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Come zip or zoom Vegas style. VegasExperience.com for tickets. Hey, Radicals, remember time is short for you to sign up for my event coming up in January of 2024. I'm hosting an investment tour, a private event, one-week tour of Panama with my friends Mikael Thorup and Gabriel Custodiat. If you have any interest in internationalization generally, meaning that you would like to learn about second passports, multiple residencies, foreign bank accounts, foreign asset management, etc.

to internationalize your life so you're not entirely dependent upon one nation, you should come to this conference. We're going to be talking about Panama specifically, but our sessions and our discussion and just frankly the time together is going to open up a world of possibilities beyond that. Sign up today.

Go to expatmoney.com/radical. expatmoney.com/radical. Sign up for the conference. Time is short so we can get our final reservations and everything done. I don't know specifically the date that we're going to close off registration. I need to talk to my partners about that, but time is short. Go to expatmoney.com/radical.

Sign up. Come hang out with me and my friends for one week in Panama. I think it's a great deal. Everything all included. We work out all the details for you. expatmoney.com/radical. Sign up today. 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 Sheets. I'm your host. Today is Friday, September 22, 2023. We are doing Friday Q&A today, although it will not be a live Q&A. I don't have the recording technology this week to record a live show. So I sent out a message to the patrons of Radical Personal Finance and said, "Hey, I can still do Q&A, but I can't do it live.

Send me your questions." And I have a lot of questions coming in. So I'm going to take today's show, answer several questions, and then I will answer all of the rest of the questions over coming days on individual shows here and there, interspersed through the standalone podcasts. Thank you all very much for your questions.

If you would like to gain access to a Friday Q&A show, you can do that by going to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Sign up to support the show on Patreon, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. That will give you access to these Friday live shows when I do those, or things like today where we have a question.

First question comes in, "Joshua, how do I make the decision on whether to either fix up or sell as is a house I bought that needs lots of work? I don't think I would be able to recoup losses either way, but I'm not happy in the house and would honestly prefer to rent at this point because of all the headaches it has given us.

I feel I have not been able to focus on going back to work full time as planned since the house needs so much attention. I've been a stay at home mom for the past six years with a 15 year old and a four year old. We are really feeling the financial effects lately along with tons of regret." So this is a really important question and I appreciate the details.

Obviously I don't have a live kind of back and forth here, but I think this particular listener has given me enough details that I think we can do a pretty good job with it. The first thing is I think the most useful mental heuristic for you to use in all of your decision making is that of zero based thinking.

I learned this when I was a teenager from Brian Tracy who drilled it into my head and I'm trying to drill it into as many other people's heads as possible. Zero based thinking is basically asking yourself a question that goes something like this, "Knowing what I now know, if I had to do this all over again, would I do anything differently?" So knowing what I now know about this particular house that I own, if I were going to do this all over again, would I do anything differently?

And I think what is obvious from this particular question is simply that knowing what I now know, if I had to do this all over again, I would not buy this house that I'm living in. And that's useful to make it clear because we need to start by being clear with ourselves on the ultimate goal of where we want to be.

Knowing what I now know, if I were going to start this business over again, would I do anything differently? And again, notice that I'm trying to use kind of soft and welcoming language. I'm not saying I definitely would do something differently. I'm not trying to say I have to get completely out of it.

I just want to know, like knowing what I now know, if I were going to start this business over again, would I do anything differently? Or knowing what I now know, if I were going to enroll my child in this school again, would I do anything differently? Or knowing what I now know, if I were going to hire this employee again, would I do anything differently?

And it's a good way of getting at what you actually know about the situation while not falling prey to all of the emotions of, "I have so much time and energy invested into this house. I have so much money involved in this house," etc. One of the biggest fallacies, especially with regard to money that we are prone to committing, is that of the sunk cost fallacy, where we look at all of the costs that we have sunk into a certain project or into a certain decision, be they costs of time, be they costs of money, be they costs of energy, be they costs of broken dreams, and we say, "But I've got so much riding on this, I have to make it work." And yet that's a fallacy, because the past and all of those costs that we have sunk into something, they don't exist anymore.

Once they're done, they're done, they're gone. The past does not exist. And so we have to discipline our minds constantly, perpetually, to think only about the present and where we are looking to go in the future. And I have found that type of question to be the most illuminating way to get at that, knowing what I now know.

If I were to get into this house again, would I do anything differently? So what we see from this listener's question is the answer is an absolutely clear and unqualified, "Yes, I would do something differently." The answer is, "I'm not happy in the house, and I would honestly prefer to rent at this point because of all the headaches it," meaning this house, "has given us." So we understand that we're not happy in this house.

I'm not happy in this house, and I would prefer to rent given all the headaches of this house. So let's break down the decision-making criteria a little bit more orderly. And the first question we ask is, "Is there a way that I could be happy in this house?" Because notice the zero-based thinking question didn't say, "I have to sell the house and move." Knowing what I now know, if I were going to do this all over again, would I do anything differently?

The answer might be, "Absolutely. I would completely gut and transform this house. Maybe I love the location. Maybe I love the neighborhood. Maybe mom and dad live across the back fence. My best friends live across the road on the other side. This is an up-and-coming neighborhood where we can easily walk downtown and have a beautiful dinner three nights a week with our family, and we just love being in this place, but the house is a wreck." So then, of course, we consider the situation.

Knowing what I now know, if I had to do it over again, I would completely transform this house on the inside and make it into a place that I would like to be. Or the answer might be, obviously, "No." Knowing what I now know, if I were to do this over again, I would never buy this house.

I hate the neighborhood. I hate the neighbors. I really despise the bones of the house itself. There's no way I could transform the house, in which case the answer is, obviously, move on and sell. Now, when the zero, the magic question, the zero-based thinking question reveals to you that you should do something differently or that you would do something differently if you had to do it over again, that does not mean that you now have to be stupid.

For example, knowing what I now know, if I had to get into this job again, I would, or if I had to get into this career again, all over again, I would never get into this career. That doesn't mean that today I need to turn in my resignation with no backup plan, nothing else that I'm going to do, and walk out the front door and flip the boss a bird on my way out.

Those aren't necessarily the right things. Rather, the question is designed to say, okay, what would I do differently again? I would go in a different direction, and I might go ahead and stick out the job for a couple of years while I'm retraining, while I'm interviewing, and then when I have another job lined up, a little bit of money in the bank, then I'll make an intelligent transition.

So the goal is to get out of the situation, but the goal is to get out of the situation as quickly and as intelligently as possible. And so in order to do that, you need to collect the information. And so you might have three scenarios in this case. Scenario A would be, what would be necessary for me to make this house the kind of house that I would want to live in?

So you might sit down, analyze the bones of the house, figure out what you like about it, what you don't like about it, make a budget, maybe invest a couple hundred or thousands of dollars into having somebody draw up some renovation plans, shop those plans around with a couple of contractors, get a couple of quotes, et cetera.

That might be some thousands of dollars very well invested into seeing if this is a house that we could make better. And if you knew that your price tag for fixing this house was, say, $50,000, and you really like a lot of things about the house, it's just, you know, it needs renovation desperately or it needs landscaping or it needs something, but you like the neighborhood, you like the location, et cetera, then now we know it's $50,000.

And when you go through the exercise of switching houses, you can burn through $50,000 in no time. So in realtor's expenses and closing costs and fix-up expenses and taxes and all kinds of stuff, and then moving expenses, et cetera. So if it's $50,000 and you could make the house the one that you love, great.

So that would be option A. Option B would be something like fix up the house and get it into top saleable condition. So what could we do to the house in order to make it very, very saleable? Maybe you would spend $20,000 on the house, but it has the potential of having a final sale value of X number of dollars.

So get clear on option number B. And then option C would be simply, let's just sell the house. We're not doing anything to it. We're just gonna sell it, it's a fixer-upper, as is we want out, how quickly can we get out and at what price? And get clear on those numbers.

And then look at your alternatives. What would we do? Well, it sounds like we would move to a rental house. So what specific rental house would we move to? Why would we choose that rental house, et cetera? And what would we have available for us? When you write a question like this and you say things like, I want out of the house, how do I make the decision?

But I want out of the house and I'd just like to go into a rental. It's a good sign that you already know what to do, but you're trying to either justify it to yourself in some way, or you're seeking some kind of external affirmation of the decision that you know is right.

I'm not saying that's for sure the case, but a lot of times we already know what to do. But taking decisions and actually making decisions requires courage and commitment. And that can take some time. If you want to justify selling this house, not doing anything to it, just getting out of it, and then moving into a rental house and so that you can go back to work and start making income, the way you justify that to yourself is based upon your new salary.

Let's say that you don't have any huge skills, but where you're not gonna be making hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. But let's just say you're gonna be able to get a job making 60 or $80,000 a year. If you were able to make your transition out of this house fast, and you have a job two months from now, then probably three months from now, you will recoup in your wages all of the money that right now has just been frittered away fixing up the house.

I find that harnessing emotional energy is something really worth paying attention to. And if you have the ability to sit down, recognize, I don't like the situation that I'm in and I wanna change it, and there's an opportunity to change it fast, even if it costs money, you could often make up for the money loss with the emotional energy of the new thing.

So one of the reasons why with zero-based thinking, I think in many cases, people should move fast with it. If you recognize, you know, if I were gonna start this business all over again, I wouldn't start it over again, then cut your losses or profits, just cut things short and move on.

Because if you can just quickly get a job, and next month you got a brand new job that you really love, or next month you're working on a new business that you're excited about, and now you can pour in your 16-hour days from a place of excitement instead of a place of obligation, then you can be in a good situation.

Now, prudence demands that I point out that of course we should be cautious. We don't wanna walk away from something that's good if we can make it better. We don't wanna just say, "Well, maybe, maybe," and bounce from thing to thing to thing like a pinball, never actually building up momentum.

I think a lot about that little meme graphic that you see online where there's two miners burrowing into the side of a hill, and there's a pocket of diamonds in the hill, and the guy is carving, carving, carving, and he's almost to that pocket of diamonds, and he just gives up 'cause he's halfway into the hill and turns around and goes backwards.

So there's times in which we just need to press through the difficult phases. But then there are also times in which we realize, "I don't care about the diamonds. "Even if I knew the diamonds "were a couple of strokefuls away, "this is not right for me," in which case, better off to go and buy a cow and start your farming instead of being a diamond miner.

(laughing) So the way that you justify it to yourself is simply saying honestly and clearly, "Let's move. "Let's simplify our life and our lifestyle, "and let me get a job," because in three months or six months, we'll not only recoup all of the financial cost of getting this house, that this house is costing us with new wages, but the emotional benefit is gonna be huge.

