Juggling kids, careers, and keeping life on track is no easy feat. With two young kids of our own, we have learned firsthand how quickly priorities shift and how even simple tasks can feel overwhelming. So today, my wife Amy and I are diving into the realities of parenting, from simplifying your finances and navigating child care, and sharing practical tips we've picked up along the way.

Whether you have kids or not, I really hope you enjoy hearing us open up about our own experiences balancing family and life. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or leave a comment or review. And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe.

Amy, we are back. How are you feeling? I'm feeling good. So the last time we did this, we didn't get a chance to cover all the topics about family, kids. And the first question here is actually even broader than that. So you want to tee it up? Sure. They asked a really interesting question around optimization versus simplicity.

With two young kids, I have very little free time at the moment. And the time I have, I'm exhausted. Hence, I haven't opened up a new credit card in a long time, and I've stopped tracking my expenses and net worth monthly. I imagine I'll do it again down the road when I have more free time.

But at this stage in life, it's not a priority. Can you relate to this with two young kids of your own? Would love to hear your reflections. I totally relate to this. Time is the newfound finite resource. And honestly, I think about life before children, and I think, "Oh, wow, sometimes we had weekends where we just didn't do anything.

We just sat at home, did nothing. We have friends that don't have kids, and that's what they do sometimes." And I have no idea how that life must feel. It doesn't relate to me at all. And what this person wrote relates to me completely. So when I think about the things you said, the way I try to think about it, and in some cases, I think the person who wrote this question, in a way, I wish that I was more like them, because I haven't been as good at sometimes letting go of these things that are probably not as important as maybe sleep or being more present in some cases.

But I've also tried to find easier ways to do some of them. And so if I look back to the way we budgeted and tracked, and you probably remember this non-pleasantly, we would go down and we'd categorize all our transactions at the end of the year or the end of the quarter, and we'd run through the spreadsheet.

And now, yes, there's more flexibility when you build your own spreadsheet that can do everything. But when we started using Copilot, it's like in very short one, two-minute intervals, I can categorize transactions when I'm going to the bathroom, when I'm in the line somewhere. And so that's made it easy to keep budgeting on track, have a good sense of how much we're spending without having to put a lot of time.

Shout out to Copilot. They've been a sponsor of the show for a while. Not as long as I've been using the app though. Really great product. So there are ways to do some of these things. But when it comes to opening up new credit cards, I am aware that there are people who manage to open up 10, 15 cards a year and get tremendous reward for doing that.

And their credit scores go up, and they have millions of points. And it's been in the back of my mind, just like this person, that we could probably do that at more velocity than we are, more than one or two cards. And we talked about 524 in an episode.

I was looking and both of us are at like 224. We could be doing more. But I think one of the challenges I have is that I want to get it right. It's like, I don't want to get a new card until I figure out the sequence of all the cards that makes sense for everything to play out in the exact perfect and optimal way.

And so I've done nothing. Now, the good news is I'm okay with that because I just don't have the free time to spend on this longer project. But I probably need to come back to the middle ground a little bit more satisficing of, "You know what? Getting one card is not going to change my 524 status.

I'm still going to be okay." And so maybe in the last six months that's happened, I've said, "Oh, here's a good opportunity." And some of it was forced. The US Bank Altitude Reserve card was closing, and I just had to throw it in before it went away. And so it forced my hand and I felt pretty good about getting forced there.

Was it the best signup bonus ever? No, but I feel okay about it. So yes, I think I agree with a lot of this. When it comes to the simplicity side of the equation, that really speaks to me. I think we used to have, I don't know, seven, eight bank accounts, multiple brokerage accounts, lying all over the place, maybe doing bank bonuses.

And you probably at the time were like, "This is a mess." It was overwhelming. And I love the fact that kids have forced us to simplify in these areas because it feels like a mental decluttering of having to keep track of all of these different things in addition to kids.

Yeah. So now we moved everything to Mercury's personal account. That's great. I did a whole episode on bank accounts. If you want to go hear what the finalists were, the short version is Wealthfront, Fidelity, and Mercury. But if you want to go a deeper dive, check that out. I'll put a link in the show notes.

But yeah, so managing everything in one central place, being okay with the fact that there are some people that want to do all their investment trades. They want to manage all the ETFs, manage all the tax loss harvesting, the rebalancing, because they want to save that 0.25% fee that you might pay to someone like a Wealthfront.

I happily pay the 0.25% fee to Wealthfront to not have to think about it. It's a very small fraction of the cost of the returns of the portfolio. And if you look at the last, I don't know, 10 years, if I hadn't been able to make the decisions I did and invest like I did because I was worried about the fee or the fee kept me from tax loss harvesting, I would not be in a better position today, even net adjusted of all those fees.

So those things are great. A couple other fun simplicity things that we added just as inspiration when it comes to food. Before kids, we used to go out all the time, we'd make our decisions last minute, we wouldn't plan that much. And that was fun. I love trying new restaurants.

Now, we do Taco Tuesday, we do Pizza Friday, and it just adds a little bit of simplicity to the week. Yes, there are still five days of the week we have to figure out what we're doing. But there are two we do not. And I think that even though there's a previous version of us that would have rather had more variety, having a little bit of headspace back and finding recipes that aren't the most creative wild recipes that, you know, take three hours of prep, but are things we can whip up in 15 minutes and we really like that level of simplicity.

I really appreciate it. Yeah, I completely agree. I think the word you used was "satisfying" and that couldn't be more accurate in the way that we are approaching life at the moment with two young kids. Okay, next question. Justin asked for just general parenting advice. I'm gonna let you start this one.

This is a very interesting question because it's quite broad, but it also assumes that we have any area of expertise. I think most parents are kind of crash course testing their way through parenting just like we are. There are a few things that I think have worked for us that I'll call out.

