I am not a worrier and have a quite relaxed kind of life. My wife and I both run our own business. She has a small beauty salon and I have a home office where I consult small-to-medium enterprise (SMEs) about subsidies. We don’t work full time. I work about 32 hours per week and my wife works around 20 hours. So we also have lots of spare time to enjoy life. In the end that is what we are working for, to have a nice life together with our three children.
But for the last two years I have been really concerned about the future of my three children (11, 16 and 18 years old). I’ll try to explain my worries.
I am a bit over 40 years old. My wife and I have lived together since 1998. At the start we had a rental house, and around 2010 we bought a nice house with enough space in and around it. Buying a house at the moment was easy. Banks were eager to lend money, even on a single-earner income. The mortgage we pay is low (around $900 monthly). Because of the low mortgage we also have enough money for our other monthly payments, groceries, clothes, leisure, and so on.
But lately I see prices rising an insane amount. Groceries have risen by over 15%, energy by over 10%, gas and oil 20%, etcetera. This is actually not a huge problem for us at present, but the trend is quite concerning.
Now I come to my concern about my children’s future. Will they be able to buy or even rent a house? Prices of houses in my region are up 20% since last year, and the expectation is that they will climb another 10%-20%. The market is overheated because of the money printing and investors desperately buying real estate, which drives up the prices more and more.
Banks are willing to lend the money, but you must have a double income and the mortgage is sky-high.
Renting a house is almost impossible. There is a seven-year long waiting list (if you’re lucky) and the rent prices are at least 25% higher than a mortgage.
In the meantime, inflation is rising and rising. But wages are not trending up with it. So in reality this means that prices for daily needs and monthly costs are going up, but your paycheck isn’t.
My children are basically sentenced to find a partner and both work full time (at minimum!) to achieve the same life standard as we currently enjoy. Even then, making it will be really hard. I can’t even imagine how this situation will be in the next 5-10 years, when my kids leave our house. Until that time we’ve made the agreement that they save money and we pay for all their necessary expenses.
Most people think that’s normal, but it isn’t. In the ’70s and ‘80s having both a working mom and dad wasn’t normal — that was special. But now it’s odd if one of them doesn’t work.
And this makes me kind of angry. The whole inflation and money-printing since the debasement of the dollar in 1971 is the main reason for this. Innovation should make everything cheaper. But all of that has been absorbed by inflation. There are some great podcasts (for example Guy Swann) about that subject.
So here’s my plan B for my children. I have been stacking a serious amount of sats for them since 2018. My goal is to stack one full bitcoin for each of them. I believe that this single bitcoin is, for them, the “way out” of the system and their life, without having to bear the financial and even social burden of where our economy appears to be heading
I think that within 10 years a bitcoin can be a collateral for a mortgage and you can pay off the mortgage with the price action of bitcoin. To be clear, it is not for financial motive that I stack sats for my kids. They don’t have to get rich with it. My motive is to give them a chance of a life which they can arrange as they want, and not how to simply “fit in” to the system.
I used the word secret in the headline of my article. This plan B has been discussed with my wife and she supports it. She also wanted to inform our kids about this, but I thought it was better not to do it, yet. They must focus on their study and social life. The price action of bitcoin could make them nervous, distracted or, perhaps even worse, lazy.
So, I hope my plan B works out fine and maybe inspires you to make your own plan B, for your children.
This is a guest post by Erwin Hemme. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
