RPF0656-12_Ways_to_Invest_in_Your

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00:00:14.760 | ♪ These are a few of my favorite things ♪

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00:00:30.360 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:37.960 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:41.400 | My name is Joshua. I am your host.

00:00:43.640 | And today I'm going to talk with you about some interesting investments that you can make for your children.

00:00:50.940 | I've got a list of a dozen that I'm going to go through in today's show.

00:00:54.680 | I don't pretend that these investments are all exclusive.

00:00:59.120 | They're just some interesting ideas.

00:01:00.820 | And my hope is that these ideas will be creative and that they will spark your own personal creativity

00:01:07.760 | to think about your life and your children and what investments you would like to make for them.

00:01:13.600 | One thing I have observed in my work as a financial planner is most of us have a distinct lack of creativity

00:01:24.140 | when it comes to the opportunities that are available for us in life.

00:01:30.520 | Where I first started to experience this was when I worked as a retirement planner.

00:01:36.660 | And I would ask people what their idea was as to when they would like to retire, if they wanted to retire.

00:01:43.860 | And the vast majority of the time I would hear the answer of 65.

00:01:48.860 | Well, it's not because there's anything magical about the age of 65. It's because that was the traditional social security retirement age.

00:01:54.940 | That was when many pensions traditionally kicked in.

00:01:58.380 | Another example that I've experienced is when I start talking about people with what they'd like to do when they retire.

00:02:03.480 | And the vast majority of the time people will say, travel, spend more time with my children, things like that.

00:02:09.160 | And those are good things. I like traveling. I like spending time with my children.

00:02:12.860 | But I've observed that it's almost like a script that you go on this life script.

00:02:17.400 | Now, we live in an interesting time wherein many of the traditional life scripts are being broken.

00:02:23.900 | There are more opportunities now for you and for me than there have been for the vast majority of people throughout the entire history of the human species.

00:02:33.340 | So there are more things that we can do.

00:02:36.340 | And yet usually we don't think of doing things until somebody brings the idea along our way.

00:02:42.760 | If you go out into the general population, you'll find that people largely do jobs that they do because somebody put it in front of them.

00:02:53.200 | For example, well, I'm a veterinarian because my uncle is a veterinarian.

00:02:58.400 | Or I'm a carpenter because my dad was a carpenter.

00:03:01.700 | Or I bought a pizza restaurant because I knew somebody that bought a pizza restaurant.

00:03:08.200 | Very rarely do any of us try to go out and take a broad scale survey of the opportunities that are in front of us and then choose which opportunities are right for us.

00:03:19.200 | Rather, we usually react or respond to what we see other people doing.

00:03:24.400 | And so I think there's a great deal of value in sharing our experiences one with another in the hopes that we can stimulate the creative juices of other people.

00:03:34.940 | Many of the things that I have done in my life that I'm very proud of have come as a result of my seeing someone else do those things.

00:03:44.440 | And now as the cost of communication and the barriers of communication have fallen so that I can communicate with you in this unique and interesting format, we can be exposed to more interesting ideas.

00:03:56.440 | So I'm going to expose you to some of these interesting ideas that come from my personal lists.

00:04:00.140 | They're not original to me, I'm sure, but in hopes that they will inspire you to think about what investments you might like to make for your children.

00:04:09.140 | In general, parents have a fairly consistent set of desires and goals for their children.

00:04:17.140 | Most of us, for example, want our children to be happy.

00:04:21.540 | It's a fairly normal human emotion.

00:04:23.300 | Most of us want to be happy ourselves.

00:04:25.880 | And so we want our children to be happy.

00:04:28.140 | Most of us want our children to be healthy.

00:04:30.140 | We say, as long as it's healthy, we're glad to have a baby.

00:04:33.140 | Most of us want our children to be successful.

00:04:37.140 | We have these things in common.

00:04:39.140 | Now, you might have more ideas than that.

00:04:42.140 | Most of us do.

00:04:44.140 | But in general, we share the same desire that our progeny would be successful, happy, well-adjusted.

00:04:50.140 | We want them to be wealthy.

00:04:51.140 | We want them to experience the good things in life that we've experienced.

00:04:54.140 | But when it comes time to connecting our money to these goals that we have, it can become a little bit more difficult.

00:05:02.140 | For example, I want my child to be happy.

00:05:06.140 | Well, how can I help that to happen?

00:05:11.140 | It may mean that I put my child in circumstances that are likely to lead to their general happiness and well-being.

00:05:21.140 | I think that's something that all of us as parents want to do.

00:05:23.140 | We want to give our children privilege.

00:05:25.140 | We want to put them in good circumstances.

00:05:28.140 | And so one way that we might spend money on helping our children to be happy would be to move from a bad neighborhood where people are unhappy to a better neighborhood where people are happier.

00:05:40.140 | Or from a bad country where there are no opportunities to a better country where there are more opportunities.

00:05:46.140 | And so these things involve money.

00:05:48.140 | And as you talk to parents from around the world who love their children and are helping to have their children live a better life, you'll find that they make these big changes in their life.

00:06:01.140 | Now, for many of us who live in prosperous first world countries, for many of us who experience and enjoy great wealth, we don't think so much about those things.

00:06:12.140 | Most of us who listen, most of my listeners who listen to this show, most of us live in perfectly safe, perfectly adequate living situations.

00:06:21.140 | Most of us live in a country that we want to live in.

00:06:24.140 | Most of us have already achieved that basic foundation.

00:06:28.140 | And so it becomes more difficult to now look at our children and to look at our money and say, "How do I invest in my children?"

00:06:36.140 | But yet it's even more important.

00:06:38.140 | Now, the standard financial planning script for this investment is, of course, suited to things that can be sold, specifically college education.

00:06:50.140 | If you ask most financial advisors how you can invest for your children, the common answer that you'll get is simply, "Well, I can help you set up a college fund."

00:06:59.140 | Now, there's nothing wrong with a college fund.

00:07:01.140 | And I think a college education is an excellent thing to acquire.

00:07:05.140 | If a child, especially if a child has a high cognitive ability, a college education could be a tremendous and very useful and important part of their overall formation.

00:07:15.140 | I am persuaded that most people who are capable, intellectually, cognitively capable of academic success should pursue a college education.

00:07:28.140 | Way back in episode 227, I did a show called "The Five Benefits of College and Radical Ways to Exploit Them,"

00:07:34.140 | where I talked about the five major benefits of college that I see and how college can really fit those things.

00:07:40.140 | Then I talked about ways that you could get those five benefits even without college.

00:07:44.140 | So I think that college is important, but I don't think it's a particularly important financial planning objective.

00:07:51.140 | And I think that if you have a limited number of dollars to invest, that there are some other investments that could be far more productive than setting aside money in a college fund.

00:08:02.140 | In my opinion, it is setting aside money in a college fund is one of the least efficient ways for you and me as parents to accomplish our objectives of helping our children to experience the success that we hope for them to experience.

00:08:18.140 | Now, setting aside money in a college fund is a very convenient way for the financial planning industry and for the college industry to help you to feel like you're doing good things for your child.

00:08:31.140 | And it's fine. It can be a good thing.

00:08:34.140 | But it's not necessarily the most efficient way for you to achieve your personal goals.

00:08:40.140 | I think there are much better options and opportunities.

00:08:44.140 | In a recent episode, a Q&A show, I talked about the value of earlier forms of education.

00:08:51.140 | For example, if you have $50,000 to spend and you're thinking about spending it either on a college degree or if you're thinking about spending it on a higher quality primary and secondary school education, I think you should spend it on the primary and secondary school education.

00:09:10.140 | I think it would be much more effective than if it's spent on the college degree.

00:09:13.140 | And that's an example of the type of thinking that I like to talk about that I believe is valid.

00:09:18.140 | I haven't had any good defeaters for these arguments presented to me.

00:09:22.140 | And I hope by showing you how you have to think outside of the things that can be purchased from the financial industry, you can get better results.

00:09:30.140 | I'm hoping that that will impact you.

00:09:32.140 | That's the preamble now for a list of things for you to think about.

00:09:37.140 | So I'm going to give you just my list of a dozen different things that I think you can invest some money in.

00:09:43.140 | These certainly don't fit the typical tradition of investments.

00:09:47.140 | I'm not saying buy a house for your child, although I think that could be excellent.

00:09:50.140 | I'm just talking about ways that you could spend money to help your child learn some interesting life lessons.

00:09:56.140 | And these are things that my wife and I are doing for our children.

00:10:01.140 | Number one, I think the most important investment, and by the way, this list is not in what I consider to be level of importance from most important to least important.

00:10:14.140 | But I consider the most important investment to make into your child's education is that your child will know how to learn.

00:10:32.140 | The basic life skill is knowing how to learn.

00:10:36.140 | I don't think that's necessarily the most important thing you could do for your child.

00:10:39.140 | In my opinion, some of the most important things you could do for your child would be to make sure that your child is a stable, normal person who doesn't experience the fears and the phobias and kind of the psychological unrest that many people experience.

00:11:01.140 | I think you can provide that through things like a stable home environment, through a well-crafted worldview, by protecting them from outside risk and danger.

00:11:10.140 | There are many things there.

00:11:11.140 | But in terms of their education, I think the number one most important thing is knowing how to learn.

00:11:18.140 | If your child knows how to learn, they can unlock the secret of life because we live in a world where almost any problem can be overcome by a person who knows how to learn and who knows how to solve problems.

00:11:36.140 | Knowing how to learn is the core skill of success.

00:11:41.140 | It's that bedrock foundational skill that, if applied, can help you and me as individuals and our children as individuals to overcome almost all of their other problems.

00:11:53.140 | Let's say that your child is not doing well with money.

00:11:57.140 | They find themselves broke.

00:11:58.140 | Too much month at the end of the money.

00:12:00.140 | Well, this is a very solvable problem.

00:12:04.140 | But in order for your child to solve this problem, if they find themselves in the unfortunate circumstance of having too much month at the end of the money, they will have to figure out how to learn their way through it.

00:12:16.140 | They'll have to figure out how to sit down and say, "What is my basic problem?"

00:12:21.140 | Now, they might not know what their basic problem is.

00:12:23.140 | Their basic problem might be that they're just spending too much money.

00:12:26.140 | Well, in that case, they're going to have to learn how to exercise control over their expenditures.

00:12:32.140 | They're going to have to learn how to develop self-discipline so that they learn how to say no to their impulse purchases.

00:12:39.140 | They're going to have to learn how to get better deals on things.

00:12:42.140 | They're going to have to learn how to change their circumstances so they can live at a lower amount of money.

00:12:47.140 | These are all skills that can be learned if your child knows how to learn.

00:12:51.140 | Or perhaps they're going to look at their situation and they're going to determine that, "My problem is not a character problem.

00:12:58.140 | My problem is not that I'm spending too much.

00:13:00.140 | My problem is that I'm not making any money or I'm not making enough money."

