2024-03-21_Why_You_Shouldnt_Wait_to_Have_Children
00:00:00.000 | Join us today during the Jeep Celebration event, where right now, well-qualified Lacees
00:00:04.060 | get an ultra-low mileage lease on the 2024 Jeep Wrangler Sport S4 by E for $329 a month
00:00:08.880 | for 36 months with $3,960 due at signing.
00:00:11.520 | Tax, title, license extra.
00:00:13.160 | No security deposit required.
00:00:14.720 | Call 1-888-925-JEEP for details.
00:00:17.120 | Requires dealer contribution and leased through Stellantis Financial.
00:00:19.840 | Extra charge for miles over $15,000.
00:00:21.640 | Includes 7,500 EV cap cost reduction.
00:00:24.000 | Not all customers will qualify.
00:00:25.280 | Residency restrictions apply.
00:00:26.760 | Take retail delivery by 4/1.
00:00:28.280 | That is a registered trademark.
00:00:31.600 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:34.520 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while
00:00:38.800 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:41.520 | My name is Joshua Sheets.
00:00:42.520 | I'm your host.
00:00:43.520 | And on today's podcast, I want to discuss with you the question, should you wait to
00:00:49.680 | have children until you can afford it?
00:00:53.440 | Now, in the most recent podcast episode, I dealt with the question of, should you wait
00:00:58.760 | to get married until you can afford it?
00:01:01.960 | And I wasn't originally planning to do this follow-along episode immediately, but after
00:01:07.520 | further consideration, I realized, obviously, it makes sense.
00:01:10.040 | As the old children's nursery rhyme goes, first comes love, then comes marriage, then
00:01:14.480 | comes a baby in a baby carriage.
00:01:16.820 | And while that sequence of events may not be as consistent as we might like, it still
00:01:23.980 | generally is true, and so it makes sense to talk about these things together.
00:01:29.420 | In this podcast episode, I'm going to share with you some ideas that come not only from
00:01:33.380 | personal experience, after all, my wife and I have five children ages 10 and under, but
00:01:38.700 | more importantly, from a significant amount of experience that I have gained from working
00:01:43.660 | as a financial planner for many, many families, and I want to share with you some stories
00:01:49.020 | that I think will drive some of these points home to you.
00:01:53.020 | The basic thesis of what I want to share with you is that, yes, some appropriate amount
00:01:59.760 | of financial planning is warranted when it comes to making decisions regarding having
00:02:05.420 | children.
00:02:06.420 | However, it's probably not so significant as you might think, and if you'll sit down
00:02:11.980 | and lay out the specific concerns that you have, you may find that if you want to have
00:02:17.100 | children, and if you're able to have children, you don't need quite so much money as you
00:02:21.980 | otherwise thought that you did.
00:02:24.540 | To begin, let's build a foundation by talking about goal setting.
00:02:27.980 | When I help people with goal setting, I often divide goals into what I call time-bound goals
00:02:33.980 | and money-bound goals.
00:02:35.860 | A time-bound goal is something that either can only happen at a certain stage of life
00:02:42.220 | or is something that is really best if done at a certain stage of life.
00:02:49.060 | A money-bound goal, on the other hand, is something that you need a specific amount
00:02:53.900 | of money to accomplish, and it can be done at any point in time when you acquire the
00:03:00.320 | money.
00:03:01.320 | So, there's no perfect line between these, but there are many goals that will naturally
00:03:07.460 | fall into one or another.
00:03:09.420 | So, for example, you might have a goal of finishing high school or finishing college.
00:03:15.220 | Generally speaking, you don't need money in order to finish high school or really even
00:03:20.140 | college.
00:03:21.140 | Generally, what you need is time, and life really works well if you finish high school
00:03:27.140 | on the normal schedule.
00:03:28.900 | Obviously, if you didn't finish high school on the normal schedule and you find yourself
00:03:32.020 | at 50 years old and you're in need of a high school diploma, you can go and get that, and
00:03:35.660 | you can go back to college at any point in time.
00:03:38.060 | But there's real value in doing these things in the normal expected time period.
00:03:45.300 | There are other things that would play into this.
00:03:48.700 | Recently I had a consultation with an orthodontist.
00:03:50.860 | I wanted to talk about straightening my teeth.
00:03:53.020 | I had braces when I was young, but foolishly I didn't wear my retainer, and now my teeth
00:03:57.700 | have gotten all crowded and crooked, and so I was looking into getting braces.
00:04:02.300 | And I was just thinking about how silly it is that here I am at my age having to go back
00:04:08.780 | and think about getting braces to straighten out teeth that should have been kept straight.
00:04:13.660 | The best time to get braces is, if needed, when you're young, and then keep your teeth
00:04:18.020 | in good shape.
00:04:19.980 | And it's not so much a money goal, it would have been better to get that done at a certain
00:04:23.580 | time and keep them at that point.
00:04:26.300 | Now financial goals often are related to things like consumption items.
00:04:31.780 | I want to have a certain kind of car, or I want to buy a motorcycle, or I want to buy
00:04:35.100 | a horse, and I'm going to do it as soon as I'm able to save the money, or I want to retire.
00:04:39.780 | Even big goals.
00:04:41.340 | Children, in my opinion, should always be considered primarily as a time-bound goal.
00:04:48.180 | Because there are two things that are true about having children.
00:04:51.220 | One, there's a time in life in which it's easier to have children, and everything related
00:04:59.580 | to children is probably better when you do it sooner rather than later.
00:05:04.740 | Not entirely, but better.
00:05:08.100 | Physically, if you desire to have children, that needs to happen at a certain point in
00:05:14.260 | life.
00:05:15.260 | Men and women are not able to have babies at just any point in time biologically.
00:05:20.700 | There's a rather narrow window of time, something on the order of 15 to 20 years, in which women
00:05:26.940 | are able to conceive and birth healthy babies.
00:05:30.960 | With modern reproductive technologies and modern medical care, we have been able to
00:05:35.480 | extend that window.
00:05:36.980 | But when you extend that window, you get very unreliable results, and you get significant
00:05:43.460 | amounts of expense, often, that are associated with it.
00:05:47.000 | And even if you can technically birth a baby outside of that normal 10-year to 15-year
00:05:53.500 | window when it's relatively easy and straightforward for most women, you still have to deal with
00:05:58.660 | the challenges of raising a child at an older point in time.
00:06:03.260 | Now, I believe that children should always be welcomed and always be cared for and supported,
00:06:10.260 | regardless of whether they are convenient in our lives or not.
00:06:14.580 | Children are a blessing, that's a universal statement of fact, and they are always to
00:06:18.860 | be welcomed and cared for.
00:06:20.820 | And sometimes, though we might like to think ourselves emperors of our lives and our domains,
00:06:26.420 | in reality, we're not quite so much in charge of the world as we might like to believe that
00:06:31.500 | we are.
00:06:32.980 | And children are precious.
00:06:34.960 | We should care for them, no matter when they come along.
00:06:37.460 | I've worked with a handful of families, for example, who had children young, had their
00:06:42.220 | perfect plan worked out, moved on through their lives, had launched their children,
00:06:47.860 | they were done, ready to retire, and all of a sudden, they found themselves caring for
00:06:51.660 | a grandchildren.
00:06:52.660 | Either the death of a child or a child was unable to take care of his or her own children,
00:06:57.980 | and now they're starting over again, raising children.
00:07:00.780 | And I think that's an admirable and respectable thing that we do.
00:07:04.820 | Sometimes, people find themselves with children much earlier than was planned.
00:07:09.420 | In that situation, you care for the child, take care of the child, do your best, and
00:07:14.320 | learn in the situation.
00:07:16.420 | So we should have that as a foundation.
00:07:19.220 | But backing away from any kind of extreme examples, I think it's important that we acknowledge
00:07:25.420 | that most things with children happen better if you have those children when you're relatively
00:07:31.100 | young.
00:07:32.140 | Probably not too young, I'll let you put the number on that, but when you're relatively
00:07:36.980 | young, it's easier.
00:07:38.780 | Physically speaking, again, the act of conception and the act of childbirth are much easier
00:07:44.340 | for women who are younger.
00:07:46.620 | It's easier, you have much statistically higher chances of having a healthy baby, of having
00:07:52.380 | smooth pregnancies, faster and easier recovery, everything is easier.
00:07:56.620 | If you're not involved or have never had babies, one of the things that was most surprising
00:08:00.020 | to my wife and I is if you are 35 years old and you are a woman, then you have now been
00:08:07.180 | graduated into a... and you're pregnant.
00:08:10.980 | You've now been graduated into something called geriatric pregnancy.
00:08:15.420 | That's the politically incorrect term, they're trying to change it now to advanced maternal
00:08:18.700 | age.
00:08:19.700 | I don't know that one is better than another.
00:08:20.700 | But that word geriatric is just so funny that geriatric pregnancy, you're now automatically
00:08:25.860 | considered to be a high-risk pregnancy and you have to take special precautions.
00:08:31.220 | So for a woman who conceives and births a baby at or beyond 35 years of age, you have
00:08:37.260 | to take many more precautions.
00:08:40.240 | It's remarkable that there are more women now birthing children into their 40s and even
00:08:48.100 | beyond successfully.
00:08:50.140 | I read recently something like a statistic that there are four times more mothers who
00:08:54.180 | birth their first child after the age of 40 than ever before, something like that.
00:08:58.460 | And it's pretty remarkable.
00:08:59.740 | However, it can be extremely difficult.
00:09:02.900 | And one of the things that often happens to people, at least in my experience, is they
00:09:08.300 | assume, well, when we go to the point of having children, it's all going to be simple.
00:09:13.020 | The normal flow of life, at least among my peers, tends to be something like this.
00:09:18.460 | We should have children after we have finished all of our schooling.
00:09:23.180 | And by schooling, generally most people mean something between 16 and 20 years of schooling.
00:09:28.780 | So we need to have children after we've finished all of our schooling, after we've established
00:09:33.780 | ourselves in our career, and usually what they mean by that is something between five
00:09:38.500 | to 15 years of work, often 10, and we want to get married, and then we'll go ahead and
00:09:44.300 | have babies.
00:09:45.660 | And so it's very normal in my circles that a husband and wife would be about 30, 35,
00:09:52.420 | they start thinking about, okay, we're going to go ahead and have a baby because we did
00:09:55.500 | school until 22, 24, 26.
00:09:58.580 | Then we had five to 10 years of establishment in our careers to make lots of money, and
00:10:02.300 | now we were ready to have a baby.
00:10:04.380 | Well, often couples find that it's not quite so easy to conceive and have a baby as they
00:10:09.660 | thought.
00:10:11.180 | And if it is possible to do it once, in many cases it's not possible to do it twice or
00:10:16.940 | it's not possible to do it thrice.
00:10:19.340 | And so it's just very challenging for couples because what they thought was going to be
00:10:23.540 | smooth and easy often is not.
00:10:26.060 | And there's a lot of heartache involved with multiple miscarriages, multiple challenges.
00:10:31.420 | It can be quite difficult.
00:10:32.900 | So there's no guarantees in life, but just be aware and do a deep study of those.
00:10:37.320 | Because I think in our modern age, because we're so accustomed to controlling everything
00:10:41.260 | medically perfectly, people often have a naive understanding of how easy it's going to be
00:10:46.780 | to have babies when they're ready for them.
00:10:49.620 | And I'm not even discussing the topic of freezing eggs and in vitro fertilization, all the modern
00:10:54.900 | reproductive technologies, all of them are much more fraught with difficulty, danger,
00:11:00.660 | and poor results than most people would like to hear about.
00:11:06.600 | The second thing though, with regard to children, is that most things about raising children
00:11:13.260 | are easier when you are young.
00:11:16.080 | Younger people tend to have more physical energy than older parents do.
00:11:20.680 | And so it can be much easier for a mom and a dad who are 22 years old to deal with one
00:11:26.040 | or two or three little babies than it is for a mom or dad who are 42 years old to deal
00:11:30.940 | with one or two or three little babies.
00:11:33.420 | In addition, because of youthful energy, youthful vigor, a lot of just the physical fun of playing
00:11:39.760 | with children and doing things with them is much easier.
00:11:44.260 | And younger parents tend to have an easier time dealing with the physical demands of
00:11:49.180 | child raising more so than older parents do.
00:11:53.300 | In addition, if you have babies when you're younger, you're often more flexible in your
00:11:56.540 | thinking and more flexible in your lifestyle.
00:12:00.180 | Certainly there are bad parents of every age and there are good parents of every age.
00:12:03.740 | But it can be difficult for older parents to adjust their lifestyle to working with
00:12:07.700 | children.
00:12:08.700 | However, younger parents, in the same way that people who get married when they're younger,
00:12:12.260 | they're often more flexible, can fit in with another person, younger parents can often
00:12:16.140 | fit them into their lifestyle in a better way.
00:12:18.620 | And I think being a young parent of older children is awesome.
00:12:21.500 | I have a friend of mine who had four children in his early 20s, he and his wife.
00:12:28.780 | And he's in his early 40s, about 42 years old, his youngest is 15 years old, if I have
00:12:34.180 | the math right, and four children, all older, and here he is in the time in life in which
00:12:39.540 | some people are just starting to have babies, and his work is done behind him.
00:12:43.300 | And so when you have babies, there is a very intense period of dealing with young babies
00:12:48.180 | where your lifestyle and everything is disrupted, but in time you can kind of get that behind
00:12:52.620 | you and it's kind of nice to have it behind you and have the benefits of being with children.
00:12:57.220 | In addition, if you have children when you're younger, you get to simply enjoy them for
00:13:01.260 | a longer period of time.
00:13:03.340 | If you think about the simple number of years that you have with your children, who doesn't
00:13:09.220 | want to have more time with them?
00:13:11.300 | If you're the kind of person who wants to have children in the first place, one of the
00:13:14.780 | reasons you're doing that is probably to have time with them.
00:13:19.140 | I don't.
00:13:20.140 | I don't know, maybe women do, but at least for me as a man, I don't look forward to babies
00:13:25.220 | and toddlers.
00:13:26.220 | I look forward to children and mature adults.
00:13:30.100 | That's where I really enjoy it.
00:13:31.740 | I do it because you've got to get through the baby and toddler stage, and I'm grateful
00:13:35.580 | that God has given my wife this weird gene that she looks at her babies and she melts.
00:13:42.220 | But on the whole though, I look forward to time with mature children.
00:13:47.620 | That's what's super exciting.
00:13:50.180 | When you have your children when you're younger, you have more time with them, more time then
00:13:55.180 | with your grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and beyond.
00:13:59.860 | One thing that's fascinating to me is how our expectations of what is normal with regard
00:14:04.980 | to having children have been dramatically skewed by our society.
00:14:12.780 | If you are one of my younger listeners, I'm imagining you may be 20 years old.
00:14:17.580 | One of the things that I have observed is that you probably receive very little encouragement
00:14:22.420 | to have children.
00:14:24.060 | I didn't realize this myself until about the specific age doesn't matter.
00:14:35.180 | But my wife and I have been married for I think five or six years.
00:14:38.100 | We had three children, and we had children in our late 20s.
00:14:46.580 | We had three children, and I remember we were in Salt Lake City, Utah, and we were visiting
00:14:50.760 | the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, Utah.
00:14:54.980 | All of a sudden, here came a young couple down the street towards us.
00:15:00.260 | It was a beautiful young couple, and they were pushing a baby stroller with a beautiful
00:15:03.260 | baby in it.
00:15:04.260 | I looked at the couple, and due to my advanced age, they just looked like kids to me, absolute
00:15:09.980 | kids.
00:15:10.980 | I looked at them, and I stared, and I thought, "I don't ever see this.
00:15:17.340 | I don't ever see..."
00:15:18.340 | By the way, they weren't kids.
00:15:20.460 | They were probably 20 years old, 21 years old.
