Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua. I am your host. Today I'm struggling with something that I don't generally struggle with, namely how to start a podcast.

Usually it comes fairly easy to me, but I'm struggling to know how to begin today because the actual topics that I want to talk about are a little fuzzy in my head still. So I don't know what to do other than just begin. So let's talk about where things are right now.

I would imagine that if you are anything like me, you're looking around at the world and are concerned about where we go from here. Over the past days as I have watched the current world events, I have chatted privately with friends and I've just said, "Where do we go from here?

Where's the exit ramp? What's the next thing?" And for clarity, of course, I'm recording this on June 4, 2020, and there are three large scale, very impactful circumstances that are impacting our lives. So of course, a big one, coronavirus, the worldwide global coronavirus epidemic, pandemic, excuse me, is certainly affecting all of our lives to some degree or another.

Now that effect is markedly different depending on your residence in a place like the United States or Brazil as compared to your residence in a place like New Zealand or Singapore. These are very different experiences of the coronavirus pandemic at the moment, but all of us are being impacted by the coronavirus epidemic.

The tone that I sense right now with regard to coronavirus is a tone of optimism. The general consensus seems to increasingly be that the actual fatality rate of coronavirus infection is much, much lower than previously feared. Now that fatality rate varies tremendously in different countries, and as always, the data is never as complete as you would like it to be.

But it does seem that we are improving with our ability to handle the actual sickness that somebody's experienced and give them better treatments. And the other thing is we have an increasing confidence that there's a higher infection rate than previously assumed. Now the case fatality rate is still extraordinarily high on a global basis, but that should continue to come down.

And yet I still take the situation very seriously. I still don't want to get coronavirus. I still would prefer to not get it. I'm still taking significant precautions, and I think that those are wise, especially for people who are at higher risk. But there is, of course, the coronavirus pandemic.

That's one thing that's large and concerning, and it's going to be with us for a very long time. Now the second order of effects, kind of the second situation that flows naturally from coronavirus is, of course, the economic situation that we're in, which is truly dire. It's truly devastating.

It's truly awful. And here again, your experience of this economic crisis varies greatly depending on where you are and at what social class you are. One of the things that I was wrong about a few months ago is I thought that the coronavirus epidemic and the associated lockdowns would flat out destroy everything.

I was in the mindset of kind of global depression for many years. And yet I think that the effects are going to be less severe, less severe than I previously feared. And the basic reason for that is the revolution in telecommunication and the ability for so many of us to telework, to work through an internet connection.

That's truly astounding. If we were living in the world of a century ago, where we all needed to be physically present in an office, and if we were facing the kinds of lockdowns and restrictions that so many countries have put in place, then it truly would have been that bad.

But many of us, especially many of us who are very high productivity people, can still work through a phone and an internet connection, which is really remarkable. The people who are hurt the most by the lockdowns tend to be those who are overall lower productivity people, people who are working lower income jobs, physical labor jobs, et cetera.

That's not universally true, but it does seem to be generally true. So much of our work has become knowledge work that now many of us can work from anywhere in the world, and that has allowed us to stay highly productive. Most professionals that I interact with have continued to be highly productive during their times of isolation.

Now there are legions of businesses that have been hurt, obviously restaurant businesses, hospitality businesses, airlines. And so it's not right to make a totally wide sweeping statement, but it's less severe than I thought. That said, it is still dire. Best estimates are that currently unemployment in the United States is something like 20%.

And of course, that impacts people differently depending on where they actually are in the overall social stratum and in terms of the kind of job that they have. Unfortunately the people who are hit hard by unemployment are those who don't make a lot in the first place, but still with unemployment benefits in the United States, with the extra unemployment benefits, the effects are still somewhat modest for those who were employed.

If you were to compare those effects versus say, people living in Mexico or Guatemala who are in lockdowns and who are experiencing massive increases in unemployment just due to the lockdowns, total social lockdowns, and yet they don't have the social safety net, the unemployment payments and the generous unemployment payments and the extra unemployment payments, et cetera.

It's just so much more devastating in a country like that than it has been in the United States or Canada or the UK. So the economic effects truly are dire and those are being felt. News is now that defaults are up as would be expected. Late payments are increasing as would be expected.

