Hello everybody, it's Sam and Sydney from the Financial Samurai podcast where we try to help you achieve financial freedom sooner rather than later. In this episode, we want to talk about a concept called a provider's clock for men. Women can definitely have a provider's clock too, but I'm trying to think about it from a man's point of view because I'm a man and this is something that I came up with.

So what is a provider's clock? A provider's clock starts ticking as soon as a man's first born son or daughter is born. And it keeps on ticking at least until the age of 18, but likely for 25, maybe 30 years until the father knows their child can be financially independent and stand on their own two feet or has found someone who loves them as much as he loves their children and can provide for them.

So that is my definition of a provider's clock. And I liken the provider's clock to a woman's biological clock. And the biological clock for a woman starts maybe teenage years, maybe after college where the woman might start thinking about having children up till the age of 45. And when I say 45, because after 45, the chances of having a child naturally declines to less than 5%.

But really after 35, the chances of a woman conceiving and giving birth naturally starts really going down because of abnormalities in chromosomes. It's just biology. So that clock starts ticking and it gets louder and louder as that deadline comes and then it eventually fades. What are your thoughts about these two types of clocks, the provider's clock and the biological clock?

Well, you're the first person I've come across to use the term provider's clock, so props to your originality. And I think this topic that you've brought up is quite relatable for a lot of folks and I think it makes for a great discussion. Alrighty. Well, hopefully this concept of provider's clock resonates with all of y'all and it becomes a more popular term going forward because I think it's very important.

I wanted to record this episode because I don't like feeling negativity and I don't really like judging people either. I want people from all types to read Financial Samurai, share their perspectives in a respectful manner and feel welcome. So this negative feeling started around 2005 when we moved into this other house in the Marina district on the north side of San Francisco.

Across the street was a neighbor who threw parties. His dad bought him the house while he was in law school. So he was like, I don't know, 24, 25 years old and the house was bought for $1.8 million. Pretty nice, right? He also drove an Audi S4, which at the time probably cost $40,000 to $50,000.

And we were hearing the noise and our bedroom was facing the front street facing their house. And this is when I started getting annoyed because I needed to wake up at 5am, no later than 5.30am every single morning for my job. And these guys are throwing parties every weekend or every other weekend and disturbing me.

And so that resentment, that anger, that negativity started boiling up in me because this guy was getting a free ride from the bank of mom and dad, whereas we had just purchased this house. We went all in. I saved a lot of money. I took a lot of investment risks and I put down hundreds of thousands of dollars and took on this big mortgage.

So I had this huge responsibility. I was more stressed than normal and I wasn't sleeping on the weekend sometimes because of the neighbor. And so that resentment built. Then in 2014, we bought a fixer in Golden Gate Heights, which is on the West side of San Francisco with some nice ocean views, really quiet, quaint neighborhood and my favorite neighborhood in all of San Francisco.

And that's when I met my other neighbor, a 24 year old son who was quite cold. He took a long time to graduate college and he moved back in with his parents. Every time I'd walk by him, he wouldn't say a thing. He was really, really prickly. And so I got to wondering, yo, what's, what's wrong with you?

I'm just saying, hi, I'm just the friendly neighbor. What's up? Well, 10 years later in 2024, he's still living at home with his parents. His parents moved out, but the parents just let him stay at home. So knowing this, I started feeling a little negative about him again, right?

He was really not a nice guy, but here's this guy. He went to college, his bank of mom and dad paid for his house again, and he was essentially living for free. So I've noticed a lot of this happening, particularly for men, where the parents take care of the men and the men stay at home with their parents.

And I know San Francisco home prices are higher than normal, so this is pretty common. But I don't see a lot of women living at home with their parents. They are either independent or they're living with their partner. And then in 2017, we had our first child, a beautiful baby boy.

And all this worry kind of came back to me during the middle of the night, you know, when I was rocking him to sleep or singing him to sleep. Will our son turn out to be like one of these entitled boys who are cold and prickly and don't care about their neighbors?

That's when it hit me. I was like, what is going on with some of the men in our society? And there's this book out there. I think Richard Reeves, he wrote a book called Of Boys to Men, and it talks about the problems more and more young men face in society.

And I started to get word. And then as one of the pioneers of the modern day fire movement, when I started writing about reaching financial independence and retiring early in 2009 with the launch of Financial Samurai, I have noticed over the past four or five years, maybe the past three years in particular, more and more men claim they are financially independent while they have working spouses, working wives.

And some blogging friends I know retired 12 years ago and their wives are still working even though they don't want to work. And no woman who is a stay at home parent, stay at home mom, has ever said that they are retired. And so I was just very curious about why there's such this difference.

And I didn't feel as much respect and love for these men who claim they're financially independent while their wives continue to work and make hundreds of thousands of dollars and earn retirement benefits and pay for healthcare benefits. And I think part of the reason why is because our situation is not like that.

