I hit my blog's half-birthday and lost steam. A lot of opportunities popped into my life, taking all of my time. Mix that with being dominated by writer's block. I haven't posted in three months, and I've been debating the future of the site.
Then my wife and I went to a Financial Independence (FI) Meetup, and the other attendees inspired me to continue. As they put it, I had already put six months into exploring this concept, creating content, and developing the site. But what sparked me was a question that someone asked me.
In this particular FI group, having kids is rare. So someone asked my wife and me: "What are the perks of having three kids?"
It's a great question, and my wife answered it well. However, we discussed it more on the way home and realized there were so many more layers to explore. So I decided to revive the blog and address this question.
The answer is multi-faceted, but I can summarize it with one word: mindfulness.
To begin explaining, we will address the aspect of time. When you have kids, especially three kids, every free minute of your life will be sucked up. To be able to get anything done, you have to learn to be very efficient and effective with your time. My wife and I are both ambitious, so we have become calculating where our time goes. When the kids are off at school, we have to maximize our time to work on our day jobs. We're human and still have idle times, but we don't have the freedom to dawdle around frequently.
This time is bookended by dropping the kids off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. There are exactly 8 hours between those two bookends. That means we need to pack a full 8 hours of work, including lunch, errands, or other distractions, into precisely 8 hours. This statement might sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many of your peers do 8 hours of work during their 8-hour workday. Although our day jobs frequently bleed into our evenings, we strive to keep it contained within those two bookends.
Then the evenings come. We have about three to four hours of family time. We feel family dinner is important, so most nights, we put a focus on a home-cooked meal and eating together as a family. We tag-team to get this done, but also get all dishes and household cleanup done. Let's not forget about the kids' homework. And then the real joys of just spending some quality relax time with the kids. Almost every night, there is a struggle to push past fatigue from a long day. But because we feel it's essential to have healthy meals and spend time together as a family, we make it happen.
And finally, the kids go to bed, and we get our final chunk of time. We have about two hours before we go to bed. Some nights we put our feet up and watch a show. Most nights, we look at our side projects, investments, or interests and push on those. These two hours are our only "us" time, so we have no choice to use this time as effectively as possible, even if that activity is to cuddle up and watch something together.
Our weekends are only a slight variation of our weekdays. Some weekends we relax and are idle all weekend. But those are very rare. We have to go to the grocery store to feed five, along with doing laundry for five. We want to do activities so that the kids can have an eventful weekend. But we also have things like Meetups, date nights, and other social events. And don't forget about the side projects. The weekend is the perfect time to knock out a chunk of tasks for those.
Especially with the theme of this blog, we want to maximize our time by minimizing our wasteful activities. Looking over our days, pretty much 24/7/365, we are mindful of our time and how we use it.
We can now get to the second layer of the answer. Having kids forces us to live in the NOW. Several of the leading FI voices who have reached early retirement have talked about the downside of obsessing over their FI number. They say they wished they enjoyed life more during the wealth-building years. Hoped that they had taken better of their health or cared a little less about every single dollar saved. But with kids, we don't feel we have that option.
As hypothetical kid-free adults, maybe we would be comfortable with making a decision where we give up five or ten years of life experiences so that we could retire early and have 50+ years of early retirement. But that's not fair to our kids. Those five to ten years might be an instrumental part of their childhoods. When each kid is only at home for approximately 20 years, even though that feels like an incredibly long time, it passes in a heartbeat. What's 50+ years of retirement worth if you lose half of your kids' childhood to FI obsession.
Although we have an FI-mindset combined with our ambitious personalities, we won't sacrifice our kids' childhood or their early life experiences. It can be exhausting, but our kids give us the energy and motivation to do exactly that.
And finally, the last layer. Motivation. After the birth of every kid, my productivity and drive in my career shot up. Once the chaos of having a newborn dies down, the thoughts of providing for the kids and ensuring they have excellent future opportunities shoots up. Not only do I want to be able to provide for them, but I also want to be a good role model for them. So I strive to achieve a career they could be proud of and possibly be influenced into also working hard and reaching their dreams when they get older. But life is much more about career. So we push hard towards living a healthy lifestyle for them to mirror. We push harder in experiencing life so that they can see what's possible. It's hard to be complacent in life when you want to provide the best life for your kids.
In the end, having kids increases the stress, chaos, and sheer amount of overhead in your life. But, besides the obvious of being a bundle of joy and happiness, the mindfulness they give you in just about everything in life is a fantastic perk to having any amount of kids, especially three. You don't have the luxury of letting life pass you by.
