"I Chose to Invest in My Children Instead"

The most common reason people never start. And why it doesn't have to be true.

You’ve heard someone say this. Maybe you’ve said it yourself.

Someone brings up financial independence, the math starts to make sense, and then — right before it gets real — the door closes. I chose to invest in my children instead. And that’s it. Conversation over.

I’m not here to tell you that raising kids is cheap or that school quality doesn’t matter. It does. You know it does. But I want to gently push on something — because that framing, FIRE or your kids, is doing a lot of work that it hasn’t earned.

What if it doesn’t have to be either/or?

The 40-year-old tech guy who moved his family to Mexico City

He’s a California native who built his career here and works at Shopify — fully remote since 2020. Total comp around $350k including RSUs. And for a long time, the Bay Area just absorbed it. That’s what the Bay Area does.

His daughters are 5 and 8. Like a lot of tech parents in that bracket, they were staring down $30k+ per child per year at the Lycée Français de San Francisco if they wanted a proper French-track bilingual education. That’s $60k–$70k a year in after-tax dollars just for school. On top of a $9,500 mortgage. On top of everything else.

Shopify being fully remote made the decision cleaner than most. No negotiation, no hybrid arrangement to finesse, no quarterly flights to justify. He just left.

The family relocated to Mexico City’s Polanco neighborhood and enrolled both girls in the Lycée Franco-Mexicain — one of the largest French lycées in the world, a 97% baccalauréat pass rate, genuinely rigorous. Annual tuition for both girls combined: roughly $12,000–$16,000 USD. Their equivalent in San Francisco would have been north of $60k. Their three-bedroom in Polanco — doorman building, pool — runs about $2,200 a month.

His savings rate went from roughly 12% to just under 40%. Same income. The girls are becoming trilingual by default — French at school, Spanish just by being there, English at home. And he’s actually around.

Is that sacrificing his daughters’ future? Or is it giving them a broader world and a father who isn’t grinding himself into the ground to pay for a zip code?

The 34-year-old nurse I met while getting blood work done in Palo Alto

I was sitting in the waiting room at the hospital, routine blood work, and got talking to the nurse who was drawing my blood. She mentioned she was on a double shift. I asked where she was from — she had an accent I couldn’t quite place — and she told me Tennessee.

She commutes. One week on, one week off. Flies in, works her shifts, flies back home to a suburb of Nashville where the public schools rank among the strongest in the state and she bought her house for $340k. Her mortgage is $1,850 a month.

She told me this like it was obvious. Like she’d done the math once, a few years ago, and never looked back.

Her kids are not in a compromised school. They’re in a better school than most of her colleagues’ children, who stayed in the Bay Area and are too stretched thin to notice. She’s banking close to half her nursing income on top of what her husband earns locally. No fancy salary. No side hustle. Just a decision that where you earn and where you live don’t have to be the same place.

She was on a double shift. I didn’t catch her name. But I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since.

The ex-consultant who traded McKinsey hours for Airbnb’s 90-day rule

He spent his late twenties in management consulting. Good money, brutal hours, the kind of career that looks impressive from the outside and hollows you out from the inside. Post-pandemic he made the jump to Airbnb — took a product role, US salary, and inherited one of the more quietly radical workplace policies out there: work from anywhere for up to 90 days a year.

He didn’t treat it as a perk. He treated it as architecture.

The family based themselves in France. His wife is French, the kids are in the French school system — free, rigorous, and frankly underrated by Americans who’ve never looked at it closely. He would take the TGV into Geneva or Basel or Stuttgart for client meetings, thirty minutes to an hour depending on the day. France, Switzerland, and Germany all share a border in that corner of Europe. What looked like international business travel from the outside was basically a commute.

Summers in Mexico — they’d been going for years, knew the neighborhoods, had the rhythm down. The 90-day window covered it cleanly.

He went from billing sixty-hour weeks in consulting to actually being present for his kids’ childhood, on a US salary, in a country where his family’s cost of living dropped by more than half. He didn’t sacrifice the career trajectory. He just stopped assuming the career had to own the geography.