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It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Today we continue our 7 Rings of Freedom series.

This series is intended for me to share with you some ideas that I believe will help you to live a freer life. After all, one of the major reasons why people are pursuing financial independence is to experience more personal freedom. And I believe that that is an excellent way to achieve more personal freedom.

We will talk about that as this 7th Ring, true financial independence, the ability to live off of the income from your investments, without question, brings you more freedom and more independence. However, I'm convinced there are a number of things that you can do prior to financial independence that will help you to enjoy much more of that freedom and independence.

Some of these things are fairly well talked about. We'll talk about living free of debt. We'll talk about entrepreneurship. But some of these things are, in my opinion, under-discussed. For example, today's topic about spousal liberty, family liberty. I'm sharing this series from personal experience. All of these things are things that I have done and I didn't realize how good my decisions would have been until I worked my way through them.

And I've come to the point where, although I'm not yet financially independent, working on it, but not yet there, I already live a freer lifestyle than anybody that I know. And I live as free of a lifestyle as I can imagine, and in some cases, freer than I can imagine people who are truly, you know, totally financially independent.

More opportunities, more interest, etc. Now, I'm looking forward to financial independence, but these are some things that I have done that have really been helpful to me. And so today, I'm going to talk to you about the value of having a stay at home wife. Both the financial value and the way that that has impacted my life positively for tremendous personal freedom.

I'm going to try to sell you on the idea. For those of you who are interested, some people don't need any selling. This is just absolutely the way that we're going to structure our family. Some people, they're like, "Absolutely not. I'm never going to do that." Okay, well, tune out here.

But for those of you who are in the middle, who've thought about this, who've considered it, I'm going to share some personal experiences as to why I believe that for a couple to make this decision is one of the most profoundly impactful and freeing decisions. Now, I didn't know what order to put these in, so I just picked my own personal order.

Because we're going to talk about things like entrepreneurship down the road, which is also a very freeing decision. But this is one of the things that has improved my life in innumerable ways. What I have found is that having a wife who does not have a paid job outside of the house has been one of the most freeing and positive and profitable, financially profitable lifestyle decisions that we could have made.

And it's been that way for me, and it's been that way for her. For both of us, it has tremendously improved our lives. Now, I'll share with you a little bit of the backstory. This isn't something that was necessarily a big deal to me when I was younger, before the time I was planning to get married.

Didn't really think much about it, really at all. I was raised in a home where my mom was always home when I was younger. And then, I guess about when I was in my 10, 11, 12 years old, when I was in seventh grade, my mom took a job at a local private school so that our family could afford the tuition payments there.

And so she worked at that job at the private school for a number of years, all the years that I was through high school. And then after we all graduated from high school, then she left that job and she went back home to become a stay-at-home wife and mother again.

So, obviously, being raised in that kind of environment, I just intuited that lifestyle naturally. That's different than a lot of people. But I didn't think a lot about it. I didn't pay much attention to it. When my wife and I first married, we didn't have these long, drawn-out conversations of, "This is exactly what we're going to do." But we both had a pretty obvious and clear plan that when we had children, that she would be a stay-at-home mom.

That was important to us for the health and well-being of our children. But when we first married, my wife had a job. She had the job that she had for years and I was working, had a business. She had a job. And so we continued to have those jobs for the first year of our marriage.

And then we conceived our first baby. And sometime before the birth, I forget exactly the timeline, she submitted her resignation and she quit her job to be home to prepare for the birth of our first child. And up until that time, I did not realize how annoying it was to have two full-time jobs in the family.

Now, in many ways, we had a better, freer situation than a lot of people because we lived fairly light. We were fairly young. We had minimal obligations. When I, prior to marriage, I withdrew from all the previous things, all the boards that I had been on, all the community organizations I'd volunteered with.

I just wanted all that stuff out of my life when I was entering into a family life. And so we had a fairly simple life. We lived in a small apartment. It made things fairly easy and simple for us. But all of a sudden, my life improved immeasurably once my wife was home.

Now, at that point, she was quite pregnant, as I imagine, and the baby was, of course, going to change things. But my life improved immeasurably. And I had not realized how much nicer things would be if my wife had more time. She became more relaxed. She had more energy, was able to do more interesting things.

Our food became more interesting. She had time for some personal growth activities and personal entertainment and things that she'd previously ignored because she had time to be at home. And as a husband, it made me feel awesome to see that improvement for her. It made me feel really great to see how much more she was enjoying not having to go to work and report to a boss every day.

And in time, I've came to really, really appreciate how much better my life was getting when I had a wife who had the time and the freedom to focus on me and our household and our family's needs and goals, instead of a wife who was torn in two directions, trying to produce a profit for her employer, while also trying to care for our family.

Now, we came to that decision fairly quickly. It was a little over a year of marriage, something like that. She quit very quickly. But at this point, when I look back, if knowing what I now know, I wish she had quit faster, because our lives became much, much better.

Her life and my life became much, much better. Now, interestingly, in addition to that, our financial opportunities expanded significantly. And I think one of the most under discussed components of financial productivity, especially for married couples, is just simply how hard it is for two people who are engaged in careers, especially if they have children, most importantly, of course, if they have children, let's not fool ourselves.

But it's very hard to build two profitable and productive careers and to have a quality home life, a quality family life. Now, if a couple does not have children, and if a couple lives a very simple lifestyle, don't have a big house, it's a very simple lifestyle, and they don't want children, and they're both going to be involved in careers, then I think that it's fairly obvious that that decision right there, they can still be extremely financially productive.

If you can put a $250,000 salary on top of another $250,000 salary and have the savings of living together, having things concentrated, etc., you have a great opportunity for wealth. And I think that there's no question that if that couple continues to work together and both continue to earn lots of money and contribute lots of money, they're going to be really wealthy.

And financially, I can't make the argument with a straight face that somehow if the husband or the wife goes home and stays at home, they're going to be better off financially. I do think that the lifestyle can improve, but when you make lots and lots of money, if you have lots of money, you can buy a lot of things done and still be in good shape.

But the wrinkle comes in if you desire children, and if you desire to have a quality, rewarding, fulfilling family life. I don't see how it's possible for a couple where both the husband and the wife have normal jobs, I don't see how it's possible for either of them to really succeed in a career without facing a major problem and having your family life really suffer.

And I think it's an extremely inefficient model to pursue. In fact, it's the worst model to pursue. Time and time again, I find myself doing consultations with clients where both the husband and the wife have good professional jobs. And my answer to them all the time is basically, "Yeah, you're doing fine.

You have good incomes, and that's great." They say, "Joshua, how do we lower our tax bill?" And my answer is simply, "You can't. There is nothing that you can do if both a husband and a wife earn high W-2 incomes. You are the most highly taxed possible household in existence.

And what's worse is that you have the highest possible personal expenses in existence." So it's an incredibly inefficient model. And then when you bring in the demands of children, and you bring in normal, loving parents who want the best for their children and want a strong family life, it's almost impossible to do that and succeed at a career.

If you want to really make a lot of money, if you want to really build a big business, it will require a huge amount of time and a huge amount of energy. And if you feel like your children are being neglected because of the time and the energy required for you to build your career, you're probably not going to build that career.

Now, when you think it through and you say, "Well, what's the marker of my children being neglected?" Well, usually it's just lack of time with parents. Complete lack of time with parents. I've known and worked with some very successful couples, big career for husband, big career for wife, massive income levels, massive levels of wealth, who can afford to hire the very best caretakers for their children.

Live-in nanny, live-in au pair, housekeepers for everything, the world's best teachers, nanny to take the children back and forth from the best school in the community, etc. Can those parents make a lot of money? Yeah, they can. My experience has been the majority of the time though, they see how their lack of presence is having an impact on their children.

Now, whether that comes out in the short term or the long term, don't know. And every couple has to do with the very best that they believe, what they believe is best for their family. But I think often it's just simply an unnecessary cost. It's an unnecessary cost to the family.

And yet, if you have, for me for example, my business and my job can take a significant amount of time. But because I know that my wife is fully involved with the children, because I know that my children aren't with a stranger, they're not sitting in an after-school program waiting to be picked up by somebody that I send on rushed out, because I know that they have their mom there to protect them, to care for them, to love them, and to support them, it makes it easy for me to do the work that I need to do.

If I need to work late, family dinner still happens. Now, it may happen without me, which is less than ideal, and very rarely happens, but at least I know their mother is there. At least they still have that same constant ability. And in time, if you care about building family wealth, and you care about building multi-generational wealth, you're going to have to build a strong family culture that will see your family through in time.

