♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaha Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more. 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.

My name is Joshua, I am your host, and today we continue our Seven Rings of Freedom series, Seven Rings of Liberty, wherein I discuss with you some ideas that I believe that if you implement them, will dramatically enhance your personal freedom. I have implemented all of these, and I have experienced the benefits in terms of living a very free lifestyle.

And I don't know of anybody who lives a more free lifestyle than I do, and that's something I'm very grateful for. And I'm gonna share with you those ideas. Now, thus far, even though this is a financial show, a lot of what I've talked about has been somewhat financial.

We've talked about spiritual liberty, I made the arguments that if you're addicted to something, or you're in bondage, if you're just enslaved in a sinful lifestyle, something that's got you, you can't be free, no matter how rich you are, you just can't be free, and so that was step one.

Then I talked about spousal liberty, the value of having a stay-at-home wife, and how, although you can analyze the finances of it, it comes with major freedom benefits. And I've ordered this series, not in order of necessarily your order, but in the order that I think I would do these things.

Now, I have to admit that a lot of this is ideologically driven, but these are the things that I would do. If I could only do one of these seven things, I would do the first one. If I could only do two of these seven things, I would do the first two.

If I could only do three, I would do these first three, which is where today we're gonna talk about family liberty. Then, as we pivot, this is the last that's kinda highly ideologically, then we're gonna talk about financial spending liberty, we're gonna talk about business liberty, we're gonna talk about freedom from state control, freedom from government, and then we're gonna talk about financial liberty.

That's where we're going in this series. But what I have experienced, and the reason I'm discussing this, 'cause I want you to understand that there are benefits of these things that are under-discussed. One of the reasons many people want financial independence, and they're striving for that, is to have more freedom in their lives.

And freedom often comes down to the ability to choose whatever you want to choose with a minimum of external constraints. And what I've found is that these decisions have helped me to have that freedom, even though I'm not yet financially independent. So I wanna talk to you about family liberty, and the specific application of that, which is home education, homeschooling.

I've spoken extensively about home education, homeschooling, and I'm not going to reprise all of those previous shows in this show. Rather, I'm gonna focus on the freedom, and the freedoms that you have that come from homeschooling. I think that's under-discussed. But I've come to really appreciate those freedoms as we have engaged in the home education process with our children.

I do need to begin with a disclaimer that should be obvious, but I have found is not. You should do what's right for you and your family. I don't know you. I don't know any of your situation. And you have to do what's right for you and your family, regardless of what someone else says.

My only goal is to share things that I have learned, share ideas that I believe are valid, but all ideas have to be filtered through your own personal situation. There are situations in which, as much of a proponent of home education as I am, there are situations that I could go through that if I looked at my family and I saw certain things happening, I would enroll my children in a school, whether it's a private school, a government school.

Different situations call for different measures. So I'm just gonna share with you what I think is the best, or perhaps the ultimate, some of the benefits of that, and then you'll have to figure out how to apply those in your situation. So hopefully you can stick with me without being offended by the strength of my own ideas.

Let's talk about freedom. First, I consider the evidence, the case, very, very clear that home education is a superior educational modality. On almost every metric, homeschooled children outperform those who are enrolled in other institutional schools. On almost every academic metric, on just many, many metrics. So that to me seems objectively proven.

And the big downside potentially of home education is the time that's required from a father and a mother. That's one of the areas where if you make a case for freedom, then you say, "Is it really free "if I've gotta do school for my children?" It does take more time to work with your children, to teach your children, especially in the younger years, than it does to take them to the bus stop and drop them off on the bus to go off to an institutional school.

Certainly, it takes more time. And so for that metric, if we're measuring our lifestyle based on freedom, I think you gotta consider, there's a cost to that. There's also a cost to that, that you're going to need somebody to be involved in the homeschool. Usually that is usually a mother, but it might be a mother, might be a father.

You might need a grandmother. I was homeschooled by my grandmother for several years during my elementary school years. Might be a family friend, might be a neighbor, might be a community member, et cetera, but you're gonna need somebody. But I've experienced that as long, if you care about those things ideologically, so for example, for us, that's a small burden because we really want that child involvement.

We want to be together with our children. We want to build that strong family culture. We want the very best that we can achieve for our children, as do all parents. But I've come to realize that there are some freedoms that I enjoy because of that decision. And I'm gonna talk through some of these freedoms for me and then also freedoms for our children.

Because as parents, one of the things that you often want for your children is you want your children to avoid some of the mistakes. If you as a parent got yourself deeply in debt and you made a bunch of dumb financial decisions, you want to help your children avoid that because you want them to do better than you did.

So let me share with you some ways that I've learned that choosing to homeschool has enhanced my freedom. The first freedom is freedom of time. And that's both for me and for the children, but primarily for the children. I am so grateful that my children have a free schedule, that they don't have massive amounts of their time taken up in relatively worthless activities.

Just something as simple as a daily commute. When I was growing up, I often rode the bus when I was in school. In my high school years, I rode the bus for 45 minutes a day. Add that up, 45 minutes on the way there, 45 minutes on the way back, pretty soon you're talking about real time.

And yet that's not an abnormal commute for many people. Many parents get up, take their children 20, 30 minutes across town. Now you can put that time and redeem that time by enjoying good conversation with your children, et cetera. But it's really nice just to have a freedom of time.

One of my major complaints about institutionalized schooling is that most of a child's time in institutional school is wasted because of the need to try to get a bunch of diverse people to move together. Whereas the average homeschool student can complete in two to three hours what might take an institutionalized school student six, eight hours to do.

There's just no need to spend that much time on academics. You can get great academic results in two to three to four hours a day. And so that frees up a child's time. And when a child is young, one of the most important things that they have is time.