00:13:03.140 | And now your child has to think about, "How do I learn a skill that I can market in the marketplace so that I can earn more money?"

00:13:12.140 | And then they're going to have to learn that process.

00:13:14.140 | They're going to have to learn how to start a business and market that business more effectively so that they can serve more customers and earn more money.

00:13:21.140 | Or perhaps they're going to have to learn a new skill.

00:13:23.140 | They're going to have to learn enough to go and become certified, to go and get a better job, go and be paid more money for something.

00:13:30.140 | But these are all problems that can be solved by learning.

00:13:33.140 | And the basic core skill that a young man or woman needs to succeed is knowing how to learn, to identify a problem, and then learning and knowing how to learn their way through it.

00:13:46.140 | Now you can test me in this.

00:13:48.140 | But I think that if you go to most employers who have jobs to offer and you say to them, "Would you rather have somebody work for you who is very good at learning the skills that they need to succeed?

00:14:06.140 | Or would you rather have somebody that has a long list of credentials?"

00:14:09.140 | If they had to choose between those two things, I think usually they would go with the person who has the basic character quality of knowing how to learn, the basic skill of knowing how to learn.

00:14:19.140 | And this is especially important as the pace of societal change increases.

00:14:25.140 | You and I live in a world in which we can expect our lives and our careers to change far faster than those of our grandparents.

00:14:37.140 | If we were to go back a few generations, what you would find is a father would teach their son about the same skills that they learned from their father, and their lives would pretty much look very similar.

00:14:50.140 | But that is not the case for you and for me, and it's not going to be the case for our children.

00:14:56.140 | And so the basic skill that they need to have is knowing how to learn.

00:15:01.140 | Now, I want to give you some ideas as I go through these topics of how do you learn this.

00:15:07.140 | And I don't know, you should know that I don't know the perfect answers to all of these.

00:15:11.140 | And I'm just going to give you some cursory thoughts to stimulate your thinking on it.

00:15:15.140 | But how are you going to help your child learn how to learn?

00:15:20.140 | In my mind, the way to do this is your child has to face a personal challenge and then learn their way through it.

00:15:30.140 | Your child has to have a personal goal and learn their way to its accomplishment.

00:15:35.140 | Your child has to face a set of tasks and learn their way through that set of tasks.

00:15:43.140 | And what I've observed is that these are skills that can be taught, but they're not skills that are often discussed or actually taught.

00:15:52.140 | This morning, I was working with my eldest son on his math facts.

00:16:00.140 | We've been drilling him with his math facts.

00:16:02.140 | I'm convinced that the basic foundation for young children for mathematical skill is to start with an excellent foundation of really comprehensive knowledge of the math facts.

00:16:13.140 | And so that's where we spend a lot of time.

00:16:15.140 | My son seems very skilled with mathematics.

00:16:18.140 | I think unusually so.

00:16:20.140 | We'll see if that stays to be the same, but he seems very skilled with mathematics.

00:16:24.140 | And so I've been working hard with him.

00:16:25.140 | But what I've observed is that he doesn't know how to work with math flashcards.

00:16:30.140 | Nobody has taught him how to work with math flashcards.

00:16:33.140 | I can give him a stack of addition flashcards, and he doesn't know what to do with it because he hasn't been taught how to actually learn those math flashcards.

00:16:43.140 | Now, I have a lot of experience working with flashcards.

00:16:46.140 | I know how to work with flashcards.

00:16:48.140 | You probably do, too.

00:16:49.140 | I know how to sit down with a stack of flashcards, go through them, sorting the ones that I know very well from the ones that I either don't know or don't know well.

00:16:58.140 | Then I know how to go to the smaller pile and drill the ones that I don't know well until I know them well.

00:17:03.140 | Then I know how to come back the next day and drill those again, and I have to come back the next day and drill those again until I know them very, very well.

00:17:09.140 | I know how to memorize facts.

00:17:11.140 | I've done a lot of it in my academic career.

00:17:13.140 | But my son doesn't.

00:17:15.140 | So he needs to be taught how to learn flashcards.

00:17:20.140 | Now, I think most good teachers, especially in an academic environment, probably want to teach these things.

00:17:28.140 | But I've observed that we often don't.

00:17:31.140 | Think back to your academic career.

00:17:33.140 | Did you ever have a class on study habits?

00:17:36.140 | Did you ever have a class on effective tools of studying to learn how to learn?

00:17:41.140 | Those of us who did well in academics usually picked some stuff up along the way, but I don't remember anybody actually ever instructing me in exactly how to learn except my parents.

00:17:52.140 | And yet the instruction makes a big difference.

00:17:54.140 | I'll give you a personal example.

00:17:56.140 | I was homeschooled up through my middle school years, and then I went into a more traditional mainstream school.

00:18:03.140 | And one area when I made that transition, I was extremely behind in the mainstream traditional school in terms of my own math skills.

00:18:12.140 | I was ahead in many other areas, but I was behind in math skills.

00:18:16.140 | And I was placed into a more advanced class, and I got a D my first semester in school.

00:18:21.140 | I didn't know what to do.

00:18:24.140 | But my dad came along, saw my D, and said, "Joshua, this is not acceptable."

00:18:29.140 | And so he took me aside, and he taught me how to do math.

00:18:33.140 | And we had a number of requirements.

00:18:34.140 | The first thing that we talked is he taught me how to do math problems.

00:18:37.140 | Nobody had ever taught me how to do a math problem, how to sit down, how to carefully write out every stage of the problem, how to rewrite the problem every single stage so I never missed a step.

00:18:48.140 | Yes, it was time-consuming, but I learned how to do the math processes by not taking the shortcuts.

00:18:53.140 | By doing them properly, I learned how to check my work, I learned how to be more careful.

00:18:59.140 | We went over every single test, and he showed me the things that I was getting wrong where I didn't understand how to do math.

00:19:06.140 | And so I went from a D, then to a C, to a B, and then from then on I got As in math, and I was caught up.

00:19:12.140 | But it only happened because someone took me aside and taught me how to learn math.

00:19:17.140 | Now, in hindsight, what I look back on is I look back on the many times in my life where I didn't go and seek out the help that was available for me if I had gone and done it.

00:19:27.140 | I didn't know how to go and ask people for help.

00:19:29.140 | I didn't know how to go and ask people for insight.

00:19:32.140 | And yet that skill of knowing how to learn includes knowing who to ask for help, knowing how to go and get help.

00:19:42.140 | So, think about how you can help your child learn how to learn.

00:19:47.140 | I think this is where, when we think about educational philosophies, I think this is where a good amount of self-directed learning is important.

00:19:56.140 | That we teach our child how to take an interest that they have, and then how to approach that topic and learn about that topic.

00:20:04.140 | I was really stumbled in my own education by being part of a mainstream schooling environment where everything that I was learning came from a teacher.

00:20:15.140 | And it took me a long time until later that I learned that I didn't have to sit and wait on a teacher to come and teach me something.

00:20:22.140 | I could go and learn about anything I wanted to learn about.

00:20:25.140 | And there's a process to that.

00:20:27.140 | There's a process of taking a survey of the subject, of laying out some initial goals, of developing some appropriate materials, of starting to use those materials, of working your way through it.

00:20:38.140 | I personally have an interest in studying languages.

00:20:41.140 | And what I've noticed in reading a lot of polyglots is the basic step that a polyglot faces is they have to learn how to learn a language.

00:20:50.140 | And once they've learned how to learn a language a time or two, then they can go on and they simply repeat that process again and again in their life.

00:20:57.140 | And that's why when somebody speaks six or eight or ten languages, it's not six or eight or ten times harder than it was for them to go from one to two.

00:21:07.140 | It's certainly more work, but they've learned the process.

00:21:11.140 | We'll take this to finance.

00:21:12.140 | What about business?

00:21:13.140 | Somebody who started a business can often replicate a certain level of success.

00:21:19.140 | Somebody who's grown a business can be taken from one business and placed into another business and can replicate that success.

00:21:27.140 | Take it from here on your own, but I'm convinced that one of the most important investments for you and me to make in our children is teaching them how to learn.

00:21:42.140 | I focus a lot on that with the process of trying to point out to them and teach them how to go about the process of learning.

00:21:48.140 | But I don't think it can be done unless they actually do it themselves, have some personal challenges that they're not equipped for, and then learn their way through those challenges,

00:21:58.140 | have some personal goals that they don't know how to meet, and then learn their way through the accomplishment of those goals.

00:22:06.140 | Think about how you can help your child know how to learn.

00:22:10.140 | Second thing I think it's important to invest money into is helping your child to learn how to fail.

00:22:21.140 | As I look at my own life and as I study the lives of people that I admire and respect, I'm convinced that knowing and understanding the skills of failure is a vital component of success.

00:22:37.140 | When you start to dig into success literature and you read people who have experienced great success in their various endeavors,

00:22:43.140 | what you find is that one of the things they talk about is the importance of failure.

00:22:49.140 | One of the things that they observe is how important it is to fail, fail faster, fail often.

00:22:54.140 | That most things you're going to do, you're going to fail.

00:22:56.140 | But yet as you fail your way through things, you eventually find the things that you can do to succeed.

00:23:02.140 | So a core skill that I want to develop in my life and practice, and a core skill that I want to help my children to develop and practice, is knowing how to fail.

00:23:12.140 | I must here concede that I am somewhat stymied as to how I can invest money into helping my child to know how to fail.

00:23:21.140 | It seems to me that this is more a matter of being with them as they walk through failures,

00:23:27.140 | being with them as they face things that are beyond their ability, and then coaching them through the psychology of that,

00:23:34.140 | and being a helping hand and a shoulder to cry on than it is about a financial investment.

00:23:40.140 | But how I do think of it is I do think that there's a financial component here in terms of our willingness to do things

00:23:46.140 | and to spend money on things that we know our children are going to fail at.

00:23:50.140 | As I learn as a parent of young children, I observe that one of the most important things that I have to do is I have to allow my children to do things I know they're going to fail at.

00:24:02.140 | I want to avoid catastrophic failure.

00:24:04.140 | I want to avoid them failing in some way that could bring risk of death or risk of physical harm or perhaps catastrophic psychological harm.

00:24:15.140 | But they need to fail, and a child who is taught how to fail well without being personally destroyed is going to experience more success.

00:24:27.140 | Now, the best I've come up with on this in terms of how we can invest money into this I think relates to a financial and social safety net that we can provide for our children.

00:24:40.140 | When you study the stories of people who enjoy great financial success, who make a lot of money, one of the things that you'll often find is you often seem to find the support of parents.

00:24:57.140 | This is one of the things that those of us who come from wealthier backgrounds have, an advantage that many of us who come from wealthier backgrounds have over people that come from poorer backgrounds,

00:25:08.140 | is that a person who comes from a wealthy background often knows that, "Hey, if I fail at this, I can fall back upon my parents.

