Should You Retire Early and Live Outside Your Home Country? with Joshua Sheets
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Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein. Today is episode 506. It's titled, Should You Retire Early and Live Outside Your Home Country? Seven years ago in 2018, Lapril and I spent five months traveling through the southern portion of the U.S., visiting family and friends, holding meetups, and exploring the country. While in

in Florida, we visited with Joshua Sheets and his family. Joshua is host of the podcast and education platform, Radical Personal Finance. We have known each other for over a decade. During the visit, Joshua and I recorded episode 250 of Money for the Rest of Us, The Great National Debt Debate.

Surprisingly, if you have listened to my three-part national debt series from last year, especially the finale, episode 479, my views have changed somewhat from what I expressed in episode 250. I am more concerned about the U.S. national debt today than I was seven years ago. In that episode, Josh was a bit discouraged about what he saw as a lack of freedom in the U.S.,

Less than a year later, he left the U.S. with his family, and they have lived outside of the country for over five years. During the holidays, Lepre and I spent some time with Joshua, his spouse, and five children. Joshua and I recorded another episode together. I was intrigued about how his views had changed in the last seven years, most of which he has spent outside of his home country.

His views have indeed changed meaningfully as it relates to the positives and negatives of living outside of one's home country.

He convinced me in this discussion why I need to get permanent residency, if not a citizenship, in another country, even though LaPerelle and I have no plans to live outside of the U.S. for long stretches of time. We also discuss why Joshua thinks most people shouldn't retire, and if they do, under what conditions. Joshua is one of the smartest financial planners I know. He is radical in that he is willing to question accepted financial wisdom.

I think you will find this discussion as enlightening as I did.

All right, Joshua, thanks for being here. Seven years ago this April in episode 250 of Money for the Rest of Us, you and I had a discussion on the national debt and freedom. And at the end of that episode, you said, I affirm that the United States of America enjoys more of these freedoms than on most places in the world. I affirm that. As I've traveled, every time I leave the country, I'm just so thankful for the opportunities. And I said this on the show many times.

It's been a while since I've been outside the border, so maybe it's time to take my own advice. If you're feeling downcast about your possibilities that you have in life, get on an airplane and go somewhere and you'll be thankful for your job. Less than a year later, you took your own advice. After traveling with your family around the U.S. for six months in an RV, you

You left the U.S. and have lived abroad with your family for almost six years now. You and your spouse have had two children outside of the U.S. You hold passports and permanent residencies from several countries. My question is, what have you learned? I think in addition to that, I think we've been in, I had to count them, but something like about 30 countries over the last five years.

What have I learned? Well, I'm affirmed in what I said previously, that my appreciation for the United States has grown, but it has also sharpened. And as I've traveled the world, what I was alluding to in that episode of the podcast was that in the United States, you have opportunity. You have opportunity to earn income. You have opportunity to build wealth. And all

almost anybody can access that opportunity. There are some people who physical disability or basic features are excluded from that, but there is opportunity for anybody. And as I travel the world, I see that that's just not the case in many places. You can go to so many countries and you can be in reasonably good health and of reasonable intelligence and a kind of normal person, and yet you're excluded from the opportunities that that land provides. And that was what I really was

interested in at that point was the opportunity to really build something. As I've traveled more over the last years, though, I've come to see the United States as dominant. We've talked about national debt. We've talked about problems in the United States. And at that time, seven years ago, I had spent decades living in the United States. And what happens to those of us who live in the United States is we tend to be very insular and

in our thinking. We see everything through an American lens. We see everything through the perspective of everything that's wrong with the United States because we're comparing our country to the way that it used to be and in many cases to our ideal vision of how it could be and how it should be if our particular worldview and political view were actually expressed in fullness. And so all I experienced at that time was just sadness and frustration with the United States. And I thought, well, everything's probably better everywhere else. And so I decided to go looking and

And I have gone and I have looked and two things have happened. And it's not an extreme view. I have come to appreciate the many things that are available in other parts of the world. And I can give as many examples as you like. But I've also come to appreciate that if there were just one country that I would want to bet my future on right now that had perhaps not the best in any one thing, but the best collection of features on every level of society, I'm still going to bet on the United States.

