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So we're going to be talking about how to find success in a society that's going through a soft collapse. And I'm gonna focus my comments on this around an ancient Chinese idiom which is riding the tiger. So what do I mean by self collapse when people think of societal collapse? Unfortunately, almost everyone thinks of something that happens suddenly and is complete in its effects. If you look through history though, and few people know this societal collapses or almost never sudden and the almost never is being conservative about it. What you'll find is that every situation that seemed like a sudden collapse was actually prefaced by soft collapse, it's soft collapse. So it's not a question of if it's just a question of how long, how long does the softness endure? And what, what does that mean? Soft? Well, it doesn't mean it's easy, it means that things go wrong in ways where some people manage to get through. And that's important to remember. And so it's good to stop thinking in terms of all of the sudden and completely and instead to start thinking in terms of how to make the most of the situation that you can't stop. And that's where we find ourselves today. Now, with that in mind, let's talk a little bit more about this idiom. So what does it mean to ride the tiger with the full idiom is riding a tiger and trying not to fall off? So you can imagine if you're riding a tiger, one thing you wouldn't want to do is get off of the tiger and the reason is because the tiger would instantly kill you. Uh I have a brother who's afraid of very few things but one fear he has that I think is hilarious is he's scared of tigers. I don't know why. Maybe he had a bad experience with Winnie the pooh. I don't know. But uh he's scared of tigers. So tigers are formidable opponents. It's not an animal you'd like to face. But if you happen to somehow get on to one, your number one goal is, is going to be to stay on it. And so the question is if you have to stay on a tiger, how can you make the most of it? And the meaning of the idiom is to make the most of a situation where you can't quit and you can't win . So nothing you do is going to help you conquer the tiger. And that's a really important thing to understand. I, I don't know why. So few people who think about this have surrendered to the fact that it's going to kick their butts. I mean, there's so many people who think, well, if I do things just right, I will continue to live a first world quality of life as the rest of the world burns. That's absolutely not going to happen. I promise you it's not going to happen. So, the question is how do you mitigate as much of the downside as you can? And you need to start thinking about that. Now, you need to start thinking about that 20 years ago. But here we are. So the next best thing you could do is to start thinking about it. Now, there isn't anywhere you can go to get away from this, it's going to affect you and it's going to be bad. So, what are we looking for? I'd like to tell you that there's a path to independence, in other words, to cut the ties that connect you to people who are going to do stupid things. And there isn't, unfortunately, there isn't, we are all slaves worldwide. Everyone living on this planet is a slave and especially in the first world, you are a slave. You should get used to that idea because until you do, you really can't see things as they are. So, uh how do I prove that the, the best argument is probably property tax. There isn't any place you can live in the United States where the government doesn't own your property. And what do I mean by that? If you stop paying property tax, the state will seize it. There isn't any state that doesn't have property tax. I think that's embarrassing. I think it's terrible. I'm not surprised that no state has come up with some other way, but not that it was always like this. But here we are so, until some state legislature courageously adopts a new way, we're all slaves. And why is that? Well, what do you need to live? You need a place to live, you need to be able to grow food. That, that's really it just those two things, the rest you can figure out on your own. If you wanted to go ultra Amish, you could and I say ultra Amish, you know, Amish, people are held up as examples of what anyone could do. And frankly, I think there's a lot about that society, those societies, there are differences amongst their different sects, but the only reason the Amish can live like they do is because all of us give them money. So it's really quite a farce if you think about it because yes, they have less dependence on less direct dependence on technology. But look at the houses they live in, this isn't 18 forties or whatever uh lifestyles. They, they're just, it's, it's like make believe because they sell all their stuff to people who aren't Amish and then they use that money. And so they're, they're pinching off of the first world. Uh the modern world, I should say the modern world while pretending to be apart from technology. And that's the ones who are, there are versions of uh the Mennonite religion where they use technology . They drive, they have cell phones anyway. So it's an illusion. Don't think of that as a counter example because it's not, if you really wanted to be independent, uh you couldn't do that today because the government wouldn't let you anyway. The closest you can get is to try to minimize your current and future property tax, maximize your ability to grow as much of your own food as you can maybe develop some sort of community with that. It is much easier to do that way. Reduce your dependency on utilities, water, power, sewer, I didn't put gas on here, but a lot of people use gas for, for cooking or heating and to pay off your house. Now we're gonna talk about of these things today to one degree or another. Um The, the one thing I don't talk tons about in the rest of this short presentation is water, power and sewer. What I will say is what low dependence means for water and sewer is being on a well and having a septic system. But power is a sticky wicket. When people think of power independence, they think of probably solar panels. I do. I have heard of one or two people who have a suite set up where they have running water on their property and they have a little hydroelectric set up. That's , that's pretty awesome. But no matter what you do, you have to understand that first world power is tied to the first world. What do I mean by that? Even when you go to local production and you're not so reliant on the grid, you're talking about massive amounts of money to maintain that system. Obviously , it costs a lot to get it, but those no component there will last forever. And not only are you gonna have to pay out the nose if you have a battery system, a whole house battery system? That's crazy expensive. But the panels and the batteries, they don't last forever, they have to be replaced and you could think of that as you would, uh, a roof replacement. It's something that has a, a life term and it's gonna cost a fortune and you can sort of prepare for that over time. Great, fine. But if you live in the middle of nowhere and you're not a super handy person, how are you going to make repairs to that system when things break? Just routine maintenance things? Because you're going to call somebody out. And if you don't live in a rural area, it might shock you to find out how much it costs to call somebody out. Um, you, you really do need to get into the position where you're doing those repairs yourself and few people had lived their lives in ways where they're capable of that. So, you know, when something goes up in my plumbing system in my house and I, I don't even live as far out as, as some people do, but, you know, I have to drop 400 bucks just to get a plumber to come out here on top of whatever else, they're gonna charge me for the work and because they get, you know, the dispatcher gets paid that much just for them to come out here, they find ways to spread the job across multiple days. And so basically anything that happens, you're over $1000. And so you have to get really good at fixing things yourself, even when it crosses the threshold of what you'd never do if you lived in the suburbs, which you'd never do yourself. So that's just the reality of the situation and we'll talk more about paying off your house. So I'll hold off until then. But the point is you want to break free as much as you can from the things that will continue to be much, much, much more expensive and far less reliable. That's the name of the game. That's the pattern. So that's the good news. The other good news is there really are solutions here. Now again, riding the Tiger means you can't win against the tiger, but there are ways to stay on it without getting eating, getting, getting eaten. And that's the point so I can't give you too, too many specifics because by nature, here's how it works. When, when a system gets really complex, there are solutions, there are ways that it can keep going. The problem is they're very specific. They're not general. What do I mean by this, uh think of the car market? This is maybe the easiest way I can explain it when most people go to buy a car. What do they do? They wake up one day and they're like, oh dang, my car broke down or it got totaled in a way, it broke down in a way that it's, I need to buy a new one right now. I can't fix this one or got totaled because I got in an accident. And so they hitch a ride to their local dealership, which most people call the steer ship because they rip you off. Right. You go the salesman, they're gonna direct you to what serves their needs, not what serves your needs because it's one of many uh situations where the person who you hire to help you is actually in it for different motives, like your real estate agent, for example, or your insurance agent. So you end up walking out there in the car, they want you to buy, you've paid way more than you should. You don't have any time. Maybe you haven't thought of doing the research to see if you're getting the best deal. This is the way that most people buy cars. Now, very few people know that large dealerships and they're everywhere nationally. They have all sorts of arbitrary rules about how long cars can sit on their lots. And what happens is once a car has been on their lot for that long, they wholesale it, which means they put it on internet sites to dump it as fast as they can and they basically sell it, not at cost but pretty damn close. So as a general rule of thumb, you never buy cars from a dealership. You always buy private party because it's cheaper. In fact, even if you go on Kelley blue book, you'll see that the estimate for your car changes depending on whether a dealer is selling it or private party because they mark it up a lot. You can also find people private party who are distressed sellers once I bought a car from a guy and uh you know, we drove 3.5 hours to get there. This is when I lived down in Utah and uh I checked out the car and it looked fine. It was exactly the kind that we wanted. And I said, why are you selling this for so cheap? He said I need this money yesterday and he showed me he had all these other cars and boats on his lot and he said, I've got payments on all this stuff and I'm out of money and I need the cash and so this is, this is paid off and I've got to sell it so I can pay the loans on the other stuff. Well , it stinks for him, but good for me. Right. So, that was, that was a great car anyway. Um, but it turns out so no one does that because if you're in a bind you don't think about all that. You don't have the time, you don't have the money and you probably need a loan too. And it's harder to get loans for private party. Although there's a way and it's not impossible. It's a pain. It's the dealer doesn't take care of it for you. So people go the easy way, but an even better way to buy cars is to do a national search on a website like cargurus.com. And no, they're not paying me to say this. I wish they would. But no, it's just out of the goodness of my heart. Um, and you can search for specific makes models, number of miles or range of miles, whatever and you could do it nationwide and you'll probably find that at any given time, there's probably some dealership selling the exact car that you want at wholesale. You might have to drive a little. But if you do the math, you're gonna save thousands of dollars thousands and you could even take a kid with you. And now you've got an adventure to have, right? Or take your spouse And now you've got a little trip to have and I've done this multiple times . I can't tell you how much money I've saved on this. We bought a truck one time and I drove it for