Tag: children

the whole life sabbatical (part 2 of 3)


Creative Commons License photo credit: ribena_wrath

In part 1 of this three-part series I talked about walking away from various responsibilities in your life. How easy would it be to leave them?

Work: If you stop to think about it, you have almost nothing stopping you from quitting your work. If you own a business, you can sell it. If you are an employee, trust me - if you quit you will be a distant dusty memory to your former coworkers in a week. If you are a freelancer, refer your clients to your freelancing network. I am sometimes stunned in a corporate environment by the loyalty and responsibility people imagine they must demonstrate before quitting, when the same company might lay that person off and tell them to clear their desk in 15 minutes. I don’t advocate just walking out, but if you stopped your job today, the world would continue. You would find new work tomorrow.

Family: You have to take care of your children and parents. But consider this: you have a responsibility to provide your children with food, shelter, education, love, trust and hope for the future. Do you have a responsibility to provide them with a Wii? An iPhone? An Ivy League education? A home? There is a line there that everyone must draw for himself, and I’ve seen it done in both extremes: parents who sacrifice everything for their children or brothers who care for unmarried sisters or children who go to great extremes for their in-laws…as well as people who walk away from even the responsibility to put food on the table. With family, your responsibilities are easy to walk away from, but for many of them you cannot walk away and look at yourself in a mirror. However, you can say to yourself “I have no obligation to buy my child a car.” It will not destroy your family.

Finances: You can walk away from your financial responsibilities to the extent that you’re prepared to lose things. The biggest obligation you have is taxes. Fail to pay those and you’ll go to jail. But if you make less and less money, eventually your obligation to pay taxes will drop away. Other obligations, at the end of the day, are optional, although some are easier to downgrade than eliminate completely. If you have a huge mortgage, you could sell the house and live on the streets (extreme) or live in a smaller house with a smaller mortgage (less extreme) or rent. If you spend $300 per month on entertainment, you can eliminate it completely - but at some point even “free” entertainment costs money (you need shoes to walk in the park, for example). You can’t walk away from finances as easily as you might think. You can walk away from some of them, but leaving them all behind is almost impossible.

Life: Obviously, you can let a LOT go in this area. You can start eating crap, quit exercising, and in various ways neglect your life. It might be a nice change for a while, but there will be consequences down the road. I often wonder how far you could push this “life sabbatical,” though. Could I get by on raw vegetables, fruits, bread, cheese, tea and water for food (i.e. forget about cooking)? Could I exercise by just walking or biking everywhere (i.e. selling my car)? Could the lack of stress be the biggest health improvement I could make?

In part 3 I’ll look at whether you should walk away from your life and take a “sabbatical”.

the whole life sabbatical (part 1 of 3)


Creative Commons License photo credit: urbanshoregirl

Have you ever just wanted to chuck it all and walk away? To just walk away from your commitments and responsibilities and start over again somewhere else? Why didn’t you?

I started thinking about the practicalities of walking away from my entire life of responsibilities after learning an acquaintance had done it. I divided my responsibilities up in a few different groups: work, family, finances and life. Each one has different implications in terms of walking away, and before anyone thinks I’m about to start discussing walking away from your family or your finances - don’t worry! I have a different mindset, and hopefully it will become clear what I’m getting at in parts 2 and 3.

First of all, what ARE your responsibilities?

Work: Chances are good that you work for a living. Maybe you are an employee, or a freelancer, or a small business owner. Your responsibilities for each of these types of work are similar but not the same. If you are an employee, you work at a business. Maybe you serve customers, or work in a group, but for the most part you have nobody who relies on you for their livelihood; the company pays their paycheck, not you. If you are a freelancer, nobody depends on you for their livelihood but customers may rely on you, particularly if you function almost as a “part-time” employee for their business. The most responsible position of these three would be a small business owner. If you have employees, you have people who depend on you.

Family: If you have a spouse, or elderly parents or children or any close family you support (or help support) you have a tremendous responsibility to them. You may share that responsibility (for example, if you are married and have kids you and your spouse both provide overlapping types of support) but in many cases this dependency is total and desperate (think elderly parents or newborn children). How easily could you walk away from family (or even close friends who are like familiy)? People do it all the time. Divorce and abandonment are extremes. I’m thinking more of cases like this: do you bring your aging parent who requires almost-around-the-clock care to live with you if you are able? Or do you send them to an assisted living/nursing home facility? It sounds cruel, but should you neglect your other family to care for someone who probably needs better care than you can provide? It’s a difficult question.

