Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less. Today I probably should just skip that intro and say hello, my friends, because I don't have a show here, just a couple of minutes of me chatting.

I don't have an outline. I don't have a script. Just simply wanted to get on here and explain myself of where I've been the last few days and also update you, my listening friends and listening family here at the Radical Personal Finance community, to say that my wife and I invite you to rejoice with us in the birth of our new baby.

We've been celebrating here the birth of a brand new baby boy. A mama is doing well. Our son is doing very well. And so we have been rejoicing here in the Sheets household and also adjusting. Those two things come together. Anytime you have the birth of a new child, it takes a period of adjustment.

So that's the basic announcement for you to know. And I want to just again invite you to rejoice with us. Everyone is doing well. And it's also the explanation for a little bit of my – after a period of a lot of consistency here in the show. It's also a reason for kind of the ups and downs.

Frankly, I have various show outlines that have been swirling around in my head that I thought about trying to integrate today. I've had show outlines called What I Love About Working From Home and What I Hate About Working From Home. I've wanted to get that show done for a while.

Another show has been All the Ways to Save Money on Birthing Without Endangering the Life of Your Spouse or Your Baby and various other things like that. But I'm just not prepared to go through those right now. I don't have the mental clarity to do a good job on those shows.

But I will say this, that one of the favorite things that I have – one of my favorite things about the lifestyle that my wife and I have chosen with my ability to work from home and to be near home really comes out in times like this where as we've worked towards the birth and those last few weeks of pregnancy which are the most difficult – often the most difficult weeks of pregnancy and then also the birth and then the first few weeks after birth, I really appreciate the opportunity that I have to be with my family, to be near to my family and to have a pretty flexible schedule.

I know that when I don't publish a show, I know that I leave some of you hanging and with a boring commute. I appreciate that. I'm sorry about that. But I also know that you're probably not going to come and beat my front door down with pitchforks and torches.

I know that I can be flexible and free to focus on my family which is a very high priority for me and I really, really appreciate about that. I do just want to say thank you because I couldn't do it without your listening. I couldn't do it without your support.

I wouldn't have the opportunity for that. This time around, I've tried to be very available here in my family partly because it's one of my regrets about the birth of our last child. Our last child was born a couple of years ago and during that period of time, I had just launched Radical Personal Finance on a full-time basis.

I was thick in the middle of working and doing the show and a whole bunch of other things going on. So, it was that time I took very little time after the birth for any kind of special family bonding, family adventures, etc. So, this time, I've been trying to take a little bit more time and really build some memories and love and support my wife and children during this period.

So that explains a little bit of my absence. Birth went well and I probably should do an entire episode on some of the things relating to finances and birth. Not ready to do that today but if you would like, go back and listen to episode 212 of Radical Personal Finance.

That was a joint episode that my wife and I did together after the birth of our second child. We talked about – that episode was titled "Comments We Had a Baby Girl, Comments on Preparing for Childbirth with Mrs. RPF Herself." So if you're interested in hearing my wife and her voice and some of the things relating to that second birth, that episode is out there, episode 212 of Radical Personal Finance.

We had a home birth this time. We recommend that to you not just as a money-saving technique, obviously, before the emails start flooding in. Obviously, saving money is not a primary goal during birthing. The safety and health and well-being of my wife and our children is the primary goal.

But as a nice benefit, one great thing is that home birthing is very economically viable and probably much more important because I would pay extra to do it the way that we've done it and we've been blessed to have low-risk pregnancies, which is a real benefit. Not everybody can effectively and safely plan for home birth.

But one of the benefits of it is just a much better experience. My wife and I, after every baby, we have looked at each other and just thought, "Man, this was such a great experience to be able to be together, she and I fully involved in the childbirth process, to be able to be at home in our comfortable surroundings where you can make the environment the way that you want it to be, to be able to have full control and full authority over how you want to birth, not to have a bunch of people in uniforms bustling in and out and disrupting things and telling you, "Sit here, stand there, do this, do that." We've worked with a midwife who helps out with some of the helpful medical things to make sure that baby's doing okay and that mom is doing okay.