And you cannot build a strong family culture, you cannot build rich and rewarding relationships with your children when they're being raised by paid professionals. Doesn't happen. So, from a wealth productivity perspective, I am personally convinced that there's far more of a compounding effect to have one very large and productive career, and to have one very solid and loving family leader, family facilitator.

That way you can have the best of both worlds. You can have a very large income, you can have a very large business, and you can have a strong family culture. I don't know how to prove this, but here's in a nutshell what I'm saying. I'm personally convinced that if you have a, let's say you have a 30 year old mother and father.

And a 30 year old mother and father both have, let's just say they both earn $80,000 per year. Each of them earns $80,000 per year, and they have two or three children. I'm personally convinced that because of the constraints of trying to raise children effectively, and the fact that they both be working 40 hours a week, rushing home to get the kids and have family dinner real quick before bed, baths and beds.

That if you look at the career trajectory of both of them with a 40 hour work week, it's not going to be nearly as high of a growth rate as if you have one career where you can put in 60 to 70 hours a week. I'm convinced that one career will compound more based upon more time, more freedom to invest in it.

But that would be a tremendous cost to the children if you had both careers doing that. And so it's much better to have mom take care of the children, dad build the family business, and in time you have a strong family culture and a tremendous income. Don't know how to prove that, don't know how to even research it, but that's my instinct.

Now what I can prove to you is you have an opportunity for a far more efficient financial life if you separate the income and the spending. Now I was fortunate, and I say that very sincerely, I was fortunate in the fact that my wife, she never had big career ambitions and she didn't make a ton of money.

And so we didn't have to face that very difficult decision that some couples face where both the husband and the wife make a lot of money. Now I've done shows on the past on how to calculate the true cost of working, etc. But I'm thankful that we didn't need to do that.

But the thing I have learned is that if you care about an efficient, productive life, it's hard to do that with two full-time incomes in a household, again, and children. The reason often comes down to cost of goods and taxes. With taxes, the most impactful taxes are income taxes and sales taxes.

When you have two W-2 incomes in a house, you have the highest possible tax rates in that scenario. We have a high income and you have high taxes. And because of the, blanking on a call, progressive, because of the progressive tax system in the United States, the more money you make, the more you pay in taxes.

And so the less and less incentive you have to work. Now another big challenge is that when purchasing things, you pay a lot of taxes to buy things where most of us live in sales tax states. And if you have one person who's exclusively focused on the well-being of the household and who's focused on getting the household efficient in its spending, and you have the other person who's focused on earning income, you can have a far more efficient financial life.

Let me give you some examples of some things that play into account. Something as simple as, let's say you're a couple, and I'm going to leave children out of it at the beginning here. Let's say that you're a couple and you want to choose a house to live in.

That's an activity that can take a very significant amount of time. It can take time to find a really great deal, whether it's on a rental house or on a house to buy. And yet if you're trying to juggle that time around your work, it can be difficult. Whereas if you have more time, you know, my wife, you know, if I say to my wife, "Listen, we've got to find a place to live." And if she's just got time to go and look for a house, she can find us a great house to live in.

She can find us a great house to buy. She has the time and the ability to go and look at 50 houses before we buy one, instead of us rushing around on Tuesday night at 7.30 PM or rushing around on Saturday morning to see four showings. And we get so tired of that, we look at 15 houses before we buy one.

And those numbers of the time required to find a deal, those numbers of savings can be really, really significant. So that's an example of an activity that my wife can do because of her time freedom that I can't do if I'm busy working at a job where I've got to be there from 8 to 5 every day.

And that's just the start of it. What about getting that house fixed up and decorating it, furnishing it, etc.? Well, if you're busy at a job from 8 to 5 every day and you want to decorate the house, you've got a little time on Saturday, a little time on Sunday afternoon to do that, but not nearly as much time as if, you know, my wife, she's got a full week to do it.

And so maybe you don't have time to paint all that much or you're going to come home, what most of us do, and I'm not trying to be unreasonable, but I am trying to make a point. So I'm not saying that you would just automatically hire painters, but you know what?

A lot of people do. It's hard to go to a job every day, work from 8 to 5, and then come home and paint the house. So one of the things that my wife always enjoyed doing a lot of was painting. I never liked painting. Oh, and she had time to paint stuff?

She's got time. She can do it on Tuesday morning and work from 10 o'clock to noon, turn on some nice music, she's relaxed, the light is good, and she can enjoy that painting process. And the savings there are really significant. The labor is really, really valuable. She has the time to go and look through the seconds or the returns at the Home Depot paint desk and get the paint for cheaper, or buy it at a garage sale, buy it on Craigslist.

These savings add up. They're all little, but they add up big time. So if we hired painters or if we paid retail price for paint, well, we wind up paying a high price for the paint versus getting it on Craigslist cheap. And we wind up paying sales tax on that paint versus no sales tax buying it on Craigslist.

And we have to, if we hire painters, well, she can do the painting with no need for us to pay from out of tax income, no need for us to pay, you know, we lose 15% on employment taxes, lose another, say, 15 to 30% on income taxes. So instead of losing 70 cents on the dollar, she gets those savings for doing that work herself.

So hiring painters can only be done with after tax dollars. What about furnishing a house? Well, if we've just got time to go and look at furniture on Saturday morning, we're going to be pretty constrained to just paying retail. One of the highest markups out there is furniture. But if my wife has time to do the planning herself, she can go online, she can look around on Craigslist, she can look around on Facebook, she can, has the time to put together to go and pick up some of that stuff.

She can save a huge amount on the cost of furnishing. My wife finds most of our furniture on the side of the road or finds it on Craigslist. She brings it home and sands it down and then repaints it. And then now we've got a great looking furniture that was practically free, sometimes completely free, just the cost of paint.

Decorating, getting stuff cheaply and then putting, having the time to create something rather than just to go out and buy the expensive after tax thing. Is this a big deal if you have a million dollar household income? No. But is it a big deal if you've got an $80,000 household income?

It's huge. These savings add up massively. What about just simply making a home pleasant to be in? One of the single most valuable things that my wife does is to work to make our house nice. To make it a place that we want to be. And if your home is a place that you like to be, that you enjoy being, you're far less likely to want to run away all the time and go out and spend money constantly.

I don't know how to articulate exactly how she does it, but there's something special about a house that is built and that is put together with love that makes it nice to be in. So the place that you want to be on Tuesday night is at home. The place that you want to be on Saturday morning is at home.

What about the cost and the work of cleaning and maintaining a house? Well, you can hire a maid, you can hire a handyman, but those expenses are always done with after-tax money, which means there's automatically maybe 30% higher expenses because you get 70 cents on the dollar after it.

But yet, if my wife has the time to do that kind of thing, to clean the house, to maintain it, to do some of the little jobs, it creates a tremendous cost savings. What about yard work, landscaping, gardening? Well, obviously, that stuff adds up. I don't have a lot of incentive if I'm working 50 hours a week and my wife is working 50 hours a week and the only time we have together is Saturday and Sunday.

I don't have a lot of incentive not to go ahead and pay the $300 a month or $200 a month to pay a professional landscaper to come and cut the grass because I need that time back. But if she does it, she can do it on Tuesday morning when it's cool and there's savings there, financial savings and lifestyle savings.

What about things like growing food, landscaping? One of the most valuable, biggest returns on investment is from a home garden, from home fruit trees, from home vegetables. Go to your grocery store, look at the cost of fruit, look at the cost of vegetables and look at your land and realize that you've got all the necessary elements sitting there to create that stuff for you.

But what does gardening cost? Time. Not necessarily a huge amount of time, but it needs consistent time, a little bit every day. So if my wife can grow a garden, she can reduce our food bill by hundreds of dollars per month. And again, all after tax savings. Much more efficient.

A home flock of chickens, some home animals. Very very useful. Better quality, more nutrient dense and cheaper. Can also be profitable too as far as a home business. What about shopping? One of the really valuable things that my wife can do is she has the time to go and to shop for the needs of the household.

So if we need clothes or we need food, we need things like that. She has the ability to do those things far less expensively. It's been harder since we left the United States, but when we were in the United States, we bought a total of I think four outfits for our children.

Every other piece of clothing that our children wore was free. The four outfits that we bought was just simply because they were cute and we wanted them. It was just a splurge. It wasn't necessary. But every other piece of clothing for our children was free. The shoes that they wore, free.

Now we have not been able to continue that since leaving the United States simply because where we live now, the free market is not as abundant as it was back there. Thankfully we have tremendous other cost savings and so now we spend money on clothes like normal people. But when we were in the United States, it was tremendous.

And my wife had all of bins of clothes laid out for all the coming years of the children. And what did that cost? Well not money, but time. So she would make it, we would take all the hand-me-downs from other people whose children were growing up. We would keep our ears open for things that were available in the free market.

