Ok, it’s only been a couple days since I said I was going to give Mint.com a two-week trial, but things are already looking a bit bleak in terms of Mint.com being my primary personal finance tool. Here are a few of the issues:

1. Budgeting feels like an afterthought

Budgeting and planning are pretty important parts of personal finance, but they feel like an afterthought in Mint.com. From what I understand, it launched without them, and then they were added later. It shows. Budgeting should probably have its own tab, but it’s just a box on the overview tab. Adding budget line items feels clunky and the list isn’t organized in any meaningful fashion that I can discern, so it’s hard to check a specific category without scanning all of them.

2. No way to enter manual transactions

Here’s another reason that budgeting isn’t terribly useful: transactions lag several days before they show up in Mint.com. This isn’t their fault, it’s just how the financial institutions work. But if I could enter a manual transaction and then clear it when it posts from my bank, I could keep my budget up-to-date. If Mint.com doesn’t know that I just dropped $300 on a new iPhone, it might think that I still have plenty of money left in my spending category, when it’s actually over budget.

Plus, I do occasionally spend cash and it would be nice to enter manual transactions for that. You can split ATM transactions into different categories, so perhaps that accomplishes the same thing for most people.

3. No way to enter manual assets or liabilities

I like tracking my net worth, and I currently enter all the numbers once a month into networthiq.com, but it would be great if the tool I use to track personal finances could tell me this. And Mint.com does have this feature, but the problem is that you can’t add manual assets or liabilities. This is a bit of a problem if some of your assets or liabilities are in institutions not connected to Mint, or if you’ve got real estate. Ironically, you can add mortgages, but not the underlying real asset that the mortgages are written against, so your net worth will be ridiculously skewed to the negative if you do this.

4. No custom categories

Mint lets you create budget tracking items and categorize your spending, but the categories are all pre-defined and there doesn’t seem to be any way to create your own categories. This is really annoying, because you spend a bunch of time hunting for the best category, and often end up using one that doesn’t fit super well. I’m guessing that one of the reasons they do this is that having every user on the same category taxonomy makes it much easier to automatically tag transactions based on how other users have tagged them. Still, it would be nice to have the option, even if you do give up some benefit.

5. No way to anticipate future spending

This is similar to #2, in that it prevents your budget from being a true picture of what you have available to spend. One of the best things about the envelope method of budgeting is that it allows you to allocate income for *future* expenditures that you anticipate. This is really handy, because if you have $15k in your checking account, it might be because you have a lot of free cash to spend, or it might be because your rent is $1500 and your taxes due are $13k and you’re paying them in two weeks, in which case you’ve only got $500 to spend. To be fair, this one isn’t completely Mint’s fault, as a lot of personal finance and budgeting tools work like this. However, it would be awesome if Mint could find some way to work it in.

6. No way to transfer money between budget categories

If you’re spending way too much in one category, and a lot less in another, it would be nice to adjust your budget temporarily for the month by transferring money from one budget category to another. You can do this with Mvelopes, but the only way to accomplish the same thing with Mint is to edit your budget and then remember to change it back at the end of the month.

So it’s looking like I’ll have to stick with Mvelopes for now, though I plan on checking Mint.com on a regular basis for its analysis tools. Perhaps they’ll get their act together on some of the points above, but for now, it’s just not that useful to me. Too bad, because the design and UI are one of the best I’ve ever seen on a web app.

If anyone from Mvelopes ever reads this, please listen to me: your model is awesome and your features are amazing. But your platform sucks. Ditch the flash, cut your price down, and you’ll have a customer for life.

I’ve been using Mvelopes.com off-and-on for the last two years, but I’ll confess that I haven’t been so good about it for the last twelve months or so. Here’s why: it sucks. It has a horribly flash interface, is ridiculously slow and clunky, has bugs, and is always having issues with downloading my account data. It’s also completely manual, so it adds a few minutes of work every day. Let it slip for a week or two and you’ve got 50 - 75 transactions that need to be categorized using a brutally painful interface. Ugh. On top of that, it’s like $7 - 15 / month.

