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Choose from a great selection of digital coupons and use them up to five times in one transaction. Check our app for details. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. What's it actually like to live in a converted school bus with three small children while you're saving money to build a house? Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast for today, Friday, October the 10th, 2014.

My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Today, contrary to what I said yesterday, I'm not going to be bringing you a show on education, but rather bringing you a show which is an interview with Sarah and Noah, who are currently living in a converted bus with their three children while they try to figure out how to build their new house out in California.

A fun adventure, so to speak. The show today, I think you're really gonna enjoy it because it's gonna be a little bit different than many of the shows that I have played previously. Now, let me be specific and give you a quick note of introduction here. Today's show is very chatty, and it's more of kind of two new friends getting to know each other over a Skype connection on a late at night telephone call.

So, it's very chatty and it's not specifically point point point point on here's what you should do; here's what you should do; here's what you should do. If that's going to annoy you, flip forward or flip backwards to another show and don't bother with this. But I think that you may, many of you will still enjoy this kind of show.

It's a little bit different. And you'll benefit, I think, from knowing a little bit on the background. So I've been interested for years in bus conversions, and I've always watched online at different people converting school buses to live in and people living in RVs. I think it's a pretty cool financial strategy for some people.

So I was Googling around and found a website called Little Bus on the Prairie and was impressed that there was this family of mother and father, so a family of five, and three small children that was living in a bus. And I shot off an email and set up an interview.

Now it was actually, I arranged the interview, I think, probably about a month before I actually did it. And so there was a lot of time that had passed. And usually, generally, oftentimes, I'm very much a person who's expecting someone to say, "Hey, this is great. We're loving our alternative lifestyle.

We love living off-grid and doing this." Whatever this thing is. That's how my mind works. But I recognize that's not reality. And what happened was a fascinating peek into what it's actually like sometimes to scrimp and save. And sometimes the radical side is maybe really challenging. It's not so necessarily so easy.

So I think this story is going to be a very interesting story, which you may enjoy. And in speaking with Sarah and Noah, they had just come off of three days with triple-digit temperatures with them being on a bus with three small children. And that is a challenge. And Sarah is very pregnant with a baby expected soon.

I think it's a month or two, something like that. And so it was neat to kind of capture some of that emotion, but it wasn't what I was necessarily expecting in the interview. The other thing that's interesting about this interview is that Sarah and Noah are an everyday normal couple just simply trying to work their dreams.

In fact, as we were emailing before the interview, they were very clear and kind of a little bit surprised that I'd reached out to them and saying, "We're not millionaires. We're just trying to kind of figure things out." So instead of today bringing you an expert on something, rather we bring you a conversation between a couple of people who are just working to figure things out.

And I think you'll enjoy that. And so the first part of this interview, the interview is about 54, just under 54 minutes long. The first part of the interview is talking about the bus living, the story of how they wound up in a bus. The middle part is talking a little bit about what it's been like as far as them trying to figure out how to build a house, how to build a house that would be affordable, that would work and actually work for their family and the location that they have.

And they're having some real challenges in making that happen. You can read on their blog some more details about the challenges that they're having. And then kind of the final third is a little bit on education as far as I noticed that they were educating their kids and I was interested in why because that's a subject of interest to me.

And I think it's also a subject that has a lot of applicability to personal finance. I had a comment on the blog from yesterday's show that seemed to indicate that maybe the connection between education and personal finance was not exactly clear. And this show is absolutely dedicated to personal finance.

We're not going to spend all our time on education, but I think it is actually an incredibly important aspect of personal finance. And on the next show, I will bring out some of the details as to why I think the connection is so strong and why I think it really matters.

But I won't do that anymore for today. So enjoy today's episode. Enjoy listening and hearing from Sarah and Noah. And I think it is a much needed refresher to a lot of times the world that I live in about everything is great about living a radical lifestyle. Sometimes living in a bus is not so fun.

Sometimes you're really, really ready to be in the house. Enjoy the interview. So Sarah and Noah, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you making time to chat with me tonight. Sure. Yeah, it's good to be here. So I've been looking forward to talking with you and I'm interested in just simply having a conversation and hearing a little bit about your story.

The way that I found you is that I was out browsing around on the interwebs one day and I was looking for, I've always been interested in bus conversions. I always thought it was cool when people would buy these old school buses and convert them into an RV, it's like a cheap RV.

I'm not sure if you guys, I would imagine you probably have seen a lot of that. But I've always been fascinated by people who've done that and just some of the craftsmanship. And then I was looking, I was wondering if anyone was living on a bus and that was how I came across your website called Little Bus on the Prairie.

So what I would love to do is share with me just a little bit, what's your background and how did you wind up living in a bus? Well, the bus itself is a 1970 international school bus and we found it on Craigslist. It was already converted, it had already had the second story added on and we found it on Craigslist for, if you can believe it, only a thousand dollars.

And then we had already purchased an RV that we were planning on living out here in and my husband sent the Craigslist listing to me as a joke. Totally joking. And I was like, yes, let's do that instead. How much were you going to spend on the RV? Well, we had already purchased an RV for, I think it was 22,000 or 2,500.