My wife would watch the diaper groups, she'd watch the cloth diaper groups and take free bundles of cloth diapers and whatnot from other people or from people who their kids outgrew it and they were getting rid of their stuff. She'd watch the mother groups and go and pick the stuff up.

Then she'd sort through it, get the stains out of stuff, keep the stuff she wanted and get rid of the other stuff. Sometimes she would buy and sell it. So she would pay some for cloth diapers, keep the ones she wanted, then resell the other ones on eBay and make a profit on some of those things.

If you calculate the cost of clothing for children, it's tremendously, it's very expensive. You get all of it for free. You save money on the money required to buy it, right, which was all after tax money. No way to save on that. You save money on the purchase price, no sales tax, no expensive retail clothing.

It's a tremendous, tremendous financial value. Other things like the needs of the food needs, etc. The ability to go and get this from this store and that from that store. When it's Saturday morning and all you've got is Saturday morning to do all your errands, it gets so annoying to try to go to eight different stores to capture the sales.

But if you've got time to spread it out through the week. I always grew up with my mom, we'd go to four or five different stores and she would get, she knew she always got her meat from this store and she shopped the sales at this store and she went to the bulk food store for this and went to the health food store for that and just a little bit there.

That costs time, but it's a major, major savings. Major savings because of the lower cost, the after tax savings, hundreds of dollars per month. Really big deal. What about things like the work involved of doing things like preparing food? When you have somebody who has the time to cook, to cook from scratch, you can get far better, far more interesting and far healthier food at pennies on the dollar.

Much, much better. When my wife and I were both working at a job, we wound up, even though we didn't even have children, we wound up eating out quite a lot because you'd come home, come home at 5.30, 6 o'clock, you're hungry. Maybe you put something in the crock pot beforehand, but then you get tired of crock pot food.

No, it's chicken and carrots and onions and potatoes again in the crock pot. You get tired of crock pot food. And so you wind up going out all the time. Now you add children into the mix and it's even more than that where you wind up going out all the time.

Whereas if she's got time and she can make something that's interesting, that takes time, learning a new technique, you have better, more interesting and healthier food at pennies on the dollar. Huge opportunity to save money and to make a huge contribution to the household. Things like supervising professionals when their services are needed.

Let's say that you've got a guy coming to fix the cable. Well, that can impact your work schedule significantly. Mom and dad are both working. You got a guy coming to fix the cable. He's only going to come sometime between 9am and 6pm, right? Because that's the time slot they give you.

So you stay home from work and you take a personal day and maybe you try to work a little bit from home, but you're not nearly as effective and productive as you are if you were at your office actually working during that time. But if my wife's at home, she's got to meet the cable guy.

She's got the time to do it. Or somebody's coming to work on the house. She has the ability to supervise them. And perhaps that supervision enables you to get better results. Handyman's coming to work on the house, but she's there to watch him to make sure that things are done and that things are done well.

Probably going to work tiny bit harder, little bit faster, etc. So supervising professionals when they're needed is a big, big deal. Or having the ability to assist professionals when they're needed. So the ability to hire somebody who's a lone guy and he comes over and says, "Okay, I'll come over and work on Tuesday." But one of the things I found when I've done construction work is that if you don't have somebody who can help you as a construction worker, you wind up spending all your time going to get supplies and things from the store.

Really, really frustrating. It's very hard to work in a business like that and then also to work on a business. Well, you can hire some guy who comes over and moonlights and then my wife can go and get things from the store. My parents built a house when we were younger.

And one of the things that my mom did that was just such an incredible asset to the process is that she was always the gopher. My dad would be working on the house or there'd be other professionals and when they needed something, instead of one of the very expensive workers having to stop and go to Home Depot, my mom would be able to go to Home Depot for them.

Saved them thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on the house because you kept the professionals, the professional plumber, the professional electrician, the professional builders kept them at work. Major, major contribution to the family budget. You have the ability just to handle the errands and administrative items from the household.

The visit to the bank, the visit to go and renew the car insurance or renew the registration, etc. When my wife, if she's got the time to do those things during the day, those are things that I don't have to do at night and on the weekends. And that's a tremendous benefit to the value of the family, to the family culture.

It's so much easier to do those errands and administrative items during business hours than it is to try to work them all in at night and on the weekends or take PTO to do them on a Tuesday. You have the opportunity to make better household decisions. She has time to do the financial tracking or to go and to carefully shop among the different internet providers or to shop about investment providers.

How do we choose the best investments? Sometimes, if so inclined, your wife may have the ability to run an investment portfolio really effectively. We'll talk about this more in entrepreneurship. But one of the most important things that you can do to live a tax efficient lifestyle is make sure that you don't have two W-2 incomes.

And at the very least, that you have one W-2 income and you have one business owner and/or investor. Far more efficient to have one wage earner and one business owner or investor in the couple than to have two W-2 incomes. So things like managing rental houses, again, overseeing and supervising workers and things like that are much more effectively done when you're not simultaneously trying to hold down an hourly job.

Very importantly, if my wife is not trying to keep a job every day and earn a paycheck, she has the opportunity to be a far better member of the local community. In my opinion, one of the major losses in US American culture, broadly speaking, one of the major losses in US American culture due to both moms and dads working full-time jobs has been the destruction of local community life.

I used to be a financial advisor. When I was doing that, I would drive around a lot. If you drive into the vast majority of suburban neighborhoods during the day, during the afternoon, they're dead. There's nobody there. There's no vibrant community life because there's nobody there. The mom and dad are downtown working at a job.

The children are institutionalized in a school or in an after-school program or somewhere out. They can't be at home because we can't have our kids at home, right? Can't be alone, too dangerous. And so there's almost nobody in that local community. But if my wife can be there in the local community, she has time to take care of somebody who's sick or in need.

Very difficult when you have mom and dad both working a job 40 hours a week and Aunt Lois is sick. Who's going to go and take care of Aunt Lois? Well, my wife can do that if she's got time. Or to go and help a mother who needs help with children, to go and care for an elderly parent.

Those things build together a community because now you have the opportunity to volunteer your time. You don't have to get paid. It's very difficult for somebody who's earning an income to keep their job and simultaneously fulfill their family responsibilities and still feel like they have time to volunteer. Some people do it.

Their sleep usually suffers, which affects their health often. Some people do it. But it's very difficult. So it's much easier for somebody who's earning a job and trying to maintain their own personal and family life to send some money, to send a card, to make a donation, etc. to try to buy something with money.

But often, although that's appreciated, obviously, you know, a gift card for groceries helps somebody who's sick who can't work, etc. But often the time and the relational support, the emotional support can make a much, much bigger impact. But in modern life, people who have jobs can't afford to commit the time for that stuff without a major cost to some other part of their life.

So my wife has the ability to be a far better member of a local community because she doesn't have to work a job every day. Because she doesn't have to figure out how to keep a business profitable. She can just focus on family and community and do those things well.

And that kind of community life has untold dividends in the long run, financially and otherwise. Could be as simple as having people to care for your children for you when you need to, when you need to work. Could be as simple as having neighbors who can come over and babysit for you without charging you money.

Can be as simple as having a friend who loves you, who will listen to you so you don't have to pay a therapist to listen to all your problems. There are far-reaching ripple effects of having strong community members where not everybody, day and night, is thinking about making a buck.

Now thus far I've said nothing about children. I've just talked about the value of my wife being able to care for our family regardless of children. And the thing that I didn't expect when I got married is I didn't expect that there would be benefits there. I thought there would be benefits for children.

But I didn't expect that there would be benefits without that. A lot of people have this idea that, okay, yes, we see that it's useful for mom to be at home when there are children growing. But then as soon as children are out of the house then mom's going to go back to a job.

Listen, you make your own decisions. It's a free world. What I'm trying to articulate to you is that I don't ever want her to have to go back to a job. Because her lifestyle, my lifestyle, and our family lifestyle is far better. Far, far better. Even without regard to the children.

But now when you bring children in it becomes 10x in terms of the value. Obviously, the basic thing comes when you have babies. It is far better, more satisfying and easier for a mom who's able to be at home full time to be able to birth babies and care for them.

Far, far better. Possibly you can have an easier time conceiving a child. Stress and tiredness and chronic sleep deprivation, those things can affect a woman's fertility. Many couples struggle with infertility. Perhaps that might be improved by your wife being more relaxed, having more time, being healthier, being able to sleep, being able to care for herself, eat quality food, etc.

I don't know, but that might be something. Certainly, you have the opportunity for smoother, easier childbirth due to a lower stress lifestyle. Very difficult for a mother to work, work, work, work, okay it's 40 weeks and I'm going to work until I start to feel birth pains and then I'm just going to race to the hospital and have a baby.