00:15:23.000 | They just looked young to me, and I realized I never see 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 22-year-olds
00:15:31.500 | with children ever in our society.
00:15:35.260 | I see 30-year-olds with children because that's what is societally normal in the culture that
00:15:40.180 | I'm from.
00:15:42.400 | It shocked me on the one hand, but it also...
00:15:47.200 | I realized the death and destruction of my own culture.
00:15:52.080 | It should be normal to see healthy, happy, strong 20-year-old married couples with children.
00:15:59.600 | That should be norm, the norm.
00:16:01.420 | That's a healthy society.
00:16:03.200 | The fact that we don't see that as much as we do is an indictment on the dysfunction
00:16:07.760 | that we have built.
00:16:09.620 | What are our counterarguments that undoubtedly some fraction of my listeners are immediately
00:16:14.320 | thinking of?
00:16:15.320 | "We don't want to have babies too young."
00:16:16.960 | Sure, but you define to me what is too young and why, and then prove to me that having
00:16:24.080 | children is specifically the problem.
00:16:27.840 | I have interacted, and I know personally friends, family members who feel like they had children
00:16:33.000 | too young.
00:16:34.000 | Usually, though, it wasn't the children that were the problem.
00:16:37.180 | It was that they didn't receive good counsel about forming their marital relationships,
00:16:42.080 | and they weren't helped to develop maturity at a young age.
00:16:48.880 | Those are some of the issues that we talked about previously.
00:16:51.720 | I had a friend of mine who is a midwife, and she delivered her great-granddaughter when
00:16:58.920 | she was close to 60.
00:17:00.200 | I forget which side of 60 she was on.
00:17:02.600 | Her mother passed away when she was—I think she was not yet 65, so between 60 and 65,
00:17:08.000 | and her mother was passing away at 80.
00:17:10.800 | I talked to her about it, and I realized again at the other end of the spectrum how shocking
00:17:15.000 | it is to think about multiple generations.
00:17:17.840 | I did the math, and in her family, my friend, she had had her first baby at 16 years old.
00:17:26.380 | That had been basically part of their family culture, that she had her first baby as a
00:17:33.800 | mid-teenager, her daughter had her first baby as a mid-to-late teenager, and then now her
00:17:38.360 | granddaughter was having her first baby as a mid-to-late teenager.
00:17:43.320 | On the one hand, I was a little uncomfortable with that.
00:17:46.440 | I still am, because it doesn't feel like that's the right decision in our current
00:17:52.680 | cultural context.
00:17:54.520 | But I really checked myself, and I thought, "Wait a second.
00:17:59.600 | Historically speaking, biologically speaking, this really should be a normal event.
00:18:05.160 | It should be normal, for example, for a child to be born to, say, a 20-year-old mother,
00:18:11.760 | who has a 40-year-old—the child would have a 40-year-old grandmother, a 60-year-old
00:18:16.560 | great-grandmother, and an 80-year-old great-great-grandmother."
00:18:20.160 | I thought, "What an amazing wealth that would be to have so many generations in life."
00:18:27.160 | My wife and I, with our own children, our children were able to get to know their great-grandparents
00:18:35.280 | before they passed away.
00:18:36.880 | But it was only for a short time, and it was only because the great-grandparents were quite
00:18:40.900 | long-lived, beyond centenarians.
00:18:45.240 | It should be more normal to be able to get to know and have a very close relationship
00:18:50.080 | with great-grandparents.
00:18:51.080 | Biologically speaking, it's healthy if children are born to a 20-year-old mother and on beyond.
00:19:01.200 | And wouldn't that be an amazing generational continuity?
00:19:05.080 | That's what some of our forebears, who had children earlier, were able to enjoy.
00:19:09.000 | They were able to enjoy more of an understanding of the generations and the continuity of family.
00:19:14.820 | And while we've created some unique challenges in the way that we structure our society and
00:19:19.800 | the way that we raise children that make that kind of situation very rare, and in many cases
00:19:25.520 | probably inadvisable, that's not to say that it wouldn't be amazing if it could happen.
00:19:32.000 | And I think we should recognize that a child that grows up and barely gets to know his
00:19:37.200 | grandparents is much poorer, culturally speaking, societally speaking, than a child who knows
00:19:44.880 | his 16 great-great-grandparents, because there was a tradition of having children at an earlier
00:19:53.240 | age.
00:19:56.720 | Here's the thesis as we turn to money.
00:19:59.160 | Don't wait until you can afford it to have children.
00:20:03.920 | Wait until you're married and you want to have children, and then have children.
00:20:10.620 | If there's something that you need to wait for, financially speaking, the kind of thing
00:20:15.180 | that you need to wait for should probably be a financial goal that you could accomplish
00:20:20.740 | within a year.
00:20:22.740 | If it's longer term than that, if it's a goal that's going to take you 10 years to do, you're
00:20:26.680 | waiting until you're financially independent to be able to have children, I don't think
00:20:31.180 | that's a wise move.
00:20:32.180 | If you want to have children, again, all of this is predicated upon wanting to have children,
00:20:40.720 | but if that's the case, then finances should probably not be the determining factor.
00:20:46.260 | Is money important?
00:20:47.260 | Absolutely, it is.
00:20:48.260 | I think any fair-minded advisor will acknowledge that your life will cost more if you have
00:20:54.780 | children than if you don't.
00:20:56.120 | How could it not?
00:20:57.920 | Join us today during the Jeep Celebration event, where right now, well-qualified lessees
00:21:01.340 | get an ultra-low mileage lease on the 2024 Jeep Wrangler Sport S4 by E for $329 a month
00:21:06.160 | for 36 months with $3,960 due at signing.
00:21:08.920 | Tax, title, license extra, no security deposit required.
00:21:12.100 | Call 1-888-925-JEEP for details.
00:21:14.400 | Requires dealer contribution and leased through Stellantis Financial.
00:21:17.080 | Extra charge for miles over $15,000.
00:21:19.120 | Includes $7,500 EV cap cost reduction.
00:21:21.280 | Not all customers will qualify.
00:21:22.600 | Residency restrictions apply.
00:21:24.040 | Take retail delivery by 4/1.
00:21:25.560 | Jeep is a registered trademark.
00:21:29.980 | There's recently been some internet memes around the dinks promoting their lifestyle.
00:21:34.960 | Dinks are always going to have the most disposable income.
00:21:38.060 | Dual income, no kids.
00:21:39.720 | You have the efficiency of lifestyle, the savings of two people, sharing expenses, and
00:21:44.840 | no kids.
00:21:45.840 | Two incomes, you're going to have the most disposable income.
00:21:48.680 | There's no question about that.
00:21:50.480 | But if you're the kind of person who wants to have children, then I would encourage you
00:21:54.740 | that money probably isn't as important as you might think.
00:21:57.800 | I'm going to get into the details, but I want to make one more comment because I don't want
00:22:02.600 | to hide my, I want to talk about children, and I'm not hiding my agenda.
00:22:07.640 | I want to encourage fecundity.
00:22:10.000 | I want to encourage you to have children.
00:22:12.400 | I don't want to encourage reckless fecundity.
00:22:16.880 | That's not my goal.
00:22:17.880 | I don't think that just anyone should have babies or even that everyone should have babies.
00:22:22.340 | If you don't want to have children, don't have them.
00:22:25.160 | That's fine.
00:22:26.160 | I'm not here to impose anything on you.
00:22:29.000 | I want to push back against some propaganda that is often pushed on us with children,
00:22:37.240 | that there's a lot of propaganda that says that children are a net harm to your life.
00:22:42.240 | And I would like to vigorously push back against that propaganda because antinatal propaganda
00:22:48.660 | is fundamentally anti-humanist.
00:22:52.080 | You become an enemy of your species.
00:22:54.360 | The most basic function of a society should be to be able to reproduce itself so that
00:23:00.120 | we can see our species flourish.
00:23:03.760 | And there's so much antinatal propaganda in our society that I do want to push back against
00:23:09.080 | that.
00:23:10.080 | But I don't want to push back against an individual.
00:23:12.000 | If you've made a choice and you say that children are not for me, hit stop and move on.
00:23:17.720 | And I will respect you and honor you without reserve.
00:23:21.960 | Not everyone wants to have children.
00:23:23.200 | Not everyone should have children.
00:23:24.240 | Of course many people can't have children.
00:23:26.520 | That's totally fine.
00:23:27.840 | So I'm not encouraging any kind of reckless fecundity.
00:23:31.360 | I also don't think that you should just have as many children as you possibly can.
00:23:34.640 | I'm not an extremist.
00:23:35.640 | I don't think that you should recklessly procreate just because you're capable of it and as a
00:23:40.000 | guy you should go out and get as many women pregnant for as much time as possible.
00:23:43.480 | That is not in any way what I am encouraging.
00:23:48.120 | I'm an advocate of the so-called success sequence.
00:23:50.680 | Graduate from high school, get a job, get married, stay married and have babies within
00:23:54.680 | wedlock.
00:23:56.120 | We don't need any more bastards in our society and we don't need more single dads and moms.
00:24:01.120 | But within that context, within those basic parameters, if you want to have children and
00:24:06.940 | are able to have children, then I'm trying to release you from the idea that you have
00:24:11.240 | to be mega rich to do so.
00:24:13.520 | I think this concept has held a lot of people back to say that I have to get more money
00:24:17.720 | in order to have more children and they often wind up at the end of their lives with plenty
00:24:22.680 | of money and fewer children than they want to have.
00:24:26.800 | In the United States, where I know the statistics best, women regularly self-report not having
00:24:32.120 | as many children as they themselves would like to have and I believe that finances are
00:24:36.360 | a significant contributing factor as to why that is the case.
00:24:40.640 | Having babies is a good thing and it's something that we should acknowledge and that we should
00:24:44.760 | encourage.
00:24:46.000 | Young married people, because of our touchiness on this subject, are generally not encouraged
00:24:52.400 | to have children.
00:24:54.280 | Your experience may differ.
00:24:55.600 | Maybe you have your grandmother who's saying, "When are you going to have babies?"
00:24:58.400 | But at least my experience, I don't pressure people to have children.
00:25:02.160 | If people aren't having children, I generally don't even ask.
00:25:05.640 | If I do ask, the most I say is just, "Do you hope to have children?"
00:25:10.400 | To me, that's the lightest way I can broach a subject that is often just a normal part
00:25:14.500 | of interaction with people that you care about without pressuring somebody.
00:25:18.840 | But I don't know what reasons somebody may have for choosing not to have children.
00:25:22.640 | I don't know what medical reasons someone may have for not having children, so I don't
00:25:26.200 | go and pry in people's lives.
00:25:28.000 | But we need to talk in public about how wonderful babies are.
00:25:31.440 | They're good things.
00:25:33.120 | Babies are likely to bring enormous amounts of joy and satisfaction into your life personally.
00:25:39.060 | Most parents find exceptions, certainly they're out there, but most parents cite their children
00:25:45.740 | and subsequent generations of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, as a primary source
00:25:49.540 | of joy, satisfaction, and accomplishment in their life.
00:25:53.380 | And it has always been this way, and as far as I can see, it always will be.
00:25:59.140 | And the exceptions prove the rule more than they make us think that this should fundamentally
00:26:04.500 | change.
00:26:05.500 | One thing I particularly like about having children is I think they bring a wonderful
00:26:09.260 | phase effect to life.
00:26:10.880 | That's my name for it.
00:26:12.300 | But the idea being that a life that only has one or two chapters—a book that only has
00:26:19.020 | one or two chapters is kind of a boring book.
00:26:23.100 | A book that has many chapters and each chapter has a different theme is much more interesting.
00:26:28.100 | I've counseled a lot of—I've done financial planning for a lot of wealthy people who had
00:26:33.960 | lots of money, early retirees, and one of the things I've noticed is that they have
00:26:40.980 | to work very hard to imagine different phases of life.
00:26:46.460 | And one of the things that happens is because aging is a continual, never-ending process,
00:26:52.700 | it's hard to look forward to aging if you don't have some counter—not counterfactual,
00:26:59.280 | but like countervailing goal to appreciate.
00:27:03.720 | If you—let's say that you're dual income, no kids, and let's say that you hit the magic
00:27:08.760 | goal of being 30 years old and you are at the top of your game, you're financially independent,
00:27:14.160 | you've made a ton of money, and now you're retired and you're 30 years old and you have
00:27:17.340 | all the money in the world to do anything that you want.
00:27:21.320 | Looking forward over your life, you've got, say, let's call it 50 to 70 years of life
00:27:27.720 | to fill.
00:27:28.720 | Now, you've got all the money in the world, you undoubtedly have lots of friends and you're
00:27:33.080 | enjoying things and you've got adventures, but how do you fill 50 to 70 years with pure
00:27:39.200 | adventures?
00:27:40.200 | Let's say you're passionate about sailing, are you going to be passionate about sailing
00:27:44.760 | for 50 years or are you going to be passionate about sailing for 10 years or 5 years?
00:27:51.320 | Maybe you have a different personality than I do, but I find that 5 to 10 years is enough
00:27:56.680 | for most things in my life.
00:27:58.600 | And so I work really hard to try to make each decade different of my life, and I think this
00:28:04.200 | is a good approach to goal planning that you should set out for your life's book, your
00:28:10.760 | memoirs, set out for yourself 50 or 100 chapters and ask yourself, "What's going to be different
00:28:16.200 | about chapter 27 than 57?"
00:28:18.880 | Well, children have this wonderful kind of normal natural effect of solving two problems.
00:28:25.160 | One, they bring in a phased effect to life where let's assume that you have three children
00:28:31.440 | between the ages of 22 and 28.
00:28:34.040 | Well, now at 38, you've got 10-year-olds and your adventures with 10-year-olds are much
00:28:38.480 | different with your youngest is 10 and you've got teens.
00:28:40.980 | Your adventures in that phase of life are very different than when you had a bunch of
00:28:44.480 | small children and you went to the park and went to the beach with them and now you're
00:28:47.800 | traveling the world with them.
00:28:49.560 | And then you're enjoying watching them come into their own and develop personalized interests
00:28:53.600 | and hobbies and you have the joy and the satisfaction of high school graduation and going to college
00:28:58.440 | and then graduating and attending their weddings.
00:29:01.280 | And then as you age, you start to naturally gain more pleasure in relationships as your
00:29:06.880 | physical capacity may be declining.
00:29:09.280 | And so you look forward to being 90 years old and bouncing your great-grandchildren
00:29:13.440 | on your knee.
00:29:14.440 | You look forward to these aspects of life.
00:29:18.360 | And as you perhaps physically slow down, now you have an opportunity to invest into your
00:29:23.840 | children.
00:29:24.840 | You can care for your grandchildren so that their parents are more freed up.
00:29:29.080 | You can sow into them and share the wisdom of your experience.
00:29:33.320 | It seems to me that if you don't have children, you miss out on these natural phases of life
00:29:38.480 | and it's much more challenging to understand how to fill all of the decades of your life
00:29:45.240 | and you have to work more diligently at it.
00:29:47.880 | It's not impossible, nor am I saying that's reason enough to have children.
00:29:52.000 | But it's an observation that I have of helping people plan that it can be challenging if
00:29:56.400 | you don't have children.
00:29:57.400 | And then just the effect of aging.
00:29:59.160 | If you reach 80 years old and you've done nothing but adventure for 50 years and you
00:30:04.640 | know that looking forward your adventures are going to be less, what can you do?
00:30:09.220 | It's challenging.
00:30:10.220 | Now, you can still, I would say, harvest this even if you're not doing it with your own
00:30:15.120 | blood relations.
00:30:17.720 | You may be 80 years old, pour into your nieces, your nephews, adopt children in some kind
00:30:23.840 | of big brothers, big sisters program or just work with the neighbor children.
