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Requires dealer contribution and leased through Stellantis Financial. Extra charge for miles over $15,000. Includes 7,500 EV cap cost reduction. Not all customers will qualify. Residency restrictions apply. Take retail delivery by 4/1. That is a registered trademark. 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. And on today's podcast, I want to discuss with you the question, should you wait to have children until you can afford it? Now, in the most recent podcast episode, I dealt with the question of, should you wait to get married until you can afford it?

And I wasn't originally planning to do this follow-along episode immediately, but after further consideration, I realized, obviously, it makes sense. As the old children's nursery rhyme goes, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage. And while that sequence of events may not be as consistent as we might like, it still generally is true, and so it makes sense to talk about these things together.

In this podcast episode, I'm going to share with you some ideas that come not only from personal experience, after all, my wife and I have five children ages 10 and under, but more importantly, from a significant amount of experience that I have gained from working as a financial planner for many, many families, and I want to share with you some stories that I think will drive some of these points home to you.

The basic thesis of what I want to share with you is that, yes, some appropriate amount of financial planning is warranted when it comes to making decisions regarding having children. However, it's probably not so significant as you might think, and if you'll sit down and lay out the specific concerns that you have, you may find that if you want to have children, and if you're able to have children, you don't need quite so much money as you otherwise thought that you did.

To begin, let's build a foundation by talking about goal setting. When I help people with goal setting, I often divide goals into what I call time-bound goals and money-bound goals. A time-bound goal is something that either can only happen at a certain stage of life or is something that is really best if done at a certain stage of life.

A money-bound goal, on the other hand, is something that you need a specific amount of money to accomplish, and it can be done at any point in time when you acquire the money. So, there's no perfect line between these, but there are many goals that will naturally fall into one or another.

So, for example, you might have a goal of finishing high school or finishing college. Generally speaking, you don't need money in order to finish high school or really even college. Generally, what you need is time, and life really works well if you finish high school on the normal schedule.

Obviously, if you didn't finish high school on the normal schedule and you find yourself at 50 years old and you're in need of a high school diploma, you can go and get that, and you can go back to college at any point in time. But there's real value in doing these things in the normal expected time period.

There are other things that would play into this. Recently I had a consultation with an orthodontist. I wanted to talk about straightening my teeth. I had braces when I was young, but foolishly I didn't wear my retainer, and now my teeth have gotten all crowded and crooked, and so I was looking into getting braces.

And I was just thinking about how silly it is that here I am at my age having to go back and think about getting braces to straighten out teeth that should have been kept straight. The best time to get braces is, if needed, when you're young, and then keep your teeth in good shape.

And it's not so much a money goal, it would have been better to get that done at a certain time and keep them at that point. Now financial goals often are related to things like consumption items. I want to have a certain kind of car, or I want to buy a motorcycle, or I want to buy a horse, and I'm going to do it as soon as I'm able to save the money, or I want to retire.

Even big goals. Children, in my opinion, should always be considered primarily as a time-bound goal. Because there are two things that are true about having children. One, there's a time in life in which it's easier to have children, and everything related to children is probably better when you do it sooner rather than later.

Not entirely, but better. Physically, if you desire to have children, that needs to happen at a certain point in life. Men and women are not able to have babies at just any point in time biologically. There's a rather narrow window of time, something on the order of 15 to 20 years, in which women are able to conceive and birth healthy babies.

With modern reproductive technologies and modern medical care, we have been able to extend that window. But when you extend that window, you get very unreliable results, and you get significant amounts of expense, often, that are associated with it. And even if you can technically birth a baby outside of that normal 10-year to 15-year window when it's relatively easy and straightforward for most women, you still have to deal with the challenges of raising a child at an older point in time.

Now, I believe that children should always be welcomed and always be cared for and supported, regardless of whether they are convenient in our lives or not. Children are a blessing, that's a universal statement of fact, and they are always to be welcomed and cared for. And sometimes, though we might like to think ourselves emperors of our lives and our domains, in reality, we're not quite so much in charge of the world as we might like to believe that we are.

And children are precious. We should care for them, no matter when they come along. I've worked with a handful of families, for example, who had children young, had their perfect plan worked out, moved on through their lives, had launched their children, they were done, ready to retire, and all of a sudden, they found themselves caring for a grandchildren.

Either the death of a child or a child was unable to take care of his or her own children, and now they're starting over again, raising children. And I think that's an admirable and respectable thing that we do. Sometimes, people find themselves with children much earlier than was planned.

In that situation, you care for the child, take care of the child, do your best, and learn in the situation. So we should have that as a foundation. But backing away from any kind of extreme examples, I think it's important that we acknowledge that most things with children happen better if you have those children when you're relatively young.

Probably not too young, I'll let you put the number on that, but when you're relatively young, it's easier. Physically speaking, again, the act of conception and the act of childbirth are much easier for women who are younger. It's easier, you have much statistically higher chances of having a healthy baby, of having smooth pregnancies, faster and easier recovery, everything is easier.

If you're not involved or have never had babies, one of the things that was most surprising to my wife and I is if you are 35 years old and you are a woman, then you have now been graduated into a... and you're pregnant. You've now been graduated into something called geriatric pregnancy.

That's the politically incorrect term, they're trying to change it now to advanced maternal age. I don't know that one is better than another. But that word geriatric is just so funny that geriatric pregnancy, you're now automatically considered to be a high-risk pregnancy and you have to take special precautions.

So for a woman who conceives and births a baby at or beyond 35 years of age, you have to take many more precautions. It's remarkable that there are more women now birthing children into their 40s and even beyond successfully. I read recently something like a statistic that there are four times more mothers who birth their first child after the age of 40 than ever before, something like that.

And it's pretty remarkable. However, it can be extremely difficult. And one of the things that often happens to people, at least in my experience, is they assume, well, when we go to the point of having children, it's all going to be simple. The normal flow of life, at least among my peers, tends to be something like this.

We should have children after we have finished all of our schooling. And by schooling, generally most people mean something between 16 and 20 years of schooling. So we need to have children after we've finished all of our schooling, after we've established ourselves in our career, and usually what they mean by that is something between five to 15 years of work, often 10, and we want to get married, and then we'll go ahead and have babies.

And so it's very normal in my circles that a husband and wife would be about 30, 35, they start thinking about, okay, we're going to go ahead and have a baby because we did school until 22, 24, 26. Then we had five to 10 years of establishment in our careers to make lots of money, and now we were ready to have a baby.

Well, often couples find that it's not quite so easy to conceive and have a baby as they thought. And if it is possible to do it once, in many cases it's not possible to do it twice or it's not possible to do it thrice. And so it's just very challenging for couples because what they thought was going to be smooth and easy often is not.

And there's a lot of heartache involved with multiple miscarriages, multiple challenges. It can be quite difficult. So there's no guarantees in life, but just be aware and do a deep study of those. Because I think in our modern age, because we're so accustomed to controlling everything medically perfectly, people often have a naive understanding of how easy it's going to be to have babies when they're ready for them.

And I'm not even discussing the topic of freezing eggs and in vitro fertilization, all the modern reproductive technologies, all of them are much more fraught with difficulty, danger, and poor results than most people would like to hear about. The second thing though, with regard to children, is that most things about raising children are easier when you are young.

Younger people tend to have more physical energy than older parents do. And so it can be much easier for a mom and a dad who are 22 years old to deal with one or two or three little babies than it is for a mom or dad who are 42 years old to deal with one or two or three little babies.

In addition, because of youthful energy, youthful vigor, a lot of just the physical fun of playing with children and doing things with them is much easier. And younger parents tend to have an easier time dealing with the physical demands of child raising more so than older parents do. In addition, if you have babies when you're younger, you're often more flexible in your thinking and more flexible in your lifestyle.

Certainly there are bad parents of every age and there are good parents of every age. But it can be difficult for older parents to adjust their lifestyle to working with children. However, younger parents, in the same way that people who get married when they're younger, they're often more flexible, can fit in with another person, younger parents can often fit them into their lifestyle in a better way.

And I think being a young parent of older children is awesome. I have a friend of mine who had four children in his early 20s, he and his wife. And he's in his early 40s, about 42 years old, his youngest is 15 years old, if I have the math right, and four children, all older, and here he is in the time in life in which some people are just starting to have babies, and his work is done behind him.

And so when you have babies, there is a very intense period of dealing with young babies where your lifestyle and everything is disrupted, but in time you can kind of get that behind you and it's kind of nice to have it behind you and have the benefits of being with children.

In addition, if you have children when you're younger, you get to simply enjoy them for a longer period of time. If you think about the simple number of years that you have with your children, who doesn't want to have more time with them? If you're the kind of person who wants to have children in the first place, one of the reasons you're doing that is probably to have time with them.

I don't. I don't know, maybe women do, but at least for me as a man, I don't look forward to babies and toddlers. I look forward to children and mature adults. That's where I really enjoy it. I do it because you've got to get through the baby and toddler stage, and I'm grateful that God has given my wife this weird gene that she looks at her babies and she melts.

But on the whole though, I look forward to time with mature children. That's what's super exciting. When you have your children when you're younger, you have more time with them, more time then with your grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and beyond. One thing that's fascinating to me is how our expectations of what is normal with regard to having children have been dramatically skewed by our society.

If you are one of my younger listeners, I'm imagining you may be 20 years old. One of the things that I have observed is that you probably receive very little encouragement to have children. I didn't realize this myself until about the specific age doesn't matter. But my wife and I have been married for I think five or six years.

We had three children, and we had children in our late 20s. We had three children, and I remember we were in Salt Lake City, Utah, and we were visiting the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, Utah. All of a sudden, here came a young couple down the street towards us.

It was a beautiful young couple, and they were pushing a baby stroller with a beautiful baby in it. I looked at the couple, and due to my advanced age, they just looked like kids to me, absolute kids. I looked at them, and I stared, and I thought, "I don't ever see this.

I don't ever see..." By the way, they weren't kids. They were probably 20 years old, 21 years old. They just looked young to me, and I realized I never see 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 22-year-olds with children ever in our society. I see 30-year-olds with children because that's what is societally normal in the culture that I'm from.