And the way that they invest that time will make a dramatic difference in the outcome that they get of their education, of their childhood, et cetera. And so in an institutionalized schooling environment, much of the time is wasted. The learning time is not very efficiently used because the need for a child to go at the same pace as a bunch of other students instead of the ability to excel at their own pace or to go slowly at their own pace.

And then much of the play is not so fun, where it's just stuck into arbitrary schedules and yeah, you got 45 minutes here to play. And so instead of a child being able to gain the benefit of hours of uninterrupted self-directed play, then they just have this highly structured directed play, which doesn't have the same benefits as unstructured undirected play.

So I really treasure seeing my children have time to enjoy their pursuits. And it's only gonna get better from here. My children are still very young. My eldest is six. It's just gonna get better from here. And when you talk about freedoms, especially the freedoms that you and I really enjoy, it's really nice to have, what do you want when from financial independence?

Many people want control over their day, freedom of time. Well, don't you want that for your children? I think many people really do. They want that for their children. Now, the opposite side is it's really nice to have freedom of time for the parents. One of the things that we find, and I try to run my day in a fairly scheduled way, I think that leads to a more efficient, smoother functioning household.

So we have a family schedule. But the nice thing about a schedule is there's no outside dictates on that family schedule. So if you get up a little bit later, or you go to bed a little bit earlier or later, or something changes, you're not stuck on a rigid chronological hour time schedule imposed on you from without.

Just yesterday, I made a big breakfast for my family, and we're just enjoying, I was sitting at the table, just kind of lingering over the table, and I was talking with my wife about how much I appreciate the ability to do that. Now, one of the things that gives me the ability to do that is, of course, entrepreneurship, which we'll talk about in a later show, leading to additional freedom.

But I'm grateful that my wife and my children can do that, even if I can't. I had an experience when I was a financial advisor where I called on a prospective client, and it was about 9.30 in the morning. I was invited to their home, and I'm sitting there at the kitchen table, and this husband and wife are just simply sitting there, lingering over their coffee to meet with me.

And they didn't seem to have any real pressing need to rush out the door and get to work. We were just having a leisurely conversation. As I recall, they didn't have much money, but it just was such a clear picture to me of what I didn't necessarily have at that time.

Because I worked a lot, I'd get to the office at seven o'clock and start my day usually by seven o'clock. And I thought to myself, I want this. I want the ability to sit and linger over a cup of coffee if I choose to, to sit and enjoy a sunny morning without having to rush off and worry about it.

And I appreciate the fact that my family, even if I didn't have that ability, my family has that ability, the ability to linger over breakfast. Perhaps there's an important conversation going along between parents and children. You can just linger. Perhaps somebody wasn't feeling well. My wife wasn't feeling well yesterday.

And so we just adjusted the whole schedule and she was able just to comfortably stay in bed some of the day and recover from her sickness. And so the freedom over time is really, really compelling. And when you get away from all of those institutional constraints, it completely opens up your time schedule, which leads to a really high quality of life.

Related to freedom of time, the next freedom that I really appreciate is just the freedom of family scheduling. If you're not enrolled in a large institution where you have to go along with everything that's institutionalized, you gain total freedom over your family schedule. Caveat, of course, that you have to work this into how you create an income.

But most people who are locked into an institutional schedule tend to have, in my opinion, fairly inefficient lives. They have to do everything when everybody else has to do everything. If you go to the store on Tuesday at 10.30 in the morning, it's pretty quiet. You don't have to fight traffic on the way there.

But if you go to the store at 5.30 in the evening, it's usually pretty full because everyone's on the same workweek schedule. If you're gonna go on vacation, well, most people have to schedule their family vacations around school activities, which means that the parks are full, the hotels are full.

If you're in a tourist attraction place, you can't schedule things when they're financially inefficient. You can't go and take the cruise on the off season 'cause the kid's gotta be in school. One of the things I really treasure about our current family schedule is the fact that we don't have any day-to-day commitments.

And so we can simply come and go as we believe is best for our family without the need to relate to other people who aren't in our family. So for us, this comes in really handy with just things like traveling. We travel quite a bit. And when we travel, I don't have to worry about consulting my wife's work schedule.

I don't have to worry about consulting my children's school schedule and seeing when is the holiday break, et cetera. We just do it. And the way that we handle our schooling days is what we've chosen to do thus far is just to do schoolwork year-round. I don't know that we'll always continue that.

There's arguments against that, to take a summer break, things like that. But at the moment, we just do school year-round unless we've decided to not do school. So if we're gonna go travel for a week, then we just don't do school for that week. And then when we get back, we pick up the same schedule right away.

I think this has better educational outcomes. I think it's better because the students stay current on what they're working on instead of having this weird four-month, five-month break, four-month, whatever it is, where they forget some of the concepts they're doing. They're always relatively current. I think that if you increase the number of days of schooling from the standard 180 days up to a higher number of days, you get a tremendous compound effect.

Just run the numbers on if you're learning every day and you go from 180 days per year to 230 days per year, you get a big compound effect over the course of an academic career. But beyond that, it's just really nice for a family schedule. There's no need to worry about other people's schedules.

That means that you can come and go and you can get tremendous efficiency with your spending, which really helps on the budgets. You can say, all right, we wanna go to this place. Well, let's see when the tickets are cheap. And you can buy a weird scheduling ticket combination that saves you hundreds or thousands of dollars just simply because you have the flexibility to fly on those days.

It is awesome to be in that situation. And yet most people don't have that freedom. But you can have that freedom with home education because you don't have to report to anybody about your family schedule. You can also then adjust your family schedule to what works for you and your family.

Some people, it works for them to do schoolwork in the morning. That was what I grew up doing. We did school from eight o'clock to 12 o'clock, and that was it. No homework, no anything. We just did school, eight to 12. We've kind of done that with our children right now, is they start first thing in the morning and then get schoolwork usually done 11, 12 o'clock, done.