Finances: You have commitments to be paid - rent, mortgages, taxes, utilities and so on. Some are less critical than others. Your cable TV is a fairly mild commitment you could end without much worry. Your electricity? Less so. Your taxes? I wouldn’t advise it - we can’t all be Wesley Snipes. This area is fairly clear cut morally, although there are gray areas - would you walk away from a mortgage if your home plummeted in value, in order to get a fresh start? I would, but some people think this is irresponsible.

Life: You have responsibilities to things in your own life that cannot be pushed aside. Food must be eaten, health must be maintained and medical care is sometimes necessary. You can switch from caviar to tuna fish, but you can’t stop eating. You can decide to stop taking multivitamins, but if you suffer from diabetes you’ll still need insulin. You may even have responsibilities to your friends, your neighborhood and your church/temple/mosque/etc., but these could vary so much it’s hard to make an overarching simplification, and I wonder if those are truly responsibilities. I suppose if you are a community-centric person they might be. I will argue that you have almost no other responsibilities. Do I have a responsibility as a citizen for certain things? I guess so. Voting, jury duty, paying taxes and so on are all “national” responsibilities, but let’s face it - you can walk away awfully easily from most of those. Whether you should is another question.

So did I miss anything? And don’t tell me it’s impossible to walk away from any of these commitments, because you can, without a doubt. These are the major areas of obligation in most of our lives, other than a sense of civic duty. In the next two parts I’ll talk about (1) whether you could walk away and (2) if walking away would make you happy. We all say we want freedom - but do we?

what your trash says about you

I’ve noticed that I can make a few snap judgments about my family’s life based on our trash output. We are not a particularly “green” family, although I am passionate about environmental issues. Trash output is one are where I definitely talk the talk but walking…not so much. If you take a close look at your trash, you’ll notice that the decisions you make on a daily basis affect both the quantity and “lack of quality” of your trash. I have noticed a few areas where we can make improvement:

Reduce the volume.

The mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle” is universal by now. The focus is far too often on recycling. Recycling your plastic bottles is a good step to take, but not buying them in the first place is infinitely superior. I’ve written about this before, but the excess packaging that surrounds us has become insane. Given a choice between two otherwise equal items, I’ll go for the less excessively packaged item most of the time. Every time you buy loose fruits instead of fruits in fancy containers, for example you’re doing well. Using a reusable bottle for your daily water instead of a Poland Spring drink-and-toss bottle is an improvement.

Consider your long-term choices. We didn’t think much about disposable diapers - we just headed right down that path. With a 500 year decomposition time our decision to use disposable diapers will affect our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-….grandchildren (you get the picture). I buy so many items without stopping to pause and realize: that crap is going to be here FOREVER.

Don’t throw it away.

Hoarding items can become an annoying habit or a frugal, environmentally friendly way to live - but the border between them is razor-thin and constantly shifting. I’ve saved boxes before, and let’s face it: if you’re a member of Amazon Prime, or shop through drugstore.com, you get boxes all the time. However, if you get an Altoid tin, it can make an excellent storage container for nails or other small items in your tool storage area (just make sure you have a labelmaker handy)!

Composting isn’t easy or fun. In an urban environment, or a condo association, it may be outright forbidden. At the same time, if you can do it I think it would feel much better to throw organic waste into a composting bin rather than tossing it in a landfill. It might be a “self-smugification” action, but so be it.

Give it away. Often if people have large items they don’t want anymore it’s easiest to put them in the dumpster. We finally jettisoned old, broken down bachelor furniture I had dragged around for many years, but we gave it away rather than dumping it (my first instinct). If there is a Salvation Army or Goodwill near you, take a shot. Freecycle or hit craigslist. Sometimes it’s hopeless - my massive 500-pound Sony TV is so heavy that nobody has ever been interested, even for free.

photo credit: mugley

Money.

I’m going to be beating a dead horse here, but the amount of trash you generate is probably proportionate to the amount of money you spend. If you spend a lot, you probably generate a lot of trash. Cut back on your spending, and you will generate less. It’s not always true - getting a free cell phone with a 2-year contract and getting a $500 iPhone both generate a lot of junk packaging waste. But as a general rule, you’ll be better off with trash if you spend less.

