Family business

My dad came by today. He had a hospital appointment to deal with a chronic heart condition, and I had to drop him off and pick him back up after. He dropped by a couple hours early, so I tried to fill him in on our investment partnership. He bought some BTC in 2017 and put down half the capital for the mining rig that I’ve operating for the last three years. I tried to explain to him how I doubled his money in the past six weeks on BadgerDAO: “So I know this next sentence won’t make sense, but here goes anyways; BADGER is a governance token for the Badger decentralized organization, and Digg is an elastic rebasing token that tries to follow the USD price of Bitcoin by dynamically expanding or contracting it’s monetary supply.” He just laughed.

The girls came with me to pick him up, and we stopped by Cold Stone for a treat before heading back to the house. I’ve been giving them a lot of leash lately, trying to reduce my own stress level. My dad seemed overbearing when I was younger, and I seemed to be emulating his authoritarian parenting style. I’ve been working on Elder’s application for GalileoXP, and the more thought I’ve been giving to unschooling them, the more I’m letting go. I used to limit their screen time to an hour a day and try to control their schedules, but I’m just letting go. As long as they keep up with their chores, then I’m fine with them watching TV all day. We’re still fighting, but I think things are improving.

If I really wanted them to stop watching TV, then I’d cancel the Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions. The point is that I shouldn’t have to. I need to find alternatives that they enjoy more. I’m hoping I can get her enrolled in Galileo and she’ll latch onto something that she enjoys more than watching sitcoms. I figure it’ll take a few weeks for them to adjust to this new way of doing things. I’m still prompting them for outside time and for Elder to sign onto school when it’s time, but they’re starting to understand that as long as they do what’s expected of them, they’re mostly free to do what they want. Which was the main lesson my dad tried to teach me growing up.

I was telling Dad about my plans for early retirement and Elder’s unschooling, and he just laughed. Missus walked into the room and rolled her eyes at me and they both had a laugh at my expense, which is fine. I’m the dreamer in the family. Luckily for them.

I’ve promised to talk about how I’m teaching the girls about money, but that’s going to have to wait for another post of it’s own. Elder is thinking like an entrepreneur already, which is great. Today she actually cooked lunch for her and Younger without prompting, which blew Missus’s mind. It was just baked beans, green beans and a marshmallow for dessert, but you know, baby steps.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of a “family office” and have been giving thought to having a family business, and generational wealth. Twenty one million BTC divided by seven billion people is … several orders of magnitude less than what I have right now. As long as don’t do anything stupid and can hold on to what I have, then our family should be secure for generations. I found a podcast that focuses on multi-generational wealth, and one of them focused on the business of family. Apparently people actually draft up family constitutions to govern how families operate and after looking at a template for one, I thought it was a great idea. I told Missus I wanted to start monthly family meetings next week.