And then the other time can be invested into personal hobbies, other things, building creative play, reading, et cetera, that's not just this structured time. But you can flip that if it works for your family. So if I work a strange shift, let's say that I had a job where I worked a night shift and we needed to change the school day, you can do school in the afternoon or the evening and you have the total freedom to work the whole family schedule around what's best for the family.

That's really, really nice, really, really nice. And I really treasure that freedom that comes from home education. Another freedom that I really treasure about home education is the freedom of geographic movement. Now, there is potentially a downside to freedom of geographic movement. One downside, of course, can be the difficulty of maintaining local community.

There are many people who move a lot who develop community in other ways, but I think that moving constantly leads to a much less strong local physical community of people. But with that caveat, if you homeschool and if you also have a location-independent income, again, not next show, but later show in the series, if you homeschool, then you have total freedom of geographic movement because you can do schooling anywhere in the world.

So literally, the entire world is open to you. We've done a tremendous amount of traveling over the last couple years as a family. We've been in, I don't know, 25, probably 20.5 different US states and half a dozen different countries. And in that geographic movement, we've been able to maintain a consistent family schedule.

Our children have been able to learn, been able to study, been able to do academic work without a lot of interruption. Travel days, there's interruption. If you have days, you have activities, et cetera, there's interruption. But you can do the same thing anywhere in the world. From a financial perspective, this is really powerful.

One obvious kind of low-hanging fruit is it allows you to completely ignore one of the major things that parents look for in their housing choices, which is living in a so-called good school district. The letter rating that your school district receives, which nobody has any idea what a good school district actually means, but that letter rating has a big impact on housing prices.

Or perhaps the need to live within a geographically close area, a doable commute to a certain private school that you wanna be involved in. Those things make a big difference in terms of your housing costs and the type of neighborhood that you live in, which drives all of the other expenses.

If you can homeschool, you have the ability to completely ignore those things. You can buy a house in a bad school district and you don't care because you're not using that school district's services. Be careful on that. Sometimes that may not be so good in terms of the house price resale value, but it's worth it to consider that.

If you wanna live out in the country or live in a remote place or live in some little country in the middle of nowhere, you can do that and still get a world-class education. You can do that without an internet connection, but when you can bring in an internet connection and you have that total geographic freedom of movement, it's really, really powerful.

The freedom of geographic movement opens up a huge, huge potential for cost savings. You can live in a place with low housing prices. You can live in a place with inexpensive goods and services. You can live in a place that's very efficient for your personal tax planning and dramatically reduce your taxes.

You can live in a place, in your choice of a place to live, you can live in a place that you love far more that has all these lifestyle benefits and comes as being a lot cheaper. And home education is one of the ways that you do that. One of the things that I have been grateful to see as a proponent and advocate for home education is that when I study the stories of people who wanna do interesting family travel, I always loved the podcast, Family Adventure podcast, Eric Hemingway, when he was doing that show, and they would interview all these people.

And basically, all of them, they were traveling as families, all of them chose to do home education. And the reason is just simply because you can't travel and not do some form of home education. Perhaps you can enroll your children in online school. Lots of school districts are doing that, which by the way is low-hanging fruit.

If you want to go through the standard government school curriculum, the standard government school grades, et cetera, you want a fairly standardized process, you want teachers, just look to see if your local government school district offers an online version where they can go through and submit their work online.

Many people all over the world are using that so they can go and travel the world with their children, do world schooling, go live on a sailboat, live in an RV, move to a foreign country. That freedom of geographic movement is incredible. And I think that when you have that, you can use that even as part of your overall educational plan.

One of the popular terms that I really like is world schooling, basically using the world as a textbook. I think that's fantastic if you have the ability or the vision to create something like that. You can really help a child to have a dramatically different view of education based upon using the world as an educational opportunity.

And you can do that in your local town, just simply going and enjoying the history of your local town. You can do that in your state, in your country, all across the world, tremendous. That freedom of geographic movement is amazing. I love it, I love it so much. And it leads to so much fun that you can have, especially if you're a travel hacker or you're good at finding travel deals, the ability to not have to try to fit into someone else's school schedule, which in many ways is built on an antiquated agrarian model, is really, really nice.

And it allows you to expose your children to much richer experiences, to much more meaningful points of their education. The next freedom that I really appreciate that comes with home education is the freedom of association for you and for your children. I consider freedom of association to be one of the most fundamental freedoms.

The ability to associate with people that you want to associate with on a voluntary basis, not to be forced into association with people who you don't like, or people who are rude to you, people who are unkind to you, people who just treat you poorly. That's a basic human right, the freedom of association for you and for your children, especially important for your children.

One of the biggest costs of institutionalized schooling is that your children lose their freedom of association. They are stuck into an institution with students that you didn't choose, that they didn't choose, and they're forced to associate with that. And that leads to tremendous negative consequences. It leads to being forced to be in a situation of a very strange, non-normal environment, which leads to these weird behavioral things, weird cliques, weird groupings, the popular cool kids, the not cool kids.

These things just inflict this tremendous trauma onto children. It leads to a child being bullied constantly, whether that's in a hard form with physical violence, whether it's in a soft form. That bullying inflicts incredible trauma on a child, and the child can't disassociate. What do they do? If they fight back, they get in trouble for that.

They try, but they can't leave. You can't let 'em leave. What are you gonna do? You can't un-enroll your child and enroll 'em somewhere else. It's a big move. Freedom of association is tremendous. The ability for your children to get away from bullies, to get away from nasty people, to get away from people who are a bad influence on them, to get away from losers, all of those things will bring down your children and also you.