Separate.

I am lazy. Throwing an unwanted Land’s End catalog in the trash is not hard. Bundling it up for recycling takes five more minutes, and that’s usually five minutes I FEEL I don’t have.

Make choices at the source. We can recycle our plastic and glass bottles in my community - but not aluminum cans, or juice boxes, or paper milk cartons. Buying containers that can be recycled, as opposed to ones that must be thrown away makes a slight - but important - difference.

Think about needs.

This relates to reducing, but simply think about needs. Are you going to go throw a gallon of milk a week? Buy a gallon, not quarts of milk. Are you going to eat 50 apples before they go bad? No? Maybe buying 6 or 7 is enough, even if you’re missing out on a good deal on 50.

You may think you need those steel-toed boots for gardening, but you know what? You’re not Sven the Hardy Pioneer, you’re Sven the Twice-a-Year-Hole-Digger. Use your sneakers. The boots are going to end up in the dump practically unused.

Think about the future.

I have noticed that there is often a conflict between health and the environment. I like to use paper towels. We have small kids, and I like to know that after I get raw meat on my hands cooking I’m not washing and wiping my hands on the same rag I might use to wipe my son’s hands after an energetic painting session. Paper towels give me peace of mind about hygiene.

Yet at the same time, I have always been blown away by this thought: almost every single thing you have ever thrown away - paper towels, apple cores, packaging, a bottle you forgot to throw in the recycling bin - is still lying in a pile somewhere on this planet. EVERYTHING. If you threw away a yo-yo in 3rd grade, it’s sitting in a pile somewhere. Forget the environment for a minute. Forget the toxins in the air from manufacturing that yo-yo, or transporting it from Taiwan to you, or the plastics it’s made of: that yo-yo still exists.

Everything I ever threw away still exists. It didn’t become fairy dust. Someday there may be a magic incinerator that can turn trash into edible food, or oil, or fuel (a la Back to the Future). Yet the simple fact is that future generations will come and go hundreds or thousands of times over, and that stupid plastic packaging that your iPhone headphones came in will still be sitting there. Daunting.

should you have children?

Sometimes it’s hard to come up with a subject to blog about, so tonight I’ll borrow Syd’s thoughts:

If you decide not to have children, you’re also going to have to learn how to fit in to a world that doesn’t understand you. When people find out that you don’t want kids, be prepared for their shock. But take comfort in the fact that it’s not as bad as their reaction would be if they found out you were secretly a serial killer.

from How to Fit in Without Kids

It’s an interesting debate. My wife and I certainly talk, with curiosity, about people we know who have chosen not to have kids. Yet ten years ago, I counted myself among those people. Until I met my wife I had little interest in having children; actually, if I’m honest with myself, I had none. I don’t know why, exactly - I had a good childhood, I was happy with family life. I simply didn’t care that much about having kids. When I look back, and try to be honest with myself, it was selfishness. I was busy with my life for a lot of years. I worked very hard, I played very hard… I traveled, I socialized. I spent a lot of time doing stuff for me. Children just seemed like they would be an inconvenience to that life. And I was right.

It’s a trite and tedious comment to say that once you have kids, everything changes. It’s true, though. My life revolved around ME until I was a husband, but even then I had plenty of time for myself. Bubelah and I were both working and could do things as separate people. We didn’t have responsibilities. Sure, we thought we did - we thought the family visits and the social events and work-related crud were responsibilities, but now I know that pales in comparison to nighttime feedings, pouring juice, wiping butts, preparing food, playtime, storytime, sicktime, and bedtime. And when work bummed me out I could take a vacation. You can’t do that with a kid. You certainly can’t do it with two (or more).

So I get Syd’s article. Now that I have two children I look at childless couples and - sadly - my first thought is usually “wow, too bad, I guess they can’t have kids” - as if no-one could rationally choose that path except through the accidents of biology. But then I reflect, and I think that the world would be much better off if people could seriously and thoughtfully consider their rationale for becoming parents. How often is it societal or parental or other types of pressure that lead people into thinking they ‘need’ kids? How many people NEED to reproduce? The world’s not lacking for people, last time I checked.

