♪ Blessing in the mornin' ♪ ♪ Come back Sunday morning ♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ We got the store to sell ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card.

Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. JC Penney. It's Friday and although there's no music, that does mean live Q&A. I'm not a great prepper or something 'cause I have lost all my music files. I had three backups and magically, right before two weeks ago, they all disappeared, unfortunately. So until I can go and get 'em off of a hard drive that is in another country, then I'm gonna have to start, I gotta find a new soundtrack.

Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua. I am your host, hopefully more competent with financial planning than the management of MP3 files.

And today is Friday, March 3, 2023. Today on the show, we do live Q&A. We do this each and every Friday in which I can arrange the appropriate technology to record a call. Works just like talk radio. You call in, talk about anything that you want. In some ways, you can think about these Friday shows as the Q&A shows, excuse me, the comments section for the podcast.

I don't have comments enabled on the podcast. And of course, some people chat in the Facebook group and chat with me on Twitter and there's emails and whatnot. But if you wanna just discuss the show, you wanna ask questions about anything that you're doing, this is the place to do it.

If you'd like to gain access to one of these Friday Q&A shows, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Sign up to support the show there and you will gain access to these Friday Q&A shows. We begin with Caleb in California. Caleb, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir?

- Hey, Caleb. I'm sorry, hey, Joshua. First time calling in, I've been a long time listener. - Welcome. - And yeah, so I had a question if you'd like to do a little bit of a monologue on birth tourism. So for a little bit of context, I'm recently married.

I've been married about five months now and we just found out that we are pregnant with our first child. - Congratulations, wonderful. - And we have both, thank you. Thank you, much appreciated. And so we've both been really interested in the idea of birth tourism for quite a while, specifically with Mexico.

So how I'm looking at it now, we're looking at our first child. I'm not sure if it's gonna be too much to try to do that with our first one. If we do do it, or if we decide to go for a future one, what would you recommend as first, how to decide whether or not we should skip it for the first child and just wait until we know the birth process?

And then if we do go for it, how should I recommend looking at the hospitals, services, all that sort of thing? - Good question, good question. All right, I'm gonna mute you here on my end just to cut out some of the background noise for a few minutes here and I'll give you a monologue and then come back and open up your mic to get your feedback.

So to begin with, you correctly identified the fact that the biggest considerations for this baby will not necessarily be anything legal with regard to birth tourism, but it's more about basically giving birth. Obviously, for a first-time mother, this is a huge, and giving birth, especially for a first-time mother who has not been through it, doesn't have the wisdom and experience and hindsight of having given birth previously, it's a significant, significant event.

And it's also, of course, a significant event for you in the context of your marriage. And so while I can tell you some stories of some people who have done birth tourism for the first time, and I think that you certainly can do it, for many people, it's just gonna be uncomfortable because it adds a whole additional layer of potential stress and potential frustration onto having a first-time baby.

And that's exactly the time that generally speaking, you don't want to add stress. You don't wanna add frustration. So there are a few things to consider. First, before you think and talk about birth tourism, it's important that you educate yourself and envision the type of birth that would be appropriate for you and for your wife.

When you do this, there are a few, basically a few options that are on your menu of choices. On the whole, you kind of go in one direction or another. Direction number one is to go down what I'm just gonna dub the mainstream medical route, which generally means you tour some local hospitals.

You go and you meet some of the local birthing departments. You look at their birthing suites, et cetera. And you say, "This is a hospital that we like. "It's a hospital that makes us comfortable. "We like the staff," et cetera, and you choose a hospital. Or you go down kind of the more natural, crunchy route, which will usually involve touring maybe some local birth centers or talking to some local midwives.

This is probably going to reflect your general perspective on any kind of medical care, whether you see yourselves as the kind of people who march into the doctor's office when you're sick, hands you a pill, and you take it and go home and follow it out and fulfill your prescription, or if you're the kind of people that say, "Yeah, we're a little sick.

"Let's take some extra apple cider vinegar "for a few days and see if it goes away." There's kind of a cultural distinction here. Now, within my sphere of Circle, which is fairly wealthy, fairly up-and-coming professionals, et cetera, most of the people that are in my sphere generally are inclined in the direction of some kind of natural option first with an appropriate medical backup.

That's where my wife and I were with our first baby. We're skeptical of wanting to go into the local hospital first thing, although we toured several of them. We're a little skeptical, but of course we want to be very prudent with regard to how we approach this thing. Now, the reason this matters so much with birthing is your initial choice can in some cases drive your overall outcomes.

There are some people who are very clearly, they go into the hospital, they got a great hospital, they got a great team, everything works out wonderfully for them. They're able to have a natural vaginal birth with no problem at all. There are other people who go down kind of the crunchy route, et cetera, and they wind up in the hospital having a C-section, and thank God that that technology exists because it has saved so many.

But there's a lot of people in the middle that based upon your initial choices, it'll drive your overall outcome. So I think of this, this is probably years ago, this is an old movie, but years ago, Ricky Lake did a documentary called The Business of Being Born, I think it was what it was called.

I'll look it up and confirm it. But that documentary that she made, yeah, Business of Being Born, is a really useful introduction for expectant parents to look into so that you understand something called the cascade of interventions. And what can happen is if a woman is not comfortable during childbirth, then her lack of comfort, and I'm talking here emotional comfort, her lack of emotional comfort can cause her body to respond with stress and with tightening up, and that lack of comfort can cause her to not have a smooth and easy natural childbirth.

And so when I think about and plan for my wife being born, with her giving birth, the number one thing that I focus on is to make sure that she is completely comfortable and feeling confident, because her comfort and confidence as a mother, and her comfort and confidence and her ability to give birth will make a big difference over her overall birth outcome.

And so you need to make sure that your wife is in whatever environment she is most comfortable. Now, with our first baby, we went and toured some of the hospitals and we quickly discovered that we didn't think we were gonna be comfortable giving birth in a hospital unless it was some form of emergency situation.

And the reason is because the hospitals are very, very structured in what they require a mother to do, what they require, and how they approach things. And while there are many wonderful nurses and doctors who work hard to facilitate positive outcomes, it's a very invasive place. You don't have much of a choice about whether they strap something to your belly or not.

You don't have much of a choice about who comes into your room while your wife is sitting there naked giving birth. You don't have much of a choice around your decisions. Once you go into the hospital, you pretty much lose a lot of choice. Now, it's not universally bad.

Of course, my experience when we first started visiting hospitals 10 years ago was that most of the hospitals in our area had ripped out all of the old fluorescent lighting and they tried to bring in a much more cozy environment, et cetera, to help the mother to feel more comfortable.

But that's the basic thing that you, when you go to a hospital, you give up most of your choices, not all of them. You can still advocate for a lot of choices, but you give up a lot of them. When you go kind of the natural crunchy path, the big distinction in philosophy is who's in charge of the birth.

I've spoken to a lot of midwives. We've worked with midwives all over the United States and all over the world, quite literally. And the basic function, the basic philosophy difference that I've experienced is that midwives believe that the mother is in charge of her birth. And the midwife is there as a facilitator, a helper, and someone to keep a close eye on proper medical practice so that the mother is safe.

But she's in charge of how she wants to give birth. And so if that appeals to you, that kind of empowering like she's in charge scenario, then you'll wanna consider either a birth center or some form of a home birth. And for a first time out, when my wife and I were thinking about this, we didn't feel super comfortable with a home birth because we just felt like, well, are we being smart?

What if it's something we don't know? And we felt more comfortable going to a birth center instead of doing a home birth. We felt comfortable going to a specific place. A birth center, by the way, is usually a facility that a midwife or a group of midwives has arranged.

It's often a large house or a commercial building or something where they have several rooms. And they've basically tried to recreate a home environment in that facility. So you go to the facility, but it's very homey and warm and welcoming. And they're gonna give you the freedom to be in that facility for the mother to be in charge rather than them just saying, this is where you go.

And then of course, every midwife, you always have a backup doctor that you work with and you always have a backup hospital where you know where you're going if you have an emergency and you need to go and give birth in a hospital where you can get proper high-level medical care for a C-section, et cetera, or for some other medical emergency.

We wound up our first time having an unintentional unassisted home birth because the baby came more quickly than we could actually get to the birth center. We followed all the instructions. We were ready to leave. And basically I told my wife, okay, it's time to go in the car.

We've accomplished all everything. She refused to get in the car. And a few minutes later, I received a baby at home. Since then, we have discovered that we love having babies at home. Now we've been very fortunate not to have high-risk pregnancies. We've been very fortunate not to need any kind of intervention, et cetera.