four years, put 40,000 miles on it and seriously dented the fender and then we sold it for the same price that I paid for it. So you can do things like this. And the only reason these pockets of opportunity exist. Uh Hopefully you get what I mean by pockets now, complex systems have lots of unique situations and you can exploit those to win when everyone else is doing the normal thing and failing miserably because the normal thing doesn't work anymore. You can find the pockets and succeed. You know, tons of people are like, oh, I can't afford a car, I can't afford a car. Yeah. Well, I traveled across country to Baltimore where I grew up to buy a truck, got a visit with family out of it. In fact, I drove that car, I told you I bought from the boat guy. I drove that out and gave it to my mother in law , took your kid with me. He slept the whole time. It really wasn't the bonding time. I thought it was gonna be we I woke him up in Chicago. I'm like, Luke look skyscrapers and he's all daisies like uh and just went right back to sleep. So that was kind of not so fun but drove the truck back, drove it for four years or something. Sold it for what I bought it for. Right. Um, the only reason that opportunity exists is because people don't know about it and people are lazy. They won't do things that make sense. They, they have limits on the intensity of what they'll do. They have nothing to do with cost and benefit. So, almost anyone is going to say I would never drive cro cross country to buy a car. You could say you'll save $3.2 billion if you do it. And they'll say no, I'm not doing it. There's too much. It's like, ok. And, uh, I don't know if you believe me when I say that it's absolutely true. It's probably true for you too. People don't think in terms of cost and benefit. They just have these arbitrary boxes within which they operate and they won't consider anything outside of it and guess who fails in complex systems. Those people, because the solution to the problem is not in their box . People follow crowds. They do what other people do. They're sheep and not the good sheep that follow the good shepherd. They're really goats, I guess. But they, they goats who act like sheep. That's how people are and the opportunities they abound, but they lie in the roads less traveled. That becomes increasingly true as things fall apart the old way, which is gone. And it's, it's not coming back people, it's done. Uh And, and, and we're gonna go over specific examples of this presentation. I'm trying to make it concise and focused. These are general principles. We could talk for a whole day about this. I could lay out every piece of reality in this frame. We could talk about dating and you're getting plenty of that on other videos. So I, I don't wanna give you a reason to skip this one. So I won't talk about it. We can talk about the things we will talk about this in this presentation. Specific examples, we could talk about how to raise your kids, which again, I touch on in a lot of other videos. There's so many things or just your religion. Right? Again, other videos you can't do it the old same way, it's not gonna work for you the same way it works for your parents, grandparents and great grandparents. It's over. That is over and those solutions only worked under the constraints of the time you gotta change, you gotta be better, you gotta be different. You can't be better without being different. OK? So the old way was, hey, here's a menu of 3 to 30 options and you know what, honestly , you could pick any of them and it won't really make a huge difference. As long as you're on the menu, you don't pick some crazy other thing you'll do. All right. That's the old way. Doesn't work like that anymore. There's not a single thing that you can tell someone and say, hey, just do this and it'll probably be all right. Now. There are so many implications of this average intelligence people cannot thrive in a complex system, let alone below average. Why? Because you actually have to think critically. That's the bad news. You can't just copy what someone else does. It's not gonna work. You gotta look at your specific situation. That's the bad news. You know what the good news is? It's weird. Good news as most good news is. If you think you're an idiot, you might not be so most really smart people don't think they're really smart. And so what you might think of as intelligence is probably not intelligence at all. I remember how much of a shock it was as I've had all these experiences in life that have sufficiently proven to me the truth of those statements. So for example, I don't know how, but somehow I ended up in advanced classes in high school and, uh, the folks that I was with, I thought that we were all the same. Uh, actually I knew I was different but I assumed I was worse. And what happened was we got similar grades and then 25, 10 years after graduating, we had very different paths and there was a cluster and the, the large group, almost everyone in that group, they're all losers . They all completely failed at the game of life. And it's shocking to me. Right. But then come to find out that what the way they were doing, high school is very different than the way I was doing it. I didn't see it back then. So what, what's my point? Why am I droning on about this? Don't think me saying, oh, you gotta be smart to win this game. Don't think that excludes you the fact that you're thinking about this stuff that that's a really strong indication that you're not in the group that that's destined to fail. Not that that is ever true that someone could be destined to fail. Um It's amazing what you can do through choice. But so the main thing is a willingness to be different. The main thing is strapping that I said most people have a narrow box, strapping that thing with dynamite and blowing it sky high and just saying, look, I'm gonna do what's required really thinking intently about what's the most important to you and structuring your life to optimize that. That's what sets you apart and that, that makes the biggest difference. So when I say intelligence, I'm really not talking about what most people would. When they say the word I'm talking about intentionality, adaptability, humility. So, all right, and, and the solutions they don't transfer. Getting back to the slide here, the solutions don't transfer. And that's the difference 50 years ago. If you're a young buck, you could look to the older bucks and say, hey, what did you do to get to where you are? And they say XYZ and you're like, ok, I'm gonna do XYZ and I'll get to the same place. Not anymore. And I've talked about this many times. Uh, you know, the path I took was programming and it, it's worked out just fine for me. But people have asked, would I advise that for other people? Not generally. No, I have two kids. Actually, all of my Children have, have been exposed to programming and are learning it to some degree, but two of them are doing it professionally. And you say, well, that's hypocritical. So, you know, we shouldn't do it but your kids are doing it. Yeah. Well, guess what? My kids started doing it uh as near to full time as they could given labor laws and constraints because they had to go to school when they're 12. My, my, my oldest two sons are about to turn 14. That's crazy. Um They're better programmers than almost anyone I've worked with professionally. And that is mind blowing, right ? But, but this is an example of the general pattern I'm talking about here with riding the, the Tiger. You find pockets just so happened that I had my own business where I needed programmers and uh I set extraordinarily high standards on those kids. But I said, look, if you wanna do this, here's the cost here's the benefit and they jump through all the hoops. So, um, that's very different than someone's going to college and starting to code when they're 18 or 19. Right? Or becoming self taught when they're 30 or 40. Which again, I've helped multiple people do all those things and for some of them , it was a really good choice. It was the best option, but it's not a general solution anymore like it was when I was 18 where it's like, hey, you don't wanna be poor. Here's a path. OK? One dimension that I'd like to talk about now with riding the tiger is in the domain of employment and taxes, this is very important. This is very, very important. So employment is gonna be your money coming in. So that matters a lot. Taxes is a huge chunk of your money going out. The nominal tax rate for someone in the US is 50%. If you're making good money. Um, if you're below a threshold and have enough kids, it's effectively zero. But for most successful people between federal and state and if it's in your situation, local, you're up around 50%. The easiest way to have more money is to keep more money, which means to pay fewer taxes. So let's, but let's start with employment. Think about the pocket, you gotta find the pockets, you gotta find the pockets, right. It's not about finding some huge segment of the population that does whatever it's, it's, and here's a, here's a dead giveaway with this. If you can describe the opportunity with a single word, it's probably not a pocket. So for example, you've heard me talk at length about the modern benefits of being in HVAC or plumbing or one of these licensed trades. Well, that's a single word, descriptor. And so you're not quite out of pocket yet. So what happens when you add words is you're adding specifics. Remember complex systems, the solutions are specific, they're unique. So the more things are tying together like I'm a concrete guy in a small town with one leg or something, right? And the one leg thing is just being made up. But, but as you tie together all these constraints, what you're doing is you're shrinking the space of people that could fill that role and that's really important. Now, unique doesn't mean good. OK. But in a complex system, what is good is also rare. Those things always go together and, and what do I mean? Uh what let me try to explain complex system in a simple, simple way, you know, those toys that little kids have really little kids and their shape holes like there's a square in a circle and a star and a triangle and then they have those blocks that they push through. Well, imagine a shape on that. That's got like a million sides. It's a super complicated shape, right? And so if you need to find the shape that fits into that hole. There's only gonna be one that fits and it's gonna have tons of details on it. So think if you had to build a robot to do this task that little kids do of matching the blocks and the holes, what would be the instruction for? Find a circle? Right. It'd be something like find a shape that doesn't have any sides. OK. I just explained that one sentence. What about a, a triangle? Find a shape that has three corners, exactly three corners. That's one sentence. Think of like the most complex gnarly shape in the world. How would you describe that? Well, at the extreme, you'd need one line of description per feature of the shape. And so maybe it's like a book, the size of war and peace, the the that's the set of instructions to identify this thing. You can think of that like a complex system. That's what we mean by complexity. Then this is just one way of explaining it. I'm trying to do this visually. So we don't have to get bogged down with technical ideas. So in a complex system like that, think of the individual features of the shape like going down in complexity to a star, let's say that it's got five points on it. Think about one of the five points that's like you finding a pocket in this complex shape. And so a star is pretty simple, repetitive, et cetera. But imagine your gnarly monstrous complex shape, one of its points is gonna be this weird bendy thing. You know, it's got Wiggles, it's got all these different aspects to it. And if you can fit into that little piece you're in, right? Because the shape is success, these are the conditions under which you can be successful and you're gonna be one of the arms of this weird shape. Ok. That's a pocket. So let's um, let's talk about how employment works with the, with the pocket. So I, I mentioned that one word descriptors are dead giveaway that you're not there yet. But if you're, if you're talking about the licensed trades and you combine that with a small town, what you're gonna start to see is this pattern of jobs that, that don't pay well enough to live in a high cost rural area, but somehow you cracked the code. Hopefully , that doesn't sound too cryptic. Uh No pun intended to talk about code cracking, but let me lay it out a little bit. So right now where I live, uh when I moved here almost 10 years ago, the houses cost less than half of what they do now. So um a lot has changed