I’ll throw out one more trite saying: now that I have kids, I can’t even vaguely conceive of life without them. And I’m not just being sentimental, because it’s hard to have kids and many times they are just not fun. My son and I had a meltdown last night when I punished him (no bedtime book) for calling me a name shortly before bedtime. I was mad, he was mad. It wasn’t fun, and I didn’t feel the joy of parenthood at that moment. As I write this I had to jump up from the computer and put my daughter back to sleep after she cried - for no apparent reason. But I still feel an overwhelming sense of closeness to my children that’s impossible to dismiss. I’ve felt endless hours of tiredness, boredom, irritation, and so on, but those hours have been tempered by moments and flashes of pure joy - first words, hugs without reservation and the usual glowing types of experiences parents tout. They’ve been cut with many hours of cute songs, fun play, interesting outings and charming displays.

I love my kids. But does that mean everyone needs children? No. No more than my love of warm weather means everyone should move to a temperate climate. Choices are made about one’s life, and although we tend to make children a central life choice, it’s not the only choice and in many senses may be only one of many. Where to live, what work to choose, who to associate with as friends, religion, diet, money - these are all important, too. You can live a full life with children, but you can live a full life without - just as you can live a desperate life with children, or without.

What you shouldn’t do is judge other people’s choices. There’s an old saying that has always seemed to me to be the epitome of reasonableness and nightmarish lack of concern for other people: “the world needs ditchdiggers, too.” That’s harsh, but you know what? It’s true. Well, in the same sense, not everyone NEEDS to have kids. Some because they shouldn’t, and - let’s face it - some people don’t want them, even if they’d make great parents. It’s a shocking thing to say, I think, coming from a parent; but it’s true. So parents - treasure your kids. People who aren’t parents - and don’t want to be - will be just fine the way they are.

how kids (can) make you poor

Raising a child can cost up to $250,000 - and that’s from a study done almost 20 years ago. That’s only the cost through high school - college is another problem entirely, unless you don’t plan on paying for your child’s education (and I don’t). Having a kid is expensive. Having a second is less expensive - hand-me-downs and shared costs can reduce the individual costs - but a larger family is going to cost a fortune. The simple fact is that you won’t become AS rich with kids.

I’ve seen the question of children play out a dozen different ways with friends and in my own life. My parents had kids (my brother and me) when they were barely out of their teenage years. I have friends who waited until they were almost 40 to have kids. One couple fervently and frequently insisted they would never have kids - and show no signs of changing their minds. In each case, the decision to have a child (or children) was deeply personal, and made for a number of reasons - but seldom considering the cost. The simple fact is that you’ll be better off financially without kids. Kids are expensive.

It’s a potentially sensitive topic … and most people don’t want to have that conversation. “Kids bring so much joy into your life!” “Kids are their own reward!” I’m biased - the cliches are all true. My son’s a supernova of energy, creative and amazingly verbal. My daughter’s charming and almost impossibly cheerful. They are joys. But to be realistic, I have to admit that because of them I will not be as wealthy as I could have been. I regret nothing, but I also understand that I’m going to have to work harder accumulating wealth than I would have without children.

So how do we plan to compensate? If you have kids, how can you avoid spending more than you need to? It’s not the nature of my blog to talk about ways to save money on Cheerios by buying the store brand - although you should. But I do have a few “big ideas”:

  1. I’m not paying for my kid’s PRIVATE college education. If Little Buddy or Pumpkin want to attend a private school, they’d better develop tennis skills or become world-class scholars. I’m not paying for Pumpkin to attend an Ivy. I’ll help, but if they can’t pay for a private college, they can go to a public university, just like Mama and Papa did. We did just fine.
  2. We will readjust our lives around their education early on, though. We moved to Florida to escape crappy public schools in Jersey, and made sure we landed in a school district considered one of the best in the state.
  3. I will strive to teach independence. This sounds stupid, but I have seen so many of my colleagues in corporate America talking about their mid-20 (or even mid-30) year old children living at home. I know I can talk big now, but I left home at 18 and my children will too. If they can’t afford a home, I’ll tell them to move to a cheaper locale. An unmarried 35-year-old living with their parents needs to experience life.
  4. We will resist consumerism. A couple of years ago, one of my neighbors bought one of those big car-battery powered cars - with a working FM radio - for their daughters. Little Buddy loved it. I was tempted to get him one. He didn’t, and doesn’t, need it. I have fallen victim again and again to the urge to buy toys. Sometimes it makes sense: I bought him a farm set that he plays with daily. Sometimes I fail: I have bought a half dozen balls (football, baseball, soccer) and he is utterly indifferent to all of them that don’t have Spiderman on them. But I see a sickness in most parents around me: the need to buy distractions. I struggle to remind myself that learning to pretend my wooden blocks were race cars taught me to IMAGINE things. My parents would have done me a disservice by buying me Leapfrog, or whatever the 70s equivalent was. Learning how to live with less - at least as far as toys - is a gift, not a burden.

