"Homeschooling is an investment in intellectual capital that often leads to financial freedom through customized education fostering entrepreneurial spirit and innovative thinking."

- Rise Capital

How Homeschooling Contributes to Financial Freedom

HOMESCHOOLING ENTREPRENEUR #1

Disclaimer

This topic can be touchy, but I'm not very touchy-feely. Strangers on the internet can suck, leaving rude comments on opinionated articles, which they are free to do, and I am free to ignore them. Likewise, you’re not only free but encouraged to ignore this stranger-on-the-internet author who may have opinions different than yours.

If you find yourself disagreeing or upset by any views expressed by this author, please move on to a different author who inspires and motivates instead of angers you. No judging here. The purpose of this series is to critically examine our choices and make the best decision for you, especially if it’s different from mine: that probably means you did it right.

WHY HOMESCHOOL?

We've been homeschooling over 10 years now; I lost count and don't even know what grade my kids would be in. With so many people now getting a taste of homeschooling as never before due to the unprecedented physical distancing advisories, business owners are beginning to experience how much homeschooling can contribute to the freedom we crave: which is likely why we began our entrepreneurial journeys in the first place.

Why did you become an entrepreneur? Most of us dream that entrepreneurship is the gateway to some type of freedom whether it's freedom from bosses except the worst one, yourself; freedom from set schedules or places to live; and hopefully if we do it right, financial freedom.

YOU CAN DO HARD THINGS BECAUSE THEY ARE IMPORTANT

Running a business is hard work physically and especially mentally, so to overcome that the entrepreneur’s call of freedom away from something or toward something must be powerful. Freedom is paramount, but if you’re running a business for profit, you’re not in this for the hobby or philanthropy: you’re in it to make money. If you’re honest, maybe even deep down you hope to get financially free off this endeavor to buy yourself some more time and location freedom as well. How does homeschool play into that freedom?

I’m a landlord or landlady or whatever, a full-time investor, and by that I mean I work part time. I didn’t get into this business to hustle, 10x, crush it, or grind my way through life: I wanted to spend more time relaxing doing what I enjoy with my favorite people, most of whom I made in my womb. Their dad is pretty cool too and usually gets invited to hang out with us. So it only makes sense that with that freedom we would want the added freedom of not being tied to a school schedule or location.

PERSONALITY PROBLEMS

I don’t like getting bossed around, and you probably don’t either based on your choice of entrepreneurial career. With so much time spent dealing with the demands public school put on me between volunteering, the backpack and paperwork shuffle, packing lunches, monitoring their lunch account funding and getting them in trouble for buying ice cream instead of food, laying out tomorrow's clothes, doing it wrong and explaining my life choices to a grade-school teacher, the anxiety of the 3pm tornado of everyone exploding into the still and quiet house, the extra-curricular rush of karate because school PE wasn’t good enough, or piano lessons because school music wasn’t good enough, or tutoring because school wasn’t, well, you get the point. Add onto that an IEP for a kid with mystery special needs and staff size larger than the West Wing who reported us to CPS anyway, another ADHD slow worker in a demanding GT program, feeling criticized at every turn, school became this stay-at-home mom’s nightmare. I decided to quit that part-time job and get an actual part-time job that made actual money.

TIME STEALERS

Each kindergartener I started into the school system increased my time and commitment there so much so that I even decided not to have any more children because I couldn’t handle the demands of so many kids in school. The first time I got the, “Well, you did choose to have five children,” comment as if to say I should willingly accept all the stress and hot mess frazzle because we brought it onto ourselves (we had one more kid anyway for a half dozen, so there!) I admitted that my lifestyle and the school culture were a bad fit. On top of all that, when my oldest tested into all GT subjects for middle school and was told to drop several due to not having time for all the homework, I realized we had to walk away.

Enough! I pulled my oldest out and plopped her at a desk two-hours a day while the toddlers were napping to go through her self-directed curriculum, and I started a business! I used that same couple of hours of quiet time to build my business and leave the house for appointments while the toddlers snoozed away under her "supervision." When I got home, they would often either still be sleeping or having a snack at the kitchen table, and while they finished I would check my daughter’s work to answer any questions she might have had. Grand total of 15-30 minutes of my day, often with some toddler snuggles mixed in. Since then, we’ve gone even more radical with unschooling and almost no formal academics. Spoiler alert: it’s okay, she’s getting straight A's in engineering school now, so it all worked out.

Homeschooling was so easy! It couldn’t be true! Not only was this taking a shockingly small amount of time, but she was getting all material at her level without compromise. My middle kids who were still in school began to feel like even more of a burden, and during that year there were more heads butting and resistance on my part, especially in regard to the IEP GT special ed twice blessed kid’s enormous staff who, believe me, hated working with me just as much as I resented working with them. A year later, I brought them all home and never looked back. Sometimes, the grass actually IS greener.

For us, having a large family meant school became obviously too demanding, and having all my own ducklings in a row was far easier. Those with less children may not realize the limitations school is putting on, or never considered the added freedom ditching school can bestow. After all, aren’t summer vacations a chaos-filled ordeal for most parents counting the days until school is back in? Isn't this pandemic-forced online schooling a torture making us glad we support a public school system that takes our kids?

TIME AND LOCATION FREEDOM

Let me paint a different picture than school-at-home, to see how freedom from a school format enhances time, location, and financial freedom.

1. We were able to start traveling as a family on trips during off-peak times for not only lower costs, but also shorter lines and smaller crowds. In the photo above, our entire family was able to drop everything to attend my dad's funeral in Seattle, but because it was our son's birthday we took advantage of the few crowds during the off peak season, and with plenty of time to relax and show them around where I grew up without worrying about falling behind or hurrying back.

2. We have made a few great friends through school, but expanded our social circle immeasurably within the thriving homeschool world we didn’t even know was out there and otherwise would have missed out on.

3. We gained a measure of control over our schedule, location, even costs (no more random “send $5 for a t-shirt” or “$15 for a class gift” notices, we make our own spending decisions).

4. The pace of our lives both at home and on trips has slowed dramatically.

It seems counterintuitive that having 5 and later 6 kids at home full time would be a net decrease for our family stress level. But many of us have experienced that same counterintuitive reduction in stress from running our own business versus working a 9-5, despite the different demands. That mental freedom and control over our lives cannot be measured, duplicated, or overlooked. Formal school is a huge part of our collective culture, but don’t just accept it blindly: it deserves a serious critical consideration of the pros and cons for how it impacts your goals for more freedom in your lives. If it works for you, great, and if not, that's cool too: but examining it rather than making decisions by assumptions will give focus and a sense of purpose and control to no matter what choice you make.

In follow up articles, we’ll explore how to make homeschooling more efficient and less demanding, using the entrepreneurship business skills you already excel at, and how if homeschooling is harder than formal school, you might be doing it wrong.

FURTHER READING

On taking back your time and location freedom from schools on Medium.com