Yeah, something like that. We still have the RV too and we just never use it. It's kind of like Ishmael, it wasn't the chosen vehicle. So that seems odd to me. You have them both, why did the bus win? How did you end up with the bus? The bus, it had a lot more space for one thing because it does have the upper story with the upper living space.

She couldn't have a blog called Little Bus on the Prairie with an RV. There's nothing exciting about that story. I never would have found you, right? If it were just a little RV on the prairie, I never would have found you in my searching. Just me personally, my family, my dad actually, since I was little, has had several buses that he's actually converted himself.

Really? Yeah, a little bit of a bus affinity, I suppose. So you know all about that. I've never seen one in person. I've only just read them. I've looked at people's photos of them on the internet. So you've got quite a history in the bus conversion space. Yeah, I remember helping my dad when I was little going out and drilling cabinets and stuff.

But yeah, we've done that forever. It seems like an incredibly massive amount of work, frankly. Every time I've ever looked at them, I've said, "Wow, there are some amazing craftspeople that have put together some amazing projects." My dad has put a lot of work into it. We didn't convert this one ourselves.

It was already pre-converted, but Noah did a lot and family members and all came and really updated everything. It was really gnarly inside. It had carpet that was probably 20 years old and everything was mildewy and it was really, really gross inside. So what were the circumstances that led to your actually wanting to live in the bus?

Well, it kind of goes back to when we were first looking back in 2012. We were looking for a house to buy and everything back in 2012 was priced really, really low. All the houses that we were interested in kept getting snatched up by investors. Noah, when he was a kid, built a house with his parents out of adobe out in Arizona.

He'd always wanted to build his own house as an adult. So we started looking at vacant land and we found the land that we were on that we eventually wound up buying. It was just a steal of a deal. Once we started looking into what building a house would entail and the fact that it's very, very expensive, I think that we just kind of, both of us were like, "All right, if this is the route we're going to take and this is the path, then we need to be able to afford it." It's really difficult to afford interest payments on a construction loan and pay rent at the same time.

So it was the idea though must have come from your dad's, did the idea come from the fact that your dad had done various bus conversions? It's just the reason I'm asking is it's not most people, many people that I've worked with, if you want to build a house and you're living in an apartment, you just continue as is and you just borrow a little extra money.

It's really not that big a deal. Most people that I've worked with don't often say, "How can I again move into a bus?" Was it the fact that your dad had done it or does this just seem like a good idea you guys came up with? Yeah, I don't think, I think it was just a good idea.

We kind of thought it was going to be an adventure and a little more exciting. We had to be out on the property and kind of see it. We also thought the process was going to go much smoother and faster. But yeah, it seemed like it was going to be interesting.

So what's great about it and what stinks about it? It's probably not the best time to ask. We just got off a couple weeks of triple digit heat wave out here and I am about eight months along in my fourth pregnancy. So the good things have, the bloom is off the road.

Right. There is a lot of fun stuff. I mean, being out here with the kids, there's plenty of stuff to run around and do and power wheels and quads and all that kind of stuff. That's a lot of fun. As far as being in the bus, I think the funnest part is staying outside of it.

So this is actually what I was interested in because what happens is that we as a society, we tend to spend most of our time writing and talking about things that are awesome. And so if you were to guess just by the internet memes that go around, then you would assume that living in buses is awesome.

Living full time in RVs is just the way to live. Tiny houses are practically just the greatest gift from heaven, allowing you to get rid of all your stuff. And just these kind of wild and radical and crazy things are, again, awesome. And that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I think that they can be awesome adventures, but yet I think I take a little more realistic view and I could imagine your bus doesn't have air conditioning, is that right? No. Right. So triple digit temperatures in your eighth month of pregnancy, that would be a challenging couple of weeks.

I certainly recognize that. Essentially, we're in a tin can which reflects the heat. But yeah, there's a lot of people at work that kind of know what I'm doing and the conversation about tiny houses and minimalist living and all that kind of stuff comes up quite a bit because they think that that's kind of my mentality and it's not.

So I think it kind of seems like a romantic kind of thing. I think people kind of put a lot of emotion into it and it's a nice thought. But in reality, it's hard. I mean, I think your circumstances are different. With three kids, a small space becomes very, very small.

I think the thought of it gets a lot of people excited, but actually getting down to it, it kind of rubs off quick. It's so interesting that you say that though about the internet and all that kind of stuff because when we first embarked upon this journey, I was totally taken in by that.

I was actually just writing a post the other day. It's hard to put into words because I feel very disillusioned by the allure of small space living. We're living without 80% of our belongings right now. It's all in storage. Although we have less stuff, we also have less space.

On the one hand, there is the appeal that it's like we have all the stuff that's gone and I don't, for the most part, miss it. I kind of miss my blender. So on the one hand, I can see that totally. You don't need nearly as much stuff as you think that you do, but on the other hand, trying to cram even 20% of your stuff into a smaller space with three children and being pregnant, it's not ideal.