00:30:28.280 | I have throughout my life benefited enormously from single men and single women who invested
00:30:34.660 | into me in a powerful and consistent way even though they weren't blood relations.
00:30:39.580 | And so consider bringing those things into your life.
00:30:43.080 | On the whole, I've tried to ring the warning bell on this for probably three or four years
00:30:47.880 | now.
00:30:48.880 | But we should acknowledge that babies are good for society and the world.
00:30:54.720 | We need more babies in the world today.
00:30:59.380 | We are heading today toward a demographic collapse in most of the societies in which
00:31:05.220 | we live.
00:31:06.220 | In some, it's worse.
00:31:07.220 | In some, it's better.
00:31:08.500 | But it's going to catch a lot of people by surprise.
00:31:10.960 | And there are a couple of reasons for that.
00:31:13.240 | Right now, global populations are rising and they will continue to rise for the next few
00:31:19.720 | decades.
00:31:21.720 | So the total number of people in the world I think is projected to reach something like
00:31:24.720 | eight and a half billion people before it starts to decline.
00:31:27.720 | The reason for the rising population is not because we're having more babies.
00:31:33.960 | On the whole, the world is already—am I getting this right?
00:31:39.240 | Jack checked me on this, but on the whole, the world is already below replacement rate.
00:31:43.560 | I'm not sure if I can say that accurately on a global standard.
00:31:46.480 | I would need to check the data on that.
00:31:48.240 | But most of our societies are below replacement rate and far below replacement rate.
00:31:52.880 | And that's spreading all around the world.
00:31:54.960 | There seems to be an inevitable process that as we get richer, we have fewer and fewer
00:31:58.840 | children.
00:31:59.840 | As we industrialize and as we move to cities, we have fewer and fewer children.
00:32:03.320 | And nobody as yet has figured out how to crack the code and stem the losses on a societal
00:32:09.360 | basis with a few ideological and religious exceptions.
00:32:16.040 | But this is going to surprise a lot of people because we're living in increasingly older,
00:32:21.200 | more geriatric societies.
00:32:23.120 | And this takes all of the youth and vibrance of a society and destroys it.
00:32:27.560 | You have a bunch of old people fighting with each other and not enough young people to
00:32:30.400 | support them.
00:32:31.480 | By the way, you can see this collapse with your own eyes if you look around you.
00:32:36.520 | Let's briefly talk about demographic trends.
00:32:40.460 | In order for a population to have a stable size, every single woman in that population
00:32:49.740 | needs to have two children.
00:32:52.360 | Technically, they often say 2.1 children, but let's just keep it simple, two children.
00:32:58.280 | So in order for your population where you live to be stable, every single woman you
00:33:05.400 | know has to have two children.
00:33:09.120 | Now, if you are like me, you know a lot of women who don't have two children.
00:33:14.840 | Again, fine.
00:33:16.600 | For every woman you know that has one child and not two, you must then know a different
00:33:23.280 | woman who has three children in order to maintain stability of population.
00:33:29.160 | For every woman you know who has zero children, you must also know another woman who has four
00:33:36.360 | children over the fullness of her life.
00:33:40.760 | So think about your personal sphere of social contact.
00:33:46.440 | Think about your family, your neighbors, your friends, your company, your church, your social
00:33:51.040 | clubs, your country.
00:33:53.200 | Think about that.
00:33:54.200 | And ask yourself, on the whole, if I make a list of all the women that I know, do we
00:34:00.240 | have on the whole an average of two children per woman?
00:34:09.440 | The answer is almost certainly no.
00:34:13.720 | And there you see demographic decline right in front of you.
00:34:16.400 | Now, here is the more shocking thing about demographic decline.
00:34:20.540 | To use simplified numbers, let's assume that you have a general population of 100,000 people.
00:34:28.060 | And let's assume on the average that the population that you have of 100,000 people, that on average,
00:34:37.120 | instead of having two children per woman and maintaining a stable population size, you
00:34:41.720 | have a generation that has one child per woman within that generation.
00:34:49.360 | In the second generation, your population size would drop from 100,000 to 50,000.
00:34:58.640 | Just one generation of an average of one child per woman continued down through it would
00:35:05.140 | guarantee the having of your population.
00:35:09.320 | Now let's assume that you wanted to grow back from that 50,000 population size back up to
00:35:14.960 | 100,000.
00:35:16.760 | How many children would each woman in that population have to have in order for a population
00:35:21.880 | to grow from 50,000 to 100,000 people?
00:35:26.980 | The answer is four, four children per woman.
00:35:32.080 | And so what is happening around the world is that there are many countries that have
00:35:35.280 | gone from a total fertility rate of certainly way below 2.1.
00:35:41.160 | Average fertility rate in the United States I think is something like 1.6, 1.7.
00:35:46.000 | You can check all these numbers out, I'm just speaking off the top of my head here, but
00:35:49.080 | this is directionally right.
00:35:50.080 | Some of the lowest fertility rates in the world are in Japan, South Korea is especially
00:35:55.240 | bad right now.
00:35:56.520 | The average fertility, the total fertility rate in South Korea is something like 0.71
00:36:00.720 | or 0.7 children per woman as far as the total fertility rate.
00:36:07.140 | That basically over the fullness of time leads to a collapse in a society's numbers fairly
00:36:13.160 | quickly because once you miss a generation of children, you don't even have enough children
00:36:19.600 | to repopulate the generation, let alone maintain it.
00:36:23.640 | And so what is happening is we're actually far into the demographic crisis and it's unsolvable
00:36:30.560 | in many countries of the world.
00:36:32.360 | Why?
00:36:33.360 | Well, because we still have lots of older generations, so we still have lots of people,
00:36:37.120 | but what we don't have enough of is we don't have enough 20-year-olds, 30-year-old women
00:36:43.200 | who are able to have children or even who want to have children.
00:36:47.080 | We don't physically have enough.
00:36:48.960 | Let's say that you could snap your fingers and you could convince all Italian women that
00:36:53.140 | for whatever reason they wanted to have lots of babies, and you could convince all South
00:36:57.920 | Korean women and all Japanese women and all Russian women that for whatever reason they
00:37:02.040 | want to have lots of babies, and it's a voluntary thing, I'm not into Chinese women, I'm not
00:37:06.440 | into forcing anybody to do anything, but let's assume that you could just magically do that.
00:37:10.920 | These populations can't even replace themselves at this point in time because there's not
00:37:15.680 | enough women of childbearing age and the younger cohorts are even smaller.
00:37:20.960 | That's what's happening, but not many people are paying attention to it.
00:37:24.320 | So mark my words, what I tell people privately, over the next two or three decades, the most
00:37:30.680 | talked about crisis that we're going to be discussing is going to be population collapse.
00:37:35.960 | Now is it going to be the end of the world as we know it?
00:37:39.080 | I hope not.
00:37:40.080 | I don't think so.
00:37:41.080 | I think we'll figure out some new solutions to it, but it doesn't lead to a very exciting
00:37:46.320 | future.
00:37:47.480 | Having an old gray society is not good for innovation.
00:37:50.840 | It's not good for any sense of excitement.
00:37:53.000 | You just have a population of people that just want to bicker with each other constantly.
00:37:56.440 | There's not enough resources to go around and there's no sense of expansion.
00:38:00.520 | Children are the ultimate resource and all of the problems that we face and that we have
00:38:06.920 | are going to be solved by children.
00:38:09.340 | That's why societies that are rich in children, although they come with a whole other set
00:38:13.160 | of problems, they have a very different experience.
00:38:17.600 | I have five young children.
00:38:19.440 | My house is loud.
00:38:21.840 | It's chaotic.
00:38:22.980 | That's been the biggest surprise to me, having children, is how loud it is.
00:38:25.920 | I work hard at it every day, quiet down.
00:38:28.840 | It's a constant challenge.
00:38:30.440 | But it is not boring.
00:38:32.080 | It is filled with enthusiasm.
00:38:33.760 | It is filled with a sense of the future.
00:38:35.920 | My house is fun.
00:38:37.360 | It's exciting.
00:38:39.040 | It's a decent metaphor for societies.
00:38:43.200 | Let's talk now in detail about the money.
00:38:48.320 | The money matters and we need to properly consider how it matters.
00:38:54.000 | Here's the general rule of money and children.
00:38:59.480 | Children will cost you as much money as you have.
00:39:03.200 | The general rule of children is they will always cost you as much money as you have.
00:39:08.120 | If you have a little bit of money, you'll spend out that and your children will probably
00:39:11.940 | turn out fine.
00:39:13.600 | If you have a lot of money, then you'll spend a lot of money and guess what?
00:39:16.720 | Your children will probably turn out fine.
00:39:19.800 | As best I can find, the amount of money that you spend on your child does not have any
00:39:23.780 | kind of measurably direct correlation to long-term success in life.
00:39:29.720 | I think it probably helps.
00:39:31.920 | I spend quite a lot of money on my children, more than many people, but on the whole, it
00:39:36.800 | just seems like it's one factor among so many that it's not particularly measurable.
00:39:44.040 | One of the great challenges in some cultures as to why the society has so few children
00:39:52.020 | is that the social expectations around how much money you have to spend on children are
00:39:58.820 | so high.
00:39:59.820 | But I want to point out that these are all social expectations.
00:40:02.540 | These are rules that if you have the courage and the determination and the vision, you
00:40:06.020 | could just break them.
00:40:07.020 | They're just social norms and you probably need to break some of them.
00:40:12.360 | Most of us, let's say you don't have a lot of money, most of us live in societies that
00:40:17.060 | have developed systems for identifying talent and bringing it up and nourishing it, regardless
00:40:24.100 | of the financial capacity of a family.
00:40:28.060 | In the United States, which is the country I know best, if you do well in school, you
00:40:31.980 | do well on your exams, you study, you're going to be found.
00:40:36.940 | You're found by your PSAT scores and your SAT scores and your National Merit Scholar
00:40:42.900 | stuff.
00:40:43.900 | You're found and you're going to be coached and you're going to be provided for and you're
00:40:48.180 | going to be given an all expenses paid shot at college and ultimately that's going to
00:40:53.300 | be your ticket to high society.
00:40:56.540 | You can break into the higher social class purely based upon your basic academic ability
00:41:01.940 | or other natural talents that you have been developing.
00:41:06.240 | In addition though, even if we're not talking about purely academics, most of us live in
00:41:11.260 | societies in which most of the things that you need for a child, if you don't have a
00:41:15.940 | lot of money yourself and aren't sure if you can afford it, most of the things that you
00:41:20.660 | need for your child is provided with taxpayer money.
00:41:23.700 | There's food and food support that helps you buy groceries.
00:41:26.980 | There's housing money that's given to you.
00:41:29.180 | Some countries have direct cash payments that are given to you if you live there, Kindergarten,
00:41:35.340 | Germany and other variations in many societies.
00:41:39.060 | If you need help with education, there's free government schools that you can send your
00:41:43.540 | children to and they can get a great education.
00:41:46.380 | There's libraries available to you that have all of the resources of the world.
00:41:50.780 | They have free computers.
00:41:51.860 | The libraries have lending libraries of video cameras and video editing suites and podcast
00:41:56.120 | recording suites and that's to say nothing of even just the general equity in society
00:42:01.140 | filled with people who want to support children.
00:42:03.700 | Most wealthy people who want to make an impact on the world, they start a scholarship fund
00:42:07.460 | or start some kind of support.
00:42:09.500 | Most physicians that I work with spend and donate and invest days of their very valuable
00:42:17.220 | work to help the poor and indigent.
00:42:19.500 | We live in societies in which we have lots of support.
00:42:22.220 | You're not on your own.
00:42:23.940 | So recognize that as a foundational thing, that your children are going to cost you what
00:42:27.460 | you have.
00:42:28.460 | If you have a lot, you'll spend all that and if you have a little, you'll spend what you
00:42:31.300 | have.
00:42:32.300 | So on the whole, your children are probably going to turn out fine.
00:42:36.140 | If you're present with them and you love them and you don't abuse them and you spend time
00:42:41.340 | with them and you encourage them, it'll all work out in the long run.
00:42:45.900 | Now, let's say you're waiting to have children until you can afford it.
00:42:49.940 | What is the specific monetary goal that you're waiting for?
00:42:53.660 | Here are some examples.
00:42:55.220 | You might be waiting until you can get a job so that you have income.
00:43:02.300 | That seems wise to me.
00:43:04.540 | I think that's a really good idea.
00:43:05.860 | If you are unemployed and you're not currently expecting a baby, then I think that you should
00:43:12.340 | go and get a job and have a source of income.
00:43:15.400 | Being unemployed and having responsibility for other human beings isn't fun.
00:43:20.020 | Now, the cool thing about it, remember what I said earlier, give it a year, you can probably
00:43:24.620 | find a job fairly quickly.
00:43:27.460 | Even if today you found out that your wife or your girlfriend or yourself that you're
00:43:32.620 | expecting a baby, then usually you have six months, eight months to prepare for that.
00:43:40.100 | Usually that's enough time to get a job and have a source of income.
00:43:44.060 | But on the whole, if you're planning to have children, I would encourage you get a job
00:43:48.140 | before you have children.
00:43:49.540 | Have a source of income.
00:43:51.280 | Being unemployed and having responsibility for other humans isn't fun.
00:43:54.600 | Now, maybe you have a goal such as making more money at your job.
00:43:58.820 | Is that an appropriate reason to wait to have children?
00:44:02.240 | I'd say maybe, but you should be really careful here.
00:44:06.780 | Again, recognize that most of us live in a society where there's some social support,
00:44:14.280 | some form of social safety network.
00:44:18.240 | That social safety network, it won't provide you with everything.
00:44:22.280 | You can't just be a professional birther or a professional parent in any society.
00:44:28.380 | But there's enough there to make up the difference in most societies.
00:44:32.800 | So if you have some source of income, and that source of income is paired with government
00:44:37.280 | benefits and welfare programs and cash payments or whatever it happens to be in a society
00:44:41.440 | that you live in, then that's probably enough for you to make it.
00:44:45.840 | Ironically though, in many societies, as your income increases, you may start to lose some
00:44:52.000 | of those benefits.
00:44:54.040 | And so in some cases, making more money, just a little bit more money, can actually cost
00:44:58.720 | you more.
00:44:59.720 | I've worked with people who were teachers in this situation.
00:45:03.880 | And if you're a teacher, at least in the United States where I have the most experience, you
00:45:07.640 | often make a very modest income.
00:45:09.840 | But it's a steady income, but it's often a modest income.
00:45:13.760 | And then if you have babies, then you probably qualify for government benefits.
00:45:18.200 | And those things can make a difference.
00:45:20.040 | But if you go and you make a little bit more money than a standard, say, government school
00:45:24.320 | teacher, you probably will lose the benefits, and now you actually have no more net income.
00:45:29.660 | So you need to make not just a little bit more money, you need to make a big jump in
00:45:34.600 | money.
00:45:35.600 | And so if your goal is to make more money at your job, you need to start by saying,
00:45:41.160 | "How much more money do I need?
00:45:44.320 | And what do I need it for?"
00:45:45.320 | And as we talk about expenses, the nice thing about babies is they're not so expensive in
00:45:50.720 | the beginning.
00:45:51.800 | Their expenses tend to rise, and then they tend to taper off.
00:45:55.120 | So making more money is a good idea, and you should be careful of just making a little
00:46:00.520 | bit more money if you're losing out on some kind of social support network that is part
00:46:05.140 | of the government system where you live.
00:46:08.600 | But also, you probably should be careful about waiting for that reason alone.
00:46:15.200 | Are you trying to make more money to be able to afford the costs of birth, the costs of
00:46:19.880 | having a baby?
00:46:21.120 | And here I mean to the physical childbirth, prenatal care, childbirth, and postpartum
00:46:27.280 | care.
00:46:28.280 | Well, this is valid.
