What can be our charter for success? We’re headed out on a vast, life-long journey, like a wedding/marriage, but with a deeper understanding of each other and a deeper understanding of the consequences.
What’s driving this? Our low quality of life. My wife and I are talking about having kids – when/how, etc. It’s such a puzzle. Everyone says you ‘just have them; there isn’t any perfect time to plan for it’, but we’re just barely making ends meet, with the high mortgage and all, and then there’s the time factor. We don’t even get home until 8pm or so and we both usually have 3-10 hours of work in the weekends.
Unfortunately, working that much means doing the average on the job, and not getting ahead of the curve any. If something happened to either one of our jobs, we would literally have to put the house on the market – and probably take a loss, since housing prices are finally starting to stall.
I don’t know how we could pay for childcare and raising a kid in this environment just seems … well, not very ideal.
But, putting off having kids means risks, too. Women who don’t have children before they’re 35 have a much higher risk of breast cancer; there’s the obvious fertility issues; we’ll be older parents; etc etc.
Yeah, it’s stressful, and it sucks sometimes.
So- what do we WANT?
Well, this is what I emailed to my wife. Lets see how she sees things and what changes she’ll make. I’m sure this will go through many iterations…
I want a better life. I want to be richer in spirit, mind, body, and wallet. I want to make MILLIONS by investing in as many money streams as is feasible. I want great portions of the money we earn to be donated to an appropriate relief effort in Africa.
I want us to begin – and continue- investing by making sound, well-informed investments. I want us to develop an agreed upon approach to investing. Maybe something like Investigate, Prove, Invest, refine. So that we’re in constant agreement about how and when to move forward.
However, I want us to be fairly aggressive and I want us to be free from our jobs as soon as possible = maybe in a year? Even though we’ll still be working, I’d like us to be together doing that. I’d like us to be able to travel 3 to 4 times a year and have at least one or more trips be extensive.
I’d like us to focus on working less than 40 hours a week and to have all support and hard labor be provided by other, trusted, workers.
I want to identify the right charities and donate increasing amounts of money. I want us to set goals for investments, donations, expenses, trips, mind/body improvements and jointly pursue them – and jointly keep ourselves and each other accountable.
I want a better marriage and I’ve seen that the amount of quality time is directly proportional to our emotional/spiritual/physical satisfaction. Not to mention our comfort with the idea of children.
Once we begin with this approach – get our feet wet, as it were – I want us to make plans for children, based upon that new information. I’d like us to have our feet wet by fall, if not sooner. That gives us about 5 months of trial and error – hopefully little mistakes – to understand what we can expect from our new life.
I want us to plan on deepening our commitment with attending seminars, reading books, meeting other investors and meeting and getting to know the affluent.
I really really really want a better life than the one I have now. In point of fact – I’m actually kinda miserable.
Let's see what she has to say.....
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