And I think that when somebody is involved in a very, in an all-consuming house, just the emotional benefit of moving into an apartment, being able to start over again, can be really, really a blessing. I remember when I moved out of a house that we owned into an apartment, and I was able to just be done with a lot of the stuff.

It was a huge load off my mind. I think home ownership is generally should be the default. It's generally the best thing long-term in terms of financial benefits, in terms of lifestyle benefits, et cetera. But that, those, the ability that you have to walk away from something that's just consuming your weekends, and now go and spend the weekend at the local park with a free heart, knowing that there's nothing hanging over your head is really, really valuable.

So that would be my thinking process, is practice zero-based thinking, lay out the alternative options. And if you'll discipline yourself to lay them out on a piece of paper with actual numbers involved, then the answer as to what you should do will probably be fairly clear to you. And once it's fairly clear to you, you can justify it to yourself based upon focusing on the higher amount of income.

If it turns out that justifying it to yourself based upon a new income is not in fact the right solution, that'll be obvious from putting it down on paper. And now you'll have more energy to say, "No, we're gonna spend the next three months getting this house into tip-top shape.

We're gonna work day and night. Everyone's in it all together. We're canceling everything else." And use the emotional energy to get the house fixed and then get it sold and then move on to the next place. Next listener question comes in. Can healthcare sharing ministries monthly shares be a business expense?

Can they be a business expense in an S corporation, in a C corporation, et cetera? So for the uninitiated, Christian Healthcare Sharing Ministries are a type of organization that has been created to help people plan ahead for large unexpected medical costs. The way the programs work is in the name.

They are Christian, which means that these organizations because they are religious in nature, they receive a small carve-out exemption from some of the other types of health insurance. And the religious basis of these programs creates basically an affinity group. They are healthcare sharing ministries. So these are not for-profit businesses.

These are ministry organizations that are trying to bring together like-minded persons who want to coordinate their health expenses together and basically in a way create an organization that helps all of the members collectively bear the load individually one with another. And then they are healthcare sharing organizations in that they are not insurance companies.

The way that they work is that you have a membership in the organization and then each month you make contributions to the organization. And those contributions are funneled to somebody who has had medical expenses. The umbrella organization or the parent organization is responsible for coordinating those sharing contributions among the members.

There are different ways that those coordinations happen. Sometimes you send your monthly share to the organization. The organization recounts off the money and sends it out to the individual member. Sometimes you send your monthly share directly to the other member. But the organization takes an administrative fee for its usually about one month out of 12 worth of shares.

So they take an administrative fee for coordinating everything, etc. And then the members support one another if they have large medical bills that are qualified for sharing among the members. That's what a Christian healthcare sharing ministry is. I love these organizations because I believe that they provide a really valuable and useful alternative to health insurance.

However, they are not health insurance. Nor are they a perfect replacement for health insurance. Unlike health insurance contracts where you have legal rights and the company has legal responsibilities, these organizations give you virtually no legal rights. You don't have any legal right to make a demand upon your fellow members that they pay for your health costs.

All of your own personal health costs are your responsibility and your responsibility exclusively. The organization can share those costs and other members can willingly donate to those costs. And you can have an expectation that in a time of need, they probably will do it. But this is not insurance.

And thus you do not have any contractual or legal rights to obligate your fellow members to pay for your medical expenses. The reason I'm pointing this out is that only health insurance is deductible as a business expense under the IRS regulations related to health insurance. Contributions that you make to a Christian ministry are not health insurance contributions.

They are not--excuse me, I misspoke. Contributions that you make to a Christian ministry are not health insurance premiums. And under the tax laws, health insurance premiums to an insurance company are deductible. But contributions that you make to a Christian ministry are not deductible. And by the way, they're not deductible as a charitable expense either.

So the answer is no, they're not deductible, legally speaking, because they are not health insurance premiums. The fact that you yourself view them as synonymous with health insurance premiums doesn't matter. They are not health insurance premiums, thus they are not deductible. So the letter of the law is fairly clear.

I would guess that all across the United States there are people who deduct those contributions as health insurance payments, and that only comes out when they are audited. But the letter of the law is absolutely clear that no, they are not health insurance premiums. I've tried to make an exemption, tried to adjust the tax code, but to my knowledge that has not yet been accomplished.

By the way, why are they not charitable deductions? Well, they're not charitable deductions because you expect to have a good or a service in return for your contribution. So you expect those contributions to pay for your medical expenses. So you cannot deduct your contributions to the Christian health care sharing ministry in the same way that you would your contribution to a local food pantry because you're expecting to receive benefit from the organization.

So it's not deductible in any way. That said, it still can be very smart and it still can be a wonderful way for you to provide for your unexpected medical expenses, which is the purpose of health insurance, but it is not a perfect replacement for health insurance. ♪ Blessing in the morning ♪ ♪ Come back Sunday morning ♪ - California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection.

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That's a challenging question because it changes and it has changed over the years, and I don't think that is the type of question where my personal answer of what my wife and I do this month will be particularly helpful because what we do this month is different than what we did a couple years ago, and it's probably different than what we will do a few years from now.

I'm not ducking the question, but I wanna just emphasize that a marriage relationship is a relationship, and in that marriage relationship, we wanna understand the basic principles, but not fall prey to trying to use someone else's formula and think that somehow it will work for us. I'll describe in a moment the kind of advice that I used to think should be applied in a formula and how it didn't really work for us.

But relating to husband and wife dynamics, I don't see how, I think we should spend 80% of our time talking about the fact that this is a relationship, this is a love relationship, and it's something that should be worked out individually between a husband and wife in terms of what they specifically do.

I have thought for a long time about if I could teach on husband and wife finances. I have never really taught on husband and wife finances, and the reason is I don't know the exact principles or absolute standards to hold, because for every, even principle that I feel strongly about, I can make a countervailing argument.

So for example, here's a principle that I feel very strongly about. That principle is that husbands and wives should manage their finances in common. And the reason is that the basic element of marriage is that of giving up your own individual rights for the collective expression of our couple's unit.

And so when a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, they become one. And that should never and can never be separated because the husband and wife are now one. That oneness has many, many expressions. One of those expressions is in finance. So husbands and wives manage their lives together as one.

Their finances are together, but it also has other expressions in their career choices. I would never make a career decision and go and take a job that my wife didn't think that I should do because this is, she's my wife. I'm not gonna make a decision that's against her.

I would never, you know, she would never go and make a decision of something that I wouldn't agree with because we're husband and wife. And that applies on the big things and it applies on the little things. We seek to, as being one, we have all things in common.

I have no rights over my body. She has no rights over her body. We are one. We don't deny each other. We work together. We care for one another. When one of us is sick, the other has a heavy load to bear and caring for the one who is sick is part of the load.

If we are wealthy, then we share all of it together. If we're poor, we share in that together and we work together in it. And in the marriage relationship, all of the basic principles that I think are probably good principles always have an exception. So related to money, as the provider of my household, as the man, it is my job to provide for my household.

But what would happen if I were disabled today and I couldn't work? Well, it would obviously be her job to provide for the household. And so immediately, everything would switch because the household has to be provided for. And yet, I don't lose my responsibility to provide for the household.

I still do everything that I'm able to, but then things would change. And so the fundamental principle of marriage and the fundamental truth of marriage is that of oneness, of working together. And that has myriad expression in terms of how that works out. Now, I said there's an exception for everything.

So for example, managing, you know, things like managing bank accounts together. I think married couples should always manage their money together. But there are very good reasons, legal reasons, and many other reasons why husbands and wives may have separate accounts. The fact that my wife and I manage our money together doesn't mean that she is accountable to me for every dollar she spends.

I wanna make sure she has elements of autonomy, and et cetera. And so those will vary in marriage relationships where we wanna make sure that a husband and wife are working together, and they're working within their needs. And then because this is a relationship among individuals who are growing and who are maturing and who are adapting, it's never static and it's never fixed.

And so in the normal course of a relationship, there may be times in which a husband is bringing in income, there may be times in which the wife is bringing in income, there may be times in which the husband is managing the daily budget, there may be times in which the wife is managing the daily budget.

Those things can work out within that basic principles. And so what are the principles that I think are undeniable? Well, there are a few of them, but I guess the first one I wanted to mention is that of oneness and that of unity. Whatever is necessary in a marriage relationship to bring oneness and unity to expression.

It's ontologically true that a married couple at the time of marriage is one. However, that expression of it in physicality takes time. And so we wanna emphasize the development of unity. But the development of unity is also buttressed by the importance of responsibility and order. So I am the patriarch of my household.

I have all responsibility, I have all authority, I am the patriarch of my household. And so one of the things that I learned early on, the advice that I used to hear a lot was, "Well, husbands and wives should manage their money together." And I interpreted that to mean that husbands and wives should make all of their financial decisions together.

And I interpreted that to mean that we should have a weekly or a monthly budget meeting. I used to listen to counselors that would say, "Husbands and wives should sit down once a month, "go over all the details of their budget, et cetera." And I tried to do that when I was newly married.

My wife and I would sit down and we would go over it and I would go over the numbers, et cetera. I didn't find that that did anything good in our relationship. And the reason is that my income has always been highly uncertain since the time that I was married up to this present day.

There are months and periods in which I make enormous amounts of money. And there are months and periods in which I make very little money. And so the entire concept of a strict monthly budget has been something that I have never been able to accomplish. That's a mindset that is useful primarily for those who have steady wages.

Rather, I have a set of basic expenses and then lots of other expenses that are highly variable. And I found that it put a huge amount of pressure on my wife just even the knowing or the not knowing of the stress or the lack of stress of our finances.

She never had an idea of what I had going on. She never had an idea, meaning that if I could lay out and had some idea, "Okay, I've got-- "When I was in the insurance business, I've got these cases out there. "I think I've got this one, this one, this one.

"I think I have X number of dollars that's going to come in." And we've got a pretty good chance of those things landing. But her mind--she's not an entrepreneur. She doesn't think in that sense. Her mind is focused on, "Well, we're out of money," et cetera. And so I found that it brought much greater peace and stability to the household when I stopped forcing her to sit and do a monthly budget meeting.

Now, I'm also very fortunate that my wife is very frugal. She spends very little money. And so because of that, my job is relatively easy. I basically throw money at her and try to get her to spend it, and she still doesn't spend it. I'll give her money and say, "Listen, this is blow money," and it just piles up and piles up.

She's a natural saver. And so my life is easy. If I were a different husband in a different relationship with a different set of needs and a different set-- and my wife were different, et cetera, we would do things very differently because we would have different things that have to be worked out.

But that has to be worked out in the context of the husband and wife and their individual needs, their individual situation, et cetera. And so I don't know all of the principles that are necessary. I guess one more that I would add. I think that what finally freed me as a man was when I took complete and total responsibility for all of our financial decisions.