00:46:30.120 | And if you don't have the money, then you probably should work really hard and save
00:46:34.520 | the money for this.
00:46:36.100 | In my experience, babies cost about $5,000 each in terms of the general costs.
00:46:42.640 | That number will vary based upon various countries.
00:46:46.080 | Right now, because of the demographic trends that I mentioned earlier, there's a big move
00:46:52.880 | in many countries to support mothers in the costs of birthing babies as well as to support
00:46:58.800 | parents in the costs of raising children.
00:47:03.100 | We don't know if any of these programs are actually going to have an impact, but as we
00:47:07.680 | are wont to do in many problems, if we have a problem, let's throw some money at it and
00:47:12.560 | see what happens.
00:47:13.560 | And since governments have lots of taxpayer money to throw around, that's what's happening.
00:47:17.040 | And so your costs of having a baby may be substantially less than $5,000, but that's
00:47:22.100 | been my experience is that babies often cost about $5,000.
00:47:26.840 | A natural birth with a midwife seems to me that rates are about $5,000.
00:47:31.280 | That includes, of course, prenatal care and birthing and postpartum care as well.
00:47:39.120 | It could be less, it could be more.
00:47:40.600 | Most midwives that I've spoken to, they really care about making sure that mothers receive
00:47:46.000 | proper medical care.
00:47:47.880 | And if you don't have the money, I've known a lot of midwives that will just simply help
00:47:55.280 | you and serve you and provide the care because they want you to be healthy.
00:47:59.160 | Midwives have a real passion for taking care of mothers and we should respect them for
00:48:04.320 | that.
00:48:05.320 | So if you have the money, pay them.
00:48:06.480 | But if you don't have the money, you can often receive that kind of care.
00:48:09.600 | If you're going to have a hospital birth and working with an obstetrician, gynecologist,
00:48:13.680 | I think the cost is often similar barring complications.
00:48:18.640 | And you should go and investigate that, but similar barring complications.
00:48:24.120 | In many cases, most people will have health insurance of some kind.
00:48:27.720 | At least for me, health insurance, I've always had something like a $5,000 deductible.
00:48:32.360 | And so basically, baby costs me $5,000 with health insurance and $5,000 without health
00:48:37.520 | insurance and it's just the cost of a baby.
00:48:40.520 | The good thing is that if you have health insurance, that if there are complications
00:48:43.600 | or extra expenses, then you're protected.
00:48:46.880 | And so if there's a C-section, if there's a stay in something like the neonatal intensive
00:48:51.640 | care unit, then you're covered with protection for those costs.
00:48:55.680 | And so you still have your deductible and other expenses, but it's probably not a catastrophic
00:49:00.960 | expense.
00:49:01.960 | In addition, if you don't have health insurance, but you don't have a lot of money, which again,
00:49:06.000 | I'm trying to help you afford babies, if you don't have a lot of money, then there's often
00:49:11.000 | some kind of government option for health insurance.
00:49:14.400 | Most welfare programs have some form of pregnant mother and baby benefits.
00:49:22.480 | So even if there's not benefits for your entire family, if you find yourself as an expecting
00:49:27.000 | mother and you need additional help, there's almost certainly some kind of government benefits
00:49:33.160 | to help pay for the cost of healthcare.
00:49:36.600 | On the other hand, I would say you don't need to have health insurance to have a baby.
00:49:40.440 | One of the things that bugs me, and I have to give my disclaimers, I hate giving disclaimers,
00:49:44.080 | I'm done with them, but I feel like I need to, I'm not saying don't have health insurance.
00:49:48.800 | I'm not saying to be stupid.
00:49:50.560 | But what angers me enormously in our modern era is that responsible people have adapted
00:49:57.960 | or adopted, excuse me, have adopted for themselves a standard of responsibility that is historically
00:50:04.400 | unlike anything that has ever happened in human history.
00:50:08.600 | Throughout human history, in every age, if you got sick, you got sick and you paid a
00:50:16.120 | doctor to provide you with care.
00:50:19.600 | Now we live in a system in which we've developed elaborate systems of mutual insurance and
00:50:24.800 | all kinds of stuff, and so people feel like they're morally wrong if they don't have these
00:50:30.960 | kinds of programs.
00:50:32.720 | Is it wise for you to have insurance?
00:50:35.520 | 100%, absolutely.
00:50:37.600 | If you can afford it, should you have health insurance?
00:50:40.320 | 100%, absolutely.
00:50:42.640 | But the fact that the medical marketplace is as screwed up as it is, is not your fault.
00:50:48.280 | It's the fault of the health insurance system.
00:50:51.440 | And at the end of the day, you're not fundamentally morally irresponsible if you don't have health
00:50:56.800 | insurance.
00:50:58.240 | So there are people out there who spend their lives caught in this kind of moral crisis.
00:51:02.880 | If I have to be a responsible human being, and a responsible human being means I have
00:51:05.880 | to have health insurance and car insurance and all this stuff, hear me clearly, you should
00:51:09.600 | have those things if you can afford it.
00:51:11.700 | But if you don't have them or you can't afford it, you're not morally wrong for not having
00:51:16.200 | those things.
00:51:17.400 | It may be unwise, it may not be ideal, and you want to change it when you're able to,
00:51:21.320 | but you're not morally wrong.
00:51:23.360 | So if you don't have health insurance and you have a baby, guess what?
00:51:27.200 | Number one, we talked about government programs, let's say you don't qualify for those.
00:51:31.400 | If you don't have health insurance, you'll go work out a plan with your doctor or your
00:51:35.520 | midwife or the hospital, and you'll just pay the bills.
00:51:38.760 | And when they send you an enormous inflated bill of X bazillion thousands of dollars that
00:51:42.960 | you owe, you'll say to them, "I don't have the money.
00:51:45.000 | I can't pay that," and you'll negotiate a payment that you can't afford.
00:51:48.880 | Because after all, I don't have health insurance and you're charging me ridiculous absurd inflated
00:51:52.640 | health rates for this.
00:51:56.380 | So you'll work out a plan.
00:51:57.920 | If you don't have insurance and they give you an enormous bill, they're going to provide
00:52:02.560 | the care for you, and you're going to pay them what you can afford to pay them, and
00:52:06.120 | the rest of it goes away.
00:52:07.960 | Remember that most hospitals in the United States began their life not as a commercial
00:52:13.840 | enterprise, as a money-making thing, but as a form of ministry, normally a Christian ministry.
00:52:21.960 | We all want to help people who are sick, and that's the basic function of a hospital.
00:52:26.720 | Now, it's proper and right that if you receive care and you receive services, that you should
00:52:32.840 | pay for those things.
00:52:34.080 | That's your proper responsibility, if you can afford it.
00:52:36.380 | If you don't have money, then we still want to care for you, and you should take the care
00:52:41.920 | and then pay what you're able to.
00:52:43.800 | So if you go into a system where you go into a hospital, and the hospital says, "You owe
00:52:49.480 | us $100,000," and you don't have $100,000, it's morally appropriate for you to pay what
00:52:55.600 | you can afford to pay and not pay a ridiculous bill.
00:52:59.360 | I hope I'm shooting up the middle on this stuff, because there's two extremes that are
00:53:04.040 | unacceptable.
00:53:05.160 | Extreme number one is the extreme where you refuse to pay money that you can afford to
00:53:12.160 | pay for services and care that are rendered unto you.
00:53:15.680 | That is wrong.
00:53:16.680 | It's unethical, and you must not do it.
00:53:18.720 | You don't want that in your character.
00:53:21.000 | You don't want that on your conscience.
00:53:22.320 | You don't want to be the kind of person who is a taker and not a giver.
00:53:25.800 | But on the flip side, a system has been developed that makes it impossible for a normal person
00:53:32.800 | to pay for his bills, and you're not responsible for that either.
00:53:37.160 | So you pay what you can afford to pay, and you work it out, and you negotiate a settlement
00:53:40.720 | or whatever you need to do with the healthcare provider.
00:53:43.280 | And if it takes you a few years to pay off your bills because you didn't have health
00:53:46.040 | insurance, fine.
00:53:47.040 | And if you have to negotiate and they forgive 80% of the bill and you pay 20%, that is perfectly
00:53:52.440 | fine, perfectly just, perfectly ethical.
00:53:55.980 | This is one of the reasons I care so much about doing proper asset planning protection
00:54:01.160 | for people, because there's an enormous group of people who don't get good asset planning
00:54:10.800 | advice.
00:54:11.880 | Rich people get good asset planning advice, and they go out and they put in place elaborate
00:54:15.280 | asset protection schemes.
00:54:16.880 | Poor people don't have any assets to protect, but ordinary, normal people often get terrible
00:54:22.200 | advice.
00:54:23.200 | And a guy will go in and he lost his health insurance because of a screwed up health insurance
00:54:27.440 | marketplace and he winds up with a $50,000 hospital bill, and he'll go rate his 401(k)
00:54:34.720 | and take $50,000 out and pay it.
00:54:36.960 | Don't do that.
00:54:38.040 | Pay the money that you have and keep all of your asset protected assets alone and work
00:54:41.800 | it out with the hospital.
00:54:43.160 | Pay it over time, take a negotiated settlement, declare bankruptcy, do whatever you've got
00:54:47.040 | to do, but protect yourself.
00:54:49.960 | You are not living in a free market.
00:54:51.920 | I used to sell health insurance.
00:54:53.400 | When the Affordable Care Act was passed under President Obama, what we lovingly call Obamacare,
00:54:57.360 | I, at the time, was a health insurance agent.
00:55:00.600 | I have a designation called registered health underwriter.
00:55:03.440 | In theory, I should know something about health insurance.
00:55:05.400 | I've forgotten most of it, but in theory, that's the idea.
00:55:11.000 | I looked at the health insurance marketplace, and I could not come up with any way that
00:55:17.120 | the Affordable Care Act was going to keep a functional market.
00:55:21.040 | I half-heartedly, most-heartedly adopted what sounds like a conspiracy theory, which is
00:55:28.080 | basically to say that the Affordable Care Act was designed to basically destroy health
00:55:33.680 | insurance so that the United States could finally transition to a single-payer government
00:55:38.960 | health care system.
00:55:41.640 | It sure seems like that's about what has happened.
00:55:43.800 | Now, the country hasn't yet transitioned to a single-payer health care system.
00:55:49.180 | It's my general belief that that probably will happen.
00:55:53.880 | I don't know of anyone that's happy with the current system.
00:55:57.200 | It's a nightmare.
00:55:58.200 | It's an absolute nightmare.
00:55:59.200 | It has almost none of the benefits of a free market system and none of the benefits of
00:56:02.560 | a government system.
00:56:03.960 | So you get the worst of both worlds.
00:56:06.120 | Government systems have a whole set of benefits and a whole set of disadvantages, and free
00:56:10.200 | market systems have a whole set of benefits and a whole set of disadvantages, and we don't
00:56:13.400 | get either of them in the United States.
00:56:15.500 | Now because I don't know anyone that's happy with the situation, and because there's no
00:56:19.200 | moral discussion seeking to overturn all of the government health insurance that exists
00:56:26.520 | right now, there's nobody that says, "Well, it's not right for government to take money
00:56:31.080 | from taxpayers and give it to other people in the form of welfare programs."
00:56:34.880 | That's not even a position at the table in the U.S. system.
00:56:39.480 | Because of that, I assume that a single-payer government program is inevitable.
00:56:45.120 | It's just we don't know when it's going to get there.
00:56:46.900 | So in the meantime, we're left with an absolute nightmare of a system.
00:56:51.180 | So who knows?
00:56:52.180 | My point is that you protect yourself, and if you don't have health insurance, you'll
00:56:56.960 | deal with it at the time with whatever way is appropriate.
00:56:59.620 | If you don't have health insurance, quite literally, go to Mexico and have your baby
00:57:03.620 | there.
00:57:04.620 | You can go to Mexico.
00:57:05.620 | You can have your baby.
00:57:06.620 | You can pay for the baby.
00:57:07.620 | Your baby will get two passports.
00:57:08.620 | You get yourself a Mexican residency.
00:57:09.620 | Why don't you stay there for 18 months and get yourself a citizenship, another citizenship
00:57:13.900 | while you're at it, and have access to a functional health care system where you can actually
00:57:17.920 | afford to pay your doctors instead of the nightmare in the United States?
00:57:22.260 | So is making money to afford the birth a good reason to wait?
00:57:26.580 | Sure.
00:57:27.580 | But it shouldn't take you that long to save $5,000.
00:57:31.080 | Remember that when I said, "If you need something, make it about a year?"
00:57:36.740 | That's what I mean.
00:57:37.740 | Is that, "Do you need a job?
00:57:38.740 | Sure.
00:57:39.740 | You can get a job in a year.
00:57:40.740 | Do you need to save five grand?
00:57:41.740 | Yeah.
00:57:42.740 | You can get a job and have a baby."
00:57:43.740 | Do you need to make a little bit more money at a job?
00:57:47.680 | Focus on it for a year and see if you can get yourself a raise and a promotion, and
00:57:50.700 | you'll be in good shape.
00:57:52.480 | What other expenses are associated with having a baby?
00:57:54.820 | Well, do you need to make more money so that you can get the baby stuff?
00:58:00.100 | You're going to spend as much money as you have on the baby stuff.
00:58:03.740 | If you have a lot of money, you're going to go out and you're going to redecorate the
00:58:08.620 | nursery and you're going to spend $10,000 on all the fancy gear and this bazillion dollar
00:58:16.000 | crib and this, I forget the name of it, the multi-thousand dollar thing that jiggles your
00:58:20.660 | baby when your baby starts to wake up, and a camera system with 18 cameras and alerts
00:58:26.520 | and all the stuff.
00:58:28.300 | Great.
00:58:29.300 | Go for it.
00:58:30.300 | If you don't have any money, you're going to have a baby.
00:58:32.740 | You're going to stick the baby in a cardboard box or get a dresser drawer from a dresser
00:58:36.580 | on the side of the road and put a little bed in it and put it beside your bed, and guess
00:58:43.020 | what?
00:58:44.020 | The baby doesn't care.
00:58:45.020 | The baby is not going to know whether he's in a $5,000 crib and the Rocky thingy that
00:58:52.020 | is pretty cool, or if he's sitting in a cardboard box.
00:58:56.300 | Nobody knows.
00:58:57.300 | It's a baby.
00:58:58.300 | They don't care.
00:58:59.300 | They don't have a clue.
00:59:00.300 | At the end of the day, the amount of money that you spend on the crib and the nursery
00:59:04.900 | and all that stuff is not going to make any difference.
00:59:07.980 | And what will happen is, number one, most of the stuff that you need for a baby, your
00:59:12.580 | friends will give you when you have a baby shower.
00:59:14.980 | Why do we have baby showers?
00:59:16.300 | We have baby showers to give poor people money and stuff that they need to have a baby because
00:59:22.260 | we know that young couples who can have babies, they don't have money.
00:59:27.580 | Recognize that there's these societal artifacts that exist in our society.
00:59:32.420 | Things like a wedding shower, things like a baby shower, things like wedding gifts.
00:59:36.980 | All of these are inherited ways that we've developed as a society to support young people
00:59:43.500 | on the pathway that leads to societal health, marriage and babies.
00:59:48.380 | We want to support that.
00:59:49.740 | So that's why we have these traditions of bridal showers, wedding gifts, and baby showers.
00:59:56.980 | What happens though is in our hyper-intensive individualistic system that we live in today,
01:00:05.460 | we have this thing that somehow in order for me to be responsible, I have to do it alone.
01:00:12.340 | And I appreciate individualism, but you're never going to be able to do it alone.
01:00:15.940 | And if you do that, you take it to the extreme and you say, "Well, I've got to be 35 years
01:00:19.500 | old.