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That's joindelete me.com slash David 20 code David 20. You've also, you've commented in the past and now that you've, you've lived outside the U S for, for such an extensive period of time, there are a lot of expats like you that do that to retire. And I believe you said that if, if in many cases, it's actually more expensive to retire outside of the U S once you adjust for quarantine,

quality of life, really. Yeah. I think that if you are going to make a financial analysis, then you have to begin by saying, does somebody have modest income and modest resources, or does somebody have abundant income and abundant resources? That's a very important distinction because it will drive what your decisions are. The second thing you have to look at is a cultural perspective. So in years of working with expats, and I've helped lots of people move outside of the United States, I've helped some people move to the United States. I

I believe the core factor that causes somebody to either be happy going abroad and living abroad and staying abroad or to prefer to be in the United States is the factor of culture. The people who go abroad from the United States, an expatriate, and who really are satisfied with that decision over the period of years are those who don't resonate with the American culture. They don't like it. They were bullied. Something bad happened. They just find the consumerism too excessive. They don't like the pace of life, and they're looking for something dramatically different.

When those people move abroad and they find a culture that's more suitable for them, more suitable for their lifestyle decisions, then at that situation, they're content usually with going abroad. The people who go abroad just to save money, though, I think are often unhappy because the savings of money are often illusory. This can be a really important technique, one that I often recommend. So let's talk about costs of life and lifestyle.

I am convinced that you can live the cheapest in the United States as compared to almost any place in the world. Now, I concede that maybe there's somebody living in a mud hut somewhere that can live cheaper. But what happens is that with the way that most listeners of this podcast are going to live, when you move abroad, you will save money in the short term on certain things. Usually the things that you can save money on most immediately are the cost of real estate and taxes.

domestic help. So these are the two things, because wages are suppressed around the world. You can often hire a full-time cook or a full-time nanny for your children much more inexpensively than you can in the United States. And also, you can often move into a cheaper place. But when you move into that cheaper place, there's usually going to be a very significant difference between

the amenities that you have in the cheaper place versus the amenities that you have at home. Let me use Mexico as an example, being next to the United States. You can move to Mexico, you can rent a small apartment, and you can do that usually, rent a whole apartment in many places in Mexico, much less expensively than you can in the United States. So for example, you could move to many places in Mexico and a single individual could very reasonably rent a studio apartment or one bedroom apartment for $500 a month, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little bit more, but you could do that.

Most of the time when people do that, they're comparing the cost of renting a studio apartment in Mexico to the cost of renting a studio apartment in Miami or in Denver. What they often forget about, though, is that you could go to Mississippi or Missouri or Louisiana and you could rent a studio apartment there. Or you could rent a single wide trailer there and you could rent a single wide or a studio apartment there for $500 a month or $230.

or cheaper. Similarly, on many different factors, you say, well, then why don't they do that? Well, because generally speaking, the person who is living in New York or New Jersey or Denver or Seattle and wants to save money, that person is generally not attracted to the lifestyle that is offered in Mississippi or Missouri or Louisiana living in a $500 a month apartment. But if they go to Mexico and they go to Playa del Carmen and

ran a $500 a month apartment they're interested in the romance of it oh here I am in another country and they're willing to deal with all the hassle they're willing to deal with higher rates of crime they're

They're willing to deal with the fact that they may or may not have a hot water heater that may or may not work. They have to wash all the dishes by hand. They don't have any air conditioning, or if they do, it's just a window unit. They accept all these things because of the romance of being in Mexico as compared to the romance of being in Mississippi or Louisiana. But in reality, if that person moved to Mississippi or Louisiana, then...

And life is so much more abundant there. The cost of electricity is a fraction of what it costs in Mexico. So you can easily put in a cheap air conditioning and keep your whole place air conditioned. You can have a dishwasher. You can have hot water all the time. And in addition, you get all kinds of other amenities. So things like Amazon. Now, Mexico does have Amazon, but the United States has the best expression of Amazon of anywhere in the world. If you move to a place where you don't have Amazon and you don't have access to the

full scope of products that Amazon offers to you, that's a major decrease in quality of life. Look at your local library. You could go to almost any town in a little inexpensive place. And again, I don't want to pick on Mississippi. I think it's the cheapest place in the United States. You could go to almost any town and it'll have a public library.

And that public library will give you access to hundreds of thousands of books that are available, thousands and thousands of movies, thousands of CDs, thousands of audio products and things that are available to you. And you are not going to have anywhere near that opportunity living in Mexico. So then let's go back to the domestic help. So you can use domestic help. One of the things that my wife and I did when we moved abroad was –

I did that because we had a bunch of little children and I needed domestic help. And so this was a big cost saving. I had a full-time housekeeper who was in our house all day, every day, cleaning the house that my wife could be free and not be overburdened by cleaning things.