As an adult, one of the most powerful freedoms that you have to exercise for success is to not associate with people of low moral standing, not associate with people that have low goals, that are not achievers, to not associate with people who are basically going to bring you down, but to associate with high performers, to associate with people who treat you well.

And that makes a tremendous impact on your personal psychology, a tremendous impact on the quality of life that you live, and you want the same thing for your children. And so when you have total freedom of association, then you can pick and choose the people that your children are associated with.

You can make sure that their friends are from the highest caliber of local people. You can make sure that their teachers are of the highest caliber. Not some random person that you didn't choose, but you can choose the best teacher in the world for this particular thing that my child is interested in is this person here.

So I'm gonna set up a relationship for this person to teach my child. It's tremendously powerful. And I think that when a child is surrounded by positive environments and by positive peer pressure and a very high-performing group of acquaintances and peers, they're gonna gain from that. Now, you can do that, obviously, with choosing one school versus another.

There are some schools that are known for that. There are some schools that are not known for that. But perhaps the ultimate freedom of association is when you're not part of the institutions and you can pick and choose based upon the best of the best in every class of person that you and your children are going to associate with.

Tremendous benefit of freedom. Next freedom that I really appreciate is just the freedom of academic excellence. It is really nice when you're learning something for your children, for them to be able to advance at their own pace, whether that's fast or slow. One of the problems of trying to group together lots of children is to figure out how do you group and get a lot of children to move forward at a consistent time, on a consistent timeline?

Because everybody learns at a different pace. Some people learn very fast, some people learn very slow. Now, obviously, that can change with some programs have the gifted program or whatever they call the stupid program, you know, where you put the kids who have a high cognitive ability and excel in academics, they move them over to the gifted program, they can move a little faster.

And the students who don't go in the other classes, but even some of those programs are being phased out, right? It's discriminatory to have those programs. And so some school districts are completely phasing those out. I think New York City recently made that announcement in the New York City School District a couple of months, a month or two ago.

But regardless, for any person, what you want is you want the ability to proceed at your personal learning pace. And so if you're a fast learner, or if you have a fast learner as a student, what you wanna do as an excellent parent or as an excellent teacher is you want your learner to go as fast as they're capable of.

There's no reason to stick to these arbitrary things about what first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade means. You want them to learn as fast as they're capable of. You wanna always challenge your student. And so if you have a student of high cognitive ability, high IQ, does well in academics, does well with that kind of learning style, then you wanna push them and keep them challenged and let them go at their own pace so they can enjoy and constantly stay challenged and not be bored.

On the other hand, if you have a student who doesn't do well with a certain subject or a certain style of learning, they don't do well with academics, their skills lie in some other area, you still want to challenge them, but you don't want them to feel like they're falling behind.

Both of these are destructive to a child's psychology. Boredom is not good. You want a child to stay engaged. On the other hand, a child constantly feeling overwhelmed can cause, really hurt their self-confidence, hurt their ability to press forward and harm their personal confidence. Many children that don't do well in school because their skills lie in some other area, they don't excel with their cognitive ability versus other skills, those children wind up with these lifelong inferiority complexes because they didn't work well in that system.

And as a parent, you don't want that for your child. You want your child to figure out where they really thrive and you want to help them to thrive in that environment. Well, you have the freedom in home education to build that kind of environment, freedom of academic excellence.

Next freedom that I really appreciate is just gonna be the freedom to have and develop and maintain a non-threatening environment for children. I'm convinced that one of the worst things that happens to many children is they're raised in threatening environments. Now, obviously, that can happen outside of a school context and it can happen inside of a school context.

Many children are raised in households where their parents don't love them, they don't care for them, their parents allow dangerous and threatening influences in them, the parents themselves threaten their children and abuse their children. And that creates a lifelong trauma that follows the child for many years until it ultimately becomes, unless it is healed.

And so obviously, that's kind of a standard thing that we wanna get rid of. But beyond that, I'm convinced one of the most traumatic environments that we put children into is school environments. I can remember distinctly when I first entered into an institutionalized school environment, how I, for the first time in my life, learned that there were people who didn't like me.

I had never understood what it was like when I was homeschooled. I had never understood what it was like for someone to not like you because I thought everybody liked me. And if anybody didn't like me, then of course, they didn't show that to me. Then all of a sudden, I started to find out that there were social hierarchies, that there's a pecking order, there's popularity contests.

And then I found out that there's these cues that are part of society, that you have to express these certain cues, et cetera, to be part of the cool kid. And they're so stupid, right? The middle school cues and the high school cues. It's so stupid. I frequently felt like you go through this weird transition as a child where in the early years, most of the time, even elementary school was relatively safe, relatively peaceful, to a certain degree.

And then towards the latter end of elementary school, it becomes strangely different. And then it becomes really threatening and middle school is a really terrible environment. High school might be a little bit better for some people. And then college, you start to recognize, oh, I have freedom of association.

I can find my crowd. I can find the people that I click with and I don't have to do what everybody else does to fit in. Then you get out in the real world and you discover that that was all school, that in the real world, you can come and go as you like.

In the real world, you can associate with people as you like. In the real world, if you don't like somebody, you don't like their ideas, you can just walk away and you don't have to worry about it. In the real world, you can find your group, your group of people that you really enjoy being with, that make you feel good, that are true friends, and you can bond to those people.

And yet, the time that you're least equipped to manage that trauma is when you're young, when you don't know that's how the world works. If any of you or I ever went back to middle school, we would laugh and we would just put our heads down and do our own thing and finish our classes and move on with our life.

We wouldn't bother with all of the nonsense of all of the drama. But it's a big deal to children. We have an epidemic of teen suicide in the United States, teen depression. The levels of happiness among young people and the psychological surveys are desperately low right now. And the levels of self-confidence, desperately low.