But none of these cost-saving ideas can compensate for the fact that a childless couple (or a single person) will simply be much better off than a couple with kids. I won’t recommend one choice or the other, because it’s such a personal choice. But don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: in the short term, having kids is no big deal. You can afford formula, diapers, baby clothes. But in the long run, having kids will change your career choices, affect your ability to save and limit your choices about almost everything. Make sure you’re comfortable with the long-term cost before you take the leap.

teaching and being taught, and links

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on this blog or not, but I spent a fair amount of time as a part-time schoolteacher for both middle school and college freshmen as a substitute teacher and later as a graduate assistant. I taught intro to calculus and accounting in grad school and substituted for math, gifted ed and other subjects when I was still chasing my starry-eyed dream of becoming a math professor. I was good. My students liked me and I don’t recall if I’ve ever had a negative review or bad experience teaching (I don’t think I have). I continued my teaching/training throughout my corporate career, leading new employee classes and training in software for over 15 years. I like training and teaching. Nowadays I do little of that as a corporate consultant - nobody wants me to train, they want me to DO. And now, if not yesterday.

Well, I get glimpses of the past and flashbacks now that I have kids. I spent a couple of days at my children’s preschool/pre-K school where Little Buddy attends pre-K and Pumpkin goes to daycare (or preschool or whatever you’d like to call it). I do realize from time to time, when I self-analyze my abilities, that I do have one ability if nothing else: kids like me. I can engage them in learning and don’t make them nervous as some other parents do. I probably would have made a decent grade school or middle school teacher if I could have supported a family on that salary. That’s a sad observation, frankly, but one for another post.

I’ll make one other observation, too, unrelated to personal finance or careers: my children’s school concentrates heavily on play, and I like it. Not learning, but play - directed, but not with any intention towards teaching any specific subject. It’s interesting as a parent to process the conflicting emotions that arise from watching this: you want your kids to learn but I also (mentally) slap myself and say “Pumpkin’s not even 3 yet - she deserves play time.” I’m a firm believer in the concept that kids need play time - creative time, self-directed - to develop themselves. They’ll have plenty of time to be crammed into desks and forced to learn times tables later, I guess. Just my parental opinion, I guess.

MonaVie Blackmails Me?: Stunning that a company, or a rep for a company, would stoop this low. Read the article to see how low a supposedly ‘legitimate’ company can stoop. You can also read MonaVie: Multi-Level Marketing Gone Haywire for more idiocy. I can’t believe anyone falls for MonaVie’s crap after I’ve read stuff like this.

Blue Cash Rewards Increase: I’ve owned a Blue Cash card for years, so this is good news. I’ll take it…

Social Lending Arbitrage Beats Projections: I still think Lending Club is a good bet - if you’re interested in trying it they have a $25 signup bonus right now. I’d treat it like any other investment - it has its ups and downs, but it can serve as a reasonable diversification strategy versus the market.

Personal Finance the Krav Maga Way: Since I’ve seen all the Krav Maga signs up around my neighborhood, I thought this was an amusing - and timely - post.

Small but Alarming Indicator: This is unpleasant - but not unexpected - anecdotal news. On the other hand, Bubelah just attended a small business workshop where they barely had enough room for the interested attendees, and I remarked that it must have been all of the laid-off people thinking about launching small businesses (and good for them if they were)…

Life After Debt: What It’s Like in the Third Stage of Personal Finance: Just an interesting read, on many levels (fitness, travel, etc.)

and more…

  • The Downside of Owning REITs
  • Talking about Deflation
  • The Key to Effective Budgeting – Master The Yes/No Factor
  • Book Review of Leah Ingram’s Suddenly Frugal
  • How Much Mortgage Can I Afford?

the passion of the hobbit

It’s a subject I waffle back and forth on – the idea that passion needs to rule your life. It seems obvious, of course, that you should have passion for your spouse, children… then maybe a bit less obvious but still reasonable to have the same passion for relatives, friends and interests. Even less obvious would be the very abstract things like country, career, sports teams and so on. If you’re passionate about something lower on the list like that – say, American Idol – reexamine your priorities. I was passionate about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I recognize that it wasn’t a good direction for my passions. I got a lot of entertainment out of it but my life is exactly 0.0% improved because of it.