We both don't have traditional day jobs and I feel a lot of pressure to be a stay at home father and to make sure our finances are okay. So this is why. This is kind of like my therapy session to try to understand why I've been feeling this type of growing negativity towards men who are still living at home with their parents.

What does it matter to me? It shouldn't bother me at all. But once I had my son, those worries started creeping in because I know, for example, the men who claim financial independence while depending on their working wives are actually secretly a little bit perturbed and they're a little bit maybe embarrassed that they can't let their wives enjoy the freedom they have as well.

And maybe they're a little bit embarrassed because they can't cut it in the workplace anymore. Hey, I couldn't cut it in the workplace anymore after 13 years. I was burned out. I said forget about it. So I understand that. At the end of the day, we're just fooling ourselves if we're saying we're financially good while we're depending on our spouses.

So Cindy, do you have a biological clock? And if you do have a biological clock, when do you think that clock started ticking? That's a good question. It's hard for me to say exactly when I first started to feel anxious about having kids. But I will say when I was in my 20s and even in my early 30s, I went through a period where I wasn't sure if I felt confident about having kids at all.

And I think this was because it just seemed like such a foreign concept to me initially and not something I felt ready to grapple with because I was so focused on my career for so long and I was struggling a lot with work like balance and I just didn't know that I could take anything else on.

But I would say that once I hit my mid-30s, that's when I really felt like, okay, I do want to have kids. And you were also on the same page at that point and I felt mature enough, I felt that I had gone far enough in my career, I felt we were financially stable and secure and I was really ready for a lifestyle change.

You were feeling okay starting in your mid-30s, but I would say that that is pretty late. It may sound late, but for San Francisco, that's actually very common. A lot of moms that I know also had kids late compared to the rest of the country at least. I think there's been a shift in our country as a whole with more couples getting married later and then also naturally having children later.

I think cost has a lot to do with it, lifestyle has a lot to do with it, juggling so many things. Yeah. For me, I felt like I needed to be on a career path with a real clear trajectory at the age of 30. I didn't have time for kids and then I remember my friend who I worked with at Golden Saks, he went to Yale, he grew up quite privileged and now he's at a hedge fund and he said, "I'm not having kids until I have a million-dollar net worth." And I was thinking to myself, okay, million-dollar net worth sounds like a good target.

I didn't know better when I was in my 20s. I was 22 to 24 at the time when I worked at Goldman and I thought, okay, it stuck with me ever since. For me, I've always thought by age 30, you need to be someone in your career and then have a million-dollar net worth to have kids.

Now that I'm 46, I think to myself, well, obviously that's unnecessary to have a million-dollar net worth. The majority of Americans don't wait until they have a million-dollar net worth to have kids but here I was living in Manhattan and then San Francisco where the median home price is $1.7 million now and I was thinking to myself, well, that kind of makes sense.

Did you have any kind of financial goals before or career goals before wanting to have kids? I didn't have as specific goals as you did but I did want to get to a certain point in my career which I managed to do and I also wanted to feel that we were stable and also emotionally ready because it's a big step in life and in marriage and I didn't want to commit to having a family until we both felt ready.

The problem with that though is going back to the biological clock. If you look at the data, having kids for women after age 35 becomes increasingly more difficult for natural conception and then once you hit 45, basically there's almost no chance to conceive naturally. Did you ever feel that pressure or did you know those statistics when you were in your earlier 30s or mid-30s?

I think I started to look at it when I crossed over 30 and yeah, it's a lot to take in. I think a lot of couples feel concerned about whether having a family will be possible for them because it frankly doesn't always happen when you want it to. No.

I just feel that so much planning actually needs to be involved in order for couples nowadays to have children, especially couples who live in very expensive cities like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington DC and so forth. If you wait too long and if you don't plan well enough, I think it's going to be hard for a lot of folks who are waiting after age 35 for women that is.

Do you have friends or colleagues who just couldn't have children because they waited too long or they had to go the IVF route? Yeah, I do. Some of them were younger. Some of them were older. Even if you're in your 20s, it doesn't necessarily mean that you will be able to have a baby right away.

Getting pregnant is harder than most people realize until they're actually trying to start a family and it's emotional. It's emotional for both sides. Fortunately, something that more and more people are opening up to talking about and this greater awareness I think will help more people plan as the younger generations are growing up.

Yeah, I think family planning is just as important if not more important than financial planning because biology, it's either going to cooperate or it's not going to cooperate. Whereas financial planning, you know that if you save an X amount of money over a Y period of time with a Z percentage return, compound annual return, you're going to get to a financial figure that will make you happy and make you financially independent or not.

Whereas with family planning, you got to meet the right person, you got to get married, you got to live your life before having children, then you have children and you got to calculate how many years between if you want X number of children and then you got to pay for the children.

