Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, I show dedicated to providing you with knowledge, skills, insights, 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 Sheetz. Today, I'm going to continue this series called My Biggest Financial Mistakes. My Biggest Financial Mistakes. I've done a lot of introspection and analysis over the past 6 to 12 months in my own life.

I've made a list. It's quite long. My personal biggest financial mistake, the things that have cost me more money than anything else.

And I've been sharing those with you little by little and in no particular order, just in the order that I feel like I want to talk about them.

And today's mistake is actually quite simple. It is simply this.

One of my biggest financial mistakes has been having a selfish focus on myself and my own lifestyle goals rather than being willing to focus on serving others.

I think your little bit of background will help you to understand this. I could have also titled this particular podcast episode how I feel like I've been bamboozled by the financial independence movement.

Because it's taken me quite a while to work through an experience enough to be sure of what I'm actually saying to you.

But we have background. When I was younger, I wanted to be financially independent. I wanted to be financially free.

And I spent time reading things and listening to people who promised financial freedom, who promised that I would be able to achieve my goals.

I read personal finance literature and personal finance literature taught me that if I would put money in my IRAs and contribute faithfully and invest it into stocks, that someday I would be a multi-millionaire and have a lot of money.

And then I would be able to retire. I read and listened to literature and things that people talked about that helped me to have that goal of financial independence.

And while I've personally made fun of and pilloried for many years, the scam of retirement, the reality is it affected me deeply.

The idea that even though I made fun of it, the Merrill Lynch ad with the Greyhaired couple walking calmly down the beach, I made fun of it.

It was still held in my mind as a vision, something that I wanted. And as I worked my way through the world of employment, I systematically grew to want it more.

I started as a teenager, consuming mainstream personal finance books that talked about the value of retirement in your mid-60s.

Then I started working in financial services in 2008. I joined a financial services company.

I started selling life insurance, disability insurance, long-term care insurance. I got my securities licenses, started selling investments.

I became a financial advisor and started doing comprehensive, holistic financial planning at the time.

When I was doing that, I was working in a business model that was structured based upon that mainstream understanding of retirement.

And so I, of course, had those goals. One of the ways that the company that I worked for attracted me was by talking about their pension programs.

And I knew people that were very wealthy and had a great retirement lifestyle. It seemed awesome. It looked awesome. And so I worked at that.

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