- Hello everybody, it's Sam from Financial Samurai, and in this episode I have a special guest with me today, my shelter in place partner in crime, my wife. - Hello everybody. - Sydney, good seeing you. Thanks for joining us on this podcast. I guess it's us, it's just me.

But in this episode I wanna talk about homeschooling and our dilemma of whether to send our three year old son back to preschool once school opens, or keep him home with us and homeschool. So just to start off with, you know it's a really tough time right now. Our school shut down mid-March 2020, and has not opened yet, and right now we're in mid-July.

Originally they were thinking they were gonna open in the beginning of August, but now that seems to be getting pushed back to September. And you're also seeing a lot of other states push back their in-person schooling, or not have in-person schooling at all. San Diego, LA, even Houston I think, it's all online learning now.

So it made us wonder, okay, maybe we shouldn't send our son to school because there could be a lot of risk. So I wanted to interview you, Sydney, and get your thoughts about homeschooling. So what are your thoughts? - Homeschooling is something we've had in the back of our mind, even way before the pandemic happened.

You know, especially when we've been talking about the cost of education these days, and especially in an expensive city like San Francisco, sending a kid to private school can be over $30,000 a year at some places. - Tell the listeners how much we paid for preschool a month. - So we paid about $1,900 a month.

- So originally it was $1,830 a month, and then the month before we sent our son to preschool, I think it was September 2019, right? - Yes. - They said, "We're gonna raise it to $1,950 a month." - Right, they raised it, and then he turned three, and we saved roughly $100, but we didn't get to take advantage of that, quote, unquote, "discount" for very long because the school shut down shortly thereafter.

- Yeah, it's kind of funny that it costs more if you send your kid under three, but then you get a discount after three, so I'm assuming they're easier to manage, but based on our experience, managing or parenting a three-year-old has been quite a challenge, given his very robust personality.

- Yeah, I can see how two-year-olds take more time, but kids are just constantly changing. - To different challenges at two versus three. - Right, so what do you think were the pros of going to preschool? - There are lots of different pros that I could see pretty quickly.

He got to make friends, which was so exciting. He'd come home and he'd tell us about everybody's name in the class, and he would also do a lot of different activities that we weren't doing with him at home, and he got to interact with kids his own age, as well as kids that were several years older.

The school goes from age two to five, and most of the day is with their own age. However, there are times during the day where they have mixed-age play, and that was really neat, and then there's a lot of extra activities that they do. - Like field trips. - Field trips, yes, the field trips were amazing.

He would just love those, and the school did a great job with documentation and sending pictures, and we were involved with a lot of those extra activities around the holidays and the field trips. - Oh yeah, the holiday sing-along was amazing. - Yeah, he was having a great time.

- That was great to have his grandparents over and stuff. And also another benefit was the free time that we could free up during our day to write, to do our own thing, to take naps, and to relax. - Yeah, and it was a huge benefit for me in the beginning because I was very pregnant with our daughter, and I had a hard pregnancy, so being able to have some time without our son all over me definitely helped me a lot.

- Right, so preschool was a pretty good experience. However, after you gave birth in December 2019, we had a couple weeks of just our son, our daughter, all of us together, 'cause it was winter break, and then when we sent him back after winter break, he got sick. - He got sick within that week.

- The first week. - Yeah, it was bad. He came home, and he had a fever that night, and fortunately his fever broke fairly quickly, but then he just was sick for at least one to two weeks at a minimum, probably was longer than that. It felt like forever, and then I got sick, you got sick, our daughter got sick.

It was rough. - So everybody got sick, so I ended up writing a post called The Biggest Downside of Preschools, not the cost, but it's the perpetual sickness. And I know I've talked to a lot of people, a lot of parents who say, you know, you gotta get sick early.

If you don't get sick early, they're gonna get sick late. You can't avoid it. You know, this is how you build your immune system and all that good stuff, but man, just all of us going down for the count is actually quite dangerous, especially if you have a newborn.

Newborn, supposedly their immune system isn't fully developed until about six months, and it was such a bummer when our daughter got sick for, what, four or five days. - Oh yeah, it was so sad. I mean, she was coughing so hard that she would vomit, and oh, it was so stressful.

- It was really stressful. - It was really, really scary. - And then I ended up getting sick for three months because I remember coughing and wearing a mask during delivery, which was kind of a bummer because I wanted to like snuggle and kiss my daughter, but I couldn't because I didn't wanna get her sick.

So I was coughing from mid-December through end of February. So it was like a three-month sickness, and I was looking back at my notes, and it was saying I had chills, and I didn't notice a fever, but I had dry cough, dry cough, and then now looking back, I'm wondering, did I have COVID-19?