There have been moments where we're like, "Man, we have really figured out parenting. Things are just feeling really smooth and everything's humming along." And it feels like just as you start to really nail parenting, everything changes. The developmental phases, the... Sleep regressions. Sleep regressions, just variables in your external kind of kids' worlds that you can't control change.

And now you're dealing with a whole new set of interesting challenges. So I think all this to say, just when you think you know it, turns out you don't know it. And you're having to relearn everything all over again in a very different way. And so I think that's very normal and something that we've learned to accept over time.

Yeah. One thing I'll add there is that I think every time something goes wrong or doesn't go the way you thought, it's like, "Oh, the kids were sleeping great. And then today they didn't." You can ask yourself a million questions to try to figure out why. And the advice I've gotten from parents who've done this more than we have for longer than we have is that don't try to explain it.

Sometimes we're like, "Oh, well, we gave them green beans. And then they didn't sleep well. Was it the green beans?" Or like, "What was it? What caused this thing? Is it that they're getting sick? Is it that she was upset that I didn't spend enough minutes with her this afternoon after work because I was a little distracted on this deadline?" And you can blame a million things for what happened.

But it turns out, and we're now four years into this, sometimes it just happens. Sometimes your kid doesn't sleep well for no reason. Sometimes your kid's in a bad mood for no reason. And that's not to say there aren't reasons. Sometimes your kid is sick. Sometimes there are issues.

But trying to explain every time something doesn't go correctly can send you down a path of worrying about way too much. And I feel like we've both experienced that a lot. Yeah. I would definitely say I fall victim to that more than you do. But you're right. Kids are kids.

The answer is kids. And that's why. They're a kid. And that happens. One of the other things I would mention is for our kids, I found it to be really helpful in trying to approach some of the challenges that they're experiencing from a place of curiosity. One of the examples that I experienced was our four-year-old resisting going to school.

She really just fought it. She did not want to go into the classroom. She was not excited when she'd wake up knowing it was a school day. So instead of trying to quickly fix the problem, we approached her from a place of curiosity, just trying to understand more the behavior.

So help us understand why don't you want to go to school? What's happening right now? Tell me more. And I think what we realized is not that she didn't like school. She was actually bored. She didn't feel like she was being challenged. And that really allowed us to figure out ways that we could help integrate some of that into her next school year to ensure that she was feeling challenged in the right way.

And now she loves school. So I think approaching it from a place of curiosity as opposed to any kind of judgment and having that open mind allows us and her to really collaborate and come up with a solution together. Yeah. And one thing that you taught me was getting down on their level.

And so when you're having these conversations with your younger children, it's like, "Oh, we want to talk about how your day's going. We want to talk about what's wrong." Get down on the ground and be a peer of theirs instead of standing up. Sometimes just looming over them can put their defenses up a lot.

And just getting down on their level, being calm, and talking to them can really open them up a lot and break that hierarchy that comes from you being the parent standing over them. And so I totally agree there. I think one thing that I'll add that is hard, and I think every parent agrees with this, and we did an episode on making time in your day, and this was a theme there.

And it keeps coming up as just trying to have time where you're present and time where you're not and splitting that off. And so instead of working all day and then coming to dinner and working during dinner, I'd say it's probably better to be at dinner 100% there and then go back and work later.

And so trying to make the time you spend with your kids fully on with the kids. And it's amazing how much we've heard comments when we haven't adhered to that, where they're like, "When are you going to be off your phone? What's so exciting on there?" And so we just have been trying to get better.

I think one thing that helps is on days when we're not at the house all day, my phone's dead. And so when I come home, I charge it. And I notice I'm like, "Oh, I was really present with the kids because my phone is on the charger." And so we put two of those magnetic phone chargers in the kitchen as just like, "Oh, when you're in the kitchen, you get to charge your phone.

So your battery's full and you have that going into the evening." And so that's kind of helped. It's like a little hack of set up two chargers in the kitchen so that when you're in the living area or in your living room to pay on your house is laid out so that you have your phones away and you can be more present with the kids.

Anything else on your list? I also think that creating a judgment-free zone is really helpful because particularly when they're young, they might do something really silly and it might feel like a very small thing. But if you remain really open-minded and judgment-free for the small things, I think over time, then when big things actually come up, they'll feel a lot more open to sharing those things as well.

And so it kind of manifests in a really progressive, strong way over time. So as much as we can, as parents, try to be judgment-free, I think that's a huge positive for the kids. Another thing that I had on my list was having time with each kid one-on-one. And we've instituted this recently where we'd split off and I'll take one girl for a date, you take another girl for a date at night.

And whether that's at night for dinner, whether that's an activity, whether that's going to Costco, sometimes buying gold, things like that with your kids, I think is really important. And I think something we want to really keep doing regularly. Yeah. I think that's huge because I definitely noticed that they are a lot calmer and just have a better kind of mentality day after day when we spend that quality time.

And if we skip it for several days in a row, it does feel like we start to see them act out a little bit beyond what their standard kind of behavior is. And another way we do it just more simply than even going out is we'll each take a different kid every other night and do bedtime.

So there's just a little bit of one-on-one time. Obviously, we still go out and do tons of activities together as a family, but we do try to make sure we do a little one-on-one time like that. It's not just important to spend one-on-one time with each child. I think it's also important to make sure you're carving out one-on-one time for each other if you have a partner, because it's really valuable for your kids to see that being a huge priority.

And I think it also helps parents go at raising children in more of a unified way. Yeah. I think we regularly do date nights. And when our children say, "No, don't leave. Don't leave." We say, "It's important for mommy and daddy to have some time together too, just like you get to go on dates with mommy and daddy.

And just like we have mommy and daddy play days, we need to spend time together." And I think I often hear some parents two, three, four years into having children that say, "Gosh, we haven't taken a date yet." And so we'll talk about childcare a little bit later, but I think it's really important.