It shocked me on the one hand, but it also... I realized the death and destruction of my own culture. It should be normal to see healthy, happy, strong 20-year-old married couples with children. That should be norm, the norm. That's a healthy society. The fact that we don't see that as much as we do is an indictment on the dysfunction that we have built.

What are our counterarguments that undoubtedly some fraction of my listeners are immediately thinking of? "We don't want to have babies too young." Sure, but you define to me what is too young and why, and then prove to me that having children is specifically the problem. I have interacted, and I know personally friends, family members who feel like they had children too young.

Usually, though, it wasn't the children that were the problem. It was that they didn't receive good counsel about forming their marital relationships, and they weren't helped to develop maturity at a young age. Those are some of the issues that we talked about previously. I had a friend of mine who is a midwife, and she delivered her great-granddaughter when she was close to 60.

I forget which side of 60 she was on. Her mother passed away when she was—I think she was not yet 65, so between 60 and 65, and her mother was passing away at 80. I talked to her about it, and I realized again at the other end of the spectrum how shocking it is to think about multiple generations.

I did the math, and in her family, my friend, she had had her first baby at 16 years old. That had been basically part of their family culture, that she had her first baby as a mid-teenager, her daughter had her first baby as a mid-to-late teenager, and then now her granddaughter was having her first baby as a mid-to-late teenager.

On the one hand, I was a little uncomfortable with that. I still am, because it doesn't feel like that's the right decision in our current cultural context. But I really checked myself, and I thought, "Wait a second. Historically speaking, biologically speaking, this really should be a normal event. It should be normal, for example, for a child to be born to, say, a 20-year-old mother, who has a 40-year-old—the child would have a 40-year-old grandmother, a 60-year-old great-grandmother, and an 80-year-old great-great-grandmother." I thought, "What an amazing wealth that would be to have so many generations in life." My wife and I, with our own children, our children were able to get to know their great-grandparents before they passed away.

But it was only for a short time, and it was only because the great-grandparents were quite long-lived, beyond centenarians. It should be more normal to be able to get to know and have a very close relationship with great-grandparents. Biologically speaking, it's healthy if children are born to a 20-year-old mother and on beyond.

And wouldn't that be an amazing generational continuity? That's what some of our forebears, who had children earlier, were able to enjoy. They were able to enjoy more of an understanding of the generations and the continuity of family. And while we've created some unique challenges in the way that we structure our society and the way that we raise children that make that kind of situation very rare, and in many cases probably inadvisable, that's not to say that it wouldn't be amazing if it could happen.

And I think we should recognize that a child that grows up and barely gets to know his grandparents is much poorer, culturally speaking, societally speaking, than a child who knows his 16 great-great-grandparents, because there was a tradition of having children at an earlier age. Here's the thesis as we turn to money.

Don't wait until you can afford it to have children. Wait until you're married and you want to have children, and then have children. If there's something that you need to wait for, financially speaking, the kind of thing that you need to wait for should probably be a financial goal that you could accomplish within a year.

If it's longer term than that, if it's a goal that's going to take you 10 years to do, you're waiting until you're financially independent to be able to have children, I don't think that's a wise move. If you want to have children, again, all of this is predicated upon wanting to have children, but if that's the case, then finances should probably not be the determining factor.

Is money important? Absolutely, it is. I think any fair-minded advisor will acknowledge that your life will cost more if you have children than if you don't. How could it not? Join us today during the Jeep Celebration event, where right now, well-qualified lessees get an ultra-low mileage lease on the 2024 Jeep Wrangler Sport S4 by E for $329 a month for 36 months with $3,960 due at signing.

Tax, title, license extra, no security deposit required. Call 1-888-925-JEEP for details. Requires dealer contribution and leased through Stellantis Financial. Extra charge for miles over $15,000. Includes $7,500 EV cap cost reduction. Not all customers will qualify. Residency restrictions apply. Take retail delivery by 4/1. Jeep is a registered trademark. There's recently been some internet memes around the dinks promoting their lifestyle.

Dinks are always going to have the most disposable income. Dual income, no kids. You have the efficiency of lifestyle, the savings of two people, sharing expenses, and no kids. Two incomes, you're going to have the most disposable income. There's no question about that. But if you're the kind of person who wants to have children, then I would encourage you that money probably isn't as important as you might think.

I'm going to get into the details, but I want to make one more comment because I don't want to hide my, I want to talk about children, and I'm not hiding my agenda. I want to encourage fecundity. I want to encourage you to have children. I don't want to encourage reckless fecundity.

That's not my goal. I don't think that just anyone should have babies or even that everyone should have babies. If you don't want to have children, don't have them. That's fine. I'm not here to impose anything on you. I want to push back against some propaganda that is often pushed on us with children, that there's a lot of propaganda that says that children are a net harm to your life.

And I would like to vigorously push back against that propaganda because antinatal propaganda is fundamentally anti-humanist. You become an enemy of your species. The most basic function of a society should be to be able to reproduce itself so that we can see our species flourish. And there's so much antinatal propaganda in our society that I do want to push back against that.

But I don't want to push back against an individual. If you've made a choice and you say that children are not for me, hit stop and move on. And I will respect you and honor you without reserve. Not everyone wants to have children. Not everyone should have children. Of course many people can't have children.

That's totally fine. So I'm not encouraging any kind of reckless fecundity. I also don't think that you should just have as many children as you possibly can. I'm not an extremist. I don't think that you should recklessly procreate just because you're capable of it and as a guy you should go out and get as many women pregnant for as much time as possible.

That is not in any way what I am encouraging. I'm an advocate of the so-called success sequence. Graduate from high school, get a job, get married, stay married and have babies within wedlock. We don't need any more bastards in our society and we don't need more single dads and moms.

But within that context, within those basic parameters, if you want to have children and are able to have children, then I'm trying to release you from the idea that you have to be mega rich to do so. I think this concept has held a lot of people back to say that I have to get more money in order to have more children and they often wind up at the end of their lives with plenty of money and fewer children than they want to have.

In the United States, where I know the statistics best, women regularly self-report not having as many children as they themselves would like to have and I believe that finances are a significant contributing factor as to why that is the case. Having babies is a good thing and it's something that we should acknowledge and that we should encourage.

Young married people, because of our touchiness on this subject, are generally not encouraged to have children. Your experience may differ. Maybe you have your grandmother who's saying, "When are you going to have babies?" But at least my experience, I don't pressure people to have children. If people aren't having children, I generally don't even ask.

If I do ask, the most I say is just, "Do you hope to have children?" To me, that's the lightest way I can broach a subject that is often just a normal part of interaction with people that you care about without pressuring somebody. But I don't know what reasons somebody may have for choosing not to have children.

I don't know what medical reasons someone may have for not having children, so I don't go and pry in people's lives. But we need to talk in public about how wonderful babies are. They're good things. Babies are likely to bring enormous amounts of joy and satisfaction into your life personally.

Most parents find exceptions, certainly they're out there, but most parents cite their children and subsequent generations of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, as a primary source of joy, satisfaction, and accomplishment in their life. And it has always been this way, and as far as I can see, it always will be. And the exceptions prove the rule more than they make us think that this should fundamentally change.

One thing I particularly like about having children is I think they bring a wonderful phase effect to life. That's my name for it. But the idea being that a life that only has one or two chapters—a book that only has one or two chapters is kind of a boring book.

A book that has many chapters and each chapter has a different theme is much more interesting. I've counseled a lot of—I've done financial planning for a lot of wealthy people who had lots of money, early retirees, and one of the things I've noticed is that they have to work very hard to imagine different phases of life.

And one of the things that happens is because aging is a continual, never-ending process, it's hard to look forward to aging if you don't have some counter—not counterfactual, but like countervailing goal to appreciate. If you—let's say that you're dual income, no kids, and let's say that you hit the magic goal of being 30 years old and you are at the top of your game, you're financially independent, you've made a ton of money, and now you're retired and you're 30 years old and you have all the money in the world to do anything that you want.

Looking forward over your life, you've got, say, let's call it 50 to 70 years of life to fill. Now, you've got all the money in the world, you undoubtedly have lots of friends and you're enjoying things and you've got adventures, but how do you fill 50 to 70 years with pure adventures?

Let's say you're passionate about sailing, are you going to be passionate about sailing for 50 years or are you going to be passionate about sailing for 10 years or 5 years? Maybe you have a different personality than I do, but I find that 5 to 10 years is enough for most things in my life.

And so I work really hard to try to make each decade different of my life, and I think this is a good approach to goal planning that you should set out for your life's book, your memoirs, set out for yourself 50 or 100 chapters and ask yourself, "What's going to be different about chapter 27 than 57?" Well, children have this wonderful kind of normal natural effect of solving two problems.

One, they bring in a phased effect to life where let's assume that you have three children between the ages of 22 and 28. Well, now at 38, you've got 10-year-olds and your adventures with 10-year-olds are much different with your youngest is 10 and you've got teens. Your adventures in that phase of life are very different than when you had a bunch of small children and you went to the park and went to the beach with them and now you're traveling the world with them.

And then you're enjoying watching them come into their own and develop personalized interests and hobbies and you have the joy and the satisfaction of high school graduation and going to college and then graduating and attending their weddings. And then as you age, you start to naturally gain more pleasure in relationships as your physical capacity may be declining.

And so you look forward to being 90 years old and bouncing your great-grandchildren on your knee. You look forward to these aspects of life. And as you perhaps physically slow down, now you have an opportunity to invest into your children. You can care for your grandchildren so that their parents are more freed up.

You can sow into them and share the wisdom of your experience. It seems to me that if you don't have children, you miss out on these natural phases of life and it's much more challenging to understand how to fill all of the decades of your life and you have to work more diligently at it.

It's not impossible, nor am I saying that's reason enough to have children. But it's an observation that I have of helping people plan that it can be challenging if you don't have children. And then just the effect of aging. If you reach 80 years old and you've done nothing but adventure for 50 years and you know that looking forward your adventures are going to be less, what can you do?

It's challenging. Now, you can still, I would say, harvest this even if you're not doing it with your own blood relations. You may be 80 years old, pour into your nieces, your nephews, adopt children in some kind of big brothers, big sisters program or just work with the neighbor children.

