As a parent, what do you wish for your children?
I think we wish, hope and pray for all sorts of things. For their health and their happiness. For them to be strong and wise. To be kind and generous. To find themselves and be loyal to themselves, among many others. But I think there is one thing that we may overlook as parents, which should not only be something we wish for our children, but that makes almost all of these other hopes and desires for our children more likely to come true. That thing is ‘Time Freedom’, or freedom from the need to hurry.
If you think about your life, at least for most of us, what is it we all seem to lack?
Time.
The Importance of Time Freedom
Now often this lack of time is of our own doing, and we could choose to remedy some part of this supposed restraint. We could stop watching TV, we could get off social media, off our phones, off the Xbox. These are all things that mostly waste our time. But there are also things that we cannot control, or at least our control is limited. It is a fact of nature that we all must work to survive (unless you decide you wish to be a burden to your family and society). Many, or probably most, people are thus incentivized to find a job, any job, if it can pay the bills. Or, if it doesn’t, they may need to find two jobs or more.
Most of us, sadly, don’t have the luxury to pick the job we truly want and are passionate about. And many of us are certainly unable to create our own hours and work when we wish.
This fact of life for many of us means that much of our time is spent in areas that we would otherwise not choose. And because we are spending this time in areas we would prefer not to, it can destroy our zest for life, and often can lead to reliance on stimulants, distractions and dopamine hits—from video games, to unhealthy food, to porn, to alcohol and drugs—we look for quick fixes to ease our everyday pain, and fill the gap that may be missing in our life.
As parents, I think, we would all probably wish for a better life and lifestyle for our children.
And this brings me to the cure, or the gift we can give our children (and perhaps even ourselves).
The Cure
The (partial) cure for time freedom, and the freedom from hurry, can be at least partially remedied, or made less difficult to achieve, through financial freedom. The easiest way to achieve this is simply by helping your children save capital, create liquidity in the short and medium term, and unleash more of the potential long term compound growth they have stored in their future.
As you are probably aware, the fact of uninterrupted compounding can be a powerful force, but ONLY if you take advantage of it when you are young.
A $100 investment compounding at a guaranteed rate of 10% for 70 years will equal $106,528.15. A similar $100 investment for 40 years will be worth only $5,370.07. That is almost 20x difference if you started the same investment 30 years earlier. That’s the difference between putting $100 away for your child or grandchild at age 1, vs starting at age 30. Imagine how much worse it is if you start at age 40, 50 or even 60.
Putting away a little for your children and also helping them understand why they should save and invest more of their money as they begin working in their teenage years, can go a long way to helping them capitalize on this future compounding.
Short and Mid Term Can Be Powerful Too
But it isn’t even those later decades of growth that I am most interested in. To achieve some amount of time-freedom back, a smaller pool of saved capital, or investments, or cash flows, would help a young adult do wonders when it comes to this time freedom.
If you were able to create this pool of capital for your child to use in their late teens or early to mid-twenties, think of the good that could achieve for them (even better if they had helped grow this, and importantly, that they are good stewards of it)? They would have less stress, less anxiety, feel less rushed to jump into a job they hate. They could take a year after high school or a year off from homeschooling to travel the world, figure out what they want and find themselves. It gives them some space and freedom in their life to not be as rushed.
Hurriedness Destroys
But why do I say that this time freedom and financial freedom can give them most of the other things we wish for our children?
Because it is a rushed, hurried, and stressed life that prevents us from enjoying the health we want, the relationships we want. It prevents us from being present, kind and loving. It prevents us from knowing ourselves, from discovering what we want and value in life. And it certainly makes it harder to be the best version of ourselves.
Having financial freedom certainly doesn’t guarantee that we will have time freedom, or even use that time freedom well, but I think most parents would agree that if we could, especially with little cost to ourselves, we would greatly wish for more time freedom for our children and grandchildren. And we can help give them this if we so choose.
If you want to learn about the most powerful way to put capital to work for your children and grandchildren, you can check out this article here. Or reach out via the contact page and we can set up a meeting to discuss options for your particular situation.