But if you can’t focus on something, it’s a shortcoming. In my case, I don’t have a lot of passion for my work. I view it as a mechanical activity that provides food, shelter, clothing and Netflix for the family. I wouldn’t view this as ideal, although I realize at the same time that 99.99% of the human population wouldn’t view sitting in a quiet, air-conditioned cubicle for 8 hours a day for an income in the top 1% of the planet’s population as a hardship. Many of the “seize your passion” bloggers do – they assume that everyone can seize their internet business bliss – nobody has to make the computer, only to live off of them.

But that’s fine – of course some can and some can’t. Whether any of us choose to do so is of course a choice; if you love taking care of horses and instead choose to pursue a career as an account receivable manager, you’ve made a choice. Whether you can live with it or not is the problem - many can, and a few can’t. I’d guess that the time when all of this questioning really came into play was when the social contract that said companies would handle retirement broke down. If I worked for IBM for 25 years and knew they’d take care of me during those 25 years, and after, I’d be a lot more inclined to give up on the need for passion. But nowadays, that’s not true; just recently a colleague of mine got laid off from a company he’d worked for over 20 years without even a thank you. Your future is not secure.

I realized all of this tonight while reading to my son. For about a week we’ve been reading a few pages of “The Hobbit” by J. R. R. Tolkien every night. I’ve explained the general story to him – a little hobbit goes with a bunch of dwarves to steal back their gold from a dragon – but I don’t have many illusions about how well a four-year-old can follow Tolkien’s esoteric prose. It’s not exceptionally complicated, but it’s not Goodnight Moon.

But tonight when I asked him if he wanted to try something easier, he said no. I asked whether he understood most of it, and he said no. I asked then if he wanted to stop, and he said no. I asked why, if he couldn’t understand all of it, and he gave me an answer that should make things clear (to paraphrase): I’m excited about it because you’re excited about it, Papa. He liked listening to it because I liked reading it. Something was in my voice that wasn’t there when I was reading Goodnight Moon or I’m A Truck.

Some of my fondest memories from childhood are of my father reading The Hobbit to me from the same book at a slightly older age. I remember being a little confused by the language and the complex plot, but loving the fact that my dad thought I was ready for something so amazing. That passion translates easily, and makes reading something like The Hobbit far simpler than struggling through Goodnight Moon for the 100th time. Sitting down at the desk in the corporate office for the 100th time is much like that; coming up with new ideas, starting new jobs or developing new ideas is much like picking up The Hobbit.

I don’t like to think that work – and through that, life – is bleak without purpose. It’s not; other things should put life in balance even if there isn’t purpose in one’s work. But work and parenthood and friendship and one’s relationship with parents, community, school and whatever else are, in fact, intimately tied up with passion. Without the passion to pursue something – church, charity, community, work, parenthood, etc. – life is going to be a little less exciting. Excitement is its own reward.

infant swimming

People have certain basic skills they need to acquire. The ability to feed yourself, clean yourself and shelter yourself are obvious. Past this come a whole list of “really ought to acquire” skills: understanding money, literacy and so on. However, living in New York for more than a decade I noticed that two skills were often never acquired by many city people: driving and swimming. The driving is easy enough to understand: if you’ve ever visited New York or a similar big city you’d know that driving your own car is more expensive (parking, tolls, insurance) and public transportation makes it very easy to get anywhere without driving. Swimming can just be attributed to the cold weather and the lack of nearby pools for learning to swim.

But starting from an early age, Bubelah and I have taken pains to make sure that both of our children are not only able to swim for recreational purposes, but able to “rescue” themselves if they fall in water unexpectedly. With Little Buddy we started when he was less than 1 year old, and with Pumpkin we started just after she was 1. The necessity for the training moved from a mild concern to an urgent one when we moved to Florida. You can’t go 100 feet without seeing a pond or a pool or some other body of water - let alone the fact that we’re in an oceanfront town.