I have throughout my life benefited enormously from single men and single women who invested into me in a powerful and consistent way even though they weren't blood relations. And so consider bringing those things into your life. On the whole, I've tried to ring the warning bell on this for probably three or four years now.

But we should acknowledge that babies are good for society and the world. We need more babies in the world today. We are heading today toward a demographic collapse in most of the societies in which we live. In some, it's worse. In some, it's better. But it's going to catch a lot of people by surprise.

And there are a couple of reasons for that. Right now, global populations are rising and they will continue to rise for the next few decades. So the total number of people in the world I think is projected to reach something like eight and a half billion people before it starts to decline.

The reason for the rising population is not because we're having more babies. On the whole, the world is already—am I getting this right? Jack checked me on this, but on the whole, the world is already below replacement rate. I'm not sure if I can say that accurately on a global standard.

I would need to check the data on that. But most of our societies are below replacement rate and far below replacement rate. And that's spreading all around the world. There seems to be an inevitable process that as we get richer, we have fewer and fewer children. As we industrialize and as we move to cities, we have fewer and fewer children.

And nobody as yet has figured out how to crack the code and stem the losses on a societal basis with a few ideological and religious exceptions. But this is going to surprise a lot of people because we're living in increasingly older, more geriatric societies. And this takes all of the youth and vibrance of a society and destroys it.

You have a bunch of old people fighting with each other and not enough young people to support them. By the way, you can see this collapse with your own eyes if you look around you. Let's briefly talk about demographic trends. In order for a population to have a stable size, every single woman in that population needs to have two children.

Technically, they often say 2.1 children, but let's just keep it simple, two children. So in order for your population where you live to be stable, every single woman you know has to have two children. Now, if you are like me, you know a lot of women who don't have two children.

Again, fine. For every woman you know that has one child and not two, you must then know a different woman who has three children in order to maintain stability of population. For every woman you know who has zero children, you must also know another woman who has four children over the fullness of her life.

So think about your personal sphere of social contact. Think about your family, your neighbors, your friends, your company, your church, your social clubs, your country. Think about that. And ask yourself, on the whole, if I make a list of all the women that I know, do we have on the whole an average of two children per woman?

The answer is almost certainly no. And there you see demographic decline right in front of you. Now, here is the more shocking thing about demographic decline. To use simplified numbers, let's assume that you have a general population of 100,000 people. And let's assume on the average that the population that you have of 100,000 people, that on average, instead of having two children per woman and maintaining a stable population size, you have a generation that has one child per woman within that generation.

In the second generation, your population size would drop from 100,000 to 50,000. Just one generation of an average of one child per woman continued down through it would guarantee the having of your population. Now let's assume that you wanted to grow back from that 50,000 population size back up to 100,000.

How many children would each woman in that population have to have in order for a population to grow from 50,000 to 100,000 people? The answer is four, four children per woman. And so what is happening around the world is that there are many countries that have gone from a total fertility rate of certainly way below 2.1.

Average fertility rate in the United States I think is something like 1.6, 1.7. You can check all these numbers out, I'm just speaking off the top of my head here, but this is directionally right. Some of the lowest fertility rates in the world are in Japan, South Korea is especially bad right now.

The average fertility, the total fertility rate in South Korea is something like 0.71 or 0.7 children per woman as far as the total fertility rate. That basically over the fullness of time leads to a collapse in a society's numbers fairly quickly because once you miss a generation of children, you don't even have enough children to repopulate the generation, let alone maintain it.

And so what is happening is we're actually far into the demographic crisis and it's unsolvable in many countries of the world. Why? Well, because we still have lots of older generations, so we still have lots of people, but what we don't have enough of is we don't have enough 20-year-olds, 30-year-old women who are able to have children or even who want to have children.

We don't physically have enough. Let's say that you could snap your fingers and you could convince all Italian women that for whatever reason they wanted to have lots of babies, and you could convince all South Korean women and all Japanese women and all Russian women that for whatever reason they want to have lots of babies, and it's a voluntary thing, I'm not into Chinese women, I'm not into forcing anybody to do anything, but let's assume that you could just magically do that.

These populations can't even replace themselves at this point in time because there's not enough women of childbearing age and the younger cohorts are even smaller. That's what's happening, but not many people are paying attention to it. So mark my words, what I tell people privately, over the next two or three decades, the most talked about crisis that we're going to be discussing is going to be population collapse.

Now is it going to be the end of the world as we know it? I hope not. I don't think so. I think we'll figure out some new solutions to it, but it doesn't lead to a very exciting future. Having an old gray society is not good for innovation.

It's not good for any sense of excitement. You just have a population of people that just want to bicker with each other constantly. There's not enough resources to go around and there's no sense of expansion. Children are the ultimate resource and all of the problems that we face and that we have are going to be solved by children.

That's why societies that are rich in children, although they come with a whole other set of problems, they have a very different experience. I have five young children. My house is loud. It's chaotic. That's been the biggest surprise to me, having children, is how loud it is. I work hard at it every day, quiet down.

It's a constant challenge. But it is not boring. It is filled with enthusiasm. It is filled with a sense of the future. My house is fun. It's exciting. It's a decent metaphor for societies. Let's talk now in detail about the money. The money matters and we need to properly consider how it matters.

Here's the general rule of money and children. Children will cost you as much money as you have. The general rule of children is they will always cost you as much money as you have. If you have a little bit of money, you'll spend out that and your children will probably turn out fine.

If you have a lot of money, then you'll spend a lot of money and guess what? Your children will probably turn out fine. As best I can find, the amount of money that you spend on your child does not have any kind of measurably direct correlation to long-term success in life.

I think it probably helps. I spend quite a lot of money on my children, more than many people, but on the whole, it just seems like it's one factor among so many that it's not particularly measurable. One of the great challenges in some cultures as to why the society has so few children is that the social expectations around how much money you have to spend on children are so high.

But I want to point out that these are all social expectations. These are rules that if you have the courage and the determination and the vision, you could just break them. They're just social norms and you probably need to break some of them. Most of us, let's say you don't have a lot of money, most of us live in societies that have developed systems for identifying talent and bringing it up and nourishing it, regardless of the financial capacity of a family.

In the United States, which is the country I know best, if you do well in school, you do well on your exams, you study, you're going to be found. You're found by your PSAT scores and your SAT scores and your National Merit Scholar stuff. You're found and you're going to be coached and you're going to be provided for and you're going to be given an all expenses paid shot at college and ultimately that's going to be your ticket to high society.

You can break into the higher social class purely based upon your basic academic ability or other natural talents that you have been developing. In addition though, even if we're not talking about purely academics, most of us live in societies in which most of the things that you need for a child, if you don't have a lot of money yourself and aren't sure if you can afford it, most of the things that you need for your child is provided with taxpayer money.

There's food and food support that helps you buy groceries. There's housing money that's given to you. Some countries have direct cash payments that are given to you if you live there, Kindergarten, Germany and other variations in many societies. If you need help with education, there's free government schools that you can send your children to and they can get a great education.

There's libraries available to you that have all of the resources of the world. They have free computers. The libraries have lending libraries of video cameras and video editing suites and podcast recording suites and that's to say nothing of even just the general equity in society filled with people who want to support children.

Most wealthy people who want to make an impact on the world, they start a scholarship fund or start some kind of support. Most physicians that I work with spend and donate and invest days of their very valuable work to help the poor and indigent. We live in societies in which we have lots of support.

You're not on your own. So recognize that as a foundational thing, that your children are going to cost you what you have. If you have a lot, you'll spend all that and if you have a little, you'll spend what you have. So on the whole, your children are probably going to turn out fine.

If you're present with them and you love them and you don't abuse them and you spend time with them and you encourage them, it'll all work out in the long run. Now, let's say you're waiting to have children until you can afford it. What is the specific monetary goal that you're waiting for?

Here are some examples. You might be waiting until you can get a job so that you have income. That seems wise to me. I think that's a really good idea. If you are unemployed and you're not currently expecting a baby, then I think that you should go and get a job and have a source of income.

Being unemployed and having responsibility for other human beings isn't fun. Now, the cool thing about it, remember what I said earlier, give it a year, you can probably find a job fairly quickly. Even if today you found out that your wife or your girlfriend or yourself that you're expecting a baby, then usually you have six months, eight months to prepare for that.

Usually that's enough time to get a job and have a source of income. But on the whole, if you're planning to have children, I would encourage you get a job before you have children. Have a source of income. Being unemployed and having responsibility for other humans isn't fun. Now, maybe you have a goal such as making more money at your job.

Is that an appropriate reason to wait to have children? I'd say maybe, but you should be really careful here. Again, recognize that most of us live in a society where there's some social support, some form of social safety network. That social safety network, it won't provide you with everything.

You can't just be a professional birther or a professional parent in any society. But there's enough there to make up the difference in most societies. So if you have some source of income, and that source of income is paired with government benefits and welfare programs and cash payments or whatever it happens to be in a society that you live in, then that's probably enough for you to make it.

Ironically though, in many societies, as your income increases, you may start to lose some of those benefits. And so in some cases, making more money, just a little bit more money, can actually cost you more. I've worked with people who were teachers in this situation. And if you're a teacher, at least in the United States where I have the most experience, you often make a very modest income.

But it's a steady income, but it's often a modest income. And then if you have babies, then you probably qualify for government benefits. And those things can make a difference. But if you go and you make a little bit more money than a standard, say, government school teacher, you probably will lose the benefits, and now you actually have no more net income.

So you need to make not just a little bit more money, you need to make a big jump in money. And so if your goal is to make more money at your job, you need to start by saying, "How much more money do I need? And what do I need it for?" And as we talk about expenses, the nice thing about babies is they're not so expensive in the beginning.

Their expenses tend to rise, and then they tend to taper off. So making more money is a good idea, and you should be careful of just making a little bit more money if you're losing out on some kind of social support network that is part of the government system where you live.

But also, you probably should be careful about waiting for that reason alone. Are you trying to make more money to be able to afford the costs of birth, the costs of having a baby? And here I mean to the physical childbirth, prenatal care, childbirth, and postpartum care. Well, this is valid.