Have you done any traveling with your bus? Is it mobile? There's some kind of problem with the radiator, which would probably be an easy fix, but we drove from where we lived to where we picked up the bus. It's probably 40 or 50 miles and it took us almost eight hours.

So it's not the most effective means of transportation. I would guess not. But that's another thing, too, that lately I've been thinking so much about because like you said, there are so many blogs out there about living in an RV and I stumbled upon this blog that was linked to on another blog or whatever about this Tickner family.

I think it's like T-I-C-N-O-R, TicknerTribe.com. And they have 12 kids and now they're down to nine or whatever and they all travel across the US. Is that what happened to the Tickner family? Yeah, they grew up and moved on and they're off doing their own thing now. So they have the nine youngest.

Right, they're the nine youngest. And like you said, they write about it and they're so exuberant about it and this is just the best life and all this stuff. And then looking at their space, they're in a brand new RV. Not brand new, I shouldn't say that, but it's much newer than 1970.

You know, they're in a new RV with slide outs and they've got TVs and they've got couches. Even though I'm sure it's a super small space and they've got a ton more kids than I do and they're also mobile, too. They're moving from place to place to place. And I think I read that they have like a 15 passenger van that follows along with their RV and all that kind of stuff.

So it's like every situation is totally different. They have more kids but a newer space and they're mobile. And we're in a much older vehicle, I guess, with smaller kids but I'm also pregnant and we're just kind of stuck out here in the heat. And then I had another reader of the blog had emailed me and it was just her and her husband and they were going to be moving into an RV, just the two of them while they built a house.

Same kind of situation. I think it was out in the Midwest somewhere. And she was like, "Do you have any suggestions? What was the hardest thing?" And it was like it's a completely different situation. You know, again, like a newer RV, just the two of them. I think they had a couple of dogs.

And it was like, "You guys are going to be fine. You're great. That's golden." You know, a lot of the challenges that we're facing have to do with our particular situation. Right? Also, probably because you're in something of a transition between lifestyles. And my wife and I learned this when we first got married.

And when we first got married and after getting married, we moved in together. We lived in a studio apartment that was a total of 243 square feet. And it was really small but we loved it. It was just the two of us. And it was just, again, a studio.

One large room. One medium-sized room. And a very small kitchen and a bathroom. And everything worked great about it. It was right in the middle of downtown West Palm Beach. It was super cheap rent. We could walk to the beach. Sometimes we could easily walk to the downtown areas.

It was just a perfect... My wife could walk to work or ride her bike to work. I needed to drive still to my job. But it was just a super great living circumstance. And what I observed was that in the first couple of days of my being there, it felt really claustrophobic.

It felt really physically small. But after about three or four or five days, it just felt like this is what we do. And then when we moved out of that little tiny apartment into the massive, I don't know, not massive, but I guess 2,000 square foot house or something like that that we live in now, it felt massive for a couple of days.

And then it just felt normal. So I noticed that we adjusted quickly. But the thing that was the most frustrating about being in the studio was that we knew it was a transition time. We knew this wasn't a permanent lifestyle. And we had certain lifestyle factors. What do you do with the snorkel gear?

Do you keep it? Do you get rid of it? What do you do with the ski gear? Do you keep it? Do you get rid of it? What do you do with all of this gear, this stuff that just goes with life? What do you do with your book collection?

Do you keep it? Do you get rid of it? If you were going to live in a bus forever, you would probably downsize a lot of those things that you needed in order to make it work. But if it's just a transition time, then you're kind of caught with the lifestyle that fits into a house that doesn't fit into a bus.

And that was just my observation is that the people who seem to, I would say, kind of live those lifestyles most successfully and with the greatest joy, it's because it's not for the purpose of glorifying living in a tiny house. It's what that tiny house opens up for them.

It gives them an opportunity to experience something they wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to experience. Or if you're living in an RV because you're traveling, that's a very different thing than if you're just living in an RV because that's what you do. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good point.

If you're dropping your baggage and getting on the road or doing whatever you're doing, that's a really different situation. I think that's, you're looking for a freedom there. You're able to kind of do that. If we were looking at this as a long-term thing, then I think, well for one, mentally I think you prepare a little bit differently.

And like you're saying, you make different decisions to get rid of some of that gear and pass that stuff on or whatever you're going to do as opposed to, yeah, the transition area is kind of what makes it more difficult because you're kind of caught in between, you know, this is only temporary.

And I've noticed that with getting utilities out here and running water and getting hot water going and my solar panels and all that, it's always kind of with the caveat that, well it's temporary. I'm going to have to take all this down. So if it's a more permanent fixture, I think you can kind of dig in a little more.

And you can customize. You can customize things more to a permanent lifestyle. Like as far as even making things comfortable, there are things that we've talked about where it's like, well is it worth it to do that? If it's only going to be for this long, is it worth the money and the time investment?