But in terms of the experience of having a baby at home, there's nothing better because the mother is in her home environment. She has everything just how she wants it. There's nobody there that she doesn't want there. There's no fear or even wondering if some random person is gonna wander into the room, right, when she's focusing on having a baby.

She's in charge. And the midwife, with the philosophy the midwives have, they'll let her do whatever she thinks is right. And so she can be in any position she wants to be. She can be anywhere she wants to be. She can do it. And they are just there to make sure that everyone is safe and to support her in her decision of how to have a baby.

The reason this is so important is you can start to get, if you don't have that environment, you can start to get into what some call the cascade of interventions. So emotions that a woman experiences while giving birth make a significant impact on her experience of giving birth. And so you'll often have something like this, not always, but often.

You'll have a mother who is laboring at home, right? She's, the baby is laboring. She's working through her process. She's been at home and labor for four hours, six hours, 20 hours, whatever it is. She's home, she's comfortable, and the labor is advancing. And let me explain what that means for you as a first-time father.

The process of childbirth is, of what labor means, it's a physical process of the baby preparing the womb and the birth pathway for his escape. And so think of, if you think of what a womb is, right? A womb is a uterus, is an organ, it's like a bag that has muscles around it, and that's basically the bag that the baby lives in.

The placenta is placed inside the bag, on the wall of the uterus, and there's a connection of the umbilical cord between the placenta and the baby, and that's how the baby is sustained. The bag is full of water, and it's like a balloon that is completely sealed. And at the bottom of the bag is a woman's cervix, and that is the pathway through which the baby needs to pass.

During the entire pregnancy, the cervix is closed tightly, so if you take your fist and you squeeze it, and you close it very tightly, that's the cervix. And it holds the baby in, it holds all the waters in, it holds everything tight so that the baby can gestate. At the end of gestation, that cervix needs to relax, and it needs to open up so that the baby can pass out the cervix through the vaginal birth path out of the mother's body.

So that process of the cervix being opened up is labor. And so in the woman's uterus, there are two sets of muscles. Basically, if you take your hands and you put them in front of you, one hand vertical, one hand horizontal, you have muscles, and the muscles go up and down and left and right.

And so the process of labor is where the muscles of the uterus squeeze and contract against each other. And so they go first one way, then they go the other way, then they go first one way, then they go the other way. And in a normal head first birth, which is the ideal birth position for the baby to be in, the baby's head is pressed squarely against the uterus.

During the last few weeks of, in the last few days of pregnancy, the baby's head will descend down, and it'll place itself right square against the uterus. And then that head is pressing against the uterus. And then during labor, the womb is squeezing and contracting, that's why we call it a contraction.

Those muscles are contracting and pressing the baby's head against the cervix. And then the cervix is gradually thinning and opening. So it starts off super, super tight, and eventually it opens up as a muscle until the entire baby's head and body can pass through. And then if everything is lined up properly, there's lots of room in her bones, et cetera, and her hips properly separate and open up so the baby can pass through.

Then very soon after that cervix is fully open, there will be a baby in your arms. That process is called labor. And generally, it can be a very extended process, especially the first time around. It can be many hours, and those hours vary depending on the woman's body. But it starts off often very gentle, and it can become fairly intense.

So a mother can be laboring at home. And over the period of time, the muscles of her uterus are working, they're stretching, they're contracting. They're just getting everything ready. Often there's several days, especially with the first baby, it's kind of warming up, getting ready over the course of a couple of days, making sure they're strong to do their work.

And then all of a sudden, she goes into the hospital. Well, the first thing that many times a doctor or a nurse wants to do in the hospital is to check her. And when someone says, "Oh, well, how dilated is she?" Well, this is normally done with a physical digital exam right inside of her vagina, which can be very uncomfortable.

So imagine that a woman is totally comfortable at home. She's with her husband. She's secure. She's listening to music, taking a bath, et cetera, breathing her way through. And all of a sudden, she's got to get in the car and then go to a hospital. And the first thing that happens is some stranger sticks his fingers in a very uncomfortable position right there.

And all of a sudden now, she's strapped up to equipment. They put a fetal heart monitor on. She's told she can't go away from the equipment. She's got to be close to everything. She's got to be in a bed. There's strangers around. There's beeping lights. She's in a hospital, et cetera.

Well, that kind of discomfort can and many times does cause a woman's body to start to shut down. And so then what can happen is a cascade of interventions. And so let's say that the pregnancy, the birth, doesn't advance during this period. Her body shuts down. She becomes tense.

She becomes tight. So instead of just be totally relaxed and all her muscles relaxed and her cervix relaxed, all of a sudden she becomes stressed. And she can't necessarily control it. She just becomes stressed from this environment. Well, then, okay, well, we're not advancing. We sit there, we twiddle our thumbs, people coming in and out.

Well, there's no labor. And what can a mother do? She can't make her body labor. So after a time, then the medical team can start to be worried about the baby, you know, it's not being born fast enough. So what do we do? Well, then let's go ahead and give her drugs.

And so let's go ahead and give her some Pitocin. There are other drugs as well, but let's give her some Pitocin. So what drugs do, what Pitocin does is it causes the woman's body involuntarily to go into labor, whether it wants to or not. And so we start to give it Pitocin, and now the muscles of her womb, the contractions are involuntarily forced to do it.

So the way I think of it in my head is you get these muscles that squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, boom, boom, boom, slamming, you know, against the baby. And the Pitocin causes the contractions to, in many cases, to be very, very strong. And this can cause them to be very, very uncomfortable.

So what's the next thing that happens? Well, because the contractions are so hard, the mother is in extreme pain. Well, we need to alleviate her pain, so let's go ahead and give her an epidural. So we stick a giant needle in her, give her a bunch of drugs. Well, now she can't feel anything, but that means that she can't feel the process of the baby actually being born.

And so you've got her womb is slamming down on the baby, you know, boom, boom, boom, the baby is starting to get distressed, and she can't feel anything to actually understand what's happening with the baby's progress down the birth path. And so then the baby starts to get in distress.

Baby's heart rate goes up because the womb is slamming down upon him. Mother can't feel anything to help and to push when appropriate, et cetera. And so baby's in distress, we've got to do an emergency C-section. The next thing you know, you've got a first-time mother who's had an emergency C-section that wasn't actually an emergency.

It was often caused by this cascade of interventions. And a lot of it could have been fixed if she had been in a completely comfortable environment. Now, once a mother has a first-time C-section, that makes everything more difficult because now she's got to recover herself from this invasive surgery rather than just recovering from childbirth.

Thankfully, of course, the baby is here, and the mother is okay, and the baby is here. But now her recovery is much more difficult. So instead of the first few days her being with baby and focused on him while recovering from a natural childbirth, she has to be cared for for her medical, her intense surgery.

And then now the second time around, now she's got to have what's called -- is she going to try to have a VBAC, vaginal birth after cesarean, or is she going to go ahead and just schedule another C-section? And if she schedules the C-section, again, of course, I'm trying to be very fair here.

We can be very thankful for C-section technology, but it can be very difficult because now the scar tissue starts to be built up. And I've had friends who -- one close friend had four children, all by cesarean. And, again, thankfully they were able to have four children. But then the doctor said, "Your body can't handle another cesarean.

Don't have another baby." That's a really frustrating and difficult thing. I had friends who had two cesareans and then they went and they had to literally go to another state because after two cesareans it wasn't legal in the state they were living in to attempt to have a vaginal birth.

And so this whole world of baby having is a world that is fraught with little things that can lead to big negative outcomes. And so your number one driving decision as a husband is to make sure that your wife is calm, confident in her ability, in her body, and in everything around her.

That was a little bit long, but you need to understand that in order to now come back to birth tourism. So with birth tourism, which is going to likely lead to her being in a more calm state? The idea of hopping on an airplane when she's 38 weeks pregnant, going to another country where she doesn't know anybody, doesn't speak the language, and then kind of wandering into whatever local scenario there is, or her being at home where her mother is there or her mother is far away or whatever she wants, right?

And she knows the place and she knows everyone and she's got everything just how she wants it. So after the first baby, it's a lot easier to think about and contemplate going to another place. But the first time around, that can be pretty daunting. And so I, looking back, as much as I love the concept and the idea of birth tourism, it would be hard for me to say that that's what I would do the first time around.

Because as a husband, my primary goal is not -- especially as an American, right, where you have this very strong passport, you have strong citizenship, you have a strong economy, everything is squared away. My goal is not -- if I were from a country where this could make or break the success of my child, maybe I'm from Pakistan, and if I could have my baby born in the United States, it would allow my baby to access the United States or Canada or something like that.