And what I realized that I was doing in that concept of working together was I was putting an enormous amount of pressure on my wife and forcing her to deal with things that she had no ability to affect. And this is most clear when you have children. My wife has, for the last 10 years, had babies.

And in having babies, a woman becomes very, very vulnerable. She's vulnerable physically, and she's vulnerable in terms of what she can do. A mother with a normal psychological disposition who has a baby has an unbreakable bond with those children and will fight like no one else for the good and well-being of those children.

That's different than fathers and the bond that we have with our children. There are a lot more deadbeat dads who abandon their children than there are deadbeat moms who abandon their children because it's just fundamentally different. And so one of the challenges is, though, is that as a mother, she is bound completely to those children, and she doesn't have the options and the abilities that I have to fix problems.

And so there were times of financial want, and we were short on money, et cetera. But as a man, that's no problem. I can just go out and get more jobs. I can go out and get more works. I can work more hours, et cetera. She can't do that.

She has a baby that needs to eat. She has a house full of little children. She can't go out and work 16 hours a day, et cetera. And so if I put that pressure on her, then it causes her to feel stressed because she can't fix the situation, whereas I can bear that stress because I can fix the situation, and I have fixed the situation many, many times.

And so when we gave up, like the monthly budget meeting and all that, things would work better. Now, what I do think is really important is to then, in the context of relationship, work out some basic rules. So, for example, I think couples and families should avoid debt. If you avoid indebtedness, then you avoid -- of all kinds, and obviously I'm not saying that it's never smart to go into -- buy a house, things like that.

But if you completely avoid indebtedness, you completely avoid the majority of the source of stresses that can come into a family life. And so I highly recommend that couples commit to each other, "We will not borrow money." And then what that means is you need to communicate about your finances enough to make sure that all of the spending needs are met and that those spending needs are met in advance with a plan that causes everyone to have the money that they need to spend.

In terms of saving and investing, I think that those decisions should be clearly planned out and committed to and that they should be made somewhat automatic. And so the two models are, number one, if you have wages, then you probably have some form of automatic investment option. So I encourage couples to do a few basic things.

Number one is avoid debt. Number two is automatically invest. So ideally you want to maximize your retirement accounts. And so you should make the decision to, off the top, before any spending happens, to maximize your retirement account contributions, max those accounts out if at all possible. And if families do that, that's plenty.

If somebody has a volatile income like I do, then the answer is not necessarily to put an automatic retirement account contribution on a certain day, which by the way, that's the other thing you should do. If you have wages and you always get paid on the 15th and the 30th, then you should have an automatic transfer of a certain amount that is discussed and clearly discussed with your spouse on that day that goes into an account.

But if you have volatile wages, then you should commit to something like the Profit's First philosophy, which you simply say, this is the amount of percentage of my income that I'm going to contribute to my savings. And then before money ever hits our checking account, that percentage gets set aside using the Profit's First methodology.

So those are the basic ways to solve it. And what I have found is that if you do those few basic things, number one was avoid debt, the potential exception being having a home mortgage, buying a home, and that's something of course that you'll communicate about on all the details, et cetera.

Number two, you automatically invest a pre-planned amount either using automatic contributions or using Profit's First methodology. Then what do you have to negotiate or talk a lot about? Most of your budget categories become fairly simple and straightforward. And so you don't need to have complex budget meetings every week.

You don't need to even keep much of a budget. You basically just need once a year to say, are we on track and what percentage of our income are we saving, et cetera. Now the other aspect of it is to figure out a spending plan that imposes appropriate guardrails.

And so I like the multiple account solution, meaning that I like an account where the money goes in, pays household bills, and that's pre-planned. Sometimes it uses software or something like that. And then you can have a separate spending account for those spending amounts that fluctuate. There's no better solution than quite literally cash in envelopes because it gives total control and you don't bounce checks, you don't mess up electronic bill payments, et cetera.

But barring that, the next best solution is simply a checking account with a debit card attached. There are technical dangers of debit cards. There are good technical reasons why credit cards are superior, but debit cards impose limits much more beautifully than credit cards do. And so I really prefer a debit card where my wife or I can just look at the account and say, how much money do we have left in this category?

And if we have it there, we can spend it. And so I think that is the best solution and the best way to handle it. The times when you need to have much more detailed interactions are times in which times of extremism. So let's say that you wake up and you're in a financial mess and you've got to get out of the mess.

You're deeply in debt. Everything's falling apart. Well, there you need to have a lot of conversations because you've got to fix that. The flip side is when you're experiencing windfalls, you're making huge amounts of money there. You need to have good conversations. And those are times when you need to have a lot more conversations or somebody needs to just, you know, really own it and fix it.

And so usually what I tell, you know, what I tell men is fix it. If you're in a mess, fix it. Like take complete and absolute control. Take total responsibility for everything. Your number one responsibility is to make sure that your wife has the money that she needs to make sure that of the things that she spends money on that that's taken care of.

And as a good husband, again, we get down to the quality of the relationship. A good husband wants to see his wife living in plenty. That's one of the things that I get the most joy out of is I love to see my wife with a luxury lifestyle. And it amazes me that women don't understand this.

The flip side, interestingly, the flip side to being a patriarch is that when your woman loves you and trusts you and respects you and grants to you all of all authority, it creates within your own heart as a man, this deep sense of obligation, deep sense of responsibility and deep sense of love and care.

And it means that you go, you'll work day and night to give your wife all every luxury that you can afford. When a woman does not respect a man in that way and she fights with him, it creates a hardness and a callousness in a man's heart where he stops losing that natural care and affection.

He stops having that natural care and affection. And he starts to view her as an adversary and he wants to fight with her. In our current day and age, given all of the dysfunction in male and female relationships, I am amazed at how few women understand men and how few women understand how men are to work.

And if you have a good man, women, you know, and again, there are guys who are not worthy of trust that you need to be very careful of. We need to be wise and mature in the way that we apply anything. But if you have a good man, you will go much farther in the world if you love him and you respect him and he will, rather than if you fight with him.

You fight with a man, all he wants to do is stand up and fight. You don't fight with a man, all he wants to do is make your life as amazing as he possibly can. So I said I didn't have any principles, but those just because that I really believe that some of these things are not well dealt with in public or if they are meaning that couples have, you're dealing with the most intimate relationship, couples need to work it out.

And if a couple is not able to communicate, maybe there's some value in having communication spurred and sparked by an external source. That's probably fine. But that external communication needs to be something that is spoken in a way that sends the couples back to each other to mutually work out a customized, personalized solution to whatever the current challenge that they're facing is rather than dictating a set of rules that are wooden because those fall flat and they create enormous problems in relationships.

Just imagine that I go off to some financial marriage seminar and I create an enormous, perfect, I'm dictated to by the guru on the stage, this is the perfect way to handle spousal finances. And I go home and I've got my workbook and all my notes and I sit down with my wife and I say, "Wife, this is the plan.

This is the perfect plan that is delivered from the guru on high and this is what we're going to do." Just imagine how corrosive and destructive that is to a relationship. How does that make your wife feel if you didn't ask her and consult with her and find out what she needs and here you are going to your guru on high and finding out exactly how you do it?

Everything about that is wrong. Everything about that is toxic to a normal, high-quality trusting relationship. That's why I'm happy to answer the question but I found over the years that my own way has changed and will change many times because you have to understand where you are, etc. And then finally, of course, my relationship with my wife is private and I work very hard to protect her and protect her privacy and so I wouldn't go any further than what I've said.

Hope that helps. Next question. Looks like we've got two related questions and this will probably be what I will do because I'm sure these will take me over an hour so I'll answer these two questions here on basically curriculum for homeschool curriculum, math, and then also everything else. Question, "Hi, Joshua.

Is mathacademy.com still your older children's main math curriculum? Our original plan was the Saxon 5-4, 6-5, 7-6, 8-7, etc. series but now we are considering Math Academy instead because it seems more efficient and at least as effective. What is your current opinion on Math Academy?" Great question. Short answer is yes and no.

It's not meaning it's a primary curriculum. It's not the only thing I'll explain in a moment. Math Academy is something that a listener turned me on to on a Friday Q&A show a couple of months ago, probably three or four months ago. I had never heard of it, looked it up live on the show.

Then I spent the weekend digging into it and I was incredibly impressed with what I found. So my conversion to being a fan of Math Academy has come for reasons that probably will be similar to yours, meaning that you're planning to do Saxon. Again, I was a weirdo who planned to homeschool his kids when I myself was always in high school and I've been paying attention to this stuff for a long time.

And I have understood for a long time that Saxon math is one of the best. I don't want to be super hardcore exclusive and say it's the only one, but it is one of the best. I now understand very fundamentally why it's one of the best. Let me explain it to you because with a bit of explanation and context it will make my Math Academy appreciation make a lot more sense.

In the world of math instruction there are phases and there are movements where people go in this direction, that direction, etc. and anything related to pedagogy. John Saxon sat down and he was a math teacher and he was just frustrated as he himself being, I think, an engineer, highly trained engineer.

He was frustrated with math curriculum. And so he sat down and he wrote his own. And he wrote it with a different style. That style I think is normally referred to in curriculum circles, or at least it used to be, as what's called the spiral approach. And the spiral will make more sense as we contrast it with what is called the mastery approach.

These are the two basic principles or ideas behind math education. We have the mastery approach and then we have the spiral approach. So the mastery approach is that where you have a new concept and you do that concept again and again and again and again and again and again and again until you master it and then you move on to the next concept.

The spiral approach is one in which you introduce a new concept, you do a couple of problems and then you go back and do everything else. And the next day you do everything that you've already learned plus the new concept a little bit and then you repeat. And basically every day you're dealing with everything that you've already learned and then you're introducing a new concept every couple of days and having a little bit of practice with it but kind of spiraling around, touching that concept from time to time.

So this was the first big distinction from a curriculum perspective is that Saxon really wanted to do the spiral approach while everyone else wanted to do the mastery approach. For a long time, and to be clear I have not gone out and done a comprehensive review of all math curricula.

There are some people they say Saxon doesn't work for them. That's fine. There are many good math curriculum available right now. But Saxon stood alone for a very long time as the leader of the spiral approach and people would go through it themselves and get good results. And Saxon was very rigorous, et cetera.

I myself was inspired by the value of Saxon from hearing Art Robinson's story with his children. Art Robinson, he the accidental homeschooler, not the accidental homeschooler but the accidental absentee homeschool teacher. He and his wife had six children. His wife contracted a crazy disease where she died in 24 hours leaving him with five children and a baby.

And they were committed homeschoolers but basically he didn't have time to homeschool so he forced the children to teach themselves. And then they turned out to have these spectacular results. And he was a highly trained engineer and scientist and he saw the value of Saxon education. So that was one of the sources.