And I think that there was a lot of hope a few weeks ago that things would get back to normal fairly quickly. There was a lot of hope that everything was looking better and better on coronavirus. We're lifting restrictions and everything seemed like it was going to perhaps be back to normal a little bit faster.

Which brings us now to the more current events of the social unrest, especially in the United States, but to some degree around the world. This is certainly not a global situation of social unrest, although there are some global manifestations with the riots in the wake of the killing in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

And as I've been thinking about this, it's so fascinating to consider whether to connect this to the coronavirus epidemic or not. I think an honest analysis would have to say that this could properly be characterized as almost a third order effect of the coronavirus epidemic. It's hard for me to imagine that you would be seeing what you're seeing right now on the news or wherever you get your sources of information.

It's hard for me to imagine that you'd be seeing that if there were not so much stored up tension related to coronavirus and all of the associated restrictions and lockdowns. It's also interesting to think about if things would be as vigorous in terms of the number of people protesting, the number of people looting and rioting, if there weren't so many economic problems, if people had more employment.

One of the interesting things is that many times when you see protests, you'll often see them, they'll work on the weekend, but if you get to a Monday, people don't exactly have a lot of time to protest. Well, when you pour a volatile situation into a world in which people have more time to protest and possibly even more income still coming in because I'm unemployed, what else do I have to do?

It makes for a very volatile mix. This situation seems different to me than it has in the past. Don't know where we go from here, but things seem different to me than it has in the past. First of course, although police shootings and police shootings of black people have gained widespread publicity and support in years past, it's certainly never been as widespread as they are right now in terms of the amount of support.

I think that that's got to affect the people involved with the protests, all of the associated marches and political movements, et cetera. I think it's going to be a significant effect that will make that continue. On the other hand, I think it's tremendously dangerous that the entire movement is very likely going to continue to be co-opted and corrupted by violent elements.

With every day that goes by, it seems as though the risk of that just rises day by day. Then that means that there will be continuing crackdowns by police, by military officials, et cetera, to stop the rioting, to stop the looting, to stop the protesting itself. It doesn't make a good mix.

It doesn't make for a very peaceful mix. Yet we're stuck with this conundrum that, again, unless you're living in a downtown area or you live in an area where you're actually been targeted by a protest site, your life outside the window probably looks about normal. And yet your emotional life and your mental life and your social media life, most of those things have been rocked.

So it's kind of astonishing because usually you would expect a disaster to have external manifestations, and yet we're living through a disaster, and we're living through a series of disasters, and yet none of them are as immediate and none of them are as predictable as you might think. You of course know that I've been concerned about many of these issues for a very long time.

I'm concerned about, I've been concerned about pandemics. I haven't talked a lot about it on the show, but I've done various preparedness shows over the years to try to help people get ready for pandemics. I started talking about quarantine back in January of 2020 here to try to help people prepare for that.

And the pandemic is, I think, not as bad again as previously feared, and yet the second order effects are truly dire. The economic crisis is truly dire. It's really severe, and we haven't really even gotten into many monetary effects. Right now there seems to be possibly some mild deflation.

There's no evidence of inflation at the moment. The government finances in the United States are day by day destroyed by this, but we don't know the actual numbers yet. We don't know the actual figures, and we won't for a while. And so this is going to be a very long and slow moving crisis.

I still don't expect any kind of, I don't expect any kind of Weimar Republic style hyperinflation. I expect sort of a malaise, but this is faster and more difficult than I anticipated, which concerns me because I'm usually pretty pessimistic on some of this stuff. I try to think of the worst case scenario.

And so when real life starts to look like more of a worst case scenario than I imagined, then that bothers me because I always want to think the worst is going to happen, and then of course hope for the best and then prepare for the worst. But when situations start getting worse than I anticipated, that bothers me quite a bit because I don't like to go down to the depths below that of how bad it can get.

So I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where you go. So I'll just tell you kind of what do you do? What do you do? I feel like a boring host when I talk about what you do because it's the same small set of things that you do.