But what I found really annoying was that I could replace so many of the things that she did with more efficient appliances in the United States. So in the United States, you can have dishwasher. You go to Mexico, dishwashers are not common, at least at money-saving places. And so in the United States, we've

We've factored in to our low population and high wages. We've fixed that with delivery services, things like meal delivery services. In the United States, if you want to hire, all your meals shipped into you, you can do that at a very reasonable cost. So I'm not saying that it's not possible to lower expenses by going abroad. It is possible to lower some expenses. But usually, once you get past the romance of, here I am in Playa del Carmen and my pictures on Instagram look really attractive to my friends—

then usually once you get past that, if you go back and look at maybe a more rural region of the United States, a smaller town, you will get a better deal and a cheaper cost of living and still have better access to a lot of things in the United States than you will living in Mexico. Now, I didn't cover here tax savings. So things like tax savings for high-income people can be a very persuasive thing that changes this whole dynamic. But for people who just say, oh, I'm just going to go and move abroad to save money,

I believe it's a useful tool because there are some people who can get their spouse or children to move to Mexico and totally change the lifestyle and make it a lot cheaper to Thailand or someplace like that because of the romance of it when that spouse or children would never be excited about going to a lower cost of living place in their own state.

But in reality, from a brutal economic perspective, I think you're better off going to southern Illinois or Indiana or Mississippi or Louisiana or some state in the United States where you have full access to all the benefits of the United States, all of the consumer conveniences, but at a much lower cost than you're accustomed to in your big, expensive city.

As you traveled, and you've done episodes on internationalization, gaining permanent residency in Mexico or other places, researching your family history to see if you can get a passport or even citizenship from a different country. Given the positives you've outlined for U.S. citizens, why would somebody want permanent residency somewhere else in Mexico or anywhere else they can get it?

Yeah, I have come to value my U.S. citizenship today, now that I don't need it, much more highly than I did seven years ago when it was all I had. So what I now see is the enormous value of being an American for me, for my children, and all of the things that that offers us. So I'm not an America hater. The reality is, however, that any country can change.

and we can be involved in inconvenient ways with countries. And so when I talk about freedom, years ago when I was considering this philosophically, I realized that in general, governments don't respect their citizens. Now, if you get enough citizens together and you form a big movement, then the government will respect a big group of citizens. But almost no government in the world really respects any individual citizen. But what governments tend to respect is other governments. And so I realized that in

if I'm only subject to the jurisdiction of one particular government, then I'm vulnerable to that particular government. And

When we look at this and talk about this in the short term, as in, well, two or three or four years for a presidential cycle or 10 years, then people tend to say, well, you know what? I'm going to be just fine because my people are in power. But in reality, other people can come to power and those other people can make changes. And 20 years from now, I may not be so happy with those changes. I may wish for something else. So my reasons for international planning is

basically involve having a plan for a what-if scenario. And a lot of this came, I'll use a couple examples. One came from economic planning. Years ago, I was very interested in financial catastrophe, what happens when a government goes bankrupt, what happens when an economy goes into hyperinflation and collapses. And I started studying various historical examples. And I started from a prepper perspective.

basically thinking that the right solution to how to survive an economic collapse was to store lots of beans, bullets, and Band-Aids and be well prepped away from like a physical preparedness perspective. And I do believe that's an important component of good personal planning. However, I was doing consulting with Venezuelans and I was watching at that time Venezuela had 1 million percent hyperinflation in the nation of Venezuela. And I realized two things.

I realized, first of all, that economic crises don't tend to be contagious. So the Venezuelan currency collapsed, but the Brazilian real didn't collapse, nor did the Colombian peso. So you have two neighbors of Venezuela, and the collapse that happened within the country did not spread to the other country. But the collapse was...