Those kinds of things to where it's kind of a difficult tradeoff sometimes. Right. If you're not going to be somewhere for a long period of time, there seems to be little sense in putting a lot of effort into improving it. Yeah. But I mean there's still the thought in my mind that's like, alright, well how can I make this work?

You know, like if we don't want to go into debt with this huge house, what could we do to really dig in here and make this work? And usually it's a pretty short thought, but it would be possible and change things up a bit. So are you thinking about doing that?

Are you going to take out a loan? Are you going to kind of build the house little by little while you can? What are you thinking about doing? We've weighed a lot of options. I think we're still, I mean we're so far down the path with the house. You know, blueprints are done.

Well we thought we were a lot further along. We just found out the other day that our contractor didn't pass the credit check. So we're like two weeks out from closing on our construction loan and now we don't have a general contractor. Ooh, bummer. So you know, some interesting thoughts go through your head.

I think we're still going to stay the course and do the loan. With the kids and everything, I think we've talked about it and that's kind of the lifestyle we want to have for them to grow up in. Not necessarily this. Right. Yeah, and we also, I mean when we first were looking at the land and I think when we first bought it, we talked about so many different options.

I mean I was checking out books from the library on like straw bale and adobe and just all sorts of alternative building materials. We've talked for a long time about SIPs or structurally insulated panels. Growing up my parents built their house and they used adobe and they did it all themselves.

Growing up it was a great experience and I got to see them do that and be a part of it. I've always kind of thought that's what I would do. The original plan was to buy some land and I'll build a house myself because I can do that. The more we got into it and everything and where we live, permits are insanely expensive.

I can't be a husband and a father and a good employee and do all this while I'm building a house successfully. So you know. You're in California, right? Yeah. Southern California. So you're right in Code Happy, in the middle of, sounds like Code Happy Municipality, is that right? Yeah.

Yeah, we're in San Diego County. What made you choose to move there? I grew up here. I spent some time here as a kid and then my parents moved to Arizona when I was in middle school or something like that. It took me a while to get back but I can't imagine being anyplace else.

I spent some time on the East Coast and up in the Northwest and there's just really no place like it. And we have family close too. One of Noah's sisters lives close and my parents are just like 10 miles away or something. Right. So you're going with more just traditional kind of mainstream construction methods then on the house project that you're working on?

Yeah. After looking at a lot of the options, I mean it's hard to find a general contractor that'll do alternative building. And then I looked at things like shipping container homes and a whole bunch of different stuff. But it's harder to get them permitted a lot of times, especially shipping containers specifically.

I was really excited about those and getting them permitted and letting, the county letting you build that way is really difficult. And it's like you were saying, Code Happy. So greasing all those palms is not financially viable. So after looking at all the options, and I wanted to try to stay as green as possible.

So the SIP panels and stuff like that, great insulation, all this kind of stuff. But the more research I did, the payback on it was like 80 years. So it's great that I'm saving electricity but if it takes me 80 years to pay them off, I'm not really helping me out.

Right. It's interesting because it brings up a, brings up the conundrum. And I face exactly the same thing. So I live in West Palm Beach, Florida. And I'm very interested in, I don't know what the right term would be, I guess I'm interested in architectural methods. And I find it a constant learning curve.

Because it's easy to dismiss everything that we do today as being without form or without reason. Why do we build these houses out of this material? Why do we build it in such a way? And it's easy to kind of just on the one hand dismiss the work of many knowledgeable people who have developed the systems that we use.

And I'm guilty of that myself many times, of just kind of saying, "Ah, this is all stupid. This stinks. We should all go and live in rammed earth houses. We should all build earth ships." Something like that. But as the more I look at it though, and the more I study, I see that there really are some interesting techniques that just don't seem to be applied.

I look around and I look at the developments in the communities and things around here and I just say, "They all look very pretty. And they're very strong for hurricanes, but they're woefully inefficient as a energy inefficient. And they're just expensive to live in and expensive to maintain." But the problem is I choose to live in West Palm Beach, Florida and the code system is very well intentioned to keep everyone safe and to keep the houses safe, but it destroys any possibility of using some of the alternative methods.

So I look longingly at some of the alternative methods and think and constantly design in my head how I could design a house that wouldn't need to run an air conditioner year round in West Palm Beach, Florida. And I've got some pretty good ideas that I think would work, but I can't do them.

And it's very frustrating, at least to me. Yeah, I hear you. I'm kind of in the same boat there. I think, I kind of go back and forth. I know the codes are there to help protect people and stuff like that, but essentially I'm kind of like, "Well, it's my land.

It's my house. I will take those risks." But I guess down the line that would matter more. But a lot of the alternative methods and stuff like that, a lot of it is code issues or just the price points haven't gotten down to a point where it's reasonable to do those things.

It's unfortunate that it's worse for the environment, but it's more financially viable to run your air conditioning all year long as opposed to doing a poured concrete house or using the SIPs. That's unfortunate, but until more bigger builders start using those, that technology isn't going to come down in price.

Until they're able to mass produce and market it in such a way, you're going to have those high prices. I think in our lifetime, I think we'll see it where we really adopt those methods and the price comes down to a point where it's sustainable and it makes sense for builders.