And over the years, as I've thought about a lot of things, I've studied a lot of topics, I've studied various doomsday scenarios and considered them. What I find is remarkable is you almost always wind up with about the same set of solutions. About the same set of solutions regardless of whether somebody is, what particular disaster somebody is concerned about, a pandemic, social unrest, civil war, or versus what political perspective someone is coming at.

Somebody can be a righty, a lefty, a century, and you wind up with kind of the same set of solutions. And so let me just talk through what I'm seeking to do and my advice for you of what to do at this point in time. So number one, guard your mental health, guard your psychology.

If you find yourself in an unstable place psychologically, pull back, pull back. Believe it or not, you don't have to respond when someone tells you that you should. You don't have to respond when someone tells you, "You have to do this thing." It's always your choice whether to respond or not.

And you should only respond to people who, you should only respond to things that line up with your personal goals. And so you need to guard very carefully how you feel and guard your head. You probably like me have lost a lot of time over the last few weeks, you know, glued to the internet, watching everything happening, trying to figure things out.

And yet, much of that time, it's largely unproductive because it gets me into a place where I'm not particularly useful to anybody. It encourages me to move into a place of arguing with people and debating with people and it's not particularly healthy. And it harms my life, harms your family, harms your health.

So guard yourself, guard yourself very carefully. Don't let other people control your thoughts. If other people can control your thoughts, they can control your life. And you may be sovereign over nothing else in your life, but you can still be sovereign over your thoughts. You may not be able to control your body.

Maybe you're locked in a prison. Maybe you're disabled, right? You could be a paraplegic sitting in a wheelchair. You may not be able to control anything external to you, but what you can always control is you can always control your thoughts. And yet, that's a discipline. It's something that we have to practice.

It's something that we have to actively do. And probably most of us are weak in it. I'm certainly weak in it. I struggle. I struggle with that. And yet, I'm determined to continue focusing on that. So guard your thoughts. Don't let other people manipulate you. Don't let other people manipulate your thoughts, manipulate your feelings, and manipulate your actions.

Don't be manipulated by other people. Especially, don't be manipulated by guilt. Somebody tries to guilt you into doing something and they use tactics of guilt on you to try to get you to say something or do something that you don't believe is right. Just say no. Don't let other people manipulate you.

So guard yourself. Guard your psychology. Focus on what you're building. Let that focus expand out to your family. One of the most important things for you to guard and to protect is your family life. You must be the sentry at the door to your home that makes sure that the only things that get into the door of your home are things that are wholesome, that are good.

People would love to come into your home and control your environment and manipulate your family into their chosen course of action. You've got to stand at the door and stop it. And you be the one who decides what's right for your family. And you be the one who moves your family in the right direction.

So guard your family. Keep peace in your family relationships. To the extent it's up to you, live at peace with all men. But most importantly, in your family relationships. For example, there can be these fourth order effects. In my family, we're feeling the strain of the quarantine. We'll go back to fourth order effects in a moment.

But in my family, we're feeling the strain of the quarantine. And I have nothing to complain about. We've done fine. I don't live in a tiny apartment on the 50th floor of a high-rise. We're not cooped up. We have all that we need. We're very, very fortunate. And yet still, it's frustrating to be locked down and not be able to go places.

It's frustrating. And the last few days, I just realized how much it was building. And that's my responsibility to adjust that and to relieve that strain, to find ways to let that pressure go out and bring us back to a place of peace. So pay careful attention. And fourth order effects, what I was alluding to is you can have coronavirus, a strain that comes in because you're worried about getting sick or you're worried about your family member who's susceptible to the symptoms of coronavirus.

Or you're concerned about whatever it is that you're concerned about. You're concerned. And so the stress starts to build in your family. And then the stress of financial stress just builds and builds. And then the stress builds with social unrest and concern about the police and just goes on and on.

And then finally, it just boils over and you put that stress on your children. And then all of a sudden, now your children are tense and on ease. And that just brings back over on you and it causes the whole family to be out of rest. So guard that, guard your home, make it a sanctuary, a safe place, a sanctuary where the only things that come in are the things that you've chosen to be there.