That's really compelling. But in a scenario where you don't need it, my number one goal is for my wife to have a successful, smooth, healthy, natural, pain-free childbirth that she will be excited about and she'll look back on fondly. And that requires a lot of work and preparation in order to facilitate for many people.

So if you're aware of that, now let's go to birth tourism and say, "Could you do it?" Well, yeah, you absolutely could do it. But you would need to do it and make sure that you had accounted for those things. So there are some -- I mean, many women's bodies give birth easily regardless of what happens.

And there are many people who just for their first baby, they go and have a baby. There's a great YouTube channel. You can go on YouTube and you can find Mike and Lauren. They don't really post anymore. At least they stopped posting. But Mike and Lauren were some personal finance YouTubers.

And you can go and you can find their experience of giving birth in Costa Rica. And they went to Costa Rica and they made videos about both of it. For their first two babies at least. I don't know if they've had more children. But they went to Costa Rica and everything worked swimmingly.

They scheduled a birth at a private hospital in San Jose, Costa Rica. They flew down when Lauren was probably 38 weeks pregnant. They came in. They had a place to stay where they were comfortable. It was just around the block from the hospital. Went into labor. Went to the hospital.

Had the baby in the hospital. Everything was great. They got their birth documents and everything squared away. A couple weeks later they got on an airplane and they flew home. And everything went really well for them. I've known other people who've done this and other people in places around the world.

And they just fly in, go to a hospital, have a baby. Everything's good. And so you can definitely do it. But you just need to be confident in it. If you -- and other people who have written a story about it, Patrick and Allie Schulte from the blog BumFuzzle.com.

If you go back in their archives years ago, their eldest is I think 13, 14 now. But you can go back and you can find their experience of doing birth tourism in Mexico. They were unemployed. They had just gotten back from their round the world cruise. Pregnant. They didn't have a baby.

They went to Mexico. Had their baby in Mexico. Wound up having a C-section. Had a great experience. Had two C-sections. Everything with two babies, both born in Mexico. Had a great experience. Everything was inexpensive. $3,000. And they were done. And so they saved a ton of money. Had their babies.

And instead of having a $30,000 C-section like they would have had in the U.S., everything was simple and done. And so this can work. You don't have to be excessively high strung about the details like I am. But if you understand the background of what I've described, that's why I think that birth tourism for the first baby is often going to be difficult for many people.

So if you find a great hospital and you feel good about the people, the doctor, et cetera, and you're the kind of person who you would go to the hospital regardless, it doesn't matter whether you go to a hospital in San Diego or Tijuana. It's the same thing. You just get a different -- you just get -- in San Diego you get a $30,000 bill and in Tijuana you get a $3,000 bill.

In San Diego you have an American citizen who's born in the United States. In Tijuana you're going to have an American citizen and a Mexican citizen who's born in Mexico. And so the hospital is the easy pathway. Now if you are not kind of hospital people, it's much more difficult because midwives, really good midwives, are often more difficult.

They're few and far between. And so if you can arrange a house where everyone is really comfortable, if you can arrange a house where everyone is really comfortable and/or you can arrange a midwife, either there's a birth center that you become aware of, there are several in Mexico. There are many midwives in Mexico.

And so if you met one of them and you had a place that you knew, that you liked, et cetera, and you felt confident, then that can be a great choice. Or in some cases you can bring a midwife with you. And so I've done that. The midwife that we used is retired.

But what I did with our birth tourism was I brought a midwife in from the United States who travels around the world delivering babies. And so she lived with us during the birth. Everything was there. It was expensive, but I was doing birth tourism and I wanted to do it my way.

And so that's also an option. And offline I could probably get you more details and more connections. So the number one thing is where is your wife going to be the most comfortable and the most confident? And then how do you fill in the details? The medical details are relatively straightforward.

And the legal details are relatively straightforward. The other big considerations to think about is, okay, how long can we go and be in this place? Because if you go and give birth in a foreign country, first you need to be there enough time before the birth so that everyone is relaxed.

With one of our babies we went at 34 weeks to have lots of time. We wound up changing -- so you want to at least be there at 37 weeks. Remember that anywhere between 37 and 42 weeks of gestation is a normal pregnancy, normal time to give birth. So you want to give yourself ample time to be there and for mama to feel totally relaxed, totally comfortable, et cetera, where you're not worrying about flying in all of a sudden last minute.

Once you have a baby, then you need paperwork for the baby. And so the first thing that you're going to have to do is get a birth certificate for the baby. If you have the baby in the hospital, then you'll want to -- then it's fairly straightforward. If you have the baby out of the hospital, it's less straightforward, but each country has a process for doing that.

And so you'll be able to go through that process and get the birth certificate. Depending on the bureaucracy in the country, you will need to deal with that, get the birth certificate, and then you can't leave with the baby until your baby has traveling documents. And those traveling documents wait on the birth certificate and then they wait on whatever country you're coming from or the country that you're trying to leave.

So if you as an American, if you went to Mexico and had a baby, you couldn't go back to the United States until you get your baby an American passport and register him as an American citizen. So that requires minimum a couple weeks to get a birth certificate plus a couple weeks minimum to get a passport because you have to go to the embassy, present all the information, prove the baby, et cetera, and have everything squared away.

And so minimum a month is probably a good plan after the birth. You want to be able to go to your destination, be there a month before you plan to leave. In some cases you're going to need more than that. In some cases you could get it done faster.

For example, the embassy, they can give you an emergency passport. Oftentimes you can get it done pretty quickly, but you'll want to think about those things. And then there is a lot of preparation that you'll want to do. When I coach clients on this, I talk about I give them a whole list of documents.

You need to make sure that you have birth certificates. You need to have marriage records. You need to have FBI background checks. You need to have all this stuff done in advance. And it all needs to be official records, and then you need to get all those documents at Bastille and bring them with you.

In some cases you'll need translations, et cetera, depending on the language of the country you're going to, et cetera. It's totally doable. We've done it. I would do it again. But I also acknowledge that it was really, really challenging. It was a lot of work. And so if you're hesitant about it, unless you and your wife are on -- both of us, we know this is what we want to do.

If you're hesitant about it, then I might just -- I think your number one focus as a husband has to be the well-being of your wife and her being in a really, really great position to do it. So whatever she's going to feel most comfortable, whatever's going to make her feel the most confident, that's what you need to work on.

If you do choose to do it, then with that as background, what you should do is just start taking some trips to Mexico now because you're a long way away from a decision, and, you know, meet with some midwives or meet with a local hospital, figure out where would we stay, what apartment would we really be comfortable in, et cetera.

And do that far enough in advance so that when it comes time for the child birth, you're not just showing up in an unknown country where you may or may not speak the language and you don't have any connections. You want to make those plans and preparations so that your wife can feel really confident.

So there's my initial monologue. And what do you think? >> Yeah, so that's actually super helpful. So, yeah, as we've been thinking about it, my wife is actually way more -- well, she's super excited about the idea. I've been excited about the idea. She's actually more gung-ho than I am.

That is very helpful on the number one focus being the level of comfort. So, yeah, I think that's a good amount for me to go on. We're planning on taking a trip there within a month or two, I think. So we'll probably get a feel for it. And if we realize, oh, no, it's going to be way more comfortable at home, then I think we'll come back here.

But, yeah, I think we're at the point where we almost definitely will try it for the second child. But I wasn't sure if, oh, yeah, there's almost no difference between doing it here versus doing it there except with travel. So I was kind of trying to get a feel for that, if that makes sense.

>> I think it's great, and I think Mexico is, in many cases, should be the number one destination for many people if you can establish the relevant connections. And so here are some things to look for. When you go, first of all, you need to be -- you need to understand, like, are we kind of the crunchy people where we're going to go and find a midwife in a birth center and a backup hospital, or are we kind of the more mainstream people where we're going to go and find the hospital that's the top-ranked private hospital, et cetera?

That's probably obvious to you, and you don't need to say it, but, like, that's usually people know which bucket they fall into. Up to you. Then your goal needs to be to find the appropriate medical providers that you're going to feel really comfortable and confident with. Then you need to look at accommodation, because regardless of where you give birth, you're only going to be -- that's only a small period of time.

You go to a local hospital, you're there hopefully, you know, one to three days, depending on details. So what also matters is, okay, where are we going to be before the birth and then after the birth? And my most important speech that I give to expectant fathers, because I was blindsided by it, is you need to prepare not only for the birth, but also for after birth.