And if you don't have the money, then you probably should work really hard and save the money for this. In my experience, babies cost about $5,000 each in terms of the general costs. That number will vary based upon various countries. Right now, because of the demographic trends that I mentioned earlier, there's a big move in many countries to support mothers in the costs of birthing babies as well as to support parents in the costs of raising children.

We don't know if any of these programs are actually going to have an impact, but as we are wont to do in many problems, if we have a problem, let's throw some money at it and see what happens. And since governments have lots of taxpayer money to throw around, that's what's happening.

And so your costs of having a baby may be substantially less than $5,000, but that's been my experience is that babies often cost about $5,000. A natural birth with a midwife seems to me that rates are about $5,000. That includes, of course, prenatal care and birthing and postpartum care as well.

It could be less, it could be more. Most midwives that I've spoken to, they really care about making sure that mothers receive proper medical care. And if you don't have the money, I've known a lot of midwives that will just simply help you and serve you and provide the care because they want you to be healthy.

Midwives have a real passion for taking care of mothers and we should respect them for that. So if you have the money, pay them. But if you don't have the money, you can often receive that kind of care. If you're going to have a hospital birth and working with an obstetrician, gynecologist, I think the cost is often similar barring complications.

And you should go and investigate that, but similar barring complications. In many cases, most people will have health insurance of some kind. At least for me, health insurance, I've always had something like a $5,000 deductible. And so basically, baby costs me $5,000 with health insurance and $5,000 without health insurance and it's just the cost of a baby.

The good thing is that if you have health insurance, that if there are complications or extra expenses, then you're protected. And so if there's a C-section, if there's a stay in something like the neonatal intensive care unit, then you're covered with protection for those costs. And so you still have your deductible and other expenses, but it's probably not a catastrophic expense.

In addition, if you don't have health insurance, but you don't have a lot of money, which again, I'm trying to help you afford babies, if you don't have a lot of money, then there's often some kind of government option for health insurance. Most welfare programs have some form of pregnant mother and baby benefits.

So even if there's not benefits for your entire family, if you find yourself as an expecting mother and you need additional help, there's almost certainly some kind of government benefits to help pay for the cost of healthcare. On the other hand, I would say you don't need to have health insurance to have a baby.

One of the things that bugs me, and I have to give my disclaimers, I hate giving disclaimers, I'm done with them, but I feel like I need to, I'm not saying don't have health insurance. I'm not saying to be stupid. But what angers me enormously in our modern era is that responsible people have adapted or adopted, excuse me, have adopted for themselves a standard of responsibility that is historically unlike anything that has ever happened in human history.

Throughout human history, in every age, if you got sick, you got sick and you paid a doctor to provide you with care. Now we live in a system in which we've developed elaborate systems of mutual insurance and all kinds of stuff, and so people feel like they're morally wrong if they don't have these kinds of programs.

Is it wise for you to have insurance? 100%, absolutely. If you can afford it, should you have health insurance? 100%, absolutely. But the fact that the medical marketplace is as screwed up as it is, is not your fault. It's the fault of the health insurance system. And at the end of the day, you're not fundamentally morally irresponsible if you don't have health insurance.

So there are people out there who spend their lives caught in this kind of moral crisis. If I have to be a responsible human being, and a responsible human being means I have to have health insurance and car insurance and all this stuff, hear me clearly, you should have those things if you can afford it.

But if you don't have them or you can't afford it, you're not morally wrong for not having those things. It may be unwise, it may not be ideal, and you want to change it when you're able to, but you're not morally wrong. So if you don't have health insurance and you have a baby, guess what?

Number one, we talked about government programs, let's say you don't qualify for those. If you don't have health insurance, you'll go work out a plan with your doctor or your midwife or the hospital, and you'll just pay the bills. And when they send you an enormous inflated bill of X bazillion thousands of dollars that you owe, you'll say to them, "I don't have the money.

I can't pay that," and you'll negotiate a payment that you can't afford. Because after all, I don't have health insurance and you're charging me ridiculous absurd inflated health rates for this. So you'll work out a plan. If you don't have insurance and they give you an enormous bill, they're going to provide the care for you, and you're going to pay them what you can afford to pay them, and the rest of it goes away.

Remember that most hospitals in the United States began their life not as a commercial enterprise, as a money-making thing, but as a form of ministry, normally a Christian ministry. We all want to help people who are sick, and that's the basic function of a hospital. Now, it's proper and right that if you receive care and you receive services, that you should pay for those things.

That's your proper responsibility, if you can afford it. If you don't have money, then we still want to care for you, and you should take the care and then pay what you're able to. So if you go into a system where you go into a hospital, and the hospital says, "You owe us $100,000," and you don't have $100,000, it's morally appropriate for you to pay what you can afford to pay and not pay a ridiculous bill.

I hope I'm shooting up the middle on this stuff, because there's two extremes that are unacceptable. Extreme number one is the extreme where you refuse to pay money that you can afford to pay for services and care that are rendered unto you. That is wrong. It's unethical, and you must not do it.

You don't want that in your character. You don't want that on your conscience. You don't want to be the kind of person who is a taker and not a giver. But on the flip side, a system has been developed that makes it impossible for a normal person to pay for his bills, and you're not responsible for that either.

So you pay what you can afford to pay, and you work it out, and you negotiate a settlement or whatever you need to do with the healthcare provider. And if it takes you a few years to pay off your bills because you didn't have health insurance, fine. And if you have to negotiate and they forgive 80% of the bill and you pay 20%, that is perfectly fine, perfectly just, perfectly ethical.

This is one of the reasons I care so much about doing proper asset planning protection for people, because there's an enormous group of people who don't get good asset planning advice. Rich people get good asset planning advice, and they go out and they put in place elaborate asset protection schemes.

Poor people don't have any assets to protect, but ordinary, normal people often get terrible advice. And a guy will go in and he lost his health insurance because of a screwed up health insurance marketplace and he winds up with a $50,000 hospital bill, and he'll go rate his 401(k) and take $50,000 out and pay it.

Don't do that. Pay the money that you have and keep all of your asset protected assets alone and work it out with the hospital. Pay it over time, take a negotiated settlement, declare bankruptcy, do whatever you've got to do, but protect yourself. You are not living in a free market.

I used to sell health insurance. When the Affordable Care Act was passed under President Obama, what we lovingly call Obamacare, I, at the time, was a health insurance agent. I have a designation called registered health underwriter. In theory, I should know something about health insurance. I've forgotten most of it, but in theory, that's the idea.

I looked at the health insurance marketplace, and I could not come up with any way that the Affordable Care Act was going to keep a functional market. I half-heartedly, most-heartedly adopted what sounds like a conspiracy theory, which is basically to say that the Affordable Care Act was designed to basically destroy health insurance so that the United States could finally transition to a single-payer government health care system.

It sure seems like that's about what has happened. Now, the country hasn't yet transitioned to a single-payer health care system. It's my general belief that that probably will happen. I don't know of anyone that's happy with the current system. It's a nightmare. It's an absolute nightmare. It has almost none of the benefits of a free market system and none of the benefits of a government system.

So you get the worst of both worlds. Government systems have a whole set of benefits and a whole set of disadvantages, and free market systems have a whole set of benefits and a whole set of disadvantages, and we don't get either of them in the United States. Now because I don't know anyone that's happy with the situation, and because there's no moral discussion seeking to overturn all of the government health insurance that exists right now, there's nobody that says, "Well, it's not right for government to take money from taxpayers and give it to other people in the form of welfare programs." That's not even a position at the table in the U.S.

system. Because of that, I assume that a single-payer government program is inevitable. It's just we don't know when it's going to get there. So in the meantime, we're left with an absolute nightmare of a system. So who knows? My point is that you protect yourself, and if you don't have health insurance, you'll deal with it at the time with whatever way is appropriate.

If you don't have health insurance, quite literally, go to Mexico and have your baby there. You can go to Mexico. You can have your baby. You can pay for the baby. Your baby will get two passports. You get yourself a Mexican residency. Why don't you stay there for 18 months and get yourself a citizenship, another citizenship while you're at it, and have access to a functional health care system where you can actually afford to pay your doctors instead of the nightmare in the United States?

So is making money to afford the birth a good reason to wait? Sure. But it shouldn't take you that long to save $5,000. Remember that when I said, "If you need something, make it about a year?" That's what I mean. Is that, "Do you need a job? Sure. You can get a job in a year.

Do you need to save five grand? Yeah. You can get a job and have a baby." Do you need to make a little bit more money at a job? Focus on it for a year and see if you can get yourself a raise and a promotion, and you'll be in good shape.

What other expenses are associated with having a baby? Well, do you need to make more money so that you can get the baby stuff? You're going to spend as much money as you have on the baby stuff. If you have a lot of money, you're going to go out and you're going to redecorate the nursery and you're going to spend $10,000 on all the fancy gear and this bazillion dollar crib and this, I forget the name of it, the multi-thousand dollar thing that jiggles your baby when your baby starts to wake up, and a camera system with 18 cameras and alerts and all the stuff.

Great. Go for it. If you don't have any money, you're going to have a baby. You're going to stick the baby in a cardboard box or get a dresser drawer from a dresser on the side of the road and put a little bed in it and put it beside your bed, and guess what?

The baby doesn't care. The baby is not going to know whether he's in a $5,000 crib and the Rocky thingy that is pretty cool, or if he's sitting in a cardboard box. Nobody knows. It's a baby. They don't care. They don't have a clue. At the end of the day, the amount of money that you spend on the crib and the nursery and all that stuff is not going to make any difference.

And what will happen is, number one, most of the stuff that you need for a baby, your friends will give you when you have a baby shower. Why do we have baby showers? We have baby showers to give poor people money and stuff that they need to have a baby because we know that young couples who can have babies, they don't have money.

Recognize that there's these societal artifacts that exist in our society. Things like a wedding shower, things like a baby shower, things like wedding gifts. All of these are inherited ways that we've developed as a society to support young people on the pathway that leads to societal health, marriage and babies.

We want to support that. So that's why we have these traditions of bridal showers, wedding gifts, and baby showers. What happens though is in our hyper-intensive individualistic system that we live in today, we have this thing that somehow in order for me to be responsible, I have to do it alone.