And I'm glad we've made time for that. I agree. This episode is brought to you by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. Bull market, bear market, inflation up or down. It would be amazing if we had a crystal ball.

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That's code ALLTHEHACKSFREE at allthehacks.com/greenchef to get 50% off your first box, plus two months of salads for free. So this next question is from Tyler. My wife is a little over three months pregnant with our first baby. Congrats, Tyler. And we have some time to prepare, but I still feel like I have no idea what to do.

What are some things you both did to prepare for the baby? And maybe what are some things you didn't do, but now looking back, wish you had known or done? This is a really good question for you because I feel like you created a notion page and you just really got after it.

Yeah. So for context, this podcast was originally potentially going to be a parenting podcast. Yeah, that's right. I went really deep down building out this new baby planning notion and registry, you know, childcare options, birth plan, everything. I was just really excited. Stroller comparisons, spreadsheets, the whole thing. Yeah.

I wish strollers didn't change so much because I have this amazing spreadsheet. I'll link to it in the show notes, but I don't know how out of date it is. But I went deep on a lot of these things. So I'll share some of what was in there because I went back and looked at it.

But when it comes to how to prepare, you know, as a mother being pregnant, I've got nothing and I'll defer to you. But one thing that I thought was really helpful, and this is probably broadly true anytime your partner is going into any surgery. I know when you had your recent surgery, it was also valuable.

It's just understand what your partner wants out of that experience because sometimes there are decisions that have to be made and your partner might be on a lot of drugs and might not be in the most coherent state or be thinking the way they want. So have a plan in advance of what you want.

Whether that's a birth plan or you just actually know, you don't have to formalize it in any way. That's important. I think also understanding what your insurance covers. Our insurance covered a doula and having a doula at the birth. So that was really cool. Lots of people I know have done that and didn't know their insurance covered it.

Also, once you have your child, you have a life event and you can change your insurance. So not only thinking about what is your insurance cover for the birth, but what is your insurance cover once you have children and do you want to use having children as an opportunity to change your insurance plans for the year?

If you have FSAs or HSAs and you want to use them the year you're having a birth, if there's going to be a big expense with that, depending on your plan, that's something to consider. Thinking about childcare, what are you going to do after this baby comes? You may have time off.

One perspective I have, and I'd be curious to get your thoughts, and then I'll finish this list, is when we were thinking about taking time off, we originally thought about staggering it where you would take three months and I would take three months. That was probably from a place of saving money, where it was like we would maximize the number of months we would have where we didn't need to hire any help to take care of the kids so we could both be working.

But I'm really glad we didn't do that because I think it was good to both have some overlapping time in those early months. But I'm curious what you think. I seem to recall we actually did test it for a very short period of time in the first few weeks.

I think the takeaway from my perspective was as much as we wanted to optimize you going straight back to work and my spending time with the baby first, and then later I go back and then you take time off to be with the baby, it was really hard. And I think particularly early on, it's like you assume everything is just going to be normal life but with a baby that sleeps a lot.

And the reality of it is that the emotional demands, you just don't expect it in the way that it actually pans out. And so I think what had happened is we tested it for a few weeks and I got to a point where I was like, "This is not working.

So why don't we see if you can actually take some paid time off now?" And we then ended up sharing some overlap there. And that was actually really nice because it was really good family bonding time and allowed us both a bit of reprieve in those moments that we weren't expecting to need it, but we did.

So I love the optimization mindset that we went in with. But I think the reality was just very different than what we had planned. I also think now that you say this, people say early parenting is kind of a blur. And now I'm like, "Oh yeah, actually now I remember part of this." One thing that I also realized was there was one week, I think, where I tested in some way, I was like 100% on.

And I realized being 100% on is a lot. Being a full-time childcare caregiver for one child and even more if it's two the next time, is just a really hard thing. And so I think we both realized, you alluded to that also, but I would rather spend the money to be able to go back to work after three months and have the first three months be both of us.

And so very appreciative that we even had that time off because I know not everyone does. But I now remember that I was like, "Wow, if I wait three months and then you go back to work, I'm 100% on for three months straight." And that might be harder than I thought.

And I think the early glimpses I got at it were that it might be. So... It's hard. Let's see, a few other things. So figuring out that childcare once whatever parental leave you have is over is really important. There's both the childcare that you might want right after giving birth.

There are a handful of options, family members, taking time off. There are night nurses and night nannies. There are baby nurses, which are more full-time, more popular on the East Coast. There is different forms of live-in help, especially a lot of Asian cultures have this concept of a period of time, maybe it's three weeks to 30 days or longer.

Often the grandmother or the mother of the mother will come and take care of mom and the baby to give mom time to recover. We actually ended up finding a Korean agency that set up a service like that. And I'll put a link to it in the show notes if anyone's interested.

But it was a really, really interesting experience. It was kind of of the ilks of us loving this cultural exchange of having different people and cultures in our home. So we had someone come in and live with us for the first, I think, three weeks. And it was a very different experience.

She didn't speak English very well. So there was a little bit of a communication barrier. But at the end of the day, the baby doesn't speak English either, right? So showing someone how to wash a baby, you could just watch and see how that works. And so that was really, really helpful for those first few weeks.

I realized how fortunate we were to be able to do that. But also just asking your parents what their intention is. Some people find out their parents are planning to come and stay with them for a few weeks, whether they ask for it or not. And some people might ask for it and find out their parents are not interested.

I think both of our parents wanted to come and visit and be a little helpful, but neither of them had any intention on moving in and helping for any period of time more than a few days. And so be upfront and ask about that is important. A couple other quick ones.

There's this thing called cord banking, where you can take the umbilical cord and kind of bank it for some future use case. We didn't do this. But I do remember they asked us at the hospital if we were going to do it. But had you not decided beforehand, you couldn't.

You needed to come with, I don't know, some kit to put it in or something. And so if you want to do that, you want to figure that out in advance after your kid's born, getting their social security number, getting their passport. If you want to do global entry, go get their global entry appointment.