Decent formula right there for starting the process towards a difficult childbirth which ends in a very expensive medical bill for a C-section. Very C-section, extremely traumatic for a mother, difficult and traumatic for a baby. A lot of time to recover so now the experience of having a baby is a medical emergency, it's a trauma instead of something that a mom can recover from much more easily.

If you can facilitate a lower stress, a more relaxed lifestyle, you have the opportunity for a smoother, easier childbirth which is good for mom. Mom can recover more quickly. Good for baby, the baby has less trauma at birth and a head start on growth. Really good for the lifelong bonding of mother and baby, especially in those first few days and then in that first year or two you have tremendous emotional stability of the baby due to mom's constant presence.

Mom being there, breastfeeding, constantly involved in the life of the baby, a universal constant for that child makes an incredible impact on the child's emotional stability and also far healthier. Breastfeeding leads to far healthier baby, things like that. Healthier for baby and healthier for mom. Better hormone experience, joy, I can't remember the names of all the hormones but just much better experience for mom and much more opportunity to bond and I think less insulting.

I've had friends who went back to work and they were super hardcore kind of crunchy people so they made sure that they were going to pump breast milk for their children and they did it, they do it but it just always seems kind of, I don't know, I really appreciate the mother's dedication and they're super dedicated to the health of their baby but it always just seems a little bit crass to me, this idea that a mom has to be sitting on her computer with a breast pump on her breast pumping milk in her office or in some quiet corner.

It just seems really insulting, really artificial. Hats off to the moms that do it, they really work hard, it's really tough for them but it's never something I've wanted for my wife. I never wanted her to be in that weird circumstance. It's night and day different versus now, she can breastfeed a baby and sit in a quiet, comfortable chair, look out the window at a beautiful, tranquil scene and enjoy the sunshine and bond with her baby instead of trying to figure out how to be super mom.

And then as children grow, the ability for a mom to focus fully on training children and investing into their self-development, I'm convinced that that constant presence of mom, especially in those early years, the most important time, babies and children need mom in those early years. They don't need dad, they need mom.

They do need dad but not nearly as much as mom. Down the road they need dad more but in those early years they need their mom. And I'm convinced that that constant presence of a mom dramatically changes a child's self-confidence and sense of security. Now it's often, in my opinion, really draining on mom.

Young children can be so draining which is why so many mothers are desperate to go back to work. They're really draining and they just call, "Mommy, mommy, mommy" all day. It really makes you feel worn down. But yet you can look at the flip side of it and see that constant presence, how that impacts the child where they don't even think about the, "Is mom not going to be there?" The reason they call mommy, mommy, mommy all the time is because mom's in constant universal presence.

And as draining as that is, there's not a daycare worker in the world who's going to care more about your child than you do. There's not a kindergarten teacher in the world who's going to care more about your child than you do. What I try to encourage my wife is I say, "Listen, let's all acknowledge that children can be really draining.

And as husbands, let's work really hard to make sure that our wives get the support that they need, the help that they need, the respite care that they need so that they can feel really good." But think about how draining it is for your children. "Mommy, mommy, mommy." Now imagine that you, instead of having one or two or three or four of little ones to care for, now imagine you've got 12 of them to care for all day, every day.

And now instead of working for the good of your family, you're working for a fairly mediocre paycheck and you have no biological connection to those children. Is that person going to do a better job managing the stress and the frustration of the "mommy, mommy, mommy," the constant demands on their time and their emotions?

Daycare workers try really, really hard. Teachers work really, really hard to be the best they can, but they simply cannot possibly care more than you. They have no biological connection to the children. They're working out of their natural sense of empathy and work. That has an impact on a child.

So I'm convinced that that constant presence of a mom dramatically changes a child's self-confidence, which sets them up for a lifetime of success. You have far more opportunities for the children to enjoy interesting experiences. I think one of the biggest costs to young children when they're raised by institutional professionals instead of by moms and dads is the limitation on their experiences.

Now there can come a point in time at which that can change. For example, let's say that your child is, your 12-year-old is really interested in science. Well, they're going to probably be able to get a far better equipped science lab at the local high school or the local private school than they are at home.

The science lab equipment at home is probably going to be fairly minimal. But for a young child, the opportunities that are available for the child in an institution are very limited. It's one building, one campus, one room all day every day. And maybe there are four field trips per year, but it's nothing like the opportunity that a mother has to take her child out for interesting experiences.

Of course, there's lots that can be done at home. And here's where financial, it's nice to have the money where you can buy interesting toys, have interesting games, have interesting activities for the child to do at home. But just the ability of time to go out on out of the house adventures, library trips, park trips, zoo trips, excursions, field trips, those things can be done every week.

Most of the time, you know, your mom will get together with a play group of other moms and they have the ability to say every week, "Hey, we're going to go to the zoo. We're going to go to the park. We're going to go to the beach. We're going to go to do these activities." And so the child has a more interesting and diverse life experience than can be accomplished in the local daycare.

Far more time to play with other children instead of it just being, daycare is a little bit questionable on this claim, but you have just more time to play with other children. If they have siblings, hopefully, more time to play with their siblings, more time to have play dates with other children at the park, etc.

And then if you take a little bit more of a global interest in your educational plan, now all of a sudden you can really open up the opportunities. This is not simply possible with just, you know, mom staying at home. We get to entrepreneurship, which we'll get to as a point of freedom, but it is possible.

My children have been to dozens of different states with a huge diversity and variety of experiences in all those different states, from the beaches to the mountains, from the alligators to the horses and the cattle, just tremendous experiences, all kinds of different things. One of my favorite activities to do with our children was, I took them, last year we took them to the Cheyenne Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

It's an incredible experience for them, seeing all these horses and seeing the rodeo, which by the way, plug for Cheyenne Frontier Days. If you're looking for a big midway and whatnot, and you come from a big city as I do, you won't be impressed by the midway. But if you want to see horses and carriages and all the stuff you only see in books, you want to see it in real life, the Cheyenne Frontier Days parade was just incredible to me.

It was so cool to see all the stuff that you only ever read about working. You know, it was the first time last year, it was the first time in my life I've ever seen a six horse team in person. So cool to see that. Six horse team pulling a stagecoach, or see a milk wagon, or see a funeral hearse, a horse drawn funeral hearse, just really enjoyed it.

And to be able to sit there and watch your children stare in wonder at those things is a tremendous experience. My children have been in multiple foreign countries in multiple languages. You can do that when you've got time and that leads to a much bigger horizon than just being institutionalized.

I'm stealing my thunder from the next show, which will be on home education. So I'm going to stop here. But you have tremendous opportunities for your children because mom has time. Simple things like learning, schooling. Let's move on to schooling of children. The world's greatest teacher student ratio, know what it is?

One to one. Schools fight to try to lower their teacher student ratio because the idea is that if a teacher has 30 students to care for, they're going to be less effective than if they have 20 students. Maybe it's true. I don't know. Maybe it is. But if it is true, a one to one teacher to student ratio, or a three to one teacher to student ratio, if you have three children, is a far better ratio than 20 or 30 to one, which leads to amazing opportunities for the child.

You don't have to know anything about child development. All you got to do is read to your kids and they'll be reading in no time. You don't need some fancy expensive, you know, private school tuition, some fancy early start education program. It all happens naturally if you create a proper environment.

And then you have the opportunity to work with the needs of your children. So instead of your child being lumped in with everyone else, mom can focus and say, well, look, you're not learning well that way, but you can learn in this other way. Or you know, the prescription for you, active son, is you need 30 minutes of hard running around and play to every 10 minutes of bookwork.

It's a lot better than the child going nuts trying to do 30 minutes of bookwork and only getting 10 minutes of play. You have far more interesting opportunities for learning. I'm not going to steal my thunder from the home education show, but time for small businesses. You know, my son's done things like building a little bread baking business.

How else can you have a six year old be an entrepreneur and make money with learning to make money and save money and etc. If mom doesn't have time to help with that stuff. It's hard to do. Yeah, you can do it on Saturday, right? And I hope that you know my heart enough to know that every parent is going to do their very best.

And so if you're the parent who, hey, we've got to have the two incomes, we're in a deep financial hole, we need the money. This is just what's best for our family. Fine. And so you're trying to figure out how to invest Saturday morning into your child. You can do it.

You can help your child set up a bread baking business on Saturday morning. But if you're that parent, you got to admit, you'd be far more effective if you didn't have to simultaneously try to hold down a job while doing that. And you got to imagine that as good as you are as a parent with the 15 to 20 hours a week that you have available, you'd be a whole lot better at waking time.