01:00:20.500 | I've got to have $3 million in the bank so I'm financially independent so that if I can't
01:00:24.100 | go back to work after I have a baby, then I'm good."
01:00:27.180 | And it's nonsense.
01:00:28.180 | You don't even replace yourself and you don't even replace your family in society.
01:00:33.420 | It doesn't work for the long term.
01:00:35.380 | So if you want to be part of society and want to contribute, and again, have children for
01:00:39.900 | your own selfish reasons, great, go for it.
01:00:41.860 | But also recognize that you're part of society and we want to support you.
01:00:49.060 | I don't like going to baby showers for rich people because you just – I don't go to
01:00:54.300 | baby showers.
01:00:55.300 | My wife does.
01:00:56.300 | But you know what I mean.
01:00:57.300 | It's like what's the point?
01:00:58.300 | You know, some couple – it's like the stupidity of a bridal shower for a couple that's been
01:01:03.160 | living together for 10 years and they're independently wealthy and they have two jobs
01:01:08.620 | and they're going to have a bridal shower to prepare for their wedding after they've
01:01:12.300 | been living together for 10 years.
01:01:14.220 | Now, obviously, you do your best.
01:01:16.780 | You want to support your friends and whatnot, but it's like you have this vestige of something
01:01:21.820 | that's completely silly.
01:01:22.820 | Am I going to give you a crock pot when you've been living together for 10 years and you've
01:01:26.380 | got a $300,000 household income?
01:01:29.820 | You don't need that.
01:01:32.100 | And so obviously, the wealthy people, they defray it and you just have a party for the
01:01:35.460 | fun.
01:01:36.460 | I'm not unreasonable in what I'm saying.
01:01:38.380 | What I'm saying is there's something beautiful about – I love to get a wedding invitation
01:01:45.860 | to a young couple who doesn't have a lot of money, who's getting married.
01:01:50.060 | And even as I said in the previous podcast episode, maybe you're in college.
01:01:54.900 | It would – I don't get these, but it would thrill my heart if in the coming years I got
01:01:59.460 | a wedding invitation from a 20-year-old engaged couple and they said, "You know what?
01:02:07.900 | We have a little tiny dorm.
01:02:09.300 | We're living in on-campus housing or a little tiny apartment.
01:02:12.900 | We have a little bit of space.
01:02:13.900 | What we really could use is wedding gifts to help us finish off our college tuition."
01:02:18.020 | I would be so thrilled to put a big stack of money in that couple's hand.
01:02:22.900 | And because at its core, that's our responsibility as a society.
01:02:27.660 | We have a responsibility to support young people who are building the future generation.
01:02:32.140 | And the same thing with regard to babies.
01:02:34.780 | My wife and I – this actually was the first baby shower I've ever gone to and I felt
01:02:38.940 | miserable.
01:02:39.940 | I don't like the idea of co-ed baby showers.
01:02:41.580 | But I went to it.
01:02:42.580 | I was a good sport.
01:02:43.580 | And we went to a baby shower for some pretty poor people.
01:02:47.540 | And they were having a baby, a young couple and not married but had a baby and we went
01:02:52.100 | to – and we wanted support.
01:02:53.700 | And it was just such a blessing.
01:02:55.180 | My wife is into cloth diapers and she had accumulated so many cloth diapers that she
01:02:59.140 | was able to give this young couple basically all the cloth diapers that they would ever
01:03:05.300 | need for this baby and however many other babies that they would need.
01:03:09.220 | And it just felt like – it felt awesome, right?
01:03:11.660 | Here you are with a woman who could have killed her baby but instead she's a young woman,
01:03:15.940 | doesn't have a lot of money, she's going to care for the baby, love the baby and it
01:03:19.300 | felt great to be able to support her with a significant financially valuable donation.
01:03:27.500 | And those are the kinds of things that I think we should take pleasure in as a society.
01:03:31.660 | Now here's the other point about getting baby stuff.
01:03:34.660 | Number one, you don't really need most of what you think you need and you really only
01:03:39.860 | need to get most of it once.
01:03:42.620 | Once you have one set of baby stuff, it can last you for three, four, five, however many
01:03:47.420 | babies generally.
01:03:48.420 | If you have boys, they destroy the clothes and you got to buy more clothes for them.
01:03:52.220 | But if you have girls, you can pass them on through five generations of girls and it works
01:03:56.780 | fine.
01:03:57.780 | So I'm being a little bit flippant but it's real is that each additional baby doesn't
01:04:02.460 | cost all that much more because you wind up having the stuff.
01:04:06.340 | And as your skill grows, you wind up thinking, "What a pain to have all this extra stuff."
01:04:12.740 | I think most parents, even if you're not hyper minimalist, most parents, you look back on
01:04:17.700 | the stuff that you registered for at your first baby shower and you recognize, "I didn't
01:04:21.740 | need all that stuff and what a hassle to have this fancy baby trash can that dumps the diaper
01:04:26.620 | upside down and this thing sticking around in my house and I didn't need all this play
01:04:31.140 | equipment."
01:04:32.460 | With our most recent baby, usually you buy some things and you have walker things for
01:04:39.260 | the baby.
01:04:40.260 | We had our fifth baby and we'd gotten rid of a lot of the baby toys.
01:04:44.740 | We didn't have many of them.
01:04:46.260 | But we just never bothered to go out and get it because what we discovered is that the
01:04:50.060 | baby enjoys pushing a chair around when he's learning to walk just as much as pushing a
01:04:55.140 | special baby walking device.
01:04:58.220 | It's kind of embarrassing.
01:05:00.140 | My kids found on the side of the road an office chair and I let them bring home things like
01:05:07.620 | that when they enjoy it for time and I try to pass it along.
01:05:11.860 | But it gives them a few days of taking stuff apart and putting it together and creating
01:05:16.500 | all the creations and it's creative.
01:05:18.920 | So I left the chair around.
01:05:20.500 | And anyway, the seat of the chair came off the base and he was left with the base of
01:05:25.220 | this office chair.
01:05:26.300 | What turned into the perfect baby walking device is that my wife gave it to the baby
01:05:30.260 | and he trots around the house holding the office chair as his support mechanism.
01:05:36.760 | And on the whole, does any of it matter?
01:05:39.820 | No.
01:05:40.820 | And so that's my point is you don't need that much money for those things in the fullness
01:05:45.380 | of time.
01:05:46.380 | Do you need to make more money or do you have a financial goal so that you can feed your
01:05:50.060 | children?
01:05:51.060 | Now, here's where we get into some of the real costs.
01:05:54.540 | Feeding your children is indeed a real cost.
01:05:58.820 | And there are some good things about it though.
01:06:00.660 | First of all, if the mother is able to breastfeed, then generally speaking you don't need much
01:06:06.620 | extra food for the baby, at least for about a year.
01:06:10.000 | So you have time to work it out.
01:06:13.140 | And when the baby starts eating, usually it's not that much.
01:06:16.380 | Most of your food just goes to support the mother in her pregnancy and in her postpartum
01:06:21.340 | recovery.
01:06:22.340 | So you have a year to figure out the money stuff to feed your baby.
01:06:26.700 | You definitely do spend more money on your food budget with babies, and the number can
01:06:32.340 | be significant, especially if you've got a house full of teenage boys.
01:06:36.500 | But I think, and I think we need to acknowledge that parents and families spend more on food
01:06:41.820 | than singles and dinks, but it's not a multiplicative more.
01:06:46.900 | It's not like in my family I spend seven times more on my food than you do as a single man
01:06:55.900 | or single woman.
01:06:56.940 | It's not the case.
01:06:58.260 | It is more, but it's a marginal more, not a multiplicative more.
01:07:02.020 | I think part of the reason for this is there tends to be some recharacterization of expenses.
01:07:10.040 | Food is actually astonishingly cheap in our current society.
01:07:13.820 | Maybe it won't always be cheap, but it is astonishingly cheap in our current society,
01:07:20.380 | and you can get a good nutritious diet from your local grocery store for a shockingly
01:07:29.380 | low amount of money.
01:07:32.060 | What has happened is we don't think of that as being a normal diet anymore, and so we
01:07:38.340 | have upgraded our expectations, our tastes of what is normal based upon our affluence
01:07:45.380 | as a society.
01:07:47.940 | So all people, singles, dinks, and families today spend a lot of money in ways that is
01:07:55.220 | historically astonishing because of our level of affluence.
01:07:59.980 | When I was single, and even still, when I travel by myself, I just feel like I have
01:08:05.140 | the cheapest lifestyle in the world.
01:08:06.620 | I go out to eat all my meals.
01:08:07.860 | I don't cook anything.
01:08:08.860 | I just go out to eat, and I – look, I recently went – I was traveling and I went to a steak
01:08:15.420 | dinner and got a steak dinner and bought all the stuff, and I texted my wife.
01:08:20.620 | I was like, "I just got an appetizer, and I got a meal, and I got two drinks, and I
01:08:27.220 | got dessert," and I sent her my receipt.
01:08:29.220 | I said, "Look how cheap it is.
01:08:30.580 | This is amazing."
01:08:31.580 | So when you're a father and used to feeding seven people when you go out to restaurants
01:08:34.820 | and you go out as one, it just feels like the most amazing deal in the world.
01:08:37.940 | It changes your perspective.
01:08:39.860 | But single people go out to eat all the time.
01:08:41.540 | They eat in very inefficient ways.
01:08:43.540 | They buy all the expensive food that's not necessary, and so their food budget tends
01:08:47.540 | to be a certain amount, similar with couples that have resources.
01:08:51.920 | They go out to eat all the time.
01:08:52.920 | They spend lots of money on just lifestyle.
01:08:55.500 | What happens when you are parents is you tend to change how you spend money.
01:09:02.740 | You tend not to go out to restaurants, partly for the cost because the numbers just don't
01:09:08.340 | make sense.
01:09:09.440 | I can feed my family an amazing steak dinner with all the sides, plenty of food, all the
01:09:15.900 | stuff, for about the cost of what a steak dinner with all the stuff at a restaurant
01:09:19.700 | costs for one or one and a half people.
01:09:22.860 | And so it's like, "Why would I go out and spend seven times as much when I can create
01:09:26.500 | better food inside?"
01:09:28.440 | Part of it is the cost.
01:09:29.440 | Part of it also is the atmosphere, the environment, that restaurants are not generally fun places
01:09:36.040 | when you have young children.
01:09:38.340 | The children often don't have a lot to do.
01:09:40.300 | It's kind of a weird environment, and they're not as comfortable, and you feel the eyes
01:09:45.760 | of the world staring at you, and so you're constantly on your guard.
01:09:49.740 | So most young families, going out to eat is just not as fun.
01:09:53.420 | When the children are better trained and they're past the stage, and they're at the stage where
01:09:56.860 | they can be held accountable for their behavior, then at that point in time, going out to restaurants
01:10:01.500 | is more appropriate.
01:10:03.420 | But parents spend more than singles and couples do, but they spend it differently.
01:10:09.100 | And it's very common then that you learn how, if we're going on a trip, we're not just going
01:10:12.420 | to stop and eat fast food, but we'll prepare a picnic, we'll take our food with you.
01:10:16.660 | And so you start to plan ahead a little bit more.
01:10:18.980 | So your food bill will increase with children, but I would say you probably can afford it
01:10:24.440 | if you're willing to adjust how you spend your money.
01:10:28.860 | And recognize that the way that you think you should spend your money is probably historically
01:10:33.180 | abnormal.
01:10:34.180 | I grew up as the youngest of seven children.
01:10:37.380 | My parents didn't have a lot of money, they didn't earn a ton of money.
01:10:41.560 | We went out to a restaurant as a family, I would say, once every six months.
01:10:46.180 | I mean, it just wasn't a thing.
01:10:50.220 | And my family with children, my children have been in a hundred times more restaurants than
01:10:54.660 | I ever was as a child.
01:10:56.020 | Does that make it better or worse?
01:10:58.100 | I don't see the difference.
01:10:59.620 | It's just something different, it's just a different experience.
01:11:02.520 | And so if you want to have more children and you can't afford them, but you actually want
01:11:07.260 | to have more children, just change how you spend it.
01:11:10.300 | You will spend more, but change how you spend it.
01:11:13.260 | By the way, one comment on the question I said about groceries, and I said groceries
01:11:17.540 | are shockingly cheap.
01:11:18.660 | I'm not blind to the cost of food.
01:11:21.260 | When I'm saying that, I'm saying it from a historical perspective that the amount of
01:11:28.460 | money that we spend on food is less of our labor than it ever has been in the history
01:11:33.940 | of mankind.
01:11:35.220 | But again, back to the core elements.
01:11:38.900 | If you wanted to have an amazingly healthy meal, a healthy diet for a few dollars a day,
01:11:45.660 | what could you do?
01:11:46.660 | You could eat for a few dollars a day and have an unhealthy diet, but for breakfast,
01:11:51.500 | go out and get eggs.
01:11:52.500 | I don't know what the eggs cost where you are, but it's going to be a few dollars for
01:11:55.620 | a bunch of eggs.
01:11:56.660 | My family, we eat eggs most mornings, I usually do about 25 eggs every morning.
01:12:01.780 | So it doesn't cost that much to have 25 or 30 eggs.
01:12:05.580 | It's some dollars.
01:12:07.220 | For lunch, get yourself, and by the way, milk.
01:12:10.900 | Milk is kind of your other normal thing.
01:12:14.220 | So wherever you live in the world, you can buy a gallon of milk pretty inexpensively,
01:12:18.900 | and it's packed with calories, packed with nutrition, packed with vitamins.
01:12:21.980 | Get raw milk if you can, but even if you can't, it's just relatively inexpensive.
01:12:26.160 | Thanks for calling Toyota.
01:12:28.900 | This is Jan.
01:12:29.900 | Hi, Jan.
01:12:30.900 | My kids are really excited about spring break, so I'm looking for a new Toyota to help make
01:12:34.660 | it amazing.
01:12:35.660 | Now until April 1st is a great time for a new Toyota.
01:12:38.340 | Imagine you and the kids in a tundra on your way to the lake to go speed boating.
01:12:43.340 | Or even taking a RAV4 to an animal sanctuary to pick goats.
01:12:46.740 | Sounds like your kids aren't the only ones excited about spring break.
01:12:50.780 | Ready, set, go get your Toyota today.
01:12:52.780 | Toyota.
01:12:53.780 | Let's Go Places.
01:12:54.780 | Dealer inventory may vary.
01:12:55.780 | See your participating Toyota dealer for details.
01:12:57.460 | For lunch, make hamburgers.
01:13:00.300 | Skip the bread, get a big thing of ground beef, make up some hamburger patties, add
01:13:04.260 | garlic and salt, add some tomatoes and lettuce and pickles.
01:13:08.260 | Pretty inexpensive and you can have a calorie filled, vitamin, nutrient filled lunch.
01:13:14.500 | For dinner, make pork butt.
01:13:16.060 | Pork butt and potatoes or something.
01:13:17.940 | Put it in the crock pot, steam it, instapot it, make shredded pork.
01:13:22.020 | It just doesn't cost much to have a superfood diet of meat and filled with vitamins and
01:13:28.060 | protein and all the stuff that you need.
01:13:30.840 | You can do it pretty inexpensively.
01:13:32.740 | Where the money goes is on the organic pine nuts and on the, you know, the fresh salmon
01:13:39.140 | flown in from Tibet and all the stuff.
01:13:42.880 | And that's the stuff that we now consider normal.
01:13:44.700 | It's just part of our diet.
01:13:46.220 | So if you can afford it, go for it.
01:13:48.180 | But if you're trying to feed your children, you can do it on a very modest budget if you
01:13:53.060 | pay attention to the stuff that you buy.
01:13:57.180 | And then at the poor end, if you genuinely don't have money and genuinely can't afford
01:14:01.220 | it, then there's government money and government systems that are there to provide for food
01:14:06.540 | costs for your children if you're genuinely poor.
