Do you hate the thought of working past 55 or 60 do you hate not being able to live the life you deserve today? Do you hate not knowing what your financial future looks like? It's time to stop doing what you hate, here's your host, Mr. Harold Green.
00:19 Aloha everybody. And welcome to the show. This is Harold Green and it is time to stop going with you. Hey, today I'm going to be talking to you about something that is near and dear to my heart and it's about kids. I really love working with kids. I've always liked working with kids. It's something that's near and dear
00:38 To my heart. But the truth is KIDS do cost money. Do cost money. They are an investment for our future and investment to society. We're going to talk about that, but I want to talk to you guys about my childhood experience. I grew up in the South with I had or brothers and sisters and it was a lot of us, well, I mean five kids, but you know, five kids in a very small house. I mean that's a lot of kids. You know, we, we grew up, we had a, had a lot of love in our household. You know, we struggled with a lot financially but you know, the love was there and you know, my mom, she was, she was really good about making sure that, you know, we felt loved and you know, although we didn't have all the material things that we would like to have, you know, we have the support of family.
01:34 I grew up with a lot of cousins, uncles, aunties and it was just a very, very, very tight, yeah, a very tight knit immunity. Now I'm going to be talking to you about kids and why they cost money. From my vantage point of being a college funding consultant, being a college funding advisor, by the way, I am no dr Phil. I am not a licensed [inaudible] therapist or a psychologist or anything like that. I am just a simple fiduciary advisor trying to make a difference in your world. Now, part of my firm, we're an investment advisory firm, but you know, before I started the investment advisory firm, I was just a basic final financial advisor doing insurance, annuities, different things like that, creating financial plans. And that's all important. But it wasn't, it wasn't anything, it wasn't anything really special. I remember one night my wife and I, we went out to dinner and we're eating at this restaurant, I believe it was somewhere in Neiman Marcus.
02:39 And you know, we have nice, nice, nice places that you can eat here in Hawaii because pretty much here you're on an Island and that's pretty much all you can do is shop and eat and go to the beach. But we were, we were eating dinner and then we put in our order and the, the kid, you know, came and you know you know, the, the, the waiter, nice young, good looking kid. And I just, I just felt it, you know, in my heart to ask the kid the question, Hey, you know, you look like you're about a 19, 20 years old, are you in college? And they said to me, no, I'm not in college because mom and dad can't afford, they send me to school. I've always wanted to go to college, but I'm going to have to work and Hey my way through school.
03:29 And so I got home and I told my wife, I said, you know, I keep hearing these stories about kids not being able to go to college and on and on and on. And it really broke my heart. So the next day, the very next day we, we built into our practice a college funding consulting side of the house, college funding advising where we help parents figure out how to save money for college and the best places, how to reduce the overall cost of college, how to help their kids pick the right schools and on and on and on and on. There's a lot of things we do in that side of the house, but I thought I would share that with you so that you would understand where I am coming from when I talk to you about why it's cost money. No, you guys ready? We're going to talk about why kids cost money and some of the things that you're going to need to do to prepare for it.
04:20 So here we go. One, two, three. Let's get it. One of the first things that I encourage people to do before they have kids just to sit down and come up with some kind of game plan as to how they are going to raise their kids and what that is going to look like. So there are three main things that we need to do. Number one, you and your spouse, you have to be in agreement. Okay. You have to be in agreement in regards to your child's future. What is your child's future going to look like? There several things we've got to think about in that. And one of the things I kind of want to touch on is one of the biggest mistakes I see parents making all the time is living through their kids. It could be in the form of music, it can be in the form of sports, it can be in the form of a lot of different things.
05:15 And so I, when I see parents living through their kids, it could be joyful for the parent, but it could be white stressful or the kids because they're, they're feeling like they always have to live up to mom and dad's expectations. And then that can be, it can be very dangerous, very dangerous. It also can be very expensive. And so I also believe that you have to guide your kids. And I think this is a very touchy subject. When you talk about guiding kids. A lot of people believe that, you know, kids are free spirits and so on and so forth and you know, you should let them grow up a certain kind of way and let them explore and so on and so forth. And some of that is true, but what I have found more times than not is that kids can be guided, they should be guided.