You'd be a whole lot better of a parent if you had 100 hours or 80 hours of waking time to parent your child. Then you have opportunities for better training. I have a strong willed child, disrespectful, rebellious, very challenging. I often wonder how that child would cope if it were being cared for by others.

The child is exasperating enough. The child would drive other people completely bonkers. But yet, my wife and I, we have the time and the ability to work with the child, help the child to come under control, help the child to learn to manage their emotions. So for every challenge, it's better off if you got time and ability to focus.

Imagine that you have a handicapped child, a legit handicap, whatever it is, difficult situation. Now, with the caveat of some institutions for certain handicaps have specialized equipment, which can be extremely valuable, you know as well as I do that you would never try to make the straight faced argument that somehow your handicap difficult child is better off because a paid professional is caring for them instead of you.

I guess maybe that was too strong because again there are specialized equipment. But when you see moms and dads who have a handicapped child, it just focuses them in on saying I'm going to figure out how to get the very best results for this child. How do I help this child to learn in spite of their personal difficulties?

And they pour themselves into that child. Well, if we do that for our handicapped children, why don't we do it for our non-handicapped children? If it would be that focusing for you to try to figure out how do I help my handicapped child deliver a more normal successful life in spite of their difficulties, then why do we not treat our so-called normal children with that same level of intensity and focus?

Now, as I pivot to kind of my closing arguments and hopefully my motivational speech here, I do want to acknowledge that there's a real challenge with children where I gave a bunch of benefits of stay at home wife with no children, then children come in. Children increase the work and often increase the work beyond what is possible to maintain all of these things as efficiently as possible.

So my wife and I, we have four children. What I have found, what we have found, as the size of our family has grown, we have less ability to do all those frugal things we once did. We have the need to start spending more money. I currently have a maid, I have a nanny.

So the maid cleans the house, does the laundry, have a nanny, the nanny comes, plays with some of the children so that my wife can be freer to focus on the baby and to focus on the schooling, which just makes for a better lifestyle. And I'm very grateful that we have the money to do that.

Not everybody does. So plan though, as your family grows, that you'll probably need to start spending more money for some of those things that perhaps your wife was once able to do. But then of course as your children grow, now they can take over some of those things. So just be careful that there are major financial costs to children and one of the major costs to children is that some of those other things fall away.

You know, you wind up eating out more. If you don't have a paid cook, you wind up going and paying cooks at a restaurant to cook for you because you can't expect, if your wife is busy with children and homeschooling, etc., you can't expect her to be cooking all the time the same way that perhaps she could when she didn't have any children.

So be very cautious there and be very in tune with those things and don't expect it to always be frugal. And in my opinion, it's one of the best things about money. Money should buy you lifestyle. And I'm grateful to have the money and have the ability to do that.

It makes me really happy to see my wife with less work on her shoulders. My summary statements here are that you and your wife can have a far better quality of life and lifestyle if you're not both trying to hold down a job. My opinion, the family life of most modern American households sucks.

Minimal time for each other, minimal time for children, have to work all the time to pay your taxes and to afford to be able to buy everything done for you. It just sucks and it's insanely expensive. And I know that most people don't like their jobs, they don't find satisfaction from them.

And one of the ways that they could get a solution is what I'm talking about. That's why I'm doing this show about freedom. One path to freedom is what I'm talking about. If you have one spouse focused on the home front, the time that the family is together can be way, way better.

All of a sudden, instead of your nights and your weekends filled with chores and activities and shopping, etc. Now all of a sudden, if your wife can do a lot of that stuff during the daytime hours, during the week, now your weekends open up. So instead of Saturday morning being the grocery shopping and yard work and work, work, work, work, you've got time for the beach, for the park, etc.

Now instead of you having to come home and all of a sudden make dinner really quick, you can come home and play with your children. It can be an incredibly incredible lifestyle for dad and it can be an incredible lifestyle for mom. Not without problems, but I've often wondered why when you wander around the financial independence circles and everyone's really focused on financial independence, I've never read an essay that said become financially independent and stop working because you become a great wife and mother.

My wife doesn't have an earning income. She's going to be supported for the rest of her life. Now there are risks there. One of the biggest things why marriage culture, divorce culture is so important, but she'll never have to earn an income for the rest of her life and yet she's got a tremendously valuable lifestyle.

I've often read essays, a lot of times especially by women, I've often read essays by women who are pursuing financial independence and they talk about the things that they want to have time to do. I want to have time to exercise, cook healthier food, work on my art project and develop my calligraphy and have more time to spend with my parents, etc.

My often obvious answer is why don't you marry a husband who would be thrilled for you to have that lifestyle. I love to see my wife fulfilled and have time for those things. It makes me feel really good to be able to provide a great lifestyle for her and I will happily work and earn income while we're not yet financially independent so that she can enjoy that.

That's why I put this show next in the series, was when trying to figure out what order do I do this, I realized although the things I'm going to talk about later in the series are important. For example, I love being at home full time. You may be able to hear my children in the background talking in the other room.

They're having their morning snack right now. I love being able to be home full time. My wife and I are home together with our children basically 168 hours a week. I don't know how you get more time with your family than that. And entrepreneurship and working from home, etc.

has opened that up. But knowing what I know now, the first thing I would do would be to make that same decision we made for my wife to be home full time. I would have done it sooner before children and I would have done it and I would have made sure of it.

And if I had to choose between both of us doing something that was going to take us outside of the house or me going and working a job, having to give up business so that my wife could be at home, I would go do the job instead of a business so that my wife could be at home.

That's how good the experience has been for me. I think the quality of life and the family life of most of modern American households stinks, but it doesn't have to. You can have a better home that's more beautiful, that's cleaner, that you like to be in, that's more pleasant, that's filled with love and joy.

Give your wife the time to do that. The money to buy the things that are necessary, but the time to do that. You can eat better, have cheaper food, healthier, better. You can have better children who are more emotionally stable, they're smarter, they have better self-esteem, have a better vocabulary.

You can have better weekends, better nights. Your nights and your weekends don't have to be consumed with chores all the time. You can have an easier time scheduling your family life. One of the biggest benefits that I love about our lifestyle is that it's easy for us to do family scheduling.

The only schedule we have to work around is my work schedule. But beyond that, because the children are homeschooled, my wife is at home, it's easy for us to schedule. I guess I was too much there. We do have to deal with homeschool co-op a little bit with some of our commitments there, but those things are very light compared to the average scheduling constraint to the modern American family.

So if we want to go somewhere, we just go. I pick a week and I go. I usually talk with my wife about it in advance, obviously, but we don't pick certain days based upon how much PTO she has from her job. We just go. And I pick the days based upon my work obligations.

Even just all the other stuff. Husbands, you can have a far better sex life if you have a stay-at-home wife who has time, is relaxed, is energetic, has the ability to take a nap, has the ability to handle her responsibilities, isn't frustrated and stressed out about her boss yelling at her at work.

So you have far better opportunities for a strong family life, for a more fulfilling personal life, and you have far better opportunities for career success and for big financial gains if you're freer to work on your career. Now I want to answer a couple of specific questions and give you some suggestions on practical steps of how do you achieve some of this lifestyle freedom.

If this makes sense to you, if you see what I've experienced of lifestyle freedom, you may have the desire to do it. But then of course we're up against the financial constraints. So you think about what about working from home and home businesses? You know, and this is especially with a lot of moms.

It's one of the reasons why many moms get involved in MLMs, they get involved in online things, blogging, you know, things like that. Because they're trying to figure out how do I stay financially productive while I'm at home? And that's not easy, right? First, there are lots of legitimate work from home things that can be done.

They totally are. And I love working from home. I work from home, so you can too. It can be tough to build. It took me a lot of years to figure out how to do it, but it is possible. And I think that those things are really excellent opportunities, especially if there are no young children in the house.

If you have the ability for anybody to get a job where you can work from home, some or all the time, or to have a business where you can work from home, I think it's well worth pursuing. One of the things that I observed growing up, my dad was a traditional engineer with a traditional office, but he often worked from home.

And that gave him tremendous flexibility. This was in the days where it was just barely a thing. And so I think that's really, really great. I personally don't see how it's possible to hold down a great job or build a business and simultaneously care for young children. I know there are moms who do it.

I know there are dads who do it. I don't know how it's possible. When I look at the tremendous time required and emotional energy, and I try to imagine myself as a stay-at-home dad with just my children to care for, and I try to imagine how I would do it, I couldn't do it with young children.

I could do it with children who are old enough to sit at a desk and do their schoolwork with just minimal supervision. That starts what, second, third grade probably. I could do it with children old enough to work in a family business. I couldn't do it with babies. And I think that that's a very difficult burden to put on your wife.

