Episode-2443- Financial Strategies for the Modern Survivalist
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Today we are going back to one of the fundamentals of modern survival living, that is financial management and debt elimination. Economics and the reality of unfunded liabilities, the national debt along with everyday financial worries is the number one reason people get into the preparedness lifestyle.
Sometimes it is from a practical approach but just as often it is panic and fear based. Today we set aside panic and establish a base of common sense and pragmatic techniques to build, preserve and protect wealth.
Join Me Today To Discuss…
- The number one wealth killer – poverty consciousness
- The number two wealth killer – consumer age thinking
- The number three wealth killer – false optimism and or pessimism
- Why debt is cancer and must be eradicated
- Why saving is more important than investing for most people in the beginning
- The lessons of alternative energy
- Start with increasing efficiency (income)
- Reduce losses (spending)
- My rules for truly becoming financially resilient
- Increase your economic IQ – daily for a year at least – Financial Term of the Day Newsletter
- If you want to believe education is an investment, you should treat it like one
- Save money, determine what you can save, then do a bit more
- Reduce expenses in small ways, put at least half of it away
- Create additional income (business, second job, more hours)
- Save money (cash on hand, cash in bank, CDs, bonds)
- Become a land owner on some level
- Put some money into silver/gold (5% of NW)
- Put some money into bitcoin/crypto (a little each month or quarter)
- Become a producer of food, yes, really
- Plant trees
- Buy the best you can afford once vs. cheap every few years
- Become highly skilled at fixing your own problems
- See opportunity everywhere because it is everywhere
- Become a great cook
- Invest in only what you understand and only when it makes sense
- Get out of the way of telegraphed punches, yes time the market
- Pay off all debt asap, I know I said it before and I will keep saying it
- Become adept at using Excel, it never lies
- Final thoughts – The game is rigged, it is a big club, you are not in it! But you can still win the game.
Resources for today’s show…
- Join the Members Brigade
- Join Our Forum
- Walking To Freedom
- TspAz.com
- The Granddaddy’s Gun Club
- This Week in History in 1927 Lindy Lands in Paris
- The absolute best free Excel Tutorial I have found
- Investopedia Term of the Day
- Highway 20 Ride on SongFacts.com
- Highway 20 Ride – Zac Brown Band
Sponsors of the Day
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https://vimeo.com/199334296
SNL- Don’t Buy Stuff
Back when SNL was actually good.
Good show. I’ll forward it to my nephew who feels so trapped. I hope it helps him find a way out.
As for me, my failed health destroyed my chances of much of anything. Medical bills have taken everything. I still try to find ways to help myself survive but it’s true….your health is EVERYTHING.
Can’t count the times point blank father in law would say “if you ever want to amount to anything you will have to have debt.” OR ” You think you ever will have any thing without debt you best think again. It wont happen” Mother in law always shopped on CC. What will people think if you don’t have new clothes for school? or “I work my kids deserve the best” They retired several years back but took a huge hit in 08. Bought a big fancy motor home and did the snow bird thing. Grandma died and they sold her house and bought a bigger (HUGE) motor home. As they felt like theirs was “the out house” Every time they saw someone with something nice they always would say crap about people behind their backs. Like “got rocks” “wow it must be nice to have so much” “well what makes them so special” ” how do you rate” Would drive me nuts. They had to then sell their house because they could no longer afford the payment and taxes because they refi their home for over 250K after they retired ! Then did it a 2nd time! They ended up living in a friends driveway for the last several years. FIL died of cancer this yr and all that $$ for the life insurance went to his medical bills. That was the mentality hubby was raised with. Good thing he is a boy because they also made him work for every thing. Taught him a good hard work ethic. Sister well she was never really expected to work because she just had to look pretty and catch a man. Worked for her until they got a divorce and she burned through the settlement in less than a year. Hubby has a hard time saving money. He is a shopaholic. Spend all you want long as it’s never over $50. So it’s 5-10 20 $50 at a time like it’s water.