Unfortunately, we're not there yet. Here's what I want, and maybe you've seen it. I haven't seen anyone do this yet, but I want completely modular building structures. I want to buy when getting started. I want somebody, and I don't care if this is built off of shipping containers, built it on trailers, built it with ...

It should be easy to create this, but basically, build for me a ... Let me buy a living room unit, a bedroom unit, a kitchen unit, and a bathroom unit and start my house with that. Let's say the thing costs me 20 grand, 5,000 bucks a unit, and put it on my land, put a concrete pad in, whatever needs to be done.

Then when I have a baby, I need another bedroom, I call up and I order another bedroom unit and bolt it on. If I need another bathroom, I order another bathroom and bolt on another bedroom and bolt on what I need. Then when I'm done with it, I just turn around and I sell ...

Kids grow up, move out of the house. They sell one of the bedrooms and the truck comes by, picks it up, takes it on to somebody else who bolts it on to their house. That's my idea for how I think housing should work. I think it'd be great. It'd be like the IKEA kind of housing.

You just pick this model and bam. I just found somebody in France who has built a house. It wasn't quite this way, but they built the entire thing out of rigid foam, structural foam panels, almost maybe about three feet wide, about two feet thick. The panels were about 40 feet long.

They put the entire thing together with these panels, 40 feet long, meaning the floor and the ... Not the floor, the roof, the actual ceiling. It was load-bearing foam. It was fascinating. The video online looked awesome as far as the technology. I think it's silly that we're building with the same technology that we've been building with for basically hundreds of years without any changes and without any updates.

As we said, codes seem to get in the way. Yeah. I looked at those. The structural insulated panels, I think that's similar to what you're talking about. It's like a particle board on both sides with a sandwich of high-density structural foam in the middle. They're awesome. I think Europe's a little bit, quite a bit ahead of the curve as opposed to us here on adopting stuff like that and making those changes.

Even just taking the smaller step and even just looking at what we call a modular home today or a manufactured home, which we also attempted, being more environmentally friendly because it's all prefab. There's not as much waste. Everybody that we've talked to and told about our project or what we're doing has said, "Well, have you tried modular?" It's unfortunate in some ways also that for one thing, that manufactured housing still has a pretty strong stigma about it as far as resale value and that kind of stuff and having to have it on your title that it's a manufactured house.

It really brings down the value of the home still in a lot of cases. In our experience, what we've looked at, the quality in some instances is not as high. In our attempt, actually, the main reason we wound up not going with modular had to do with the company that we were working with primarily more so than those reasons.

It turns out, too, that going with a traditional build, the projected value of the home is way higher than it would have been with a modular, which is unfortunate. This is interesting how the interplay between the financial markets affects the technology that's used. One of the major problems, at least that I've observed, of all of the alternative designs, whether you're going to build with a geodesic dome or whether you're going to build an earth chip or whether you're going to build a straw bale or a modular house, the problem oftentimes with all except the modular house comes with how do we get financing.

Let's say the house is valued at $50,000, $100,000, $150,000. There are many fewer people who are able to simply pay cash for the house no matter how great it is versus being able to finance it. If you don't fit into the traditional mold, then the finance company often has little ability to know how to work with you.

You're right, exactly on the modular home, is the technology, at least just from my understanding, is vastly superior. There's no reason why you can't use a modular approach to create a phenomenal house. In many ways, some of the biggest buildings in the world are modular buildings. They're all prefab.

They're all planned to bolt together. A skyscraper is basically a system of girders that is you have a certain amount of poured concrete and then the girders are all bolted together and it's all planned out, designed and constructed offsite and disassembled onsite. The financial system and the financing system doesn't support it and then the market has that perception.

We continue to perpetuate the broken cycle simply because that's what is better for our situation. Right? Right. Just because it doesn't fit. Right. If we would have had more, I think we talked about building it a little bit as we go so we wouldn't have to really play that financial game.

But then you're in a situation where the longer it goes on, if you're doing it piece by piece, it goes back to the codes as well. You've only got a certain amount of time where you have to show a certain amount of progress and all these kind of things.

Yeah, maybe it's saving up that much money in a short amount of time wasn't viable for us either. Right. Well, good for you for working hard with what you got. San Diego County is probably not a great place to try to be innovative. Neither is Palm Beach County. But I pay a lot of attention to what some of the guys out and gals up in Utah or up in Tennessee or up in Montana or Wyoming or out in the middle of nowhere or in Texas and non-incorporated areas in Texas where you can just do it.

That's where a lot of the real innovation is happening and I'm excited to see some of the technologies that are being developed there. But good for you for working with what you got. I have one other question for you and then we'll wrap up and anything else that you have to say.

I noticed on your site that you guys do home education with your kids? Yeah, we're actually part of a local charter school. I really like the program a lot. It's a hybrid program. So my oldest, the only one that's formally in school right now, she's in first grade. So she goes to what they call workshop two days a week with a teacher in a classroom environment.