My wife and I spent so much time preparing for the birth that we were blindsided by how difficult breastfeeding is, by how difficult those first days can be with a baby, et cetera. And so make sure that you have a house lined up where you're going to be comfortable and confident, et cetera.

And then you'll want to think about what kind of help you have available to you. If your wife gives birth in her hometown, there's a whole bunch of people that can generally help with that event. People bring over food, you got meals taken care of, you got people who will come over and rock the baby in the living room so she can sleep and you can sleep, et cetera.

So it's like all this support structure. When you pick up and you go to another country, you lose that support structure. So given the fact that you're going to be there for at least several weeks, two to four weeks, I can imagine getting it done in two weeks, but four weeks is safer and even then sometimes that's questionable.

So you're going to at least be gone for two to four weeks. So you need to bring some of that support structure with you. So who's going to help you? Who's going to be there and rock the baby from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. or from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.

so that she can sleep and you can sleep? So think about that. So if you have someone who will go with you or you make friends there or you have friends there or something like that, that's really, really important. Since you'll be on your own, think about things like food.

So is there food accessible or is there someone who can make food for us? The nice thing about Mexico is the prices are very modest. So you may go ahead and if you meet some people and they can give you some connections, you may be able to hire a full-time cook to cook for you for a month for $1,000.

Well, now your food is taken care of and you can do it. But think about these things holistically. If your wife is enthusiastic about the idea, I love it. And I, in some cases, we have five children. Only the final two have been birth tourism. The first three were not.

And I've often thought back and I'm like, "Oh, but all the citizenships I could have if we'd had the first three babies around the world." Knowing what I know now, what I could have done. But looking back, I couldn't have handled it as a first-time father. So if you do it, I think it's great.

And then just for anybody who's uninitiated, the reason I recommend Mexico so strongly as a great option is quite simply, if you have a baby in Mexico, your baby will be Mexican-American, in your case because you're coming from the United States. Your baby will be Mexican and American from birth, which is awesome.

Because the Mexican citizenship is a phenomenal second citizenship. Powerful country, very powerful passport, big economic future in terms of growth prospects, good demography, et cetera, good job prospects, et cetera. And the future for someone who's able to work in both countries would be really, really powerful. Fairly neutral country, not super involved in world affairs in one way or the other.

Doesn't come with a lot of baggage, et cetera. And then as the parents of a Mexican child, you immediately qualify for a permanent residency visa. And so you don't have to do it while you're there for the first time, but you'll also want to make sure you make a connection with an attorney who can help you do the process of applying for your permanent residency visa.

And when you have a Mexican permanent residency visa under current Mexican law, you never have to be in the country again. That's a document that you could get it if you're a baby, you could leave. And 20 years from now, under current law, you'd come back and you still are a resident of Mexico.

Then after you have a permanent residency visa, if you and your wife wish to become Mexican citizens, there's a very, very fast expedited pathway to citizenship that basically you need to have maintained your permanent residence visa for at least 24 months. And then you need to go to live in Mexico.

And then when you apply for Mexican citizenship, you need to have been physically present inside the country for at least 18 of the 24 months prior to your citizenship application. And then, of course, there's civics exams, Spanish exam, et cetera, that you need to pass their other requirements. Then you could become a Mexican citizen, which is a phenomenal second citizenship to have.

So in terms of real, actual pathway to citizenship, there's real -- this can be done fairly quickly. And then unlike countries like Brazil, which is another one that you read about, unlike Brazil that the law says one year and then reality on the ground is, yeah, it's not a year.

It's more like two years to get -- live there two years after it takes you forever to get your residence visa and then be there another two years and then they'll eventually get around to maybe becoming a citizen. Mexico's bureaucracy is pretty good. And so you can move a lot quicker through the system and get it done fairly quick.

So in terms of a pathway, a fast and inexpensive pathway to a second citizenship, Mexico is my number one recommended destination. And in terms of the costs, it would probably cost you several thousand dollars extra. So budget on that. I would say a budget of, say, $3,000 to $5,000, depending on whether you try to do everything all at once or whether you just go and have the baby.

You'll have the added costs for the baby, the travel, medical costs, et cetera. But it's a wonderful plan. So if she's excited about it, I would explore it and go for it. It's worth doing. >> Okay. Thank you very much. Yeah. We'll be looking into that and hopefully we'll keep you updated on it.

Thank you. >> I'd love to hear more and love to help you with any other details as time goes forward. Justin in Florida, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? >> Hey, Joshua. I have really been enjoying the series you've been doing about investing in your kids at a very young age.

I have the latest two to catch up on, but I've listened to the others. I had a question in that vein. I'm going to ask my question and I'll pop on another call. But it's in regards to what kind of grade level, for lack of a better term, even though I don't like that term, books to read to your kids.

So here's a reference. Our kids are five and three and then there's supposed to be one this month. And so, you know, for even more background, I'm trying to kind of find some chapter books that we can work through slowly but that aren't overwhelming and something that our oldest and our middle child, five and three, are both interested in so as to not lose the middle child.

I read the book and saw the list of money for a child part that you recommended. I really enjoyed that book, by the way. But, you know, in the last couple of weeks we've read like the fraud and tote chapter books, for example, and kind of worked through one chapter of the day and they really both enjoyed that.

But trying to find -- kind of trying to not read something too beyond our middle child, who is three years old, to lose it. But also not read something that's too behind our oldest because I tend to read to them together and I don't have the time to read to them, you know, separately throughout the day because of my job and stuff.

But at night I usually tend to read to them together. So there's enough information for you to talk for maybe a few minutes about that. Great. Absolutely. I'll put you on mute and you can go for your other call and I'll give you the answer here in detail. When you are reading to your children, you are seeking to do a couple of things.

Number one, you are seeking to foster a love of the activity. You want reading to be a precious and treasured part of your family's daily routine. And that means everything about it. You want it to be a time where I snuggle up with dad in a comfortable chair and you want to read the books that they love and that they really enjoy.

And with younger children, the thing I find extraordinarily frustrating, you will generally be reading the same books over and over and over and over again. That's the biggest challenge to your patience is simply to figure out how do I keep my patience so that I can, anyway, keeping your patience and reading the same book over and over again.

If you can do that, they are going to love it, you are going to hate it, but this is the price you pay. This is how you invest in your children is reading the same book over and over again. So I would say that in the early stages, you want to focus on 80% pleasure.

What I mean by pleasure is you'll know you're doing it right when your children, when you say, "Hey, it's time to read," and they squeal and run straight to the chair that you always read in or run straight to the bookshelf and grab their favorite book. You'll know you're doing well when they bring you a book that they want you to read.

That's a good sign. And so in the early years, if you can cement that enjoyment factor, then all of the other stuff that you use to stretch them out is going to be, you'll have the solid foundation that you need. I think of it kind of like coaching or counseling.

If you really want to effectively coach someone, you need to build a relationship of trust and confidence and respect before that person is open to your coaching. That requires an investment. Imagine a wayward teenager is thrust into your life. You might have all the wisdom in the world to help the teenager, but you're going to spend a lot of time building relationship before you much open your mouth on anything significant.

So with reading, the goal is not to just push, push, push. The goal is to establish the foundation of the love of reading. Now, as you go on, your children will naturally mature, and what they mature in is not vocabulary. Children are completely insensitive to vocabulary. The most unusual word, if it's something that you yourself use, will quickly enter into your child's lexicon.

And so it's not the vocabulary of a book that is going to be the biggest factor. It's the subject matter of the book. If you have a subject matter that is engaging to your child, that will draw your child in. And the other thing is your subject matter and also attention span.

So a five-year-old will naturally start to be attracted to subject matter that is more interesting, more involved. I notice that a lot with my seven-year-old daughter. One of the things that's incredible to me is watch the difference between my seven-year-old daughter and all of my other boys. My daughter is so lasered in on relationships, on emotions, on characteristics, on all the stereotypical things that women are lasered in on.

And so the books that interest her are the ones that have kind of those complex feminine relationships, et cetera. It's hard to put on. Whereas the boys, they don't care about the relationships. They just want action, bang, boom, sword fighting, et cetera. It's just blindingly obvious their temperamental differences.

And so if you have a five-year-old and you're five-year-old is a girl and you start to recognize, you know what, she's interested in some of this relationship scenario, and you start to try a couple books that are a little longer and try to find something where she's engaged in the story.