All those things need to happen if you want to travel at any point in time. Another one is just figuring out what your plan is in case something happens to you or your partner. And so making sure you have a will, making sure you figure out who your guardian is, making sure you figure out if you have enough assets and you want to avoid probate, you could go for the full estate plan.

And so shout out to Trust and Will, which is who we use to set up our will and estate plan and all that. And since doing that, we have brought on as a partner on the show. That's something important, especially because I think it's obvious to some people who the guardian of their children might be.

And then as you start thinking about it from the perspective of, "Oh, well, who do I think will raise these children in the way that we want to raise these children?" That question might not be the person you initially thought. And so that's one that took a little bit of time.

Couple quick ones. Updating your withholding. You can now change your withholding. You might have lower tax withholding because you have dependents. Life insurance. Having a child is a great time to think about life insurance. I am really a fan of term life insurance. I'm not a fan of all other life insurances.

And another partner that we reached out to was Fabric, which is a great place to go get term life insurance. And you can do it all from home. You might not even have to do a doctor's appointment. So check out the show notes there. Let's see. Finding a pediatrician, because you usually have doctor's appointments days after the hospital.

And so some people end up not thinking about that and then scrambling. If you want to figure out and be intentional about who your children's doctor will be, you can figure that out in advance. Only other thing is, don't go overboard on your registry. I think sometimes you can buy all this stuff and then either not need it.

I don't know how many burp claws and bibs we had that we didn't use. So I would say there's an endless supply of things you can have. For most people listening, I imagine you can, within a 30-minute drive or Amazon same day, next day, get almost anything you need.

So I wouldn't go too overboard there. I don't know. That was a lot. But those are all the things on my notion list. You have anything else to add there? Yeah. Those were all really great. If I think about what was on our registry and what we ended up getting versus what we used, we maybe used 60% to 70% of all the baby stuff we got.

And we ended up giving away in brand new condition, in boxes, a lot of the stuff that we had purchased and/or been gifted, because you just don't need the things you think you might need. And every baby is kind of different also. So I'm definitely a huge advocate of going at it in a minimalistic nature at first.

And then once you figure out what you need, quickly acquiring those things, whether it's driving to the store or getting it shipped to you overnight. This is a tip from you, but I don't know if you're going to remember it. So I will share it. Write some of these things down.

I was so blown away when we had our second daughter, we were like, "Hmm, what did we do about writing down how often they went to the bathroom? Did we write those things down? What do we do about when we start feeding them certain types of food?" All of these things that we thought, "Well, of course, we'll remember this." We didn't remember any of it.

It was a total blur about the dates and times these things happened. So anytime there's a milestone or anytime you did a little bit of research on how to figure out how to help with sleep, how to do really anything, I would encourage you, if you think you might have other children, to just set up an OceanPage, set up something, and start writing those things down.

Yeah, that's such a good call out. I think the other thing that I would mention is looking back, I think one of the things I wish we had changed is we went deep down research rabbit holes and preparing for a baby. And I don't think I fully appreciated, nor did you, the idea of being able to relax, of being able to sleep in, of being able to do things when you wanted to.

And once you have a kid, that all goes out the window. So I would definitely encourage any expecting parents, especially if it's your first one, take time for yourself. It feels maybe uncomfortable, but it is so, so valuable because you'll never get that time in the same way back for decades probably.

And then the other thing is, I think we did a bunch of research up front. And I think that research was valuable. But a lot of the research and learnings that we did six months before the baby was born was then done at 2am in the morning when we were actually having the problem.

And we were going down these rabbit holes of research trying to understand what was happening because we were desperate at that time. And so it was almost like we were relearning a lot of the stuff that we'd already kind of done the legwork around. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

You're going to end up re-googling or re-chat GPT-ing everything that you are already learning now. So I would say just wait until you actually need it and then go deep down those rabbit holes because you will, whether you want to or not. It's funny you say chat GPT-ing and I realized chat GPT wasn't around when we had our first child.

So kudos to you parents who now have access to this resource that can much more quickly give you answers to things. They might not always be the right answer, but it's something that I wish we had. The only other thing I'll add here is that in those early days, I will say as your children get older, first it gets a little harder to get around, then it gets easier.

But those first few six months, we were right in the middle of the pandemic. So we didn't really get to take advantage of this. But there's a window of time where your kid will sleep anywhere, on your chest, sleep in a stroller, sleep in almost every way, shape or form.

And it's a magical time that I see people post-pandemic or pre-pandemic where they are able to go on little adventures, whether they're local or whether they're to the beach or somewhere where it's just a lot easier. Because once your kids are running around and wanting to crawl and not napping as much, it's just a lot harder.

And then it gets easier. We're seeing now with our kids, one's done napping, one's almost done napping, both out of diapers. It's actually starting to get easier again. But those first six months were actually also easy in terms of your kid can sleep anywhere. You're not worried about feeding them whatever you're having at the dinner table and whether they're throwing stuff around and not eating the food and throwing ketchup on their face or whatever it is.

And so find a way to enjoy that time. Yeah, it's a great point. And it just speaks to all the different phases that the children and the parents need as they grow. And so actually, one of the questions that came in was around childcare. And that's changed from us from when the baby was three months versus when the child is 1, 2, 5, 10.

And so someone wrote in a question and asked, "How did you think about childcare options? And what led you to decide on an au pair?" So this is an interesting one, because I had four or five au pairs as a kid. And so had I not had that experience, I don't even know if I would have known what an au pair was.

So I've actually gotten some feedback from people in person that didn't know what an au pair was. They're like, "Gosh, it sounds so fancy. It sounds like so expensive in this very elite thing." I was like, "Really? Can I tell you more about it?" Because it's actually not that at all.