01:14:11.020 | Do you need to make more money in order to be able to afford to educate your children?
01:14:15.940 | This is a big one.
01:14:18.260 | In this case, most of our pressure towards education is a cultural pressure that is probably
01:14:26.160 | largely unnecessary.
01:14:28.580 | Just this week, I was reading an article, I forget the publication, but it's talking
01:14:31.420 | about South Korea.
01:14:32.420 | South Korea, again, perhaps one of the world's lowest birth rates right now.
01:14:36.580 | And evidently in South Korea, being the Asian tiger stereotype, there is a strong cultural
01:14:43.540 | pressure that in order for your children to succeed, not only do they have to do all of
01:14:49.340 | the standard schools, the government schools, but you have to spend huge amounts of money
01:14:53.060 | so they have tons of extra tutors to cause them to be absolute star students because
01:14:57.940 | you have this hyper-competitive society.
01:15:00.660 | And this is almost a perfect storm of a sick society where you create enormous pressure
01:15:08.200 | on people in their school life, their work life, and the pressure winds up destroying
01:15:12.820 | the resource that you're trying to enhance.
01:15:14.960 | You're doing all this work to try to help the educational pathway of your culture, and
01:15:19.580 | at the end of it, you're going to wind up with no culture because you have no people.
01:15:25.060 | And this is unnecessary.
01:15:27.500 | It's unnecessary.
01:15:30.260 | First, all of us have access for free to all of the learning resources that any of us would
01:15:40.340 | ever need.
01:15:42.340 | And access to good resources coupled with benign neglect is probably sufficient and
01:15:50.360 | in many cases superior to a hyper-intensive tiger mom, tiger dad lifestyle.
01:15:59.220 | I find the stories of the unschoolers really inspiring here.
01:16:04.060 | I've always been inspired by the unschoolers who basically work really hard to expose their
01:16:09.700 | children to great resources and then to allow the child's curiosity to take him or her to
01:16:16.900 | where he wants to go, and in general, broadly speaking, the results that they get from this
01:16:24.660 | kind of benign neglect – it's not neglect, I'm not accusing – I mean, in some cases,
01:16:28.500 | some are neglectful, but I'm not accusing broadly the philosophy of unschooling as being
01:16:32.540 | neglectful.
01:16:33.540 | What I'm saying is kind of a hands-off, figure-it-out-for-yourself-buddy kind of approach, and in many cases, this
01:16:39.860 | produces an outcome that is equivalent to going through the traditional program.
01:16:49.360 | It's got a good argument for it.
01:16:51.540 | I find it inspiring.
01:16:54.020 | Never before in the history of humanity have we had access to more resources for free.
01:17:01.260 | All of the greatest books that your child can read to be well-educated are all public
01:17:07.460 | domain.
01:17:08.460 | They're free.
01:17:09.620 | All you need is some way to read them, so you can get yourself a digital e-reader device.
01:17:13.780 | You can get a printer, a cheap printer, and print them out yourself.
01:17:18.780 | There's plenty of access to them.
01:17:21.400 | You have a local library.
01:17:22.400 | That local library has all the books in it, and what's more is there's free book sales.
01:17:27.260 | They give away the good ones after a while, and they're all available to you for free
01:17:31.620 | in your local library.
01:17:33.340 | In addition, you have all of the Internet resources that you need, and so there's everything
01:17:37.740 | from Khan Academy to all kinds of stuff, and you can access all that stuff for free.
01:17:44.660 | If you don't have a computer, don't have Internet, go to your library and go on there for free
01:17:48.540 | and study there.
01:17:51.540 | All of the educational resources that any boy, any girl, any adolescent, any man or
01:17:58.180 | woman needs to become well-educated are all available for free or practically for free
01:18:04.880 | in today's world, so you absolutely can afford it.
01:18:07.060 | You already have a phone.
01:18:08.220 | You already have a computer.
01:18:09.420 | You already have Internet at your house.
01:18:11.340 | You can afford it.
01:18:14.460 | Is it nice to spend more money than that?
01:18:17.420 | I think so.
01:18:18.460 | I spend a lot more money than that, so children will cost you what you have.
01:18:23.060 | I spend as much money as I have on my children's education.
01:18:26.500 | It's important to me, and you'll do the same thing, but do I think my children are much
01:18:31.740 | better educated?
01:18:34.500 | I would say they're better educated than a lot of people, but some of the areas in which
01:18:39.180 | I spend the most money I wouldn't argue are that important.
01:18:43.140 | I mean, as an example, I spend all kinds of money shipping in foreign books in foreign
01:18:47.940 | language from all around the world.
01:18:49.620 | I spend a bunch of money getting physical books that are free, that are public domain,
01:18:54.980 | that I could just put on a Kindle in the hand of a Kindle, but I am trying to cultivate
01:18:59.380 | the power of attention and deep focus and all these languages, and I spend—so is it
01:19:06.940 | better?
01:19:07.940 | Yeah, but do I think that you genuinely need to speak seven languages to be successful?
01:19:12.020 | Of course not.
01:19:13.020 | That's nonsense.
01:19:14.340 | You don't need any of that, and is it going to pay off?
01:19:17.260 | I have no idea.
01:19:18.620 | Ask me in 30 years.
01:19:19.940 | We spend the amount of money that we have based upon our perceptions and our goals,
01:19:23.940 | but on the whole, it's one of those 80/20 analyses that 80% of the results, the educational
01:19:31.180 | results that your child is going to get come from interest and time and good resources.
01:19:38.300 | 20% may come from you having the world's best pedagogical approach and great coaching.
01:19:44.380 | It's just not that significant on the whole.
01:19:48.500 | Where you really start to spend money when it comes to educating your children is if
01:19:53.020 | you—so the big one is paying for private schools.
01:19:58.900 | One reason I homeschool is clearly financial.
01:20:01.300 | I have five children.
01:20:03.040 | If I were paying private school tuition, it would be $100,000 a year.
01:20:06.660 | I count the cost of spending $100,000 a year on private school tuition, I look around,
01:20:12.260 | and I say, "I can do a whole lot better and at least more interesting for them and
01:20:16.940 | for me with $100,000 a year."
01:20:19.900 | I am happy to spend money on it, but that only is if you have $100,000 a year.
01:20:24.380 | If you don't have $100,000 a year, you wouldn't spend it.
01:20:27.020 | There are private schools that are available that are cheaper and there are plenty of no-tuition
01:20:31.940 | government schools available.
01:20:33.900 | You can homeschool with no tuition as well.
01:20:35.900 | Khan Academy is available for anybody who needs it now in not any language, but at least
01:20:41.700 | a dozen languages and growing all the time.
01:20:44.900 | In English, it's all available.
01:20:49.940 | Private schools are certainly one thing.
01:20:51.420 | If you have the money, you'll spend it.
01:20:52.660 | If you don't have the money, you'll find another way around it.
01:20:55.020 | Where a lot of the money comes in is on experiences, things like great trips and special classes
01:21:01.060 | and special tutors.
01:21:02.980 | I say go for it if you have it.
01:21:05.820 | I recently was talking with my friend Mikel Thorup from Expat Money, and he's amazing.
01:21:09.800 | He has his children, and they've got a private art teacher who works with his children multiple
01:21:15.740 | days a week and a private piano teacher who teaches them piano and Russian and a competitive
01:21:21.320 | jiu-jitsu gym and karate and martial arts, and that's kind of normal.
01:21:26.620 | When you have the money, you wind up buying all the stuff, and you've got gymnastics and
01:21:30.680 | parkour and ballet, and there's no limit to the amount of classes that you can do.
01:21:35.520 | Those things are expensive.
01:21:36.800 | When you start signing all your children up for all the activities, they're just crazy
01:21:40.400 | expensive, huge cost.
01:21:43.120 | I spend it on travel.
01:21:45.520 | Last year, I took my children to 16 countries, spent the equivalent of a new car on it, a
01:21:53.320 | modest new car.
01:21:54.880 | Do my children care?
01:21:58.120 | They care.
01:21:59.120 | They enjoy it.
01:22:00.480 | They sort of, but is it superior than if we just spent the same time together at a local
01:22:07.720 | park, local state park, camping in the woods, hanging out?
01:22:12.160 | I wouldn't argue it's that much superior.
01:22:15.160 | It's probably more interesting.
01:22:16.320 | It's more interesting than for me.
01:22:17.760 | I like it.
01:22:18.760 | It's kind of fun to go into the fancy cathedral and to go to the museums.
01:22:24.640 | It's kind of interesting, but on the whole, I wouldn't argue it's that much different.
01:22:29.880 | It's just different.
01:22:32.280 | What I mean is that much better.
01:22:33.520 | It's just different.
01:22:34.600 | One person grows up hanging out in the woods, and then he takes himself to Europe and tours
01:22:38.840 | the cathedral at 19.
01:22:40.200 | I took my children when they're young.
01:22:43.360 | Is it worth it?
01:22:44.360 | Again, it comes down to you spend the money that you have, and beyond that, people work
01:22:50.720 | it out.
01:22:51.720 | There's plenty of people who have lived wonderful, successful lives, and they never left the
01:22:56.480 | city or county they were born in.
01:22:58.920 | And so I don't think that it's just fundamentally better.
01:23:02.000 | What happens is we have so few children in the modern world that we try to make up for
01:23:07.080 | it by spending a bazillion dollars on them.
01:23:09.680 | So the classes and all of the stuff that we do and the gymnastics and the things, we spend
01:23:17.760 | the money on it because we think it's good for them.
01:23:20.120 | Is it actually good for them?
01:23:22.120 | I don't think we know.
01:23:23.580 | We know that it can be damaging, meaning that having a very harried childhood where you're
01:23:29.720 | just trundled from one thing to the next and you never have any time, I think that's harmful
01:23:33.440 | for children.
01:23:34.440 | I think it's better to have time.
01:23:36.800 | Is the actual class itself damaging?
01:23:38.760 | No.
01:23:39.760 | Wouldn't it be great if you developed gymnastic skills?
01:23:42.420 | But are you going to produce a world-class swimmer because you go to swimming five times
01:23:46.440 | a week?
01:23:47.720 | Only if eventually your child is interested, and then he or she will develop the skills
01:23:52.680 | and pursue the process.
01:23:54.320 | But you're not neglectful if you don't.
01:23:57.680 | You're not neglectful if you teach your child to swim in a pond at a friend's farm or at
01:24:02.560 | the local public pool versus having the private coach.
01:24:06.640 | It's just that we spend the money on the things that we have the money for.
01:24:11.240 | So on the whole, children cost money.
01:24:14.880 | They can cost substantial amounts of money, but they'll basically cost all the money that
01:24:19.160 | you have.
01:24:20.280 | And so if you have a lot, you'll spend a lot.
01:24:22.240 | If you don't have a lot, you'll spend a little.
01:24:25.460 | And so it all comes down to do you want to have children?
01:24:29.760 | What is the biggest cost of children?
01:24:32.680 | I think generally speaking, the biggest cost of children is the lost career earnings for
01:24:38.320 | a stay-at-home mom or a stay-at-home dad.
01:24:42.480 | That's where the biggest cost is.
01:24:43.940 | So I have five children.
01:24:45.280 | My wife and I couldn't have five children if she had a job and I had a job.
01:24:51.680 | There's a few people out there that can do it, I guess, but it just seems like an insane
01:24:55.900 | hairy lifestyle that most people wouldn't want.
01:25:00.320 | And so what happens is you can have children if you have the resources to have children.
01:25:08.040 | And so because I work from home, because my wife is a stay-at-home mom, then we have more
01:25:13.960 | resources, more ability, more time.
01:25:16.440 | We have less money, but we have more time.
01:25:19.320 | And so that makes it less daunting to have a bunch of children.
01:25:23.120 | And I've made the choice that my children will be my status symbol instead of consumption
01:25:29.660 | status symbols of things that I pay money that are shiny and go fast and look shiny
01:25:34.560 | on the water, et cetera, then I've just chosen that I would rather have my children be my
01:25:39.880 | status symbol.
01:25:40.880 | I derive a significant amount of pleasure from their company.
01:25:44.440 | I love to spend time helping them.
01:25:46.640 | I enjoy helping people succeed and I love being with them.
01:25:51.560 | And so I feel an enormous amount of pride in them.
01:25:56.880 | It's a significant component of my life and I'm looking forward to my grandchildren and
01:26:00.520 | my great-grandchildren.
01:26:01.520 | I want to build a family dynasty.
01:26:03.640 | And so I'm happy to spend the money on it.
01:26:06.280 | But the biggest financial cost is the cost of my wife not having a job and also the cost
01:26:12.560 | of her career, meaning that young women face a real challenge in today's world.
01:26:24.040 | What we have done in the world that we live in is traditionally we had a society in which
01:26:32.480 | it was expected that men would support their wives and that the wives would bear children
01:26:39.200 | and would raise children and there was a symbiosis and society supported that.
01:26:44.640 | There's a lot of talk in the political space about the concept of a living wage.
01:26:49.480 | That's important and it's always been important.
01:26:52.400 | But in general a core component of that is to talk about a living family wage is in times
01:26:58.720 | past it was expected that a father would be able to earn enough money to support his family
01:27:05.200 | with one income.
01:27:07.880 | What's happened though is as we trace all of the trends forward till today, number one
01:27:16.320 | we doubled the supply of workers in the marketplace and it became much more difficult for a family
01:27:23.800 | to live on one wage.
01:27:25.420 | We talk about a living wage now, we don't talk about a living family wage and so it's
01:27:29.400 | much more challenging to make the numbers work.
01:27:31.840 | Many families genuinely challenged to make it work on a single income, very difficult.
01:27:40.900 | Not impossible, just difficult.
01:27:43.140 | In addition we have created enormous insecurity in marriage and that insecurity has made it
01:27:52.020 | difficult for young men and women to trust each other.
01:27:55.340 | In marriage men are suspicious of women, women are suspicious of men, and the law, while
01:28:01.180 | certainly there is divorce law, the divorce law, especially in the wake of no-fault divorce,
01:28:09.260 | has led to instability in families rather than stability.
01:28:12.940 | The idea was that marriage is a stable institution.
01:28:17.800 | One man, one woman committed to each other for life, in good times and bad times, better
01:28:22.220 | for worse, in wealth and poverty, for richer, poorer, in sickness and in health, supporting
01:28:28.900 | one another.
01:28:30.340 | But we've stripped that out and we've traded it in for a system of personal autonomy and
01:28:35.660 | pleasure and I think this is a system that ultimately collapses, it has to collapse.
01:28:40.460 | Let me give you just one example and we're getting philosophical here but it's important
01:28:44.200 | to understand it.
01:28:46.700 | When people talk about marriage, or when I talk about marriage, many people have a vestige
01:28:54.680 | of what marriage meant in the past that they no longer believe in or are committed to.
01:29:01.160 | The example I like to use where I think that people still understand the value of marriage
01:29:04.700 | is this.
01:29:05.700 | I want you to imagine that I'm 50 years old, whatever, 50 years old is a good age.
01:29:13.960 | And I've been married for 25 years and I want you to imagine that my wife got sick, developed
01:29:23.520 | some kind of sickness, the specifics don't matter, and she became a bedridden invalid.
01:29:28.780 | And so now my wife can't do anything for me.
01:29:33.080 | She can't cook for me, she can't clean for me, she can't make money for me, she can't
01:29:39.760 | spend time with me, imagine she's sick all the time, she can't talk to me, we can't have
01:29:46.140 | sexual relations, just assume that she can't do anything for me.
01:29:51.760 | So I want you to imagine that I look out and realize, listen, I'm not happy in this relationship.
01:29:58.760 | This woman is just a leech in my life, why do I have to do all this stuff for her?
01:30:04.840 | And so I divorce her, and I go off and I marry someone else who's better.