So why do I keep using it (or trying to)? Because when you get it rolling, it’s amazing. The envelope method of budgeting works like this: for each spending category, you put money in as you get it, based on your budget, and you take it out as you spend it. When it’s gone, it’s gone. If you don’t spend all the money in that envelope for that month, it carries over to the next month. For example, let’s say I make $2000 per month. I put $700 into a rent envelope, $200 into food, $200 into utilities, $200 into spending, $300 into savings, and $400 into gas As I spend money out of each of those categories over the month, I take that money out of the appropriate envelope. At the end of the month, if I have $45 left in the spending envelope and everything else is empty, I’ll have $245 in my spending envelope for the next month. Envelope budgeting is a great way to control spending and save for things over a long period of time, like an annual insurance payment, or Christmas gifts.

Anyway, about a year or so ago, I signed up for Mint.com, which is kind of like Quicken, but online and free. The interface was good, but this was at the height of my enthusiasm for Mvelopes, and since Mint.com was mainly about seeing how you’d already spent your money, I didn’t spend much time on it.

Fast forward twelve months and Mint.com is starting to look a lot better. It’s got more robust budgeting features, some amazing graphing, trend analysis, automatic transaction categorization, and best of all, it’s all free. But at the end of the day, it still feels more geared towards tracking the money you’ve already spent than helping you spend correctly in the future.

So should I switch? I’m not sure. I really like the envelope budgeting method, but if the interface is so horrible and painful to use that I won’t do it, it’s not really giving me much benefit. If Mint.com would just add something close to the envelope method of budgeting, I would be a customer for life. I’d gladly fork over $10 / month to never have to log into Mvelopes.com again.

I’m going to get Mint.com all setup and rocking for the rest of this month. In two weeks, I’ll evaluate where I’m at and post a status update. If it’s working well for me, I’ll stick with it and cancel Mvelopes. If anyone has found any other alternatives, I’d love to hear about them

Today is my 26th birthday. It was a low-key affair, just hanging out and spending a bit of time with my wife before grabbing some dinner. Relaxing. I can’t help but be a little depressed on my birthday…I always feel like I should have accomplished more over the previous year than I did.

I just finished reading “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis, a British publishing mogul worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $900 million. The book is an incredibly frank appraisal of wealth, what it takes to get it, keep it, enjoy it, and the prices you pay along the way. Best of all, it’s actually written by a guy who built incredible wealth, rather than a guy who made most of his riches off of books he’s written telling people how to get wealthy. Anyway, one of the things that stood out to me was where he said that he would give it all up and everything he would ever make just to be young again. And I think that many wealthy people would say the same. He states that if you are young, you are far, far richer than anyone much older than you can ever be, because you have a lot more time than they do, and time is the most valuable resource we have.

I completely agree, and for me, building wealth is about building the ability to own my time and do what i choose with it. Additionally, wealth buys access to better health care, which can both improve the quality and the quantity of the time that we have in our lives. And if radical life extension becomes a reality during my lifetime, the unfortunate truth is that those with wealth will have access to it sooner than others.

I guess the trick is finding an area to build wealth in that you enjoy, so that you don’t spend your entire life toiling away at something you hate just to build wealth, and thus lose the time you were trying to save in the first place.

I want to be rich. There, I said it. Ever since I was a kid, I always knew that I would be wealthy one day, and I’ve been steadily moving in that direction ever since. I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, learned a lot about myself, and spent a lot of time thinking about why I want to be wealthy. In particular, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about being rich in the context of my faith (I’m a Christian), and in the context of being a good steward of what I’m entrusted with. My good buddy Ben Rasmusen pointed me today to a blog post by John Reel about the lessons learned by getting rich and then losing it all. It got me thinking about this subject, so I’d thought I’d share eight reasons I want to be rich:

Support worthy causes

The way I see it, the more I have, the more I can give away. There are so many organizations and efforts in the world today that need money, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to contribute. I guess when I analyze the rest of the items on this list, many of them are more specific examples of this point.

Give my kids great opportunities

I have been blessed with two wonderful parents who taught me everything I need to know about the things that matter most in life: faith, family, marriage, integrity, etc. However, I don’t come from a wealthy family. My parents are smart people, but neither had the opportunity to go to college, nor did they have the resources to pay my way through college. Thanks to the Navy, I was able to attend a decent school, but I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out differently had I gone to MIT or Stanford out of high school, instead of enlisting in the Navy. I would have had trouble paying for it, and perhaps that’s part of the reason why I didn’t consider those schools to be options. I want my kids to have great opportunities without finances being what’s holding them back. I want to help them pay for school, buy a house, start a business, etc. There’s no guarantee that they’ll have success later, but the least I can do help them take the first step.

