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 Sheet, so I'm your host, and today I want to create a show specifically talking about what to do when you are facing financial disaster and catastrophe.

Now, in yesterday's show, I talked about the meltdown at the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and I was very aware that it is affecting lots of people.

It's a huge catastrophe for many, and I know that there are many in my audience who are being affected.

But I just kind of shared off the cuff a few basic very quick things that I hoped would be useful and helpful to you.

I had several listeners write to me, simply saying thank you so much for the short comments that I made and how much they helped.

And I want to take today's show and speak directly to you and amplify those comments. I want to give you a broad perspective on what to do when you're facing financial catastrophe.

When you've lost all your money, when all your funds have disappeared, when something bad has happened, I want to give you a broad perspective on this.

I want to speak directly to you and give you some useful and actionable and practical advice.

And so this is applicable if FTX, if you're wiped out in FTX and you've lost your life savings and now you're completely penniless, this is applicable if your business is collapsed for some other reason.

This is applicable in many circumstances and many situations. So I want you to sit back, relax, and listen, because this is going to help you.

To begin with, we need to start by putting the money in perspective. This is the most important thing for us to begin with. You have to put money into perspective.

Financial catastrophe is a big deal.

It is going to dramatically affect your life in many, many ways. It is important. It is exceedingly important.

Bankruptcy, poverty, etc. These things affect lives. But it is in no way the worst catastrophe that can happen to you.

What I'm about to say is going to sound exceedingly insensitive. But I believe that in the fullness of time you will come to recognize that it is true.

If you have money problems and money problems alone, you don't really have that many problems.

When you, there's an old saying that if we all came into a room and we took all of our problems off of our backs and we put them on the floor together and said, okay, you can pick whichever problems up from this pile that you want.

Most of us would probably walk over and get our own problems, the ones that we're accustomed to and be happy then that we have those problems.

And I genuinely deeply believe that if you only have money problems, you don't actually have that big of a problem.

Because not only are money problems, where do I use? I'm going to say fake for right now. And I'm going to expand on that and clarify.

Not only are money problems fake, but they are some of the simplest, most straightforward problems to solve.

...