06:07 I think as parents, it is our responsibility to guide and to nurture our kids based on two major things. Or actually three. There are skills, there are gifts and their talents. We all know and it was if you have kids, you know, from an early age, the kind of skills and talents and gifts that your children have. I knew from an early age that my son would be good in math and he would be good in sciences, he would be good in engineering and so on and so forth. But we also had to let that play out. Okay. One of the other things we had to also think about is what's necessary for our kids and what's not necessary for our kids. And I think society, society does play a big role and to how we are bringing up our kids, whether, you know, we're bringing them up with the best of everything or we're bringing them up with basically what they need and so on and so forth.
07:04 And so my wife and I, the way we brought our kids up, we brought them up in a very caring and loving way. But we were also pretty strict because we, we figured out what path our kids should be on and we stuck to that path. My son wanted to be a PR, he wanted to be a professional basketball player from a young age. And so as good parents we, we decided to say, okay, you know, we, we want to support the dream. And so we put them in different types of a youth basketball and so on and so forth. But from day one I realized that my son could barely his issue. In other words, he was a tall kid, but he was very uncoordinated and it just looked very awkward. And I said, I don't know if you can coach awkwardness out of this kid.
07:52 But I knew he was smart. I knew he was bright. So I said, son, you know what? I think you have a better shot at owning an NBA team versus playing for one. And you looked at me and say, dad, get out of here. I said, no, I think, I think you have what it takes to, to, to do well in life, but just not in the sports arena. So from that day on, we began putting them into different types of enrichment programs. And my wife being Japanese, one of our kids also to learn Japanese. And we also think language is very important. So we enrolled them into Japanese school and in Japanese school they had all the subjects that they would have in American school. And so my kids for a years, they had two sets of homework. They had their Japanese homework they had to do and it was all in Japanese reading, writing and so on and so forth.
08:40 And they had their American homework that they had to do. People looked at us, looked at us and said, man, you guys are crazy. You're, your kids are going to hate you. And we said, Nope, we have a purpose. We have a plan and we know why we are doing what we are doing. And we stuck to our, regardless of what everybody else said. And and we had to tell her kids that Japanese school was kind of expensive. And so at that time it was only I working, my wife she, she worked at home with the kids. And so our budget was really tight, but we knew that was an investment that we had to make. And so for us, we ignore the experts. There's a lot of different people out there on TV telling us how we would, how we should raise our kids and what we should do.
09:22 But I really think you ought to ignore the experts and here's why so many kids, I'm into my office at 17 and 18 years of age. When it comes time to plan for college and to send them to the school or to send them to university. My main question to them is this, okay guys, what do you think you want to do for the rest of your life? You know what they say? Sorry, uncle. We don't know. In Hawaii it's a uncle. There's a term of endearment, you know when you usually called and call an older guy, uncle and older lady, auntie. And so they call me uncle, uncle Harold, we have no idea what it is that we want to do. And I said, I'm sorry, but you've had quite a bit of time to figure out what it is that you want to do and why is it that so many kids are confused today?
10:12 It's because I think that there is too much information on the internet. There is too much of this stuff going around about it. Your life, do whatever you want to do with it and so that's what [inaudible]. That's what gets pretty much do. It's their life and sometimes the parents are really hands off and they let the kids do whatever and so they they, they don't have the proper structure that it takes. Now some, some parents do a really good job of this. Some kids, they come and they know what they want to do from day one. I want to be an engineer. I want to be this one to be a lawyer. I want to be in business, whatever, whatever. They know what it is that they want to do. Another thing that we have to look at when bringing up our kids is the type of education that we want them to have.
10:52 I get the question all the time in regards to private school or versus public school here in Hawaii, I don't know if you guys know this, but Hawaii is ranked very low when it comes to the education rankings in the United States. And so private school is a very big deal here in Hawaii. People want the best for their kids. And so sometimes they feel that if they don't get their kids into private school, then the level of education it made, it may just not work. It may just not work for them. And so my wife and I, we at one point dabble with putting our kids in private school, but we found that if we simply spent that money in an alternative direction, we probably would have better results. And we would also have money leftover for college when the time came. So we made the decision to send our kids to public school and then send them to private colleges because that's where we felt was in there.
11:52 Absolute best interest. But everybody's family is different. And so if you're thinking about a private school education, then just know that it's going to cost you money and it can be very expensive. Another thing we have to think about is whether or not we're going to invest money in a five 29 plan for their education. And so I'm going to talk about that in a later show. But there's pluses and minus in a five 29 plan I had that, that parents need to know about. Okay. The next thing we have to think about is enrichment. Enriching our children's lives and that could cost money. And one of the biggest things that I share with parents in terms of enrichment is exposure. Getting our kids exposed to the different things in life is very important. And the younger you get them exposed, the better off they will be.