and I won't go into details, but for the sake of time, but as it stands now, no one is going to pay the astronomical amount of money it would take to move here and then do something that doesn't pay very much. Right. It'd be like if this is one thing I kick myself so hard for before COVID. Uh, you, you might not know this but the USDA has loans that they give for specific things and they're, they're subsidized, the interest rates are lower than market and, and sometimes they'll give you way more than a bank would. And, um, they, they would get, and they still do this. They, they have loans. For example, if you want to build a home in a rural area, there are different programs for that where you can get a much lower interest rate. Uh They also had loans for farms and they have a whole host of loans for farms. One of those programs is for new farmers and they give you all these freebies, lower interest rates, higher uh principles, whatever . And I am kicking myself for not buying an enormous ranch prior to COVID. It just, it was not on my radar at all for a multitude of reasons. There's no way I could have known unless God explicitly told me and he didn't and I understand why. But, um, now that's out of reach like so many prior opportunities were because even with the subsidies, farmland is so freaking expensive now that you'll never recoup the cost by actually farming. And the reason is the market has changed from actual farmers to funny money, investment groups or, um, more than, than more than that, uh wealthy people. Who want a show ranch. And so they buy the thing, they bulldoze all the buildings, they put million dollar barns on it and now it's their retirement or whatever. So, um, anyway, same principle applies here, but not just the farming. So if you want to be a carpenter or a plumber or HVAC or whatever trade you wanna do , you're, you're not gonna go move to a small town to do that because you'll never recoup the investment required to, to buy a house in a shop, even if you had the money, which you probably don't. Ok. So how do you crack the code? What do I mean by that? Well, uh, with HVAC and plumbing and other licensed trades, you usually, you have to train in the state, you wanna live so you don't start out in the high cost rural area. You start out in a town or a city. Ok. But you still have a high cost. Sure. So live in a van or live in an RV while you're getting your license because it takes time. It's a paid apprenticeship , paid apprenticeship coming through the door and then that converts to the full time regular job. And then you start working through your licenses. So you can get to the point where you don't need to work under someone and you pack your money away. And then by the time you get to be whatever you have to be in the licensing structure. To work on your own. You got enough cash to go in and buy a place. But by the way, since you're not in a hurry, this is another principle is, don't be in a hurry since you're not in a hurry, you're like that trout. That's just swimming behind the rock, waiting for the right thing to float by not using all its energy to fight the current. And when the right thing flies floats by, you know, you jump on it right away, say cash offer, Shazam, right and grab it. The other thing you could do is buy land knowing full well, you're gonna develop it and now you have a way a place to get away to on the weekends too, right? And you slowly build it up, maybe even build your own house with your own hands. It could be done or maybe you buy the land and then you start looking at these companies that do manufactured homes, the the dealers and you just make clear to them that you're interested in a repossessed home. And um then you end up getting that for 50% off the list price or whatever. And so you can stack these things on top of each other. And that's another principle we're gonna talk about is stacking these things. OK? So uh that's very detailed, right? And the details are gonna be completely different in other opportunities. But that's an example of what we're talking about here. So you're looking for employment opportunities that are in no way national. They're very, very specific to the, the area and to what you're doing. So, they're, they're not national geographically . That's funny. Um They're not national geographically and they're also not national in terms of the description. So plumber, that's a, that's a national thing, but small town plumber, that's different. And, and why is that different? So, um if you drive around in the suburbs count how many houses you pass and think about what it, what it would be like to be a trash man there. And then think about a rural area where houses are five miles apart. How would that business be completely different in a rural area? Right. Obviously, there are immense density issues there and that's just the tip of the iceberg it turns out. Um, but I don't wanna get too much into that. Ok. Now, let's pivot into taxes. I already gave a preview of this. One of the best ways to make more money is to keep more money, which means spending less money, including on taxes. Now, you probably don't think of taxes as something you spend money on. You probably think of taxes as something that's taken from you. And that's because you're in the W-2 standard employee mindset, you gotta get out of that. Now, the tax people do everything they can to make this as unpleasant as it could possibly be. I am almost sure that you know, that how they have revolving doors in government, I'm almost sure that the retirement plan for CIA torture people is to go to the IRS and write the tax laws. But, um, if you're looking for something that'll make you hard core, you could either go to ranger school or try doing your own taxes because reading that manual will make you wanna cut your eyes out with a dull spoon and it changes every year. So you could probably tell, I don't envy accountants. Although it is a nice gig because it's protected. It's one of those sweet jobs where license requirements can, uh, net you more money than you should actually be getting. But they have the benefit of focusing and doing the same exact thing day in and day out. Um, so the hill to climb, they only have to climb it once. Whereas if you're doing your own taxes, you have to familiarize yourself with all this nonsense and you're just doing it once every year. So , um, this pain is quite fresh to me because yesterday was the day where I had to, I block off everything and I, I warn my kids don't come anywhere near me. You know, my wife must approach me with a plate of cookies, whatever if she's gonna talk to me at all. Um, because it's, it's disgusting. So, the , the good news is if you, if you pollute your soul by acquainting yourself with the tax code. One of the benefits from that hero's journey. The boon will include the fact that, you know, I'm not even calling loopholes. Uh Only stupid people call these things loopholes. Only stupid people say things like game, the system, you should look up what that means. It's a, it's a phrase that comes from, from game theory. Um There's another word for that. It's called winning. It doesn't mean cheating. That's not what we're talking about here. We're not talking about doing anything illegal. If you're paying 50% on your taxes, you're not thinking very hard. Ok? And you're not working very intelligently because maybe with some slight tweaks to the way you do things, you could pay a heck of a lot less in tax legally. Ok. Now, as far as specifics go, I'm not gonna go there. You should talk to an accountant , right? Or at least read some books. There's this thing called youtube. It's awesome. You should check it out. But I'm just gonna say that there are paths where you can legally pay way less in tax, depending on your situation. So there are two ways of going at this folks. One is to say, hey, I arbitrarily chose this one path in life and I do XYZ in this certain way. Well, there might be some huge tax benefits that you don't know about. Ok, fair enough, but it's much more likely that there will be enormous benefits. If you look at what the rules are and then change your behavior to go with them. What do I mean by that pockets? It's pockets again, it's all about pockets. Ok. Just say the word like 10 times in a row. Shout it from the top of your lungs so that everyone within earshot thinks you're crazy, especially if it's really early in the morning or late at night. Ok. Get the, get the neighbors to call the cops because you're so loud about it. It's all about pockets. How do pockets work with taxes? Tax code is written for two categories of people. And it's been this way since 1913. You, you, you know politicians who are either stupid or are trying to manipulate. You will say things like there have been times in the United States where there is a 99% income tax. No, there haven't. That's the vanilla tax law but they write vanilla tax law to look good to the normies. They want to show normal people, hey, or convince normal people. Hey, we're sticking it to the rich. But guess who funds their campaigns? Rich people. It's all a show. Rich people do not pay taxes, not nearly as much as a percent as you do. Wealthy people know the tax code or they hire people who do and they're called wealth advisors and they make a butt load of money. Why? Because they take a cut of what they save and the tax rate is really high and they save a lot of money. So, let's say you make $100,000 a year and I'm just hard and fast with the math. Right. We're doing this rough. Let's say you're paying 50% taxes, that's $50,000 a year that you don't get to spend. You earn it, but you don't spend it. Let's say you can get to 40% tax. You just save $10,000 a year in your pocket to, to make the math easier. Let's say, uh, you save $12,000 a year, you're earning 100,000 a year, your take home is 50 and you can do the math divide that by 12. What's $1000 in your pocket every month? What difference is that gonna make in your life? That's enormous. That's a new car, right? That's a very fancy family vacation every single year with enough money left over. So that if you have to replace the tires on your car, you don't have to sweat it. No big deal. Do you see why this matters? That's it? 100 K if you make a million dollars a year, you understand now why people hire wealth advisor? Right. And why they jump through the hoops to organize their activities so that it goes with taxes instead of against taxes. That's what we're talking about here now, just to give you some, some rough ideas again, I'm not giving you any specific particulars here. You need to go talk to an accountant or educate yourself, but try to think about jobs where your overhead becomes deductible. So if you're a W-2 employee, like basically everyone and that's what they want you to be because you're the tax mule, you're the one that's gonna be paying all the taxes on A W-2. You probably don't have a job where you can deduct the cost of your vehicle. Think about that for a second. If you had a job where you could deduct the cost of your vehicle, say your, your vehicle cost 40 grand to buy, imagine paying taxes on $40,000 less in income. That's not 40,000 less in taxes, but it's 50% of that. You just save $20,000. That's like getting a raise for $20,000 or one time bonus, I guess. Imagine if you could write off your fuel. Um, before I started working from home, I was commuting to town five days a week, which is a huge time cost, but it's an enormous fuel cost. And so imagine if you're in a situation where you're dropping $1000 a month on gas or 500 a month, imagine not having to spend that effectively because you, you get to write it off. So, uh, you get a 50% discount is the point. Imagine an immediate 50% discount on fuel on the mechanic, right. And now that's just cars what about real estate? You know, you want a big old garage? What if you had to have a, a job where that's part of the business? There's structure questions. I mean, corporate structure. Um, like if you've got an LLC versus self, I, um, I'm sorry, versus being an employee. So being a contractor versus being an employee. Now, a lot of these changes, they require you to be the one who's in control. right? And you might think well, with my job, I have to be a W-2 employee. I don't have a choice and none of this matters. One look into side gigs. So again, there are tons of rules about this. But if you learn the rules and you play the game, play with the rules, not against them, you might be able to start up side gigs, not because you need extra money because you want to pay less taxes. There are ways of doing this, right? Um And it's not a perpetual motion machine, right? It takes extra thinking and some extra work and you're gonna have to make some