in that particular country. The second thing I realized was that any Venezuelan that had left Venezuela a few years earlier and had moved to Miami was completely exempted

exempt from the financial crisis, had no reason to participate in the financial crisis. Now, that Venezuelan may or may not have moved all of his money, but if he was living in Miami, he was safe, he was comfortable, there was no crime on his doorstep, he was not living in a collapse where the power is only on two hours a day, he wasn't walking around with a backpack full of

of physical money that was hyperinflated, everything was good. And I realized that things can happen in any country that can cause issues, and the best way to avoid those things is to go abroad. So if I look at the United States, a lot of people have concerns about things like economic crisis, economic collapse, inflation of the dollar, default on national debt. We can argue that

how likely those scenarios are. But I've tended to miss most of my predictions and prognostications on the future. I've been wrong about most of them. So I've adopted a different way of thinking that says, if I'm concerned about something, can I make a plan for it and then not have to predict it happening or not happening, but just be prepared for it, kind of like an insurance policy? So I came to the

perspective that if the U.S. dollar were to collapse, again, I think it's unlikely, but just as a hypothetical, if the U.S. dollar were to collapse or my country were to go into some economic crisis, then the best way for me and my family to be protected in such an extreme scenario would simply to be somewhere else where the disaster was not. But in order to do that, you have to have all of that infrastructure established many, many years before the actual event happens. So give an example. I had friends of mine

who, when Russia invaded Ukraine, friends of mine who were Russian and who were Ukrainian, none of them in Russia, actually one of them in Russia, who I met later, but they were not in Russia and Ukraine, but they were Russian and Ukrainian. So many people in Russia and Ukraine were directly affected and are continuing to be directly affected by the actual violence happening in that place. But those governmental actions affected many other people to different degrees. And

So first, let's start with Russian. I wound up meeting a Russian friend of mine, and this Russian friend was formerly in the armed forces in Russia.

had left the armed forces and became a Christian and became a deep conscientious objector towards the actions of the Russian government. But it seemed likely that this person was going to be drafted into the Russian military, not only him, but also his three sons. And so he had three sons of draftable age, and he said, I cannot go and fight in this war. He considered the war immoral. He said, I can't go and fight in this war. What am I going to do? And so the only solution for him to save possibly his own life and his conscience was

and also his sons' lives and their consciences, was to flee Russia. The problem was that he had nothing established. So he had to literally sell things as fast as he could and

pile up money, literally sold his car at the border, sneaked out across the border, and fled. The problem is that the day that... So the Russian passport was a pretty strong passport before the war. But the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, all around the world, Russians who had visas had their visas canceled, and visa-free entry for many Russian citizens was completely canceled all around the world. So Russian citizens were basically trapped in Russia with very limited options of places that they could travel on their passport.

Now, my friend was able to go. He became a refugee, was able to be granted refugee status abroad. But it became very difficult for him because now he couldn't work. Now he couldn't support his family. And it was a catastrophe. If he had had the prudence and foresight to establish just one other place in the world, literally any country other than Russia, and I guess obviously Ukraine,

if he had had the prudence and foresight to establish one residency permit in another country, and if at all possible to have another passport, and to have a little bit of money abroad, or at least have some way of getting money abroad, then when all the sanctions came in and he couldn't transfer money, then he would have been well protected. And remember, he was not in favor of the actions of the Russian government. He was an objector to that. Now, similarly, let's go to Ukraine as an example. So I've

have worked with a number of Ukrainian clients living all around the world. So immediately after the invasion of Russia, Ukraine closed its borders for all men of military age, draftable age, to leave. And no man of military draftable age was allowed to leave. Now, that's a reasonable—we can understand from the government perspective, but I happen to think that your willingness to fight in a war or not is up to you. I don't think it's moral and appropriate to go and kidnap people and force them into an army.

So any man that didn't get out of Ukraine was now forced to fight in a war for the Ukrainian army. But what about those who had left Ukraine many years earlier? So at one point, and I'm not sure if this is still the case, but it was for a time, Ukraine has needed men so desperately that the Ukrainian embassies around the world made a decision that they were going to stop providing consular services to Ukrainian citizens.

What that means is if you were a Ukrainian citizen who had emigrated to the United States and you were living in the United States with a permanent residence, a green card, living in the United States, you'd been there for a decade. Your family was American. You're all in the United States and you had a green card living there, but you didn't have American citizenship. Then the Ukrainian government said, we're not going to renew your passport because you're a man of military age. They stopped providing consular services, including renovation of passports.

What would then be required would be for you to return to Ukraine to renew your passport. And at that point in time, they would not allow you to leave. They would draft you and you would wind up serving in the Ukrainian military. So you say, well, why doesn't that person, after all, he's been living in the United States for 10 years, why is he with a green card? Why not go ahead and apply for citizenship?