And then the other three days I teach her from home. They provide a standard curriculum and they guide it day by day. This is what you should be doing. But they also allow you a lot of freedom to do things how you want to do them, how best fits for your student and your lifestyle and stuff.

Is that sponsored by the public school system? It is. It's a public school system. It's a public charter. So it does still have to go through all the state standards and all that kind of stuff. But just the actual program itself allows for a lot of individuality and freedom.

How does that benefit you? Why did you decide to participate in that versus just simply designing your own plan for your kids? Well, when we first started considering homeschooling, I thought that that kind of what I thought I did think that it was kind of like either or. Either you go to public school or you go to private school or you homeschool.

I wasn't aware of the hybrid program at all. And I think for a lot of parents, even just considering the choice to homeschool, it can be really intimidating, you know, taking that huge responsibility onto yourself. I did a ton of research and I was all prepared to go it on my own when somebody introduced me to this model.

And I guess my first reaction to it was kind of like, "Wow, it sounds like homeschooling but with training wheels." Yeah, right. It's just kind of like you get to put your feet in the water. What is it like to actually stay home? I mean, I was staying home with my kids all day anyway, but to actually have a formal schooling environment and what is that actually like?

And my daughter, my oldest, she's in first grade, she really, really, really wanted to go to school. And she loves going to class and she loves seeing her friends. So for her, I think it's mainly a social drive that really keeps her wanting to go those two days a week.

As we've gone along these past couple of, you know, kindergarten was our first year and this will be our second. I have. I've kind of craved a little bit more freedom. I've written about it a little bit on the blog, just a little bit. My instincts kind of tend a little bit more toward like the unschooling school of thought where I do, especially at these younger ages, I just kind of want to let them go and play and learn naturally rather than sitting down and here now we have to do this and now we have to fill out this worksheet and that kind of stuff.

So I would like to have a little bit more independence, but she just loves going to class. First grade is fun, right? Oh yeah. So we're just kind of taking it as it goes. Right now this really works for us. And it is nice to be able to spend time with my younger two, those two days when she's in class.

Yeah. I can't imagine anybody objecting to first grade. First grade is fun. Now fourth grade on the other hand, or sixth grade or seventh grade, that's a different question of a first grade. The children are sweet and the activities are fun. You go coloring with your friends. That's a good day.

Exactly. It's when you sit at the desk all day and study a textbook that was put together that's boring as anything. That's when you start to have more challenges. It's interesting that you talk about the new model. I have some good friends of mine who have gone back and forth and they're currently using that model out in Texas.

And they're using, their version is not a charter school. It's a private independent school. But they do, I think it's two days in class and then three days at home. And I think that can really be an advantage for families busy. Especially if you're expecting a new baby. That can really help with some structure that takes a little bit of the stress and the pressure off while still retaining many of the valuable benefits of basically not being in school.

But hopefully avoid the problems of being in school. And I think that's a really great model. I would love to see, one of the things I personally predict, I'd love to see hundreds and hundreds of new models created and new people try things and compete. And I love that that charter school has that model to compete with the other approaches.

What was your path to, why did you, what even raised the idea for you of considering taking charge of your kids' education? I think for me, well, for me, I was public school raised all through K through 12. And I always thought that homeschooled kids were kind of weird.

And so it never really occurred to me to do it until my oldest probably hit around two or three when you start thinking maybe a little bit about preschool or school or just what your options are and that kind of stuff. And it just kind of occurred to me that even within the next couple years or whatever, I wasn't going to be ready to send her to somebody else eight hours a day, you know, and see her less than somebody else was seeing her, you know, and kind of give away that influence and that priority in her life.

And so that's when I really started researching. I started going on homeschooling blogs and I started talking to women that I knew that were homeschooling. And it really changed my perspective on it, you know, because one of the most common questions and the question that I had too was like, "Well, you know, they're never going to be socialized." It's just such an obnoxious question to homeschool moms I have since discovered.

And just kind of having people sit down and be like, "No, no, no. That's silly." Because actually, you know, in many situations, a homeschooled kid is being socialized much more naturally than sitting in a classroom with 30 of his same-aged peers, you know, to only interact with. You know, they're going, they go with me to the grocery.

They go with me everywhere, you know, so they're getting more of an idea of what real life is like. They would just sitting in the classroom eight hours a day, five days a week. Is that what was the, is that the argument that was compelling for you to allay your fears about socialization?

Yeah, pretty much. And just the fact that, I mean, not with regard to socialization, but just the fact that, you know, up until they start school, you teach them everything they know. You know, there's no reason why as soon as they turn five, you know, and that cutoff date passes that you stop knowing more than they do.

You know, you don't lose your ability to teach your children right at that instant, you know, because you don't have a certification or accreditation. Right, right. Yeah, for me, I went along with it because I didn't want to let her go. She's, you know, come back with, and they're like different kids, you know.

I saw it like with my nieces and stuff like that, you know, you kind of see it change, you know. So when Sarah started bringing up, you know, thinking about homeschooling, I was like, yes, let's keep her sheltered some more. I'm not quite ready to let her go. Right, right.