I have no idea, and frankly, I hope I did, and I hope all of us did because then hopefully we'd have some antibodies and we won't be so stressed out when we're going outside. - Yeah, it's hard to know. - It's hard to know. So the biggest downside really kinda is the sickness, and if you are not in good health to begin with, it's gonna be tough.

I'm proud to say that Financial Samurai didn't miss a beat during my three-month-long sickness. There's still three posts going out a week. There's still one newsletter going out a week. I still did the podcast, but it was tough, folks. So we've basically been homeschooling since mid-March, and now it's mid-July, so that's April, May, June, July, so four months now.

How do you feel about homeschooling, and how do you think about homeschooling going forward? - In the beginning, it was hard because we hadn't planned for it. I think both Sam and I are big planners, and we actually pulled our son out a couple weeks before the school officially shut down because of the news, and we just felt concerned, and our immune systems were already compromised at that point, and we didn't wanna risk getting sick again.

So yeah, it was hard in the beginning, but then it's almost like a muscle. You get stronger over time, you get used to it. - The routine. - Yeah, we just kinda developed a routine, and now it's hard to imagine him being gone again. So I think I would really miss him again.

- I think we would miss him, and I think we would feel bad. We would really feel bad sending him before there's a vaccine. I mean, I can just imagine, let's say school opens up September. We drop him off at, I don't know, 8.30, 9 a.m., and then we pick him up after his nap at four or five.

It just feels bad because we both don't have full-time jobs. Now, we keep ourselves disciplined by writing, podcasting, and we have, obviously, a baby at home to take care of, but there is none of that outside pressure to perform at a job to earn money. At the same time, we still earn money through passive income and through our website, and that's something that we'd like to keep up with because we're in a global pandemic, and just it's better to have more than less during times of uncertainty.

So we decided very recently that we would not send our son back to school until there's a vaccine. It's probably not gonna be until 2021. And what do you think about that? - Well, I will mention that we originally thought we were gonna do it. The school asked for, or the school announced in early July that they were going to reopen in August, and I had a big fear that if we pulled him out, we'd never be able to get him back in.

Preschool in San Francisco is extremely competitive. It's ridiculous that it's so hard to get in to good schools. - Yeah, we got rejected six out of seven places we applied. - Yeah, and so I had this big fear, and I was like, well, you know, maybe we say we're gonna go, and then we just pay for the month of August, but then send him late in the month, yada, yada, yada.

So we gave the school our decision, and then it just did not-- - Our decision not-- - Decision to go first. - Oh, to go, to go first. - And then it just didn't sit well with either of us the more we kept thinking about it. - I talked to my dad, I was like, oh, we're gonna send our son to preschool in August, and he said, what?

- What are you doing? - What? He's like, what are you talking about? Why would you do that? - Yes. - Aren't you afraid of the virus? - So we talked about it again after the deadline had passed that the school needed an answer, and then we came back the next day and told them we changed our mind because we just didn't feel right about it.

We wanted to be more cautious. We have the luxury to stay at home with him and work on a flexible schedule, and that we'd hoped to be able to put him back in at a later date. The school told us they can't guarantee that he'll get back in, which is understandable, but that he would at least be on a priority wait list.

- Yeah, and we kept on telling ourselves the what if scenario. What if we sent him back to school and he got sick and got us all sick? Well, that chance is probably 80% chance. Kids are germy, they touch each other, they sneeze, they cough, they don't wash their hands.

So all of us getting sick again was probably an 80 plus percent probability within the first month. And I turned around that equation and said, how much would I be willing to pay not to feel sick for a month, not to feel sick for three months? I mean, I would pay a lot of money not to go through what I experienced earlier this year.

It was the longest sickness of my life. - I know, and the other thing that went through my mind is 10, 20 years down the road, when we look back, are we gonna feel good about sending him back to school when we have the option to keep him home?

No, I think we would be kicking ourselves and saying, what the hell are we doing sending him back when we didn't need to? - Yeah, we have an option. So the only reason why we would send him would frankly come down to parental laziness, right? Because we have the option to take care of him.

So setting him would mean we need a break, we're just dead tired. I mean, after four months, it's been pretty difficult. But the groove has happened. - Yeah, we're used to it. This is our new normal, I think. - Our new normal, right. - We're fortunate that we can work on flexible hours.

- Right, and we don't even really need to work. I mean, I have another problem, and that is I have this commitment to publish three times a week and do the newsletter and do this podcast, which I did take a couple week break, thank goodness. And it's just kind of hard to break free and not do it after 11 years now.

- Self-imposed pressure. - Self-imposed pressure is just kind of brutal. And I'm just trying to figure out ways to just say, hey, just relax, we're a global pandemic. You don't have to get ahead, you can just kind of survive. But there's this inherent need or desire to provide, I feel, every time a child is born.

I feel, uh-oh, I've got two kids now, we both don't have jobs, we got to, or I gotta at least provide the bacon because I can't feed my baby. So I gotta provide the bacon, and so I just need to be on the ball. - Yeah, and you've done a phenomenal job, and I think the readers definitely appreciate that too.