Well, all consular services from a country are all consular services. So when you apply for citizenship, normally you need to present an apostille birth certificate. You normally need to present a background check from the federal government or the law enforcement of your home country. And all of those services are provided as consular services. So a Ukrainian who had been in the United States living on a green card –

who doesn't have the ability to renew his passport, can't even apply for U.S. citizenship in that situation without those papers. And so this has happened to a modern, sophisticated country like Ukraine. But I also had this happen with Venezuelans. Venezuelans living in the United States, that the Venezuelan government stopped having the ability to issue passports, and they couldn't get documents even though they were legal residents in the United States.

So we can go on and on. But basically, if you are only subject, if you only have one government to draw on and you're only subject to the jurisdiction of one government, you don't have a lot of options if something goes wrong there. And I think that...

No matter how happy you are today with the status of your particular government and your particular home country, if we add enough time, I think most people would recognize things could change. So if I'm happy today in the United States, I can look and say, 20 years from now, things could be different. And most of my motivation for all this has also been for my children.

As I look and say, I don't want my children to be trapped. I want them to have options. And maybe it's 20 or 30 years from now that they need these options. I want them to have options. I have the ability to do it now, so let me go ahead and do it.

That makes sense. I've thought about this for years. And as I've listened to you and every time I go to try to, yeah, I'm going to go get permanent residency in Mexico. I talk myself out of it, but I'm going to do it. The idea that it hadn't occurred to me that other countries could cancel the ability, in my case, of American to visit. So we always think, well, we can still get out because we have a travel visa. But if all that gets canceled.

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One other area that I believe your thoughts have changed in the last seven years is on the idea of retire early, the FIRE movement, financial independence, retire early. Has that changed? 100%. And how has it changed? When I got interested in personal finance, I was about 15 years old and I just started reading books on finance. My primary goal was to get rich. It took me a while, of course, to figure out a plan for that. So as I got out of college, I...

was working a couple of different jobs and that was when I found out about FIRE. And I would go and I would spend my time reading FIRE blogs and I thought, man, this would just be amazing if I were just financially independent, how incredible this would be. But I

As time went on, I had one business that was a pretty good fit for me, but then I had the dream of starting Radical Personal Finance, and I had a problem. I had a problem that I was going to talk about financial independence, but I was not financially independent. I couldn't live exclusively on the income from my investments. But I realized if I just start a business, then I don't have to wait so long. And

In that process going through it myself, I realized that the vast majority of the things that I was interested in with regard to being financially independent could be achieved by having more personal agency over my life. And I could achieve personal agency, personal autonomy, personal freedom by simply running a business. That if I had a business that had enough income to pay my bills and I wanted to take two months off and travel, then I could do that.

If I had a business and I didn't want to work on a particular day, I could do that. But the business would still give me benefits that I wouldn't have if I were completely financially independent, sitting in my house, just living on dividends from a stock portfolio.

So I did that and I experienced that and I realized I have almost everything I want with regard to financial independence. The other thing that happened is I started having children. So when I started Radical Personal Finance, I had a baby. Since then, we've had four more. So I have five children. And having five children has completely transformed my psychology and my view of the world where now I don't even compare.

consider things from a personal, self-oriented perspective. I consider things from a family perspective and from a community-based perspective. And that, I think, is one of the biggest differences, that now I see that I have obligations to society that go beyond just my own personal pleasure. Over the years, I've realized, first of all, let me put this in a series of bullet points. Number one, people who achieve

financial independence still face the same problem I observed coaching retirees for many years, that the kind of people who become wealthy enough to not work are the kind of people who are not ever going to be happy and contented not working. They're going to continue to pursue things. The guy who's just a lazy sluggard,

who doesn't want to work, he will never accumulate enough money to retire. But people who accumulate enough money to retire, they're not lazy sluggards. So the basic thing holds true with financial independence. If you work really dedicatedly for 10 years and you build a great business or you practice extreme savings, you become financially independent, you are not the kind of person that's going to sit around and just watch TV all day and just do nothing. Or at least you're not going to do that for more than some months or a year or two. You might take a year off, take a sabbatical, go travel the world, but you're going to come back and you're going to do something new.

And if you look throughout the

the world of financial independence, early retirement aficionados and devotees, you will always find that they encounter something that they dedicate their time to. And that thing is usually productive. They don't always make money from it, which is totally fine. I think that's a good reason to still work towards financial independence, but they're going to be doing something productive. And the thing that they're doing that's productive, they could be paid for anyway. Number two, I think that financial independence and early retirement, by the stochastic

strict pursuit of it often cuts people off from their biggest value and their biggest capacity. So I've become a strong opponent of retiring for anybody, including those of a traditional age.