I myself used Saxon in the private school that I went to from 7th through 12th grade. But I don't think I got a great experience with Saxon because they were just always skipping problems. I now understand that the whole concept of teaching math in a classroom environment is exceedingly difficult because the teacher has to cover a certain volume of work and in the course of 180 or 183 school days or whatever he or she has.

And yet the student needs to go through and do it. And so what I look back on is that we did very, we would always do evens or odds. We just never did enough homework for my math skills to be as good as I think they ought to have been.

But I saw the value of Saxon math and I always intended to use that. Well, lo and behold, about 8 or 9 years ago I came across a guy named Shorman. And I forget his first name but S-H-O-R-M-A-N. And Shorman was a high school math teacher and he also developed a tutoring program for Saxon math because Saxon math was never designed to be used outside of a classroom environment.

But because of its rigorous nature, etc., Saxon math became a favorite among the homeschooling crowd. And yet this guy Shorman found that he, that a lot of people needed some extra tutoring. So he created something called Dive Math or Dive into Math which is basically his tutoring program designed for homeschooling parents who wanted to have a math teacher help their children learn the concepts of the lesson and then have, you know, some additional help in structure.

Because though Art Robinson forced his children to use the math curriculum and figure it out, that doesn't seem to be as successful for a lot of other people. Maybe it's just force of will, force of personality, but there are a lot of children who just dissolve into tears if they have to sit and teach themselves math.

And so his program helped with that. Well, of course, John Saxon died and Saxon math was sold and they went on and things. But it became long in the tooth. And so what you had is that people were using the old versions of Saxon, I think the second edition, because they didn't want all the new math, they didn't want all the common core stuff, they wanted the good old stuff that worked really, really well.

But then the tests were changing. And so Shorman identified the fact that the tests were changing, there were key concepts in order to do well on SAT math, et cetera, that were missing from the Saxon curriculum. And so he created his own math which is called Shorman Math. And basically he took everything that was good about Saxon and he supplemented it with his own approach.

And he has a whole self-teaching program, I think it's still Dive Math or DiveEducation.com, something like that. And he teaches math with all the principles of Saxon but updated for some of the more modern integration that needs to be done in order to do well and have all of the concepts that are covered on SAT, et cetera, covered.

What also attracted me to Shorman is that he is super turbo-Christian, hardcore in his approach. And I have a huge frustration with the majority of my own Christian school education because it wasn't very Christian. And what I mean by that is that very few educators seem to understand the importance of a truly integrated, comprehensive Christian worldview and how that affects every aspect of education.

And so basically a lot of Christian education in many Christian schools is basically baptized secularism where we take all of the same basic ideas that come from the modern secular educational programs around us and then we just pray at the beginning of class or we talk about God. And what's the point?

And for years I started digging deep into philosophy education, Christian philosophy, et cetera, and I started to see the beauty of a comprehensive, deeply integrated Christian worldview. I came to believe very strongly that that should be integrated deeply into every aspect of education. I still believe that. And what drove me nuts was that nobody was doing that in math.

And it's not to say that Christians and non-Christians can't both be great mathematicians. They can both be incredible mathematicians. Just like Christians and non-Christians can both behave ethically and morally in a virtuous and upright way. Of course they can. But at its core, the entire philosophy of mathematics, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the most powerful evidences for the existence of our Creator.

And when we study math and when we do math, it gives us insight into the brilliance of His mind. And so that should be foundational to it. And there's so much in mathematics that needs to be done. And we need to be doing more and more rigorous and better mathematics to the glory of God because we're living in a universe that is governed entirely by this mathematical thinking.

And mathematics reflects the minds of our Creator in a truly incredible way. And there's been an absolute revolution over the last 20 years in our understanding of this, in cosmology, in the understanding to a greater degree the mathematical precision of the universe, et cetera. And so I was annoyed by the secular mathematics out there.

And so I was attracted to Shorman, him being -- at least being loud about it and showing a lot of the integration of mathematics because the world of science owes a huge portion, not all of it, but owes a huge portion of its most influential founders and thinkers to Christians who were seeking to do science specifically from an explicit theological perspective to the glory of God.

And that's something that I have watched change and I want to see change. We are in an environment right now where I think -- so when I was in high school and in college, basically it was exceedingly shocking to -- when I was in high school and in college, it seemed like there was such massive skepticism about anything related to religion or Christianity and it seemed as though secularists had completely won.

And so it seemed bleak. But what has happened and what I think is going to continue to happen and what I want to urge and foment and encourage to happen is a revolution. And I think the leading revolution in intellectual thought. And I think the biggest evidence of this has come in the space of philosophy.

If you went back 30 years, the idea of Christian philosophy was laughed out of the academy. And Christians had lost all standing and it was all secular philosophy. But that has dramatically changed over the last decades. Whereas now there are significant percentages -- I'm not current enough to give precise percentages -- but there's significant exposure to Christian philosophy, explicitly Christian philosophy, in the world of philosophy at the academic level.

That's not to say in any way that there are not many, many leading secular philosophers. There are. But there's been a broad growth of that. And I think a similar thing is happening in science and will happen in science. I think we see just the -- you can look at -- COVID was so illuminating from a scientific perspective of basically a broad scale -- let me be careful with my words.

I want to say collapse. I feel like that's a little strong. I'd like to dial it back a point or two from collapse. But just a fundamental transformation of the world of science where I have lost huge amounts of the respect that I formerly held for scientists and academic science practitioners.

And their just absolute unwillingness to stand for truth. And in hindsight I should never have been surprised by that. If you don't believe in truth as a fundamental concept, if you don't believe that you're accountable for truth, damn the consequences, then how do you ever -- how do you function in that world?

And yet to go back and find that all of the stuff that I relied on, all of the people that I thought, well, these are academics, these people will be honest even if they don't agree, et cetera, and to find that basically all of it seemingly was fake and these people lined up to lie, collaborated with one another, conspired with one another, it's just insane.

And yet I was a dunderhead for being surprised by that. Of course they would do that. Why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they lie? If you don't believe in truth and you -- anyway. And you look at the underlying philosophy that so much of modern academia is full of, then obviously that would be the case.

Why was I surprised by that? And so I was the naive one, but I just always had a higher respect for science and scientists and their commitment to truth. And again, I want to be -- I'm not trying to be caustic in my remarks here. There are many good scientists who tell the truth regardless of their religious commitments, et cetera.

But at its core, science can only flourish truly in an environment of the right philosophy. You have to have the right philosophy. You have to believe that truth exists. You have to believe that the human mind can go and can find it out. You have to believe that it matters.

You have to believe that -- you have to believe first. And if you don't believe, you know, you don't believe in an orderly universe, a cause and effect universe, et cetera, then all of the fundamental philosophy of science collapses. And so at its core, that's a real passion for me is I want to see the Christian world wake up and stop using just lightly baptized secularism, but teach comprehensive Christianity and teach how it affects every area of life.

And I believe that with all my heart that that's something that we can do. And so the good news is that over time, you know, that that's an attractive thing to the right people, to the zealots. And we're just in a very painful, you know, shaking time. But that's -- that was what attracted me to Shorman Math was that at least finally here was, you know, a loudmouth Christian who would talk a little bit about the philosophy and Christian philosophy as it relates to mathematics.

And I believe that's what all, you know, all young Christian students should be taught is the fundamental -- the unexplainability of mathematics apart from our creator. So my plan for the last about probably seven or eight, ten years -- sorry, seven or eight years since I found Shorman Math was to use Shorman Math all up until -- well, actually, let me add one more.

I have also -- let me go first to Math Academy, actually. So then a listener told me about Math Academy. And over the last couple of years, I've done a deep dive on learning science. I've been super interested in cognitive science, neuroscience, trying to understand what we know about learning.

It's really amazing because I was never taught how to learn. You were never taught how to learn. None of us were ever taught how to learn. And what's interesting is that we all know how to learn, but the things that we think we know about it are generally not true.

And so I've dug into it a little bit. And I now apply a lot of my own understanding of some of these learning techniques to the brilliance of things like John Saxon. So, for example, we know from laboratory exercises that human beings do much better with interleaved learning than with block learning.

We know that proven in physical endeavors, there's exercises that have been done with badminton players and tennis players, et cetera. We know this in all kinds of academic spaces. I'm not aware of any space where interleaved learning is not superior to blocked learning when measured by long-term retention. Sometimes blocked learning gives an immediate response that is higher than interleaved learning.

But when you insert a little bit of time of decay of learning, so a week or a couple of weeks or something like that, and you come back, interleaved learning is universally superior. So the idea is we naturally think that the way to learn something is, well, let's just drill, drill, drill, drill.

And so in the physical domain, we think, okay, let's practice forehand, forehand, forehand, forehand, forehand for 30 minutes. Then let's do backhand for 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 30 minutes, backhand, backhand, backhand. But what we know is that when these skills are brought together, we do forehand, then backhand, then serving, then forehand, then backhand, then serving, we get better.

Now, we do want to have a focus for the area of learning, but we want to interleave everything. So John Saxon has been proved to be right with his spiral approach, but now we see that more and more. So I came across Math Academy, and I was amazed because I saw right up front, especially I bought a membership and I started playing with it myself, I immediately saw the brilliance of it.

Because the brilliance of Math Academy is using an algorithm to require mastery of the material, but to do it in short segments and to push the student as quickly through the things that he already knows to the things he doesn't know as possible. And so what I have come to believe about Math Academy is that Math Academy is as if you had John Saxon standing at your elbow, choosing each and every problem or problem set to give to you.

And on a daily basis, looking at a sample set of problems and then basically saying, "Hey, here are the ones that you're going to go ahead and do, here are the ones that you're not going to do." And what's better than a textbook? Well, John Saxon himself is. And yet what they're proving at Math Academy is that we can use an algorithm to do that.

And so it keeps the student constantly at the edge of his ability, which is where we want to be. We want to be in that place where math is hard, and we want to move quickly through the stuff that is easy so we don't get bored. And then we want to integrate, again, interleave learning, et cetera.

So the Math Academy curriculum is fantastic. I see no downside to it. I have no frustration with it except one. What I love about Math Academy is that it is -- so this is an annoyance, not a frustration, but it's annoying to me that it's all on a computer.

I don't see how it could be done in any way except all on a computer, because fundamentally you have to use the algorithm to do it. But it annoys me because I think that the vast majority of learning should not be screen-based. We know that children learn more, remember more, et cetera, when they can work on paper.

There was a study that -- or an article that came out of Sweden and the Swedish educational authorities last week. And so all of the move to have students do all their work on tablets and laptops and whatnot, this is dumb. It is completely wrong. Children learn better and adults learn better on paper than they do on a screen.