Give the underdog a chance

One of my friends just got a job at a company out here in San Francisco and he blogged about their values as a company. One of them is to “help outsiders and underdogs win”, and I can’t stress enough how much I believe in this. I have observed over the last few years that the maxim of “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is very true, at least out here. I’m incredibly grateful that someone at CNET saw my resume on Craigslist and emailed me to offer me a job as a product manager. I was just out of college, had pretty much no experience, no connections, nothing. They took a chance on me, and I hope they would say it was a good choice in the end. Money opens doors, and I hope to use any influence I have to hold the door open for other people who may not have the right background or connections. Someone gave me a chance, and it made all the difference.

Own my time

The most valuable resource that any of us have is time. We only get so much of it (and we don’t even know how much), and there’s only so much you can do to maximize the amount that you get. Even if you eat healthy, exercise, be careful, etc., you’re unlikely to live much longer than a century, at least under current life expectancy (this could change, though). The point is, I hate selling my time. I hate that there are things in life that I need and currently, the only way I can get them is by selling my time in exchange for money. Granted, since I’ve started freelancing, I sell my time for a lot more. And I’ve read about people who sell their time for hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour. But in my mind, that’s still slavery. It’s a much more palatable form of slavery, but slavery nonetheless.

My goal is to reach a point where I can live a comfortable life through passive income sources. I will never have to get a job, take a client, or borrow money unless I want to. I can spend my time pursuing the things in life that matter to me. And as a side note, I’m not entirely sure that kind of financial security can’t be considered happiness that money can buy. John agrees with me.

Explore the world

You know that saying about how the things you own end up owning you? Well, it’s true. If you want proof, just try moving frequently, ideally into gradually smaller and smaller places so you have to get rid of stuff. It’s so liberating to get rid of junk that you don’t need or even want anymore. My wife and I sold both our cars when we moved to San Francisco, and I’m so glad. Is it a pain sometimes? Yes. But aside from the financial benefits (which are huge), just the peace of mind of not having to worry about a car is amazing.

I say all that to say that what I’ve come to value more than stuff are experiences. Stuff doesn’t make you happy. My wife and I were blessed to be able to spend eleven weeks trekking around Asia earlier this year, and it was one of the most amazing, enriching experiences of my life. I think travel is one of those things that just fundamentally shifts your perception of the world the more you do it. I want the opportunity to live in some of the world’s greatest cities, explore the world’s cultures, and broaden my horizons by getting out there and seeing how the other six billion people live.

Create wealth for others

I read this fantastic essay about wealth the other day by Paul Graham, a noted angel investor who has funded dozens (or hundreds) of startups, mostly in the technology space. In the essay, he talks about how many people view the world’s wealth as something that’s fixed, and they accordingly view wealthy people as having taken more than their fair share. But entrepreneurs are not working in a zero-sum world. Entrepreneurs actually create wealth, and when they do, lots of other people get wealthy along the way, from the investors, to the employees, to even the customers. Think about how much richer our lives are thanks to the work of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the Google guys. They’ve been rewarded with billions for the work they’ve done, but they’ve given the world a lot of wealth, too, both monetary and in terms of technological advances. I want to create wealth for others and help make their dreams come true.

Change the world

This brings me to the next point: entrepreneurs change the world. The innovations that they create make our lives richer in countless ways. I believe that the next few decades will foster in so much innovation that the last couple centuries will pale in comparison. In particular, I believe that advances in artificial intelligence / robotics, genetics, and nanotechnology will change the face of the world beyond recognition. I want to be a part of these paradigm shifts and wealth will give me the opportunity to fund great startups in these and other spaces, as well as start companies of my own.

Master myself

Finally, one of the best things about getting rich, I’ve heard, is not the destination, but the journey. Becoming a millionaire is something that most people can technically do, but statistically, few of them will. It’s just too hard. Controlling your finances, investing, starting a company, and other paths to wealth are all difficult and require a lot of personal growth and development for most people. One of the best lessons in John’s blog post is the first one: “I can get rich.” Once you’ve done it, it’s much easier to do it again, because you believe in yourself, and because you’ve mastered yourself, at least to some degree.