Financially the steps are pretty simple and it's pretty basic. I continue to be conservative financially, continue to keep expenses low, continue to keep cash on hand, continue to try to keep an add to the war chest and look for investment opportunities, continue to try to keep income strong, continue to try to keep your business going as much as you can.

As I have talked about many, many times, when you go through a recession, if you can keep your job and keep your income flowing into your house, your experience of that recession will not be severe. It'll be kind of a, it won't be a big deal in your life.

It'll just be a relatively minor thing that you remember. Okay, there was a recession of 2020. But if you lose your job, then it will be a deeply emotional thing in your life, a deeply difficult scarring thing in your life. You know, you get kicked out of your house, you get foreclosed on, those now, you get your car repossessed, now those things become deeper and heavier and much more difficult.

So work, work, work to keep your job, to avoid the layoffs, to work really hard. And if you do get laid off, work hard to get another source of income as quickly as you can. Just be, do everything you can to keep the income coming into your household. Look for opportunities to grow on it.

I've got a couple of consulting clients that are starting to have some opportunities, some investment opportunities. You know, competitors are starting to go bankrupt, they're starting to get in difficult times, mismanagement is showing up, and there's opportunities to expand their operations. And so in your business, look around and see, keep your feelers out there.

One of the most useful and impactful things that you can be doing at all times is cultivating deals, cultivating deal flows, what I call it, but just building deal flow. And every business is different in terms of thinking about how you're going to build deal flow, but you've got to think to yourself, where are my investment opportunities going to come from?

And then how can I cultivate them by cultivating the relationships that would lead to them? Sometimes it's cultivating a relationship with a center of influence. That center of influence might be a broker, it could be a financial professional, it could be a bankruptcy attorney, it could be an accountant, it could be somebody who's just connected, you know, the person who leads the local business networking group or something like that.

But sometimes it's cultivating a center of influence. Sometimes it's building friendly relationships with your collaborators or your competitors or joining and finding out. But you've got to sit down and analyze your business and say, where's the deal flow going to come from? How are you going to be aware of the investment opportunities?

That's how I talk about it in terms of businesses, if you're going to invest into an actively managed business. But it's no different in any other kind of investment. If you're looking at real estate, you've got to start to cultivate that real estate deal flow. Where are you going to find the properties?

Are they going to show up on a listing website? Is it going to come from finding out from a family member? How are you going to cultivate that? If you're investing into paper assets, stocks, you've got to ask yourself, where are my areas? What am I watching? How am I going to judge these things?

So be working on your deal flow because there may have already been deals. There may be more deals coming. So if your investment strategy involves anything other than dollar cost averaging into a mutual fund, be thinking carefully about your deal flow. If you're dollar cost averaging into a mutual fund, good for you.

I think it's pretty remarkable to see the changes in the stock market over the past months and to see where we are. It's certainly head scratching, I think, for most of us. It's head scratching, but you can see it there, see the difficulty of predicting market momentum, broadly speaking.

So it's an interesting time to be an investor. What else? I think that you see now more than ever the importance of physical preparedness. I expected the risk of violence to increase over the course of a pandemic. Usually when you have economic unrest and economic difficulties, you usually will have increased risks of violence, increasing crime rates, et cetera.

I didn't expect that the cause of those things. I didn't anticipate that the cause would be a police killing or a couple of killings, I guess, but certainly that's as reasonable as anything else in terms of a cause. And so good preparation still comes into play. I think one of the most important things to learn from the current emergencies and the current disasters is simply how disasters can build one on top of another.

And this is, I think, common example. Hurricanes. Hurricane comes through town, blows some trees down. It's bad, but it's not terrible. What makes the hurricane terrible is when you're out cutting trees down after the hurricane and trying to clean up your yard and you saw your leg off with a chainsaw and now you can't go to work the next day.

That's what makes the hurricane really, really terrible. It's the combination. And usually that's only the case for a small number of people. But what you see right now, if you study the current disasters, you see that happening. So you see coronavirus, disaster for some people who are dying, six figures in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people globally.