00:25:16.140 | They'll give me a room to sleep in.

00:25:19.140 | They'll give me a car to drive when they won't let me go hungry."

00:25:22.140 | And I think it's important that our children know that they can always trust and count on us to provide that safety net for them.

00:25:29.140 | Now, there's a balance here.

00:25:31.140 | There's a balance between creating a child who's dependent on the economic outpatient care of their parent versus a child that's independent.

00:25:39.140 | But that social net, that safety net, I think does provide a very important foundation under a child, under their willingness to take chances.

00:25:52.140 | If you think about the worst that can happen, those of us who come from families that support us, those of us who come from families that are invested in our success, I think if you say, "What would you do if you took away all your money, if I took away all your money?"

00:26:08.140 | Those of us who come from a strong family background would say, "I'd go home and I'd start again.

00:26:14.140 | I'd go back.

00:26:15.140 | I'd let Mom and Dad help me.

00:26:16.140 | I'd stay in their basement.

00:26:18.140 | I'd park an RV trailer out behind their house.

00:26:21.140 | I'd ask for some money and I'd start again."

00:26:24.140 | And so, although I don't know how to invest money into teaching your child how to fail other than being willing to purchase materials or enroll them in things that they're probably not going to be well-suited to and then allowing them to fail, I do think that making sure that our children know that we're there as a safety net is a fundamental, important thing

00:26:49.140 | in helping to build their personal confidence and their willingness to try difficult things.

00:26:56.140 | Number three investment I believe you can make for children is to enable and to instill in our children a love of reading.

00:27:07.140 | I thought about putting this one connected to how to learn because certainly it is very connected, but I felt like I wanted to lead with how to fail because I think that's more important.

00:27:16.140 | But in the skill of learning, the basic skill is knowing how to read.

00:27:23.140 | And what's remarkable to me is as the general literacy rate declines across at least the US American population, as the appreciation of the value and enjoyment of books seems to be in significant decline, as the more enticing alternative technologies of social media, video, etc.

00:27:50.140 | seem to be taking away from many of us from our time that we spend reading, I'm convinced that even more important that the value that can come in a book is just that much more important.

00:28:05.140 | I was recently speaking with a 15-year-old young man and I was talking with him about skills of success.

00:28:13.140 | I was talking to him about how to be financially independent by the time he was 30 and I described to him and I spent a good bit of time with him just simply describing to him how if he would simply read and learn his way around things that he was interested in and involved in, he would quickly distinguish himself from almost any other person in his field because his peers do not read.

00:28:38.140 | Now, unfortunately, he doesn't really read himself and I was trying to encourage him and motivate him to read.

00:28:43.140 | But one of the skills that I've relied on again and again and again is simply reading.

00:28:47.140 | And I've taught myself vast amounts of knowledge on subjects that I've never had personal interaction with an individual on simply through reading.

00:28:59.140 | And back to that skill of knowing how to read -- sorry, of knowing how to learn, knowing how to read and loving reading is, I can convince, the cornerstone of knowing how to learn.

00:29:13.140 | Certainly, you can learn through experience, but it's a completely inefficient process for you to have to go through the slow and painful process of learning through your own experience when you can synthesize the lessons learned from the experience of other people.

00:29:30.140 | And that's what you do in books. Even if you just read biographies and autobiographies of people that you admire, you can see the lessons printed in their lives and shortcut your own need to pass through those experiences.

00:29:47.140 | If you learn to trust the wisdom that other people have to share and you'll learn how to get that wisdom, you can shortcut your own experiences.

00:29:54.140 | There's no reason why you or I or our children have to make all of the mistakes that our forebears have made.

00:30:01.140 | Our forebears have made the mistakes. They've written down the mistakes and they've described why they were a mistake so that we can understand the circumstances that we should be looking for to avoid those certain mistakes.

00:30:13.140 | But yet, the man who knows how to read and does not read is as poor as the one who cannot read. I butchered that famous quote, but you get the idea.

00:30:24.140 | The knowledge can be there. And yet, it doesn't matter if it's sitting there if you haven't gone and looked for it.

00:30:34.140 | The vast majority of libraries that I visit are largely empty. Many of the bookstores that I visit don't have that many people in there.

00:30:45.140 | And yet, I can't think of a more productive use of money than the purchase and acquisition of books.

00:30:52.140 | Now, back to knowing how to read. One of the skills that I've developed over the years in developing a love of reading in our children,

00:30:58.140 | one of the skills that I've developed over the years is the ability to read quickly and broadly.

00:31:04.140 | And this is where people who don't have a basic skill of reading that has been honed over the years really, really suffer.

00:31:12.140 | A good friend of mine, very smart, modestly successful, a normal person, and he possesses the basic skills of reading.

00:31:21.140 | He can sit down with a paragraph of written English text, and he can read it with decent proficiency.

00:31:29.140 | He'll pronounce the words correctly. He's not a stupid person. He has a bachelor's degree.

00:31:34.140 | But it's painful for him to pick up a book and do a survey of the book because he can't read quickly.

00:31:41.140 | He's never kind of crossed over from that basic, I don't know all the words in the reading, the proper lingo to use,

00:31:51.140 | but he's never crossed over from the basic decoding of words and developed the ability to grasp paragraphs, pages, and chapters with minimal involvement.

00:32:02.140 | And that's a skill that I think can be developed, but it can only be developed if you help your child to cross over from knowing how to read

00:32:10.140 | to loving to read.

00:32:14.140 | For me, it was simply because I crossed over from knowing how to read to love to read by reading a lot of fluffy things that I enjoyed,

00:32:21.140 | lots of novels, lots of stories, lots of engaging things.

00:32:24.140 | And so then the actual mechanics of reading became completely second nature.

00:32:30.140 | It's just I don't even think about the mechanics of reading, at least in English.

00:32:33.140 | But then once you have that, you can then bring that skill to areas that actually make a difference in your life.

00:32:40.140 | And you can learn how to do some topical reading where you have a subject that you're interested in or a certain problem that you're facing.

00:32:49.140 | And then you can quickly digest a dozen or two books on a certain subject.

00:32:54.140 | And this is one of the basic skills of solving many of life's problems, that many of life's problems have been experienced by other people.

00:33:02.140 | And so if you're experiencing a problem that someone else has experienced and you go and look for that problem,

00:33:07.140 | for the solutions that other people have found and have developed about those problems,

00:33:12.140 | and then you learn how to do a syntopical study of an issue, you can very quickly develop an expertise in a certain subject that will serve you well in your life.

00:33:24.140 | And on almost any issue, you can do this.

00:33:26.140 | Now, there are a few issues, a few subjects that still stymie me.

00:33:30.140 | I have some things I have, but frankly, the reason they stymie me is simply I haven't read my way through them yet.

00:33:35.140 | And so if there's a skill that you can help a child to develop, a skill of academic skill,

00:33:41.140 | helping them to develop a love of reading, I'm convinced is a basic cornerstone of success.

00:33:48.140 | Now, certainly there are people who don't love to read who've experienced great success in their life.

00:33:53.140 | I've listened to them.

00:33:54.140 | Some of them are very loud about their opinion, and they poo-poo the learning how to read.

00:33:58.140 | But what I've never heard is I've never heard a person who has been in that situation where I've actually become convinced that they couldn't have experienced a higher degree of success if they had developed the skill and knowledge of learning how to read and loving to read.

00:34:13.140 | Reading doesn't actually make much of a change in your life.

00:34:17.140 | You have to apply, right?

00:34:18.140 | It's action.

00:34:19.140 | And so there are some people that I've observed as I've listened to them carefully, as I've read their stories, as I've studied their speeches.

00:34:25.140 | What they have is they have a bias for action and an ability to take action quickly.

00:34:31.140 | And that's where I prioritize even that knowing how to fail is perhaps more important.

00:34:36.140 | If we're going to assign priority to these, know it more important than reading.

00:34:43.140 | And I think that bias for action has served them.

00:34:45.140 | But at the end of the day, when I look at it as a reader and I study their circumstances, I'm convinced that if they read, that bias for action would have served them even better.

00:35:03.140 | You can find a good coaching in a sport, right?

00:35:07.140 | Perhaps that you're working with one of your children who has really a great deal of natural expertise and natural raw talent, physical ability, raw talent in a certain sport.

00:35:22.140 | That physical ability and raw talent will probably help them to be much more effective at that sport than somebody who doesn't have raw physical talent and expertise, but who likes to read about that sport.

00:35:38.140 | But if you can take the person with raw physical talent and expertise and then layer onto that the knowledge and the expertise, the good coaching that can come from, in this case, we're talking about reading, but in any way, they can achieve a far higher level of success in that sport or endeavor than they would have if they weren't interested in learning how to do it.

00:36:00.140 | But yet there's going to be a building to these stages.

00:36:05.140 | The child has to first be given the basic mechanics of reading, the ability to decode the letters and words and understand their meaning.

00:36:13.140 | Then they have to cross to a level of fluency, and then they have to be taught how to apply reading to the problems in their lives.

00:36:21.140 | Want to know how to get into college?

00:36:23.140 | Read a half a dozen books on getting into college.

00:36:25.140 | You'll have the best plans in the world.

00:36:27.140 | Want to know how to be a great student?

00:36:29.140 | There's books on that.

00:36:30.140 | Want to know how to be a great husband?

00:36:31.140 | There's books on that.

00:36:32.140 | Want to know how to start a business?

00:36:33.140 | There's books on that.

00:36:34.140 | Want to know how to be a multimillionaire real estate investor?

00:36:36.140 | There's books on that.

00:36:37.140 | Want to know how to be financially independent?

00:36:39.140 | There's books on that.

00:36:40.140 | And the books are good.

00:36:42.140 | They're generally true.

00:36:43.140 | And if you learn how to read syntopically, you can, over the course of reading a dozen books, you can quickly sort out the things that are probably not good or true in each book.

00:36:51.140 | And that's the advantage that somebody who really has mastered the craft of reading has over somebody who just goes step by step through a basic book.

00:36:59.140 | I have watched my friend that I'm thinking of, I've watched that every time he reads a book, his life changes significantly.

00:37:06.140 | I can only imagine where he would be if reading weren't laborious for him.

00:37:15.140 | Let me switch keys just completely now to number four.

00:37:19.140 | Sorry.

00:37:21.140 | How do you invest in reading for your child?

00:37:23.140 | I think here is where a good quality educational environment will make a difference.

00:37:28.140 | That they learn the basics of learning how to read.

00:37:31.140 | And then as far as practical investments, I think it's a matter of surrounding your child with inspiring literature, with quality living books, and being willing to surround them with that raw material.

00:37:45.140 | So that when the child is ready and appropriate and is in that place where they can absorb it, that it's there.

00:37:54.140 | And having things that are going to grab their interest. Not fluff, not twaddle, but good living books that are going to grab their interest.

