Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated providing you with the knowledge, skills,

insight and encouragement you need, live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan

for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, I'm your host, and on today's podcast I want to discuss with you the question. Should you wait to have children until you can afford it.

Now in the most recent podcast episode,

I dealt with the question of,

should you wait to get married until you can afford it?

And I wasn't originally planning to do this follow-a-long

episode immediately, but after further consideration I realized obviously it

makes sense as the whole children's nursery rhyme goes. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby

carriage. And while that sequence of events may not be as consistent as we might like, it still generally is true and so it makes sense to talk about these things together.

In this podcast episode, I'm going to share with you some ideas that come not only from personal

experience after all my wife and I have five children ages 10 and under but more

importantly from a significant amount of experience that I have gained from working as a financial planner for many many families

and I want to share with you some stories that I think will drive some of these points

home to you. The basic thesis of what I want to share with you is that yes, some

appropriate amount of financial planning is warranted when it comes to making decisions regarding having children.

However, it's probably not so significant as you might think.

And if you'll sit down and lay out the specific concerns that you have, you may find

that if you want to have children and if you're able to have children, you don't need quite so much

money as you otherwise thought that you did. To begin let's build a

foundation by talking about goal setting. When I help people with goal setting I

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