And I appreciate individualism, but you're never going to be able to do it alone. And if you do that, you take it to the extreme and you say, "Well, I've got to be 35 years old. I've got to have $3 million in the bank so I'm financially independent so that if I can't go back to work after I have a baby, then I'm good." And it's nonsense.

You don't even replace yourself and you don't even replace your family in society. It doesn't work for the long term. So if you want to be part of society and want to contribute, and again, have children for your own selfish reasons, great, go for it. But also recognize that you're part of society and we want to support you.

I don't like going to baby showers for rich people because you just – I don't go to baby showers. My wife does. But you know what I mean. It's like what's the point? You know, some couple – it's like the stupidity of a bridal shower for a couple that's been living together for 10 years and they're independently wealthy and they have two jobs and they're going to have a bridal shower to prepare for their wedding after they've been living together for 10 years.

Now, obviously, you do your best. You want to support your friends and whatnot, but it's like you have this vestige of something that's completely silly. Am I going to give you a crock pot when you've been living together for 10 years and you've got a $300,000 household income? You don't need that.

And so obviously, the wealthy people, they defray it and you just have a party for the fun. I'm not unreasonable in what I'm saying. What I'm saying is there's something beautiful about – I love to get a wedding invitation to a young couple who doesn't have a lot of money, who's getting married.

And even as I said in the previous podcast episode, maybe you're in college. It would – I don't get these, but it would thrill my heart if in the coming years I got a wedding invitation from a 20-year-old engaged couple and they said, "You know what? We have a little tiny dorm.

We're living in on-campus housing or a little tiny apartment. We have a little bit of space. What we really could use is wedding gifts to help us finish off our college tuition." I would be so thrilled to put a big stack of money in that couple's hand. And because at its core, that's our responsibility as a society.

We have a responsibility to support young people who are building the future generation. And the same thing with regard to babies. My wife and I – this actually was the first baby shower I've ever gone to and I felt miserable. I don't like the idea of co-ed baby showers.

But I went to it. I was a good sport. And we went to a baby shower for some pretty poor people. And they were having a baby, a young couple and not married but had a baby and we went to – and we wanted support. And it was just such a blessing.

My wife is into cloth diapers and she had accumulated so many cloth diapers that she was able to give this young couple basically all the cloth diapers that they would ever need for this baby and however many other babies that they would need. And it just felt like – it felt awesome, right?

Here you are with a woman who could have killed her baby but instead she's a young woman, doesn't have a lot of money, she's going to care for the baby, love the baby and it felt great to be able to support her with a significant financially valuable donation. And those are the kinds of things that I think we should take pleasure in as a society.

Now here's the other point about getting baby stuff. Number one, you don't really need most of what you think you need and you really only need to get most of it once. Once you have one set of baby stuff, it can last you for three, four, five, however many babies generally.

If you have boys, they destroy the clothes and you got to buy more clothes for them. But if you have girls, you can pass them on through five generations of girls and it works fine. So I'm being a little bit flippant but it's real is that each additional baby doesn't cost all that much more because you wind up having the stuff.

And as your skill grows, you wind up thinking, "What a pain to have all this extra stuff." I think most parents, even if you're not hyper minimalist, most parents, you look back on the stuff that you registered for at your first baby shower and you recognize, "I didn't need all that stuff and what a hassle to have this fancy baby trash can that dumps the diaper upside down and this thing sticking around in my house and I didn't need all this play equipment." With our most recent baby, usually you buy some things and you have walker things for the baby.

We had our fifth baby and we'd gotten rid of a lot of the baby toys. We didn't have many of them. But we just never bothered to go out and get it because what we discovered is that the baby enjoys pushing a chair around when he's learning to walk just as much as pushing a special baby walking device.

It's kind of embarrassing. My kids found on the side of the road an office chair and I let them bring home things like that when they enjoy it for time and I try to pass it along. But it gives them a few days of taking stuff apart and putting it together and creating all the creations and it's creative.

So I left the chair around. And anyway, the seat of the chair came off the base and he was left with the base of this office chair. What turned into the perfect baby walking device is that my wife gave it to the baby and he trots around the house holding the office chair as his support mechanism.

And on the whole, does any of it matter? No. And so that's my point is you don't need that much money for those things in the fullness of time. Do you need to make more money or do you have a financial goal so that you can feed your children?

Now, here's where we get into some of the real costs. Feeding your children is indeed a real cost. And there are some good things about it though. First of all, if the mother is able to breastfeed, then generally speaking you don't need much extra food for the baby, at least for about a year.

So you have time to work it out. And when the baby starts eating, usually it's not that much. Most of your food just goes to support the mother in her pregnancy and in her postpartum recovery. So you have a year to figure out the money stuff to feed your baby.

You definitely do spend more money on your food budget with babies, and the number can be significant, especially if you've got a house full of teenage boys. But I think, and I think we need to acknowledge that parents and families spend more on food than singles and dinks, but it's not a multiplicative more.

It's not like in my family I spend seven times more on my food than you do as a single man or single woman. It's not the case. It is more, but it's a marginal more, not a multiplicative more. I think part of the reason for this is there tends to be some recharacterization of expenses.

Food is actually astonishingly cheap in our current society. Maybe it won't always be cheap, but it is astonishingly cheap in our current society, and you can get a good nutritious diet from your local grocery store for a shockingly low amount of money. What has happened is we don't think of that as being a normal diet anymore, and so we have upgraded our expectations, our tastes of what is normal based upon our affluence as a society.

So all people, singles, dinks, and families today spend a lot of money in ways that is historically astonishing because of our level of affluence. When I was single, and even still, when I travel by myself, I just feel like I have the cheapest lifestyle in the world. I go out to eat all my meals.

I don't cook anything. I just go out to eat, and I – look, I recently went – I was traveling and I went to a steak dinner and got a steak dinner and bought all the stuff, and I texted my wife. I was like, "I just got an appetizer, and I got a meal, and I got two drinks, and I got dessert," and I sent her my receipt.

I said, "Look how cheap it is. This is amazing." So when you're a father and used to feeding seven people when you go out to restaurants and you go out as one, it just feels like the most amazing deal in the world. It changes your perspective. But single people go out to eat all the time.

They eat in very inefficient ways. They buy all the expensive food that's not necessary, and so their food budget tends to be a certain amount, similar with couples that have resources. They go out to eat all the time. They spend lots of money on just lifestyle. What happens when you are parents is you tend to change how you spend money.

You tend not to go out to restaurants, partly for the cost because the numbers just don't make sense. I can feed my family an amazing steak dinner with all the sides, plenty of food, all the stuff, for about the cost of what a steak dinner with all the stuff at a restaurant costs for one or one and a half people.

And so it's like, "Why would I go out and spend seven times as much when I can create better food inside?" Part of it is the cost. Part of it also is the atmosphere, the environment, that restaurants are not generally fun places when you have young children. The children often don't have a lot to do.

It's kind of a weird environment, and they're not as comfortable, and you feel the eyes of the world staring at you, and so you're constantly on your guard. So most young families, going out to eat is just not as fun. When the children are better trained and they're past the stage, and they're at the stage where they can be held accountable for their behavior, then at that point in time, going out to restaurants is more appropriate.

But parents spend more than singles and couples do, but they spend it differently. And it's very common then that you learn how, if we're going on a trip, we're not just going to stop and eat fast food, but we'll prepare a picnic, we'll take our food with you. And so you start to plan ahead a little bit more.

So your food bill will increase with children, but I would say you probably can afford it if you're willing to adjust how you spend your money. And recognize that the way that you think you should spend your money is probably historically abnormal. I grew up as the youngest of seven children.

My parents didn't have a lot of money, they didn't earn a ton of money. We went out to a restaurant as a family, I would say, once every six months. I mean, it just wasn't a thing. And my family with children, my children have been in a hundred times more restaurants than I ever was as a child.

Does that make it better or worse? I don't see the difference. It's just something different, it's just a different experience. And so if you want to have more children and you can't afford them, but you actually want to have more children, just change how you spend it. You will spend more, but change how you spend it.

By the way, one comment on the question I said about groceries, and I said groceries are shockingly cheap. I'm not blind to the cost of food. When I'm saying that, I'm saying it from a historical perspective that the amount of money that we spend on food is less of our labor than it ever has been in the history of mankind.

But again, back to the core elements. If you wanted to have an amazingly healthy meal, a healthy diet for a few dollars a day, what could you do? You could eat for a few dollars a day and have an unhealthy diet, but for breakfast, go out and get eggs.

I don't know what the eggs cost where you are, but it's going to be a few dollars for a bunch of eggs. My family, we eat eggs most mornings, I usually do about 25 eggs every morning. So it doesn't cost that much to have 25 or 30 eggs. It's some dollars.

For lunch, get yourself, and by the way, milk. Milk is kind of your other normal thing. So wherever you live in the world, you can buy a gallon of milk pretty inexpensively, and it's packed with calories, packed with nutrition, packed with vitamins. Get raw milk if you can, but even if you can't, it's just relatively inexpensive.

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Or even taking a RAV4 to an animal sanctuary to pick goats. Sounds like your kids aren't the only ones excited about spring break. Ready, set, go get your Toyota today. Toyota. Let's Go Places. Dealer inventory may vary. See your participating Toyota dealer for details. For lunch, make hamburgers. Skip the bread, get a big thing of ground beef, make up some hamburger patties, add garlic and salt, add some tomatoes and lettuce and pickles.

Pretty inexpensive and you can have a calorie filled, vitamin, nutrient filled lunch. For dinner, make pork butt. Pork butt and potatoes or something. Put it in the crock pot, steam it, instapot it, make shredded pork. It just doesn't cost much to have a superfood diet of meat and filled with vitamins and protein and all the stuff that you need.

You can do it pretty inexpensively. Where the money goes is on the organic pine nuts and on the, you know, the fresh salmon flown in from Tibet and all the stuff. And that's the stuff that we now consider normal. It's just part of our diet. So if you can afford it, go for it.

But if you're trying to feed your children, you can do it on a very modest budget if you pay attention to the stuff that you buy. And then at the poor end, if you genuinely don't have money and genuinely can't afford it, then there's government money and government systems that are there to provide for food costs for your children if you're genuinely poor.

