Do Not Pass Your Own Regrets On to Your Children: On Aging, Family Ties, and Real External Economy

Audio file transcript

Hello everyone, this is CLEC James Talks, and I am James.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3W0lywf1MWyY0mMFAgXjoM?si=JWaxYKT6TKq6SWngLvfP9g

Today's topic comes from a letter from a friend. He said, "Teacher, my asset allocation needs to include 2 million in cash, which I am setting aside for my child to use when going abroad, so that 2-million overseas fund probably cannot be invested." I asked him, "How old is your child?" He said around ten-something.

That set off today's discussion. You expect your child to study abroad. First, a ten-year-old is unlikely to come to you on their own and say they want to study abroad; second, why do you expect them to study abroad? Is it that you want to complete the career you never completed yourself, or are you truly thinking of your child? And the child has not said they want to go abroad, so why are you deciding for them that they need to go?

So what parents should be thinking about is the parents' own lesson. That is, if you send your child abroad, that child may leave you, and in the end they will settle in America while you settle in Taiwan. This happens in many families, and eventually when you are old you may not see them once or twice a year, and in the end they come back only when there is an inheritance, so you have to see this clearly.

So the parents' lesson is: you have to know the final outcome, and are you willing to bear it? And what the children should think about is, if you are already an adult, do you really want to go abroad? Do you know what it takes to go abroad? Do you have enough money? I think that if children want to go abroad, parents do not need to prepare it for them: let them apply themselves, work part-time themselves, taste hardship themselves, and only then can they succeed! If food, clothing, housing, and transport are all worry-free for them, you usually end up raising children who feel no gratitude and do not know how to be grateful. So you must let your children know: "If you want to go abroad, fine, your father and mother will give you 500,000 NT dollars to get started, and after that you have to find work over there yourself, find part-time jobs yourself, work yourself, study yourself, take responsibility yourself."

So is going abroad really better? Leaving your homeland and being separated from your family, does that fit your goals in life? This is what every child going abroad should consider. So parents have their own lessons; do not think about the child's lesson. Here the child is not even 18 yet, and you as a parent are already saying you will send them abroad; that goes somewhat beyond your own lesson.

The reason given is "for the child," but honestly what I hear is that it is all about realizing dreams you never fulfilled. Like this friend who emailed me: he said, "I am sending my child abroad because many of my outstanding classmates went abroad, and they have all done rather well since coming back." You see, it is for his own unfulfilled ideals, or because among his classmates he found himself falling a little short, so he hopes his child will win back some pride for him. Why should a child win back pride for you? That is your lesson, and it has nothing to do with the child; do not shift your problem onto your child.

The lesson for the children to think about: parents can remind them, saying, "Oh, if you go there you will have to bear hardship yourself. In America you are far from home and you are not native-born, so life will usually not be as easy and free as in Taiwan." So the decision belongs to the children, not the parents; at most the parents remind them, saying, "Oh, then you will have to be independent."

This is the separation of the parents' lesson from the children's. In Taiwan what we see is many elderly parents whose two children with doctorates are in America. I have told the story of going to the pharmacy the other day: an elderly mother, maybe in her eighties, brought in by a caregiver, unable to see, saying to the pharmacist, "Ah, I cannot see, I cannot see." I believe she had a caregiver and certainly had children, but the children in fact could not be there with their parent. And if your children are far away in America, it is very hard for them to help you with anything. Parents in Taiwan with no one to care for them, two children with doctorates in America, and not one of them comes back to look after their father or mother, if the father or mother ends up living alone.

So parents who now want to send their children abroad: are you willing to take the risk of your own old age? Unless you are also prepared to emigrate with your children and live in the same city. The best way to age, in my view, is to live near your children but not too near. That is, not within walking distance, within 30 minutes by car, within an hour by public transport; that is the most economical arrangement externally. But absolutely, absolutely, remember, absolutely do not live together with your children.

In America many parents buy a house and a car for their child, cheerfully sell their house in Taiwan, and happily move to America to live with their children. In fact living with your children is not more comfortable, because it is not your home and there is a great deal you cannot decide. So you need enough money to live near your children wherever in the world they are. And aging in America is also very expensive: when you are old, a nursing home or retirement home might cost 15,000 dollars a month now, which is nearly 500,000 NT dollars a month, and in future it could reach 20,000 dollars a month, which an ordinary family cannot afford. Otherwise you have to exhaust your assets first and then have the U.S. government take it on.

But when an ordinary household has one or two million dollars, they all want to leave that one or two million as an inheritance for their children and will not go into a retirement or nursing home themselves. And the children may also be thinking that their parents have 2 million, and if they go into a nursing home it might all be spent in seven or eight years; and although the state will support them afterwards, their own 2-million inheritance can no longer be inherited, because the parents spent it. Everyone is thinking about inheritance and money, so Asians rarely go into nursing homes, unless the elderly person has no assets at all; otherwise you have to exhaust your assets first and then have the U.S. government bear it. Nursing homes and retirement homes in Taiwan are relatively cheap, and Taiwan's medical care is still quite good, but Taiwan's nursing homes cannot compare with America's. American nursing homes actually take very good care of the elderly, because that is their god of wealth, right? Even when the government pays, the money arrives every month; you just have to take good care of the elderly person, so the elderly person is the nursing home's god of wealth.