It's not the word choice. It's the story. And then vice versa, if you notice that, hey, this isn't working and I got a five-year-old boy, well, let's look for something where quick, short, punchy, you know, right straight to the point, action, action, action. No long, drawn-out descriptions of how so-and-so is feeling and see, hey, is this engaging?

Then we come to attention span. So children generally have a fairly short attention span. So if you recognize that, you know what, we can do 15 minutes if there's a book with pictures, but if the pictures are fewer, then we're down to about 10 minutes, then you just automatically know we're going to do about 10 minutes in a book.

And then you try to stretch it just a little bit, but don't stretch it into 40 minutes. Stretch it into -- keep it at smaller amounts. And in general, if you can find the right topic or the right style that can engage your children, that's what you're looking for is that kind of that hook.

So when you notice something that your children really like, then go ahead and see what else it can be. So, right, my seven-year-old daughter, she was a slower reader. She didn't start to write as quickly, but she made progress. We worked with her and worked with her and worked with her, et cetera.

And then she got into a horse book, and it was the book that hooked her, and she was reading it to herself, and my wife and I are pumping our arms, "Finally, we found the hook." So I immediately bought 15 more horse books, right, because I found the hook.

She's into horse books. She listens to horse audio books and little horsey girl stuff. All right, so I flood that. I flood the market in order to kind of get her into that next thing. Well, now she's listened to so many horse books and read so many horse books that the horsey thing, she's still super into the horses, but the horsey thing is kind of paused.

But we built up the stamina now that we can turn it and put it into something else. And so here, try this. I try to find -- she very much connects with female protagonists, and so you find all of the series that have a female protagonist that she connects with.

And she's not exclusive, but I know that if I can give her a book that has a female protagonist and she really gets into it, right, Betsy Tacey, she loves Betsy Tacey. So here, let's go through this, and she's engaged in the story. So just watch your children and observe.

So in conclusion, it's not the vocabulary that is important. Children have no filter for what is kind of high-level vocabulary or not. They just skip over the words that they don't know, and then eventually they come to know them. And you'll know you're doing it right when your children spit out words in their normal course of conversation that you've never taught them, that you don't use, that you may not even know.

Then you know that they're properly learning their vocabulary from books, and that's exciting. But it's not the vocabulary, it's the story. It's the subject matter. So mine book lists and test things. And by the way, if you start a book and it doesn't work, just skip it, right? Don't force it.

If you get two or three chapters in and children start groaning when you bring out that book, just skip it or lay it aside. Maybe next year it'll be right for it. I want to just share one personal anecdote as to why this is important. When I was a child, I remember vividly -- I don't know why -- actually, I do know why.

I remember vividly that I was looking -- casting about, looking for something to read. And I remember my mom gave me this book. It was a yellow book, and I'll share the details. You can know how vivid it is. I don't know why this is one of those vivid childhood memories.

But at the time, my dad had just had a dump truck load of gravel brought to the house, to gravel the driveway. And I remember I took this yellow hardback book out to the driveway, and I sat and I read it. I remember sitting on it, and I read it, and I just -- I could read it, but I didn't get into it.

And I remember taking it in and saying to my mom, like, "Mom, I don't like this book." And she said, "Okay, that's okay." And she laid it aside. She didn't force me to read it. And then I remember sometime later, who knows, a year or two later, I came across that yellow book on the shelf, and I opened it up, and I tried it again.

And I loved it. I became obsessed with it. The book was "Swiss Family Robinson." And I loved the book so much. And it was just a lesson to me that I've learned and I've seen so many times. There are a few books that are -- generally, if a book is printed -- I mean, there are some bad books.

But if a book is printed, and especially if it's a classic or if it's recommended by anyone else, it's probably a good book. So there are a few books that are coming from a list or that are printed and popular and have reviews. There are a few of those that are bad books.

But they just may not be the right time for this book. Books are very much a matter of timing. Even as an adult reader, I usually just buy books. But a lot of times I'm not into this. Then all of a sudden, two years later, I notice that book, and I pick it up, and I think, "What a perfect book." It speaks to me at a time based upon where I'm going into.

So try different things. See what sticks. Gauge your response by the reaction of your children and see what they're into. But don't let vocabulary be the thing that holds you back. There's no -- the child does not have a filter for lexile score. The child has a filter for story.

And even advanced stories meted out in appropriate quantities for attention span can be appropriate. We go to the state of Alabama, Reginald. Welcome to the show. I'm going to serve you today. Hey, Joshua. I have a question. So in a recent podcast, you mentioned that you advise people to max out their retirement account.

And I just wanted to hear your thoughts on, like, you know, how to -- like, if that makes sense, if you're planning on taking up a strategy such as, like, barista fire or coast fire, like, how do you balance those things in terms of, like, maxing it out? Is there a point at which you should stop or should you just, like, you know, continue to max it out indefinitely even though, like, at some point you might have too much?

Is there too much? Just wanted to hear your thoughts on that. So let's define some terms. My understanding of the term "coast fire" involves the idea that you should -- so fire, acronym being financial independence, retire early, right, early retirement, financial independence. Coast means save aggressively, fund a bunch of money into a retirement account.

Then you're not going to quit working completely, but you're going to think of your working life kind of as being on -- coasting along on autopilot. So maybe you've accumulated a few hundred thousand dollars in your 401(k) and you're 27 years old. Now you say, "You know what? I'm not going to save for retirement anymore because by the time I reach 67, there's going to be plenty of money in this account under normal growth projections.

So I'm just going to work a job that I love, it pays me enough money to live on, and I'm not going to worry too much about saving." That's my understanding of the term "coast fire." I don't know the term "barista fire." Is it similar? Or can you define it more clearly for me?

Sure. So the term "barista fire" is -- it kind of falls in line with something that you championed before, which is, like, this idea that there's really no reason to ever stop working if you find something that you love and you're passionate about. But barista fire basically is coming up with a number that if you think, like, how much money you'll need in retirement and how much money you feel like you'll be able to -- if you don't stop working, you'll be able to kind of -- like, finding that difference, if you will.

So let's say, you know, you feel like you'll need $100,000 in retirement, but you feel like you can safely make $40,000 if you continue working. Then I guess you need to save up enough income where you can generate the difference, like $60,000, for example. Yeah, okay. I understand. So to answer your question, the -- I don't see -- let me think for a moment as I speak this.

The only reason I can -- the only reasons I can come up with as to why you wouldn't prioritize saving in a retirement account are these. Number one, if you want to invest into something that is not an eligible asset for holding in a retirement account. So an example would be in your own business that you're going to own and operate into a piece of real estate that you're going to live in, et cetera.

Or an insurance policy or something that's a disallowed asset. There are some assets that you cannot hold in a retirement account, and if you wanted to invest into those, then a retirement account is not appropriate. Another reason not to invest in a retirement account would be if you knew for certain that you were going to be leaving the country in which the retirement account is held.

This happens a lot to international expats, right? Let me go and work in England for a few years. And do I go ahead and get involved there? It can be particularly thorny with the United States and Canada kind of going back and forth. In general, most of the time, it still makes sense to utilize the country's pension schemes, but there can be exceptions.

Another connection would be if you were super hardcore about privacy from the government. Most of the assets in a retirement account are fully disclosed to government, just like your bank account and all things like that. So if you were super kind of secret squirrel, I've got to have some money that's not disclosed to the government, well, buy some gold coins or some anonymous Bitcoin.

BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com, by the way, BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. Go buy some gold or some Bitcoin or something like that that's not in your name, then it can serve for that. But in virtually all of the scenarios, at least that I can come up with, it's always better to prioritize a retirement account. Let me explain why.

Let's start with the concept of taxation. Years ago in the annals of Radical Personal Finance, I released a show. I'll try to come up with it in a moment and give you an episode number where I said, "What if you exclusively saved in a retirement account and then just quit and lived on that money for the rest of your life, but you quit at the age of 30 and you had to pay full penalty taxes on it?" This is most likely where your question comes from.

"Hey, what if I want to retire early or pull money from a retirement account and I don't want to have to incur the penalty?" Remember, of course, that there are ways to get money out of the retirement account without incurring a penalty, but let's assume that you do incur the penalty.

In every scenario that I can run, somebody who quits completely and has a zero-dollar income is better off just taking early distributions from a 401(k) and paying the 10% penalty tax because that 10% penalty tax, if viewed just as a tax rate, that's lower than the tax that he would have paid if he hadn't used the retirement account in the first place.