But other than that, midwives generally don't operate with the same authoritarian mindset that a physician staff and nurse staff does in a hospital. So we've just thoroughly loved the experience of having our babies at home, would highly recommend it to you if you have any interest or have done any research.

We've found the process to be extremely, extremely rewarding. And this third child was absolutely that way. And I tell you what, for all of you men and dads, for women I know that bearing a child can be an extremely empowering thing. It's one of those major things that separates the girls from the boys, to be able to have a baby and to hold life in your hand and to recognize the fact that your body created that is extraordinarily beautiful and empowering and precious.

And as a husband and as a father, I'll tell you this, for those of you aspiring husbands or aspiring fathers or who will face that in the future, if you want to feel like a man, deliver your own child. Work with your wife and deliver your own child. Having done it three times now, I found it to be a very just empowering thing.

And my wife and I really treasure the memories of the births of our children. After this was our third baby, we feel like we're – at least I do feel like I'm getting a little bit more of the groove. Every childbirth is different. But with this one, I was much more relaxed, was able to really – third time around makes it a lot easier than the first time.

I tell people I'm practically a midwife now. A little backup career if I ever have a problem. Male midwives are not common in the United States but you never know. I know that in Europe they seem to be more common than they are here. So maybe there's a new market for me, the big hairy bearded male midwife as a backup retirement plan.

Not a bad financial independence business. You can come and go with some freedom. Obviously, when you're on call, you're just like an obstetrician. When mama's having the baby, you got to go. But you have some freedom and flexibility with your daily schedule. It's a very diverse experience. I'm primarily kidding.

It's not quite for me. But it was a great birth. We're really rejoicing. The baby is doing very well. Healthy nine-pound baby boy, he's doing very well and we're very thrilled. We've been praying and praying and praying for a happy baby. Our first two babies were just miserable as babies, absolutely miserable.

The second one, even more so than the first one we thought was bad and the second one was awful. Just very, very sick for months and months. She had colic and she had, what was it? Forgive me. I can't remember the medical name. GERD. GERD and colic. It basically just means her digestive system didn't work and the stomach acid would come up out of her stomach and burn her esophagus.

There was very little that the pediatrician could do. Very little. You just basically had to wait until they grow out of it. But it made for an extremely difficult and very trying first few months. We are rejoicing that this baby is happy and contented and we are thrilled with his arrival.

Just working on his integration into the family. Another tip for those of you who are new parents. We took the baby to the chiropractor. We were talking with her. She had just recently had a baby. And I'll affirm this. My wife and I, we've developed our standard little speech to give to prospective parents about all the things that they need to know.

And I'll give it to you here as my listening friends and family. Just simply to say, one of the most important things is to recognize that it's important to prepare for the birth. If you're preparing for your first child or beyond your first child, preparing for the birth is very important.

But nobody stumbles into that. You've got nine months to think about it. You've got a lot of time. There are plenty of people that want to tell you stories and give you advice. There's lots of things out there that you can study. But I'll tell you this. The thing that caught my wife and me blindsided, that blindsided us on the birth of our first baby and even as we were talking with our chiropractor on the birth of her baby, the thing that really blindsided us was recognizing how difficult it can be in the first days and weeks after the birth.

Breastfeeding is very difficult. I know I talked about that with the physician that I interviewed last week. And breastfeeding is, Marilyn, I forget her last name, breastfeeding can be very difficult making the transition. Babies, for those of you who are not parents, the common joke to make to new parents is, "Well, how's the sleep?

You're not getting any sleep." It's rather a silly joke. Most people make it with the best of intentions because they mean the best. They don't know what else to say. People who aren't parents don't know what else to say to parents and so they talk about and make a joke about the sleep.

It's the standard thing. But the reason that new parents' sleep schedules get mixed up is very simple. Babies' tummies are really small and babies can't go more than a few hours or they shouldn't go more than a few hours without eating. Some people, if your baby is not waking up in the night to eat, that's a problem.

You need to set a timer and get yourself up and wake the baby up. It's very important in the first few days and weeks of a new baby's life to do that intentionally. If your baby doesn't want to wake up, you need to wake them up to make sure that they eat.