How I was raised, my parents always said you work today save today cuz tomorrow you will need it. Buy property. Houses, land, apartment buildings, invest in as much real estate as you can. Get as many rentals as you can. Then never spend any money unless you really have to. It never hurts to have 2 jobs. Sew those holes up 10 times before you by used jeans. Better yet get them free from the church. I spent many weekends and summers cleaning and painting rentals or baby sitting my little brothers and sisters and never got paid or even an ice cream cone. Dad would say when you grow up and make the money then you can have an ice cream cone. Until then I put a roof over your head and clothes on your back. That is payment enough. UGH then came the when I was a kid milking cows and walking to school barefoot in the snow speech. hahaha.
My Grandpa always said debt is cancer. Learn how money works. You never want to give money to the bankers if you can help it. Invent something and run your own business. Learn how government works and know that there are always 2 types of people that will lie to you, lawyers and politicians. They both just want your money. Then came the lecture about taxes. Which I was way to young to understand.
I grew up with a very strong savings discipline. I always saved 50% of any money I got. Made most of my money with my own business. My first one was selling veggies door to door when I was in the 4th grade. Got free veggies from weeding gardens. Pay my brothers and sisters to do the work with a candy bar or a free cookie I got from mom. I never ate mine. I would save them for payment. Then I went to work at a motorcycle shop down the street. I would dry the bikes off that were outside. My sales pitch to the owner was that when it was raining people wouldn’t want to test drive them if they were wet. So on rainy days I would take my towels down and dry off his bikes. Then the wet towels I would take inside and dust off the tires of the show room bikes. I know I must have cracked the owner up. I was so happy to get that quarter. Then one time he gave me a 50 cent piece. Oh man I was rich!!!
When I met hubby I was blinded by the glitz of his family and bought into the debt thing hook line and sinker. Eventually realized that sucked. For yrs when the kids were young, we were a one income family. I would baby sit / home day care clean houses do yard work to help with the bills Long as I could take the kids with me. Well we ended up jobless & homeless several times. There were nights we didn’t have enough money for food. So hubby got to eat because he was working. USAF and if he didn’t show up to go to work he went to jail. If he was sick he went to the barracks or the hospital. So he ate. Of course the babies had to eat. So I would go to bed hungry. I would take the food money and go buy coffee, sugar, & OJ on sale with a coupon. Then when the sale was over I would sell those things to neighbors for a profit. But they still saved because the sale was off at the regular stores and I could shop on base which they matched or beat the off base sales.
Hubby’s grandfather told us never buy a new car only buy used. That a car has only one purpose to get your butt from point A to point B. Never barrow more than you need. Never barrow what the banks will be willing to lend you it’s a trap. Then he loaned us $$ for a car that we could all fit in. That way I could take hubby to work if I had Dr. appointments. But he wanted to be paid back in 2 yrs. Loans at that time were 3 sometimes 4 yrs. He said nope that is dumb. Then after that car we were to pay cash for every car from then on. Of course we didn’t listen. UGH… Until the 2nd new car broke down and the guy we hired to fix it took the engine out and then split town with the money.
From that time on we never bought a new car again. Will only buy something that is at least 7 yrs old. Now most of our cars are pushing 20 yrs old the truck is 23 yrs old. We could sell it for what we paid for it.
I read so many book on how to get out of debt. It was one of Jacks pod casts that gave me the fire under my butt I needed. This was after I was in a car accident and lost my income. Once again down to a one paycheck family. Bad memories flooded my dreams. That was it I was getting us out of debt. ASAP NO MATTER WHAT!!