I don't understand why more parents don't wake up and say, "I'm not doing this anymore. "You're telling me that you've created a system "that seems highly likely to turn my child "into an unhappy, depressed, medicated person "who's considering suicide?" No. So the ability to create a non-threatening environment for your children as a parent is just a profoundly empowering freedom where you can create a home environment that is peaceful, that's pleasant, that's safe, that's filled with love, where there's no physical threats.

Parents buying bulletproof backpacks for their kids and it's nonsense, no physical threats, no emotional threats. You can weed out all of the jerks who wanna make themselves feel better by making other people feel worse. You can weed out a lot of the, you can protect your children. And that's so important for a child to be protected.

Tremendous benefit and a tremendous freedom of home education. Next freedoms that I really appreciate is the freedom to learn what matters. One of the major complaints I have against institutionalized schooling is that what they teach is irrelevant, largely irrelevant to real life. There's a meme that goes around and shows a picture of a parallelogram and then it talks about, "Sure glad I know what a parallelogram is "because during the season of parallelogram season, "my knowledge really becomes useful." The play of course is tax season.

They didn't teach me about taxes in high school, but they taught me about parallelograms. But I don't care about parallelograms, it's hard to use that basic knowledge of geometry on a day to day basis, but the tax knowledge is really important. Well, I have a high opinion of academics, I really care about some of that academic knowledge, even if it's not directly applicable.

So I want my children to learn that, but I don't want them to learn that exclusively. The way that institutionalized schooling is done fails most students. If we use as a definition of success, that they're prepared to live as productive, knowledgeable adults. There was a time when people said, "Well, the success formula is finish high school "and then you can get a good job." And then that success formula came to be, "Finish college and then you can get a good job." Well, now there's a whole lot of people from my generation that are not happy with the fact that they finished college, but they find themselves frustrated with their job or their lack of a job.

One of the most popular and fastest growing classes on college campuses are classes on adulting, where people come in and teach basic practical knowledge. It's become practically a joke, which I don't like when people are mean to entire classes of people, I think that's kind of ugly. But there's reason why millennials are stereotyped and whatever the, I forget the name of the generation below, but the generation coming out of college right now is stereotypically unskilled, unskilled to be successful in life.

Stuffed with some disconnected academic ideas, but not able to put those things together into a coherent, cohesive model and not able to have practical skills. I don't see why that should be the case. I do not see why any parent should settle for that for their child. I want my child to have an immense range of practical skills.

I want them to enjoy the academic pursuits and I have a bias towards that, I like academics, I believe that the intellectual world is really valuable and if my children are well suited to that world of intellectual pursuits, I want them to succeed in that. I want them to be really excellent in higher mathematics and higher sciences and in engineering and in high literature.

I want them to appreciate the great ideas of the tremendous civilization that we're a part of. I want them to understand and value the canon of Western literature. I want them to understand the arguments of the philosophers over the centuries. To me, that's important. But I also want them to know how to build a house.

I also want them to know how to back a trailer. I want them to know how to raise their own food. I want them to know how to build a business. I want them to have a wide range of skills that they can use to provide for themselves and income in the marketplace.

One of the most difficult financial planning situations that I face is when I'm dealing with somebody who is fundamentally unskilled. A number of times I've worked with usually a father and the father is fundamentally unskilled. Maybe went to high school, did a little college here and there, but never developed meaningful skills.

And it's the most horrific situation to be in when you're facing a 40 year old or a 45 year old father who's trying to support a wife and children and who doesn't have practical skills that are valued in the marketplace. We must help our children to develop sufficient practical skills that they can use those things to generate income so that they can earn at a high enough rate to support themselves, to support a family.

If you want your children to be able to support a family so that they can build a family culture that matters so you can have a multi-generational impact through your family, you have to help your children learn how to build a high income. Well, there's no reason in today's world why that has to wait.

It's ridiculous that an 18 year old could come out of an institutionalized learning environment and not be able to go into a specific job where they can say, yeah, I'm worth a lot of money. I'm worth $30 an hour here. There's no reason for it. No reason whatsoever. So obviously that's a big area of conversation to try to figure and working with your children to see where their interests lie, to see where their aptitudes lie, to try to figure out what the market is saying at the time.

But I think that the freedom to learn what matters and to build those practical skills is really, really important. My best favorite model of that or kind of how I think it'll work out in the future, we'll see. I'll be honest with results, lack of results, et cetera, as I learn.

But what I think, where I think we'll come to as a family in the future is I think we'll constrain academic pursuits to a few hours in the morning. I think three to four hours is sufficient, plenty. A child who's doing school every day without the interruption of bells and hallways and people stuffing them in the locker and whatnot, three to four hours of focused, uninterrupted work is fine.

Which by the way, one of the basic skills that matters is just simply knowing how to study effectively. I haven't told my wife what it's called yet, but my wife is working with my son on what's practically a Pomodoro method. She's teaching him good skills from day one where at this point, now that he can read, most of his schooling is largely self-directed.

She gives him a checklist, says here's the work that you're responsible for today. Goes through his books, we listen to his narration, we listen to his reading. But at this point, even that's not really necessary. Give him a checklist and then he does the Pomodoro method. He does 30 minutes of work and five minutes of non-work.

30 minutes of work, five minutes of play. 30 minutes of work, five minutes of play. And to the extent that he focuses, he can get his work done fast. To the extent that he goofs off, just cuts into his other free time. And so that's a basic skill that's taught, but that's not taught in an institutionalized environment.

In an institutionalized environment, you have Parkinson's law in full effect. The work always expands to fill the time allotted. And so if I have finished an assignment quickly in school, I was never allowed to leave. I was never allowed to go and goof off and play. No, I had to sit there and wait.

And so it's just a dumb environment. So practical skills though. What I think will happen is that, especially as we do more academics in the future, we'll do a few hours of academics in the morning. But in the afternoons, I want my children focusing on practical skills and developing real skills that can pay off in the marketplace.