Do you need to make more money in order to be able to afford to educate your children? This is a big one. In this case, most of our pressure towards education is a cultural pressure that is probably largely unnecessary. Just this week, I was reading an article, I forget the publication, but it's talking about South Korea.

South Korea, again, perhaps one of the world's lowest birth rates right now. And evidently in South Korea, being the Asian tiger stereotype, there is a strong cultural pressure that in order for your children to succeed, not only do they have to do all of the standard schools, the government schools, but you have to spend huge amounts of money so they have tons of extra tutors to cause them to be absolute star students because you have this hyper-competitive society.

And this is almost a perfect storm of a sick society where you create enormous pressure on people in their school life, their work life, and the pressure winds up destroying the resource that you're trying to enhance. You're doing all this work to try to help the educational pathway of your culture, and at the end of it, you're going to wind up with no culture because you have no people.

And this is unnecessary. It's unnecessary. First, all of us have access for free to all of the learning resources that any of us would ever need. And access to good resources coupled with benign neglect is probably sufficient and in many cases superior to a hyper-intensive tiger mom, tiger dad lifestyle.

I find the stories of the unschoolers really inspiring here. I've always been inspired by the unschoolers who basically work really hard to expose their children to great resources and then to allow the child's curiosity to take him or her to where he wants to go, and in general, broadly speaking, the results that they get from this kind of benign neglect – it's not neglect, I'm not accusing – I mean, in some cases, some are neglectful, but I'm not accusing broadly the philosophy of unschooling as being neglectful.

What I'm saying is kind of a hands-off, figure-it-out-for-yourself-buddy kind of approach, and in many cases, this produces an outcome that is equivalent to going through the traditional program. It's got a good argument for it. I find it inspiring. Never before in the history of humanity have we had access to more resources for free.

All of the greatest books that your child can read to be well-educated are all public domain. They're free. All you need is some way to read them, so you can get yourself a digital e-reader device. You can get a printer, a cheap printer, and print them out yourself. There's plenty of access to them.

You have a local library. That local library has all the books in it, and what's more is there's free book sales. They give away the good ones after a while, and they're all available to you for free in your local library. In addition, you have all of the Internet resources that you need, and so there's everything from Khan Academy to all kinds of stuff, and you can access all that stuff for free.

If you don't have a computer, don't have Internet, go to your library and go on there for free and study there. All of the educational resources that any boy, any girl, any adolescent, any man or woman needs to become well-educated are all available for free or practically for free in today's world, so you absolutely can afford it.

You already have a phone. You already have a computer. You already have Internet at your house. You can afford it. Is it nice to spend more money than that? I think so. I spend a lot more money than that, so children will cost you what you have. I spend as much money as I have on my children's education.

It's important to me, and you'll do the same thing, but do I think my children are much better educated? I would say they're better educated than a lot of people, but some of the areas in which I spend the most money I wouldn't argue are that important. I mean, as an example, I spend all kinds of money shipping in foreign books in foreign language from all around the world.

I spend a bunch of money getting physical books that are free, that are public domain, that I could just put on a Kindle in the hand of a Kindle, but I am trying to cultivate the power of attention and deep focus and all these languages, and I spend—so is it better?

Yeah, but do I think that you genuinely need to speak seven languages to be successful? Of course not. That's nonsense. You don't need any of that, and is it going to pay off? I have no idea. Ask me in 30 years. We spend the amount of money that we have based upon our perceptions and our goals, but on the whole, it's one of those 80/20 analyses that 80% of the results, the educational results that your child is going to get come from interest and time and good resources.

20% may come from you having the world's best pedagogical approach and great coaching. It's just not that significant on the whole. Where you really start to spend money when it comes to educating your children is if you—so the big one is paying for private schools. One reason I homeschool is clearly financial.

I have five children. If I were paying private school tuition, it would be $100,000 a year. I count the cost of spending $100,000 a year on private school tuition, I look around, and I say, "I can do a whole lot better and at least more interesting for them and for me with $100,000 a year." I am happy to spend money on it, but that only is if you have $100,000 a year.

If you don't have $100,000 a year, you wouldn't spend it. There are private schools that are available that are cheaper and there are plenty of no-tuition government schools available. You can homeschool with no tuition as well. Khan Academy is available for anybody who needs it now in not any language, but at least a dozen languages and growing all the time.

In English, it's all available. Private schools are certainly one thing. If you have the money, you'll spend it. If you don't have the money, you'll find another way around it. Where a lot of the money comes in is on experiences, things like great trips and special classes and special tutors.

I say go for it if you have it. I recently was talking with my friend Mikel Thorup from Expat Money, and he's amazing. He has his children, and they've got a private art teacher who works with his children multiple days a week and a private piano teacher who teaches them piano and Russian and a competitive jiu-jitsu gym and karate and martial arts, and that's kind of normal.

When you have the money, you wind up buying all the stuff, and you've got gymnastics and parkour and ballet, and there's no limit to the amount of classes that you can do. Those things are expensive. When you start signing all your children up for all the activities, they're just crazy expensive, huge cost.

I spend it on travel. Last year, I took my children to 16 countries, spent the equivalent of a new car on it, a modest new car. Do my children care? They care. They enjoy it. They sort of, but is it superior than if we just spent the same time together at a local park, local state park, camping in the woods, hanging out?

I wouldn't argue it's that much superior. It's probably more interesting. It's more interesting than for me. I like it. It's kind of fun to go into the fancy cathedral and to go to the museums. It's kind of interesting, but on the whole, I wouldn't argue it's that much different.

It's just different. What I mean is that much better. It's just different. One person grows up hanging out in the woods, and then he takes himself to Europe and tours the cathedral at 19. I took my children when they're young. Is it worth it? Again, it comes down to you spend the money that you have, and beyond that, people work it out.

There's plenty of people who have lived wonderful, successful lives, and they never left the city or county they were born in. And so I don't think that it's just fundamentally better. What happens is we have so few children in the modern world that we try to make up for it by spending a bazillion dollars on them.

So the classes and all of the stuff that we do and the gymnastics and the things, we spend the money on it because we think it's good for them. Is it actually good for them? I don't think we know. We know that it can be damaging, meaning that having a very harried childhood where you're just trundled from one thing to the next and you never have any time, I think that's harmful for children.

I think it's better to have time. Is the actual class itself damaging? No. Wouldn't it be great if you developed gymnastic skills? But are you going to produce a world-class swimmer because you go to swimming five times a week? Only if eventually your child is interested, and then he or she will develop the skills and pursue the process.

But you're not neglectful if you don't. You're not neglectful if you teach your child to swim in a pond at a friend's farm or at the local public pool versus having the private coach. It's just that we spend the money on the things that we have the money for.

So on the whole, children cost money. They can cost substantial amounts of money, but they'll basically cost all the money that you have. And so if you have a lot, you'll spend a lot. If you don't have a lot, you'll spend a little. And so it all comes down to do you want to have children?

What is the biggest cost of children? I think generally speaking, the biggest cost of children is the lost career earnings for a stay-at-home mom or a stay-at-home dad. That's where the biggest cost is. So I have five children. My wife and I couldn't have five children if she had a job and I had a job.

There's a few people out there that can do it, I guess, but it just seems like an insane hairy lifestyle that most people wouldn't want. And so what happens is you can have children if you have the resources to have children. And so because I work from home, because my wife is a stay-at-home mom, then we have more resources, more ability, more time.

We have less money, but we have more time. And so that makes it less daunting to have a bunch of children. And I've made the choice that my children will be my status symbol instead of consumption status symbols of things that I pay money that are shiny and go fast and look shiny on the water, et cetera, then I've just chosen that I would rather have my children be my status symbol.

I derive a significant amount of pleasure from their company. I love to spend time helping them. I enjoy helping people succeed and I love being with them. And so I feel an enormous amount of pride in them. It's a significant component of my life and I'm looking forward to my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren.

I want to build a family dynasty. And so I'm happy to spend the money on it. But the biggest financial cost is the cost of my wife not having a job and also the cost of her career, meaning that young women face a real challenge in today's world. What we have done in the world that we live in is traditionally we had a society in which it was expected that men would support their wives and that the wives would bear children and would raise children and there was a symbiosis and society supported that.

There's a lot of talk in the political space about the concept of a living wage. That's important and it's always been important. But in general a core component of that is to talk about a living family wage is in times past it was expected that a father would be able to earn enough money to support his family with one income.

What's happened though is as we trace all of the trends forward till today, number one we doubled the supply of workers in the marketplace and it became much more difficult for a family to live on one wage. We talk about a living wage now, we don't talk about a living family wage and so it's much more challenging to make the numbers work.

Many families genuinely challenged to make it work on a single income, very difficult. Not impossible, just difficult. In addition we have created enormous insecurity in marriage and that insecurity has made it difficult for young men and women to trust each other. In marriage men are suspicious of women, women are suspicious of men, and the law, while certainly there is divorce law, the divorce law, especially in the wake of no-fault divorce, has led to instability in families rather than stability.

The idea was that marriage is a stable institution. One man, one woman committed to each other for life, in good times and bad times, better for worse, in wealth and poverty, for richer, poorer, in sickness and in health, supporting one another. But we've stripped that out and we've traded it in for a system of personal autonomy and pleasure and I think this is a system that ultimately collapses, it has to collapse.

Let me give you just one example and we're getting philosophical here but it's important to understand it. When people talk about marriage, or when I talk about marriage, many people have a vestige of what marriage meant in the past that they no longer believe in or are committed to.

The example I like to use where I think that people still understand the value of marriage is this. I want you to imagine that I'm 50 years old, whatever, 50 years old is a good age. And I've been married for 25 years and I want you to imagine that my wife got sick, developed some kind of sickness, the specifics don't matter, and she became a bedridden invalid.

And so now my wife can't do anything for me. She can't cook for me, she can't clean for me, she can't make money for me, she can't spend time with me, imagine she's sick all the time, she can't talk to me, we can't have sexual relations, just assume that she can't do anything for me.

So I want you to imagine that I look out and realize, listen, I'm not happy in this relationship. This woman is just a leech in my life, why do I have to do all this stuff for her? And so I divorce her, and I go off and I marry someone else who's better.