So that just leads to disrupted sleep schedules where instead of getting a full night, you wind up getting snatches of sleep here and there. And it's just very challenging in those first few weeks. So far so great. We are enjoying the process and really enjoying the addition of this new baby but still focusing on doing very little work and trying to spend all of my time maintaining and building back and getting the family back on schedule and back into a really workable routine.

In other news, I'll go ahead and just make this a stream of consciousness report related to children. My oldest child, my son, has successfully made his first investment. So of course being Mr. Radical Personal Finance, I'm very proud of him. In short, and at some point, I've got a book outline written on this.

We'll see if I can get the project finished at some point. But in short, he has been accumulating his money steadily. He is three years, three and a half years old at this point. And I've struggled with a lot of different approaches as far as should you give a child an allowance or not.

In general, I'm opposed to the giving of an allowance primarily because it sounds a lot like welfare. It sounds a lot like an entitlement mentality. That said, I have chosen up till now to go ahead and to give my son an allowance. I give him a weekly allowance at this point.

I intend to cut it off as soon as he is able to work and earn money reliably by the sweat of his brow. So I'm picturing that being around six or seven years old, something like that. And the theory that I have behind this at the moment is that I want him to become accustomed to handling money so that it's a natural and normal thing.

And I just can't come up with any way for him to handle money on his own unless it comes from me. And I want him to have practice of handling money from a very early age. So what I've done up till now is, I think I started when he turned three, is I have given him a three-quarter per week allowance, so 75 cents a week.

Yes, I know I'm overly generous with my child, but hey, it adds up quick if you have it in time. So I give him 75 cents a week. And then what he does is he has three – well, they're Ziploc bags is what we use. One is for saving, one is for investing and one is – sorry.

One is for spending, one is for investing and one is for giving. And so each week, he puts a quarter into each of those bags. And of course, it's important. If he's going to have money, no money should come into or out of his hands that's not tracked, right?

Fundamental rule of radical personal finance is that every dollar coming in and every dollar going out should be tracked. So we have little ledgers on the cards and of course I write it for him. But I explain to him and we keep a running tally of each bag. And as he finds money on the street, I encourage him to find money and to put that money in there and we divide it up, I change it out.

And so every time he receives money, we divide it into three. And I found this to be – so far, I'm really happy with the decision I've made to pursue this. It helps a lot for – I have found as a young father, it helps a lot for your child to have a spending budget.

That way, it gives you a good way to divert some of the requests for things. A lot of the things that he sees that he'd like to buy, the monster truck or the things in the stores then allows me to go back to, "Oh, well, do you have enough money saved for that in your spending bag yet?" And allows him to do that.

And he's accumulated his money. I remember some months ago, he was very excited. He went and bought his first Hot Wheels car all with his own dollar. That was a very exciting day for him. So he's been doing some purchases on the spending category. But we were struggling with the investing category.

It's a real challenge. How do you teach an almost four-year-old to invest their money in such a way that they'll understand and gain the concept of investing but to do it with a couple or $3 budget? It's not an easy nut to crack. How do you profitably invest $3 or $4 in a way that's useful?

You can't go and buy a stock for a four-year-old. That's meaningless to them. They can't do complex mathematics and work a compound interest chart at this point in time. So I've kept my eyes open and I posted this question in the Radical Personal Finance Facebook group at some point in the past.

And some listeners had some great suggestions. But this last week, he had the opportunity to buy some honey. So he bought some honey from some family members who were in the honey business. And he bought it at wholesale, little mini bears. He'd saved up $6 in his investing money.

And so he bought five little honey bears from his family members at wholesale. And he turned around and as people have been coming to our house to rejoice with us and bring us food after the birth of our baby and see the new baby and everything, he has been selling them honey, which warms my little heart to see a little salesman going out there and in complete innocence say, "I'm here to try to sell you some honey.

Would you like to buy my honey?" So success. He sold all five of his honey bears, doubled up his money, and he's rolling in the dough. So we made a little ledger for the investment, showed him his profit, put the seed capital back in, split the profit out into the three categories.