Took me 3 yrs to do it and I pretty much played hard ball. Hubby didn’t like it at all. We dayum near got divorced over it. He kept telling me I couldn’t do it. There was no way. 1. I told him if he didn’t like it go file for divorce 2. I cut up his CC and debit card 3. I asked him how much $$ he needed to get back and fourth to work each week. I gave him 1/2 that in cash and told him make it work. He ended up sharing in a car pool. Then I upped the game and dug deeper. I think TV was the hardest thing to give up. We lost so called friends. Family got pissed at us and wouldn’t talk to us any more. Hubby moved out once and once I kicked him out. Then he saw the light. Moved back in and we dug deeper. Started growing our own food and pinching every penny we had. That’s when the tests came. Appliances broke down Hubby would fix things if he couldn’t we went without. The cars started breaking down. Even the farm truck broke down. The furnace and hot water heater broke. There was a leak in the roof on the back porch. The well pump went tits. Lawn mower broke. Then the big one. Carpenter ants chewed so much of our rim joist the house could have collapsed. Of course the decks and steps into the house were rotten. It was horrible. just horrible. There were tears and fear, still I held fast. Found some free pallets and built steps out of them and then used a step ladder for the front door. I didn’t care what the house looked like long as it was sound. So we took money out of savings and sold some stuff. Fixed the rim joist ourselves. But we didn’t need steps and a deck besides the pallets. The next summer ants and termites because of a broken pipe we didn’t know was there. Because of how the damaged happened and the location it wasn’t covered.
Then came the day Christmas eve. I told hubby to come to the computer and I pulled up the house payment at the bank. Paid that sucker off the last payment. All but $1.00 That $1.00 I took out of our wedding album and told him this was the very first dollar we got as husband and wife. When the bank open we will go down and pay that last dollar off together. He looked at me and said oh screw that pay it now who cares make it go to zero! hahahaha. Click click click and that was that no more debt. No house CC car payments nothing. Oh yeah he was happy. Yup we did a happy dance in the front room. The dogs thought we had lost our minds.
Then the next AM, Christmas day. I called hubby to the table and gave him a box. In that box was 15K of $1, 5, 10, 20, 50’s & 100’s He about shit. That was money I had rat holed (without telling him) from the grocery money and returning pop cans I found. That was the cash ER fund. I had built that first because being a one income family if that paycheck stopped we were screwed. He was always getting laid off or going on strike. Then I gave him $2000 and told him to go buy the gun he wanted. This was his reward for not bitching any more about me cutting up his CC hahaha & finally getting on board.
I didn’t care what people thought. I didn’t care what he thought. I knew what I was doing was the right thing. I also told him that if he should decided to leave me he can tell the judge that his reasons are I paid off his truck paid off the house and gave him a 20k cash ER fund with $2000 to buy his AR with. And I am always busy growing our own food and raising livestock. So I can cook from scratch and feed him healthy whole foods. Then don’t forget to tell him I take care of the house and the yard plus I build the buildings. So he doesn’t have to work his ass off when he gets home from work. I save so we can go fishing and camping with the dogs. And I put a years worth of food away with some long term so when we turn 70 the party food is already there. After my rant (which to this day I still have to have from time to time) he realized how much the “programming” from his parents & just the commercialism culture, was giving him a knee jerk reaction. I knew that is what all the butt hurt was. Just emotional bull shit when it comes to money and self worth on top of bad examples. Our parents were at opposite ends of the spectrum his spent way to much and mine you couldn’t squeak a penny out of. It was the grandfathers that made the most sense. Then Jack backed that up for me. He also helped me find my determination again.
I am sharing a bit of my story the good the bad and the ugly. It’s not a walk in the park all the time. Sometimes it’s like a really really bad hangover. You spend too much and you pay the price. Sometimes you are walking on cloud 9 and you know you can do it. There can be many obstacles to over come. From day to day living to the emotional baggage we carry. That programming. I am here to tell you that no matter what you can do it! If you want to. If you are broke you are broke because you want to be. It’s really that simple. Not always easy but it is simple. Numbers don’t lie nor do they have emotions. When in doubt run those numbers again. Yes it takes time, but time is going to pass any way.