I want them earning significant amounts of money in the afternoon. So whether that's copywriting or doing tax prep or building wooden birdhouses to sell at the local green market or baking bread to sell to their neighbors, I don't care. I just care that they're building those practical skills and developing them.

And I think that this is one of the areas where financially we have the biggest opportunity to set our children ahead substantially. The best model I've always been inspired by Steve and Terry Maxwell's results with their children, where that all of their sons were able, in their early to late 20s, all of their sons through their own employment were able to work and to save enough money to pay cash for their first house with a range of prices of anywhere from a hundred and something thousand to almost $200,000, depending on the particular situation of each of their boys.

That's a tremendous legacy to leave to your children. The ability to earn and save money while they're living at home and to be able to start their married life in a paid-for house, tremendous. I mean, that changes dramatically the financial experience that the average person experiences in their life.

When you start in a paid-for house, it dramatically changes the pressure on your marriage. It dramatically changes what your young family can look like and how well you can invest in that family. It changes your family tree. And yet it's not rocket science. All it is is the implementation of practical skills with academic instruction.

Shrink academics down to a few hours a day and give an opportunity for a few hours of work in the afternoon. And their children have done it all in diverse areas. One of their sons is a computer engineer. I think another one had a building business. One of their daughters is an extremely accomplished author, has published a dozen books by the time she was in her early 20s and sold lots of them.

Extremely accomplished, it's incredible. So the freedom to learn what matters is one of the things that I really treasure about using home education rather than going into an institutionalized environment. I think one of the other freedoms, and this is of course related, it's just the freedom of interest, the ability to study a child's interest and then to allow them to pursue and explore those areas of interest.

If you give a child open amounts of time and they're not just medicated into not, whether it's actual physical drugs or whether just lulled by a system that destroys them and turns them into boredom, they're gonna find areas of interest and then give them time to pursue those things.

As a parent, you don't need to be in charge of trying to tell your children everything they need to know. You just need to teach them how to learn and then set them free. Give them some coaching, give them some guidance, but let them teach themselves and let them develop their own interests in the areas that they really care about.

I think the next thing is just freedom to learn in a style that's appropriate for your children. I've watched again and again and again students ruined by a system that doesn't fit their learning style and they don't see applicability to how what they're learning and studying applies to their own life.

I'm so inspired and have been over the years, I need to have him back on to an update, which by the way, Jonathan, if you're listening to that, send me an email, I'll reach out to you, but I'm so inspired by Jonathan Harris, who I had on the show earlier in my life, in the very early in the show, who runs the website 10K to Talent with his children, that the way that he integrates their education and modern business skills is really, really impressive.

So for example, his children, for their English assignments, for their writing assignments, they do writing assignments, but he has them do those writing assignments based upon a particular area of interest, particular area of talent, and with some sort of broader appeal. So if his, one of Caleb, who listens to the show, I've talked about here and there, Caleb is into knife making.

So Caleb's English assignments were to write a newsletter to other people who were wanting to learn about knife making. So he would write the essays for his newsletter, and those were his English assignments. One of his daughters is into horses, and so she would write about horses to her newsletter, to her website, publishing her information as part of her work.

So now you're starting to have this stacking effect, layering effect of skills. Yes, you're learning to write, but you're not just writing some random essay that your teacher's gonna read, put a letter grade at top, and then throw away. You're writing an essay that you're publishing online, so thus you're learning WordPress, or you're learning how to run an email list, and you're doing it over a thing that you're interested in, so you're learning more about that thing that you're interested in, and that can expand into another career.

The ability to use a child's unique learning style is, I think, a secret weapon that will help the child to get way more, way more benefit, and to develop far more confidence in their ability to learn, and their ability to execute. And the next freedom that I appreciate so much is just the freedom to choose the moral instruction that your child receives.

It is one of the most important fundamental rights that you have as a parent, is to choose the moral instruction that your child gets to receive. If you wanna see how people try to accomplish a moral revolution, almost always it starts with the children, and that's where, when you look at different societies where there have been profound moral revolutions, one of the biggest, hottest battlegrounds of that is the children, and what the children are allowed to learn, and how they're allowed to learn it.

As a parent, you should never give up your fundamental right to choose what your children are taught. In a public school, you don't get to choose what's taught, and you don't get to choose who teaches it. Parents who send their children to government school will usually spend way more time vetting a simple babysitter who's gonna be with their child once every few weeks for an hour or a couple hours, than they do choosing the people who are gonna be with their children for an hour a day, to cumulatively seven hours a day, cumulatively 15 to 18,000 hours over the course of a child's life.

To outsource that without any screening, without any thought, and to give the most valuable 18,000 hours of your child's life, their moral instruction, their character instruction, the way they view the world, to outsource that to people that are randomly selected by government agents that you didn't choose either, is insane.

That's a public school. You don't get to choose what's taught, you don't get to choose who teaches it. In a private school, you don't get to choose who teaches it, but at least you can choose some of what's taught, but you still don't get to choose how it's taught.

You can choose and say, "Okay, I'm gonna enroll my children "in the local Catholic school, "the local Jewish school, "or the local non-denominational Christian school, "or the local STEM school." You can choose some of what's taught if you're choosing a certain private education, but you still don't get much say over who the teachers are.

You're kind of just given those people, and you still don't know anything about them. You have to trust the system to vet them a little bit, that, "Okay, I want my child to get a Catholic education, "so we're gonna hope that the school's gonna stand up for it," but you don't know that, and you still don't get to choose how it's taught.

It's not taught in a way that's unique to your child, but in home education, you have the freedom to choose it all. You get to choose what's taught, you get to choose who teaches it, and you get to choose how it's taught. That's powerful, and it's the most important, one of the most important freedoms of parents that they just, so many people give up unthinkingly.