Now, yes, you do need more means to have childcare. But on the spectrum of childcare options, it's certainly not the most expensive version of childcare. And so I think naturally, as we did, we were like, "Let's explore all the options." Just because I had an au pair as a child isn't like, "Oh, we have to have this thing." So we actually did compare all the options.

We looked at nannies. We looked at daycare. We looked at Montessori kindergartens that start really young. We looked at au pairs. And we looked at multiple au pair agencies. We interviewed some nannies. We kind of tried to cover the entire spectrum and understand pros and cons of everything. And are there some tricks here?

One fun trick for daycare was a lot of daycares are full, right? You try to get in and they're like, "We don't have any space." And so someone told me, "Look, sometimes they only have space one or two days a week. So even if you want five days a week, start with the one or two days a week.

And then when another day opens up, they usually give it to the people who are going part-time. So if you want to quickly get your way into full-time, don't wait for the five-day-a-week option. Take a limited day." So that was one thing. So we looked at all of these.

And I think we really settled on the au pair program because it was really interesting. So I'll let you talk a little bit about why. But for a little context, the way this program works is someone from another country spends one year and potentially up to a second year in the US on what's called a cultural exchange.

And there's actually a Department of State-issued visa for cultural exchange similar to a student visa in that they're not allowed to go get jobs in the United States and be fully employed, but they are allowed to come. And the trade-off that is part of this cultural exchange is you provide room and board, and they provide childcare for up to 45 hours a week.

And there are some very specific rules and restrictions on how that works. They can't work for more than 10 hours straight. And you need to give them a weekend off. And I won't go through every single one of the rules. But it ends up being a very, very flexible program.

And from a cost standpoint, depending on how many children you have, it's probably one of the most affordable options of all forms of childcare with the understanding that you're giving up a room in your house to someone that's living in your house. And for us, and the experiences I had as a child, and we've now had, I love that.

I love that we get to expose our kids to people from other countries. But there is a cost. If you don't have an extra bedroom, it's just not an option for you. But we have actually talked to some friends who realized that if they're renting a place with two bedrooms, renting a place with a third bedroom would cost more, but would actually, in the long run, be cheaper than having a two-bedroom with a nanny and a three-bedroom with an au pair.

They actually saved money in that perspective. So something to consider. But why don't you talk a little bit about why we ended up doing this? There were so many upsides to having an au pair and being part of that program that I think ultimately, it just made so much sense.

And that's why we ended up going up that route. So a few things that became super interesting for me were one, the personalized care, and the fact that I think I had a very clear parenting or caregiving style that I wanted implemented with my children, and we did, is something that having an au pair live with you, they're not only starting to adopt the way that you like things done, but even when they're not working, they're experiencing the way that you interact and engage with your children.

And so it's a lot easier for them to quickly kind of align and adopt some of the different parenting philosophies that we had. And I think that was really, really important. I think the other thing that was really helpful is obviously what we were looking for with a six-month-old baby was very different at the time than what we are looking for today.

Right? And it's great that through the same program year after year, you can take a step back and reassess, "Okay, what do we need for our kids or our family this year?" And we can go out and look for those specific traits. So early on, it was good energy and someone who's able to verbalize and communicate and use language and music and play with our baby.

And now with one being in school, one being very part-time, someone who is actually willing to take on more of that educational element and is really invested in early childhood education is really important. And so that's what we've been able to find through the program. We've primarily done all of our searching with CulturalCare, the agency we've used for all five au pairs.

In the early days, we did explore some of the other agencies. But if we talk about features, I don't want to promise that they exist for all au pair agencies, but they definitely exist for CulturalCare, which is who we used. And one thing, we didn't talk about this process, but when you're looking for an au pair, you can go and browse hundreds of profiles, maybe thousands of profiles.

And so you mentioned we were looking for these different things. So in the process, it's almost in a way like a dating app where you're filtering for things or a recruiting site. We were like, "Okay, we're looking for someone. You could choose the country." If it's really important for your kids to learn Portuguese, you can focus on certain places.

If it's really important for your children to learn Spanish, you can focus on Spanish-speaking countries. If you really need someone who's a really strong swimmer, or you need someone who has a lot more experience driving, or whatever the factors you're looking for are, there's an app, you can download it on your phone, and you can start browsing profiles and starting to watch videos and read descriptions and see what kind of educational background people have, personality traits, those kinds of things.

And so for us, over the years, we've gotten really attuned to what we're looking for, what's important for our family. And for some people, they might want more spontaneity. Some people might want someone that's very neat and organized. And those are all things that you can drill down on, and then interview someone and have some video calls.

Which I'm laughing because my parents did this before video calls. And so they just had a piece of paper and a photo. And they're like, "Great, we'll have this person live with us for a year." We've been fortunate to have like four or five video calls and get to know someone and maybe meet their parents and all that kind of stuff.

So I think throughout the process, it's not like we want this and someone shows up on your door, you've gotten a chance to talk to 10, 12 people, whatever the right number is for you, and find someone that you think is really going to be a good fit. The other thing that I have really appreciated about the program is the flexibility that you get.

And so it's not like set hours, every single week, week after week, that we found to be asked more prevalently with nannies. We're able to change the schedule weekly, daily, if needed. And it's nice because you have such a close working relationship with the au pair because they live with you, they're integrated into your family, such that it becomes a lot easier to say, "Oh, hey, you know, we have this big thing coming up." Or, "Hey, it looks like our daughter is coming down to something.

So we might need to change the hours for tomorrow because she might not be going to school or whatever it might be." And so there's an added layer of flexibility because they're just way more in tune with what's happening in the family. And because they may be sitting down having dinner with you the night before, they get a little bit of visibility into the next day.

And so that's been a huge win for us, particularly when things become more demanding, either personally or professionally. Yeah. And because they're part of the family, we bring our au pair on vacations. So from a flexibility standpoint, when we went to Hawaii, yes, there was an added cost, we got another room, but we also had her with us.