Imagine that you heard about those circumstances, what would you think of me if I did that? I think you would despise me, and I would say rightfully so. I would despise any man who did that to his wife. And we should, there should be a social shame, a social opprobrium that is brought against a man who would do that to his wife.

It's one of the most selfish and arrogant things that ever could be done. The sense of that feeling that you have when I describe those circumstances, that sense of shame, and that despising of me, if I did that, that's right. Because we know that marriage is not just about happiness, it's about much more than that.

It's a basic fundamental institution of human society. And we're not in it just because we're happy, that's not it. There's something larger than that. So now, let's use a different circumstance. Let's say that I'm 50 years old, and I'm married to my wife, but let's just assume that she's not physically sick.

But she's just grown distant, we've kind of grown apart, after all, we raised children, we didn't keep knowing each other through the years, we raised a bunch of children. And she says, "You know what," or I say, "I'm just not really happy anymore. Maybe our sex life isn't great, I'm just not really happy anymore." And I was like, "I'd just like to try something new." And so I divorced my wife, and I go and find someone else and marry someone else and start over again.

How would you feel towards me? In our current society, most people wouldn't despise me. They would just say, "Hey man, you do you, you've got to be happy, whatever your life is about happiness, you need to be happy, you deserve to be happy, Joshua, or you deserve to be happy, wife." What's the difference?

Functionally speaking, and I'm not here to preach about marriage, but that's at the core of one of the things that's really difficult. So what has happened is men and women have internalized this in today's world, and that we don't trust one another anymore. I think, I know women have significant amounts of problems of trust.

Men, it seems to me, have been waking up to this over about the last 10 years, and a lot of men feel like they can't trust marriage anymore. And so this is causing men and women not to marry, it's causing men and women not to have children. And this is an enormous problem for this financial perspective, because in the lack of trust, if my wife knows that I would divorce her just because I'm not happy anymore, then now she feels like she's got to defend herself, and she feels like she's got to go out and she's got to make her own money, and she's got to have her own backup accounts, and she's got to make sure that she has her own career, because after all, I can't trust that my husband's going to be around here.

And this is a fundamental problem that is destroying one of many things that's harming our birthright. It's not one thing, it's many things. I don't have any solutions for those things legally, meaning I could propose some suggestions, but I have no confidence at the moment that there's any social support for those.

It seems like it's going to have to get a lot worse before it gets better, until we kind of wake up and realize what we've lost. But at the moment, what is possible is simply that individuals can see the problems and you can work your way through. And that's this enormous paradox that we live in.

We live in a paradox in which, from a cultural perspective, things have "never been worse." But on an individual perspective, things have never been better. And I see this paradox at many levels. Things about like freedom, for example. People want to go on and on about, you know, "Big Brother, Big Brother is watching all my communications and I can't do anything and there's too many laws." Well, that's true on a cultural perspective.

Never before in the history of mankind have human beings ever lived under the authority of as many laws and regulations and statutes as govern your life. That's true. But on the flip side, individuals have never been more free to just chart their own course than today. If you went back a millennium, a thousand years, and you were stuck into a society, you probably couldn't just strike out across the countryside because the people over there want to kill you.

You couldn't just go off and do whatever you wanted because you needed the land, you needed the support structure to be able to eat. You had very little personal freedom. So maybe there were fewer laws, but you had very little personal freedom. You were completely connected. Today, there's a lot more laws, but you can go your own way.

You can go from one side of the world to another in 24 hours. You can do it all. And it's like this on so many levels. Never before have schools been worse. That's a hard one to make, but you can say, "Well, schools have never been worse." Okay, yeah, but never before have you had more options to have a great education for nothing, for free.

And on almost everything, we see this paradox. And so similarly speaking, when it comes to children and families and relationships, we have this cultural paradox that never before have we had fewer children, never before have we had such a high divorce rate and dissolution of families and destruction of marriage and all this stuff.

Okay, that's all true. But on the other hand, to some degree, it's never been easier for you to break through. It's never been easier for you to have children and raise them and build strong families and earn money and live where you want to live and all these things.

So I can't solve the big cultural stuff. I've got solutions I'd love to hear heard, but it's not the time. But what I can do is I can take action myself, and I can use the systems that exist in order to fix that. And so I can take care of my wife, and I can build the confidence in her and in me and in our relationship so that she's willing to be a stay-at-home mom.

She doesn't feel defensive. She doesn't feel like she has to protect herself. But she can trust me. I can build that. That's the biggest cost of children, and it weighs heavily on moms, and we need to take care of them. What's the big benefit of children, though? Children are highly motivating.

I think you'll probably do and make more having children than not, and I'm going to close with this train of thought. As with anything, when we see data, we ask ourselves, "Is this causation or correlation?" We're all stats experts now is the first thing. "Is this causation or correlation?" We know that parents with children make more money than people who don't.

We know that people who are married and have children have more wealth than those who don't. And we say, "Well, is this causation or correlation? Are the children causal in this result? Is the marriage causal, or is it just that people who are rich get married and have children?" I can't prove to you one or the other.

All I can tell you is from personal experience and observation, I think that children are a causal factor in doing more in life, in changing your perspective, and in causing you to desire to be more ambitious. It's probably not universal. It's really not. But when I think about myself before I ever had children, and I think of myself as a father, I don't even recognize the man that I was.

I don't even recognize the boy that I was. My children have caused me to grow in so many ways, and it's very subtle how it happens. A lot of it happens just in terms of confidence in yourself. When you have humans, even if they're little humans, that adore you and respect you and love you, it changes your psychology in a really compelling way.

And a couple of examples from today. One of my children is prone to saying, "Daddy, you're the best daddy in the world." I know that I'm not the best daddy in the world. I do my best, but I'm not the best. Obviously not, even if I could define that.

But when somebody says to you practically every day, "Daddy, you're the best daddy in the world. I'm so grateful," you have this desire to be the best, and it causes you to do something differently. I've got a toddler in my house right now, and generally speaking, toddlers are a hassle.

But my toddler is right at that phase where when I walk in the door, wherever he is, if he hears that daddy's coming, comes running across the floor, arms up, "Daddy, pick me up." And you do that, and it changes you. Men are transformed. I guess probably women, too, but I'm not a woman, so I can't tell you.

But I know that men are transformed by bearing responsibility. And when you have children, you have responsibility. And authority and responsibility come together. And my experience has been that as the burden of children has come more heavily onto me, and I bear that responsibility, recognizing that truly if it's to be, it's up to me.

I've got to keep this human alive. I can't be lazy. I can't be... I got to take... It's me. It's my job. As that responsibility rests heavily on my shoulders, what winds up happening is I sense it develops me, and that responsibility rests on me, and it develops me, and it causes me to be more confident in other circumstances.

Because when you know you have to, because this human is on me, and you just receive love and adoration of your wife and your children, then now you go into the workplace and you don't feel like less of a man. You don't feel immature. You feel stronger. And so I think there's a direct causal influence that men with children tend to do more, be more effective than those who don't.

So children... and then you have a reason for it. And your reasons change. I can track in my own thinking. I can track the change from being a single man versus being a married father of many. And you look at the world differently. Most of the people that I used to look to for advice when I was single, I don't have any interest really in what they have to say anymore.

It doesn't appeal to me. It sounds hollow. It sounds self-centered often, and it sounds just not particularly useful. And a lot of it, and in some cases, it's just flat-out laughable, the stuff that I used to think was effective. And I'm not... I don't want to be critical of it.

After all, probably the advice I gave 10 years ago, probably laughable. We all are on a process of development and self-improvement, and we all grow in maturity over time. And we can't be ashamed of who we were. We do the best we know at this point in time. We give the best answers, do the best job.

We can't change that. It's just a natural part of life. I'm just observing that the advice that I just thought was so wonderful, I no longer think that. And the causal change has to do with having children, and it changes how you think as well. I've observed that I'm more conservative than I once was.

I previously was very libertarian, and now I look at many libertarians, not the concept of liberty, but I just look at libertarians, and libertarians tend to turn into goofballs. They tend to become libertines and turn into goofballs. And the stuff that they do, it's just, "This is not healthy.

This is not good." And so it's been interesting to watch my political inclinations. I've abandoned some of the things that I used to think were true and become more conservative. I don't like... I'm not a Republican. I guess... I don't know. Who knows? I don't even... I don't get involved in that stuff.

But I reflect more conservative values than I once did because I'm a different man than I was, and I can see this in many areas. So children are motivating. There's a lot of guys that never even start until they got a reason to, and when you've got children, you often have a reason to.

And I think that this is something that needs to be countered, kind of brought into the picture. I have an ambition to live a more upright life. I want to have, when I'm old, I want to have the respect of my children. And that changes you as a father.

If I'm going to have the respect of my children, it means I need to live an authentic, congruous life. I can't say one thing and do another because I can't hide anything from them. I have to be that person. And I find myself giving instructions to them, and then I look at my own life and I say, "Joshua, are you doing that?

You better do it." Otherwise, you better do it, otherwise it ain't going to work. And so that's the big benefit. On the whole, again, I want to be charitable and not pry into your life in any way, but I want you to recognize that while children come with costs, those costs are often less than you might think, and most of the costs that are real can be adapted to, but they also come with enormous benefits.

And at the end of your life, you are likely to enjoy and appreciate more some of the benefits than you will be worried too much about the costs. I want to close. I was going to save this for another podcast, and I may still do that. But there's this really fascinating passage in the book that I read, and it kind of illustrates something of what I wanted to say.

The book is called Fortune's Children, and it's about Cornelius Vanderbilt and his children. And this is a passage without getting too deep into it. It's kind of a crazy story because the Vanderbilt fortune was enormous, and then it all fell apart. So when old man Vanderbilt died, he left most of his fortune to his son, William.

And at his son's end of his life, this was what he had to say, and I'll just read a short passage here. "The Commodore had died" – the Commodore was Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of the fortune – "The Commodore had died, believing that through the occult he would know what his heirs were doing.

Perhaps between playing the harp and singing hymns, the activities that he hoped would occupy his time in heaven, or maybe while trying to figure out how a camel might pass through the eye of a needle if he was elsewhere, the Commodore noticed what his son had accomplished. Not bad for a blatherous kite, he might have said.