And I think also with the homeschooling model that the charter introduces, I've heard it referred to as a university model, you know, where it is just a couple days a week or whatever, that the family environment in comparison to a public school is a little bit different because there does have to be at least one parent at home with the kids, you know.

One parent has to be involved with that child, you know, day to day and with their education and that kind of stuff. And I think that there's a difference, you know. There's a difference in the culture of the school and in the classroom and the parents that you meet, you know, and then the kids' behavior too, I have to say.

My wife and I, we have one son and he's one year old, so we haven't been, you know, you're a few years ahead of us as far as actual experience. But in watching it, and we hope to take charge of his education at home as well. But in watching it, one of the things that I observe is many times people mix up a lot of words and they use them interchangeably.

So for example, oftentimes we use interchangeably the word school and education. And those words are very different. School versus education is very different if you actually kind of explore some of the nuance. And other things, so for example, I've got issues with, I personally have some issues with how the schooling system works for the negative socialization for the way that you say, like exactly the concern that many people have about kids that are educated at home.

The same concern that they have, I have the opposite concern. And I've observed that kids are probably going to turn out just about like their parents. So if the parents are awkward, socially awkward, it's likely that the kids are going to be socially awkward. And if the parents are socially adept, then it's likely that the kids will be socially adept because they're going to model their parents.

So people oftentimes have met, we've all met, man, there are some awkward kids in school every day, right? There are some very socially awkward kids. I mean, there are some socially awkward parents in every part of society. So I think that's a poor basis of judging the results that somebody gets with an educational system.

I look at it and I say, the idea that the valuable socialization is from a classroom filled with eight year olds or filled with 15 year olds, that that's the valuable socialization. This is a very strange concept in the history of the world. Throughout history, society has always been integrated.

And you've had an integration of children, fully integrated with parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, the entire community. I forget the person who popularized the saying, but the saying of it takes a village to raise a child. Life has always been integrated. This is how we learn. And yet in our society and in modern society, we've embarked on this very strange idea that somehow the best person to teach a 13 year old girl socialization skills is another 13 year old girl.

Right, exactly. Really not the best plan in my opinion. I think we see the results. Look at the frustration in children. And I learned this even from my own personal experience. I was, with the exception of third grade when I was in public school, I was educated at home through seventh grade and then I went to a traditional private school.

And in seventh grade, I always felt like I got along great with adults. I just fit in well in society. And then I had to learn all these new skills of somehow fitting into these weird cliques and the cool kids and the not cool kids and all this weird stuff I'd never had to deal with.

And it wasn't until I finally got to college again that I started to feel kind of more normal because people backed off of the silly high school stuff. And then when I became an adult and I recognized, wow, people don't care about what I look like and they don't care about these silly things.

It's just they're interested in my ideas. It was such a freeing concept that I hadn't had since I was in sixth grade. Well, it's interesting too that you bring that up because one of the conversations that I have with one of my brothers, he doesn't have any kids yet, but he's so interested in our journey with the homeschooling and stuff.

His point is that we went through school and I have four brothers and I think all of us kind of took our knocks as far as getting picked on. And it was kind of like, well, even though that was a terrible experience, bullies and having to deal with that kind of stuff, it teaches you empathy.

And he was like, "Do you feel like your kids are going to be missing out if they don't experience that or just being picked on by other kids of their age?" And I don't think that there's any parent out there that's like, "No, I really want my kid to get picked on for a little while." But I think that one of the biggest things is that most of our generation was public schooled and that's all we know.

And if that's not the right way or if there's other ways, it kind of makes it feel like our experience wasn't necessary. It makes it invalid almost. I feel like a lot of people feel in danger of having their experience invalidated. I went through public school, so you have to go through public school.

You're going to learn the same things that I learned. You're going to go through that school of hard knocks. And I think it takes courage to look back at that and be like, "No, maybe that wasn't necessary. Maybe there is a different way. Maybe there is a better way for my kids." I think you just proved your concern even in the statement that you just made.

If school were about education, then we wouldn't have any concerns about the social fear of, "Well, no. You've got to go through what I went through." If school were about education, we would applaud those who had achieved an excellent education. But our concerns are generally from a social perspective.

If people aren't taught their place, if people aren't taught their class, if people are not taught these certain things, whether it's -- I won't give any examples, but if people are not taught this common core of what they need to know for everyone to be the same, then how can our society function?

I think you just proved the point, even in what you were saying, logically, that it's less about education and it's very much about organizing society, at least in my observation. Yeah, I think that's valid. It is interesting, though. I have a friend, a close friend, who was homeschooled her whole life, but she grew up very isolated.

She was raised on a mountaintop, actually. Really? The neighbors who lived in a bus, but that's beside the point. She actually went through kindergarten through her sophomore year of high school before she finally was like, "Okay, I'm going to public school now." She really felt like she was missing out.

She felt isolated. She felt like she didn't want to be homeschooled anymore. She kind of held her hand. She said, "I'm going to high school now." It's interesting talking to her. Her kids aren't at school age yet. As far as I know, she hasn't decided what path she's going to take.