And so I'm really happy with the lesson. I was just enjoying the fact that he – and he enjoyed the process. It's just very rewarding as a father to see just the innocence of a child. And yet I know the lessons that he's learning, the lessons of selling. Not everybody said yes, which is good.

Learned to take rejection at an early age, learning to have success. He doesn't quite – can't work all the math on the quarters and the dollar bills and the profit and a lot of it is over his head. But I'm really happy with the progress that he's making. So I've really been enjoying that the last few days.

And it has also amply demonstrated to me once again that profits are better than wages. I intend to teach my children to earn wages. I think it's very important for children to earn wages, not to be exclusively focused on profits. I think that if a child doesn't master the skill of work, hard work, diligent work, work for other people, it's my opinion that they miss out on some very important lessons.

That said, profits are better than wages as Jim Rohn used to remind us so consistently. Profits are better than wages and just seeing how he's been able to turn his quarter a week income into – and a $5 investment where he doubled up in one day, doubled up to $10 was pretty good.

I was refreshed on some of my own lessons on finance just in watching that. And we have lots more lessons planned for him. Of course, I'm taking good notes so that I can pass along. And here, for free, here, for free, I'll finish out my kind of economic theory on children since I talked about allowances and then with that, I'll wrap up this ramble.

My theory is at this stage, I want to give him money so that he has practice handling it. There's so much value in every week taking these quarters, setting them aside, putting them in the investing, putting them in the spending, putting them in the giving. It gives him opportunities to look for how can he give money away.

It's a challenge. How do you give away meaningfully $5 in a way that a child is going to understand what they're doing? But I think that's very beneficial. The accumulating – we don't call it saving. We call it spending. But over time, naturally, the slow accumulation of money is delayed gratification.

So he's learning the skill of delaying gratification for things he wants. He's learning to understand how much things cost. For example, we go to Costco and he has his eyes on the $200 drive-around cars. Well, if he gets one of those, it's going to come out of dad's pocketbook or grandparent's pocketbook obviously.

But it helps him to see the scale of how much money different things cost. And so I'm really pleased with that and then the investing as well. I've got lots of plans for the investing. But my theory is that by giving him an allowance until he can work and earn wages, then that will help him to build the skills of money management so that it will be second nature.

I want to start young so that it's second nature to him. Then when he's able to work, I don't know the age. I haven't been there as a father. But my guess is seven, eight, nine, ten years old where he'll start to be more of a help and not a hindrance and we can arrange little jobs whether it's cutting grandma's yard or whether it's cleaning the toilets for the man next door or whatever those circumstances are that we can find for him to earn wages.

Then at that point, my plan is to discontinue the allowance or change its character because the third phase, or at least keep the allowance so small that it's relatively meaningless compared to what he can earn from working to find out that working is how you earn money. That's the most effective way.

Money doesn't just come and flow to you in checks that show up for your existing. Money comes from work. But then the third phase, of course, is my hope is that a lot of the expenses that I as a parent owe to my child just simply for my parental duty for their care, that I'll be able to transition those over to him.

For example, I think that there's no reason why a 12-year-old shouldn't be responsible for their own clothing purchases. My intention is to figure out what is an appropriate budget at that point in time for a child to spend on a child's clothing, to lay out the appropriate standards for the child's clothing and say, "Here are the standards.

Here are our parental standards for the type of clothing we wear." Then hopefully by that time, we'll have taught him how to shop. Here's what you get if you shop in this manner. Here's what you get if you do this other thing, et cetera, and to transition the budget over.

He will still have income coming in from me, but it'll be income that's responsible to provide for those maintenance items. That's my hope. So I'll expand on all this in the future, but spend a lot of time thinking about it, reading what other parents have done, learning from what has gone well, et cetera, and that's where I'm at at the moment, subject to change.

So that's a little insight into Joshua's week. That's what's going on around here. I'll be back with you as soon as I can, but number one priority right now is my wife and our family. So with that, I'm going to end today's show and get back to it. Talk with you soon.

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