Conclusion

I’m not waiting until I’m “rich” to do any of these things. I believe that building wealth is a process. There aren’t shortcuts, per se, though there are methods to get there faster and smarter, but they usually require more risk, more dedication, and more time. Regardless of how I get there, I hope that if and when I do, I’m able to keep these things in perspective and be a good steward of what I’ve been blessed with. I’d love to hear your comments on the subject.

About a year ago, I started blogging in earnest about personal finance and investment, as well as the occasional post on personal development.  In April 2007, I started a series about investing for young adults, which took me a bit longer to complete than originally planned (6 months vs. 1 month).  During the process of writing that series, I got the idea for a site dedicated to helping young adults succeed, covering topics like personal finance, career development, etc.  I got so excited that I turned the project into a huge mountain of an idea and got discouraged.  I have since decided that I need to start somewhere, so I’m going to go ahead and just give it a try.  Hence, Bounteo.com is now live as a simple blog (for now).  I’ll be moving a lot of my personal finance and investing posts (including the series) over to Bounteo.  Please check it out or subscribe to the feed.  Also, I would love any suggestions on how to make the site better, post topics, etc.  Thanks!

PS - The name comes from the word “bounteous”, just in case you were wondering.

Ok, ok, it’s been awhile since anything has been posted relating to the investing series for young adults.  However, the series has basically been finished, so I’m going to start posting the next installments in the series.  I’ll be moving the series and several other posts to a new site that I’m hoping to get up and running in the next few weeks.  This site (ryanwaggoner.com) will be undergoing a transformation soon to enable it to better serve my needs, after which all investing posts will be relocated to the new website.  Stay tuned!

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T. E. Lawrence, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”
British soldier (1888 - 1935)

I’ve posted this quote before, but it’s especially appropriate for recent developments in my life. I haven’t posted to my blog in the last 3 months, and so much has changed since then. Let me give you the highlights:

This Blog
I’ve received lots of notes from people asking if I’m going to finish the investing series I started. I owe my readers an apology. I’ve just been swamped with a bunch of other things, some of which you’ll read about below. I wanted to let people know that not only will I be finishing this series, but I’ll be launching a new project in the next few weeks that the readers of this blog will hopefully find very interesting. It’ll live on a new site of its own and I’ll be releasing details within the next couple weeks, hopefully, so stay tuned. I know you’re probably thinking that I’ll flake on this as well, but the good news is that my time has opened up some. For more, read on…

CNET Networks
As I’ve mentioned before, my day job is an Associate Product Manager at CNET Networks, one of the largest web companies in terms of traffic. I started at CNET in August of 2006 and I’ve really learned a lot there and made some great friends. However, about three weeks ago I started looking around for some contract work, primarily through craigslist.org. After about a week, it was apparent that not only was there enough work for several full-time jobs, I could make 2-3 times as much doing freelance work as I was making at CNET. I managed to hang on for a few more days before I decided that going freelance full-time was the right move and I gave my notice at CNET. My last day was Friday and I am now completely free. I have punched my last clock and done my last 9-5. From where I’m sitting right now, I have a hard time imagining any circumstances under which I would be an employee again, but I’m always open to discussion :-). I already have more than enough work coming my way to stay busy and I now have the flexibility to be able to work from anywhere in the world, at any time that I choose. I’m sitting in a 24-hour starbucks in San Francisco writing this at about 12:30am and it’s comforting to know that I don’t have to get up in the morning unless I want to.

I will say that CNET was an awesome opportunity for me. They gave me a shot when I needed it most and it was a fantastic place to cut my teeth in the web field. I met a lot of very passionate and talented people who inspired me greatly. They offered me a great job before I left, but ultimately, I’m just not an employee. I came to the Bay Area to start a company, not work at one. I don’t want people to think that I’m saying that there’s anything wrong with being an employee or that I didn’t enjoy it. I am fortunate in that I have skills that are in such high demand that I can pay the bills with part-time freelance work and have a lot of time left to focus on projects of my own, some of which I’ll talk about below.

Oh, and my wife quit her job the same day. She’s been working towards it for a lot longer than I have and now we’re both unfettered freelancers, free to travel the world, set our own rules, and take the road less traveled.

BlueSwarm.org
For the last six months or so, I’ve been hard at work with two brilliant and talented partners on a project called BlueSwarm.org. It’s a social network aggregator / lifestreaming / friendstreaming service, which are all fancy ways of saying that it helps you easily keep track of what your friends are doing all over the web and vice versa. Very cool stuff. We launched a private beta of the site on July 7th and have been steadily working on improvements since. Please check it out and request an invite…we hope to be giving out a bunch in the next couple weeks.

