, Friday, although right now it's about five days a week, at either noon or 1 or 2 o'clock Eastern time, I'm live-streaming the recording of the shows to Facebook, to YouTube, and to Periscope.

So if you're interested in seeing those or interacting, what I want to do is I want to incentivize you to come and subscribe. You can subscribe at facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance or youtube.com/radicalpersonalfinance or find me on Twitter @JoshuaSheets. I want to incentivize you to subscribe, and so to incentivize you to do that, I'll try to come and deal with some of your questions during the live-stream.

That's it for right now. In closing, recognize that you have huge opportunities available to you to increase your lifestyle if you'll take advantage of this time to really establish yourself and the ability to work from home. Thank you for listening. I'll be back with you very soon. The holidays start here at Ralph's, with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

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