00:38:02.140 | In addition to that, at least the strategies that I try to play, is I try to make sure that my children see me reading continually.

00:38:09.140 | Because in many ways, especially young children, will seek to model the behavior of their parents.

00:38:14.140 | And so if my children see me staring at my phone screen all the time, flipping and swiping aimlessly, they're going to want to model that behavior.

00:38:23.140 | But if my children see me reading, they're also likely to want to model that behavior.

00:38:30.140 | And so for years, I don't do this now because of my travels, but for years I've always tried to buy physical books and read so that it's obvious that I'm not just staring at the screen of my phone.

00:38:39.140 | That's cost me more money.

00:38:41.140 | I could read things on my phone, but I want to be seen reading physical books.

00:38:44.140 | I don't want my children to be confused. Is dad on Facebook or is he reading a book?

00:38:48.140 | I want to see them see me reading them.

00:38:50.140 | In terms of the skills of reading, I invest in the actual buying of the books so that I can destroy the books.

00:38:57.140 | Beyond that, you can decide and consider how to invest in reading, maybe tutoring for your children, maybe surrounding them with good books, maybe modeling reading yourself.

00:39:05.140 | At the end of the day, reading doesn't cost all that much.

00:39:08.140 | But purchasing books and having room to house books is, in my opinion, very important.

00:39:13.140 | I appreciate many things that Miss Marie Kondo might say, but I don't appreciate what she has to say about books you judge for yourself.

00:39:24.140 | Number four, interesting investments for your children.

00:39:27.140 | I would say multiple citizenships.

00:39:30.140 | A second citizenship, a second passport is an interesting investment that you can make for your children.

00:39:34.140 | Totally different vein here.

00:39:36.140 | But one of the most valuable things that you find is if you can help your child to move among various government regimes, you may open up more opportunities for your child.

00:39:48.140 | Now, those of us who live in the United States or Canada, where the predominant majority of my listening audience is, we don't usually think about these types of things.

00:40:00.140 | But many people who come from other places really do.

00:40:04.140 | They see the opportunities.

00:40:06.140 | If you are from El Salvador, you would understand the benefits of your child having dual citizenship with El Salvador and the United States.

00:40:17.140 | If you are from Afghanistan, you understand the benefits of your child being a dual citizen of Afghanistan and of the United Kingdom.

00:40:25.140 | This is rather intuitive for many people.

00:40:28.140 | It's just not something that we usually think about in the United States.

00:40:31.140 | And I think we should.

00:40:34.140 | Over the last months, it's something that my family and I have done.

00:40:36.140 | We've done birth tourism, given birth to a child abroad to get a second citizenship for that child.

00:40:40.140 | We've moved abroad to gain second citizenship for our other children and for ourselves as well.

00:40:47.140 | And I see that if you care about freedom and liberty, this is one of the most valuable things that you can do to ensure your freedom and liberty.

00:40:54.140 | I've come to the conclusion that about the only way to peacefully work and to peacefully deal with the tyranny of one individual government,

00:41:07.140 | if you're not going to resort to violence, which I'm not willing to resort to if you're interested in peace,

00:41:11.140 | about the only way to actually work against the tyranny of a government peacefully is to simply use another government to your own benefit.

00:41:21.140 | Because governments don't respect their citizens.

00:41:24.140 | Governments respect other state governments.

00:41:27.140 | And so the best thing that you can do as an individual is seek to find out the various governments of the world that are going to give you the best choices and the best options.

00:41:36.140 | Now, practically speaking, for your child, as we go on to the next one, which is unique life experiences,

00:41:41.140 | practically speaking, if your child has backup options, if your child can increasingly use the world as an opportunity for their,

00:41:50.140 | as can use the world for interesting places to go to school, interesting places to live, interesting business opportunities,

00:41:57.140 | they can have many, many benefits.

00:41:59.140 | Even just simply having a second passport could be very helpful for your child's business career.

00:42:05.140 | There are some countries in the world that a child may not be able to go to without a visa.

00:42:11.140 | And yet in a business environment, the ability to go and travel to that country would be very important.

00:42:15.140 | Or the ability to work in that country could be very important.

00:42:18.140 | Even in countries where there's a relatively simple and free flow of labor back and forth, for example, the United States and Mexico,

00:42:26.140 | if your child is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico,

00:42:30.140 | they have options where they can legally and easily, without applying for visas and permits,

00:42:36.140 | they can legally and easily work in those two countries.

00:42:40.140 | Same thing with Canada, a Canadian citizenship and a U.S. citizenship.

00:42:44.140 | And it's not that difficult. I could teach you how, if you're having a child, I could teach you how in a few years of effort,

00:42:50.140 | and a few thousand dollars, I could teach you how to have your child be a tri-citizen of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

00:42:58.140 | Now think about the interesting options that that opens up to your child,

00:43:01.140 | where now they have the ability to interface back and forth between these different countries.

00:43:05.140 | They have the ability to engage in business opportunities back and forth in these different countries.

00:43:09.140 | They have the ability to invest in these countries very freely. It's a unique option.

00:43:13.140 | If you were to add on, I'll talk about just the bigger blocks, the very attractive blocks, a European Union citizenship.

00:43:20.140 | If your child is from the United States, but they also have the ability to be a citizen of an EU country,

00:43:25.140 | now they can live and they can travel to and they can work in any country that's part of the European Union.

00:43:30.140 | That can make a major difference in their career prospects, in their educational prospects, etc.

00:43:38.140 | And you can do that. So you may invest some money into helping your child to develop a second citizenship.

00:43:44.140 | Just simply investing some money, paying the money, paying with the time, to go and give birth in another country,

00:43:51.140 | where they can get another citizenship by birth.

00:43:53.140 | So it's an interesting topic. I've talked a good bit about it on the show,

00:43:56.140 | just because it's something that I've studied a lot and I've done.

00:44:00.140 | And by the way, back to that skill of learning.

00:44:02.140 | A few years ago, I didn't know anything about second citizenships.

00:44:05.140 | I didn't know anything about second passports. I didn't know anything about birth tourism.

00:44:09.140 | I was vaguely aware of the ideas, but I didn't know anything because it just hadn't entered in as an idea.

00:44:15.140 | My wife and I had our first children in the United States. We didn't have the idea.

00:44:19.140 | I didn't think when we first had our first baby, I didn't think about going and having a baby in Mexico.

00:44:23.140 | That wasn't on my radar screen. We were just thinking about having a baby.

00:44:27.140 | But yet over the years, I studied the problems, I came across the ideas, it was creative ideas.

00:44:32.140 | And what's interesting is even since I've said it on the show,

00:44:34.140 | I've had listeners reach out to me for advice and insight and information on how to do that.

00:44:38.140 | So that's where in the preamble to today's show, where I talked about how we inspire one another when we share our stories,

00:44:43.140 | you can see how that's worked.

00:44:45.140 | Now, since then, through reading and through studying and through knowing how to learn,

00:44:49.140 | I would consider myself an expert on birth tourism.

00:44:53.140 | I could give a lecture for today without preparation, without notes.

00:44:57.140 | I could probably lecture on the subject for five or six hours.

00:45:01.140 | So that's just come from learning how to knowing how to learn.

00:45:05.140 | And you can do that, too, if you know how to learn.

00:45:08.140 | You could take a subject that you know nothing about.

00:45:10.140 | And I could today develop a business as a birth tourism consultant if I wanted to.

00:45:17.140 | Which brings me on to number five, unique life experiences.

00:45:20.140 | And this is focused on the creativity.

00:45:23.140 | I had a unique experience myself recently where I was speaking with a young man that I have known my entire life.

00:45:29.140 | I knew him. He's younger than I am.

00:45:31.140 | And I knew him my entire-- but I've known him my entire life.

00:45:35.140 | And this young man has recently had his job come to an end.

00:45:40.140 | And he is in an interesting situation where he's far more successful than many people of his age with regard to money.

00:45:50.140 | He seems to just be naturally frugal, doesn't naturally spend a lot of money, living with his parents, just naturally saving money.

00:45:58.140 | And so he's a young man. He's 27 years old and he has $15,000 saved, which is very unusual for most 27-year-olds.

00:46:06.140 | But one of the things that I have observed is throughout his lifetime, he's only ever done one job.

00:46:13.140 | And he's really only ever done-- and he doesn't really know any other opportunities.

00:46:18.140 | He grew up working in his dad's business.

00:46:20.140 | He graduated from high school, didn't go to college, started working for his dad, worked in his dad's business until his dad sold the business,

00:46:27.140 | worked for a time for the successor of his dad's business, and has recently lost his job.

00:46:32.140 | He wants to go and get another job, but he has no idea what he wants to do.

00:46:39.140 | And he's a very competent, capable 27-year-old young man, but he can't come up with any ideas of what to do.

00:46:46.140 | And in talking to him, one of the things that I have observed is that it basically comes down to his unique lack of life experience.

00:46:53.140 | His parents never really traveled.

00:46:56.140 | They would travel a little bit around Florida, but he's never really been out of Florida, never really traveled abroad, just lived a very--

00:47:08.140 | I hate the word because it sounds so insulting, but I think it's an accurate adjective to use.

00:47:16.140 | He's lived a very provincial life.

00:47:18.140 | He's not from the country. He lives in a big city, but he's just lived a very provincial life, just the standard life script, got a job, he saved a little money.

00:47:26.140 | But he has no interesting ideas. He has no interesting goals.

00:47:29.140 | He has very few interesting-- he doesn't really have any interests.

00:47:35.140 | He wants to get a better six-pack, get a little stronger, save a little money, but he doesn't really have any interests.

00:47:40.140 | And so my advice to him was I've succeeded in getting him to go and travel a little bit.

00:47:45.140 | And it's not that travel is the cure-all for all circumstances, but in his unique case, as I was providing some mentoring and just talking with him, I pointed out to him that he has no imagination.

00:48:00.140 | He doesn't know the kinds of jobs that he'd like to have next because he can't imagine any jobs other than the one he's done for the last decade of his life.

00:48:09.140 | Well, how do you fix that?

00:48:11.140 | You could fix it with reading, but he's not a reader.

00:48:15.140 | You could fix it with YouTube, and some people are doing that.

00:48:18.140 | I'm grateful for how many diverse YouTubers are employing things, but that doesn't really work so much on a career level.

00:48:26.140 | I've read recently that the number one aspiration for most young people right now is to be a YouTube personality.

00:48:32.140 | I guess it's possible, but that's not as actionable for the average person as understanding that you can work on an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico, or you can run a lobster boat in Maine, or you can be a woodcutter, a lumberjack in the upper inland Northwest, or you can drive a crane in downtown Chicago doing construction.

00:48:56.140 | There are just thousands of interesting jobs, and I'm using these jobs because my friend is not particularly academically inclined, and yet these are all jobs that could be interesting and fulfilling and rewarding and remunerative that don't require intensive academics, but he can't come up with any ideas.