Real Estate
As I noted in a post earlier this year, I purchased a single family home with a partner and rehabbed it. We had it on the market for about six months before I finally decided that I’d rather keep it than drop the price any further. I negotiated an agreement to buy out my partner and I now own my 2nd long-term rental property.

Last Wednesday, I was forwarded an email about a sweet little 3/2 condo and managed to put it under contract at a great price within the next 24 hours. The best part is that about 75% of the purchase price is covered by an assumable private note at 6% fixed (!) and the current seller agreed to carry another 15% of the purchase price at 7.5% fixed, leaving me with just 10% to put down and no banks or mortgage companies to hassle with. If you can find a private lender at a good rate, I highly recommend it. We can close any time that works for us, so hopefully in the next couple weeks, I’ll own my third property. The empire grows…

I think that’s pretty much it…I’m also getting my pilot’s license and learning to sail, but so far those haven’t been too time-consuming

In closing, I would just like to say that I’m overwhelmed by how richly God has blessed my life in just about every way. I’ll be 25 years old in less than a month and the world is stretched out in front of me, filled with endless opportunity. I say this not to brag, but to encourage others to take the road less traveled, to take risks, to discover and follow their passions. I won’t say that it hasn’t been hard at times and sometimes it’s completely overwhelming to have a seemingly endless array of options available, but overall, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Once you taste the freedom, you won’t either.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki
When I was about 19, this book changed my entire outlook on money and finances. Looking back, and reading through the book now, I see a lot that I disagree with, but it sparked my thinking about how to manage money, and what financial freedom truly means. Not a practical book, but definitely a good start if you have no “financial motivation.”

The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley
This book, which I read recently, is the result of years of research of America’s millionaires: how they live, what they wear, what cars they drive, how they made their money, etc. It was definitely inspiring to me, and also got me thinking about the impact of wealth on future generations, both good and bad.

Cashflow Quadrant by Robert T. Kiyosaki
This book builds on Rich Dad, Poor Dad and goes into detail about how to build multiple streams of income and gradually reduce your reliance on earned income. It contains overviews of the impact on personal finances and income of things like real estate investment, entrepreneurship, and investing in businesses.

The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
This is a deceptively simple book that contains a series of financial parables that teach the importance of always saving, the power of compound interest, investment, insurance, and other time-tested financial truths. Easy read and a good reminder of some very basic lessons. Again, good to read if you find yourself lacking that “financial motivation.”

Everyone always says that money can’t buy happiness. I’ve always liked to say that money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy relief from certain types of misery. Perhaps an example will be helpful.

Every time I fly commercially, about the time I’m shuffling through security with my shoes in one hand and my recently-torn-apart bag in my other, I think about the indescribable joy that private air travel would be. My feeling escalates as I’m herded onto a plane that is probably older than I am, and sit down between two enormous women who both have toddlers that are vying for the title of the World’s Most Annoying Child. By the time the beverage cart creaks by at the express speed of .00756 mph and the Flight Attendant informs me that the last of the orange juice was just given to the grubby little urchin screaming his head off next to me, I’m ready to kidnap the little bugger and sell him on the black market to finance the purchase of my jet.

Relax, I’m not in the business of peddling children. Yet.

Anyway, the point is that flying commercially is miserable. Absolutely terrible. Could money buy relief from that? Certainly.

However, even I’m willing to admit that this is a rather unproductive example. Most people will never set foot on a private jet, so it’s not really a viable alternative to commercial travel.

A more representative type of misery that most people go through is financial slavery. In fact, to say that most people go through this is misleading, because the majority of us will spend most of our lives mired in financial slavery, “working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” (Fight Club)

Let me give you a few examples of more common types of misery that characterize financial slavery:

• Not being able to spend time with your family because you have to work two jobs
• Not being able to provide adequate food, shelter, clothing, medical care, etc for your family
• Constantly being stressed about how you’ll pay the bills this month
• Getting stuck in a job or city you hate because you can’t afford the risk of trying something new
• Being a burden on someone else for financial care
• Seeing your marriage torn apart by the stress and anxiety that money problems cause

The number one cause of divorce in America is money problems. Is divorce miserable? You betcha. It’s a special type of misery that almost always gets passed on to your kids and, if you’re lucky, your grandkids. If the number one cause of one of the most destructive forces in our society is money problems, how can people say that money can’t buy happiness?