changes. But the the question isn't, does it cost something? It's what is the cost benefit? Remember what we were saying about the little box, blow the walls off the box. Just think in terms of cost benefit on everything, don't have any limits. The only limit you have is that they are 24 hours in the, in the day and most people live till they're around 70. That's it. And there are so many ways to pump so much into those limits beyond where people are. Ok. And then, uh, so, so side gigs is one thing, the other thing is it doesn't cost you anything to go to your boss and say, hey, I'd like to become an independent contractor instead of an employee. I think it'd be a win, win. Here's how much money you'd save. How about it? They might go for it. One of the easiest ways of starting a business is it's called intra preneurs instead of intra. And what that means is from within a company you're spinning out is one of the safest ways to start a business because your former employer, employer is your first customer and effectively they're beginning at your current rate. Right. So you preserve the current, you just get permission to do it for other people too and they can say no and they probably will. Right. But does it hurt to ask? All right. Um The other thing I want to mention here is that another thing wealthy people do is they get away from the traditional employer, uh I'm sorry, employee role where you're getting paid on A W-2 and they make money based on dividends because dividends are taxed at a much lower rate than income. Although there are some politicians who've tried very hard to get rid of that. They have not yet succeeded. And so that's a huge savings right there. And so a lot of people starting their own businesses , they'll form C Corps or S Corps and the benefits of those there, those are two different entities. But it's, it's all about the tax benefits of how you're paid. That's what it comes down to. So, Ac Corp, the corporation pays income tax and then you have to pay tax on whatever it pays you. So it's doubly taxed. Um, in S Corp, the difference is the IRS basically makes you pay yourself half of your compensation as a, as an employee. So you have to pay normal employee tax on that and then the other half you can get as dividends and you pay capital gains on that, which is lower. And so, and it's, it's, there's no double taxation like AC Corp, but you can look into all that. All right. So just giving you some things to think about there. And if you're interested in any of that tax stuff, you should definitely talk to somebody who knows and uh who you would trust because obviously there are huge legal implications with all of that and IRS agents have guns now. So, um, all right, another thing to think about with employment is this idea of multiple income streams. This is, you know, with all these things you sit down and you start thinking, well, what would a normal person not be willing to do? Let's make a list of those things and then let's go through them. One of the things that normal people don't do is have more than one job. See, uh, when I was little, this was like the go to Staple for poor people. So basically everyone in my social network as a kid, uh, the adults, I mean, when I was a kid, they all had more than one job because they weren't getting paid enough at the one job to pay the bills. So they had to have more than one. Um, nowadays, even poor people don't do this. So they'll just have their one part time job and that's that there are exceptions. Of course. So please don't feel insulted if you're an exception. Um This advice is really good for you if you're an exception. So this is something though that more and more people who want to be successful should think about. So, benefits of multiple income streams. There's a whole lot of them. Um, one of them that's not on the slide is that it's insurance against cancellation and, or robustness against changes. So let's say that you have one job and something happens and now you get laid off. Well, especially if you live in a rural area, you might be in a world of hurt because there aren't as many jobs in rural areas you might think. Well , I'm a fancy pants programmer and I can work remotely for now. You can, what happens if, um, I don't know. The elites get sick of Elon Musk and they, they, uh, take him out and Starlink falls apart or whatever. And all of a sudden you don't have the ability to work from home or some brilliant politician decides that work from home differentially benefits white people. And now there's a special work from home tax or something. Right. You don't know. And that's the thing with the more complex the system, the less accurately you can predict it. So you have to think it's funny the solutions are about specifics , but predictions ought to be ranges because it's easier to predict a range than an exact thing. And so if you find yourself ultra dependent on one thing being like it is in a complex system, that's a flashing red flag flags don't flash. But you know what I'm saying, a neon sign saying, look, you need to become robust on this point of failure. So, um if you work from home and you're in a place where the only high speed internet is starlink, that is an enormous red flag, right? What would you do if you couldn't get that anymore? If they made the price 10 times what it was or whatever, you'd be in trouble . So you have to find contingencies. Um So with multiple income streams, what are your contingencies? If you've got three little things and one of them goes away, you'll probably be ok if you have 10 little things and one of them goes away. You'll definitely be ok if you've got one big thing and it goes away, you're probably in a lot of trouble. Right? Ok. So what other benefits are there for multiple income streams? Complimentary schedules. What do I mean by this? So I was talking to a butcher the other day and this sounds made up. But it's, it's, it is true. I was talking to a butcher the other day and he was, he was telling me kind of his life story. He didn't want to. But I was man, I was inquisitive. Um Every time I'm way out of my league, I mr question because I convert to a little kid because I know that I'm in a place where I could learn some serious stuff that that's way outside of what I'm familiar with. And so this guy, he just kept coming out with boxes of meat from the store cause we were picking up a whole cow, not the store, his shop. And I actually, I was trying to help him. He wouldn't let me. Um But every time he appeared from his freezer, I just hit him with questions nonstop until he disappeared. So he was working really fast. So, uh I was asking him all kinds of things. Uh You know, how, how large is the staff? What kind of troubles do you have hiring people? How long have you been doing this? Um You know, do you get overtime pay. What are the hours like? Is it seasonal ? Uh, what kind of animals do you get here? What do you think the needs are? Whatever? That's just me. Right. And, um, he told me that he had been doing it for over 30 years. Uh, he's an older gentleman and, um, he got into it because, because I said, how did someone become a butcher? And, um, he said , well, to tell you the truth, not many people are cut out for it. I'm just kidding. He didn't say that. So, um, uh, he didn't have a sharp wit. Um, I'll stop now. So it's hard to put my puns away though. I pack them up. Um, he said he got into it because his family, he, he had decided with his family to start up a fireworks stand over the summers and he said I was looking for a job that I could do over the winter and this is perfect because it's super busy over the winter and fall and then it dies down. And he said at this place, at least they don't do much over the summer. And I said, oh, that's a really good idea because I was thinking, you know, in Montana it's absolutely beautiful over the summer. And the perfect job would be something like a teacher where you're off on the summers and, uh, you work your butt off over the winter because it's nasty. So you're not missing out on anything and I was thinking about what other jobs are like that. But anyway, um, because, you know, I'm not a teacher anymore. Plus, unfortunately I was allowed to be a teacher for long enough to work through all my summers and get tenure. So that's not cool. Anyway. Um, so that's what I mean by complimentary schedules . Now, that's a seasonal, seasonal pairing. But you could also do it during the week or even daily. Uh, I know that school bus drivers, they work obviously in the mornings in the afternoons, but not in the middle of the day. So what if you had some kind of job where you, you had something else to do between the bus driving? Well, if you're in a rural area, you could probably make some bank being a bus driver because, uh, here you get paid almost as much for driving a bus as you would on a construction crew. It's very close. I think it's $21 an hour to be a bus driver and they train you right to get your and, and, uh, I don't know, do you have to have a commercial license to be a bus driver for school? But if you do, then the synergy could be, go find something. You can use a commercial license for between the hours that you're driving the bus when you're not driving the bus, right? And now you get to stack those things together and you've got two income streams. And one of the reasons they pay the bus drivers more is because they can't find people to take the job. And so you're getting a boost there. That's one example of using the constraints of your situation to your advantage instead of working against you, ask yourself, what advantages do I have? And how can I exploit them? Well, if you live in the middle of nowhere, you can make 21 bucks an hour as a school bus driver. And if you were in a suburb, maybe it's like 16, I have no idea. But you have to combine it with other things . Like what are you gonna do between the hours when you're not driving the bus? There's another factor here with the multiple income streams, which is what I call synergistic overhead and this ties into the idea with taxes. So, um, I'm trying to think where I was going with snowballs and fireworks. Maybe you could reuse your vehicle like you have a trailer and you could use it for snowballs because there's not a lot of equipment for that. It's not like you'd have to overhaul a kitchen, maybe just have a snowball stand and a fireworks stand. So you could have the same stand and it could operate for, for each of those with very little change over. Or if you've got a monster pickup truck, maybe you could haul loads with that because there are loads that you can haul with a pickup truck and you do that when the weather's nice and then you can also plow snow in the winter. So maybe you do like fire, firewood in the summer and plow snow in the winter, you put a plow on your monster truck. It's the same truck, right? And so what you're leveraging there is that you've got the overhead for the truck no matter what. So now you're using it for income in more than one situation. Think about a skid steer and how many attachments they have for those things. You could do several lines of work with the same piece of equipment and maybe you have to drop $40,000 for the equipment, but then you could use it for multiple jobs. Right. So again, whenever we go into examples, I'm not trying to constrain your thinking , but I have to give you some specifics so that you can see what I'm talking about. But you want to be very creative with all of this. A huge resource is thinking about how you can reduce your living expenses. So there's this phrase keeping up with the Joneses, forget the Joneses. Look at the Joneses , they're miserable, right? They're miserable. You know, one of the spouses might be cheating on the other or about to divorce them or maybe they just hate each other or maybe just one of them hates the other. How are their kids? The kids probably aren't doing that Well, you know, we could go into details but we'll try to save the offense in this video for where it really counts. You probably don't want to be one of the Joneses and not in a complex system. You don't because on average, remember people are failing, people are not keeping up, they're not riding the tiger, they're falling off and getting , getting eaten. You don't want to get eaten by the tiger. So when it comes to reducing living expenses, what you wanna do is think intentionally about what matters to you and then look at your, how you're spending your money and say how well do these two things line up probably very poorly to tell you the truth. I'd be shocked, I'd be shocked. Put in the comments if you're like, oh, my finances are perfectly aligned with my priorities. It's, it's a very strange thing. Ok, let's go over some