It's a disaster for them, disaster for their families. Coronavirus is having a heavy impact on many businesses, certain types of businesses. And then all of a sudden, you're one of those people who is in a business that's in an area that's affected by rioting and looting. And now it's just triple whammy.

There are people out there right now who have lost a loved one due to coronavirus, who have lost huge amounts of business due to the lockdowns and the restrictions. And then their front windows have been stoved in by a looter and now they're done. And so you see how these things add on top of each other.

And it's just a sobering reminder, very, very sobering reminder as to how things can go from bad to worse quicker than you imagine. And even where we are, an honest accounting, there are a number of ways that things could get much, much worse very quickly. I don't even like to talk about it, I don't like to think about it, but it's worth thinking about and talking about, and you got to be prepared.

So stay focused on your basic preparations. Have physical security in place. If you're not living in a safe place, get out. You can see right now how many disasters can be affected differently by being in a safe place versus not being in a safe place. Whether that's simply living in a downtown city, which is prone to social unrest versus living out in the country, even just the experience of a lockdown.

I've reflected many times over the past months of how dramatically different the experience of somebody living in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, or downtown Atlanta, or downtown New York City is versus somebody living in a rural area of Tennessee, or a rural area of Nebraska, or et cetera. It's just night and day in terms of the actual experience of something like that.

I'm so grateful having children not to live in a little tiny apartment. And it's such a brutal situation for the millions of families around the world who have a little apartment that they live in and they've got children and everyone's locked down. It's really, really tough. So be considerate and thoughtful of your physical safety.

If you live in a place and you're concerned about your physical safety, I'd encourage you to go. This comes into play even on a broader state level and national level. It would seem to me that with the current social unrest in the United States, it would seem to me that most of the physical safety concerns could be handled by simply staying home.

There would be only a few places, I guess, where there would be that much of a risk of physical safety, of loss of life, unless you're out and about and involved in a violent incident. But if you simply stay home, the physical safety is pretty low. But that could change very quickly.

The current tensions, political and racial tensions in the United States, certainly very bad, very, very bad right now, but they could get far worse. And there are a couple of things that could happen that could just simply set things off. So far, I've been generally appreciative of the amount of restraint and the number of peaceful people as compared to the small number of people using the opportunity to be violent and engage in violence and theft and killing.

But that could change. A significant – a small but significant percentage of society is made up of people who just don't care and people who are fundamentally evil and who will use any situation that they can to do things that they just feel they can get away with. And so thus far, things have been on the whole about as much as you can expect.

But it could get a lot worse. All you need is for – I mean, if the police violence has been bad so far, there have been a couple of police officers killed, but all you need is a handful of people to go out and – like happened in Dallas a number of years ago.

It was at 2017, I think, when the guy went out in Dallas and just started killing and shooting police officers. I mean, think things are bad now? It would be far worse if some guy goes out and just starts killing people randomly. The police arrested today some of the far right violent elements, and all you need is for a few of those guys to slip through and all of a sudden things could be much, much worse.

So if you're living in one of those places, if you're living in a big city, have a plan to get out and have a place to go. You'll have to judge the risks locally. It would be foolish for me to say, "Get out," right? There's no need for that at this point in time.

But you better have a plan to get out. I think it's remarkable to watch. One of the things I didn't expect is that – I didn't expect the United States of America to start to get behind on things like passports. Right now if you want a new passport, the United States of America, unless you can prove to them that it's an emergency, basically you can't get one.

You can't get one. I've been preaching at you for years, feeling like a broken record. Get your passports. Get your passports. Make sure that you and everyone in your family has passports so you can get out. That one little document, that one little piece of paper, or little booklet I guess I should say, is the thing that opens up the ticket for you to get from one place to another.

You can completely change your circumstances if you go from one place to another with that little passport. But if you can't get that thing, you're sunk. There are so many people around the world. My travels, I ran into Venezuelans and so many Venezuelans and they're always – they're like, "Yeah, I'm Venezuelan but I'm also Spanish.

Here's my Spanish passport. This one is I got because my Venezuelan one, I can't get a new one made." Well, to see that in the United States right now, you can still get one but you have to prove that it's an emergency. So don't wait around. Get that stuff going because countries can close their borders and if you got to get out, you got to get out.

