Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. Today is Monday, April 7, 2025. And on this Monday, I want to share with you some ideas about recent tariff announcements,

recent declines in the stock market, the prospects of a global trade war, and basically

what you should expect in equity investing.

Now, formerly, I worked as a licensed professional financial advisor, and it's been more

than 10 years now since I held any licenses. I no longer give advice on stocks or securities. I hold no

investment licenses. But in the last 10 years, even with 10 years of external perspective,

I really haven't changed much of my perspective from anything

that I used to say and used to believe. And I'm going to give you a basic set of bullet

points here at the beginning with regard to stock market investing that I think are useful,

productive, and that every person who owns any kind of stocks should know. First and foremost,

from my perspective, the basic job of a financial advisor is to affect his client's behavior. So I think of myself as a behavior

manager. Now, that means a couple different things. Number one, it means helping the client to be optimistic

about his goals, helping him to set goals that are clearly important to him, helping him to lay

out a pathway that might result in his achieving those goals, and then coaching him systematically

towards those goals. The ways that people win with money primarily have to do with them

starting early, earning a high income, spending less than they make, and then consistently

saving money year after year after year after year. And along the way, we need some good

investment tools to achieve those money growth outcomes. For many of the wealthiest people, the biggest

winning investments are usually involved to some degree with a business that this person

begins or buys and grows or with a career that is a very high paying career. So one of the things that I've been arguing against for years

is simply that most of the wealthiest people don't necessarily get there

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