And so we try really hard when we're on these vacations to make sure that they also get to go explore. So they're not working a full week. So every one of our au pairs has been like, "Hawaii is the best place. We've been able to bring them. They love it." But then there's also been a couple days where in one case, I was at a conference.

In one case, we wanted to just have a date and go explore. And so we've been able to do that. So whether it's date nights or weekends or evenings, we've been able to have that flexibility even while traveling, which is something that I think is really different about having an au pair versus a nanny or daycare, where it's a lot harder to have weekend support.

Your daycare is not going on vacation with you. And so if you are looking for an au pair, obviously, we've had a great experience with Cultural Care. They're the largest agency in the country. I think they have the best search. I know they're doing background checks. They have a great mobile app.

They have local coordinators called LCCs around. So one of the nice things is you're not the only person there to support this person in a new country. There's a person especially for that. And I think one of the great things about having a big agency is that the other au pairs in that agency are also around.

And so there is a community for that person. So one of the biggest things that I've heard people say is, "Gosh, do we have this person living in our house all the time?" Well, it turns out, as most of us remember from when we were around 20-something years old, we didn't want to sit at home all day.

We wanted to go out with friends and we want to go see people and do things. And so that community exists from other au pairs and from that local coordinator. So huge shout out to Cultural Care. We actually reached out to them earlier this year and said, "You guys have been a fantastic agency for us.

We're going to talk about childcare. We have lots of parents listening. Do you guys want to be a partner?" And they said, "Yes." And so thank you to them for being a sponsor of this episode and of the show. For anyone listening, you can get $250 off if you join as a new host family, your first au pair experience.

You can do that at allthehacks.com/culturalcare. And just because Cultural Care is a partner of ours now doesn't mean that an au pair is necessarily the right fit for every family. For us, it's been nothing short of amazing. And I can't imagine having to send my child to daycare or having an outside nanny to manage, but every family is different.

So just make sure you're going through that assessment. Yep. Again, allthehacks.com/culturalcare. I'll put a link in the show notes. It's $250 off for any new host family. This episode is brought to you by Built Rewards, which is an amazing points program with so many ways to earn, including on your rent, where you don't even need to check with your landlord.

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What are your thoughts there?" This is something that we've actually been thinking a lot about as our daughter approaches kindergarten next year and I think there are so many pros and cons to both and it really boils down to two things in my mind. One, what is the financial situation?

What is our financial situation? And two, what are the needs of the child? Are there specific needs and/or support that they should have in order to accelerate or thrive in school? And those would be the two big ways that I think about assessing private versus public. What are some of the things you think about?

Yeah. I didn't read the full question Omar wrote, but one of them was like, "We've been thinking about private and we wonder if the money can be better spent elsewhere." So I think one big question before you even have to consider this is, do you have the financial resources to make this work?

I don't think the upside of a school that costs money, a private school, or if there's a charter school that has fees is worth putting yourself into debt and all that. So let's just put that aside. But then if you do have the resources, are they worth it? It would really come down to, well, what is the trade-off?

Is this you have so much money under the sun, that trade-off is whether you leave more inheritance or is this you can't take vacations as a family? And I think that's going to be so different for every family that it's really hard to give a blanket statement. I think you are probably going to get more personalized education for your children at a private school.

But I don't know, we both went to public elementary school as kids. I will say in some parts of the country where I grew up, there was a gifted and talented program. In some parts of the country, there are magnet schools and charter schools that are part of the public program.

In California, to my knowledge, we don't have any of those things. And so I think another, like you mentioned, important factor is your own child's individual learning. And so if your child is struggling or really excelling, you might not get anything to support that as much at a public school.

I actually would say there's probably more resources for people who are a little bit behind than people who are ahead, at least in our school district from what we've learned. But again, case-by-case basis. And I think at the end of the day, there are so many options for something in the middle of that.

Yeah. I think one of the discussions I recall us having more recently was if we put our child into public school, you get more of that local community vibe and you really get to know your neighbors because everyone is going to that school. And you can support it with some of these supplemental programs, reading, math, language, whatever that might be.

But you as a parent are responsible for coordinating, paying, and planning all of those extracurriculars to further support your child's needs. Whereas I think on the private side, you're paying upfront for it, but you don't have to do the same level of extracurricular research and planning because hopefully they're getting a little bit more of that in the classroom itself.

But again, then it's more expensive and you don't have the same kind of tight-knit neighborhood community as you would sending them to public. So I don't know that there's necessarily a right answer. I think it really depends on what you value most. And to your point, Chris, where do those resources go if they're not going to public or private?

And what strain would it put on your family? I would say if you have to take a second job to be able to afford private school, and that means you're not home a lot and you don't get to spend time with your kids and one of the parents isn't around as much, I don't know.

I can't speak to every situation, but that seems to be a trade-off that I would really, really think twice about before making. Obviously, every child has different needs so I can't speak to everyone, but I think you really got to think about those trade-offs. And I have met people that have done amazing things in private school and public school.

I went to public school and private school. My sister didn't. We both turned out great. Well, it's interesting too, because Emily Oster in one of the books that she has goes deep into research and data around parenting. And the single biggest factor she said that influences children's success is actually what happens at home and the relationship and the amount of time you spend with your child at home, which to me then leads me to conclude that, yeah, education is definitely super important, but it's not the single biggest factor to a child's success or failure.

And so I think it's good to remember kids are super resilient and whether they end up in public or private, what happens at home is probably going to be one of the bigger determining factors of their success. If you're listening to this and you're years away from having children, first off, I'd be surprised if you made it this far.

But if you did, I know that in a lot of parts of the country, there are districts that have better schools and worse schools. And so sometimes people pay a premium to live in a district with a good school district and then end up deciding they wanted to send their kids to private school.