If you expect her to be a good mother, don't try to make her be a good mother and a super businesswoman at the same time. Some people do it. I don't know how. I've never been able to figure out how. But if you can build a work-from-home business, I think that's fantastic.

I think a family business can be even better, a family where everyone can be involved. Dad, mom, children is really, really worth building. And one of the benefits of having some kind of business like that is that it can be a good option both ways, for mom to be able to have some contact with adults, but also to still be available with children.

One of the most difficult things that you've got to work for is it's very draining to be with young children all the day. Talk to a mom of young kids and she'll be grateful to be able to sit down and have coffee with an adult and be able to have the times.

And so I think one of the biggest things that you should do as you're trying to lead your family is work to make that happen. Work to make it happen so that she has a break. And that can really be a big deal for her happiness, for her health, for her mental health, etc.

So there are opportunities in working from home and home businesses, but I'm not going to do it too much. We'll talk a little bit in a section on entrepreneurship. I don't think it's necessary. I think that sometimes there's so many things of savings that can be done without them being as demanding as trying to work every day during the kid's nap time, that there's plenty of financial abilities for your wife to be financially productive.

I personally don't ever want to be in a position where I had to force her and say, "You have to work from home." There are things I think that are better suited to the benefits of working from home. So what I would try to do if we needed, if I needed my wife to be more financially productive, but we wanted her to be able to be at home, I would try very hard to have her more in the vein of handling investments, renting out a home, managing our investment properties, handling Airbnb listings, something like that where the work is not, where you have to sit down for three solid hours every single day, where the work can be worked around in a few minutes here and there, just because I think that would be better for the home environment, for her ability to get the work done effectively.

Now one of the big questions, especially that a lot of men face is, "What if your wife doesn't want to stay at home? What if she says, 'I find the home environment draining. I don't like it. I feel confined. I want to talk with adults. I want to build my career.' What do you do in that situation?" It's a really tough question.

I personally feel like I dodged a bullet on this particular topic in choosing my wife. Prior to being married, prior to this experience, this particular thing we're talking about wasn't really all that important to me previously. I didn't think much about it. I was young, so you expect young people not to think too much about it, but I didn't think much about it.

Several of the girls that I was interested in when I was younger, before my wife and I got together, had very significant career ambitions. Two of them are now doctors. I've often thought to myself, "What on earth would I do if I were married to a doctor?" You can imagine how difficult it is for those ladies.

This has been their dream, both of the girls, my personal acquaintances. Their dream from the time they were little girls was to be a doctor. They invested years and years of blood, sweat, tears, and treasure into becoming a doctor, built these big careers, and earning lots of money. Imagine you're a woman in that situation.

Let's say you go through college, get out of college at 22, go to medical school, get out of residency, and there you are in your late 20s. For the first time, you're finally able to earn some money. You start earning some money, but you know you want to have children.

You've basically got a biological cap of 40 years old to have children, and yet you're finally starting to earn an income, finally, after years and decades of work. Are you going to walk away from that to be home with your children? Most can't. They just can't do that because of all the time that they have invested in it.

Most aren't. I've often thought, "What if I were a husband in that situation? What would I do?" The problem is that as a husband, if you're a good husband, you want to support your wife in all of her ambitions and goals. You want her to have the richest, most fulfilling life that she can possibly imagine, and you want to lay down your life to help her do that.

Today, one of the challenges is that many women have major career goals, major ambitions related to that. Here you are as a husband. You want to support your wife. You want her to live a rich and fulfilling life, and she's got these major career goals, but you also have family goals.

You sit down and you say, "How do I make these things work?" Really, really tough. Really tough. I have often think, just the other night in preparing for the show, I was telling my wife, talking about the outline of what I was planning to talk about. We were talking about it, and I just said again, "I am so grateful that I never married those two girls that became doctors because I don't know what I would do, and it would really be difficult for me." Obviously, one of the simple things you can do is choose.

One of the things that I have most come to value about my wife is that she never had big career ambitions. Her goal was not, "How can I get married as quickly as possible so that I can be a mom with children?" That wasn't her at all, but she just didn't have a lot of big career ambitions.

For her, the cost of being a full-time wife and mom was not related to careers. I don't think if you're a husband, you're in this situation, I don't think you can force your wife into something. I think that's a recipe for disaster. It's disrespectful and really, really difficult in that situation.

I hope that I've given some ideas that might possibly be able to persuade her, to help her to see something. One of the things that I have observed today is that many women just simply don't have a concept of what they could do in their family and personal life with time and flexibility.

Same problem that both men and women face when thinking about retirement. They don't quite know what to do with it. If you talk to many women who've been raised with career ambitions as the first and foremost thing, "You go, girl. You got to build your career. You got to be independent." They have big career ambitions, but they don't have the ability to see what good they could do as a wife and a mother and what would be the benefit of that kind of lifestyle.

They don't see all those things that I could talk about. They don't see how they could contribute to the family without just holding down a full-time job. Many women face this challenge. They want to contribute to the family and so they think, "I got to work and I got to earn an income." Yet, there's lots and lots of ways to contribute to a family that don't involve work outside the home and an income.

I would try to talk about some of those things. I think that if you're in a situation like that, I think that there are some wives where if you showed them how meaningful their impact could be, they might love the opportunity to be a full-time wife, full-time mother. They might really appreciate that.

If you can demonstrate that you would really value that, I think there are a lot of girls in the middle that would really go for that. Not all. Again, this show is never going to persuade somebody who's ideologically committed to, "Got to earn an income. Got to be independent.

Got to make more than my husband," etc. But I think my experience has been that there are a lot of girls who would love the ability to have that more relaxed lifestyle, to invest into their home and their family and to making it awesome and beautiful and meaningful. I think that there are a lot of husbands, my experience, a lot of husbands who really love it.

It makes them feel really good to be able to support their wife in that way. But if you can live a... So talk about it. Talk to your wife. At the end of the day, every single couple in these things has to decide what's best for them. And there's no place that any of us have to go into to dig into and try to control another couple.

This is the most intimate relationship you can have. And I think it has to be worked out between a husband and wife. My goal is just simply to provide some ideas that can possibly show how much I've benefited by having a life arrangement in this particular way. What if you can live a great life and still both work?

Well, I think you can. And I think that, especially if you don't have children, I think that obviously that's an opportunity. You take children out of the mix, and I still think there are benefits. I gave through that long list of benefits. But if you take children out of the mix, then I think you have the opportunity to both still work and to live a great life.

What I would say is that what you should try to do there is streamline your life as much as possible and try to find some efficient ways to get some of those benefits. So for example, easier for you to live an efficient life if you live in a small apartment and still have time on the weekends.

One of the things I didn't anticipate until I went through it was when my wife and I married, we lived in a little tiny studio apartment. So we had to clean the house. But we had one bathroom to clean, and we had the studio that we swept. So about 15 minutes, we could do the whole housework.

I'd go and clean the bathroom. My wife would sweep, finish the dishes. Boom, we're done. And then we can go and do our things. So recognize that freedom can be achieved in many ways. So you can achieve personal freedom with things like living a minimalist lifestyle. So you don't have to have all those things tearing you down, those things holding you down and restricting your freedom.

Those are choices. So nothing in this kind of analysis is either/or. There are many ways to achieve this kind of freedom. And so look for that. Now, I've thus far, I've generally used the term stay-at-home wife, and I've assumed that a husband would be the one generating an income and the wife would be at home.

And in the modern world, this is a very scandalous assumption to make. When I conclude this show, if any listeners have gotten to this point, usually they just turn off and leave a review about Joshua's, you know, sexist, etc. But sometimes they write me an email and say, "You use just such total sexist language." I don't worry much about that.

But I do want to answer the question, though, because there are a lot of listeners who are in a situation where their wife earns a much bigger income, has a much bigger career. And I've often thought, "Okay, what if I were married to one of those girls that became a doctor?

What would I do? Would I be the stay-at-home husband?" I've thought a lot about that. And all I can do is say, is just say, "May God give you wisdom in your situation to do the very best things." My personality and temperament is such that in a lot of ways, I would love to be a full-time stay-at-home dad.

Frankly, I am. I'm a full-time stay-at-home dad. I just also am running a business. So, I love the opportunity of doing things with children. I really love it. It is so fun to me to work on, you know, children's educational products and projects. So fun for me to think about, "Okay, where could we go this week and go to the museum and then the park and what could we do?" I think it's fun.

I enjoy all of the domestic stuff. In my household, I do a lot of the cooking because I enjoy cooking. My wife doesn't enjoy cooking. And I think it's so fun to... I'm that guy who likes to learn a new recipe and make something new and whatnot. And so, I would thrive personally as a full-time stay-at-home dad.