00:49:11.140 | So he needs more interesting life experience.

00:49:15.140 | He needs to go and talk to random people at a bar and hear their stories.

00:49:19.140 | He needs to go and see different things and survey the country and have an idea of different things that he could do.

00:49:25.140 | And so you can help your child to be far ahead of their peers by exposing your child to interesting and unique life experiences.

00:49:33.140 | This is one thing I'm very grateful that my parents spent the money and took the time to do for me was to expose me to interesting and unique life experiences, to have experiences of extreme poverty and have experiences of extreme wealth.

00:49:49.140 | Both of those are valuable.

00:49:51.140 | It's valuable to know that you could survive and be very happy living in extreme poverty because you've been there, done that.

00:49:58.140 | It's also valuable to know that you can be comfortable enjoying extreme affluence because you've been there, done that.

00:50:05.140 | And the great thing about it is, as we talk about how to invest money, many times these experiences don't actually cost that much money.

00:50:13.140 | You can go to the Breakers in Palm Beach and you don't have to actually stay there, but take your child to the Sunday brunch at the Breakers.

00:50:20.140 | It doesn't cost that much money, but gives those peak experiences.

00:50:24.140 | You don't have to spend all that much money to go and volunteer at the soup kitchen on the difficult side of town, but take your child and help them to be there.

00:50:34.140 | It doesn't cost that much money to buy a plane ticket from Atlanta to Managua, but take your child to Managua and help them to experience something foreign.

00:50:46.140 | Take your child to China, help them to be in a place that's different and new.

00:50:51.140 | Take your child to a backcountry ranch and have them work there.

00:50:56.140 | Take your child and have them volunteer in an orphanage.

00:50:59.140 | Take your child and have them shadow a big shot lawyer in the top-ranking law firm.

00:51:09.140 | Help your child to develop different jobs, businesses, etc., because these unique life experiences start to build on one another.

00:51:15.140 | And these experiences are the sum, the creative fodder for an individual as they develop interests, as they develop desires, as they develop an understanding of what their unique skills are, what their unique talents are.

00:51:26.140 | And they start to merge these things together, and it's in that creative mixing of the ingredients of experience that you wind up with the ultimate cake of success.

00:51:36.140 | But if you don't have a variety of ingredients, you don't wind up with nearly as interesting of a final result.

00:51:43.140 | You can take flour and water, you can mix them together, form them into a little cake, and you can place them down on the ashes of a fire and make for yourself an edible source of calories and nutrition.

00:52:00.140 | It's called ash cakes.

00:52:02.140 | All you need is flour and water.

00:52:03.140 | You can do it with cornmeal, water, etc.

00:52:05.140 | But that is not nearly so interesting to eat as when you take a dozen ingredients and you mix them together and you use some more sophisticated baking methodology to create an elaborate cake or an elaborate sticky bun.

00:52:26.140 | You get the point.

00:52:29.140 | It's not that it's bad to eat flour and water.

00:52:31.140 | Just like my friend, he's doing pretty well.

00:52:35.140 | But he doesn't have nearly the zest for life because the raw ingredients, he was never exposed to those raw ingredients.

00:52:42.140 | They were never mixed up in his life to see what would come out of the other side.

00:52:47.140 | And so you can invest in the money to expose your children to unique life experiences, to cities, to countries, to cities, to the countryside, to the top levels of society, to the bottom levels of society, to different jobs, etc.

00:53:00.140 | However that works out, to different artistic pursuits, music, mathematics, dance, whatever, however that comes out to you, invest in those unique life experiences.

00:53:11.140 | Number six, I think it's important to invest into helping your child develop a way to financially support themselves if possible before they're actually an adult.

00:53:25.140 | As I have done financial counseling over the years, I have faced some difficult situations working with people who had a high school diploma, but they had relatively few or no marketable skills.

00:53:44.140 | There's one man that I worked with and it really just stumped me.

00:53:48.140 | He was a father, had children, but he had no significant marketable skill.

00:53:56.140 | He had no real expertise or skill in any one area where he could compete in the unique markets that we all live in.

00:54:05.140 | Yeah, he had basic labor ability.

00:54:07.140 | He worked in a warehouse, moving inventory in that warehouse.

00:54:11.140 | He had one job doing a random sales job, but he never pursued that to develop sales skills.

00:54:16.140 | Developed a little bit of skill in another area, but didn't really pursue it, just worked as a helper in a construction business.

00:54:22.140 | And it's very difficult when you're talking with a 35 or a 40-year-old man who's a father, who's trying to support children, who doesn't have any useful, unique, marketable skills.

00:54:32.140 | My opinion, that's a tragedy.

00:54:34.140 | And there's no reason for it to be the case.

00:54:38.140 | All of us who are parents could look at our children, could watch them over the years to try to understand where their interests are, where their unique skills tend to be, where their personality is.

00:54:51.140 | And we could help them to develop a marketable skill in an area that suits them.

00:54:56.140 | And we can do that long before they are adults.

00:55:01.140 | We can do that regardless of high school diploma, regardless of college degree.

00:55:08.140 | Those college degrees and high school diplomas might indulge that certain thing, or they might not.

00:55:14.140 | But at least if they have a basic skill where they can go in the marketplace and earn a decent wage, you can set them up for success.

00:55:24.140 | Now, some of these skills could align with traditional academic subjects.

00:55:28.140 | For example, perhaps you take the skill of reading and you teach your child how to turn the skill of reading into the skill of proofreading or editing.

00:55:38.140 | Or perhaps the skill of writing and you teach your children how to take the skill of writing academic papers and just translate that over into writing for, say, financial, personal finance blogs.

00:55:50.140 | You may not know this, but it's fascinating.

00:55:53.140 | Around the financial industry that I'm involved in, there are a lot of writers who make their living just simply commissioning articles for various large companies.

00:56:04.140 | And they want a 700 or a 1,000-word blog post to post on XYZ Insurance Company's blog.

00:56:11.140 | This is Information Marketing 101.

00:56:13.140 | And the XYZ Insurance Company needs an original article.

00:56:16.140 | And so they can sit down, write a $1,000 article, and make 500 bucks or 1,000 bucks, whatever they charge for the article.

00:56:21.140 | And all it requires is pooling together these basic skills of being able to do a little bit of research about a subject, hey, a quick web search, look at a couple of books, and then take the same article and repackage it for another person.

00:56:34.140 | But it has to be an original article.

00:56:35.140 | But a basic skill of writing can be parlayed into something that can allow somebody to live and to work and to do very well.

00:56:44.140 | It really can be.

00:56:45.140 | Or let's say that you take a basic skill like somebody who has a strong degree of numeracy.

00:56:52.140 | They're good at mathematics.

00:56:53.140 | Well, just take that person who's good at mathematics and have them take a basic bookkeeping course.

00:56:59.140 | Help your teenager to take a bookkeeping course or read a couple of books on bookkeeping.

00:57:03.140 | Learn how QuickBooks works.

00:57:04.140 | And then have your student hire out to a couple of local business people to run their accounting for them, to run their books for them.

00:57:12.140 | I've laid out in past shows how a young teenager can become a fully employed, a fully employable tax preparer before even graduating from high school by becoming an enrolled agent.

00:57:25.140 | If your child possesses a good degree of skill with mathematics, if they seem to have the cognitive ability to deal with things like tax law, et cetera, they can become an enrolled agent.

00:57:36.140 | They don't have to be an enrolled agent to work as an assistant tax preparer, but they could become an enrolled agent.

00:57:40.140 | There's no need for a college education.

00:57:42.140 | They can set up a job working doing tax preparation.

00:57:46.140 | They can work six months of the year, make $60,000, $80,000, $90,000 a year in six months of work, have the other six months off to do whatever they want to do, and do very well with just being a tax preparer, just being a basic bookkeeper and tax preparer.

00:58:00.140 | It's very doable.

00:58:03.140 | And yet that all could also serve as a foundation for other things.

00:58:06.140 | So having a child have a skill where they can go out and compete in an adult world and earn an adult income I think can make a major, major difference.

00:58:16.140 | And that's the kind of thing that when I was doing counseling for that man that I'm thinking of, it didn't exist.

00:58:23.140 | He doesn't have it.

00:58:25.140 | And let me tell you, it's tough.

00:58:28.140 | If you're 40-something years old, have children in the house, it's tough at that point in time to figure out what that skill is and then to go and develop it.

00:58:38.140 | It takes years to develop it.

00:58:40.140 | Far better to do it during the teenage years.

00:58:45.140 | Next, related but slightly different, would be the basic skills needed to live, such as the skills of doing something like building a house or providing food for yourself.

00:58:56.140 | In the modern specialized societies that most of us live in where we compete in this very specialized skill with high division of labor economies, most of us don't give much time to providing for these basic needs.

00:59:08.140 | We think more about how do I be a great accountant and make an income than we do how do I build a house.

00:59:13.140 | But as I've tried to point out over the years, having some of these skills can really set someone apart and can really help someone to succeed.

00:59:22.140 | I don't think it's realistic in the specialized economies that we live in to really plan to live exclusively on these basic skills.

00:59:36.140 | I read a book recently by a couple of young men who did do it recently up in Montana.

00:59:43.140 | The book was called Poor Man Living.

00:59:45.140 | The main author was Jeremy Aul.

00:59:48.140 | He talked about how they went out into the wilderness, they purchased a little bit of land, built a cabin, did basically the old-fashioned homesteading thing and basically surviving on almost no income.

01:00:01.140 | I was impressed. So it's not that it's not possible, but it's just not the way that I think most of us want to live.

01:00:08.140 | I think there are ways to do it if you want to, but it's not the way that most of us want to live.

01:00:12.140 | And yet to go and say, well, there's no value in being able to do everything yourself and you should only just focus on your career, I think leads to these very empty lives that many of us have lived where we just do one thing and where the corporate drone that Scott Adams talks about in his Dilbert strips,

01:00:27.140 | where we go to the job and we do our Dilbert job in the Dilbert cubicle and then we leave.

01:00:31.140 | And a good balance seems to be in the middle between these two things, at least by my assessment, where most of us gain benefit from having a balance of these things.

01:00:39.140 | And so if you can put together having a good marketable skill in the economy and in the marketplace and help your child to have that so that they could go out and support themselves, as I said, let's use my analogy, my favorite example.

01:00:51.140 | Let's say that your 16 year old has developed a thriving tax planning, sorry, a thriving tax preparation business and they're making $30,000 a year.

01:00:59.140 | They're an enrolled agent.

01:01:01.140 | They have a handful.

01:01:02.140 | They have a bunch of tax clients.

01:01:04.140 | They're working intensively during the tax season from January through April.

01:01:09.140 | Basically, they're working super, super intensively during that period of time.

01:01:13.140 | Well, now from April through December, they have a season where it may be a low season for them.