If you think you might be on the fence about something like that, it's not crazy to rent for a couple of years and see where that nets out if that's something that works with your lifestyle. Because I can say we have friends who have done both. They've decided to move to a school district that had really great public schools and took advantage of that.

And then we have friends that have paid the premium for a house in a school district with really great public schools, decided to send their kid to private school, and they probably would have saved a lot of money on their home if they had bought a home probably even closer to that private school, but it was in a district that didn't have as great schools.

And also, school ratings are really interesting. And I've learned from a few people that really understand school rating that they really come down to a lot of things that aren't always about the school. So it might be more related to test scores. And if you live in a school district with a bunch of affluent families, they might supplement that school as much as is necessary with outside tutoring, outside education, parent involvement, such that the school might look like it's incredible because the kids get great test scores, but maybe the school's not.

And I'm sure many other factors. So my advice, and you could do this very early, is go tour the public school in the district you live in. A lot of public schools will let you go on those tours for new families even earlier. So you can just start to get a sense of it and start talking to parents about it and just kind of figure out what makes sense for you.

But there's no definitive answer here. I can't tell anyone what to do because it's so circumstantial. And nothing is permanent either. So if you choose to go public one year and it's not working, assess private. Or you choose to go private and it feels like it may not be the best fit, you want to try public, you can do that.

Nothing is permanent. And that's true for both kids, right? I went to private high school, and it really went well for me. My sister went to private high school and like six months in, she was like, "This isn't for me." And she went to public and thrived. And so it's very dependent on each child you have and what their particular personalities are and their learning needs are.

Okay. Okay. We're going to wrap this up. Next question from Justin. He asks about tips for traveling with kids. Okay. I feel like we could make a whole episode out of travel with children. And honestly, you asked me this question, but you are really the pro here. So why don't we at least try to get through some of the fundamentals here and some of the great things we've learned.

There are people that have done this much longer and better than us, and maybe we need one of them to join us for that fuller episode. But what are your goals for travel with kids? And how do you make it better? So a few things have saved us on the trips we've taken.

One, I think going into it with the understanding that everything is flexible. You know me, I'm super type A. I like having a very clear, structured schedule. And when you're traveling, that's just not reasonable, and it's not realistic. And so being able to kind of put that out of your mind and say, "Everything is flexible.

Anything kind of goes day of, and it's just survival mode," it sets a low bar in the parents' mind. And I think that helps. But really, everything is flexible. And the more you can flex and kind of go with the flow during those very small travel windows, the better off I think everyone will be.

The second thing I would say is pack less and buy more when you need it and you're traveling. Or rent more. Or rent more. BabyQuip is actually a really great site. It's global at this point. And so most of the countries you go to, you can rent whatever kind of baby gear, toys, cribs, high chairs, whatever it is that you need at the destinations.

You're not having to lug all of this stuff in addition to a kid or kids with you. And so that makes the travel just so much easier in my mind. And then I think two other quick hits. One, if you're traveling in the car for a longer period of time or on a plane ride, pack snacks.

Pack a lot of snacks. Pack like 5X what you think you need. And if you can find new snacks that your kids haven't been heavily exposed to, that's a great idea. Because it's odd how kids suddenly just are hungry 24/7 when they're on an airplane or traveling. And so this way, you're just extra prepared and no one gets hangry through the process.

You also pack so many amazing new activities like a new watercolor book, a new set of things that you can stick on the seat behind you. Sorry to whoever sits in front of our children. All kinds of stuff like that. Yeah. And it can be really simple things like you can buy this really cheap colored tape.

It's almost like painters tape, but it's smaller rolls for little kids. And it's just colored tape. And you just let them go wild. And they just tape wherever, seat backs, their clothes, whatever it might be. And then you just take it all off before the plane lands and killed a good 30 minutes and brought a little sanity to our lives.

So that's big. And then the last one I think we've learned the hard way is just plan less through the days that you're out traveling and on vacation. I think we have a tendency to go, go, go and to try to fit and pack in as much as possible.

And especially with younger kids, it's a lot and it can be really overwhelming. It can feel really overstimulating depending on where else you are in the world. And so I would say just plan one big thing for all of you to do in that day. And all the other little things can kind of fall into place as you're out and about.

But to try to pack everything in with a full schedule is going to result in full meltdowns. Yep. We've seen those meltdowns. Sometimes I forget that those meltdowns exist and you have to remind me when I come up with crazy, ambitious ideas. But a few other things. So if you don't have an au pair that's coming with you, but you are in a place that's interesting, you want to see things, you can hire local child care.

And we have lots of friends that have done this. They've reached out to the hotel usually and said, "Hey, do you have a recommendation for someone?" If it's an Airbnb, you could ask the host. And just like there are babysitters in the US that you can hire to come over, there are all over the world.

This is a thing everyone uses. And so that's something that will allow you to have a little bit of time on any vacation you're on and really get to see and explore. On this topic, someone else actually asked how we think about flying with kids, whether it's in business or coach.

I have a few kind of tips on in-betweens. But Amy, I'm curious how you think about that decision. Our kids are young enough that I don't know that we've had to fully land on a decision here. But it is definitely something we think about often because on the one hand, we don't want to fly economy overseas, especially when we have a ton of points that we can really optimize around finding good business class.

At the same time, we don't want to expose our kids purely to these upgrades and this life that it's just not reality all the time and they need to build some grit. The way we've approached it is if it is crossing the ocean, particularly overnight, we will upgrade. If it is stateside, we typically won't upgrade.

Just to be clear, since I'm like the nerd about the points and miles here, we're never actually really upgrading because it's always a terrible deal to upgrade with points and miles. We're just booking directly in business. And I think it's funny because we've tried to adhere to this idea of crossing an ocean overnight, book in business, but we've never actually paid for it.