For those of you who are younger, who are newlyweds or new couples thinking about starting a family, you've got to plan. You've got to plan carefully and you have to have different scenarios just like financial planning. Now, I want to turn back to this idea of the provider's clock for men which is like the biological clock for women because I feel, correct me if I'm wrong, the biological clock for women could last maybe 30 years, maybe let's say from age 15 to 45 and I use 45 because after 45, it's almost impossible to conceive naturally.

Do you think 30 years is a reasonable amount of time? I mean obviously, it's there, the clock starts but I would say a lot of women probably aren't thinking about it until mid-20s, late-20s but again, it depends on when you meet someone, when you settle down, where you are with your career, it can be all over the place frankly.

Yeah. But let's say mid-20s, so 25, so 25 to 45, so 20 year ticking biological clock. Now, so for men, the provider's clock starts with the birth of your son or daughter and then it ends, it has to end at least at the earliest at age 18 I would say because that's technical adulthood and maybe up until age, after 25 years maybe or 30 years or whatever that time period is when your child is financially independent.

What do you think about that concept of the provider's clock and that time frame? I think that all makes sense. Okay. Well, I have realized, I feel that the desire for a man to provide for his family is innate, it's biological, it's part of evolution to allow our species to survive over the years and of course, women have a provider's clock as well.

I'm just looking at it from a male's point of view, a man's point of view where I was perplexed. I was perplexed for the longest time of why I felt like, "Man, you're 35 years old and you're still living at home with your parents. I've got literally, we've got what, 5, 6 male neighbors who are still living at home with their parents in their late 20s and 30s and I was thinking to myself, "Yo, let's get on with it.

Your life is ticking by. Let's try to be independent. Go live on your friend's couch if you need to but try to get out and launch. Otherwise, life is going to pass you by." I think it's harder to find someone if you're living at home with mom and dad and I think it's hard to impress someone if you're still living at home with mom and dad in your mid-30s for example.

Now, this is judgmental thinking and this is why I wanted to change and so I realized to overcome my lack of admiration for men who don't provide in terms of financially, I realized, "Ah, it's biological." In the sense that some people have louder provider's clocks than others. So if you have a really loud provider's clock that's wound up, you're going to want to work and produce for society and do something meaningful and productive probably for the rest of your life no matter how rich you get.

And if you have a quiet provider's clock, you'd be willing to, maybe you'd work hard in the beginning but then you'd be willing to just check out earlier, retire earlier as they say, and let your wife be the primary breadwinner which is totally fine and that's my realization that everybody is wired differently because genetics is different for everybody.

Yes, I can totally see how everybody is wired differently and the level of desire that each person has in terms of how much they want to work and provide, it's going to be different. And I just realized something, so for our daughter and actually for our son, I think it's important if you're going to be with someone, if you're going to commit to someone in a committed relationship, marry them, whatnot, is to find out how strong is their biological clock and their provider's clock.

So let's say our daughter finds someone in the future and they have a very weak or soft provider's clock. It's important for her to know this because that means that she will likely have to work hard for a longer period of time, right? And so if that's the case, she needs to be okay with that, to be with someone with a quiet provider's clock.

And I do think it's important to have as many serious conversations before getting married as possible about what both partners want in the future. If one person is adamant about not having children and the other person really wants to have children, they need to have some serious conversations about whether or not they're going to be compatible long term.

And the other thing is, if you want to retire early in your career, like you already know this, right? You need to find someone with a very loud provider's clock. Someone who maybe grew up poor or who faced a lot of discipline and struggle in their childhood where they need to prove to their parents that they can be on their own.

And so it's almost like you have to really strategically think about how strong someone's drive is if you are thinking about taking it easier, right? Because strategically, we know some people marry rich so they don't have to grind it out, whereas some people are fine to be independent and grind as long as possible because they have that strong provider's clock.

So something to think about and teach our children about that both biological clock and provider's clock going forward. Alrighty, folks, we hope you enjoyed this discussion about biology and the provider's clock. If you ever encounter someone that bothers you, that does something that you wouldn't do, that makes you mad, maybe angry, maybe miffed, just think about how biology affects us.

I think biology is probably the majority of how we think, our personalities, how we act. The majority means 50.1%, right? I think biology probably governs maybe 70% of who we are and the rest is the environment, how we were raised, how we were taught. So in other words, a lot of us just can't help the way we are.

Some of us have more positive demeanors. Some of us are nicer, more patient, have better charisma, laugh more, or some of us are sulkier, you know, Debbie Downers, whatever it is. And we should try to step back next time we see someone we don't like or something and try to understand what is it exactly that's bothering us.

And maybe the reality is they just are who they are and we have to accept them for who they are. And if they're not doing anything negatively to affect us, then we should just let them be and stop judging. Thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast episode, we'd love a share, a rate, and review.

We read all the reviews and they motivate us to keep on going. But also if you want to increase your chances of achieving financial independence sooner, sign up for the free Financial Samurai newsletter at financialsamurai.com/news. Thanks so much. Bye everyone. you