And I do that for a number of reasons. Number one, I think that work provides us with many benefits more than money that we don't actually see until we leave. So, for example, social connections. When I was a financial advisor before starting Radical Personal Finance,

I thought, well, happiness is going to be me with freedom and a laptop working from home. I do not like working from home and I do not like working alone. I think most people are much happier in an office environment with friends who are similar to them, who have similar values and are working on a common goal. It's really rewarding to be part of a team doing something that matters in the world. And our work, no matter how menial or how simple, our work truly contributes. Even if I'm a street sweeper,

And my only job is keeping this street in front of my house swept and cleaned up. That still contributes to a positive town, a positive climate. And so that sense of contribution to work, to a society, is a really valuable thing. And you talk to people who are just consumers, they're early retirees, wandering around, consuming excessively, they miss out on that.

In addition, there's a lot of social status that comes from work. So I often really warn people of traditional retirement age about this. You're 65 years old. You're a partner at your law firm or a partner in your business or an owner of a big business. You are at the top of the social hierarchy. Everybody wants to know you. Everybody wants to seek you out. Everybody wants your advice. Everybody in the office respects you, looks up to you.

wants to hear what you have to say at your church, they want you on the board of this, or they wanted you to be a deacon or whatever, they want you to be in leadership. When you go to the country club, people are saying, oh, I want my son to come and ask you some questions. You are sought out. And especially for a man, that sense of status in society that is derived from our work is a really meaningful component of life. It's also a really meaningful way that we can contribute to our society.

The day you retire, you're just some old rich bum and people only want you for your money because now you don't have the connections. You may have the wisdom, but how are people going to know about that? And so usually you retain a little bit of your status for a few years, but you're 70 years old now. You're sitting in your house. You're not out and about and involved with the community. You're not at your office. You don't have the title. You don't have a business card that says anything except 70-year-old random former such and such person. And now you are just...

You've lost all that status and you've lost that sense of contribution and purpose. It doesn't matter how much money you have. So I could go on and on, but what I realized is that the people who are pursuing FIRE and dedicating, say, 10 years of their life to an extreme savings approach, they wind up so limited and

Let me make one more comment about living on a fixed income. Living on a fixed income stinks, even if the income is very, very ample and abundant. So you can have a very high fixed income, but now you're still mentally calculating and you still have to calculate what can I do, what can I not do? It's much more fun to know that I'm totally financially independent. I have enough money set aside to do whatever I want. And now I can spend 100% of my income anytime I want

to. I can spend 100% on some kind of lavish consumption thing. I can throw an amazing party and invite all of my 100 friends and relations onto a cruise that I pay for. I can make some extravagant charitable contribution or donation because I have full control of my income and I'm not living on a fixed income. I'm not a miser counting the pennies from my portfolio. And so when you go through all of the reasons that people are pursuing financial independence and pursuing early retirement,

they can almost all be achieved more efficiently with a better job that you like or a job that, say, makes less money but gives you more flexibility or pursuing something that is where you are seen and looked after for your wisdom rather than for just your work that you're doing on an hourly basis.

So I have three rules and I'll give them to you. And these apply to early retirees and these apply to traditionally aged retirees. I believe that nobody should retire in the traditional sense of the word, meaning quit your job, until one of three things is accomplished. Number one, you should never retire from something. You should only retire to something. So you don't have a bad job that you really hate or live in a city that you really hate and say, my answer to this is to become financially independent by the time I'm 30. Rather...

recognize that my goal is to get a better job that I'm more likely to enjoy or more likely to feel like my talents are appreciated or to move to a city that better fits my lifestyle.

So we don't retire from something. We fix the thing in the most direct sense, and we only retire when we're retiring to do something. So when we're retiring to something, as in, hey, here's this amazing organization that's a charitable endeavor. There's no money for a salary for me, and I don't need the money, but I really want to dedicate the next decade of my life to this organization or this cause or to public service in some way. Absolutely.

Quit your job and go do that because you can, but don't quit your job just because you don't like it anymore. Number two, you only retire to do something when the thing that you're retiring to do is something that you can't do and keep your job. So I use here the sailing example. Years ago, I thought I'd be super fun to buy a sailboat, sail around the world nonstop. And I followed sailing blogs and people who've done this.