01:30:11.620 | Imagine that you heard about those circumstances, what would you think of me if I did that?
01:30:19.040 | I think you would despise me, and I would say rightfully so.
01:30:24.480 | I would despise any man who did that to his wife.
01:30:32.040 | And we should, there should be a social shame, a social opprobrium that is brought against
01:30:38.160 | a man who would do that to his wife.
01:30:40.760 | It's one of the most selfish and arrogant things that ever could be done.
01:30:49.160 | The sense of that feeling that you have when I describe those circumstances, that sense
01:30:53.640 | of shame, and that despising of me, if I did that, that's right.
01:31:01.800 | Because we know that marriage is not just about happiness, it's about much more than
01:31:07.840 | that.
01:31:08.840 | It's a basic fundamental institution of human society.
01:31:11.200 | And we're not in it just because we're happy, that's not it.
01:31:15.640 | There's something larger than that.
01:31:18.160 | So now, let's use a different circumstance.
01:31:22.240 | Let's say that I'm 50 years old, and I'm married to my wife, but let's just assume
01:31:26.960 | that she's not physically sick.
01:31:29.560 | But she's just grown distant, we've kind of grown apart, after all, we raised children,
01:31:34.480 | we didn't keep knowing each other through the years, we raised a bunch of children.
01:31:37.400 | And she says, "You know what," or I say, "I'm just not really happy anymore.
01:31:42.200 | Maybe our sex life isn't great, I'm just not really happy anymore."
01:31:46.880 | And I was like, "I'd just like to try something new."
01:31:50.720 | And so I divorced my wife, and I go and find someone else and marry someone else and start
01:31:57.040 | over again.
01:31:59.680 | How would you feel towards me?
01:32:03.840 | In our current society, most people wouldn't despise me.
01:32:07.900 | They would just say, "Hey man, you do you, you've got to be happy, whatever your life
01:32:11.600 | is about happiness, you need to be happy, you deserve to be happy, Joshua, or you deserve
01:32:15.840 | to be happy, wife."
01:32:21.440 | What's the difference?
01:32:24.320 | Functionally speaking, and I'm not here to preach about marriage, but that's at the core
01:32:29.760 | of one of the things that's really difficult.
01:32:31.360 | So what has happened is men and women have internalized this in today's world, and that
01:32:35.160 | we don't trust one another anymore.
01:32:36.920 | I think, I know women have significant amounts of problems of trust.
01:32:43.880 | Men, it seems to me, have been waking up to this over about the last 10 years, and a lot
01:32:48.000 | of men feel like they can't trust marriage anymore.
01:32:52.080 | And so this is causing men and women not to marry, it's causing men and women not to have
01:32:55.600 | children.
01:32:56.600 | And this is an enormous problem for this financial perspective, because in the lack of trust,
01:33:01.100 | if my wife knows that I would divorce her just because I'm not happy anymore, then now
01:33:08.160 | she feels like she's got to defend herself, and she feels like she's got to go out and
01:33:12.320 | she's got to make her own money, and she's got to have her own backup accounts, and she's
01:33:15.200 | got to make sure that she has her own career, because after all, I can't trust that my husband's
01:33:18.400 | going to be around here.
01:33:19.400 | And this is a fundamental problem that is destroying one of many things that's harming
01:33:24.120 | our birthright.
01:33:25.120 | It's not one thing, it's many things.
01:33:28.000 | I don't have any solutions for those things legally, meaning I could propose some suggestions,
01:33:34.840 | but I have no confidence at the moment that there's any social support for those.
01:33:40.100 | It seems like it's going to have to get a lot worse before it gets better, until we
01:33:43.800 | kind of wake up and realize what we've lost.
01:33:47.000 | But at the moment, what is possible is simply that individuals can see the problems and
01:33:52.440 | you can work your way through.
01:33:53.440 | And that's this enormous paradox that we live in.
01:33:55.800 | We live in a paradox in which, from a cultural perspective, things have "never been worse."
01:34:01.880 | But on an individual perspective, things have never been better.
01:34:04.320 | And I see this paradox at many levels.
01:34:06.680 | Things about like freedom, for example.
01:34:09.400 | People want to go on and on about, you know, "Big Brother, Big Brother is watching all
01:34:14.080 | my communications and I can't do anything and there's too many laws."
01:34:16.960 | Well, that's true on a cultural perspective.
01:34:19.800 | Never before in the history of mankind have human beings ever lived under the authority
01:34:24.840 | of as many laws and regulations and statutes as govern your life.
01:34:28.680 | That's true.
01:34:30.360 | But on the flip side, individuals have never been more free to just chart their own course
01:34:35.360 | than today.
01:34:36.720 | If you went back a millennium, a thousand years, and you were stuck into a society,
01:34:43.320 | you probably couldn't just strike out across the countryside because the people over there
01:34:47.840 | want to kill you.
01:34:49.800 | You couldn't just go off and do whatever you wanted because you needed the land, you needed
01:34:53.500 | the support structure to be able to eat.
01:34:56.260 | You had very little personal freedom.
01:34:58.540 | So maybe there were fewer laws, but you had very little personal freedom.
01:35:02.780 | You were completely connected.
01:35:04.080 | Today, there's a lot more laws, but you can go your own way.
01:35:07.520 | You can go from one side of the world to another in 24 hours.
01:35:11.520 | You can do it all.
01:35:12.960 | And it's like this on so many levels.
01:35:15.460 | Never before have schools been worse.
01:35:18.300 | That's a hard one to make, but you can say, "Well, schools have never been worse."
01:35:21.520 | Okay, yeah, but never before have you had more options to have a great education for
01:35:25.400 | nothing, for free.
01:35:27.480 | And on almost everything, we see this paradox.
01:35:29.960 | And so similarly speaking, when it comes to children and families and relationships, we
01:35:37.680 | have this cultural paradox that never before have we had fewer children, never before have
01:35:42.160 | we had such a high divorce rate and dissolution of families and destruction of marriage and
01:35:48.200 | all this stuff.
01:35:49.200 | Okay, that's all true.
01:35:50.200 | But on the other hand, to some degree, it's never been easier for you to break through.
01:35:54.800 | It's never been easier for you to have children and raise them and build strong families and
01:36:00.360 | earn money and live where you want to live and all these things.
01:36:03.640 | So I can't solve the big cultural stuff.
01:36:06.040 | I've got solutions I'd love to hear heard, but it's not the time.
01:36:10.320 | But what I can do is I can take action myself, and I can use the systems that exist in order
01:36:18.120 | to fix that.
01:36:20.080 | And so I can take care of my wife, and I can build the confidence in her and in me and
01:36:25.320 | in our relationship so that she's willing to be a stay-at-home mom.
01:36:29.560 | She doesn't feel defensive.
01:36:30.560 | She doesn't feel like she has to protect herself.
01:36:33.420 | But she can trust me.
01:36:34.680 | I can build that.
01:36:35.680 | That's the biggest cost of children, and it weighs heavily on moms, and we need to take
01:36:39.160 | care of them.
01:36:40.160 | What's the big benefit of children, though?
01:36:43.540 | Children are highly motivating.
01:36:44.540 | I think you'll probably do and make more having children than not, and I'm going to close
01:36:51.640 | with this train of thought.
01:36:54.960 | As with anything, when we see data, we ask ourselves, "Is this causation or correlation?"
01:37:00.200 | We're all stats experts now is the first thing.
01:37:02.320 | "Is this causation or correlation?"
01:37:04.400 | We know that parents with children make more money than people who don't.
01:37:11.740 | We know that people who are married and have children have more wealth than those who don't.
01:37:17.520 | And we say, "Well, is this causation or correlation?
01:37:20.360 | Are the children causal in this result?
01:37:23.320 | Is the marriage causal, or is it just that people who are rich get married and have children?"
01:37:29.360 | I can't prove to you one or the other.
01:37:30.840 | All I can tell you is from personal experience and observation, I think that children are
01:37:34.760 | a causal factor in doing more in life, in changing your perspective, and in causing
01:37:41.120 | you to desire to be more ambitious.
01:37:43.320 | It's probably not universal.
01:37:44.480 | It's really not.
01:37:46.180 | But when I think about myself before I ever had children, and I think of myself as a father,
01:37:53.000 | I don't even recognize the man that I was.
01:37:56.960 | I don't even recognize the boy that I was.
01:38:00.400 | My children have caused me to grow in so many ways, and it's very subtle how it happens.
01:38:08.640 | A lot of it happens just in terms of confidence in yourself.
01:38:13.280 | When you have humans, even if they're little humans, that adore you and respect you and
01:38:20.140 | love you, it changes your psychology in a really compelling way.
01:38:28.520 | And a couple of examples from today.
01:38:34.400 | One of my children is prone to saying, "Daddy, you're the best daddy in the world."
01:38:39.120 | I know that I'm not the best daddy in the world.
01:38:41.680 | I do my best, but I'm not the best.
01:38:45.100 | Obviously not, even if I could define that.
01:38:47.840 | But when somebody says to you practically every day, "Daddy, you're the best daddy in
01:38:52.040 | the world.
01:38:53.040 | I'm so grateful," you have this desire to be the best, and it causes you to do something
01:39:00.040 | differently.
01:39:01.160 | I've got a toddler in my house right now, and generally speaking, toddlers are a hassle.
01:39:06.720 | But my toddler is right at that phase where when I walk in the door, wherever he is, if
01:39:10.920 | he hears that daddy's coming, comes running across the floor, arms up, "Daddy, pick me
01:39:17.760 | up."
01:39:19.080 | And you do that, and it changes you.
01:39:22.040 | Men are transformed.
01:39:23.160 | I guess probably women, too, but I'm not a woman, so I can't tell you.
01:39:26.480 | But I know that men are transformed by bearing responsibility.
01:39:29.680 | And when you have children, you have responsibility.
01:39:34.000 | And authority and responsibility come together.
01:39:37.880 | And my experience has been that as the burden of children has come more heavily onto me,
01:39:46.240 | and I bear that responsibility, recognizing that truly if it's to be, it's up to me.
01:39:50.960 | I've got to keep this human alive.
01:39:52.640 | I can't be lazy.
01:39:54.320 | I can't be...
01:39:55.320 | I got to take...
01:39:56.320 | It's me.
01:39:57.320 | It's my job.
01:39:58.960 | As that responsibility rests heavily on my shoulders, what winds up happening is I sense
01:40:09.740 | it develops me, and that responsibility rests on me, and it develops me, and it causes me
01:40:13.440 | to be more confident in other circumstances.
01:40:16.480 | Because when you know you have to, because this human is on me, and you just receive
01:40:21.560 | love and adoration of your wife and your children, then now you go into the workplace and you
01:40:26.720 | don't feel like less of a man.
01:40:29.880 | You don't feel immature.
01:40:31.160 | You feel stronger.
01:40:32.160 | And so I think there's a direct causal influence that men with children tend to do more, be
01:40:37.960 | more effective than those who don't.
01:40:42.400 | So children... and then you have a reason for it.
01:40:45.480 | And your reasons change.
01:40:47.380 | I can track in my own thinking.
01:40:49.360 | I can track the change from being a single man versus being a married father of many.
01:40:57.080 | And you look at the world differently.
01:40:59.880 | Most of the people that I used to look to for advice when I was single, I don't have
01:41:05.060 | any interest really in what they have to say anymore.
01:41:07.840 | It doesn't appeal to me.
01:41:09.160 | It sounds hollow.
01:41:10.240 | It sounds self-centered often, and it sounds just not particularly useful.
01:41:16.320 | And a lot of it, and in some cases, it's just flat-out laughable, the stuff that I used
01:41:21.440 | to think was effective.
01:41:22.440 | And I'm not...
01:41:23.440 | I don't want to be critical of it.
01:41:24.840 | After all, probably the advice I gave 10 years ago, probably laughable.
01:41:29.540 | We all are on a process of development and self-improvement, and we all grow in maturity
01:41:36.960 | over time.
01:41:37.960 | And we can't be ashamed of who we were.
01:41:40.280 | We do the best we know at this point in time.
01:41:41.920 | We give the best answers, do the best job.
01:41:44.300 | We can't change that.
01:41:45.300 | It's just a natural part of life.
01:41:47.000 | I'm just observing that the advice that I just thought was so wonderful, I no longer
01:41:51.920 | think that.
01:41:52.920 | And the causal change has to do with having children, and it changes how you think as
01:41:58.160 | well.
01:41:59.160 | I've observed that I'm more conservative than I once was.
01:42:02.760 | I previously was very libertarian, and now I look at many libertarians, not the concept
01:42:10.560 | of liberty, but I just look at libertarians, and libertarians tend to turn into goofballs.
01:42:16.520 | They tend to become libertines and turn into goofballs.
01:42:19.520 | And the stuff that they do, it's just, "This is not healthy.
01:42:21.760 | This is not good."
01:42:23.480 | And so it's been interesting to watch my political inclinations.
01:42:26.480 | I've abandoned some of the things that I used to think were true and become more conservative.
01:42:31.560 | I don't like...
01:42:32.560 | I'm not a Republican.
01:42:33.560 | I guess...
01:42:34.560 | I don't know.
01:42:35.560 | Who knows?
01:42:36.560 | I don't even...
01:42:37.560 | I don't get involved in that stuff.
01:42:38.560 | But I reflect more conservative values than I once did because I'm a different man than
01:42:42.480 | I was, and I can see this in many areas.
01:42:45.360 | So children are motivating.
01:42:46.560 | There's a lot of guys that never even start until they got a reason to, and when you've
01:42:52.960 | got children, you often have a reason to.
01:42:56.280 | And I think that this is something that needs to be countered, kind of brought into the
01:43:01.000 | picture.
01:43:02.640 | I have an ambition to live a more upright life.
01:43:06.440 | I want to have, when I'm old, I want to have the respect of my children.
01:43:11.600 | And that changes you as a father.
01:43:14.480 | If I'm going to have the respect of my children, it means I need to live an authentic, congruous
01:43:18.960 | life.
01:43:19.960 | I can't say one thing and do another because I can't hide anything from them.
01:43:23.800 | I have to be that person.
01:43:25.740 | And I find myself giving instructions to them, and then I look at my own life and I say,
01:43:31.800 | "Joshua, are you doing that?
01:43:33.600 | You better do it."
01:43:34.600 | Otherwise, you better do it, otherwise it ain't going to work.
01:43:40.800 | And so that's the big benefit.
01:43:42.840 | On the whole, again, I want to be charitable and not pry into your life in any way, but
01:43:50.080 | I want you to recognize that while children come with costs, those costs are often less
01:43:57.880 | than you might think, and most of the costs that are real can be adapted to, but they
01:44:05.600 | also come with enormous benefits.
01:44:08.880 | And at the end of your life, you are likely to enjoy and appreciate more some of the benefits
01:44:18.660 | than you will be worried too much about the costs.
01:44:23.240 | I want to close.
01:44:24.240 | I was going to save this for another podcast, and I may still do that.
01:44:26.920 | But there's this really fascinating passage in the book that I read, and it kind of illustrates
01:44:37.200 | something of what I wanted to say.
01:44:42.080 | The book is called Fortune's Children, and it's about Cornelius Vanderbilt and his children.
01:44:50.520 | And this is a passage without getting too deep into it.
01:44:54.480 | It's kind of a crazy story because the Vanderbilt fortune was enormous, and then it all fell
01:44:59.600 | apart.
01:45:00.720 | So when old man Vanderbilt died, he left most of his fortune to his son, William.
01:45:06.280 | And at his son's end of his life, this was what he had to say, and I'll just read a short
01:45:15.040 | passage here.
01:45:16.040 | "The Commodore had died" – the Commodore was Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of the
01:45:20.160 | fortune – "The Commodore had died, believing that through the occult he would know what
01:45:26.440 | his heirs were doing.