From talking to her, she said that one of the things that was really neat was that when she went to high school, she had so many fears that she was going to be so far behind in her education. She felt like she'd missed out on all this stuff. Then going to school, she was like, "Oh, no.

I'm ahead. I know all this stuff already." It didn't take very much at all for her to figure out where she was and what she was doing and to assimilate into the culture. I think that that's another fear, too, that people have is that, "I take my kid out of this environment and someday they want to go back.

They're going to have this huge gap, all these learning gaps or something like that." I just don't think that that's necessarily a realistic fear because there are so many things that we think that we have to teach children and that we have to cram into their brain at a really early age.

They have to read by this age. They have to know their numbers and how to add and all these things. As you get older, those things are really, really easy and quickly taught and quickly learned. Any learning gaps that there might be are pretty quickly covered once you realize that they're there.

It's like being an adult. You realize, "Oh, I never learned about this era of history." Then you pick up some books and you read about it. You watch some movies and there you go. Gap filled. Right. Right. I'm interested, even on this show, about some of the ways that if we take a little bit more interest in thinking farther ahead than general society does.

The problem that general society has, especially the problem that politicians and policymakers and bureaucrats face, is that they have to think of the common good. They have to think of all people. They have to design systems that work for all people. If they're going to design a schooling system, they need to design it in a way that's going to work for everybody.

Maybe they'll have a little bit of variability there. You may have a gifted program, but there you have two programs. You've got to fit everybody into one of these two tracks. As individuals taking charge of our own lives and hopefully our own children's educations, we don't have that same constraint.

We can customize things exactly based upon our goals and based upon our kids' goals. When you look at the incredible start that you can give to a child, whether it's from an educational perspective, connecting them not with the teacher who happens to be the teacher in the local school, but rather with a world-class teacher who's the best in the world in the subject that they're interested in, or whether it's not designing the curriculum that has to work for everyone, but rather let's do this world-class curriculum.

We don't read textbooks. We read primary documents or something along those lines. Or whether it's just the financial perspectives. I know many have read and met many home-educated kids who finished their bachelor's degree from an accredited university by the time of 18. You can basically dispense with the idea of having to deal with that stuff after the primary years and you can really help a student go out ahead if they're academically gifted.

Or you can do, I'm getting ready to bring a guy on the show who all of his sons so far, his three older sons and his two others are on track for this, have been able to purchase a home debt-free by the time they were in their 20s and got married.

Well, that happened because they were educated at home and were able to really focus on vocational skills that then they could use to enhance their life. So I think even from a personal finance perspective, it's an incredibly exciting opportunity when you think of how we can really set our children on a stronger course than perhaps we had the opportunity to go on.

Absolutely, yeah. So anything else, any other ideas that you have or anything else that you'd like to share before we wrap up? I don't think so. I think we've pretty much covered the bases. Well, I would just encourage you guys to keep doing what you're doing and keep writing honestly about what your experiences are.

And remember the famous wise words of philosophy, "This too shall pass." So hopefully soon you'll meet your new little one and all will be forgotten as you watch the house go up. And in the meantime, I wish you great wisdom as you face all of the challenges with getting the project done.

I know it's going to be a draining, it's going to be a very challenging and draining process, but the end result, I'm sure you will enjoy living in your house much more after having spent the time in the bus. So your website is... I should mention we're cultivating a lot of gratitude.

Exactly. Your website is littlebusontheprairie.com. Is there anything else you'd like to mention before we wrap up? As we go here, where people can find you or anything like that? No, we're not very social media savvy. That's all we got. You've got three kids. There's your social media. Turn off the phones and spend time with your kids.

Thank you guys for taking the time to come on the show. I really have enjoyed chatting with you. Thank you, Josh. It was a pleasure. Told you it'd be fun. So happy Friday to you. Let that send you off with an idea and maybe this weekend you could be thankful for the house that you're living in with the air conditioner that you're living in.

I think that it may have helped to bring out some information as far as some of the good things and the bad things and just the challenges of life sometimes of working through with contractors and working through trying to figure out how do we afford the lifestyle that we have.

In many ways, it's just kind of a dose of reality. So thank you for listening. Have a great weekend, everybody. Next week, I've got a number of shows lined up for you. I've got three interviews at least in the hopper already which are excellent interviews. I think you're really going to enjoy those details next week.

I'm not sure what order I'm going to play them in. And then I may actually run a couple more interviews next week because I've got some projects I need to finish up and I may not have the time to finish the teaching shows that I need to do prior to next week.

Thanks so much for being here. Have a great weekend, everybody. Get the perfect gift for the wine lover in your life at WineEnthusiast.com. Personalized wine openers? WineEnthusiast.com. Cheese boards? WineEnthusiast.com. Glassware? WineEnthusiast.com. A 500-bottle wine fridge? Yep. Wine Enthu... you get the picture. Find the best prices on the perfect wine gift for you, I mean, for someone special this year.

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