- Thank you, I appreciate it. Can you leave a five-star review? - Of course, I already have. (laughing) - Anyway, so since we've decided to homeschool, at least until the vaccine, we've got to come up with a plan. And the plan has to have some structure because if it was up to our son, he would just play and go, "Ah!" And go out and all day long, right?

So we've got to divide and conquer. We've got to divide and conquer on the fundamentals, we've got to research homeschooling. I mean, at three years old, we're basically, we're gonna teach him language, his communication skills, problem solving. - Problem solving, but there is still a lot of play that's needed at this age, which is easy for him, easy for us.

- Compound interest rate calculations. - Not yet, but he is, I say he's quite advanced with math for his age, and he's reading already as well. - Right, well, let's just say that every single parent believes their child is advanced, and so we feel the same way, but the reality is we're probably just average.

- Well, I will say that at the beginning of the preschool year, when we had the open house, they had a presentation on the goals for his class for the whole year, and one of the goals was to be able to count to 10. However, he was already counting into the millions, quadrillions.

- He was counting. - He could count to 1,000, but we taught him millions, billions, quadrillions, infinity, and all that. - Yeah, and he also already knew his ABCs. He could recognize uppercase, lowercase letters. - Colors. - Yeah, colors. - Shapes. - Yeah, he-- - He was pretty advanced.

- But socially and emotionally, he definitely needs some work still. - But I think at three years old, it's all the me phase, right? Me, me, me, me, me. - Yeah, there's a lot of that. - Not so much sharing. - Fortunately, he never bit or hit anyone at class.

He was the victim. - But he did get bit. - He was a victim, unfortunately. - That actually pissed me off. I was like, who is this kid? And who are your parents? - It's very common in all schools, but unfortunate, yeah. - So I think from a homeschooling perspective, it's much more efficient.

Just like working from home, as many of you guys all experience, is much more efficient, it's more productive. I wake up 5 a.m., I can start cranking things out, starting at 5.30 and finish by 7.30, and I've got my day free. The problem with me is I just don't stop, and I need to stop.

And I think a problem with many people who work from home now is they just end up working more and more and more. At least this is the feedback that I've gotten from many of my friends. So on the homeschooling front, I think we're gonna divide and conquer in terms of subjects.

So I'll take, let's say P.E., Mandarin, arithmetic, and what do you wanna take? Oh, I'm helping him with his reading. - Reading, yeah, and writing. - So we've been working on his phonics and sight words and putting together short sentences and reading together. And he's picked up on that really well.

He's having a lot of fun with that. So I'm gonna continue on with that. And we do a lot of math games together. - Problem solving. - Yeah, problem solving. - Sharing situations. - Yeah. So I think, I don't know, for us, it's kinda, I think it's probably easier, right?

It's easier to homeschool a three-year-old, I think, than homeschooling a 15-year-old, but maybe the 15-year-old is gonna be totally belligerent. - You can't compare. - I mean, who knows? - You can't compare the two. - I'm expecting 15-year-old son to be totally disciplined, listen to everything we say, or else no soup for him.

- Yeah, right. (laughing) But here's the thing, the other thing about homeschooling is if you are retired early, or if you have an online business, I mean, what a great way to do both, and to also travel once travel restrictions are lifted. - Right, and once this whole social distancing thing goes away and we're not worried about the vaccine anymore, there are groups of other homeschooling parents that get together and let their kids socialize together.

Yeah, that's just not really happening now. - Surely, there's gonna be a boom in homeschooling and these little pods of homeschool family get-togethers. - I would think so. - Yeah. - I mean, I don't expect everyone to do it by any means, but I think some families who were maybe on the fence before are probably-- - There's no other option, frankly, sometimes.

- Yeah. - So I wanted to ask you about the stigma that I hear, and maybe you guys hear about homeschooled children being a little bit more awkward and weird than the average person. What are your thoughts? - I will be frank that I did have a colleague at one of my full-time jobs who was homeschooled.

- And-- - Socially awkward? - She was an only child and she was very socially awkward. - But you guys hired her. - But she was, yeah, she was hired. I mean, I wasn't involved in that process. She did her job well, but she had a bad attitude. She definitely thought she deserved better than the role she was hired for.

She was hard to work with. - Okay, those are all bad attributes. - So I had that bad experience with her alone, but I'm not gonna say that she represents all homeschooled kids by any means. - I just feel it's very dangerous to generalize. - I totally agree, and I have friends from college who, same age, but have older children who decided to homeschool, and it's been working out really well for them.

And I think homeschooling now versus 10, 20 years ago is different too, I think. - Thanks to technology. - Yeah, I think technology makes a big difference, and I think there's just more families doing it. So there are more of these groups that come together and have interactions for the kids.