But this is, I think, a key benefit where you need the screen. Thankfully, a lot of math is done on paper, but you still need the screen. So I'd like to change that. But the benefit of math is that -- excuse me, the benefit of the math academy curriculum is that though it be on a screen, there's no videos.

It's all text. It's a text explanation and problems. There's no videos. There's no flashing anything. It's just very simple. So it's like a book on a screen, but a customized book. So I'm willing to accept that. The only thing I don't like about math academy is there's no context.

There's no sense of purpose. There's no sense of meaning. There's no overarching narrative. There's no sense of usefulness. It's just all problems and instruction. And I don't necessarily fault them for that. In fact, I don't see how the creators could do anything else. They're creating the curriculum as part of their government school efforts, et cetera, and so I'm happy to do it.

And I don't really care whether my children are doing math and it says how much are the pencils that Johnny bought for his Bible study versus how much are the pencils that Johnny bought. I don't care about all the little Christian-y things. I care about the quality of the education.

But I do care deeply about the narrative. I do care deeply about the context. So that brings me now to Life of Fred. I have become an enormous fan of Life of Fred. I found Life of Fred accidentally a couple years ago when I was researching personal finance curricula for students.

And I was trying to see if something was out there. And I stumbled across the preview for the Life of Fred personal finance book. And I read the table of contents and I was blown away at the concepts that he included, Schmidt, I think Stanley Schmidt, included in the Life of Fred finance books.

And so then I started looking at his math curriculum. And then I started to get it and I bought it and I started testing it. And my children love it. And basically what Stanley, again, I think his name is Schmidt. Stanley something or other. What Stanley has done is that he took this – he uses an utterly ridiculous story.

I mean Fred for the context, he starts off as one-year-old math teacher who lives at a college called Kittens University. He's – I can't remember, 18 inches tall, something like that. But he becomes a four-year-old calculus teacher and he has all these ridiculous adventures. But what he does is he uses these utterly absurd stories to explain every mathematical concept and why a student needs this particular math because Fred always needs the math that he's going to do.

And he starts at one plus one and what is a number. And Schmidt or Stanley, because I don't remember if Schmidt is the right name, Stanley has written all the way through, up through basically an undergraduate math degree, beyond calculus, up through number theory, linear algebra, some of the other stuff as well.

He's written basically this comprehensive curriculum. And so I've purchased it up through algebra – up through pre-algebra. I'm getting ready to buy the whole algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus set in the next month or two. And so I put those two together. I have put those two together. And I have also included a little bit of Shorman where necessary.

The problem is Shorman, though the philosophical connection is there a little bit, not as much as I would like, but it's there a little bit, the actual instruction is just lecture and then problem sets, which is no problem with that, but it doesn't have the benefit of the algorithm moving faster and slower.

And so I've used some Shorman lectures and I'm glad that I've used that to supplement instead of Khan Academy because sometimes having that lecture is really useful. And so I think I will wind up using basically all three of these. I'm having all of my children do Life of Fred with my six-year-old.

We do it aloud with the eight-year-old and the ten-year-old. They read it themselves. And I really love that because I believe that even just doing it in a book where the children have to read it is teaching one of those lessons we want people to teach. And Stanley talks about this in the book, that you want your students to understand that the way you learn is from a book.

There are so many great math books out there that someone who will pick up the book and read it can learn. But if you think that you have to learn math in a classroom with someone doing lecturing, you're breaking the first lesson. You need to teach your students that you can teach yourself math from a book.

That was what Robinson did so well years ago. And so I love Life of Fred. And the narrative of it, the connection of math with everyday, well, not everyday, but ridiculous but yet connectable scenarios makes a huge difference. And what I find is that every one of my reading students -- first of all, my six-year-old loves Life of Fred.

He thinks it's the best thing in the world. He would love to read chapters a day. All of my other students who are reading it themselves, I'll give them a Life of Fred book and I have to cut them off because they'll read five, eight, ten chapters sometimes. And then what Stanley has done a brilliant job of is integrating all other incredible knowledge into his books.

So my ten-year-old is two-thirds done with his pre-algebra series. There's three books. And the first one is Pre-Algebra Zero with, I think, Biology. And so he has a theme that we're doing pre-algebra but he brings in huge discussion of biology concepts. The next one I think is with Physics, Pre-Algebra One with Physics.

And, again, same thing. The entire book has a theme of physics and then Pre-Algebra Two with Economics, I think it is. And so he's bringing in all of these other things from the other discipline. And Stanley does that in his chemistry book, et cetera. And so all the knowledge is connected.

And that's what I believe we have a duty to give to our students. We have to give them a comprehensive theory of knowledge that connects all these pieces because they're all interrelated and, you know, interleaved. We have to interleave it. It's that we don't study math in isolation of biology.

We need math in order to do biology and chemistry, et cetera. But those are just expressions of the applications of it. And so all of the modern concept where we divide things into subjects and we study these subjects in isolation and we don't connect them, I see that as fundamentally wrongheaded, that all of this needs to be connected.

And if we do that effectively, we create deeper, more lasting learning, et cetera. And I consider Math Academy to be a fundamentally valuable tool in that. So right now I'm basically doing three things. Number one, the primary math curriculum that we're using is split between Life of Fred and Math Academy.

I don't require the working out on paper of the problem sets of Life of Fred, although I think that I do believe Life of Fred could stand alone as a very good math curriculum. But I'm not currently requiring the problem sets from it. I think they're great. I have all the books.

I have the zillions of practice sets books. If I think that they're needed, I'll apply more of them. But I'm just requiring the reading and the mentally answering of the questions, of most of the questions. But I'm just primarily requiring the narrative. Then Math Academy is where I'm requiring the problem sets.

And we're doing Math Academy just based upon a timed approach. I had some emotional breakdowns when it was too hard, et cetera. And I fought and tried to assign a certain number of experience points, XP, et cetera. Finally I just switched to a timed approach to say we're going to do this for 30 minutes.

We do 30 minutes. We do 30 minutes every day, six days a week. And you can make great progress in 30 minutes a day, six days a week. Now remember my eldest is 10, and so barely 10. And so I'm working in a more constrained context where that will be different when we're dealing with 14 and we can do a couple hours a day, et cetera.

Math Academy. And then I supplement with some Shorman lectures to help with things that would really benefit from a video lecture. But the Shorman stuff I think is great. I think it's a great standalone curriculum, but I don't want to wear down my students with too much practice. And so I'm using Math Academy as the structure of it.

I hope that explanation of my journey helps you. I don't want to just be long-winded. I want you to understand why I immediately saw the value of Math Academy and yet where I think its shortcomings are. And so I think that my recommendation to you would be don't do Saxon.

Let me add one more thing. There was one more piece of it. But I would encourage you, Math Academy and Life of Fred side by side. I'm thrilled with my choices so far. One more point that I forgot to add. Prior to Math Academy, Math Academy starts with fourth-grade math, which is fine.

But we have been using ABECA workbooks for everything before fourth-grade math. I am not insistent on abundant amounts of workbook math at a young age. I believe that the cautions that I shared in the series I did on early childhood education about doing too much formalized workbook math at a young age being damaging, I believe those cautions are warranted.

And we should be careful and cautious about trying to do too much. Most math prior to fourth and fifth grade should be -- just can be informal. But I do think that it's valuable to learn how to do a workbook. And so what I have found is I really like the ABECA curriculum for the younger ages.

What I like about it specifically is that it takes all of the good things of the spiral approach, which I will now just basically refer to as interleaving before that word was broadly known, is it takes the spiral approach, introduce a concept and basically practice everything every day. But it puts it into a convenient format for little children, basically a worksheet front and back every day.

And it puts some pretty pictures, et cetera. Now, ABECA is kind of the syrupy Christian, like, you know, John is going to Bible study or Sunday school and he needs eight pencils and each pencil costs him 15 cents. How much money does John need for Sunday school? And that stuff, it annoys me a little bit because I view it as a very thin expression of Christianity and that bothers me because I feel like it doesn't get to the heart of the matter.

But it doesn't bother me. It's fine. I think creating a culture where that's normal is fine. But they lay it on thick in ABECA stuff. But what is great is just the discrete nature -- and I'm using discrete in the mathematical sense -- the constrained nature of it where you have a worksheet.

Because what I found with my younger children is that it's just easy to overwhelm a child with too much math. And so we want this to be something we can sit down, we can do it, 20, 30, maybe 40 minutes maximum is ideal, and the pretty pictures help, et cetera.

That is not Saxon's benefit. Saxon is something -- it's a non-consumable book where you have to sit, you have to copy everything out by hand. It's all black and white and so it's not super attractive to young children. And you have to always balance that measure of what is ideal versus what is attractive.

Same problem you face in anything is that if you can make learning attractive, as attractive as possible, and still get really good learning and thus the child has less resistance against it, then that's superior, that attractiveness is superior to something that might technically be more efficient. If I give an example, right, I think that learning words with word cards when you're learning a language and flash cards through even using a space repetition system is probably a really good, efficient way of acquiring vocabulary.

I think it works and it's efficient in the beginning stages. I have zero interest in doing it so I never do it. And I'm not going to do it because I don't want to do it. I want to read. And so I may have a less efficient process, but because I read and that's what I enjoy and I want to do that, then I can spend more time with it and it works through.

So I think we need to be cautious about making efficiency the king. And I think that's the potential downside of Math Academy. I don't have any resistance to it. I think the way they do it with the modules and everything like that is really good, but it does require some explanation.

I do help a little bit and it's not super attractive. And so I don't think it's great for younger children. I think with my eight-year-old, we're going to go ahead and do another year of a BECA and then introduce Math Academy because -- but we'll see. That's the story.

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Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Del Amo Motorsports in Redondo Beach and get yours. Offer in soon. See dealer for details. Now to your second question which was homeschooling related as well. Is AmblesightOnline.org the main source of inspiration and materials for your homeschool?

Is there anything about Amblesight Online that you do not use or that you modify? Another great question. So Amblesight Online is an amazing -- we call it free and open source to use those lovely words. It's a free and open source curriculum that was put together by a really passionate set of homeschooling mothers who were deeply influenced by the Charlotte Mason philosophy of education.

And in all of my studies of educational philosophy, educational outcomes, et cetera, I continue to be amazed at how prescient and far ahead of her time Charlotte Mason was. I cannot point to a single educator that I think is better than her. To be fair, I have not done a deep dive on all of the educators who are in her class.

I have not done a deep dive on John Steiner -- John Steiner? Steiner? Rudolph. Excuse me. I'm blanking on the name. Basically Waldorf education. I have not done a deep dive on Maria Montessori, et cetera. But I have done a deep dive on Charlotte Mason. So I may be ignorant about some of those things and I'm not criticizing any of those other approaches.