01:01:18.140 | Now in that period of time, they can then go and exercise skills of building a house and they have the time to go and get their reused materials instead of buying them all new at Home Depot.

01:01:31.140 | They can go and salvage things.

01:01:33.140 | They can build things little by little.

01:01:35.140 | They can develop these things.

01:01:36.140 | They have time to learn the plumbing and the wiring, et cetera.

01:01:39.140 | Well, now that person has an interesting way to live where they can experience a high degree of freedom even from a very early age.

01:01:46.140 | I covered this in the Radical Real Estate series where I talked about a young person who goes into the construction industry and who just devotes a period of time to learning the skills of different trades so they can come out and they can do things for themselves.

01:01:59.140 | They have a lot of opportunity.

01:02:01.140 | Now you could parlay that over onto a farm and now you can have cash income from selling farm produce, pastured poultry or microgreens or some of these kinds of things mixed with the ability to build your own house,

01:02:13.140 | mixed with good specialized skills such as tax preparation and you have a very resilient young person, a person who can always experience a high degree of freedom and they can choose different areas that they want to pursue.

01:02:26.140 | I think helping a child to develop those skills is really worth it.

01:02:30.140 | Now, it doesn't have to be done by saying to your child you have to build a 3,000 square foot house, but there are ways that you could invest as a parent into these things, ways that you could spend money on them.

01:02:41.140 | Things that I really appreciate that my parents did for me, one of the things that my dad always did for me was he would drive me to different work before I had a driver's license.

01:02:48.140 | He would make sure that I could always get to my jobs and I always had these Saturday jobs and all these different things, but he would go and take me in the morning and he would come and get me in the afternoon.

01:02:57.140 | That's costly for a parent, but yet it's an investment of time and a little bit of money or investments into doing things at home.

01:03:04.140 | For example, building a shed in your own backyard, building a tree house, these are the ways that your children will learn how to saw and to hammer and to screw and to nail and all these things through actually doing it.

01:03:17.140 | Really, a 3,000 square foot house is not that different than a tree house.

01:03:21.140 | It's just a difference of scale and perhaps precision of making your corners straight, but there's not that much difference in the basic construction techniques.

01:03:31.140 | When I was younger, my brothers and I, we built a three-story tree fort out in the woods.

01:03:35.140 | That couldn't have happened without the support of my father and using his tools and things like that, but that confidence that comes from knowing you could build a three-story tree fort just builds over time.

01:03:46.140 | When I was younger, my dad built a house and he did a lot of the work himself, contracted out some of the stuff, but did a lot of the work himself.

01:03:54.140 | One of his reasons for doing it was to provide a place for my family to live and to have all of my siblings together at a price that we could afford, save money by doing it himself.

01:04:04.140 | Another reason was to do it as an educational opportunity for all of his children.

01:04:09.140 | Doing things like that, building a house with your children where you're actually doing a lot of the work could be something that you could use to help your children to develop skill and expertise.

01:04:21.140 | It might be easier for you to hire a contractor to do it all, but the contractor might not want to have your eight-year-old son crawling through the rafters like I used to do, hanging high hats in the kitchen.

01:04:37.140 | You could probably hire a flooring contractor, but your teenage boys might learn a lot more laying the flooring themselves.

01:04:44.140 | There are a lot of ways that you can take these things and say, "I'm going to do things a little slower so that I can teach my children and help them to learn something."

01:04:54.140 | Today, I have a confidence just simply from, even though I was the youngest, simply helping my parents build a house, I have a confidence that I could tackle a lot of home improvement things.

01:05:06.140 | I hate to always share just from my personal experiences, but it's a major source of learning, of course, for all of us.

01:05:17.140 | But I remember vividly how, when I was a senior in high school and we were building our senior float, I don't even remember what it was at this point, but I just remember vividly standing around with a group of a dozen or two high school seniors.

01:05:32.140 | We had this idea for building a float, but as I remember it, virtually none of my peers knew how to bring it to fruition.

01:05:42.140 | They didn't know how to frame a wall. They didn't know how to build this thing, how to make it work.

01:05:48.140 | But because of the experiences that I had working on home improvement projects, helping my family build a house, I remember stepping up and taking the lead and helping to lay out an elaborate senior float that won the prize.

01:06:01.140 | Just with the basic skill of knowing how to run a screw gun and frame a wall.

01:06:06.140 | So these don't have to be things where you have to invest years and years and years, but if you think about how to invest in your children and apprentice them to a skilled tradesperson, buy the lumber that they can build a tree for themselves, get a screw gun so they can learn how to run a screw gun, give them a hammer and tools for their birthday.

01:06:28.140 | If you'll be alert, I think there are a lot of opportunities here, and those skills merge very well with specialized economic skills to help somebody to survive and to have a number of things that they can fall back on.

01:06:42.140 | So as they live in changing cultures, as we work in changing economies, you can start to stack these different skills one on each other, and they can start to play off of one another.

01:06:53.140 | So I won't give example after example, but the stacking of skills is really powerful.

01:07:00.140 | Next, another skill you may invest in is the knowledge of a second language, helping your child to develop a high degree of proficiency and fluency in at least a second language, if not multiple, if that's within your capacity.

01:07:16.140 | There is virtually no child that any of us are working with, virtually no child who's not capable of learning as many languages as you'll teach them.

01:07:26.140 | And depending on where you live, you may already be doing this.

01:07:29.140 | If you raise your child in Zurich, Switzerland, your child is going to basically know English, French and German at a minimum, if not Italian and something else as well, just due to the virtue of the educational structure that your child is in.

01:07:44.140 | But yet the knowledge and the ability to speak a second language is one of those things that can really, again, open up substantial opportunities to somebody, can open up substantial benefits.

01:07:57.140 | It can be the key differentiator in your child being able to get the job versus not get the job.

01:08:03.140 | The fact that your child speaks fluent Spanish and also has a Mexican passport, but yet can also live and work for a U.S. American company and communicate in English could be the key difference that allows your child to get the job working with the company who has operations in Mexico and in the United States.

01:08:20.140 | That could really set the difference.

01:08:22.140 | It's also incredibly important to help your child have the confidence that they can go throughout the world, that they can travel.

01:08:28.140 | Now, the disadvantage that most of us, the advantage that most of us have is that we speak English.

01:08:33.140 | And of course, English is the current lingua franca of the world.

01:08:37.140 | And so very few of us see the need to learn something other than that.

01:08:41.140 | If you only spoke Pashtun and you wanted to help your child to succeed on a global basis, then certainly you would see the value of investing in English lessons for your child.

01:08:53.140 | I can't even speak English anymore.

01:08:55.140 | English lessons.

01:08:58.140 | So you would see the benefit of that.

01:09:00.140 | And yet English speakers, we often tend to be a little bit arrogant, and especially American English speakers, and they'll think, "Ah, what's the point of learning those things?"

01:09:07.140 | But it really does help.

01:09:08.140 | It really does make a difference and can open up the world.

01:09:11.140 | Even a basic level of fluency in another language can make a huge, huge difference in the opportunities that your child has, the places that they can go, the things that they can do.

01:09:22.140 | Now, how do you invest in this?

01:09:24.140 | Well, it might mean, of course, some classes in school.

01:09:26.140 | It might mean encouraging your child to actually study in school.

01:09:32.140 | In general, you can with a couple years of high school Spanish or high school French or high school Chinese.

01:09:38.140 | You can become fluent in a couple of years of high school Spanish.

01:09:41.140 | I've only ever had two years of formal education in Spanish of high school Spanish.

01:09:47.140 | But if you combine that with the ability of knowing how to learn, with learning how to go and get a book, learning how to go and hire a tutor, and a willingness to practice, you can become fluent in a very little bit of time.

01:09:58.140 | And you can become fluent with a little bit of effort.

01:10:00.140 | So you could help your child by encouraging them to develop a second language.

01:10:05.140 | You may also invest money into the family experiences that you have.

01:10:09.140 | You may choose to invest money into hiring a personal tutor.

01:10:12.140 | You may choose to invest money into hiring somebody to, a house employee who speaks that language and to speak with them.

01:10:19.140 | You might invest money into travel, to go and to travel and take your children to language school in Shanghai and spend the summer there.

01:10:29.140 | You might choose to take time off and go to another destination where they can start to have friends in that local language.

01:10:34.140 | You might choose to pull your children out of school in Louisville, Kentucky for six months and go and enroll them in school in Guatemala City for six months to help them with their Spanish acquisition.

01:10:45.140 | There are a lot of ways that you can invest money into helping your children develop a second language.

01:10:50.140 | And I think that's one of the skills that really can open up horizons to them.

01:10:54.140 | It can really open up huge swaths of the world to them.

01:10:58.140 | It can open up huge opportunities to them.

01:11:02.140 | So don't just spend money on family vacations.

01:11:05.140 | Do spend money on that, but bring it over with some of these skills as well.

01:11:09.140 | I think one of the things that does make a big difference is leading by example.

01:11:13.140 | And so if you have an interest, what we do with our children sometimes, listen to language tapes in the car, learn something new.

01:11:19.140 | I try to model a love for language learning.

01:11:21.140 | I try to model always being willing to speak in a language even if I don't speak it all that well.

01:11:26.140 | And my hope is in time that will rub off.

01:11:28.140 | Ask me in 10 years and we'll see how it works.

01:11:30.140 | Linked to that next would be the power of strong communications skills.

01:11:36.140 | Back to these basic skills that really make the difference for a child.

01:11:41.140 | Strong communication skills will set your child apart.

01:11:46.140 | And that communication skills can be expressed in verbal communication, the ability to speak well, to articulate concepts effectively.

01:11:55.140 | It can be used in written communication, the ability to write well, to write effectively, persuasively.

01:12:01.140 | And it can be done in other perhaps less obvious ways.

01:12:05.140 | The ability to empathize with people, the ability to engage with people, to read emotions, things like that.

01:12:10.140 | You can invest money into helping your child to develop strong communication skills.

01:12:16.140 | And this is I think one of the least exploited areas, especially of mainstream academics.

01:12:25.140 | There are some academic traditions, I guess most notably would be the classical tradition, where the ability to communicate effectively is a cornerstone.

01:12:36.140 | The reason the classical is because in the basic outline of the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, rhetoric is emphasized as that third stage of the trivium.

01:12:46.140 | And rhetoric can be both verbal rhetoric and written rhetoric.

01:12:49.140 | But in most of our experiences, the kinds of schools that most of us have gone to, the kinds of schools that most of our children are in, there's very little emphasis placed on skillful and effective communication.

01:13:01.140 | And even as literacy standards have declined in the United States over the last decades of the ability to write papers, effective essays, persuasive writing, things like that, as the standards have fallen, as the required output from children has fallen,

01:13:17.140 | then we're really facing a crisis for most of our children and the ability to communicate effectively.

01:13:23.140 | And so what do you do?