So even in a hardcore early retirement scenario, then you're better off funding a 401(k) first. Now, if you pursue some form of coast fire or barista fire, as you describe it, then I see nothing that would impact that because you're still going to be generating money. In most of those scenarios, you're probably going to be generating enough money that it provides for your living expenses because once you get into a mindset of retirement, you're generally going to do that when your living expenses go down and you're consuming less.

And it's not that hard for really anybody, any single guy who doesn't have children with expenses associated with them, et cetera, it's not that hard for anybody to live on whatever you make from any job or any business. And if people are into this, they're usually into extreme savings in some form or another, they're accustomed to living on less.

And so, you know, talking about it for a minute, no, I can't see any reason not to use a retirement account. The retirement account gives you significant savings on your taxes. The retirement account gives you significant security from your asset protection and creditor protection. And I think it needs to be the priority in all situations.

And with the exceptions that I gave, right, I want to start a business or I want to do something that's a disallowed investment or I'm going to leave the country, those are legitimate objections. But from barring those obvious exceptions, I think a retirement account should be your number one investing choice.

Okay, so thank you for that. I kind of have a follow-up question because I guess what I was more so like wondering about was if there was a situation in which it wouldn't make sense to like completely max out your account if you were going to continue working or if your plan was to continue working.

And then on top of that, I am fairly certain that I currently work at a government job that I'm fairly certain that I'll have a pension that will cover at least 60% of my final average salary when I leave. So I was just trying to get a sense of like, you know, yes, I'm maxing out all these things, but I'm wondering like, you know, am I kind of like doing too much if I know that I'm going to continue working in some form, you know, post like what I'm doing right now.

And on top of that, I'm probably going to be collecting, you know, some pension. So I was just like wondering like, you know, if I was already kind of thinking about, you know, employing a strategy such as like resupply or like am I kind of like, you know, sacrificing like a whole lot today and I won't even need as much funds in the future.

That's kind of like what I was thinking. Those are two important questions. They're also completely separate. So let's make sure that we're engaging in rigorously logical thinking by disconnecting the questions. Question number one that you have asked is quite simply, is there a reason not to prioritize a retirement account in my savings?

The answer to that is you would not put money into a retirement account that you are accumulating for a specific expenditure that is in the short or medium term. So if you knew that I want to buy a new car or another car, I need $10,000 for that car.

So therefore, I'm not going to take that money from a retirement account. That'd be dumb. So I'm just going to start saving $500 a month so that two years from now I can go ahead and pay $10,000 for the car. So if there's a specific expenditure that you know you're going to be making and while you're still working, then no, it absolutely doesn't make sense to contribute to a retirement account in that scenario.

But that's because you have a specific expenditure. Now the flip side of that is quite simply every year of unused retirement account contributions is a lost year. It's a year you never get back. So somebody who's a hardcore financial engineer would say, "Joshua, am I not better off funding my retirement account and then taking out a car loan so that I can make sure I get the money in the retirement account?" To which my answer would be, "Maybe you are better off that way, but most people are not better off that way." So there are some financial engineering things that you could do that are probably technically superior for the very disciplined and the very analytical, et cetera, but in most cases I wouldn't recommend that because most people are not that sophisticated or analytical or logical or consistent or disciplined.

So if you know you're going to spend the money and you're saving for a trip to Europe next year, save it in a savings account. Don't save it in a retirement account. The second question has nothing to do with retirement accounts and it has everything to do with what percentage of my income should I be saving.

Should I be saving aggressively for retirement such that with a goal that I make 150% of my income in retirement or should I be doing something different now in my life? And let me just verify. Reginald, how old are you? I'm 40 years old. Are you married? Do you have children?

I am married and I have two young children. Okay. So in general, let's start with the philosophy of savings. The only reason you save money at all is because you value something that you can spend the money on in the future more than you value what you can spend the money on today.

That's it. There's no other reason to save money. The reason you save money is because you value something in the future that you could spend the money on more than what you value today. Now we can add a little bit of complexity to that, but at its core, that's all that's needed.

So if somebody is saving for financial independence, the reason that person is saving for financial independence is because they value what they can spend their money on in the future more than what they value what they can spend their money on today. And every person will have a different name for what they value.

So somebody who's pursuing fire will often value the idea of freedom, right? Say, "I value the freedom I can have from work in the future more than I value what I could spend the money on today." Somebody who is super charitably inclined would say, "I value what I can spend my future higher invested dollars on more in the future than what I can spend today." Someone who is consumption-oriented and saving for consumption would say, "I value the fact that I can buy a car that's twice as fancy in the future more than one that's half as fancy today.

So I'm going to not spend the money today. I'm going to save it for the future." That's it. So in order for this to make sense, you need to clearly understand what you value in the future and why it's more valuable to you than it is today. So then we have to look at consumption.

And when you go into most lifestyles, you wind up with a set of decisions that are fairly homogenous within a group. Most of the people who pursue early retirement financial independence, generally speaking -- let me be careful here. Okay. Let me not say most. I retract the previous statement because it would be inaccurate for me to say that.

Let me say many of the people who are pursuing financial independence and early retirement and who are the loudest promoters of it are doing that promotion of the lifestyle either before they have children or they have chosen not to have children. And so their life, instead of having a life that has various obvious stages, their life and lifestyle is basically kind of one smooth sweep towards the future.

It's fine, right? I'm not making fun of that or saying that's the wrong decision in any way. But you'll see that as a commonality. So Mr. Money Mustache, right? The time that he accumulated his money was before he had a child. And that was when he was a hardcore saver.

So if you go around -- I haven't read a FIRE blog in years, so I'm not familiar with who the latest and greatest influencers in that space are. But you will generally find a common theme that the most hardcore people who are saving for early retirement financial independence are doing that before having children or they're doing it and not planning on having any children.

And it makes sense, right? Because they value freedom in the future, their financial freedom and the need not to have to work. When you bring children into play, you get this tension. Now there are many advocates for early retirement financial independence, many people have retired early and saved for that retirement when they had children.

So it's not mutually exclusive. But when you bring children into the mix, you add a whole different mindset of experiences and each person is going to make an individual decision. But most parents want to invest into their children and most parents find that money spent on their family lifestyle is a better investment than is kind of a long term of scrimping and saving just so we can have more freedom in the future.

This is a simple example of space. My wife and I pride ourselves on our ability to be minimalistic. We can travel the world with under seat bags. We did it. We traveled nonstop for almost a year with nothing except under seat suitcases, six of them plus my backpack with work stuff.

So we had six people, four children, we had six under seat rolly bags plus my work backpack and that was it. So we pride ourselves on our minimalist kind of lifestyle. We don't mind being in close quarters. And in fact, over the last few years, one of the things that I've learned is I like being in close quarters with my children, especially when we're sleeping.

We lived in a travel trailer, a 30-foot travel trailer with three children. Children were super close. We traveled the world, one hotel room for a long time, houses, et cetera. We like to be physically close. But when it comes time to think about living in a small house versus living in a big house, I live in a big house because that big house facilitates a whole set of lifestyle decisions that are really, really wonderful.

I don't want to live in a tiny 200-square-foot house just because I can. I don't want to live in a 500-square-foot house just because I could. That's awesome for a single person. I would be thrilled to death to live in a tiny house when it's just my wife and me.

But with children, I want to live in a large house because that facilitates all kinds of other things. And so we consume at a higher level. We consume a large house in terms of expenses and lifestyle because of what it facilitates. And so as a parent, you have all kinds of kind of natural built-in consumption.

So you spend more naturally because you want to facilitate something in your family. I spend a vast amount of money on experiences. But I have made the choice that I can be happy as a clam, as a 60-year-old man, sitting in one town, sitting in a chair under the tree, reading 10 books a week.

I don't need to spend a dime. I can sit in that chair. I can get a cushion out of the dumpster and sit on the chair under the tree and get all my books from the library and be happy as a clam. I don't know that I myself want to go to Europe and backpack around when I'm 60 years old and I'm a single guy.

But I love taking my children around the world. Problem is, it costs a huge amount of money to do that. Plane tickets, times seven. Hotel rooms, times two. Taxi rides, times three sometimes. It's incredibly expensive. But I love it. And so I want to spend and consume money now at this stage of life much more than I want and consume it later.

And I think many parents reach that similar scenario. So back to your point, if you have a 60% pension and you are generally content in your government job and it's a good fit for you and you don't hate it, you're doing fine, you're enjoying your work, et cetera, it doesn't make sense for you to also simultaneously save 75% of your earned income living on 25%, making your family suffer, avoiding the luxuries that would really enhance your children's lifestyle and their opportunities in life.