I think that for many people -- I'm so grateful for the broad growth of the Montessori movement. I think that's fantastic. So many children are being saved from the terrors of industrial schooling by those wonderful Montessori schools. Waldorf, wonderful. I've got nothing bad to say about it. But I'm particularly impressed by Charlotte Mason.

And I continue to be particularly impressed by her the more that I myself learn about learning. And so Amblesight Online is one of several -- there's many other good curriculum. Charlotte Mason -- simply Charlotte Mason is -- Sonia Schaefer is wonderful, has great stuff. All kinds of people have great stuff.

But I am continually impressed by the basic outline of Amblesight Online. And what I love about them is that these mothers have created something that uses world-class stuff and they've showed us how to implement the Charlotte Mason philosophy in the modern age. And they've made it easy. And that's the thing is stuff's got to be easy.

Montessori is not easy as far as I can tell, right? So much. But Charlotte Mason is relatively easy. And yet it's totally comprehensive and gives us everything. In a few minutes I will describe to you what is so -- how modern, again, learning science is showing us the brilliance of Charlotte Mason.

But first it's important to know where it came from. Charlotte Mason was a highly educated, very competent lady who devoted her entire life and career to the education of children and spent enormous quantities of time in the classroom with those children. And that's what's unique about her as compared to so many other educators.

Who did not spend time in a classroom with children but rather came up with their ideas in a laboratory setting or based upon their own hunches, etc. Charlotte Mason was in the classroom. And so her insights into children are really amazing. And if you read her writings what you see is that she was totally current with all of the philosophy and all of the leading thinkers of her time and all of the educational debates of her era, etc.

And so it should not be a surprise how an unmarried lady who invested all of her career into this one subject, of course she would create incredible insights into them. And then later, again, we're finding out today many of those insights are being validated increasingly by learning science. And so her insights into children and how to work things, she would do a couple of the basic concepts of -- it's very hard for the uninitiated, it's very hard for anybody to clearly articulate in a few sentences what a Charlotte Mason education is because she wrote so much and it's all so applicable and yet it covers everything.

And so is a Charlotte Mason education living books? Absolutely. Is a Charlotte Mason education nature study? Yeah. Is a Charlotte Mason short readings with lots of narration? Yes. But she doesn't neglect copy work and composition, etc. So it's hard to pin down exactly what a Charlotte Mason education is.

But some of the themes are things like using living books. And I have watched with my own children just the incredible power of living books and I see incredible connections. What do living books do? Well, they create more connections to content than is ever possible using textbooks because textbooks create materials in isolation and there's just not enough connections, literally neuro connections to the material.

And all new knowledge in order for it to be acquired effectively and easily has to be connected to something that somebody already knows. And so the narratives involved in living books really cement the learning at a very deep and powerful level. Things like using short readings. Generally in Charlotte Mason you do many, many short readings of materials, often 15 minutes, sometimes less.

And yet you require absolute perfect concentration during those short readings. I would now point to that as a really powerful encoding strategy that we require students to be entirely engaged when the material is being encoded and then we're done. And what happens is if you have long assignments and long readings and things like that, then the encoding phase of learning, which is the most important phase, is an encoding phase that doesn't, it's something that doesn't happen very effectively.

And so you had a lot of information but it just goes on. Another expression of a practical demonstration of this is we don't, in Charlotte Mason, we don't, I don't, some people do, but I don't require any kind of notes or review. What we do is we have something, we read it with total attention, and then we narrate it.

I would say today if you listen to learning scientists, they'll demonstrate. The value of note taking is very minimal in classes, et cetera. The only thing you should take notes on are things that you either don't understand that you need to go back and connect to or notes that are connecting ideas in some way that's unique where you're rearticulating it.

But the narration is beautifully viewed as a form of free recall, free recall, where you are articulating something. And then in the context of narration, what I think is really powerful about it is we're doing higher order learning. We're not just spitting out facts, but we're talking about connections, which is the best encoding strategy and the way you do higher order learning.

So Amblesight Online is just a wonderful resource with world-class books and a world-class setup that is comprehensive in nature. And I think it should be the starting place for everybody. Now, it took us years of practice to become better at fully incorporating it. When we were just getting started as homeschoolers, we basically just picked and chose.

That's a funny grammatical. We pick and choose, we picked and chose, I guess. So we said, okay, we can do the readings. And so we would do the readings, but we didn't do all of the so-called free readings. Then we got better over time. We kind of did a little nature study, but weren't so great with it.

We're still okay with nature study, not as good as I'd like to be. We've gotten a lot better at recitation. We've incorporated everything. Like we're doing a lot better, but it's taken us years to improve. And so what I would say is just pick and choose. If you just picked the basic AmblesightOnline.org books and you read those with your children and you talk about those books, you will have a child who is years ahead of his peers.

If over time you can work up to doing the whole thing, where you're doing copy work and you're doing recitation and you're doing all of the readings and you're doing math and you're doing multiple foreign languages and you're doing music study and composer study and picture study, etc., you are going to have a world-class education.

One of my hobbies is that of digging deeply into the best education philosophy that I can find in the world. I spend time trying to go to all the private schools as best I can, figuring out from their websites, from their sources, their curriculum, etc., what are they doing, trying to figure out everything I can about the world's elite education.

If you did AmblesightOnline.org and you do it consistently and well, you will have access to the world's elite education. I am absolutely persuaded of it. I have watched my own children come through it. I don't know how to compare my children's natural cognitive ability to other children. And so just be warned that my wife and I are not stupid.

I'm sure they've inherited a decent level of cognitive ability from us, but I don't know how to compare that to other children. I have no context for that and I refuse to do any kind of testing or IQ testing and things like that. But what I have watched is--and I have more confidence today as I watch now my younger children coming through and I can see, "Oh, okay, it's not just a fluke with my eldest." But my children are capable of things.

And by the way, this is common. You spend some time in the Amblesight Online forums and talking to people and you'll find that this is common. We do--starting in third grade, basically, year three, we do complete full Shakespeare with no--in the first few years, we do some retellings and whatnot to make it simpler, but Shakespeare is a standard part of it.

My children find it hilarious. They love the--they'll be sitting there reading and listening. I put an audio book along with the text. They're just cracking up in the other room with Shakespeare. We read Plutarch. We read all this stuff together and we get huge value out of it. And so--and that's one of the beautiful things about a Charlotte Mason education is that you never dumb stuff down for children.

What you do is you make it accessible to them. And so the other day I had a teacher who was visiting my house. Somebody who was a trained teacher, classroom teacher, who was getting ready to start a school, and I was going through my library and just showing, and I was handing--I was like, "Look, this is a first grade book.

This is a second grade book, basically, third grade book, et cetera." And she's looking at it and was like, "This is second grade?" And I said, "Yeah, this is second grade." And the language is sophisticated. It's beautiful. The prose is highly educated, et cetera. And yet we have zero problems whatsoever using those materials with very young children from a language perspective.

What we do is we make it accessible by reading it aloud, right? Because they're not quite capable--they're not capable yet of digging into it and going on for a page. But reading it aloud, it's totally accessible to them. And in short segments, totally accessible, et cetera. And they can listen, understand, and narrate the material back perfectly competently.

And so I know that it's being understood and absorbed. So I think I've given a pretty good festschrift of Amblesight Online here. Let me add--what do I do differently or what do I not use? Well, basically what I do is I do add to it. Should I add to it?

Probably not. But I do add to it because I find that we can--we could and can blow through the material pretty quickly. By the way, one of the things that is integral to the Charlotte Mason approach is slow things down. And again, good learning science, this is demonstrated to be a really important thing.

And so we'll take a book. We have a lot of books. And we will do--well, we have a lot of books and we'll do them very slowly. So half a chapter a week, a chapter a week, and we'll stretch a book out, in many cases, over three years. But what happens--and I'm now persuaded.

This was the hardest thing for me to accept about it because I was always a devourer of books and my ideas. Let's just get through it. But I now accept that Mason was right, I was wrong. When you stretch books out, it causes the student to live with those ideas.

And then every time you start a new section, every week, you're practicing recalling the previous principles and adding new principles in, etc. I haven't formalized my entire list, but I bet I could give an hour presentation with no problems of all of the modern learning science stuff that Charlotte Mason did intuitively from her experience that is now being borne out in a laboratory environment.

But I do add books. So I add a lot of languages in the early years because I believe that children are completely acceptable--that languages are completely straightforward. And so that's where a lot of the time has gone. And so this is going to sound a little surprising, but here is what I have done.

And it's intentional. So my 10-year-old is fully fluent now in Spanish, French, German, and English. And by fully fluent, let me define that. What I mean is able to read far beyond grade level and enjoy, able to enjoy verbal content. And I have seen plenty of opportunities that is able to express himself verbally whenever he wants to.

I don't do a lot of conversation practice, etc., but my definition of fluency is able to read beyond grade level or able to read at grade level. Also highly fluent in Latin now. Latin was a project that took--we've been working at it for about a year now. We're not quite into reading Julius Caesar, but we're at a very high level with introductory text, etc.

We've finished basically the full course of high school curriculum, and we're just working on it as well as working through the Vulgate New Testament and whatnot now with good understanding. I've introduced biblical Greek, and we're making progress in that. I'm using Biblingo as a primary resource for that. What the work they're doing is fantastic.

And then supplementing that with Athenaze, we're just getting started with that. We're doing Chinese, primarily using an app-based approach, using Hello Chinese. We're getting ready to start on some workbooks, etc., and then we'll go ahead and add in some other languages as well. So I've got four good academic languages of English, Spanish, French, and German, and then the ancient languages of Latin and Greek, and I'll introduce Hebrew as well in the future.

And we're getting a good start. So I believe that prior to age 10, the brain is really beautifully prepared for language acquisition, and there's very low opportunity cost. When you get to after, say, 10, 12, 14, I think the opportunity cost for languages gets higher. So is it more valuable to study Chinese or to learn how to code computers?

I think probably coding computers is more important than Chinese, but yet not at 8. So maybe at 14, though, definitely coding is better. Or the opportunity cost of practical skills. So learning to edit video, I think, is a really good use of time for a 14-year-old. I don't see any benefit of a 7-year-old doing that.

Working and things like that. So I think that the primary focus for prior to age 10 should be language acquisition. And then afterwards, then also math should increase quite a lot, because mathematics and those technical skills will be a primary thing. And so it's not that learning languages in your teen years is not a good thing, but I have a hard time justifying five hours a day on language acquisition when there's so many other benefits after that point in time.

But I could easily justify five hours a day prior to age 10. And so that's one thing that certainly is included in AmbleSight Online, but I do more of that. The other thing that I do is because of this language stuff we've been doing, we do the primary AmbleSight Online curriculum mostly in English.