I don't get it. I don't get why people give up the freedoms that they have. So in summary, these are just some of the freedoms that I personally really appreciate. I appreciate the freedom that I have as a parent, and how home education has enhanced those freedoms, and the freedoms for my children.

I want my children to be free of a bunch of things. I want my children to be free of the trauma that so many children come out of childhood with. I want my children to have the freedom to study the things that they're interested in. I want my children to have the freedom to develop at their own pace.

I want my children to have the freedom to have self-confidence based on their successfully developing the skills of learning. I want my children to have the freedom to come and go throughout the world. I want my children to have the freedom to associate with people who make them feel good, who inspire them, instead of people who bully them, and tear them down, and corrupt them.

I don't think you can make a case that children automatically make you freer. Certainly you as an individual can probably achieve a higher level of personal freedom if you don't get married, if you don't have children. You can come and go around the world like a vagabond, totally free.

So I have to concede that, that I don't think that children make you as an individual freer. But I didn't have children because I wanted to be freer. I had children because I wanted to have a family, and I wanted to have a multi-generational impact on the world. And that's gonna require a lot of work.

But what I've found is that with these choices, with children with home education, I enjoy a very high level of freedom. It's not as high as it would be if I was an individual, but that life is not fulfilling. It's never been attractive to me, I hated it. But when you have the ability to come and go as you like, live where you like, schedule your time as you like, schedule your week as you like, it's tremendously positive.

So if you care about freedom, all I ask of you is this. Consider educating your children at home. That doesn't mean that you have to do all the teaching. There are a few basic objections that seem to always come up. And so very quickly, let me just answer just a few of these.

There are probably more, but I just have a few. Number one, the basic objection that always comes up is what about the socialization of my children? When you home educate, you have the ability to socialize your children in the best way possible. Whatever you think is the best way, you can do that.

That's the dumbest argument, but it's the most common argument. I've separately done a Facebook video on that. If you'd like to see that, go to facebook.com/joshuascheats where I give you five arguments as to why that's a dumb argument, the socialization of your children. If you choose to educate your children at home, you can socialize them among the very best people that you want to socialize with them with.

If that means a bunch of people of their own age, great. If that means a bunch of people that are four times their age, great. You can choose the socialization of your child. You cannot choose who socializes your child when you put them into an institutional environment. The next thing is, well, how am I gonna teach all this stuff that I don't know?

Ridiculous. First, the basic, and this especially affects moms where often it's like, I don't have the confidence to teach my child. I only have a master's degree, but I'm not sure that I'm a great teacher. It's insane. First of all, teaching children is easy, especially at the early years.

A fourth grader can competently teach a third grader. In fact, it's one of the most powerful ways for that fourth grader to cement their learning is to teach a third grader. I see this happening with my children. They teach one another to read. So all you need to know is a little bit more.

And the stuff that we're talking about in the early years of education is just so basic that literally your children can do the teaching. And they probably should for their own good and to some degree. Second thing is the most important skill to come out of schooling is the ability to be a self-directed learner, the ability to learn.

Not the ability to be a student, but the ability to learn, which often requires you to just simply pull back and force the child to learn to teach themselves. I'm convinced that one of the most important things is to get the child to learn how to teach themselves. Because as an adult, you don't always have a teacher.

But if you have the ability to say, I know how to learn, I know how to read a book, I know how to go and look for a book, I know how to go and find a teacher, you have the ability to learn. You're here listening to me right now because you value what I'm teaching you.

Nobody forced you to do this. You went and looked for the information and thus you're receiving it. So this is part of your learning. And so the basic skill that children need is to learn how to teach themselves. And that should happen by middle elementary school. And basically from then on, a parent should be more of a coach, more of an advisor than specifically a teacher.

And then of course the other obvious solution is that when a teacher is needed, you go out and find the best teacher for your child. Now that teacher might be to go and take a class at a local school. If your child is studying chemistry and you don't have the financial ability to provide a fully equipped chemistry lab and you believe that my child will learn chemistry more effectively if they can go down to the local school and they can enroll in the chemistry class there, send them down and let them take the chemistry class.

That's entirely within your prerogative as a parent. And that's what you should do. Tons of homeschool students do that. Parents enroll them in a class at the local high school, parents enroll them in a class at the local college, et cetera, or you can go and find the world's greatest teacher online.

You wanna teach your child Spanish, your child wants to learn Spanish and you don't know Spanish, italki.com. Sign your child up, have them tutored by a native Spanish speaker every day, right in the comfort of their own home. Your job is just simply to help them connect that. And you can easily put the connections there for your child.

Tremendously valuable. So there are other objections, but you know what I forgot to talk about? I gotta finish the show. I appreciate the financial freedom that comes from home education. To get a world-class education for cheap. I was the other day looking at the high school that I graduated from and I was looking at their tuition rates.

And I was considering how much they cost. And that high school currently has a tuition rate for high school of just under $20,000 per year. And I was imagining myself enrolling my children into that high school. And I was just thinking about that. I was doing the math, all right, $20,000 per year.

Of course, I have four children. 20, 40, 60, $80,000 per year. Then I was imagining what can I do for $20,000 a year? What can I do for $40,000 a year? What can I do for $80,000 a year? Friend, if you can't think of how to spend $20,000 per year better than the local private school, you haven't exposed yourself to enough interesting ideas.

For $20,000 a year, I can hire a private tutor, give them room and board, and have a private tutor in my home to care for my child. There are lots of very smart and lots of very learned people that would take room and board and a $20,000 per year stipend to live in my home or live in a little guest quarters out back, maybe have a maid quarters or something like that where they can live.