01:13:25.140 | Well, I think this is one of those things where you don't need a lot of money, but you do need to invest time and effort.

01:13:31.140 | So, of course, written communication is most effectively developed through the practice of writing.

01:13:37.140 | And my intent here is not to do an outline on how to develop an effective homeschool curriculum.

01:13:41.140 | I'm still working on that for myself.

01:13:44.140 | But I am convinced that one of the most important things that you can require of your child or that you can make sure that your teachers require of your children is constant writing.

01:13:54.140 | Constant writing at every stage of their academic career.

01:13:59.140 | Writing is a learn-by-doing skill.

01:14:01.140 | Certainly, good reading helps with good writing, but it's a learn-by-doing skill.

01:14:06.140 | So you can help your child to do that.

01:14:08.140 | But then also verbal communication can be helped.

01:14:12.140 | And so invest in a school that's going to prioritize verbal communication.

01:14:18.140 | My opinion, we'll see what happens when my children are teenagers, but my opinion at the very least, make sure your children join a Toastmasters club.

01:14:28.140 | I'm convinced that one of the best deals for any person, be it a teenager, be it a young person, be it an old person, is to join a local Toastmasters club.

01:14:39.140 | And you can learn multiple things simultaneously.

01:14:42.140 | The first thing is you can learn the practice and the ability of effective public speaking, which in and of itself is something that separates somebody and helps to distinguish somebody in their career.

01:14:54.140 | A person who can speak effectively in public at a board meeting, a person who can make an effective presentation to a customer, a person who can stand on stage and introduce a new product effectively in a black turtleneck and a pair of blue jeans,

01:15:06.140 | is somebody who can possess a skill that sets them apart from their competitors.

01:15:12.140 | But in addition, Toastmasters has the benefit of helping somebody develop self-confidence.

01:15:18.140 | By learning public speaking, somebody has the ability to develop self-confidence, one of the most effective ways to develop increasing levels of personal self-confidence.

01:15:26.140 | And increasing levels of personal self-confidence has an exponential effect in other areas of life.

01:15:32.140 | It just runs over every other area of life.

01:15:35.140 | In addition, even Toastmasters, again the secret that's never really talked about, Toastmasters has an entire leadership curriculum that you and your child can participate in,

01:15:44.140 | where you learn how to effectively lead a meeting, how to effectively lead an organization, how to effectively plan an event.

01:15:51.140 | If you're looking for the best bang for your buck educationally for your child, your teenager, or for yourself, I'm convinced it's Toastmasters International.

01:16:00.140 | So consider checking that out.

01:16:02.140 | But helping your child to develop good, strong communication skills is, in my opinion, one very, very effective area of investments.

01:16:14.140 | Next one, just for fun, I'll totally change this, but interesting investments that you can make for your child.

01:16:21.140 | One of the fun ones that I think has a lot of benefit is invest in, for your child, a good, decent home firearms battery.

01:16:32.140 | One of the things, especially in the world of changing laws and changing things, etc., is even right now, as I record this in 2019 in the United States, develop and invest in, for your child, a good home firearms battery.

01:16:45.140 | One of the best things that, one of the good kind of long-term, tangible investments would be very unusual for you to develop and to purchase a good home firearms battery for your child that your child didn't want when they were older.

01:17:01.140 | Now, if you don't come from, or if you don't also develop kind of a shooting culture or a gun culture along with that, there is a chance they may not want it.

01:17:09.140 | But if you come with a gun culture, for many of us, some of the best experiences that we have was when our dad took us out with a single shot .22 and we got to shoot it for the first time, or being able to shoot the air rifle, or going hunting for the first time, or the first time we bought our first handgun, things like that.

01:17:25.140 | That stuff can help.

01:17:27.140 | The good thing about firearms, they very rarely go obsolete.

01:17:30.140 | And so you can secure a future for your children, your grandchildren, by investing and developing a good home firearms battery for them.

01:17:38.140 | Whatever you think the ideal battery, I've done shows on that as far as kind of the basic home firearms battery.

01:17:43.140 | But that's one of the good, interesting, tangible investments that you can make.

01:17:47.140 | Other tangible investments.

01:17:49.140 | What I like to do is I like to buy silver coins for my children and to have a collection of American Eagles that fits each level of their, sorry, each year of their birth.

01:18:01.140 | I use that as a way to talk about tangible investments, precious metals, silver and gold coins.

01:18:07.140 | I enjoy showing them coins, helping them to have it.

01:18:10.140 | So a good collection where every year you buy a silver eagle, if you need to spend 15, 20 bucks a year.

01:18:16.140 | Buy a gold eagle if you want to spend a thousand bucks a year, depending, or a couple thousand bucks, depending on what you're buying.

01:18:23.140 | Just developing an interesting collection that has value is, in my opinion, something really fun, really interesting, and relating to your child.

01:18:32.140 | I love the idea of curating a collection of, again, let's just say you're from the United States, curating a collection of one ounce gold eagles.

01:18:43.140 | One per year per child.

01:18:45.140 | Right now, 1,500 bucks price of gold depends on where we are in the price of gold.

01:18:49.140 | But I love the idea of having in my hands and handing over to a 20-year-old, here's a stack of 20 coins.

01:18:57.140 | There's one from each year of your life, and being able to hand that over as far as that physical, tangible store of money.

01:19:06.140 | Also has some unique benefits for your own savings, your ability to have money outside of the banking system, all the common benefits of precious metals that we talk about, privacy, etc.

01:19:15.140 | But using that as a lesson for your child and making it a collection where they have one for each year of their life is really fun.

01:19:23.140 | I think it has a level of connection that is often missing when we just deal with digital things.

01:19:33.140 | As I work with my children, teach them about money, I've just noticed that there's really power in tangible connections.

01:19:40.140 | I try to work a lot with tangible money, with paper money, with just normal currency, and then also precious metals to help them to develop things.

01:19:48.140 | I think that there are benefits where that can be less easy for them to spend and can be more available to them than just the numbers on the page.

01:20:00.140 | Other tangible investments, I'm just going down some interesting tangible investments.

01:20:03.140 | Other tangible investments would include things like a set of tools, helping your child to develop a set of tools.

01:20:10.140 | I've given some thought to this. I don't think it's worth doing a whole podcast on it, but a child needs a basic set of tools.

01:20:19.140 | Now, depending on your own personal skill set with tools, etc., what you have, you may bring this to yourself.

01:20:25.140 | But sending your child out in the world with a set of tools where they can do the basic things that are required around the house, the basic things that are required to earn a living, could be really, really important.

01:20:36.140 | And you can expand that concept of tools to be the tools of a trade.

01:20:43.140 | Whether we're not just talking about the tools to do home improvement, you're talking about tools of a trade.

01:20:47.140 | Well, if your child has an interest in watches, then help them buy a set of watchmaker tools and give them that so they can always lean back upon that.

01:20:53.140 | A good skill I've recommended for people is buy your child a set of tools to work on electronics.

01:20:59.140 | And so you have a portable skill where they can travel the world and fix phone screens. Help them have them fix those for you and make sure they have those tools.

01:21:06.140 | So that's a marketable skill that your teenager can do effectively.

01:21:10.140 | Many other things as well.

01:21:12.140 | Other tangible investments. I love the idea of helping your child to buy an investment house.

01:21:18.140 | If you have the skill in the financial resources, I love the idea of helping your child to buy something like a fixer-upper.

01:21:28.140 | And investing in them with that process, especially in their teenage years, of helping them to own their first rental house.

01:21:35.140 | Now, they may live in it or they may rent it out. That kind of depends.

01:21:39.140 | But there's no reason for your 14-year-old to not live with you and to live in their own house just because they have one.

01:21:45.140 | Better for them to have their first house to be a rental house.

01:21:49.140 | I love Jim Rome's pithy little saying where he always said that a child should have two bicycles, one to ride and one to rent.

01:21:56.140 | Well, if you have the capability and you have the ability to spend the money and to save the money,

01:22:01.140 | help your child to make sure they have a couple of houses.

01:22:04.140 | Teach them how to build one to live in and have one to rent.

01:22:07.140 | And so now when we start to add something like a huge tangible investment like a house to some of the previous conversations,

01:22:13.140 | I think this could provide a really useful way of helping your child to learn about money and also develop a lot of tangible skills.

01:22:24.140 | And so I generally think unencumbered by a commitment to the daily or weekly schedule that is required for the government school system or for the private school system.

01:22:36.140 | And I think basically like a homeschooler where the average homeschooler can get all their academic work done in about three hours a day.

01:22:45.140 | So what I think about a 14 or 15-year-old and I think about them having 168 hours in a week,

01:22:52.140 | and I think about the opportunities for work.

01:22:54.140 | They need to have good academics.

01:22:55.140 | They need to have some interests that are outside of academics.

01:22:58.140 | But there's a whole long amount of time that's available for learning skills and supervising skills.

01:23:04.140 | And as long as I'm in a work situation where I can have the flexibility,

01:23:07.140 | then one of the things I hope to be able to do when I'm at that stage is to help my child buy the first rental house and make that the teenage project.

01:23:14.140 | So we may not need to build a house for ourselves, but I can work with my children and help them learn how to drywall,

01:23:20.140 | help them learn how to frame, help them learn how to redo the flooring.

01:23:22.140 | And we can start with a little fixer-upper, and then they can learn all the skills of investment in real estate because of helping them to purchase their house and develop it over time.

01:23:31.140 | They can learn how to learn about it.

01:23:33.140 | It can be basically one of their school projects is to buy and develop their first rental house.

01:23:39.140 | So you could consider that in the world of tangibles.

01:23:42.140 | So beyond that, anything that you think is interesting, some people have areas, others,

01:23:47.140 | but those are just the ones that occurred to me when talking about interesting, tangible investments to buy for your child would involve things like tools, a good firearms battery, interesting precious metals investments.

01:23:58.140 | Those would be fun things.

01:24:00.140 | Next, I do think there is real value in helping your child to develop efficient pots of money, good tax-free pots of money.

01:24:11.140 | Now, this is beyond the scope of this show, but it is, of course, super important as a financial planner.

01:24:18.140 | Help your child to develop a Roth IRA, one of the best things that you can do, and then use that Roth IRA as a tool for teaching about investing.

01:24:27.140 | Use it as a tool for teaching about trading, about stocks, about mutual funds.

01:24:31.140 | Don't just put the money in there and never let them see that.

01:24:34.140 | Talk to them. Teach them.

01:24:35.140 | Read the investment company brochures.

01:24:37.140 | Read the prospectuses.

01:24:38.140 | Help them to understand the subject of investing.

01:24:42.140 | If you have the ability in any way possible, you should hire your child to work for you in your business.

01:24:49.140 | If you don't have a family business, you should start one.

01:24:52.140 | As a financial advisor, I can't in good conscience not recommend that every person have at least, every family have at least a family business.