Things that I would do differently. I would have picked a smaller fixer upper home and not bought a bigger one so soon. I would have sold every single thing we didn’t need. Just to get out of debt faster. When I think back, at how I use to think it was so important to have matching throw pillows for the bed. Or that big screen TV and Starbucks all those clothes and makeup and holiday dishes &&&&&&&&& yrs and yrs and yrs of spending. Yrs and yrs of giving money we didn’t have to the banks as interest to buy all that crap we didn’t need, yeah I get a bit sick to my stomach. Especially when I think son of a bitch we could have retired 20 yrs ago easy. We always figured we would retire at 50 then ok well 55. yeah and that birthday has come and gone as well. We are still paying the piper as far as getting our retirement funds in order.
So you youngerlings get off your butts while you have the energy and get yourself out of debt! ASAP! Start today. Trust me you wont regret it. I can’t even begin to describe how out of this world wonderful it feels to walk OUR property, garden in OUR soil, play in OUR creek, or clean OUR house knowing it’s all bought and paid for. Thankfully we did this before health issues have popped up.
Best of luck to you and just GO FOR IT. If you don’t like it you can always get your debt back really easy. (for the record sometimes staying out of debt is harder than getting out of debt.)
Synchronicity is a weird thing. I just started a review of all of my ‘wealth books’ on the same day you published this podcast. =)
“Think of every dollar you save as a soldier fighting for your freedom. Every dollar you waste as a soldier you’ve lost.” – MJ DeMarco
“Millionaires value freedom over comfort – and because they do, they get both.” – The 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires & The Middle Class
When poverty comes in the front door, love goes out the back.
I am 27 and I agree that most of my my generation are complaining because they are lazy or incompetent at life skills. I made that evaluation and I decided with my good math skills and decent computer skills I would do tech jobs. My generation complains that kids ruin your life etc but its absolute bs. I got married my sophomore year had our eldest my junior year graduated with a pregnant wife my senior year in 4 years with double major in Comp sci and physics, nearly a triple major including math but came 3 classes short. I worked every summer and during the school year. We are now on track to pay off both of our student loans 3 years after graduation on 1 income, we made the decision it was more important for our kids to be with their mother vs the crap day care system that rivals public schools in stupidity. The two most important things my parents taught me are probably “you stick with your spouse no matter what life throws at you” and “you are never unemployed if you dont have a job your job is getting a job”. 8 to 10 hrs a day filling out job apps has lead to a job in a week or two with no exception.
“you stick with your spouse no matter what life throws at you”
And if a person doesn’t like that, they should not get married in the first place! Damn strait. I am not saying that there are not marriages that should be ended, but if it is simply because shit gets hard, no real man leaves his woman over that.
I’m 35 and most of us older millennials are busting our asses and saving and investing our money as Jack mentioned. I’ve been a disciple and only-to-close-friends prophet of the ‘save as much as possible, invest much of it and go out with the Baby Boomers’ cult of retirement. The nature of work and AI & robotics are rendering a lot of blue collar and many white collar jobs useless. White collar jobs will become even more competitive given not as many positions will be needed once AI improves. Even coding has become a more routine job with mid level rather than high level salaries with AI and algorithms writing their own code now (unless you’re a rockstar in advanced stuff like quantum computers, etc). Disruption will take place more frequently and rapidly everywhere in everything. If folks wanna hang in that atmosphere, they’ll have to use their wits for critical thinking in entrepreneurship and study the market, job trends, disruption trends, etc. And most people won’t until it’s too late because they’d rather people tell them what to do and how to live, and worse, tell others.
My general plan is to make enough to retire, buy some land, build my own house to my specifications, build a homestead, a few toys of specific interest, and tinker and create until I croak, with money in the bank if I need it but not actually use it. Plan up for modification with the passage of time, improvement and disruption, especially of technology.
What a beautiful song. Thank’s Jack.