01:45:37.640 | Perhaps between playing the harp and singing hymns, the activities that he hoped would
01:45:41.000 | occupy his time in heaven, or maybe while trying to figure out how a camel might pass
01:45:45.400 | through the eye of a needle if he was elsewhere, the Commodore noticed what his son had accomplished.
01:45:50.520 | Not bad for a blatherous kite, he might have said.
01:45:53.280 | There's something to that boy Bill, after all.
01:45:56.280 | What did it mean to be the richest man in the world?
01:45:59.160 | To William Vanderbilt, it meant very little.
01:46:01.640 | He was constantly concerned about preserving his wealth and was obsessed with scrutinizing
01:46:06.520 | his smallest expense.
01:46:08.720 | Just after he had invested $50 million in government bonds and was sorting them into
01:46:12.680 | stacks on his desk, he called for his private secretary, Isaac Chambers, to come into his
01:46:17.880 | office.
01:46:18.880 | "Was I here last Thursday, Mr. Chambers?" he asked.
01:46:22.080 | "No, for I remember having been up to your house that day."
01:46:25.640 | William Vanderbilt picked up a bill from the janitor who supplied him with lunches for
01:46:29.200 | $0.40 a day.
01:46:30.200 | "Well, do you know that the janitor has charged me with a lunch on Thursday?"
01:46:34.640 | He took his pen and made a correction on the bill, eliminating the $0.40 for the lunch
01:46:38.380 | he had never eaten, and handed the corrected bill to Mr. Chambers to be paid.
01:46:42.680 | The sheer magnitude of his fortune, he told Chauncey DePue, gave him no advantages over
01:46:47.240 | men of moderate wealth.
01:46:48.560 | "I have my house, my pictures, and my horses, and so do they.
01:46:52.440 | I can have a steam yacht if I want to, but it would give me no pleasure, and I don't
01:46:55.840 | care for it."
01:46:57.140 | On another occasion, he spoke of a neighbor, saying, "He isn't worth a hundredth part
01:47:00.740 | as much as I am, but he has more of the real pleasures of life than I have.
01:47:04.880 | His house is as comfortable as mine, even if it didn't cost so much.
01:47:08.520 | His team is about as good as mine, his opera box is next to mine, his health is better
01:47:12.800 | than mine, and he will probably outlive me, and he can trust his friends."
01:47:18.440 | Being the richest person in the world brought him, he said, nothing but anxiety.
01:47:23.840 | He enjoyed having some fine horses that grazed in a pasture he could see from his office
01:47:29.120 | in the Grand Central Depot.
01:47:31.160 | One friend noted that he was so fond of horses that he "probably would have slept with
01:47:35.160 | them" and did not, only through fear of the newspapers criticizing his eccentricity.
01:47:41.220 | And he was beginning to collect works of art.
01:47:43.960 | Other than that, there was nothing he wanted.
01:47:46.680 | His fortune was really nothing but a source of headaches.
01:47:50.060 | He believed that his health had been broken by the burden of managing his father's empire.
01:47:54.000 | "I feel pretty well," he would tell his doctors, "but can't depend upon myself."
01:47:57.840 | "What's the use, Sam, of having all this money," he said to his nephew, "if you cannot enjoy
01:48:03.400 | it?
01:48:04.400 | My wealth is no comfort to me if I have not good health behind it."
01:48:07.840 | He asked his nephew if he thought he looked old, as old as the Commodore right before
01:48:11.400 | he died.
01:48:12.860 | That was just how he felt, like an 83-year-old.
01:48:17.360 | By his early 60s, he was tired and worn out.
01:48:20.800 | "The care of $200 million is too great a load for my brain or back to bear," he confessed
01:48:26.360 | to his family.
01:48:27.360 | "It is enough to kill a man.
01:48:29.400 | I have no son whom I am willing to afflict with a terrible burden.
01:48:33.960 | There is no pleasure to be got out of it as an offset, no good of any kind.
01:48:38.680 | I have no real gratification or enjoyment of any sort, more than my neighbor on the
01:48:43.240 | next block who is worth only half a million.
01:48:46.120 | So when I lay down this heavy responsibility, I want my sons to divide it and share the
01:48:50.320 | worry which it will cost to keep it."
01:48:54.160 | That was written by a man who was astonishingly wealthy.
01:49:00.000 | Just recognize children cost money, and they're an investment, but they're not an investment
01:49:06.280 | without benefit.
01:49:08.720 | I don't know what's motivating for you, but having spent a long time doing financial planning,
01:49:14.480 | I've always found it a little bit sad when a man arrives at the end of his life and he
01:49:18.520 | has lots of money, and he doesn't have children and grandchildren to share it with.
01:49:23.760 | And again, I want to be clear, many people will not have children.
01:49:29.340 | Throughout society, actually, the percentage of people who don't have children has dropped
01:49:32.560 | a little bit, but it's always been lots of people who don't have children, couldn't have
01:49:36.800 | children, won't have children.
01:49:39.320 | That's fine.
01:49:41.640 | We all live our own life, and they can find other ways of connecting with human beings
01:49:46.160 | and being warm and generous and building relationships around them.
01:49:51.280 | But the natural normal pathway is that your family forms the core nucleus of your relationships.
01:49:58.000 | And if you have to choose between two things, being old and rich, really rich and alone,
01:50:08.820 | as compared to being old and somewhat rich and having, I don't know, two children and
01:50:14.360 | four grandchildren, or being old and just okay and having four children and 15 grandchildren
01:50:23.480 | or, you know, seven children and 20 grandchildren, which is more attractive to you?
01:50:32.800 | We all choose.
01:50:33.800 | But to me, it seems obvious that children are a form of wealth.
01:50:42.320 | They cost you money to maintain them, bring them up, but on the whole, the benefit is
01:50:48.520 | much greater than the cost.
01:50:51.320 | And that's something that has generally only rarely ever been questioned.
01:50:57.080 | I couldn't account for—it's such an obvious thing that in most societies, it's always
01:51:03.200 | been accounted for.
01:51:04.640 | It's always been obvious and normal.
01:51:07.280 | Most men in societies that have wealth and power have or want lots of children.
01:51:12.560 | It's only in the last 75 years, I guess, where that's been completely transformed.
01:51:20.080 | And it's been completely transformed by Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood and her racist
01:51:27.160 | plans to take children away from those who were not worthy.
01:51:32.760 | It's been confirmed—it's been the whole like anti-child movement of the predictions
01:51:38.200 | about global famine and all the stuff, and all of that stuff is so thoroughly debunked.
01:51:43.040 | And now we're going to face probably the opposite problems, and it's probably not
01:51:46.120 | going to be as bad as, you know, Malthus—it's probably not going to be as bad and the opposite
01:51:51.380 | as Malthus predicted it would be if we had too many people.
01:51:55.880 | But the point is it's a challenge.
01:51:58.720 | So you have a choice to make in life.
01:52:01.240 | And all I want to do is to say that if you desire to have children, don't let money
01:52:05.400 | be the impediment.
01:52:06.400 | The money can work out.
01:52:08.240 | You should prepare yourselves.
01:52:10.000 | Again, I'm not encouraging reckless fecundity.
01:52:13.400 | I want you to be responsible.
01:52:17.240 | But if you're listening at this point in a podcast, there's not a doubt in my mind
01:52:20.680 | that you've already done that.
01:52:22.800 | Nobody who's irresponsible would ever get an hour and 50 minutes deep into this podcast
01:52:28.600 | and still be here.
01:52:30.200 | So if you desire to have children, have a baby.
01:52:33.640 | And if you already have children, I think what makes sense in today's world is maybe
01:52:37.840 | have one more.
01:52:39.680 | What I mean by that is there's a big difference between having, I don't know, two children
01:52:45.120 | and ten children.
01:52:46.120 | I don't think everyone should just go through life and have as many babies as they can.
01:52:49.760 | That's not what I'm advocating for.
01:52:51.760 | But in general, if you are the kind of person who has children and you are not sure do we
01:52:59.200 | want to have another baby or not, have one more.
01:53:02.780 | Have one more and then stop.
01:53:04.920 | And I can't imagine you would regret it.
01:53:07.720 | I really can't.
01:53:08.720 | And there's two comments on this that are important.
01:53:12.240 | Comment number one is that historically this is where the growth of society has come from.
01:53:17.120 | With my recent interest in demography, I've learned that in general, again, our reproductive
01:53:23.760 | rates are very similar to what they've always been.
01:53:27.280 | A percentage of people that never reproduce, a percentage of people that reproduce with
01:53:30.960 | one or two children, it's very similar as to historical rates.
01:53:35.720 | What is different and why our populations are declining now is the percentage of people
01:53:41.840 | who don't have four, five, six, seven children.
01:53:47.240 | That basically people who in days past would have had six today have three.
01:53:54.280 | People who in days past would have had eight today have four and stop.
01:53:59.120 | And that's the difference in the population decline because instead of the family with
01:54:03.160 | eight, the woman that bears eight offsetting the two women who don't bear any, today the
01:54:10.200 | woman who in times past might have had eight today has three or four.
01:54:17.720 | And so there's not the offset to the woman who never has children.
01:54:21.920 | And that's basically the demographic change.
01:54:24.400 | Now, I don't think we should try to build our lifestyle upon demography.
01:54:28.640 | You're not going to single-handedly save the world by having 19 children, that's silly.
01:54:34.720 | But on the whole, we want to build cultures that have more children.
01:54:38.600 | And the big point I would say as a father of five is that the first baby is the hardest,
01:54:43.520 | the second baby is hard, and the third and following are not so hard.
01:54:47.280 | And people, they're pretty easy and they bring multiplying fun and joy to your life and they
01:54:53.920 | only have marginal costs.
01:54:56.200 | That your parenting style is different after you have two children because you're no longer
01:55:01.640 | evenly matched with two parents, two children, so your parenting style is different.
01:55:05.120 | The children have playmates, they actually take less time from you.
01:55:09.680 | Having five children is, once they get past toddler stages, because toddlers are still
01:55:13.440 | demanding, having five children is, I would say probably in some ways less demanding than
01:55:18.520 | having one or two because I don't play with them as much, my wife doesn't play with them
01:55:23.160 | as much.
01:55:24.160 | I don't think that makes for a worse childhood.
01:55:27.080 | We still are very involved and active.
01:55:28.920 | I don't think that's something that I would need to feel guilty about, it's just different.
01:55:33.800 | And you have a lot more help.
01:55:35.720 | And so now with a toddler and times past with a toddler, it was either me or my wife following
01:55:40.320 | the toddler around and keeping the toddler safe, now I have children follow the toddler
01:55:43.720 | around and keep the toddler safe.
01:55:45.100 | Not in all circumstances, but if it's five o'clock and we're making dinner and getting
01:55:50.600 | everything ready, then I can have the children, say, take turns, watch the toddler, keep the
01:55:55.120 | toddler alive.
01:55:56.720 | And with a little bit of supervision from me, it's easier.
01:55:59.160 | And so I think that it seems to me that people who know they don't want to have children,
01:56:03.840 | they're pretty clear on that.
01:56:05.640 | People who know they want to have children are also pretty clear on that.
01:56:08.660 | But it seems to me there's an enormous population of people who appreciate having children,
01:56:14.840 | but they feel like they can't responsibly have one more.
01:56:18.440 | They have two and three would be too much, or we have three, but five would be too much.
01:56:23.640 | And I don't think that that is something that you should feel.
01:56:26.040 | I think that you'll be happier at the end of your life with three instead of one, if
01:56:31.280 | you were the kind that knows that I value children.
01:56:34.680 | I think you'd be better off with five instead of three.
01:56:38.160 | And slightly marginal cost, and a lot more benefit.
01:56:44.920 | Good friend of mine, I have a couple of friends whose children have committed suicide.
01:56:54.440 | And I've often reflected on it since I had a sister that died when she was a teenager.
01:57:03.120 | Not by suicide.
01:57:04.120 | She was sick.
01:57:05.120 | She had a seizure.
01:57:06.120 | I've always expected, I kind of still expect, I've always expected that one of my children
01:57:11.680 | will die, be due to this.
01:57:14.980 | But there are a few deaths more painful than suicide.
01:57:18.740 | And I have one friend who had one child, and he committed suicide when he was about 20.
01:57:26.360 | And my friend had poured his life into him.
01:57:31.840 | And when his son committed suicide, it was obviously quite disruptive.
01:57:37.360 | And he and his wife, they had one son.
01:57:40.320 | And I don't know whether they wanted more, I don't know.
01:57:44.480 | But it just struck me as particularly catastrophic when they had one child who died.
01:57:51.400 | I have another friend who has had eight children, and one child committed suicide.
01:57:57.880 | And I was struck by what a comfort it is to, as you grieve the loss of one child, to have
01:58:06.880 | other children.
01:58:08.280 | And that it's just a different experience.
01:58:12.080 | Why am I saying this?
01:58:13.840 | It's probably an obvious point, but we don't plan for death in today's world.
01:58:18.400 | We just kind of assume that everything is going to work out great.
01:58:21.000 | And I think about, you know, there was a tragic story from Florida recently of parents were
01:58:28.920 | down on the beach with their two children, a boy and a girl, and they were digging a
01:58:33.720 | hole on the beach, and the hole caved in, and I believe their boy was killed, suffocated
01:58:38.320 | underneath the sand just very quickly.
01:58:41.240 | Tragic story.
01:58:42.240 | And I just thought, what a tragedy, how terrible.
01:58:45.600 | And as a parent, I think we should talk about those things, because it's always going to
01:58:51.400 | be tragic.
01:58:53.040 | But I just think of my parents.
01:58:54.760 | My parents had seven children, one died.
01:58:58.020 | That was difficult.
01:58:59.020 | It was tragic.
01:59:01.560 | But they continued to enjoy all of the benefits of having six children and 16 grandchildren,
01:59:09.240 | and what a blessing.
01:59:13.160 | And it may be the same for you and for me.
01:59:16.520 | So I guess what I'm driving at is, I think if you want to have children and you like
01:59:23.520 | children, and you're thinking, "Can I afford it?", just have one more.
01:59:27.460 | One more and see.
01:59:28.980 | And you'll know when it's enough, too much.
01:59:31.580 | But if you're just on the fence, let the scale tilt in the favor of one more baby, and recognize
01:59:38.040 | that to the extent that there is a heavier cost, you'll probably be grateful at the end
01:59:43.160 | of your life.
01:59:44.440 | Challenges, we can't know.
01:59:47.080 | You got to have your babies when you're young.
01:59:48.840 | There's a time in life in which you can have babies, and there's a time in life in which
01:59:51.320 | you can't have babies, and the decisions that you make go far.
01:59:55.160 | So I hope that I've struck a proper tone.
01:59:57.920 | Just to be clear, I don't judge anybody for not having children.
02:00:00.880 | I don't judge anybody for having few children.
02:00:02.840 | I don't know any of the reasons why.
02:00:04.880 | That's between you and your spouse, and God, and your plans.
02:00:10.200 | That's up to you.
02:00:11.200 | I don't do that.
02:00:12.200 | But I just wanted to encourage in today's podcast that money is important in having
02:00:18.120 | children, but it needs to be clearly specified what specifically is important about it.
02:00:24.720 | What do you need to do?
02:00:26.000 | If your financial goals that are keeping you from having babies that you want to have are
02:00:29.760 | things that are going to take you more than a year or two to reach, I think you're probably
02:00:33.960 | better off setting those aside and working your way through with the burden and responsibility
02:00:39.600 | of children as compared to not.
02:00:42.080 | And if you've been trying to think about how to be responsible and not have too many babies,
02:00:47.480 | I think that you can release yourself from that, and my encouragement would be have one
02:00:52.080 | more.
02:00:53.080 | Thank you for listening to today's podcast.
02:01:19.320 | I'll see you next time.