Well, if that is your dream and your goal, you clearly can't do that and keep your job. So if you say my early retirement plan is to accumulate enough money so that my wife and I can buy a sailboat and go around the world for the next 10 years, then you're going to have to pursue early retirement. So that's a good example of something you should do. But if your plan of early retirement is I'm going to play video games or I'm going to paint art or do something like that, you don't need to retire to do that. Even working 40 hours a week,

And then sleeping eight hours a night and doing all of the other normal daily things, you still have 40 to 60 hours a week that you can allocate towards that thing that you want to do. There's no reason for you to retire to play video games when you can play 40 to 50 hours of video games and keep a job. That's the second rule is only retire to something when the thing that you're retiring to do can't be done with your job. And then number three, only retire to do that thing when you have fully and deeply tested it.

in as much detail as possible. So I'll use traveling here as an example. I have traveled, as I said, with my children and my wife to, I don't want to exaggerate, I haven't counted the number of countries, probably 25 to 30 countries over the last years. I've been able to do that completely with my wife and five children and running a business and had no problem with it. What I've learned from doing it is that traveling can

continually is not a great lifestyle. It's not a great lifestyle for me. When I go on a six-week trip, for example, I find that after about three weeks, I'm done. I've seen enough museums. I've seen enough castles. I'm done.

Three weeks is a great amount of time to travel. Now, three weeks once a quarter seems really great for me. I really like that. So it's nice to have more than just three weeks of vacation, but I don't need just permanent full-time travel. That's not fun. It's not enjoyable. You might do it for six months or a year, but very rarely does anybody become an actual perpetual traveler. And when they do and you listen to them and you read them, over time, you just ask yourself why. Why?

Why are you wandering through the world continually? Why? What's the point? Wouldn't you be better served by establishing a community, having children and grandchildren, really building? And so I've tested almost all of these things that people want to do, the way they want to do when they live in early retirement.

And I've discovered that these are all phenomenally fun things to do as a respite, as a break from my daily job and my daily structure. But in terms of something to build my life around, they have a very, very short duration. So the key difference for me after 10 years of radical personal finance is this.

I'm not nearly as radical as I once was because I've discovered that there is wisdom embodied in the basic decisions of society that I ignored and was ignorant of when I was younger. And I come back to basically the most powerful concept for me now is that of Chesterton's fence. Chesterton famously said that if you come across a fence, I think he said something like a fence in the road or a fence, don't tear the fence down.

until you can clearly understand why it was put there in the first place. And so almost everything that I used to rant and rave about as a much younger, more aggressive, more radical person, I now see the wisdom in. So I never wanted to work a nine-to-five job, ever. I thought, nine-to-five, I want to work early in the morning. I want to work late at night.

I pretty much work 9 to 5 now, and I realized, oh, 9 to 5 is actually a really good schedule for a normal family schedule. I never wanted to work in an office. I work in an office, and I see the value of working in an office with coworkers. It's nice to have the freedom to not have to be there every single day, every single hour, but I can get that with management roles, with ownership roles, where I can come and go from the office as I please without having to be stuck there.

Things like being part of a community, having a home, having a house instead of living in an RV. All of these things have value.

And as I've tested my most radical ideas, I've realized, number one, this radical idea is radical because it doesn't represent the best pathway for most people. And it's really great on a part-time basis. So I love RV travel. I don't want to live full-time in an RV with children. So the traditional pathway of having a home and having an RV is a really great pathway. I like to travel a lot.

But that doesn't mean I want to travel 12 months a year, 365 days a year. So owning a business where I can set my schedule and take one month off out of every four is a really great structure. So I see the value in conclusion. I see the value of being wealthy.

That's clearly helpful because wealth expands your options. I see the value of being financially independent, and I think of financial independence as an important milestone to observe along the way, but as a deep-seated goal, as something that you absolutely are dedicated to for its own sake.

It's a very small goal without much payoff. It's something that should be achieved on the pathway to contribution, the pathway to developing your earning ability, the pathway to developing a business. It's something that's an important milestone because it allows you to test things, take a year off, travel the world, go and spend time with your children, doing interesting things. But as a core goal to organize your life around, it is not an appropriate goal for most people.

Great, Josh. Your insights are invaluable. Thank you very much. We'll point people to your website. And it's been great. Thank you. Thank you, David. I hope you have enjoyed this conversation with Joshua Sheets. You can learn more information about what he shares with the world at RadicalPersonalFinance.com.

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