So all of this has to be weighed, rather than simply letting the child go abroad to broaden their horizons, or sending them abroad to complete the dream I once had. In fact sending your child abroad is an enormous change for the family: not only a financial upheaval and the upheaval of family separation, but also an external diseconomy.

So I would rather you take your child abroad every year for a couple of weeks somewhere, travel and broaden their horizons, than necessarily send them overseas to study, with the whole family staying in the same country. This is a question of external economy, and it is the key to being able to see your child several times a year. If the child is in America, you may not see them once a year; and in the end when you are old you may never see them again, until they come back to inherit your estate.

But if you live in the same country and can get together every week, is that not excellent economic value? So I can understand people who have this idea of sending their children abroad, because it is the same rigid thinking as when we insist on buying a house in investing. But that is old thinking: going abroad now is usually not better than staying in your own hometown. Even if some parts of home are not so good now, they will keep improving. Taiwan 50 years ago really was very bad, so back then everyone wanted to go abroad, and now the younger ones all want to come back. Have friends who went abroad from Taiwan thirty or forty years ago done better? In terms of life, not as well as people imagine.

If you have the chance to visit friends in America, look at the lives they lead. The houses look nice, but every family is in fact a mess of feathers on the floor. There are even friends who went to a friend's home in America wanting to understand American life, only to find that this outstanding classmate of theirs was actually doing blue-collar work in America; they had not expected it. We are not saying blue-collar work is bad, but it is not as good as people imagine. And in the end many friends in America, whose retirement savings there are insufficient, have no choice but to return to their hometown; there are plenty of them. So if you have not carefully considered whether the whole family can emigrate, then sending a child abroad really deserves a second and third thought.

This friend who wrote said it is because some of his classmates who went abroad and came back have done rather well in Taiwan. Well then, why did those classmates not stay overseas? If they are so capable, why not develop and prosper overseas? Why come back to Taiwan? Why come back to Taiwan? Were they not doing very well in America? Why come back to Taiwan? Of course I am not saying that people who return from America to Taiwan are not talented, but if you were doing that well in America, like Jensen Huang or Lisa Su, you would not come back to Taiwan, right? You think they are doing well, so why, having the ability, did they not stay in America?

Besides ability, the question is: is America better than your own hometown? If you are just an ordinary person, going back to your hometown in the end is actually warmer and easier to adapt to. If my investing had not succeeded, I probably could not have made it in America either; I could only get by in Taiwan, which is what people call doing reasonably well.

So this is not about fawning on the foreign, and it is not necessary for a child to go abroad. If your whole family can live together, and you invest well, and you have more money than you can spend, then what more do you expect of your children? Overseas is not the soil we grew in, and you cannot grow well there. Among overseas Chinese who went abroad to study, I have not seen one who reached the very top. Of course there are plenty like Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, but those families emigrated when they were small. If you have hundreds of millions of NT dollars right now and want to emigrate as a family to America, then I support you, because your assets are large enough. If you have 10 million dollars in assets (about 300 million NT), and you want to emigrate to America with your whole family, I support you. But if you do not, and merely want your child to dip a toe in America and come back to soar, then I think you should not encourage your child that way.

Going to America as a small child and going to study abroad are not the same thing. But this cannot be generalized either, because I find many Chinese students abroad really are quite outstanding: more than half of the people in artificial intelligence in America now are Chinese, and the country with the most AI talent in the world is also China. Of course I have not researched whether the Chinese people at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or Anthropic in America went there as children or went to study, so I do not know.

So if the whole family is in America from start to finish, I can support that, having all gone as a family from an early age. If that is not your situation and you merely think, "Oh, I want to send my child abroad to study, and I only have 2 million NT dollars," then I think you should not expect your child to dip a toe in and soar. It used to be said that studying abroad and just passing through made you different, that having drunk foreign ink you came back a different person. No, no, you are not different, no, no; everyone will judge you by the same standard.

So to be like Lisa Su and Jensen Huang, those two successful people, you would have had to go abroad from an early age, with the whole family emigrating when they were 5. If you do not have that ability, then my advice is that the whole family live together happily, take two or three trips abroad each year, and spend money when you want to spend it, an external economy; that is what real family happiness in life is.

All right, that is where today's chat and talk ends. I think it will be Monday through Friday each week; on Saturday evening there is Clubhouse, so Sunday will be a rest day. So in future the James Talks podcast will probably run Monday through Friday. OK, all right, see you next Monday, bye-bye!