We signed both of our kids up for the Infant Swimming Resource, and to get an idea of what that was like, watch this video (if you’re a parent, it’s fairly amazing).

You might think that’s some kind of trick, but my son (a little older than 3 when he took the course) and daughter (a little more than 1 year old at the time) could do exactly the same, even in full clothes with shoes on. It’s a shocking thing to observe - in a good way. I still wouldn’t trust either of them to spend even 1 minute unattended around a pond, but it does give me the confidence that they wouldn’t panic if they did fall in water someday, which - in the minute it might take me to reach them - they wouldn’t do something that would result in drowning.

No parent (or spouse or friend or anything else) wants to contemplate the mortality of their loved ones. Jan commented on my post about making time for details about my lack of a will:

No WILLLLLLL?????? and you have children? This is really bad. Just jump on line and go to a simple legal site and download one. In fact- write one yourself and take it to your next party. Line up four people to sign that they saw you sign it. Do the details later. Appoint guardianship! Do it- TODAY!

Jan was of course right. Just like it was difficult to talk about why a survival swimming course for our children was necessary (because we don’t want them to drown), it was difficult to talk about how our children’s lives should be handled if we died before they were at least young adults. After I had written about not having a will, though, I realized it was time for us to answer the ugly questions finally - it was irresponsible parenting to teach children to swim but not worry about what would happen if they were thrown in the water, figuratively speaking, by their parents’ deaths.

Infant swimming is a good metaphor for many of the life skills we want for those we love to acquire, and for many of the actions we can take on their behalf to give them the ability to react in a crisis. We teach kids to recite their names and address from the time they can talk in case they are lost. We teach them to survive falling in a pond. We set up wills to protect them (frankly) against the system. So many of these actions are small, but they require asking yourself “what’s the worst that can happen” - and being honest with yourself about the answers.

Note: This month, ISR has been selected to compete in the Pepsi® Refresh Project. ISR needs daily votes for FLOAT during the month of August to “Help Eliminate Childhood Drowning” at this link www.refresheverything.com/InfantSwim.

Voting opened Sunday, August 1st, and is open for just one month! ISR supporters can vote daily to help provide ISR lessons to families in need. The Pepsi projects with the most votes receive the grants. If you feel so inclined, please vote to help a worthy cause: stopping childhood drowning.

heat and links

Just in - it’s hot. The whole eastern US is hot. It’s interesting how extreme heat and extreme cold both have the same general effect on a family with small children - both extremes tend to make you stay indoors. We made it to the pool every day this week but one, but Saturday was hot enough that even the pool was unbearable. Good times.

So due to the heat, another one of my fairly abbreviated link roundups. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a “what I’m reading online” box over on the lower right hand side of the front page of the blog that’s updated throughout the week. I consider that a bit of an add-on to this weekly post. Plus my “thoughts” tumblr blog and my twitter account usually have a few more links, too.

  • BlogCrafted — build the blog you want!: A good consulting service if you need help building a blog.
  • Download My Free eBook: Invest Like a Pro: A good eBook for investors from Generation X Finance - worth checking out if you’re interested in learning more about investing.

    • » The secret of education: An excellent and thorough breakdown of the value of higher education that makes reference to a post I wrote way back when, attacking the humanities and praising a practical education in the sciences (read both Jacob’s post and mine before you bash me, incidentally).

And more…

Finances are Fun: 5 Ways to Encourage Your Child to Embrace the Spirit of Enterprise

We live in a capitalistic society. Many say this with a sigh and a shake of the head, but there are some upsides that shouldn’t be overlooked. If you start early enough, it is possible to rise to unfathomable heights of success. Unfortunately, it’s also possible to destroy your credit and your life quite early in the game by not having a clear conception of how to manage your finances.

kids in belfast

American young adults and children are notorious for their lack of financial know-how. In a society that practically forces you to get a credit card when you turn 18, this ignorance can be deadly. Here are five ways to teach your children how to excel in a competitive economy and to avoid the pitfalls along the way.

1. Teach the idea of financial self reliance early on.

There are times when everyone could use a helping hand, and there’s nothing wrong with that. With that said, there’s nothing wrong with teaching self reliance as a preferred choice. From a very young age, help your child differentiate between needs and wants. If the thing they’re asking for constitutes a “want”— assuming you can/will give it to them in the first place— set up a system where they can work to earn it. Even if “working for it” only means doing extra chores for a couple days, they’ve learned that work is necessary and beneficial.