examples and again, the same principle applies this example, these examples might not match your situation at all. It's just to give you some thinking, some things to think about and, and get you rolling on that. Do you have two cars? Do you need two cars? So think about the overhead on a vehicle. Not only do you have the, the cost to actually drive the thing daily? You know, you need to pay for the fuel that you put into it. You also have maintenance, you also have replacements of things like tires uh, so you gotta get the oil change, you have to get broken things fixed, you gotta get new tires from time to time. But then there's the car insurance and I don't know if you've noticed but it's going through the roof and that's gonna keep getting worse because there is over, there are over 10 million illegal people in this country now and they're all gonna be driving without insurance. Uh, there are way more illegal people than that, but new ones, right? So when, when those folks crash, it's your insurance that's gonna have to pay for it. And so that means that people paying insurance, gonna have to pay a lot more. Plus the electric car problem. And I've talked about this in other videos, car insurance is gonna keep going through the roof. So thinking intentionally about how to reduce that cost is a really good idea. It's gonna pay growing dividends over time. It's like investing in a stock that's gonna grow guaranteed. That's a hard thing to find, right? But it's easy when, when you look at your car insurance, so maybe you do need two cars, maybe there's not a way of getting around that I will mention here, I need to mention here this is a huge thing. I didn't put it on the side. I just thought of it. I saw a news article recently, it said the average cost for child care is now $2000 a month in the US. And I did some quick math and I happen to know what the average salary is and I happen to know that the average salary for women is lower than the average salary for men. And I started thinking, wow, that child care cost is so high that on average a woman who is working is actually just costing her family money. That's even before you start thinking of the quality of life differences and whether or not your child ends up a mental basket case. So that's worth thinking about if your childcare costs are $2000 a month and your pre tax income is 36,000 a year, you should not be working. You should stay at home with your kid because doing so is gonna put you into a higher tax bracket, uh sorry, a lower tax bracket for your, for your husband's income. So you'll pay a lower percent on the money he earns. So you get to keep more money. That way you don't have to pay for childcare costs. You won't have to pay for therapy later on when your kid's crazy because you never saw them. You won't have to pay for a second car. So I knew a lady who was driving around in an SUV, that wasn't a super duper fancy SUV, but just because of the cost of things, it's an $80,000 vehicle and she was making about 65 K at her job. And I was thinking to myself, you know, you don't buy a new car every year but running the numbers and realizing when your wife works, you're gonna get take out more often. You're gonna do all the, you can't shop sales at the grocery store because you're a chicken with its head cut off in the hours you do have away from work. You can't fix things when they break whatever, whatever, there's no econom conversation going on. And I was thinking, isn't it nice that your husband makes so much money that you can afford to work in a way that costs your family more money than you're making? That's crazy to me. So, you know, the threshold is not around 35 36,000. It depends on, on what you're spending. But in many, many, many cases, it makes no sense. And people today they'll say it's impossible to work with one income false. You can make a family work on one income, especially if the woman chooses wisely for a husband. But in many cases, it actually, it doesn't make any sense to have two incomes even when maybe you're not making all the money in the world. As a man, you have to do the math, you have to do the math. Ok. So we talk about things like Uber eats, you know, $7 coffees and the question isn't, is it worth paying these things? It's how do you determine the worth what's the cost versus the benefit? What's it worth to you? Right. You might think that, I don't know, a $3000 handbag is worth the money. If you really get that value out of that, you could make the argument. I suppose there are other things we could say about it, but the cost benefit, you know, if it makes you the happiest person in the world to have that handbag, maybe it's worth the money. But if you just don't care if you're guzzling $7 coffees uh full of sugar and of course, it, it's making you weigh £300 as well. Maybe the costs aren't worth the benefit. What are you getting out of it? You know, I, I talked to an older woman who's retired and has a very predictable life. Nothing urgent ever happens. It's just her chilling out all the time and she's super addicted to caffeine and she's like I can't function without it. I said, what do you have to do with it? What on earth? What is your reason for ever having it at all? You have no reason. Your, your life is the, the definition of monotone. You don't have to uh mortgage your energy. You know, caffeine can be useful when you need it in a certain chunk of the day. You need energy and focus. If your life is monotonic, you don't need that. It's just hurting you because it's dropping your baseline and it's the same idea. Like what is, what are you actually getting out of this? And does it make any sense? Let's talk about health care costs. This is enormous. I think the last time I checked the average family plan is north of $30,000 a year in total cost. Now again, getting back to employment situation, most of you work at a place where that's subsidized in some way. Uh, and, and maybe you have an additional $1000 a month or something that you have to pay into this plan. Some of you hear that and you're like, I wish it was that low. What are you getting out of that? That is an enormous chunk of money. And this is where if you want to have a conversation with your employer about becoming an independent contractor and the details abound, you know, and a lot of plans, the, the employer really doesn't have a choice. They have to have everybody on it or else the costs go up on everybody else, whatever, whatever, whatever. But if you don't care about health insurance and you become an independent contractor, there might be a path where you could put $30,000 a year in your pocket or you know, split it with your employer, former employer, save some money, $20,000 a year in your pocket. So you've got premiums and I know when I worked at a university, I opted out of the health plan everybody thought it was nuts. I guess that was just one of many reasons that they thought it was nuts. I opted out of the health plan because we're on Samaritan Ministries, which is a, a health sharing thing. And it was, it was uh I didn't get the employer contribution back that the employer, the university was paying half of it or something and they didn't just give me that money. Once I opted out of the insurance, I lost it. But my contribution is what I got back. And I think by the time I was canceled, I think it was $2000 a month if I remember and I was looking at what it covered and it was everything under the sun. I mean, you can go to the chiropractor 12 times a year. You could get your breasts cut off electively if you're a woman or other things that are probably less appropriate to talk about. And I said, yeah, I'm not gonna do any of that. So I guess I don't need this and um the health sharing was less than half way, less than half of what the university was charging me every month and that covered everything we needed well checks. You know, I'm not gonna give you medical advice . I'm not that kind of doctor, but you could read the peer reviewed research on well checks and whether they do any good or not uh prescription pills. That's a big topic. But a lot of people just need health insurance because they're doing things, whatever those things might do, that probably don't make them healthier. So if, what you're, what you've got health insurance for is to take care of you. If you have some emergent issue, maybe putting $30,000 a year into some sort of thing that can gain value is a better idea. And again, if you go the self employment route, you get the option for an HS A which it's, it's, it's tragic how difficult it is to get one of those going as just a normal person. You can't, it has to be an employer plan as far as I understand. And that's ridiculous, but that's the way it is and those are um, tax free. So that's, that's another way of offloading a bunch of your tax burden in a legal way is if, if you're gonna spend it for health, put it through an HS A and then you get to avoid, um, legally, you, you get out of the obligation to pay taxes on that, on whatever you're gonna spend on health related things, even things like deodorant, you can use an HS A for. So, um what about things like like clothing, do you? So my point here is that pockets are everywhere and, and if you stack up enough of them, it's gonna make a huge difference. I, I uh when I go on dates with my wife, we will always take advantage of being in town. I mean, you guys spend the money and the time to drive out there. Um, 22 hit a store or two and, and take care of some errands as well. And, uh, we were in Lowe's the other day and I showed her where the two areas are that they have discounted items and they're kind of hard to find. But I was showing her how, uh, normally it doesn't make any sense to, to buy things like laundry detergent or soap at Lowe's. But regularly they will have some random brand of something on clothes out and it's got a yellow tag. It's really obvious. And so, um, you can buy whatever they happen to be selling, you clean them out, you buy every single one. If it's laundry detergent, it's not gonna go bad. Buy five of them, right. And then you just save $200 because it's on clothes out. And so it went from being whatever, down to like a dollar or something. And, um, you could do the same thing with clothing. So it's really silly to pay full price for clothes because they are constantly, uh, clothes on clearance. You just have to buy them out of season. And this is one of the principles that's on a different slide. If you think ahead, you can maximize your opportunities and when you, when you get things because you know that you need them, which usually requires you to have a plan. You can make those cost benefit decisions and save tons and tons of time and money and trouble. So, for discount clothes, I'll, I'll share with you our game plan as a family that served us incredibly well. And we used to get clothes at thrift stores when we lived in Utah. That was a viable option. But then we moved and, um, the thrift stores in Missoula, well, there's only one, the quality of clothing is really bad and the prices are really high for the same or less cost as goodwill. I figured out that the store Coles has a rewards program and, uh, birthday discounts and they regularly have coupons. They'll send you for 40% off. Well, the, the normal ones are 20 or 30 but sometimes you get a 40%. And so our rule of thumb is was we only go clothes shopping when we have a 40% off coupon and we only buy clearance clothes because Cole's routinely has huge mark downs on clothing. And so , um, I asked my wife, she stores all this stuff in bins with age ranges on it or sizes or whatever. And so we stockpile the clothing that our kids are gonna need and then we save it. We don't get rid of clothes, we save them. And even if our kids are outgrown, we know that we'll find somebody that needs it. And if no one does that we will give them to our kids when they have kids. So that's, that's what we do. And, um, and then Walmart regularly has clothing on clearance or shoes. Um, it's probably like two or three times a year. I shouldn't say regularly but regularly enough. And, you know, my wife made a spreadsheet. I, I nagged her until she made me a spreadsheet of what we have and what we need. And so, for example, we have a spreadsheet of shoe sizes and, um, to show you the degree to which I engage in this one day, I went to Walmart. It was for just some random thing, but I always check the clearance and they had two giant racks of shoes giant full of really nice hiking boots and running shoes and whatever. And these things were normally priced at like $65 and they were $10 or less. There were several pairs of shoes that were marked at a dollar or $3. And so I called my wife and I said , give me a range of