I do insert a few foreign language books when appropriate. But the AmbleSight Online free reading, we do those in other languages. And so I'll just go ahead and read those in translation. Because what happens is you get too many languages, and you have no time to maintain them. It's just too many hours.

And so even though in many cases you probably are better off reading the book in the primary language, then I substitute the books in translation in order to have language acquisition in a natural way. But that's something that I do that's different. In addition, I substitute a few more science biographies and a few other readings that are on top of AmbleSight Online.

I really appreciate the work that I forget her name, but the lady who writes Sabbath Mood Homeschool has done with her Charlotte Mason Living Science curriculum. I don't think that it's superior to AmbleSight Online or NCOE Competition. The books are scheduled slightly differently and whatnot, but there's a big overlap between the books.

I don't use any of her guides or her curriculum guides, et cetera. I just use the book lists. But I do add in some books off of her biography list because I really believe that's such a powerful way for a child to absorb science education. I have a real passion for science education, and I think that science education is done largely wrongly in industrial schools because you're not connected with why the science was discovered in the first place.

And so what most students seem to – how that most students encounter science is they walk into a classroom and they're handed a textbook and they're taught this is science and science is infallible. Science is correct and here's what you need to know, and they learn it from a textbook.

But those textbooks miss the historical context. And so then the students seem to think themselves literate because they understand what the science textbook says, and they don't understand the importance of science being progressed and advanced, et cetera. They think that scientists just are this royal caste that knows everything.

And so I really love the idea of learning a lot of science from biographies by walking with the scientists. My eldest read Eve Curie's biography of her mother, Marie Curie, this last year. I read about half of it aloud. He got about halfway through and then he got bogged down, so I read about the other half aloud to him.

And I was just amazed at how beautiful it was to just walk alongside with Marie and Pierre through every stage of their life and yet how deeply you're able to learn about radioactivity and the process of discovering radioactivity and seeing it work out and how deeply it connects when you do it in the form of a biography where you care about the people.

And so I really, really want to see children exposed to more biographies at a young age as a precursor to their formalized science studies. I really do believe in the value of textbooks and connections that are made through textbooks and a clear laying out of the current knowledge base of a subject.

I'm not anti-textbook, but I'm definitely anti-textbook for young children. And if children could come into the textbook having a long connection, right? We're going to read a biography of Robert Boyle this next term. And I'm so excited about that because here is the key to understanding chemistry and to caring about chemistry.

One of my favorite Charlotte Mason quotes is this, and it's relevant to the question of how do you know a child is well-educated? And her quote is something like this. "It's not how much a child knows that matters. It's how much does a child care." And I really believe that there's wisdom there that we need to implement.

It's not how much a child knows. We're living in an era in which any fact can be spat out of an electronic device. What matters is how much does a child care. And so we really need to interpret the value of education by how much does a child care about this subject, etc.

And so I'm amazed by that. Another thing that I add to it is I add a whole lot of virtue education. I really think that a foundational obligation that we have with education and education of our children is to train their moral character and train them in the development of virtue.

And there's lots of great stuff in Amblesight Online. I just choose to add a whole bunch of stuff that I create and find myself. And so part of that obviously is religious instruction. But I believe that stories are really foundational. So I have a huge collection of stories, and I read basically various stories at least once per day.

And we talk about character qualities, virtues, etc. And I really think that that's something that we need to instruct our children explicitly in and not just assume that they grasp it implicitly. I believe character is primarily a skill, not a fundamental inherited attribute. And it should be discussed as a skill, and it should be trained as a skill, not as an attribute.

And so I wouldn't want to talk anything about results or anything like that. We've had lots of challenges. But I believe that as a philosophy, character should be viewed as a skill and as something worth instruction in for the improvement and training in. And I find I have a huge collection of virtue literature, stories, etc., demonstrating virtuous people, biographies, all kinds.

And that's a standard part of our daily education. In addition to that, we bring in a huge amount of world schooling. And so I don't think that the concept of world schooling is in any way academically sufficient for what a well-educated young person should have. Children don't just pass through the world and absorb the knowledge that they need by osmosis.

Certainly, pure world schooling of going around the world and visiting museums and whatnot is obviously better than your local government school can do. But I don't think it's in any way sufficient for being well academically prepared to function at a high level academics. And academics are really important to me.

But I do believe that world schooling is a phenomenal supplement or a phenomenal catalyst for deeper connections with a place. And so that's a huge part of our life is traveling and connecting those travels to local places and seeing museums and visiting monuments and discussing the development of the place, etc.

We do a lot of historical fiction reading as part of the travels. I try to find it with a place of historical fiction. And so connecting the dots. Learning is mostly about connections, helping children to make connections to different things. And if you can help make those connections in a variety of ways, then you create better grasp of the learning long term.

I do have other things that I add, but I've gone long enough. I don't take anything away from Amblesight Online. We adjust, we adapt, we modify, and I add to it and kind of adjust it. Those are some of the adjustments that I make. For context, I shoot right now for my older two, a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old.

I shoot for about five hours of daily academic work and I'll often give them a break and drop it to less. So that's probably more than a lot of homeschoolers will do, but I think it's not unreasonable. I really believe in the value of just play. I really believe in the importance of free time, undirected, you know, free time for children.

But I try to do basically plan on formalized academics, 9 to noon and then 1 to 3. So it winds up being about five hours. And again, I'll often cut the afternoon short if necessary, because we can do in five hours, we can do enormous amounts. I would guess that for us at this stage, we could do Amblesight Online, the entire curriculum, in about two to three hours a day.

But I do have strong readers, and so that's something that we've worked hard at and built to over the year. Two things that I know my philosophy has changed on over the last year, I'll share those two things specifically. Number one is the value of testing. I have tried – so I used to be very anti-test.

I didn't see the point of tests. Then I learned about Robert Bjork's research on testing, and I have been persuaded that he is correct. So I am now trying to incorporate more testing into my children's learning process. Robert Bjork, UCLA – I think UCLA – learning scientist, one of the better leaders from an academic perspective in this field.

Basically, he persuaded me that teachers should use testing as a learning opportunity. There's interesting research that's done. Let's say you have three sessions, and you have two groups. Group one has a certain amount of material to study, and you study, study, study in session one. Then in session two, you study, study, study, and then in session three, you study, study, study, and then in session four, you're tested.

Then group two has session one where you study, and then in session two, you're tested. Then in session three, you're tested, and then in session four, you're tested. What is interesting about those is that those who are tested three times after one study session do better than those who study three times and then have a test session.

I'm pretty sure they do better immediately, but what's really interesting is if you then insert a couple of weeks into it, and then you come back, that those who were just study, test, test, test do vastly better than those who study, study, study. I have embraced the value of testing, and I'm trying to test more as a learning tool, but not with standardized testing or things like that.

Sorry, not with multiple choice or dumb stuff like that, although there's probably a place for that, but doing a lot more narration testing and a lot more of specific questions to articulate concepts, et cetera. So that's the goal, doing mostly verbal. I have decided that for writing, we're very weak right now in writing, and that's really important to me.

Susan Wise Bower's writing with ease is the best that I have found. I really think she's created the best comprehensive writing curriculum, and so I have decided to implement her writing with ease program with my children for writing. And the other thing I was going to say that I have changed on is it's escaped me.

It'll come back in a moment. Speaking of Bower, let me add one more comment on something that I think many interested homeschool people will have. What is the connection between Charlotte Mason curriculum and classical curriculum? I used to think that there was some kind of disconnect between the ideas of classical education and a Charlotte Mason style education.

I have now fully resolved all of the distinctions between these, and I do not believe that there is any fundamental disconnect between classical education and Charlotte Mason. Classical education is on a huge rise, and I'm grateful to see that. There are differences between the focus of classical education. Let me articulate these for a moment and how I've resolved the conflicts that I thought were there.

First, one of the frustrations that I have with the way that the term "classical education" is bandied about is that many people seem to have isolated their understanding of classical education to a fairly primitive expression of Dorothy Sayers' "The Lost Tools of Learning" speech. I have nothing against Sayers.

I think that "The Lost Tools of Learning" is a really great speech. I recorded and released it years ago in the Annals of Radical Personal Finance. You can listen to my recording of her speech. I think it's a useful discussion. But Dorothy Sayers' "The Lost Tools of Learning" does not define classical education.

Sayers herself, in that speech, brought a novel interpretation of the ideas of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and applied them to developmental stages in a student's life. I'm not opposed to that. I think that there's probably a useful application of that. But first of all, that is not what it means to be classically educated.

I often wish for better when I hear enthusiastic parents of children in classical stools articulating what is classical education. They say, "Well, classical education means grammar, logic, and rhetoric." What we do with our very young children is we have them memorize lots of facts because that's how you build grammar.

And then what we have with our middle-aged students is we have them think about the logical connections and disconnections between things. And then in rhetoric, we teach them to write and to speak well so they can articulate it. Well, that's maybe useful, but it's not in any way approaching even the slightest bit of the totality of what it means to be classically educated.

And so – and I'm more skeptical of Sayers' contribution than I am of a deep-level classical education. I'll explain why. First, I think what we see with Sayers as compared to Charlotte Mason is that Sayers was an intellectual academic novelist who didn't have any classroom experience, and Mason spent all of her career in a classroom.

And Mason has a much deeper, more comprehensive understanding of children than Sayers could even dream of. And so I think Sayers is fine to make the contribution, but Mason – my money's on Mason any day of the week. The biggest thing that I always struggled with and the biggest disparity is the distinction of the use of the word "grammar." And so in the classical education movement, there is an enormous emphasis on memorization of grammar, what is referred to as grammar.

And so you see this in places like Classical Conversations, a well-known kind of homeschool co-op model of incorporating education where we memorize and we have the word songs and the capital songs and the Latin declension songs, et cetera. There's always focus on memorization, memorization. What brought me peace on that was I always knew that our modern use of the word "grammar" was completely wrong, meaning that when you and I use the word "grammar" in a normal context, we use it to refer to things like understanding subject-verb order in a language or discussing the difference between a direct object and an indirect object.

Most of our exposure to the use of the term "grammar" is based upon this concept of English grammar and how it relates to the grammar of a language. Now, when sayers or other educators use the concept of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, they often use it with a broader sense.

And I think that's a perfectly useful tool of learning. So if you approach a certain subject, let's say you're going to study the world of personal finance, you need to be exposed to the basic grammar of personal finance. It has nothing to do with the language, meaning direct object, verb, that stuff.

What it has to do with is understanding the basics. And so many people take the word "grammar" and kind of automatically substitute the word "basics" or "fundamental meanings and definitions." You need to understand what is a retirement account. That's part of the grammar of personal finance. These are those things that are assumed in any case.

And so if someone is going through a journey of personal finance learning, they need to understand the grammar of taxes and income taxes and retirement accounts and how those protect from taxes. Then they move on to the logic stage of an argument between contributing to a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA, etc.