So you need to have that stuff now. So I would have some bags packed and have a few different places ready to go and just be watching because things could get worse. I hope they don't. So far, some of the worst case fears have not come to pass. Thankfully, for example, there's not been any evidence of bank instability in the United States.

I'm grateful for that. There's been no runs on the banks in the United States, modest runs on the banks in other places. There's hyperinflation in Lebanon right now. Some modest bank runs in Argentina, bank runs in Brazil but very, very modest. And so thankfully, my fears about bank runs have not happened.

And again, thankfully, no major concerns yet about inflation but you need to be prepared. The time to be prepared is far before you ever need it. What else can you do? I think one of the things that you see right now is the power of community and community is at the core of how you get through something.

And so whatever community means to you, invest into your local community. Get together with your neighbors. Make sure you get together with your neighbors. If there are various groups that you're involved in, it can be political groups, political action groups, whatever it is, be ready. But be involved in your community, your local church, your town, etc.

It's crucial and there are a lot of people right now who are hurting. There are a lot of people who don't have food. There are a lot of people who are hurting. And so find out about who those people are. If you really want to gain political influence in your community, meet the needs of the people in that community.

When a government stops meeting the needs of its people, the authority of that government quickly disappears where people just aren't willing to pay attention. And so what do you do? You step in and you meet the needs of that community. So get involved in your local community and seek to build and to cultivate community, whatever that means in your local context.

Beyond that, there's not a lot that you can do. There's not a lot that you can do. You can do things. You can be an activist, write on social media, write articles. There's of course a place for that and that may have some effect. I'm skeptical of the effect.

I don't see a lot of people that are able to effectively persuade other people to their position. But if you've got a tool of persuasion to bring people over, then exercise that. I think you see right now, I'll stop there. I don't know a lot else that you can do except to those things.

Work to care for your family, care for your community, work to shore up your personal finances, work to keep your income coming in, and then look for opportunity. Look for opportunity in the midst of crisis. I know that my tone is not as boisterous as it usually is. Got to be honest.

I'm trying to be honest. I always try to tell you where I've been wrong, where I think I'm right. But I can't. It's hard to put on a happy tone and kind of be Mr. Optimistic sometimes, as you well know. So that's where I think we are. But I hope you're doing well.

I hope that you're prepared for this current event and I hope that things will go through there. I'm going to go ahead and re-put into, in the light of the current police tension, I'm going to go ahead and put again into the podcast feed a replay of the show I did a number of years ago on how to arrest proof yourself, how to arrest proof yourself and your children so that you don't get arrested.

If you are in the process of going out and getting arrested, I certainly understand. It certainly seems that there are times that it's worth it to take a stand for what you believe in and to get yourself arrested. I would beg of you though, count the cost. Make sure you're ready to pay the cost.

Just the simple act of getting arrested, if you're engaging in civil disobedience or protesting or some other form of demonstration. I respect you and my hat's off to you for sticking to your convictions and advocating for the things that you believe. But I would beg you to count the cost.

And I would encourage you, one of the things that is such a concern is that one of the practical things, I try to find the solutions that work. I try to find the things that are likely to be effective. And if I can find those things, I like to share them.

And it's deeply frustrating to me when I can't find the common threads that will work. But one of the things that does still work in the United States for those who are concerned about tensions with the police, what does work are the things that I talked about in that show on arrest proofing yourself and your children.

It does still work. The rule of law is thankfully still in force. You still have a number of rights that you can exercise and that you should exercise, you must exercise. And there are a lot of things that you can do to protect yourself. And so whether it's teaching your neighbors about how to conduct themselves during a traffic stop, teaching your neighbors how to conduct themselves during encounters with the police.

I teach a little classes on it. Anytime I can, I try to take someone and say, "Listen, let's drill you on what you do when you get pulled over, what you don't do, what you do if when you're speaking to the police, what you don't do." And I feel like that's a really practical area of advocacy that can really help.

So if you listen to that show, recorded a number of years ago, but if you listen to that show, I hope it'll help you to take some of the ideas and techniques and teach them to someone else. Thank you for listening. (dog barking)