shoes sizes that we don't have and I cleared them out. So until she put them away, there's literally a stack of shoe boxes in my living room as tall as me. And it was more than one box wide and we saved like $600 at least, right, then at least. Right. So this stuff, it, it all stacks up pun intended, right? It makes a difference clothing. Same thing. I went to Walmart one day. They had a whole rack of long sleeve shirts and sweatpants marked down to a dollar. So I looked at the rack and I peeled off the, you know, Roman numeral number of X's in the XL and, and took all the other sizes and threw them in the cart. I bought all of them. Right. I have five kids. We will use it all. It wasn't 400 shirts, but it was a ridiculous amount of clothing. It was a dollar a piece. Right. So you can save tons of money this way. Tons of money. It's so funny because when we take the kids out to town, they, they don't look like bums. We dress them well, uh, when they're just running around here, especially if we're doing yard work, they might look homeless, but we make sure brush your hair, whatever. We go out to town and they look sharp. You know, they look sharp and people might look at those kids and say, wow, their parents spend a lot of money on their clothes. Nope, odds are like if you look me up and down and this is gonna not surprise you if you've seen these videos and wearing tank tops and hoodies or whatever. But I also dress decently when I go out to town and rule of thumb . E every everything on my body probably cost less than $5. Right. It's, it's pretty crazy shoes are gonna be the most expensive part. But I do this for shoes too. I, the last time I bought not running shoes, uh, Kohl's had a clearance online and I knew from experience that they don't stock a whole ton of nice shoes in the, in the store there. So I went through their clearance. I looked at men's shoes and I bought, I wanted essentially a lifetime supply of nice shoes. Like, I don't mean nice, nice. I mean, like business casual, what you could wear to work shoes and, uh, because my feet aren't gonna get any bigger or smaller unless there's some farming accident. So I figured they, they're only going to be more expensive in the future because of inflation. So I'm gonna invest in shoes. I'm gonna buy, I have T shirts and shoes for the rest of my life. They're the specific kind that I like the most and I paid almost nothing for them. I bought an entire box of T shirts of multiple colors for $3 each including shipping and they're high quality really nice shirts and they fit me very well. Right. So I experimented, I bought like four different kinds. If found the one I liked, shopped around until I found that there was some place you could buy bulk T shirts and if you bought 30 or whatever it was $3 a piece, I said done. Now it's done. I never have to worry about it again. Right. I saved massive amounts of money and I look sharp. So this is the idea and I'm just drilling into this and droning on and on and on. So you get it right. This is the way, this is the way he saved tons of money and you have a better quality of life. You know, you save the time. You don't have to go shopping. It's done. So, we're at the point now where I just throw the Kools Coles's coupons away because I know the spreadsheet says we're good. We're good. So, um, all right, let's talk about, I didn't finish the shoe story. So I've got weird shaped feet and um I knew that a bunch of the shoes weren't gonna fit me. So I bought every design. I might like that was under the price threshold. I, I literally ordered something like 30 pairs of shoes and I knew they had a return policy and I returned something like 20 pairs of shoes. The lady was looking at me like I was nuts. I don't care. It's done. Right. I never have to go shoe shopping again. Probably. So, those are, those are thoughts. You find something that works, you double down, you, you solve the problem, you save the money. All right, I wanna talk about phones and streaming services and then we're gonna move on. Uh, recently we're shopping our phone plan and we had, you know, every major phone vendor. There's a discounter who uses the same network. I don't remember what the names are, but there's cricket, there's mint, there are more, but basically whatever your network is. I, if you have T Mobile Verizon or AT&T, you are absolutely overpay for your cell service. There are people who use the same networks and have the same service for way less per month. And so that's one way you can instantly save money. You're welcome. So we were shopping that and um I could not believe all the add-ons that this slick sales guy was trying to tack on to the plan. And I was like, no way, man. No, no, no, no, no, he's like, oh you want this $1200 phone? I said no, give me the one from four years ago. That's brand new. Oh, but that doesn't have eight cameras on it and whatever I was like, I don't need eight cameras and whatever. There's that, that will not register at all, any difference in my life for anything I care about. Oh, but, and I said f friend and not only is it more expe it's thicker and heavier? Why do I want that? I don't care about five other camera. I don't care. Oh, do you want monthly insurance on it? I said, how much is it? It was some astronomical amount. I did some quick math and I said, yeah, that doesn't make any financial sense. Well, if you drop your phone. You're really gonna wish you had it. I said, how about I get the cheaper phone and I don't get insurance and I'm not gonna drop it. Well, do you want this overpriced accessory here? No, I'm not buying it here. I know you mark it up by a ton. I'll get it online if I need it. Do you want to add all these streaming services? No. And now let's pivot to the well. And also do you know if you got three kids, do your kids really need cell phones? If they do, do they need $1200 phones? Can you get him a prepaid flip phone for emergencies for like 50 bucks and be done with it? Think about what it costs you versus what it's worth. And I'm not even gonna get into because that's a separate video how giving kids cell phones is basically child abuse, plenty of research on that. You can go look it up. It's a very, very, very bad idea in almost all cases, a foot phone that prepaid is a different story. If they can still get in touch with you in emergencies or even if you just wanna check in, it will cost you almost nothing but keeps all the bad stuff away are at streaming services. I guess not all. If your, if your kid had a flip phone and they wanted to use it to start some crack business, they probably could um streaming services came out as this cheaper alternative to cable. But now it's ballooned into being comparably expensive. If you've got three of them or something. Do you really get the value out of that? And if you do, I mean, by all means it's like if you have a boat, boats are super expensive, everybody knows that. Right. If you're out there every single weekend and it's just, it's your jam and it's just the, the meaning of life for you, then get your Zen. You know, but if it's just eating you alive and, and robbing your resources from things that matter more to you, then it's probably not a good idea. All right, pivot. Let's talk about where and how you live. Now, we're gonna talk about housing. The name of the game is to reduce the dependencies. The, the connections reduce how susceptible you are to inflation and stupid people. That's the name of the game. Minimize inflation and stupid people. Well, you can't minimize stupid people but you can minimize the effect they have on you. What do I mean by that? Well, I don't have it on here. Do you live in an ho A? That's probably not a good thing. That's only ever gonna go up and do you get out of it? What you would have to, for it to be worthwhile. In some cases? The answer is gonna be yes. But in most cases the answer is no. What about dumb laws? You know, new taxes, property taxes will only ever go up, they'll only ever go up and there's very little that you can do about it, but you can look into things that you can do about it. So um you can always contest your home value with, with the entity that's taxing you and that could be successful. Although it's a huge pain in the butt and usually it doesn't last very long. You can make long term decisions on the home you buy and what you do to it, to try to keep that at a minimum. Almost all places, Jerry rig the tax system to benefit the folks on the bottom. Disproportionately. Like in Montana. For example, if you live in a trailer, you're probably not paying anything hardly on your property tax or if you have tons of land. But if you have less than 20 acres and, or a house that can actually support a reasonably sized family, they're gonna take you to the cleaners, right? Because proportionately very, very few people have that. And so this is a, uh uh this is the distinction between being in the pocket and walking around with a bull's eye on your back, right ? We didn't talk about this in terms of employment. But if you're a W-2 employee and you make lots of money, you're walking around with a target on your back because you're the bad guy and they're gonna direct all tax policy right? To you, you're the mule. So, um what about where to live? We're talking about car searches. You can do the same thing with houses, hop on Zillow and check out some random places. Look at the house prices. You might be in a place where you could get a way nicer house in a way nicer place for half of what your present house is worth. Now, I happen to know that that's increasingly becoming hard to find pre-covid piece of cake, but no one wanted to listen to that pre COVID. I tried. You didn't listen. So now a whole bunch of people are in the case in a situation where if they were to move, they'd have to buy a much more expensive house than what they've currently got. Sorry, I tried to help. Um That's probably gonna get worse but there are still places you can go, you have to stay out of the hot spots like the coasts, Florida, Texas, the, the places mon uh people want to move to and also the cities. Uh So the the places that people have always wanted to be the coast, the places people are starting to go now, Florida, Texas to a lesser extent, Montana and cities, you just gotta find the pocket and the details are gonna be different. Maybe you really, really, really would love to have a pond on your land. It could be done. But again, think about the pocket. We're not talking about I want to move to this one place in Missouri we're talking about there is a specific house that I found that happens to meet all the criteria and it's probably the only one in the whole country because it's some weird special situation. I saw one house in northern Arkansas and it was made out of sheet metal which most people would see as a downside. I see it as a huge upside. You know why? Because I know that the state or the county, whoever handles the property tax valuations in Arkansas, they're gonna see that as lower quality because it's cheaper to build and most people don't want it. But I see that as an advantage. Not just because I'm gonna save property tax money every single year for the rest of my life, but also because I happen to know that metal is a, is a wonderful exterior building material compared to the garbage that they put on houses today. And so it's gonna last forever . I'm never gonna have to replace that. Like I would have to a bunch of other things, you know, and the woodpeckers aren't gonna eat it. So things like that, you know, and it happened to be like a barn Domini. So the, the inside was what some people would consider to be strange. But again, for my purposes , I was like, this is, this is a dream house. It's a dream house. So you gotta find your pocket now, here's a question. Does that mean that you should live off grid? Because we talked about reducing dependency on utilities. I'm a huge proponent of a well and a septic system and you should definitely find the details on the well, because they have different production rates and a lot of well, water tastes terrible. Our well, water at our house happens to be the best taste in water I've ever had in my life. So we're, we're very blessed in that regard. But what about the power? Uh I just leave that as a question mark. We talked about the cost of replacing batteries and fixing things, the difficulty of doing that. So that may or may not be important to you. But one tactic that might work for you is to buy land that's not currently supported by electricity. And in case you don't know, it costs a lot of money, a lot of money to run electric lines to land that's off of wherever they're already running. And so you can work that to your advantage. If you don't care about it, you