And then the rhetoric phase where you're arguing about, "Should I even contribute to a retirement account in the first place?" That would be an application of it. But I always knew there was something wrong with that because it still didn't make sense. What finally unlocked it for me was – I forget the name of the book to cite, but it was written by one of the homeschool moms in Ambleside Online.

And she was basically saying, like, what are the – in her book, what is the disconnect between grammar and – sorry, classical and Charlotte Mason? And are they compatible or are they in conflict? And she taught me that the basic root word meaning of the word "grammar" in its Greek technique – or I'm sorry, grammaticae – comes from the art of letters basically is the same basic meaning as the Latin root from which we get the modern word "literature." And that instantly resolved everything for me because I can understand now the use of it.

In a Charlotte Mason education, in the early years especially, we promote broad, vast amounts of reading, of literature. And this literature starts to create the background knowledge that a student needs in order to be ultimately well-educated. And as you progress through a Charlotte Mason education, you don't ever stop consuming broad amounts of literature.

But you do then shift to expression. But there's no point in teaching a second grader to express himself. He's got nothing to express. You need to first sow in the literature. And then the 16-year-old will have some thoughts that are more worthy of expression. And so if we just substitute in the grammar, logic, and rhetoric, if we just substitute the word "literature" instead of "grammar," all of a sudden it makes a lot of sense.

That now, classical education, the goal is to acquire the fundamentals of various subject areas with broad amounts of literature. And then we'll deal with the integration and the conflicts between those things at a later stage. Now it makes sense. And I think traditionally, now we move to things like languages, this is actually the meaning.

So where do we get the term "grammar school" from? Well, remember that in most of education, what we now call classical education, in order to be well-educated, it was fundamentally required that you learn how to read Latin and Greek. Why? Because those were the languages in which the literature was written.

And if you were going to consume literature, you had to be fluent in Latin and Greek. And so a grammar school was to train you in the languages so that you could go on to become well-educated by reading. The grammar school was founded to teach Latin and Greek to people who did not read or did not know Latin and Greek.

The distinction here for Mason came in the flourishing of English language literature. Mason lived at a time in which it was no longer universal that all academic literature was written in Latin. And now people were starting to produce works directly in English. And Mason had no argument against classical education with an emphasis on the classical languages.

But what she did do was she wanted to bring the beauties of that classical education to the masses. She saw herself fundamentally not as serving the intellectual elite or necessarily even the cultural elite, but trying to create a high-quality education for ordinary boys and girls. And as such, she chose, and she said, "There will always be elite education in which the students master Latin and Greek.

But I'm going to bring high-quality education in English to the masses." Now, if you look at what is generally done with the teaching and the use of the languages, the classical languages, in most classical schools, I think you see the basic fundamental reason for this. That even in the so-called classical schools, the vast majority of them do nothing with the languages.

They teach Latin as a subject, and the students never actually become fluent to a reading level comfortably in Latin. They teach Latin as some kind of artificial thing. And I myself have studied all the arguments in favor of teaching Latin for those reasons. "Oh, it makes you better with English." I don't buy any of those arguments.

The reason to learn Latin and Greek is so that you can read in Latin and Greek. That's it, as far as I'm concerned. All the rest of the nonsense of, "It's going to make your child better." Yeah, you get a better SAT score, but just learn Spanish, learn something useful, etc.

The reason you learn Latin and Greek is to be able to read Latin and Greek. That's the point. And I think that you can accomplish every other of the things that people talk about Latin and Greek better with a modern language that will be more useful to the student.

But if you want to be able to read in Latin and Greek, then study Latin and Greek. And I'm in favor of Latin and Greek. But not for the artificial reasons that are usually listed. At least, as far as I can see. They don't hold water to me. I don't buy them.

But Mason did the beautiful job of bringing the quality of a classical education to the common people and doing it in a powerful and attractive way. And instead of destroying her students under the deep weight of Latin declensions and studying them formally in first grade, she awakened a love of knowledge and a love of learning through exposing the children to beautiful literature in their native tongue.

Now, she did encourage multiple languages. Students who went through Charlotte Mason's schools were generally fluent in at least three languages. And that's totally doable. And at Amblesight Online, they encourage the study of Latin and several modern languages. And so I think it's relatively easy for most students to easily acquire three to five languages.

It's just not difficult at all when you actually make it a focus. But she wasn't in competition with them. She was bringing the classical education to the masses. And something had to be given up. And what she chose to give up was a deep focus on the classical languages.

The other aspect that is slightly different to a Charlotte Mason education is this modern versus classical. It's this modern emphasis on constant memorization of facts. Mason was not in favor of a constant memorization of facts. She was in favor of memorization. Recitation, meaning memorized pieces, was a core component of her curriculum.

But it wasn't of facts. It was of language, of literature, a beautiful poem. She did that because she believed that the goal of an educator was to inspire and awaken an appreciation of a subject in the student. And I don't think you get there much with facts. I don't think these things have to be in conflict.

So we use some of the songs. We use -- my wife does this part of it. But she has the children memorizing the classical conversations timeline song. We do memorization of the skip counting songs. She does some geography songs, et cetera. And I think that's all great because, okay, spend 10 minutes a day on it.

10 minutes a day is not going to grind out of the child of the love of learning. That's not going to happen. But the primary focus would be on literature and on beautiful ideas. And so if you're going to really spend time on deep level memorization, let it be of a beautiful poem.

Let it be of a beautiful hymn. Let it be of something that brings the child up. And this may have been the second point is that memorization, I have come to really believe that memorization of languages is really, really important. And it's really important for many reasons. We've been -- we were weak on it for a while, but we're doing a lot better now.

And thus I will end my discourse on Math Academy and Amblesight Online. There was your hour lecture on it. Thank you for the question. I hope it's useful to you. Let me conclude with some of those fundamental principles that I think are important. Number one, you as a parent know your own child.

One of the beautiful points about what is probably fundamental to things like homeschooling is the fact that you have a one-to-one relationship between teacher and child, or one to three, or how many children you have. And so in that fundamental connection that you have, you have the ability to articulate what is most important to your child.

And you don't need to just follow a curriculum. If something's not working, toss it out. Adjust. If Math Academy -- so there was a time with my eldest, Math Academy wasn't working for a while. I was trying to figure out what it was. It was too hard. I was expecting too much.

I just laid it aside, let it sit there for a few weeks, did some lectures, some recorded video lectures, did some just practice and whatnot, came back, we're in a different place. And so you know your child. And so you should never be a slave to any one curriculum fundamentally.

As your child gets older, you want to incorporate more and more things that are specifically of interest to the child. I'm not going to go into this today, but I believe -- so I'm really fascinated with what is the difference between an elite, upper crust education, the kind of education you get at a world-class private school, boarding school, et cetera, versus the industrial education that the masses receive.

And there's a huge element that involves the independence of the student. And so we really want to incorporate things the student is interested in and adjust and adapt the student with what's working and what's not. But that comes mostly at a later age. At a younger age, I believe we have the opportunity to, quote Charlotte Mason, "to spread a beautiful buffet of ideas before a child." And allow the child to pick and choose among the options based upon what he or she is interested in at a particular time.

But you should do what's right for your child, and you should not be scared to adjust and to adapt. We are dealing -- so we're in competition with a horrific system. The industrial school system and what is happening in the industrial school system is just -- the results are so bad.

And it's not necessarily the teacher's fault. They're victims of a system that is designed to create homogeneity in a population rather than to allow them to inspire learning. And in the industrial system, you can't. If your ratio is 30 to 1, you've got 30 students or, God forbid, 150 students that are passing through your classroom every day.

How do you give them the kind of care and attention that we do in a one-to-one setting? So anything you do is fine. Unschooling is going to be better. Unschoolers routinely perform better on academic assessments than students that have gone through the industrial school system. So adapt and adjust.

But you're going to need to have some kind of triage of your ideas. For example, I don't think that the distinctions that I just spent 20 minutes talking about between classical education and Ambleside Online are really that big of a deal. I mean there's so much overlap. Something like reading to your child for two hours a day, that's transformative.

And so if you could do nothing else, just read to your child two hours a day. Something like having a very screen-light existence where your child isn't going around glued to social media, that's a key thing. And so it doesn't matter what curriculum you use. If you can just separate your children from the constant vapid dopamine hits of TikTok, you're going to be far ahead because you create zombie children that just can't do anything.

And so regardless of what curriculum you choose, that doesn't matter. And you've got to choose something that works compared to the other things. So we need to have a really good classification or a really good structure of ideas and focus on the really important ones first. So some things that are really important is connection and relationship with the child.

Some things that are really important is keeping the spark alive of the interest and feeding your child's interest. Things that are really important, lots and lots of reading aloud. Things that are really, really important, having lots of great books. Even if your child just goes to the library and picks the books, that's better than anything.

So Amblesight Online is fantastic. It's wonderful and I think it should be a core portion. But feel free to pick and choose and create your own things based upon where you are right now as a family. And recognize that where you are today is going to be different than where you are in the future.

And you can adjust and adapt and that's the beauty of it. So I love Amblesight Online. I'm finding that as I'm reading through some of the books more and more, especially as my children are getting older, it's just world class. I'm super excited we're getting into this next term.

We're getting into Winston Churchill's books. I never even knew that Winston Churchill was a writer. We read Teddy Roosevelt's, a biography of Teddy Roosevelt this last term. And I started my eldest on the book himself and then I just started reading with him because I just wanted to read about Teddy Roosevelt.

And I came away so inspired by Teddy Roosevelt. He was already my favorite president. But he, like, I'm just, what an amazing guy. And so one of the huge benefits of homeschooling your children is you get to go back and get for yourself the education that you never got.

And I love it. I think Amblesight is fantastic. And I keep going on. One of the beautiful things about Amblesight, by the way, is that it's a really great international curriculum and many of the books are open source. I mean, sorry, public domain. And so a lot of them you can just get totally for free and toss them on a Kindle.

And so it's a widely accessible curriculum. Not all of them, but you can always find something public domain to substitute if you need to. So I buy all the books even though we use a lot of, we use Kindles especially when traveling and I will load them up with a lot of stuff.

But I really think that it's important to make the investment into the physical books and have them. But even so, for those who don't have the resources, just use the public domain books. Put them on an e-reader or cheap tablet of some kind and you're going to have a world class education for your children.

So my respect is enormous for those mothers who and their, what they have done. I hope they get the reward that they deserve in the long term. Thank you all so much for listening to today's Friday Q&A show. It was a monster. But I hope you enjoyed the conversation.

As noted, these are some of the questions that I received, written questions from my patrons. If you would like to support the show on Patreon, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. That will gain you access to these Q&A shows where you can get your questions in the queue or join the live show.

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