I was pondering this today as I walked to work (yep, I walk to work. City living rocks.). In terms of deciding whether money itself buys relief from certain types of misery, the relevant question becomes this: For most of the people experiencing the types of financial misery that I described above, would more money really solve the problem? I think that in most cases the answer is no. Let me explain.

It’s always helped me to think about money not simply as as solution to problems, but as a multiplier of both problems and solutions. If you’re responsible and able effect positive changes with a little money, you’ll likely be responsible and able to effect even greater positive changes with more money. Conversely, if you’re unable to manage small amounts of money without getting in over your head, and you’re constantly thinking that if you just had more money, your problems would be solved, then the reality probably is that more money would only exacerbate your financial problems in the long term. We need only look at Lotto winners, a high percentage of which are bankrupt within a decade of their winnings. Here’s a great article from MSN Money about the subject.

The point is, if you’re not responsible with a little money, you aren’t going to suddenly become responsible with a lot. I think I’m going to have to revise my saying to be the following:

“Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy temporary relief from certain types of financial misery. However, unless the root cause of that financial misery is dealt with properly, the end result of injecting money into the situation is often worse than the problem was to begin with. Ultimately, the only long-lasting paths to relief for financial misery are death, an infinite supply of cash, or learning proper financial stewardship. Your call.”

Hmmm…definitely not as catchy.

No, I don’t have kids. And barring any unforeseen incidents, I won’t be having kids for awhile. I’ve struggled intensely to explain this to some people, who don’t seem to understand. I love kids. It’ll be awesome to be a father. It would be sad to miss out on such a huge and incredibly rewarding part of the human experience.

Sometimes you read something and it perfectly captures why you see the world the way you do, even though you couldn’t articulate it. For me, the revelation about parenting was the book Freakonomics, written by two economists. Many of their conclusions fly in the face of conventional advice, but they are supported by extensive data. I wanted to cut and paste this review on abcnews.go.com of the book as it relates to parenting, but you should probably go read it for yourself. Here’s a little excerpt:

Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, co-authors of the best-selling “Freakonomics,” pored through a massive government database called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Starting in the late 1990s, it followed 20,000 American children, collecting information on many aspects of their lives. Levitt and Dubner used the ECLS to see what helps young children do well on tests.

“Not only does it measure their scores,” said Dubner. “It also conducts extensive interviews with the families of the kids, so we know a lot about each family and what they do in the family.”

Here are some factors that are strongly correlated with higher test scores:

• The parents are highly educated.
• The parents speak English in the home.
• The parents are involved in the PTA at school.
• The mother was 30 or older when she gave birth to her first child.

Here are some other factors that aren’t:

• The child’s family is intact (no divorces, the parents were married when they conceived).
• The child is regularly spanked.
• The child frequently watches television.
• The mother left work to be with her child between birth and kindergarten.

If you’re thoroughly flummoxed by now, Dubner said that the ECLS data only show correlations between different factors and children’s test scores; they do not necessarily establish cause and effect. But there still are useful hints here about what matters in parenting.

“If you are smart, hard-working, well educated, well-paid and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed,” write Levitt and Dubner. “(Nor does it hurt, in all likelihood, to be honest, thoughtful, loving, and curious about the world.) But it isn’t a matter of what you do as a parent; it’s who you are.”

That last line was what jumped out at me: “it isn’t a matter of what you do as a parent; it’s who you are.” The authors of the book assert that by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it’s far too late.

I don’t want to have kids any time soon because I’m not yet who I want to be. I’m not yet someone that I would want my kids to become. And ultimately, kids become their parents in many ways, as described in the book. They follow in their footsteps in a thousand ways. Kids whose parents are educated and value education are more likely to put similar value on education and succeed academically, which is a very good predictor of success in other areas of life.

Now, I know that financial and academic success are not everything. But if I can offer my kids a better shot in those arenas without sacrificing any other area of their lives and future development (and probably enhance those areas as well), as well as be able to enjoy “the wife of my youth” for a little while longer before taking on such a huge responsibility, why wouldn’t I? Where is the downside?

Disclaimer: Everyone’s situation is different. Use the advice above at your own risk, as your mileage may vary.