Welcome to radical personal finance. For the last three months, my family and I have been living in

Brazil. Now, I want you to take a moment and I want you to think about if you were going to

move to Brazil or if you were going to visit Brazil, what city would you move to? What city would you live in? I've discovered by talking

with people that most Americans, for example, are really not going to know all that many cities

in Brazil. If I ask you to name some, I think you're probably going to list

Rio, right, Rio de Janeiro. You're going to might list Sao Paulo, right? That would be reasonable.

You might have heard of some other cities. You might know that the capital of Brazil is

Brasilia, but most Americans anyway would not know about the city that we chose to be in.

However, if you were going to speak to many Brazilians and you were going to ask them a question,

such as what is the best city to live in or what is the most livable city in Brazil, many of them

would respond with the name of a city called Florianopolis Brazil.

And that is specifically where my family and I have been living for the last three months.

Now, we went there to have a baby doing birth tourism.

But while I was in Brazil, I became very interested in why every single person I spoke to

who lived in Brazil would go on and on about how great Florianapolis was, or is.

While I was in Brazil, I worked hard at learning Brazilian Portuguese. I made a great progress.

I really enjoyed it. Got to a good, solid, intermediate level, able to communicate fairly,

freely, good understanding. And I proved out one of my three-month language projects. I read a million words in Portuguese. I really enjoyed it. So while I was there, I talked to every Uber driver that I spoke to about the city. And that gave me contact with dozens and dozens of people. Because Uber there was great. Didn't need a car. Didn't have to rent a car. I had to get a couple of Uber's anytime my family wanted to go anywhere. but it was great. And again and again and again and again and again, I wind up in a conversation with somebody. And I say, oh, where are you from? They give me a name of some city that I didn't know and didn't recognize, but they're usually a gaucho or from South Palo or something like that. And I say, why did you come to Brazil?

Sorry, to Florianopolis.

Why did you come to Florianopolis?

And the answer that they gave was so profoundly simple and consistent.

Before I give it to you, I want to ask you, what do you think it was?

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