can work that to your advantage and you end up saving money per acre on land. But you could also strategize and buy a place that's a little off the beaten path, but there's a uh a pattern or otherwise reason to believe that the beaten path will grow out to that. There are a lot of places like that right now. I watched I've watched this happen over the last few years where I, if you had purchased a property that was a little off the beaten path all of a sudden, it's not anymore and it would have been worth four times what you bought it for just in 23 years. That's outside of the normal inflation just in addition to that. Ok. So, um we've talked enough about property tax, I guess. Uh I will add when you're thinking about moving to a place, look in detail in detail. It's super duper important to look at how property taxes work in that place. Find out what the formulas are that they use and you'll, you'll actually have to call the county or whoever does it to figure it out. The real estate agent won't tell you, they won't know and they won't care to look, they're gonna think you're crazy for asking. But um these systems are usually kind of sophisticated and they're getting worse and knowing what the rules are. So I, I can tell you in Missoula County, Montana, for example, I think they have five tiers of quality and they charge you price per square foot and then there's an extra charge if you have something, they consider a luxury item like a jacuzzi uh bathtub in your house. And then on top of that, they have this funky fudge number where they add an arbitrary percentage depending on what region you of the county, you live in and this is their way of dumping even more taxes on the people that don't live in the city. Unfortunately, it's a, it's, I think a 60% premium, which is insane. Um, so knowing that I would never move into this county again because I'm two miles off the county line or something like that. And the next county over isn't insane. But I didn't know that when I moved here or else I would have done that. Right. So looking into these things, you'll find some red flags because property tax is gonna get worse. A lot worse. There will be people left and right who lose their homes because they can't afford the property tax and insurance. And so mitigating that is a really big deal and no one thinks about it. Let's pivot to insurance. Homeowners insurance is a requirement. If you have a mortgage, if you don't have a mortgage, it's not required. It's your choice. So let's talk about these folks with the mortgage again. Homeowners insurance can vary wildly depending on the specifics of your house. So who has ever called an insurance company to ask about what causes the, the premiums to go up? What house features cost more? I, I don't think I've ever met anyone who's done that and yet that is like the property tax, it's going to become paramount in the monthly cost of maintaining your house and it's going to be the thing that causes people to lose their houses. Uh, uh, not, not that everyone's gonna lose their house, but there will be specific people who do because of this. So, for example , um, Costco has homeowners insurance and they won't cover a house that has one woods, at least one wood stove. They just won't even consider it. So what the insurance company, uh, think about metal roofs versus asphalt roofs in a place where there are forest fires. These are things that, that matter what, how does the insurance company quote? Um, if you have porches versus if you don't, what's the relative difference? What's the difference between a detached garage and an attached garage? Because these things can drastically affect the cost of your insurance in general property tax and insurance square footage ends up being really important. So, if you have a house bigger than you need, you're gonna pay out the nose for the rest of your life. Right. That's a huge thing. So if you can stack the kids in bunk beds and get away with it, you might want to think about it, kids at home or for a limited time, property tax is forever. I joked with my wife. She's a nice foil for me in many ways. But I was like, what if we Airbnb our house over every summer and I would pay our mortgage for the whole year and we could just buy, she's like, where are we gonna stay? And I said we could just buy three travel trailers and put them in a triangle on the one side of the property and we could be in one, the kids could be in the other and the other one could be kind of like the, the living room for during the day where we eat the meals. She's like, you're crazy. We're not doing that. I was like, all right. Well , at least I tried anyway, let's more about homeowners insurance. So, um, it's always good to shop around for homeowners insurance and car insurance. People don't realize. I only know this because at 1.1 idea I had for a business was making a, an app that would do this for you. And this was at a time where there wasn't such an app. Um, and I had some, some brilliant ideas on, on how to make money in unexpected ways on this. But anyway, um, insurance companies will give better rates to new customers from time to time because for whatever business reasons, they just really need to pick up more people . And so you can get really good rates if you're willing to shop around. Um, and it's not so much about the company people think that they're like, oh, this company is cheaper or that company is cheaper sometimes, but most of the time it's just about sort of the luck of the draw and the company doesn't really matter that much sometimes. So it's worth shopping. Right. And then there's a question of bundling homeowners and car. Um, anyway, these are things to look into from time to time. But another thing that is worth looking into that I don't think many people think about is changing the actual coverage that you have, not just the company but the coverage. So, um, it's like medical insurance where you can change the slider on your deductible and in some cases that is gonna make sense in other cases, it, it won't. So there's no universal rule here, just like all this other stuff we're, we're talking about. But I'll tell you in our area, homeowners insurance doubled, doubled from last year to this year. And so I got the warning letter and I immediately, I called my agent and said, we're not doing this. So tell me what my options are and she's really great and, uh, she was going through everything and I said, what is the minimum coverage? I need to keep my mortgage people happy because I said, honestly, I would just self insure, I wouldn't have this insurance if I didn't have to have it. And she's like, oh, well, most people aren't like that. But if that's really how you feel, then, uh, this company has an option for your house. You, you would have a $30,000 deductible, but your coverage is gonna be a little less than it was before it doubled. And I said, let's do it. Let's do it because everything that breaks in my house, I just fix it myself anyway. And if it crosses the threshold of where I would hire somebody, the house is pretty much gonna be totaled. And in that case, I wouldn't mind paying $30,000 to get back the whole principle. Right. The whole value of the house. It's a, makes total financial sense for me. And the, the cash on hand question is just a question of how liquid whatever investments we might have are, right? So where would I come up with the money? That's a good question. If you don't have $30,000 this isn't an option for you, right? Or you're just rolling the dice and really hoping that bad things don't happen, which, you know, it's all risk and reward. You gotta do the math for yourself and, and work the probabilities out. So what if you own your home, if you own your home outright, then what you're looking at is, do you wanna dump your premiums every month to a company where you're never gonna see that money again or put it in some kind of quasi stable liquid investment? And then you actually have the money that you can take out again. You know, if your house gets totaled, you might not have enough saved up where that, you know, you don't have a place to live or you have to reduce something, you still have the land and, and that's a risk that you need to work out. But I think in a lot of cases, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to invest that money than it does to get insurance on your house. So it just depends on your situation, but that might be an enormous amount of money that you can save every year. I think our current, I can't remember the details, but I can't remember if it's a new or old policy, but we're talking something like $6000 a year. That's an astronomical amount of money. And that's post tax money. We talked about taxes. You had to earn $12,000 to pay that $6000. That's a lot of money. So that's something to think about. All right. Now in the olden days there was, there was a tried and true. Remember I told you here's a menu of options, here's how to win and everybody can do it. The old pattern was like this. You rent an apartment with roommates, that's step one. You stack your cash, you look for some duplex that goes up for sale. Usually something pretty broken down. Ok? And then you buy it, you rent out the one side and then you live in the other side with roommates and so you're not paying anything for that duplex, you're actually making money on it. Ok? And then maybe you meet somebody, get married, start popping out kids, you stay, you kick out your roommates, you have a new roommate and, um, and you keep going until you can afford a starter home. Usually you keep the duplex. Right. And you just rent out both sides when you move into your starter home and then when you outgrow that you build or buy your dream home and that's the last place until you downsize as, as an older person. And that's the latter right now. Very few people did this, but the ones that did they did really well. Right, then the word got out and it became really hard to find a duplex and it just shot the whole plan down. So then it was just, well, rent an apartment with roommates and then buy a starter home and, and the situation now is much, much worse. Ok, because if you're renting an apartment with roommates, you might never get to the point where you can save up enough to buy that starter home. And that starter home is probably also going to be your last house . If you're lucky, if you're lucky, most people who are kids today are never going to own a home, it's never going to happen. So nowadays, is there a way, is there a pocket where this can still happen where you can own a home? Yes, there is, there are a lot of options, right? But all of them are gonna include something radical where you have drastically less living expenses in the beginning So what could that be? Could be living in a van and you're probably gonna finish that with, down by the river. But that's only for the rich van people to have, right? You don't even have the river. You're in a van in the Walmart parking lot or whatever. Just some random place, right? You convince somebody in the suburbs to let you park outside their place for five bucks a month or something. Um You live in a vehicle, maybe an RV or you pay rent to your parents and that's a step down from having your own apartment . For sure. Right now, if you're a guy, I am gonna say, uh women are gonna look down on you if you live with your parents. So when she asks probing questions to figure that out, make sure that you offer up something that indicates how much money you're stacking by doing this. You know, there are tactful ways of doing that anyway. Not that she'll be more impressed if you're living in a van or an RV. Um Unless you wear your, your stock market account on your T shirt or something to indicate that you're saving tons of money. Um And then you buy with cash with cash. What a crazy idea why? Because interest rates are sky high, that's the way to go as much cash as you can get. Right. Details are gonna vary. Don't take all of this too literally. So what are some variables here. Well, if you wanna get out into a rural area, you might stair step this, you could look into that USDA loan that I was telling you about. But maybe you do something like you buy the land and you do the trout thing where you're waiting for a really sweet deal on land. Um, and then you, you jump on it, maybe you buy the land and then you just slowly build on top of it or you don't do anything for years and then you put the house on it because they're not gonna get you with atrocious property taxes until you have a house on it. Right? It's usually much, much cheaper to buy with the house already on the property. Even if it's a crack house, you might look into the county where it is, what the rules are for building a