And there's other ways that kids can participate in group activities outside of our typical classroom as well. So there's lots of avenues to explore. - So regarding that stigma, I've always heard that stigma, unfortunately, but I don't know if that stigma or that stereotype is true, because think about how many socially awkward and weird people there are who went to normal school.

- That's very true. - Right? - Yeah. - I mean, so talk about, hey, maybe normal school is making you weird and awkward. - Yeah, there's weird and crazy people everywhere, just like there's normal, wonderful, phenomenal people everywhere too. - Yeah, so I think it's, so let's throw that stereotype aside.

I mean, if you're homeschooled, you're probably getting more education more quickly. You get more love from your parents because you're spending more time with your parents. And I think times are different now than they were in the past. And I think attitudes towards homeschooling is quickly changing, just like the adoption of working from home or moving to a lower cost area of the country.

- And I will say one thing that we are open to as parents is digital learning. I know some parents are very anti-device, electronic devices with their kids. And if that's the way they wanna raise their kids, that's great for them. For us, we're really open to it. Our son watches videos on the iPad every day, and he's learned a lot from it.

There's some great educational videos out there for kids. - Right. - And how could we be against digital learning if we have Financial Samurai as the website, and then the podcast, and then whatever else we wanna create? I mean, we're definitely pro-digital learning, and it's a much more efficient and scalable way to learn.

- Right. I think it's, I still think it's really important to have physical interaction with people. It's just been a great additional resource that we've been able to utilize with our son. - Oh, and there's this one other thing that I wanted to mention before we finish, 'cause it's been a long episode.

And that is, if we're gonna homeschool for life, let's say we have the vaccine. We don't have the vaccine. Let's say it's COVID-19, and the next year is COVID-20, COVID-20, and 2021, it's like COVID for life, right? I mean, it's funny, but it's not funny. I mean, it's funny because it's kind of crazy that we've shut down everything for this virus.

And one of the things to counteract that lonely child syndrome that might be socially awkward is maybe having a brood of children, right? Let's say you have five children. They can all learn to play together. You don't need to send them to school anymore. They need to learn to share and communicate with their siblings.

- Okay, we're not going to have five kids. - I know, but I'm just saying, let's just, for example. So therefore, for those of you who only have one kid who's on the fence and wanna have another kid, or who has two kids and wanna have a third kid, hey, maybe this is a benefit so your children can share and play together.

- Well, you know, that reminds me, way back when our grandparents were in school, at least my grandmother, she went to a school where there was one little schoolhouse way out in the country, and there were no separate grades based on your age. Everybody was in the same classroom.

- Really? - Yeah. And so the teacher had to accommodate everybody. - Sounds messy. Sounds difficult. - Yeah, it looks messy, but I don't know. That just randomly popped in my head. - And then so finally, so our kids will become adults technically at 18, but they're probably still not adults mentally 'cause it takes, I don't know, you're 24, 27 before your brain fully develops.

So mentally, I found that challenging yourself to do hard things, for example, writing three times a week for 10 years. It's hard, but if you mentally tell yourself upfront, okay, the most we have to homeschool is 15 more years for our son and 18 years for our daughter, that's it, we'll be free afterwards.

- Yeah. - I mean, we just have to say that's hopefully the worst case scenario. - Or maybe even earlier. I don't know how hard it's like-- - Oh yeah, why can't they graduate young? - If you pass whatever standards-- - The GED? - I don't know what the standards are.

- I mean, we had the what? Didn't Doogie Howser go to medical school at 16? - That was a TV show. (laughing) But yeah, I get your point. - Oh my gosh, that's right. We don't have to do 18 years each. Maybe we do 16 years each because we're gonna accelerate, they're gonna-- - 'Cause some, even in traditional schools, some kids are able to graduate early.

- Yeah, take college credit while they're in high school. - Right. - Oh, oh, I totally didn't think about that. That's a total no-brainer. It's like, why on earth is going to college still the same for four years? Hello, the internet was invented and now it's like ubiquitous. You can do a research paper and learn four times faster.

I mean, colleges shouldn't be four years anymore. It should be two to three years max. And it'll be cheaper too. - That would be interesting. - Yeah. So anyway, so this is our lovely conversation on homeschooling. If you are thinking about homeschooling for life or at least for the next 18 years, sounds like a long time, but there could be a lot of benefits.

There is also a lot of negatives, which is a lot of effort, but we have never failed due to a lack of effort, right? That is one of the key principles on Financial Samurai. We'd love to hear from you, either in the comment section, 'cause I'm gonna write a post about this as well, or you can drop a great review and leave a comment about the subject as well.

We're gonna talk about this. We're gonna be parents for life, and we're gonna have a lot of these type of subjects going forward. So thanks so much for listening and take care. - Bye everybody.