2. Learning about compound interest is crucial.

When your child first learns about interest, start to talk to them about credit. Explain the pitfalls of taking out too much debt. At the same time, open up discussions concerning investment. Show them the potential for making money if they invest early in life. Compound interest can work for you, or against you. Teenagers are more likely to be interested in these discussions than younger children, so keep the conversations age-relevant.

3. Teach them about other financial perspectives.

Every society and individual family has a unique financial policy. Discussing other viewpoints allows your child to pinpoint the crucial financial questions that any functional philosophy seeks to answer. Here are some examples:

“Is private property a good thing?”
“Should we allow extreme divisions of wealth?”
“How much influence should governments/companies/individuals have in making financial policy.”

Accept that you might not agree with their answers. Keep any debate friendly and informative.

4. Encourage early attempts to start businesses.

When I was 8 years old, I started a business selling golf balls and cans of soda on the golf course next to my house. These early experiences taught me the basics of running a business. This knowledge was carried into my adult life, and inspired me to become a freelance writer.

You never know how far a child’s chosen small business will take them. A close friend in high schools started a lawn-mowing business. By the time he was 18 and had graduated high school, he was able to sell the business for 500K. Now, he manages a department of 100 people in a Fortune 500 company.

5. Allow your child to enjoy the fruits of their financial success, and, if applicable, controlled financial failure.

Saving for college is important, but don’t’ demand that your child put every penny they earn from a high school job into a savings account. Help them save a certain percentage, and allow them to spend the rest how they see fit. Never feeling rewarded for your work can foster an attitude of futility.

Finally, allow them to make manageable financial mistakes. If they don’t save ahead-of-time for a desired item, it’s “ok” to allow them to go without the item. Now is the time to make small mistakes so that larger, life altering, mistakes won’t be made down the line.

Bio: Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at onlinedegrees.org, researching areas of accredited online degrees. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

Photo by larbelaitz

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networking is not about quid-pro-quo

rome

Quid-pro-quo means “something for something” and in a capitalist society we’re trained to think about this rule governing almost all transactions, both commerce and personal. Just as we expect to hand over $1 for a pack of gum, the guy selling the gum expects to receive that $1. Most people say “I love you” with the expectation that it will be returned with “I love you, too.” Very few transactions escape the quid-pro-quo “law”: maybe doing things for your children, or working overtime for your employer (but even there, you might argue you’re hoping to keep your job in exchange for unpaid work).

But networking isn’t (exactly) like that. You can’t expect someone to return something of equal or greater value every time you help someone through networking. If someone puts you in touch with a new client that generates six figures of income for you, do you owe that person a six-figure client? Do you owe them anything? No, you don’t, but you do owe someone something. At the risk of sounding like I’m using a movie to establish my point, you have to pay it forward.

If all networks operated on a quid-pro-quo basis, many people would find large networks a full-time job. The advantages to helping out newer members of an industry or smaller businesses would be minimal, because you couldn’t count on them to return your help quickly or easily. That’s not how a network should work, though. You’ll often read in career advice books/blogs/columns that you should give help in a network (or on Twitter or whatever the social media darling of the day is) without expecting an automatic equal return of the favor. That’s true to a point: you should give help without expecting a return of the favor from that person, but you do have every right to expect a return of the favor from the network as a whole. It may not be immediate - and it certainly may not be obvious - but that return over time has to occur to make the network worthwhile.

Look at how you help people in your network, be it social, professional, educational - whatever. If you aren’t receiving at least equal value back out of your network compared to what you put in, your network is broken. There will always be those who take more than they give, but on whole the network has to provide more value to you than you put into it. If it doesn’t, get out.

Of course value can be companionship or fun, not something as quantifiable as clients or services. But value has to be there. If you find yourself putting more of yourself into any of your networks - and I’m including ‘social media’ such as Facebook or Twitter as well as traditional networks like professional associations, churches or friends - then maybe you should consider finding a new way to spend your time and effort. If it doesn’t make you money, then it should be fun. If it doesn’t make you money and it’s not fun, why are you doing it? There are many other activities you could be doing that make you money or let you have fun instead. Go do them.

photo by ** Maurice **

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