And they have the ability, all they gotta do is tutor one child. Tutor one child and the rest of their time, they can work on their own things. I could find PhDs the world over who would come in and do that for $20,000 a year. So just that in and of itself, fairly traditional.

Right there, I've solved my teacher problem for $20,000 a year. Now you're telling me that my child's gonna get better results being in a class of hundreds of other people with a student to teacher ratio of 25 to one versus a full-time tutor in my home. I can't buy it.

I cannot buy that. Now, you give me the world and you say, "Joshua, you've gotta spend $20,000 per year "on each of your children." I can enroll them in the world's greatest classes. I can take them all over the world. I can do tremendous. But the point I'm making though is that most people don't have $80,000 a year to spend on their four children's education.

But you don't need to spend that. A few thousand dollars a year provides a world-class education. I didn't cite this number exactly, so forgive me if I'm wrong, but from past research, I think the average homeschool student spends about $600 a year on their homeschool curriculum, things like that.

Now, that doesn't count the time value, the time value of mom or dad or whoever's involved with their instruction. But in terms of actual money out of pocket, it's tiny. So I'm not gonna spend $20,000 per year per child to send my child to a private school. Not gonna put them in a government school.

So homeschooling is by far one of the best financial expenses you could possibly have. It's incredible. Obviously, there are some schools that are not that expensive, just that I was doing the math myself. The only thing, by the way, I will point out, the only thing I've never been able to try to, never been able to replicate in that I don't know how to replicate in a homeschool environment are just things that require lots of other children.

So for example, the school that I graduated from has a world-class theater program, and I always enjoyed the theater program, performing in musicals, et cetera. I don't know how you do that in homeschooling. I can replace socialization. I can do, I have lots of friends, lots of strong social groups for my children.

I can't replace a theater program without that. Now, the nice thing is that some schools, especially some government schools, allow you to bring your children and just enroll them in certain classes. So let's say you want your children to be in band. Well, you can take them and enroll them in band class, and they go for band class, and they go for band practice, but they just don't go to classes the rest of the time.

So that would be one way. But if I had a child that was really interested in something like theater, I can't replicate that in a homeschool, maybe the professional theater group. So those are the kinds of things that if you look at your own family, and you look at your children, you say, all right, this is a good reason for us to choose this particular institution.

And you have that freedom as a parent. Listen, you have this freedom, and especially in the United States, and the world over, and by the way, in three shows, I'm gonna talk to you how to have freedom for things like homeschooling, even if you are in a country that makes homeschooling illegal.

We're talking about freedom from state control. But if you're in the United States, there is a whole generation of people that fought in the courts for decades to get that freedom for you, and I beg of you, use it. Don't keep your children enrolled in a system that was designed for the 1800s, a factory system that's almost guaranteed to make them hate learning, to expose them to corrupting, wicked influences on a day-to-day basis, to expose them to deep trauma in their psychology, and they come out with a diploma that basically gets them nothing except potentially access to a college, which basically gets them nothing from a career instruction, career aspect, except possibly the ability to go and get a job that they're not gonna like, and then they're gonna start reading online and find a financial independence forum, and well, how, if I just work this crazy job for work, work, work, work for 10 years, then I can be financially free and do what I really want.

Why set your children up for that system? It's a stupid system. Why not set them up for a lifestyle of freedom from the beginning? Why not give them the freedom to study the things that they care about? Why not give them the freedom to be exposed to lots of things so that they have a much more creative approach to life?

Why not give them the financial freedom to earn money so that they develop useful skills during the years when all their peers are wasting their time? Why not give them the ability to graduate from high school with $100,000 in the bank, to start a business, or to be financially free, or pay cash for a house, or travel the world, or whatever they wanna do?

Why not start them on a lifestyle of freedom? Why put them into this same broken system that results in broken people who hate their lives and are deeply unhappy? If you care about freedom, and if you have children, you're gonna want better results for your children. Now my ways might not be perfect, right?

I'm sure that there are things that I don't know about because I don't have a 16-year-old that I'm working with right now. I'm sure of it, and I'll tell you when I'm wrong. I promise you that, I promised you that from day one of this show. I'll tell you when I'm wrong, I'll tell you when I've developed, and I try to do that from time to time.

Say, here's where things I got wrong. But the point is that whatever it is, let's apply the same level of creativity and personalization and modern thinking to our children's lives and lifestyles with the hope of setting them a little bit ahead of the start that perhaps you and I had.

It's all I hope to inspire you to do. If you care about freedom, my third ring of freedom is this, family liberty. The ability to educate your child on a path that leads to liberty. The ability to infuse your child with an ideology of liberty. I'm trying not to make this show too personal, but I don't want my children taught that the way they get ahead is by voting for somebody who's gonna give them more government cheese that's stolen from someone else.

I want my children to have an ideology of work hard, provide for yourself, and don't steal from your neighbors. Can't do that in a government school. Can't do that in homeschool. Freedom of moral instruction. To instruct your children in a moral, in a sense of morality that's going to serve them instead of destroy them.

Don't waste your freedoms. Consider what's right for you and your family, but I beg of you, give a serious thought to how your personal lifestyle as a parent and how the lifestyles of your children can become more free by home education. If I had to work a job, if I had to do all these things, but I knew I could come home every day and have the confidence that my children were free, my wife were free, I'd do it pretty happily.

Now, tomorrow, the next episode, we'll talk about some ways, though, that your family can enjoy increasing financial liberty. We'll talk about financial liberty, liberty of income, and then we'll talk about freedom from state control and full and complete financial independence. Stay with me. If you're interested in my personal consulting services, send me an email at joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.

I have some openings for late January. If you are interested in working with me personally for a private consultation, send me an email at joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com and I'll share with you the information on how you can do that. Thank you for listening. - With Kroger Brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season because Kroger Brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.

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