(Written 2019.10.05)
Then my wife and I went to a Financial Independence (FI) Meetup, and the other attendees inspired me to continue. As they put it, I had already put six months into exploring this concept, creating content, and developing the site. But what sparked me was a question that someone asked me.
In this particular FI group, having kids is rare. So someone asked my wife and me: "What are the perks of having three kids?"
It's a great question, and my wife answered it well. However, we discussed it more on the way home and realized there were so many more layers to explore. So I decided to revive the blog and address this question.
The answer is multi-faceted, but I can summarize it with one word: mindfulness.
To begin explaining, we will address the aspect of time. When you have kids, especially three kids, every free minute of your life will be sucked up. To be able to get anything done, you have to learn to be very efficient and effective with your time. My wife and I are both ambitious, so we have become calculating where our time goes. When the kids are off at school, we have to maximize our time to work on our day jobs. We're human and still have idle times, but we don't have the freedom to dawdle around frequently.
This time is bookended by dropping the kids off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. There are exactly 8 hours between those two bookends. That means we need to pack a full 8 hours of work, including lunch, errands, or other distractions, into precisely 8 hours. This statement might sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many of your peers do 8 hours of work during their 8-hour workday. Although our day jobs frequently bleed into our evenings, we strive to keep it contained within those two bookends.
Then the evenings come. We have about three to four hours of family time. We feel family dinner is important, so most nights, we put a focus on a home-cooked meal and eating together as a family. We tag-team to get this done, but also get all dishes and household cleanup done. Let's not forget about the kids' homework. And then the real joys of just spending some quality relax time with the kids. Almost every night, there is a struggle to push past fatigue from a long day. But because we feel it's essential to have healthy meals and spend time together as a family, we make it happen.
And finally, the kids go to bed, and we get our final chunk of time. We have about two hours before we go to bed. Some nights we put our feet up and watch a show. Most nights, we look at our side projects, investments, or interests and push on those. These two hours are our only "us" time, so we have no choice to use this time as effectively as possible, even if that activity is to cuddle up and watch something together.
Our weekends are only a slight variation of our weekdays. Some weekends we relax and are idle all weekend. But those are very rare. We have to go to the grocery store to feed five, along with doing laundry for five. We want to do activities so that the kids can have an eventful weekend. But we also have things like Meetups, date nights, and other social events. And don't forget about the side projects. The weekend is the perfect time to knock out a chunk of tasks for those.
Especially with the theme of this blog, we want to maximize our time by minimizing our wasteful activities. Looking over our days, pretty much 24/7/365, we are mindful of our time and how we use it.
We can now get to the second layer of the answer. Having kids forces us to live in the NOW. Several of the leading FI voices who have reached early retirement have talked about the downside of obsessing over their FI number. They say they wished they enjoyed life more during the wealth-building years. Hoped that they had taken better of their health or cared a little less about every single dollar saved. But with kids, we don't feel we have that option.
As hypothetical kid-free adults, maybe we would be comfortable with making a decision where we give up five or ten years of life experiences so that we could retire early and have 50+ years of early retirement. But that's not fair to our kids. Those five to ten years might be an instrumental part of their childhoods. When each kid is only at home for approximately 20 years, even though that feels like an incredibly long time, it passes in a heartbeat. What's 50+ years of retirement worth if you lose half of your kids' childhood to FI obsession.
Although we have an FI-mindset combined with our ambitious personalities, we won't sacrifice our kids' childhood or their early life experiences. It can be exhausting, but our kids give us the energy and motivation to do exactly that.
And finally, the last layer. Motivation. After the birth of every kid, my productivity and drive in my career shot up. Once the chaos of having a newborn dies down, the thoughts of providing for the kids and ensuring they have excellent future opportunities shoots up. Not only do I want to be able to provide for them, but I also want to be a good role model for them. So I strive to achieve a career they could be proud of and possibly be influenced into also working hard and reaching their dreams when they get older. But life is much more about career. So we push hard towards living a healthy lifestyle for them to mirror. We push harder in experiencing life so that they can see what's possible. It's hard to be complacent in life when you want to provide the best life for your kids.
In the end, having kids increases the stress, chaos, and sheer amount of overhead in your life. But, besides the obvious of being a bundle of joy and happiness, the mindfulness they give you in just about everything in life is a fantastic perk to having any amount of kids, especially three. You don't have the luxury of letting life pass you by.
(Written 2019.10.05)