12:46 You may have family members that are in medicine or family members that are engineering. I would say get your kids exposed to those family members and what it is that they do from an early age and just begin to have these conversations, not things that you read on the internet, because a lot of times the kids will, they'll get something on the internet, but there's really no life experience to back that up. And so when you're talking to a live human alive, a family member or a friend, whoever it might be, they can, they can really share and expound on their experiences and different things like that that they've had throughout their life. And I think that is very, very important. Another thing we can do to help enrich our children's lives is travel. That costs money. You know, taking them to different places in the world.
13:32 When my kids were coming up, they had some exposure, but because they're, you know, they're part Japanese or whatnot, that was, that was about as much exposure as they got and then being here in Hawaii, being exposed to the different nationalities and things like that. But Japan was a very good experience for them because they got to experience Japan as an individual that wasn't born and raised there. They could speak the language, they could read and they could write it and they could communicate, but they got to experience a different side of Japan that most people don't get to see. And I think that really broaden their horizons and then gave them a very different respective when it comes to [inaudible] in life. Now the third thing I think we have to do, well we're thinking about bringing kids up is and installing values. I said, and installing values.
14:26 Some people say and still values. I say install values and here's why kids don't come. What's all fair? Only hardware. When your kids are born, I think they are a blank slate and they are to be nurtured. I did directed, but you also have to install values in them. And growing up my parents installed values in me and my granddad installed installed values in me. And it was, it was very important because growing up in the South at that time my mom when she had me, she was a single mom. And so my grandparents believed in education. So what they did was they sent her off to college and she got pregnant with me and then she came home, had me, and then my grandparents sent her back to college. Now this was back in the seventies. Okay. Back in the seventies, my grandfather, he he, he owned his own business.
15:21 And he began to tell me the story about how his business came to be. And in the South we still had racial tensions and things like that. But what my grandfather told me was, never blame anyone for your situation. You have the power to change whatever's going on in your life. There's no one's fault, but you're on. But he also told me, you have to work hard. You have to be honest, be truthful, and take care of people. And that's one of the biggest things he, he put in me was taking care of people. My grandfather did a lot, or our community per se, he was a member of the church. And one of the things he did with me as a young kid was we were responsible for cleaning the grounds and making sure the church was, you know, taken care of and it had what it needed.
16:08 And sometimes, you know, I w I would hate going in morning grasp early Saturday morning. That's cartoon time, man. But my grandfather said this is important. We're going to go, we're going to take care of it. I was like, grandpa, there's nobody else's. There's other people in the church. Why can't they do it? And he said, Nope, this is something that I decided that I want to do and I'm bringing you with me so you can come if you want or not. But you know what I found spending time with my grandpop's was one of the best things that that ever happened to me in my life because he taught me so much. He had to take time out of his day and do that. Yes, that's very, that's very true. So when it comes to installing values, sometimes it will, it will take time away from work where you could be earning money.
16:52 But it's very important. Maybe you take time off and work and volunteer with your kids and then do things in your community. But it's definitely gonna cost you some time and some money. So kids will cost you money. Kids are an investment in society. They are an investment in our future. But we must have a plan. We must be able to dream, plan and accomplish all the things in life that we want to do. But if we have kids, we're going to have to include them in that plan. Education is going to cost you money. But here's another thing that I want you to think about. You're also going to have to do this and put away and save for your kids as well as putting weight and saving or retirement. So how do you accomplish all of that at the same time? Well, I created a program called rapid retire and rapid retires designed to put you in position to retire seven to 10 years sooner than the average. Joe. It also paying for college. It also covers paying for private school. It also covers your lifestyle in a lot of different things and so if you're interested in being able to raise your kids and give them the kind of life they deserve as well along with saving for your retirement, do me a favor, go to retire now, retire well.com download
18:09 That rapid retire brochure. They'll offer the game changer form and I will be in touch with you to figure out how I can help you read the kind of life and the kind of plan that you desire or your kids little disclosure about rapid retire and using rapid retire. There can be no guarantees made that you will be in position to retire seven to 10 years soon or any specific period when investing past performance is no guarantee of future results. All investments including real estate are speculative in nature and involve substantial risk of loss. We encourage our investors to invest carefully. We also encourage our investors to get personal advice from their own professional investment advisor and to make independent investigations before acting on information that we published. Thanks again for joining today until the end to the show and a until next time, one, two, three my it.
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