It makes far more sense for you to save, hey, I'm going to save 10% of my income just in case something goes flaky with the government pension. I've got a 60% pension. I'm going to keep working this job. And it makes far more sense for you to buy a bigger house in a better neighborhood.

It makes far more sense for you to enroll your children in a private school or homeschool. It makes far more sense for you to have better vacations where you teach them and give them more interesting information on life and consume at the stage of your life at which consumption makes sense.

But that's not a question of retirement account or not. It's more a question of how much do I value the consumption now versus how much do I value the consumption in the future. Thank you. That was excellent. That was kind of like -- I think I just needed to hear it made that claim to me because I was definitely feeling some of that tension as a father and, you know, of two young children and, like, you know, putting so much, you know, maxing out on accounts and just thinking to myself, like, hey, what am I doing?

I mean, me and my wife, like, make so much money and sometimes it just feels like, you know, why are we -- why does it feel like we're struggling? And then it's like when I decided to -- like when I said, okay, what if I pulled back a little bit to where it makes sense?

But then, you know, I also didn't want to make sure I was -- I wanted to make sure I was, like, doing the thing that was responsible, but that makes sense. I feel like I'm still being responsible but also putting the needs of, like, you know, my family and, you know, spending, you know, at a time in my life where it makes sense.

So thank you. My pleasure. So here's what I would recommend for someone in your situation. Number one, the first exercise you need to do is sit down and project your wealth forward to two ages. The first age is the age at which your children become legal adults. The second age is "normal retirement age." So calculate the total balance of your retirement accounts and your savings and project forward to those dates and try to get a sense of where you are.

Some people will have a very intense savings goal for things they want to do with their children. This is where I come from. I'm super -- literally on my chart on my desk here -- Rush Limbaugh used to shake his paper, right? In my greasy little hands or my greasy big hands or my non-greasy big hands, I have here on my desk my chart that lives on my desk many days, not all days, but it has a chart of every calendar year going forward from now to my age 115.

This is the life -- that's when I plan to die is at 115. And on this chart I have my calendar age, my wife's calendar age, and the calendar ages for each of my children. And if you do this, it's really important. I have -- for each of my children I have the age of 13 highlighted.

I have the age of 18 highlighted. I, of course, know the ages they are right now. But the reason I do this is because in parenting you have a few different stages. So the first thing you have is baby stage. And I don't have much to say about baby stage.

I rock my babies and I love them, but they don't do much for me. It's a baby. After they got a baby stage, then they start to be pretty cool kids, and you start to enjoy that. But kid stage asks -- or child stage -- I don't like the word "kid" -- child stage lasts until, say, 13, right, adolescence.

And then in adolescence you need to be aware of the fact that you've got young adults. And young adults in adolescence is a very different stage because now instead of being selfish as a father and we're going where I want to go, you need to be respectful of the wishes of the young adult while also guiding the young adult.

So I see kind of life as very different from, say, 4 to 13, 4 or 5 years old to 13, and from 13 to 18 you have someone who is technically a minor, not legally competent to do many things that a legal adult can do, but somebody who is a young adult where you're going to be very, very thoughtful of this young adult's goals, this young adult's ambitions, what's best for this young adult.

You need to factor the individuality of that young adult into your decisions. Then after that child is a legal adult, then you have a little bit more freedom. Of course, the child may be independent, financially independent, meaning on his own, etc. And then your lifestyle changes. So then I have my age going out and I have kind of the traditional retirement ages marked very carefully on my chart because while I myself don't intend to ever "retire", I also acknowledge the fact that I may be delusional.

In my experience coaching a lot of people in their 60s and 70s, unless they have succeeded in developing a job or a business that engages their ambition and their learning, etc., they often don't really want to work anymore. And so I'm very conscious of that. I hope to be successful in developing a business that gives me a lifestyle and requires me to learn, etc., because I don't want to sit around and twiddle my thumbs from age 65 to 115.

But I want to pay careful attention to... But I also want to be aware of the fact that it might be really important for me to have freedom because that's a common experience in that period of time. Now, along with this, so project your account balances. And if today you could project forward and you could say, "At 65, I can totally maintain my current lifestyle, let alone kind of...

I'm good to go." And figure out where you are so that you need to start with the balances. Number two, you need to fill in your chart with kind of what your big things are that you might like to do. So I--excuse me, I got a little distracted. I was saying that some people have big goals for weird things that they want to do with their children.

So I'm very much in this camp. I'm weirdly obsessed with traveling the world. I'm weirdly obsessed with living in an RV in the United States for a year. And work doesn't really work--it doesn't--it's not--those things are not conducive to business success. Bouncing around from hotel room to hotel room to hotel room is not a great way to make a million.

Living in an RV is not conducive to building a business. And so I need to be very, very careful to denote the years in which I don't expect to make much money. I don't expect my businesses to flourish during those times. Well, I have other years in which I can really expect my businesses to flourish.

And so you need to make a note of things that you might want to do or that are important to you at certain ages. If you're the kind of family that's going to buy a sailboat and sail the world, you don't need money in a retirement account. You need money to go buy a sailboat.

On the other hand, if you're the kind of family who is very well--you're very content in what I call a traditional or mainstream lifestyle and no shade is being thrown when I say that, then that's super helpful because it makes things a lot simpler than those of us who have these weird lifestyle ambitions.

So look at your chart and try to figure out, "When do I need money? Where do I need money?" And then go back to your expenses and kind of reevaluate them. What I think is so powerful about people who are focused on fire is you learn that you don't need to spend a lot of money to live a really great lifestyle.

And this is one of those things that to me is an important lesson to learn. It is laughably easy in the United States to become very, very wealthy compared to the rest of the world. The money is swooshing by your feet in the gutters and all you got to do is reach down and pick it up.

Everything is cheap. Everything is cheap in the United States. And so when you understand that you don't have to be extremist, you can just be a little thoughtful, then I think you can do both. The people who just are dumb with their money is they work a job that is a medium-paying job that they don't really like and then they go out and they bandage over their frustration with life with constant, never-ending consumerism.

And the US-American system is built to suck every dollar out of their checkbooks and leave them with nothing at the end of the day. But if you're just thoughtful about it, you're thoughtful about your big purchases, you choose big expenses that are appropriate for your family so that you can minimize friction and transaction costs, then you're thoughtful about how you like to spend the time.

Spending money excessively for things you don't value is pointless. But then going ahead and liberating your spending on things you do value, that's, as far as I'm concerned, the smart move. So lay out that chart and see if that helps you in your thinking. Good enough, Reginald? Yes, that's great.

Thank you, Joshua. My pleasure. With that, we move on to Daniel in Texas. Daniel, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Thank you. How are you doing, Joshua? Very well, sir. And you? Good, good. I got the timing wrong. I forgot it was at Eastern, not Central.

But thankfully, you're still on, so there you go. So my question has to do with how do I treat a new business as a business and not just a side hustle when it comes to spending money, buying equipment, buying technology, getting professional services, that kind of thing. Is it your ambition that this new business become a full-time business?

Yes. Yep. I want to treat this. I have a tendency to not go hardcore enough into things and just kind of piddle around. But I want this to be a full-time business, not just making a few hundred bucks on the side. Okay. When will you leave your job to run this business full-time?

Are you asking a timeline for now or an amount of money? You may choose. Related question. Yeah. I would say when it can, probably when I can pull at least $50,000 to $60,000 out of it so I can pay my mortgage, get by with the bare basics, and make sure I know my family will be taken care of.

What expenses, business expenses, what money spent on the business will move you the quickest towards making that $50,000 to $60,000 that would allow you to go full-time? Sure. I mean, I think biggest things I can think of is obviously marketing, effective marketing, which could obviously be a giant hole you can pour money into very quickly.

Equipment, this is a contractor business, so some amount of equipment, obviously a lot of that can be minimized to begin with. And then part of it would be kind of back-end technology to help me basically quoting and accounting software. So I know I'm selling my jobs at the correct amount of money and helping me stay on top of that.

If you were earning that $50,000 to $60,000 of profit today, are you ready to give your two-weeks notice to your boss? Yes. Would moving faster into the business help you to feel like you are making faster progress towards your life vision? I believe so. What expenses, what business expenses, what money spent on the business would slow you down from achieving this goal of going full-time?

I think my biggest concern would be more so being foolish and overextending myself and risking the health and well-being of my family more than keeping me from being able to go full-time with it. I would rather do it, per se, part-time and spend the money to build it right than go full-time and be struggling along without the right tools.