01:25:00.140 | It's just too efficient for you to have a family business where your children work in it, you pay them, good tax-free transfers of wealth from you to them,

01:25:09.140 | very efficient, helps them to have earned income, helps them to develop money that they can fund things like Roth IRAs or other traditional 401(k)s, etc.

01:25:18.140 | But help your child to do and to develop these accounts and to use them when they're available to them.

01:25:24.140 | This helps also to have employment skills, to have the skill of working and learning and doing work with somebody.

01:25:32.140 | So make sure that you have a family business.

01:25:35.140 | Make sure your children work in your family business, not to the exclusion of other things.

01:25:39.140 | That's the real danger that I have watched.

01:25:41.140 | I've watched some people with family businesses where their children only worked in the family business.

01:25:46.140 | In my opinion, at this stage of what I can see as a parent, I don't want to do that with my children.

01:25:52.140 | I don't want them to just work for my family business.

01:25:55.140 | But I can't honestly expect my friend who runs a tile company to hire my 8-year-old.

01:26:02.140 | I can expect them to hire my 16-year-old, but I can't honestly expect them to hire my 8-year-old.

01:26:08.140 | But I can hire my 8-year-old in my family business.

01:26:11.140 | I can do it effectively, I can do it legally, and I can help my 8-year-old to start to learn skills within the context of my family business.

01:26:18.140 | So invest the money into hiring your children.

01:26:20.140 | And then invest the money into getting training for your children in the context of the skills that you have for your own business.

01:26:27.140 | Your child is interested in bookkeeping? Start them with bookkeeping for your business.

01:26:31.140 | You have the ability now to pay them for your business.

01:26:34.140 | You have the ability to help them to generate income for themselves.

01:26:40.140 | Make sure that you match that. Make a Roth IRA contribution for them.

01:26:44.140 | And then when they're 25 years old, 30 years old, and they're trying to find a down payment for a rental house,

01:26:50.140 | they can take the money out of the Roth IRA and use it.

01:26:52.140 | Or keep it there and you make a loan to them.

01:26:54.140 | Lend them the money for that and use the Roth IRA as informal collateral.

01:26:57.140 | Lots of different things that you could do.

01:26:59.140 | So my only basic point is use the common financial tool.

01:27:04.140 | Use the 529 accounts. Use the ESAs.

01:27:08.140 | Use all of these tools that we talk about, but don't be limited to those tools.

01:27:13.140 | Don't be limited to thinking that they're the only solution.

01:27:16.140 | And then finally, number 12, help your child to develop a strong work ethic.

01:27:24.140 | Trying to bracket, you know, the first one was knowing how to learn, and the last one is strong work ethic.

01:27:32.140 | I don't know how to assign importance to these, but I do know this.

01:27:35.140 | If a child has a strong work ethic, that's enough in and of itself to help them bump up in society.

01:27:47.140 | Their teachers will take notice of them because of their strong work ethic.

01:27:52.140 | Their bosses will take notice of them because of their strong work ethic.

01:27:56.140 | Their potential spouses will take notice of them because of their strong work ethic.

01:28:00.140 | The community leaders will take notice of them because of their strong work ethic.

01:28:06.140 | I don't know how to invest money into helping your child to develop a strong work ethic.

01:28:12.140 | This is one that has stumped me.

01:28:14.140 | If you have ideas, let me know.

01:28:16.140 | I don't know how to invest money into it.

01:28:18.140 | I think that this one is one that's just simply a matter of example and time.

01:28:25.140 | If you will work with your children and bring them in with you from the beginning and have them work alongside you,

01:28:33.140 | you can help them to learn that strong work ethic.

01:28:36.140 | Perhaps the cost is simply your decreased productivity by working with your children.

01:28:42.140 | As a father of young children, as I'm sure you, if you had young children, I find it very frustrating to work with my young children.

01:28:50.140 | It slows me down.

01:28:51.140 | They get in the way constantly.

01:28:53.140 | Everything is harder.

01:28:54.140 | Stuff winds up wasted.

01:28:56.140 | Stuff winds up broken.

01:28:58.140 | My tools wind up displaced.

01:29:00.140 | Everything would be faster if I sent them inside the house and said, "Go read a book," and I did the work.

01:29:05.140 | I have done that, and yet I can't do it anymore because if I don't work with them, how are they going to learn the strong work ethic?

01:29:14.140 | If I just say, "Go read a book," how are they going to learn the work ethic that they need?

01:29:20.140 | Maybe this comes with you working with them.

01:29:22.140 | Maybe this comes with, for some people, athletics and team athletics is really important or hiring good coaches.

01:29:28.140 | I don't know, but I do know that if you can instill a strong work ethic in your child, they can solve all the rest of the problems.

01:29:36.140 | Let's say that you only do one of these things.

01:29:39.140 | Of course, that's hard to pick.

01:29:41.140 | Some of these, though, I think are strong enough that if there's only one, they can solve a lot of other problems.

01:29:46.140 | If your child only knows how to learn, well, they can learn what they need.

01:29:50.140 | They can learn how to build a strong work ethic.

01:29:52.140 | If your child only knows how to fail with grace, well, they can learn their way through.

01:29:57.140 | If the child only loves reading or some of these other ones, it breaks down.

01:30:01.140 | But if your child only has a strong work ethic but you don't have a college fund for them, they can work their way through school.

01:30:08.140 | I did it.

01:30:10.140 | Worked three jobs my freshman year.

01:30:13.140 | And again, just pointing it out to say that I'm not all that special, but I did it.

01:30:19.140 | And I can line up student after student after student who has done it.

01:30:24.140 | You can work your way through college.

01:30:27.140 | You can work your way through high school.

01:30:29.140 | If you die and you leave your kids penniless and they're in eighth grade but you leave them with a strong work ethic, they can work their way through.

01:30:37.140 | They can support themselves in eighth grade and on.

01:30:40.140 | They can support themselves through college.

01:30:42.140 | They can learn how to get better grades.

01:30:44.140 | So think about those character qualities.

01:30:46.140 | Of course, there are dozens of other character qualities that we want to instill in our children.

01:30:50.140 | But with related to finance, I think a strong work ethic is a massive, massive leg up.

01:30:59.140 | That's my list of 12.

01:31:01.140 | There are dozens more that we could talk about.

01:31:05.140 | Take my list.

01:31:06.140 | Take the ones you like.

01:31:08.140 | Toss aside the ones that you don't like.

01:31:10.140 | But I hope that they give you some creative juice, some ingredients for your cake, your unique cake with your children to think about how you can spend and invest money into your children in a way that will really serve them.

01:31:25.140 | I think it's worth it.

01:31:26.140 | I think it's really worth it.

01:31:28.140 | For me, as I manage my budget, this is one that I've had to convince myself of it through this type of analysis so that I'm willing to be free with the family money to buy experiences for them.

01:31:40.140 | I naturally have a tendency to want to be frugal.

01:31:43.140 | I don't want to go for that experience.

01:31:45.140 | I don't want to buy that theater ticket.

01:31:47.140 | I don't want to do that dinner at the nice restaurant.

01:31:49.140 | I want to be frugal.

01:31:50.140 | I don't want to buy the camp, you know, pay the tuition for the camp or pay for the teacher, et cetera.

01:31:56.140 | I could save all those things and not do it.

01:31:58.140 | But it helps me.

01:32:00.140 | Back when I did a show a long time ago on budgeting, I talked about there are categories in your budget that you want to decrease and there are categories in your budget that you want to increase.

01:32:10.140 | And so I have an entire category in my budget that relates to children.

01:32:16.140 | I have a category for children's education.

01:32:19.140 | I have a category for children's educational materials so I can distinguish between, you know, hiring, purchasing things.

01:32:30.140 | If I purchase a, you know, a little science kit or books or things like that.

01:32:34.140 | I have a category for children's entertainment for just doing things that are fun.

01:32:38.140 | So I have all these categories for children, and I look at those.

01:32:40.140 | And, of course, they need to be proper compared to our family's income and expenses.

01:32:45.140 | But that's not a category that I am seeking to diminish down to zero.

01:32:50.140 | There are categories that I want to get to zero or as low as possible.

01:32:53.140 | But those are these categories are not categories that I want to diminish down to zero.

01:32:59.140 | I just don't think it works.

01:33:00.140 | I think that the working with children, especially in the younger years and in the teenage years, and investing money in them is some of the best dollars that you can spend.

01:33:14.140 | Hey, in the long run, if it gets down to it, if you have no retirement money, well, if you do it right, your kids will provide for your retirement living.

01:33:23.140 | It's a very crass thing considered to be crass and improper in the U.S. American culture.

01:33:29.140 | But on a global basis, that's the normal retirement plan.

01:33:33.140 | And I don't think it's a bad one.

01:33:36.140 | More on that on a different podcast.

01:33:39.140 | Thank you for listening to today's show.

01:33:41.140 | As we close, if you would like to help me to have money to spend on my children, to invest in my children, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/store.

01:33:50.140 | And let me check out some of the courses that I have featured there, how to borrow money safely and never pay interest using credit cards, how to survive and thrive during the coming economic crisis, guide to career and income planning that could be helpful for you, helpful for your children.

01:34:06.140 | I have other things that I would like to do.

01:34:08.140 | I would say this, one of the things that some listeners have done, which has been very helpful to me.

01:34:13.140 | If you hear me say something in passing, I'm working on new courses, I have ideas, but I would love to know what you think.

01:34:19.140 | If you would like a course on birth tourism, if you would buy that, let me know and I'll write it.

01:34:23.140 | I'll tell you about, I'll give you my six-hour lecture on birth tourism, how to acquire a second citizenship for your child, no matter even whether it's by birth or even with your child who's a little bit older.

01:34:35.140 | I've studied that out as well.

01:34:36.140 | If you would like a course on teaching your kids to handle money, that's another one that I'd like to do at some point.

01:34:41.140 | I've put together a whole bunch of stuff that I'm working with my children to help them learn how to invest money, help them learn how to earn money, help them learn how to save and give money.

01:34:49.140 | That's another one.

01:34:50.140 | And I'll share with you my research and my programs that I have done.

01:34:55.140 | Many other things as well.

01:34:56.140 | I'd like to have a whole outline written for a course on precious metals investing.

01:34:59.140 | I need to do that at some point.

01:35:01.140 | Self-directed investments, my challenge has simply been having children and caring for them.

01:35:07.140 | But I'm hoping, I'm optimistic that the rest of 2019 will be a very productive rest of the year.

01:35:14.140 | I'll be working August, September, October, and November and I'll be off in December.

01:35:18.140 | So if you hear me say something, you say, "Joshua, I would really be interested in that," shoot me an email, Joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.

01:35:23.140 | You can always reach me that way, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.

01:35:26.140 | And in the meantime, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store and check out some of the courses that I have to offer to you there.

01:35:32.140 | Be back with you soon.

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