I'm unconvinced that that's the best solution for young children unless it's just clearly the solution that needs to be made. I really think that young children need mom. Dad is better than a daycare worker. So, if that's the only feasible financial solution or that's the only feasible solution based upon the unique peculiarities of a family, dad is better than a daycare worker.

So, if we talked it through and we decided that, "No, this is... my wife's career is more important or due to these personal constraints or she's made these commitments or whatever the details are," I would do that. I would stop working and I would go and be with my children because I believe that I can make a far bigger impact with my family and with my children if I have the opportunity to build into them the way that I want to build into them than if I'm working in an office all the time.

So, if it's a choice between mom or dad, I think mom is generally better. If it's a choice between dad or daycare worker, walk away from the money, take care of your children. You're going to really value that investment that you make in your children. So, may God give you wisdom in that situation.

Now, to close, how do you make the transition? Let's say that you... something of what I've said has been appealing and you're like, "Yeah, Joshua actually would be nice. We would enjoy that family freedom in some way if we chose to do that." But yet, we really aren't sure about the financial planning.

We're not... we're really not sure about how to do that. So, I'll give you just some suggestions. Number one, you've got to talk about it. Talk about it together and be honest with one another. My experience is a tremendous level of dishonesty about this subject in the world abroad.

When I was in college, I never would have told a girl, "I want to stay at home wife," because I would have feared that I would be perceived as not with the times, not hip with the times, right? And that's a fear that a lot of people have. I think it's especially difficult on women because I think there are a lot of women who fear saying to somebody, "I want to be a stay-at-home mom.

It would make me happy to be a stay-at-home mom and to care for you, my husband." That's not popular in today's world. That's a very difficult statement to make publicly. And so, because of those fears, I think people often suppress the desire and they often suppress the conversation about it.

So, if I can do nothing other than potentially stimulate a conversation in your marriage about what you and your spouse would really like and how you would really like to live, I'm happy with that. But you've got to be honest. Honest for both sides. As a man, I love having a wife who's only concerned about me and our family.

That is awesome. If I'm picky... My wife died and I had to choose a new wife. And I had the choice to choose between a woman who said, "Joshua, if you'll provide for me, if you'll meet my needs, if you'll love me, if you'll care for me and you'll be faithful for me, I'll just spend my time and energy focused on your well-being, on our family goals, on our family businesses, and we'll be totally joined in those goals and my goal is to support you." Versus, I'm choosing a woman who says, "Well, I love you and I want to be together with you and I want to be an equal partner, but I also want to build this independent career and go and serve an independent boss.

I'll choose option one all the time." It is awesome to be a husband and to feel that way. And I believe it gives you a much greater loyalty in a relationship and a much greater sense of loyalty. You know, my wife has taken a tremendous personal risk to ally herself with me.

When a woman walks away from a career, it's a tremendous personal risk, especially in the modern divorce culture because there are multiple costs associated with that. The first obvious cost is that, you know, my wife, when she stopped working, she lost a lot of her connections in the job force, etc.

She loses her independent income, which is obviously a tremendous, you know, piece of vulnerability. Prior to that, she had income, she could do whatever she wanted with it. Well, now she's dependent on my income. That's a very vulnerable place for her to be in. In addition, that cost goes on down the road.

So, for example, let's say that my wife works really hard, diligently raising our children, and then 20 years from now decides to go back in the workforce. The cost of her leaving the workforce has a financial cost for the rest of her life because it's unlikely that she'll enter the workforce at the same place as where a woman who stayed working in a career the whole time did.

It's very unlikely. And so there's tremendous financial costs and it's a place of insecurity for a woman, which is one of the reasons why I'm very hardcore about men being responsible to provide for their wives and to care for their wives. I don't like, it's one of the reasons I don't like doing divorce planning.

Not that there's not a place, there are women who take advantage of men, lots of them, but I believe that men have a responsibility to care for their wives and to provide for them for life. So there's a tremendous risk that your wife takes. Now, I think there are plenty of rewards that make more than make up for it.

As a husband, I'm far more, I feel far more loving towards my wife, knowing that she's been willing to do that for me. And I think it makes our relationship far deeper than if she were competing with me and trying to say, "Well, I'm going to earn more than you are and we're going to have this separate things." If I didn't feel like my wife was fully invested in our place as a family, I'd feel like I was competing with her boss, her career, and that would make me feel less loving towards her and would diminish the bond that we have in our relationship.

So it goes both ways. I guess my encouragement to you is to be honest. I'm doing my best to model that for you, speaking honestly from my experience, but my encouragement to you is to be honest. And then for women as well, if you have a desire to be a stay-at-home mom, be honest about it.

And one of the things that I've observed over the years is I worked with a couple, a handful, a couple of clients where the man would say to me privately, "I need my wife to make more money. She's just not producing enough." And men didn't acknowledge the contributions of their wife in the household and they wanted their wife to produce more.

And often that cultural sense, that fact that many women, many wives don't see a way to contribute to their household or to their marriages unless they're earning an income. Often they're just short-sighted, they haven't had it modeled. You know, dad and mom both went to work every day and so the way that you contribute is you go to work every day.

This is a different experience. But if you want something different, be honest and talk about it. It sounds dumb, I mean it just sounds simple, but that's the key is I think starting with being honest and talking about it. In addition, I hope I've given you a few ideas to see how if you're a woman who wants to be a stay-at-home wife, you've got an opportunity to really contribute to your household.

And you've got a really important job. The ability, again, the family life that most people have experienced, latchkey children and whatnot, you know, our parents' generation invented this idea of quality time. I think quality time is a complete farce. I think it's utterly stupid. And I think that it was invented by our parents who were going into the dual income kind of career world and they were trying to figure out a way to absolve their consciences of their guilt of the fact that they weren't seeing their children.

They institutionalized their children and they weren't going to see them. And so they came up with this idea, "Well, I don't have quantity time with my children, but I have quality time." I think it's total bunk. My experience as a father, there's no such thing as quality time. The most important conversations always come at the weirdest times.

You know, you're strapping your child into a car seat, you're late for a dinner appointment, and all of a sudden your child's staring at the sky and, you know, the Twitter joke. Last night, my two-year-old said, "Daddy, what is the meaning of life?" Well, that's the kind of stuff that happens all the time as a parent.

You know, your child will express some deep-seated fear at the weirdest time. And yet, if you're not there, you don't get those chances. You don't get those opportunities. They'll ask a question that turns out to be a really important question, but if you're not there, you don't get those opportunities.

Years ago, I listened to a Brian Tracy seminar on parenting and he said, "It's quality of time at work that counts and quantity of time at home." And I've always grabbed onto that. It's like, that's good. That's true. At work, I can be efficient and productive. And at work, I can multitask and I can hire things done.

It's quality of time at work that makes a difference, but it's quantity of time at home that makes the difference. But because many of us haven't had much of an example of what a pleasant home environment was like, of what it was like to have a place where everyone wanted to be and everyone wanted to be together because relationships were fractured and stress and tension and fights were all around the place.

We didn't see that, but that doesn't have to be you. If you're a woman and you're in that situation, you can learn how to build those things. You can learn how to build a house that your family wants to be in. You can learn how to build relationships of peace and harmony among your children.

And if it costs you money in your career, I think you'll get benefits from it down the road. If not in financial support, at least in love and in rich relationships. It's very difficult for a family where everyone is institutionalized. Dad works in his institution. Mom works in her institution.

Children are in their institutions and they're together for a short period of time out of convenience. It's very difficult for that family to all of a sudden magically 30 years later, build some kind of close family culture. What'll happen is dad will be institutionalized in the nursing home. Mom will be institutionalized in the nursing home and the children will be institutionalized in their jobs while they institutionalize the grandchildren and something else.

So if you want a different family culture when you're 80, you're going to have to work differently at it when you're 30. At least that's what I see. Now, if you talk about it and you decide, you know what, in our family we would like to have a stay at home parent.

We would like mom or dad to stay at home. If you're going to, how are we going to do it? Well, my answer is if you're going to do it, just decide and do it. I'm convinced that this is far more of a personal ideological decision based upon something that you see and that you want than it is a planning decision.

You may not be able to afford it where you are right now. So you do need to look at the numbers, but if you're going to do it, just make the necessary changes to do it. I'm at this point ideologically committed to this lifestyle. So it's not a matter of technical question, et cetera.

I would give up on $2 million of extra wealth at retirement in order to live this lifestyle. Maybe I have, I don't know. I don't think so because I'd still believe that I have much more opportunities to be financially productive because I have a stay at home wife. But if you said, Joshua, the cost is for you to have $2 million less at retirement age, but you can have all these benefits that you're experiencing with a stay at home wife and a strong family culture, et cetera, I would do it.