Just to be clear, we would never pay. If the choice was spend $3,000 in business class or fly economy, we'd be flying economy every single time. But if the choice is we found a great deal with our points and miles to be able to fly in business on an overnight flight where we're going to show up at 6am and we're otherwise going to be completely unrested, we would try to do that as much as possible and just really emphasize to kids, probably more like you said when they're older, that here's how we're doing this.

When it comes to business, I think we'll have more conversations to have with our kids as they get older. And I certainly just don't want them to think that this is just a normal thing because the way we pay for it isn't normal. We're not paying for it with dollars.

And funny enough, I was talking to a friend about this airline Zip Air, which is like business class, but it's like the spirit of business class. There's no frills. You pay for your own meal, you get to pay for your own pillow, but you get a lie flat bed.

And ultimately, I'm like, "Well, that's what I really care about. I care about showing up rested and not missing a night and ruining a few days of a vacation that otherwise can be really expensive." Because there's a lot of costs that come to a vacation, which actually reminds me, you have this great idea that we haven't gotten to implement about how to think about planning and costs.

Can you share a little about that for people who maybe have older kids? Yeah. So we haven't tried it because we don't have older kids yet. But I think one thing we're excited to do is as our kids get a little older, enabling them to participate more in the planning and the decision-making process of the trip.

So helping them understand, here's how much we have allocated towards this trip, whether it's points, miles, dollars, whatever it may be, and helping them understand the different trade-offs of making these decisions, knowing that there is a limited resource to how much we are willing to spend to have the ideal trip we want.

And so I think that becomes really interesting because it allows them to really start understanding the value of a point and how that's earned, or a dollar and how that's earned and spent. Yeah. I'm excited to give them all the award booking tools and be like, "You got to plan this trip." And I'm like, if they come back and say, "This thing is going to cost too many miles," be like, "No, go back to the drawing board.

You didn't work hard enough. You didn't find the best deal." Or, "Oh, that restaurant is not as good. Keep looking." Or they'll come back at age seven and just have this perfect itinerary, little digital wizards. Yeah. I wonder whether they follow in those footsteps or they become the ultimate satisficers where we're like, "Hey, do you want to go to dinner?" And they're like, "Yeah, any restaurant." I'm like, "What do you mean?

You don't want to pick the best restaurant?" They're like, "Whatever. We'll just do whatever." It's going to be really fun to see them grow up and travel. So obviously, we talked about there's more travel. I think we need to do some homework. We haven't traveled enough combo of pandemic and young kids.

Honestly, an answer to how to travel with kids in the toddler phase might just be don't do it. I'm not going to say that having kids that are jumping out of your lap, running around planes, not sleeping, being tired, being great, that's not fun. And I think there's a period of time from six to 24 months that is probably my least favorite time to travel with children.

And we're just coming out of that with our youngest. And so I think we'll have a lot more advice on this in the years to come. This episode is brought to you by Fabric by Gerber Life. If you have anyone relying on your income, then you really should be considering life insurance, but be careful going with the policy you get at work because it might not offer enough protection or follow you if you leave your job.

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I think I'm gonna let you take this, but I'm amazed at the wide spectrum of content for children and how wild and flashing and screaming and crazy it can be and how little I thought about this until you brought it up and how much it might affect how they're thinking or what they're doing and whatnot.

So what are some of your top favorites? So Anna asked specifically about screen time. So I'll touch on some of the shows that our kids watch that are low stimulation. Some of our favorites are Bluey. Bluey is great, by the way, for parents and kids. So I can't imagine there's a parent that hasn't checked out Bluey.

But if you haven't, or even if you're not a parent, I think you'd enjoy it. It is so entertaining. And the best part is the shows are all about nine to 10 minutes. So really quick hits, which is really nice. So if you say one show, it's nine to 10 minutes, and that's it.

A few others we love, Trash Truck, Lucas the Spider, and Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, which is kind of a new spin on Mr. Rogers. Yeah, it's great. Shout out to Kevin Rose, who told us to check out Stillwater, which I've put in the newsletter, and I probably talked about on the show.

But another really, really great show for kids, low stim, lots of like Buddhist principles into life. And honestly, I could just watch that show myself also. And I really love the song that plays in the credits. But just to be clear, I think these are the shows we like.

We try to really limit screen time a lot. Go bananas on screens on an airplane. We're open the floodgates because... No rules. No rules. We're just trying to survive. But outside of that, I would say we kind of reserve it for a special occasion or maybe on a weekend.

But it's certainly not the primary form of things. But I'm sure people will have various degrees of opinions on screen time. And granted, I agree. We did, too. I think every parent I know starts out with, "We're going to never have screens." And some of them make it there and some don't.

But things like that are all things that we do when the few times we have screen time off an airplane. And then there's a handful of apps that we've used. I've talked about Mentava in the past, which is like an accelerated learning app that's kind of fun. ABC Mouse has some interesting content for kids.

Khan Academy has a cool app, but I can't remember what it's called. But I think our kids are just starting to get old enough that using an app is fun. Honestly, early on, even a show wasn't interesting. So that was a struggle. We were on a plane ride once and we were trying to get our 18-month-old, "Can't you just be interested in this show and stop running around the airplane, please?" And she's like, "No, don't want it." But actually, one tip that I thought of on this show, we were trying to let our daughter watch a show on the plane and we put on a movie of some sort.

She wasn't interested. It turns out, she just only had about five minutes of attention for each individual show. And then if we were willing to change the show to another show every five minutes, we could hold her attention for longer. And so that might be a little hack that someone could use.

Yeah, that's a great one. I think we hit a lot on parents and children. I like doing these with you. And so I hope we can do more. So allthehacks.com/AMA. If you have questions for me, for Amy, for us, we're going to try to do these a bit more regularly.

This is a lot of fun. Any final thoughts? To all the parents out there, we see you. We appreciate you. You're doing great work. Keep going. And to all the parents coming, it might sound hard, but it is so rewarding. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next week.