second residence because in, in a few places that's easy. In most places, it's an enormous pain in the butt and, or they'll say no. So that's another thing to look into. Um, another crazy thing you could do is look at joining up with other people. Now, this is fraught with all kinds of pitfalls and if you're doing this , you definitely wanna do something more than just a handshake. So you have some legal protection and you'd want to vet these people very thoroughly. Even just assuming that it's a good idea with family members, you're, you're going to get burned in many cases. But if you can find people that you trust enough and you can work out details that work for everybody. You can usually get a discount if you buy a larger tract of land and then subdivide it again. There, there are questions with the county and with all of this, you're probably like, if you're still here, you probably didn't stick around to this point. But um, you're probably thinking holy cow, this is so much to think about. It's completely overwhelming. Well, welcome to complex world. This is why most people fail in a complex system. They're not up for the challenge, right? So find someone who is and maybe you can work together with them. That's, that's the name of the game that people don't want to think or talk about. But that's the way it is. And lastly with all of this, the ability to grow food is a huge piece of this. Now, I don't actually want to get into doomsday stuff with this video, but I know that there are people out there and they're like, oh yeah, so number one priority is to live in a place that's amenable to growing food. Uh So I might have to limit that to a place in the South or Mid Atlantic or something like that. Uh Midwest. No, that's not what I'm saying at all. You have to counterbalance that with the fact that all those places have a lot of people per square mile. Typically, I, I'd say most of them do anyway. There, there, there are many other considerations. Don't just think that you should set aside all the other criteria just to live in a place that is a perfect farm climate. So, I, I live in the rocky mountains and north in the rocky mountains and it's an abs absolutely terrible place to grow food. But, uh, there are things you can do to make that happen. I can't grow what you would buy at the grocery store, but we can grow an awful lot here. And so it's, it's not about, well, you just have to weigh what you want and how badly you want it. And all the other things to worry about like population density, nuclear fallout, et cetera, et cetera. So my, my rule of thumb is anything east of the Mississippi is a no go but your rule of thumb might be different. I actually have a very specific rule of thumb , but this isn't the presentation for it. All right, we're almost there. Um The last general strategy I wanna share with you is make long term plans. Now, I actually have already given you a bunch of specifics on this. But what you're trying to do is compound the benefits of good decisions. What do I mean by compound, I mean, like compound interest where the more principle you have and it just builds over time. So synergies capturing synergies good decisions. They beget good decisions. This should sound familiar to you, but you might not make the connection. Light cleaves to light, right? Good flows together. So everything you do, if you focus it on the long term, you'll find yourself doing drastically different things than everyone else with drastically greater benefits over time compared to everyone else. Sometimes that means that it it it you're almost always going to be acting differently, but sometimes what that means is going cheap and sometimes what that means is going quality. So if you, if you look around your bathroom, for instance, you can go cheap with bleach, not so much with toothpaste, toothpaste, and deodorant, right? So there are things you can cut costs on and things that you actually would do well to, to focus on the quality. There's still ways to make those purchases and save money. But this long term outlook is something that's really good to adopt across the board. It, it, it more than more than many other things that'll make a huge difference. And I just wanna pepper you with a few examples of long term thinking here, believe it or not, a roof has a lifetime and it's well known even if you don't know it, if you have asphalt shingles, there are two types. They have different lifetimes, metal roofs also have a lifetime, they have a maintenance schedule. And if you're not doing the maintenance on your roof, it's not gonna last as long as it could. But no matter what, there will come a time when you have to replace it and it costs a fortune. So, if you know how long it's gonna last, you can plan for that expense. And as the time approaches, you can get bids from multiple people and get it replaced before it causes damage. Getting bids on a roof could save you as much as 50% which is crazy. Now, lowest bid does not mean it's the best deal, but you can, you can save tons of money by shopping around on getting a roof replaced. So I used to be a roofer. That was one of the main things that I've done before for money. Some of them, I'm not proud of just kidding. Um So, uh we, we bought this crack house in Provo and um against my better judgment and then I spent the next 2.5 years breaking my back, renovating it 20 hours a week in addition to everything else I was doing , which was a lot, but in exchange for my herniated disk, uh I was able to make something like 250 an hour on my work, which, you know, was terrible at the time. I uh I, I had the skills to make a heck of a lot more than that as a programmer. And I should have just got a part time job doing that and uh not living in a crack house. So when it came time to replace our roof because it was in really bad shape. And I knew that and I was just hoping it would hold out for the time we were there. And it did. My wife said, why don't you call some roofing companies to get bids? And I said, I'm not doing that . This is my jam. Like I'm just gonna do it myself. That's insulting. And she said, well, you only have so much time. Why don't you price out how much it would cost you in materials? At least it doesn't hurt to call a couple of people. And thank goodness for my wife because I did call a couple of people and the, the first two bids were astronomically high. And I said, see, I told you and then the third crew came in and I don't know what the heck these guys were fueled on. Probably something illegal. They, they did an amazing job for almost nothing. I couldn't believe it. I watched them like hawks because , um, like I said, I knew what I was doing and I was, I was watching for them to cut corners because I didn't know how they could do it. They did the whole job for less than my material cost was going to be. And granted I was just going to Home Depot to buy the stuff and they had obviously they had commercial accounts at suppliers, but I didn't understand how on earth. But man, they went up there, they got it done. They were done. It's just instant beautiful and um it, it was, it was half the price of the other guys couldn't believe it. So you never know. Same thing with a car. We already talked through getting a, a good deal on a car. But if you do this with time on your side, you can wait for the sweet deals and you can save so much money. I've saved enough buying cars in my short life so far that uh I mean, I've saved at least $20,000 on, on. Well, it, it's more than that because we're buying economical cars in the first place compared to what most people do. But I mean, tens of thousands of dollars is not a stretch. It's a huge amount of money that you can save doing that wisely, talked about clothes, talked about buying land on the edge and waiting for civilization to get out there because it's gonna happen. More and more people coming out of California buying up the, the place. So in summary, I actually just the say this somewhere. I was talking about how people don't stick around to the end of videos and it actually, it really hurts the channel, believe it or not, youtube leans on that quite heavily as part of their metrics, which would suggest that you should make shorter videos, but it's very difficult to talk about in depth topics in short amounts of time. You just can't convey the information. And so youtube's just incentivizing everybody to be dumber at the end of the day. But my wife was like , yeah, I usually don't stay around to the end of videos on things. They just click off because they're just summing up what they've said and I was like, caught, caught, you're part of the problem. And I said that's funny because I am always saying random very valuable things at the very end of videos , it just comes out and uh she's like, why don't do that on your videos? I was like uh huh. Uh huh. Um Anyway, in summary, be intentional, be explicit in what you're trying to do. Like really ride it out, literally write out what's important to you and list out what options you have for, for whatever decision is before you. Every choice you make, every choice you make is a um How do I want to put this? It's a trade off but there's a better way of saying it. I'm sorry, I can't think of the better way at the moment. I've got it written down, but I couldn't find it quickly if I tried. So uh maybe I can talk around it. We think of the choices we make as like something we're grabbing, but you're actually, you're actually switching out something every time you make a choice, you're, you're trading something. There's a better way of saying this and I apologize. But, um, you really have to get into the zone where you're realizing that every choice you make, it's from a list of options. It's a multiple choice test. Doing nothing is one of those options. But you, it costs you something and it's important to think about what doing nothing costs you because it does cost you something. Um, but thinking about the pros and cons in relationship too, what you feel is most important when you're enumerating those options. Always think outside the box don't limit yourself to what other people do include other things that you could do. There's no reason you can't live in a van down by the river for a couple of years. Why would you possibly want to do that? You'd say, well, that cost exceeds what I'm willing to consider. Well, what do you get from it? And how much is that worth? That's the question and maybe the answer is not enough, fair enough. But have you thought through it or you just governing your options based on basically an emotional laziness? You're like, you know, I just wanna, I wanna live my life like people on antidepressants feel just monotone baseline all the time. No ups, no downs, you gotta have downs to have the ups. That's the way it goes. Anyway, when you come up with your crazy plans, bounce them off of mentors, people who know better than you. So I mentioned multiple times this presentation. If you know an accountant or get acquainted with one, if you want to talk to them about tax things or read a book written by someone who knows, you don't literally have to talk to somebody . You can watch a video, you could read a book but find people who have thought about stuff and hear their thoughts and, and get their reasons. And if you do have a living person, you can interact with, bounce your plans off. You know, I, my grandfather is dead, but before he died, anytime I had any kind of construction issue whatsoever, I'd bounce it off him. And I'd say, look, I think this is a solid plan. What do you think? And he'd say, yeah, that does sound solid. Or have you thought about this or how does this work? Explain this to me again. Why wouldn't I call him? It's two minutes. It was actually less than two minutes usually because he didn't like being on the phone. So I'd get exactly what I wanted in the minimal amount of time. Right. Get feedback from mentors. It costs you very little and it could make an immense difference, they'll say, oh yeah, you got those four options. How about this? And that might change your life. If you do what everyone else does, you're going to get what everyone else has. So that's true. For better or for worse. If you look around today and I'm not talking about your grandparents. Look at what people, four years, 10 years older than you did and where they are, if they're miserable, you probably wanna take an exit off of that highway. Right. Because you already know what you're gonna get going down the same road. You find somebody who's figured it all out and they're 1 to 10 years older than you. That's not a strict range. But, you know, the conditions are actually the same. Maybe what they did isn't such a bad idea. So, there you go. I hope this is useful.