If I had to move to a cheaper place, I would do it. If I had to move out of a fancy neighborhood into a cheap neighborhood to afford it or move from an expensive city to a rural town where there's far fewer opportunities for me to earn a lot of money, I would do it because I'm ideologically committed.

It's a presupposition. It's a pre-commitment to the money. Now you may not be there, obviously. So what you need to do is look at the numbers and think about what would I be willing to do to make this happen? If you see it as important, you will figure out a way to do it.

Now only a few people though are going to be in a situation where it would be a really big financial cost. Most couples aren't making $400,000 a year each of them. Most couples have at least one income in the house that's far more modest. And when you calculate the cost of working, as I've talked about in separate shows, and you calculate the opportunities for more financial efficiency through this type of lifestyle, I think you have more opportunities.

If you want it, you can figure out a way to do it. Remember that not working in a job doesn't mean that you have to be non-productive. It's kind of interesting. I, for a long time in the financial independence or the retirement space, the FIRE movement, I have stated the position publicly that I'm not a fan of the FIRE movement because to me it's just too much of a focus on unproductivity and kind of indolence and laziness.

This idea that while I was working, now I'm just going to sit back and engage in doing nothing. And I don't see the point. I think you should be productive for health and for impact and for meaning in life. You should be productive. So many people have said, "Joshua, you're wrong.

I'm pursuing financial independence because... but I'm not going to be unproductive. I've got all these things I want to do." But ironically, when I talk about the value of having a stay-at-home wife, when I talk about that, people often just assume it's a place of unproductivity and they can't imagine how that's a better thing for her and how she can still be productive.

So don't do that. If you're going to look at ways that you can be productive. And productivity is not exclusively related to children. Again, community involvement and things like that. Many moms have made a massive difference in community projects, etc. because they had the time and the energy to devote to those things because they weren't working for a paycheck all the time.

So look at the costs, but just look at how you can make up the value on the back end. Practical tip. If you're getting married or newly married or you're trying to make this work just as a transition period, just commit to living on one income. Ideally, commit to living on one income from the very start.

It's one of the things that my wife and I did do well, is we just, from the very beginning, we put her income in a separate bank account and we saved all of it. So if you already know that you can live as a family on one income, do it.

And it'll make your decision a lot easier. So if you're trying to figure out, well, how do we make this transition? Maybe for six months from now, our goal is to make a transition six months from now. Well, commit to living on one income and start to learn the skills now.

Just like when you're starting a business, you do the same kind of chicken entrepreneurship. Just do it. Live on one income from the very start. My closing statement. I have often wondered if the dual income lifestyle is a giant conspiracy. As far as I can tell, the only people who benefit from the modern dual income household are tax collectors and government agents.

Because what happens is, in the modern dual income household, you have a far higher level of tax collection. Instead of a mom doing all these things within her own household, growing food to support her family, cooking meals at home, caring for children, educating children, etc. What happens is that mom goes to work.

And so that immediately creates employment taxes and income taxes for the government based upon her work there. Then she has to use after tax dollars to pay for all those things. So then that goes in and instead of cooking a meal at home, we pay for food in a restaurant.

Instead of growing money, growing a garden, then now we pay for food out. And so that creates sales taxes. And it creates more income taxes. Because instead of neighbors trading among neighbors, and maybe your wife grows green beans and the old guy next door grows tomatoes and they trade back and forth with a tax free barter exchange, now all of a sudden everything goes through the financial system.

It creates more and more value, more and more tax revenue. And then when children are institutionalized, then they're automatically taught groupthink. They're automatically taught to all think the same way, to respond the same way, to stimulate. They're all taught to believe the same things. These are the doctrines that you need to know.

And their love of learning is beaten out of them. And they basically are created into robots who easily move into factory jobs. So the children become much more easily governable, much more easily managed in a managerial society. They have far less of an ability to be a free thinker, to make decisions for themselves, to think creatively about their situations.

And you create a much more easily governed society. I guess the third person that benefits, I forgot, so you got tax collectors and government agents who run a society. And then the third person that benefits would be corporate employers. That basically automatically, prior to the revolution into dual income households, in general you could have a dad who would earn enough money to support his family with his wife at home.

Well, what do you do if you automatically double the supply of workers, where both mom and dad now are part of the workforce? Basically what you do is you halve the cost of labor. And so now the corporate business owners and corporate titans have basically halved the cost of labor.

And so you have this society where the people who don't benefit are the dad and the mom and the children. They don't benefit really in any way, except this kind of ethereal, mystical sense of independence and financial independence and you go girl and be an independent woman and et cetera.

Feel free to take that if you want it. I don't see it. So I've often wondered, is this whole thing just some giant conspiracy? Now, I don't actually believe it's a giant conspiracy, but it would not surprise me in an instant if you told me it was and you presented some kind of compelling proof.

Either way, you can look at the results of it and say, "This lifestyle really stinks. It's no fun." And yet, you don't have to live it. One of the most impactful books I've read in the last few years was Anthony Esalen's book Out of the Ashes. If you haven't read it, I commend it to you.

But in his first chapter he talks about the rubble. He talks about the rubble that is our modern society. I read you an extensive passage of it in a previous episode. If you haven't gotten it, read it. Read Out of the Ashes. And one of the things that he says on page 10 of chapter 1 called The Rubble, he says, "We are incompetent in the ordinary things of life." We're incompetent in the ordinary things of life.

And he starts to list a number of examples. And later in the paragraph he says, "We're in debt over the eyeballs. We cannot make ends meet, even on two incomes. And yet we hug ourselves for being liberated, looking with pity on a grandmother who in a single day did 50 skillful things for people she loved, rather than spending eight hours fielding phone calls in an office or scraping plaque off the teeth of strangers while wearing goggles and a face mask to guard against dreadful infections from their blood and spittle." And he says, "Every single pagan philosopher of the ancient world said that if you wanted to be free, you had to learn the hard ways of virtue, and that the worst form of slavery was slavery to your own appetites.

That is what the founders of the United States also believed. That is what Christian preachers used to preach. That is what we have repudiated or forgotten, so that now we look to a massive central government for everything." Goes on and gives examples of that. And then he closes with this paragraph, "So we need to clear out the garbage, admit our errors, and rebuild.

That requires humility, patience, and determination. But nothing else will do. When your only choices are repentance or oblivion, you repent." It is time to get to work, and that is what this book is about. Now, it's a great book, and he talks through some ways to do that. What I'm saying is, if you desire more freedom in your life, there are things that you can do short of being financially independent.

I began this show with talking about spiritual liberty. If you are spiritually free and in a place of spiritual liberty, you have more freedom than you need. But now the next thing is some lifestyle decisions that you can make. What I have found, which was surprising to me because I didn't set out with this idea, but what I have found is that having my wife be home without the concern to try to figure out how to create an income has been one of the best lifestyle decisions that I could possibly make.

I'm happier for it, she's happier for it, our children are happier for it. Consider if you, your spouse, and your family might be happier for it. I consider it an absolute benchmark of freedom and something that we don't want to give up. I hope you'll consider it. Now, stay with me in this series.

I've got a number of other things. Some of them you'll expect, some of them you won't expect. We're going to talk more about financial freedom. We're going to talk about freedom from the state. I'm going to give you some really practical stuff. But these are, I think, things that anybody can do.

Anybody can become spiritually free. Anybody who wants to can have a stay-at-home wife. All of these are achievable and all of them will help you in your freedom. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate your help. If you need any personal help, feel free to reach out to me in a couple of ways.

First of all, I sell a number of courses, including some courses on, I guess the most impactful one today would be the one that I have called "How to Borrow Money Safely and Never Pay Interest Using Credit Cards." We'll talk more about that in a show that I'll do on financial liberty.

We'll talk about being debt free and having money, etc. But for now, feel free to check out my courses. You can go and find those at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. I guess, let me plug the other more relevant one. I wasn't prepared with my ad copy. Big relevant one is career, my career and income planning course.

One of the major reasons why many men can't support a stay-at-home wife is simply because they've never bothered to figure out how to try. They've never sat down and said, "This is expected of me, so I've got to build a career that actually makes money." Rather, they've just kind of randomly bounced into whatever random job that they're in.

If that's you, stop. Figure out how to build a high-income career. Because although you can support a wife and family on $50,000 a year, you can do it. And if I had to, I would do it. I'll tell you, it's a whole lot nicer to do it on $150,000 a year.

It's just a lot better. It's better for you, better for your wife, etc. So sit down, be an adult, grow up and make a career plan. Go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store and see if my course can help you with that. Thank you for listening. Be back with you soon.