But I guess my more concern is I've got to pay the mortgage and take care of my family. That's more my big concern. My mental model that I'm sharing with you and I'm going to now speak about is not as concise and clear as I would like. I wish it were eight words and one picture, but it's not.

So we've got to back into it with a few more words, but let's do it because I think it should be fairly clear. When you have a side hustle that you desire to become a full-time endeavor and when you are confident that that is the ideal next step for you, this should immediately become your number one most important goal and you should go after it with the goal of speeding up the timeline as much as possible.

There are a few reasons for this. First, if it's successful, you want to start to experience the joys of that success as quickly as possible. Why spend years working two jobs when you could just go ahead and work one job and experience all the benefits and the flexibility, et cetera, of that?

And more importantly, if it's successful and you can make more money and have more opportunity, you want to get that going as much as possible. Let's say that on the side you could service 10 clients, but full-time you could service 30 clients. Well, those 30 clients, that gives you much more word of mouth.

That makes it much easier for the business to grow much bigger, much faster. So when people are able to build and start a successful business, they often wish they had done it sooner because they just see the benefits of it and they say, "Man, I should have done this sooner.

This would have been wonderful." Now, what if the business fails? Well, if a business fails or is going to fail, we want it to fail as quickly as possible so you can stop wasting your time with a stupid idea and get on to something that might work. And so if the business, you know, "Hey, listen, you try it and you go full-time and it just completely fails because it doesn't deliver the money that you need or it doesn't deliver the lifestyle that you were hoping for," et cetera, you're far better off failing faster so that you can go back to your job and pick that thing up and pick up the pieces.

Or you're better off to say, "Hey, that business sucked. Let me go on and figure out what would actually be my dream." And so if it's successful, you want it to succeed quickly. And if it's a failure, you want it to fail quickly. So everything on either ends of the spectrum is a matter of improving speed.

The faster you can get to it, the better. So the only thorny bit is in the middle where, all right, it's okay but it's not great and it's, you know, that's where it's difficult because you can't say the business is such a success that I'm excited about going after it and you can't say it's a failure that I'm just going to close up shop and go to something else.

So this is the space that you want to be really careful and you want to think very carefully about the money that you're spending and the time that you're spending to make sure that you are as quickly as possible getting the business to one of those extremes, either very successful or an obvious failure.

And you don't want that failure to be from stupid decisions but you want to get it to there fairly quickly. So money that you can spend that's smart is money that's going to position you for success. Maybe that, as you said, marketing. Any money that you can spend on making more money, that's smart money.

Money that you can spend just on controlling expenses, you know, it's not so exciting. But money that you can spend to make more money is exciting because if you genuinely need to invest, you know, $3,000 a month in marketing or $1,000 a month in marketing and you genuinely need equipment that's going to cost you, you know, $3,000 a month of payments or, you know, $50,000, whatever it is the equipment that you need.

Then you want to get that stuff really quickly, as quickly as possible so that you can find out is this business going to be successful because you want to get it to successful or failure. You don't want it to go to failure because you just made dumb consumption expenses or hired people you didn't need or streamlined your life too much.

You want to focus on revenue production primarily. And so filter your decisions through that. Is this moving me quickly towards knowing that it's a success or that it's not? What really sucks in my opinion is if a guy doesn't put enough energy into his business to actually give it the legs that it might need to be successful.

So you see people who go after a business and, you know, I'm going to start this sideline business but I need a piece of equipment to do the business well and I'm just going to not go after it. I'm not going to spend the money on the equipment. I'm just going to keep on with my old broken down equipment and you never reach the scale that perhaps your business needs.

Some businesses need a certain scale and it's better off get the stuff, get into the business and find out if it's going to work. You know, I had a cousin of mine a number of years ago. This cousin was a farmer and he got out of school, grew up on a farm and he decided he was going to be a farmer.

And the thing that I'm most proud about him is he went after it. Dude signed up for hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans, maybe seven figures. He had all the greatest equipment. He had all the latest stuff, the newest tractor, the best seeder, drill, seed drill, all of the stuff.

He had all the stuff, everything, GPS, computerized, etc. He went out and he leased I don't know how many acres he leased and he went after it for several years. At the end of it, he made no money and he said that sucked, sold everything, got rid of it all, went and got a job, right?

But how much better the fact that I think he was 30 by the time he decided he couldn't make a living in farming. But he didn't spend years wondering, "Oh, what if I could have gone and gotten all that stuff?" He went into it, he got after it and he moved on with his life.

And so that basic mentality I think is the key thing. Build, expend the money on the business as quickly as possible of smart decisions to get you to where you know you could be successful. And then go after it and then see if this business is a success. And don't waste time because the sooner you can get after that business full time, the better off you are in the long run.

And then just make sure you don't slide into the failure column by stupid excess random stuff. Skip all that stuff that's not necessary. Don't necessarily try to make your life easy if you can just save a little bit of money and focus on generating revenue in the short term.

Sure. Okay. All right. I mean, that's kind of been my inclination. But also, I'm very much a risk mitigator and so trying to find that balance. I am trying to be more bold. Especially the episode you did about Bitcoin. Gosh, that was a year and a half ago now or so.

And some of the related episodes have made me try and seek to be jump out there more. But I have my wife stays home with our kids. I've got three kids. I want to be wise with that as well. Of course. Fortune favors the bold. Figure out what would be – and here's how I approach that.

There's no question that there's a lot more responsibility on you now than there was 10 years ago. But that responsibility is basically the bare minimums. So figure out what you would do in the case of a total bankruptcy and think about that so you're clear on what you would do if you had to declare bankruptcy.

And then go to your finances and go to your career and figure out how things could work out if you needed to. If you are in a career where you could be easily rehired, if you're in an industry that is strong, et cetera, you've got a lot less risk.

You can always come back and get your job back. I think this is one of the things where people often underestimate how employable they are. If you're employed today, if your career skills could stay current, if you can keep your contacts current, et cetera, you can probably afford to pretty quickly move on and try the business if you can get rehired in.

Now it gets harder when you're 10 years out. When you're 10 years out, you're more used to working for yourself. You're more used to independence. Your contacts have probably grown stale. Your job skills may have grown rusty, et cetera. But you certainly got at least a couple of years where you could probably get rehired pretty quickly.

And then if you have to look at your household expenses and figure out if we had to cut it to the bone, what would we do? If we had to go behind on payments, which ones would we let go? What's my bare minimum? I'm going to keep my mortgage payment, but I'm going to let this go, et cetera.

Just get a clear idea of a worst-case scenario. And I think a lot of people overestimate the risks that they face. Very prudent people often just overestimate the risks, and they underestimate the value of moving quicker. So it really is important to move as quickly as you can. If you can go two years earlier by being moderately aggressive instead of really, really conservative, that's two years that you can be a business.

And your business can ramp up very quickly. More importantly, if your business fails, that's two years of your life you get back where you're not pursuing a failed business. Instead of kind of nursing the dream along, nursing the dream along, nursing the dream along, and now you wake up, and it's eight years later, and you're just now finding out that this business sucks.

So speed is of the essence, and it's really, really valuable. Fortune favors the bold, and obviously prudence is good, but go after it hard and strong. We go, oh, he just jumped off right when I was going to him. Well, I was trying to get you off the line, Daniel, to go onto my last caller and finish it up in a reasonable time, but he jumped.

Is that anything else, Daniel, that you want to talk about? No, I think that's helpful. I appreciate it. Thank you. Wonderful. Have an awesome day. And with that, we conclude our Friday Q&A show. In conclusion, I want to simply remind you that right now, bitcoinprivacycourse.com. You mentioned Bitcoin. If you're interested in purchasing Bitcoin, owning it anonymously, and having your own stash of money, bitcoinprivacycourse.com.

Back to the original question on internationalization, birth tourism, remember that I also sell at internationalskateplan.com. I sell my course on how to set up a backup plan abroad. That course is not a birth tourism course. It is an international skate plan course. So if you're not having a baby, and you're not going to go and do birth tourism, make sure you go to internationalskateplan.com.

Take my course there on how to set up a backup plan. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back with you soon. If you'd like to join me on next Friday's Q&A, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Hey, cricket customers. Max with ads is included with your cricket $60 unlimited plan at no additional cost.

Max is the streaming platform where you can watch Scoob, Meg to the Trench, the Nightmare on Elm Street collection, and so much more. Just log in with your cricket username and password to experience Max on all your favorite devices. We never seen this before. Max, the one to watch for a good scream with cricket.

Phone plans, streams, and standard definition. Programming subject to change. Fees, terms, and restrictions apply. See cricketwireless.com for details.