There's something to that boy Bill, after all. What did it mean to be the richest man in the world? To William Vanderbilt, it meant very little. He was constantly concerned about preserving his wealth and was obsessed with scrutinizing his smallest expense. Just after he had invested $50 million in government bonds and was sorting them into stacks on his desk, he called for his private secretary, Isaac Chambers, to come into his office.

"Was I here last Thursday, Mr. Chambers?" he asked. "No, for I remember having been up to your house that day." William Vanderbilt picked up a bill from the janitor who supplied him with lunches for $0.40 a day. "Well, do you know that the janitor has charged me with a lunch on Thursday?" He took his pen and made a correction on the bill, eliminating the $0.40 for the lunch he had never eaten, and handed the corrected bill to Mr.

Chambers to be paid. The sheer magnitude of his fortune, he told Chauncey DePue, gave him no advantages over men of moderate wealth. "I have my house, my pictures, and my horses, and so do they. I can have a steam yacht if I want to, but it would give me no pleasure, and I don't care for it." On another occasion, he spoke of a neighbor, saying, "He isn't worth a hundredth part as much as I am, but he has more of the real pleasures of life than I have.

His house is as comfortable as mine, even if it didn't cost so much. His team is about as good as mine, his opera box is next to mine, his health is better than mine, and he will probably outlive me, and he can trust his friends." Being the richest person in the world brought him, he said, nothing but anxiety.

He enjoyed having some fine horses that grazed in a pasture he could see from his office in the Grand Central Depot. One friend noted that he was so fond of horses that he "probably would have slept with them" and did not, only through fear of the newspapers criticizing his eccentricity.

And he was beginning to collect works of art. Other than that, there was nothing he wanted. His fortune was really nothing but a source of headaches. He believed that his health had been broken by the burden of managing his father's empire. "I feel pretty well," he would tell his doctors, "but can't depend upon myself." "What's the use, Sam, of having all this money," he said to his nephew, "if you cannot enjoy it?

My wealth is no comfort to me if I have not good health behind it." He asked his nephew if he thought he looked old, as old as the Commodore right before he died. That was just how he felt, like an 83-year-old. By his early 60s, he was tired and worn out.

"The care of $200 million is too great a load for my brain or back to bear," he confessed to his family. "It is enough to kill a man. I have no son whom I am willing to afflict with a terrible burden. There is no pleasure to be got out of it as an offset, no good of any kind.

I have no real gratification or enjoyment of any sort, more than my neighbor on the next block who is worth only half a million. So when I lay down this heavy responsibility, I want my sons to divide it and share the worry which it will cost to keep it." That was written by a man who was astonishingly wealthy.

Just recognize children cost money, and they're an investment, but they're not an investment without benefit. I don't know what's motivating for you, but having spent a long time doing financial planning, I've always found it a little bit sad when a man arrives at the end of his life and he has lots of money, and he doesn't have children and grandchildren to share it with.

And again, I want to be clear, many people will not have children. Throughout society, actually, the percentage of people who don't have children has dropped a little bit, but it's always been lots of people who don't have children, couldn't have children, won't have children. That's fine. We all live our own life, and they can find other ways of connecting with human beings and being warm and generous and building relationships around them.

But the natural normal pathway is that your family forms the core nucleus of your relationships. And if you have to choose between two things, being old and rich, really rich and alone, as compared to being old and somewhat rich and having, I don't know, two children and four grandchildren, or being old and just okay and having four children and 15 grandchildren or, you know, seven children and 20 grandchildren, which is more attractive to you?

We all choose. But to me, it seems obvious that children are a form of wealth. They cost you money to maintain them, bring them up, but on the whole, the benefit is much greater than the cost. And that's something that has generally only rarely ever been questioned. I couldn't account for—it's such an obvious thing that in most societies, it's always been accounted for.

It's always been obvious and normal. Most men in societies that have wealth and power have or want lots of children. It's only in the last 75 years, I guess, where that's been completely transformed. And it's been completely transformed by Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood and her racist plans to take children away from those who were not worthy.

It's been confirmed—it's been the whole like anti-child movement of the predictions about global famine and all the stuff, and all of that stuff is so thoroughly debunked. And now we're going to face probably the opposite problems, and it's probably not going to be as bad as, you know, Malthus—it's probably not going to be as bad and the opposite as Malthus predicted it would be if we had too many people.

But the point is it's a challenge. So you have a choice to make in life. And all I want to do is to say that if you desire to have children, don't let money be the impediment. The money can work out. You should prepare yourselves. Again, I'm not encouraging reckless fecundity.

I want you to be responsible. But if you're listening at this point in a podcast, there's not a doubt in my mind that you've already done that. Nobody who's irresponsible would ever get an hour and 50 minutes deep into this podcast and still be here. So if you desire to have children, have a baby.

And if you already have children, I think what makes sense in today's world is maybe have one more. What I mean by that is there's a big difference between having, I don't know, two children and ten children. I don't think everyone should just go through life and have as many babies as they can.

That's not what I'm advocating for. But in general, if you are the kind of person who has children and you are not sure do we want to have another baby or not, have one more. Have one more and then stop. And I can't imagine you would regret it. I really can't.

And there's two comments on this that are important. Comment number one is that historically this is where the growth of society has come from. With my recent interest in demography, I've learned that in general, again, our reproductive rates are very similar to what they've always been. A percentage of people that never reproduce, a percentage of people that reproduce with one or two children, it's very similar as to historical rates.

What is different and why our populations are declining now is the percentage of people who don't have four, five, six, seven children. That basically people who in days past would have had six today have three. People who in days past would have had eight today have four and stop.

And that's the difference in the population decline because instead of the family with eight, the woman that bears eight offsetting the two women who don't bear any, today the woman who in times past might have had eight today has three or four. And so there's not the offset to the woman who never has children.

And that's basically the demographic change. Now, I don't think we should try to build our lifestyle upon demography. You're not going to single-handedly save the world by having 19 children, that's silly. But on the whole, we want to build cultures that have more children. And the big point I would say as a father of five is that the first baby is the hardest, the second baby is hard, and the third and following are not so hard.

And people, they're pretty easy and they bring multiplying fun and joy to your life and they only have marginal costs. That your parenting style is different after you have two children because you're no longer evenly matched with two parents, two children, so your parenting style is different. The children have playmates, they actually take less time from you.

Having five children is, once they get past toddler stages, because toddlers are still demanding, having five children is, I would say probably in some ways less demanding than having one or two because I don't play with them as much, my wife doesn't play with them as much. I don't think that makes for a worse childhood.

We still are very involved and active. I don't think that's something that I would need to feel guilty about, it's just different. And you have a lot more help. And so now with a toddler and times past with a toddler, it was either me or my wife following the toddler around and keeping the toddler safe, now I have children follow the toddler around and keep the toddler safe.

Not in all circumstances, but if it's five o'clock and we're making dinner and getting everything ready, then I can have the children, say, take turns, watch the toddler, keep the toddler alive. And with a little bit of supervision from me, it's easier. And so I think that it seems to me that people who know they don't want to have children, they're pretty clear on that.

People who know they want to have children are also pretty clear on that. But it seems to me there's an enormous population of people who appreciate having children, but they feel like they can't responsibly have one more. They have two and three would be too much, or we have three, but five would be too much.

And I don't think that that is something that you should feel. I think that you'll be happier at the end of your life with three instead of one, if you were the kind that knows that I value children. I think you'd be better off with five instead of three.

And slightly marginal cost, and a lot more benefit. Good friend of mine, I have a couple of friends whose children have committed suicide. And I've often reflected on it since I had a sister that died when she was a teenager. Not by suicide. She was sick. She had a seizure.

I've always expected, I kind of still expect, I've always expected that one of my children will die, be due to this. But there are a few deaths more painful than suicide. And I have one friend who had one child, and he committed suicide when he was about 20. And my friend had poured his life into him.

And when his son committed suicide, it was obviously quite disruptive. And he and his wife, they had one son. And I don't know whether they wanted more, I don't know. But it just struck me as particularly catastrophic when they had one child who died. I have another friend who has had eight children, and one child committed suicide.

And I was struck by what a comfort it is to, as you grieve the loss of one child, to have other children. And that it's just a different experience. Why am I saying this? It's probably an obvious point, but we don't plan for death in today's world. We just kind of assume that everything is going to work out great.

And I think about, you know, there was a tragic story from Florida recently of parents were down on the beach with their two children, a boy and a girl, and they were digging a hole on the beach, and the hole caved in, and I believe their boy was killed, suffocated underneath the sand just very quickly.

Tragic story. And I just thought, what a tragedy, how terrible. And as a parent, I think we should talk about those things, because it's always going to be tragic. But I just think of my parents. My parents had seven children, one died. That was difficult. It was tragic. But they continued to enjoy all of the benefits of having six children and 16 grandchildren, and what a blessing.

And it may be the same for you and for me. So I guess what I'm driving at is, I think if you want to have children and you like children, and you're thinking, "Can I afford it?", just have one more. One more and see. And you'll know when it's enough, too much.

But if you're just on the fence, let the scale tilt in the favor of one more baby, and recognize that to the extent that there is a heavier cost, you'll probably be grateful at the end of your life. Challenges, we can't know. You got to have your babies when you're young.

There's a time in life in which you can have babies, and there's a time in life in which you can't have babies, and the decisions that you make go far. So I hope that I've struck a proper tone. Just to be clear, I don't judge anybody for not having children.

I don't judge anybody for having few children. I don't know any of the reasons why. That's between you and your spouse, and God, and your plans. That's up to you. I don't do that. But I just wanted to encourage in today's podcast that money is important in having children, but it needs to be clearly specified what specifically is important about it.

What do you need to do? If your financial goals that are keeping you from having babies that you want to have are things that are going to take you more than a year or two to reach, I think you're probably better off setting those aside and working your way through with the burden and responsibility of children as compared to not.

And if you've been trying to think about how to be responsible and not have too many babies, I think that you can release yourself from that, and my encouragement would be have one more. Thank you for listening to today's podcast. I'll see you next time.