A FATHER’S GUIDE TO INVESTING
by Kirk Ho

There have been many books written about investing. But are they neglecting the most important investment a father should be making?

Many of these investment books are focused on investing our material wealth in stocks, bonds, property & how to get the best returns in every material sense. The other common theme is how to make enough money & smart investing so that we can retire early. Yes, indeed you can find much advice on how to ensure we utilize our monies better & build our material wealth. But the greatest & best investment we can make that will give us the greatest & most rewarding returns is our family- our spouse & children.

TIME VALUE OF FAMILY

We need to start investing time & energy in our family from very early on in order to give us the greatest returns. As husbands, we need to spend time to work at our relationship with our wife. Our time is being constantly used up by work, media & many other distractions. The one thing that needs time is communication. We must communicate better and spend time doing that for any relationship to work, the more so if it is our wife.

As for our children, this is even more important. As fathers, our children need our time to help them to build up their character. There are certain important traits of character that fathers needs to cultivate such as sound judgment, sense of responsibility, courage, self-mastery & greatness of heart. Just as our colleagues see us and respect us for who we are at the workplace, our children need to see this in us at home. Time passes ever more quickly. Every decade of life passes twice as fast as the one before. A father has only a short time, a tiny window of opportunity to shape his child’s conscience and character for life. So our job at home is not only important, but absolutely urgent. We need to know we have only one chance to raise our children right.

The more we invest our time and energy now in our children, the more we will be assured that they will grow up to be adults with a strong and responsible character, contributing positively to the improvement of society and the world at large. This is truly what will bring us the greatest return and happiness, above and beyond everything else.

Long Term, Consistent & Disciplined – the “Value” approach

As fathers, we need to have a long term vision for our family. The way we go about bringing up our children has to have a long term view too. Our long term and the best partner in this investment is our wife. As a team, we need to be consistent and disciplined in the way we set about building up the “value” of our family. If the team doesn’t work well together, has different approaches and lacks consistency, just like investing, we will not be able to get the desired returns or results. So first and foremost, we as husbands need to work with our wives well. We both have equal vested interest in the family and our children. This means we put in equal effort, time and energy to make it work. We cannot allow ourselves to fall into the temptation, epidemic among so many men today, of letting our wives handle most children issues alone. This is unfair to her and to our children.

Experience shows that character building works best when both parents takes it seriously. Nature is such that fathers and mothers have differing traits that are necessary to make a family work and in building of our children’s character. Our children need to learn these traits from both parents. Boys need to learn a man’s dominant traits from the father and girls the women’s dominant traits from the mother. As fathers, we need to take the lead. We need to help everyone to be focus on the end goal. No short cuts and no quick returns. We need to help everybody stay the course in order to achieve our long term goal. The ultimate goal is to build a strong family and bring up our children to be responsible adults.

Knowing our Family

The other important aspect of investing is to know our investments well. If it is in stocks, we need to know if the company is well managed and its management practices sound. Similarly, and even more importantly, we need to know our children well in order to be able to nurture them into responsible and competent adults. Each child is different and as fathers, we need to treat them differently in terms of dealing with their strengths and weaknesses, but always with the same affection and love.

We need to know that as fathers, we have a great impact on our children’s upbringing. The lack of a father’s knowledge and influence in the family and on the children’s lives has been shown to have adverse impact on their character building and therefore, their lives as adults. The authoritative figure as head of the household teaches our children about authority with responsibility. The way we do our work with professionalism and great attention to detail will inspire them to treat work with the same attitude and respect. The way we deal with issues teaches them how to persevere in times of difficulties and have strength of character. The way we love and protect our wife will teach our sons to treat their future wives in the same way. The way we show our true affections to our daughters will teach them to know the right type of guy they should be dating in future. To know our family and children well will help us to bring the best out of our family and our children, keeping us on track to give us the greatest returns on our investment.

Return on Investment

The measure of how successful our investments are typically summed up by what we term as return on investment. Simply put, it is the profit made from an initial investment. So how do we measure the return on the investment of our family?

First we need to acknowledge that the returns on our families cannot be measured just in material terms. We must be well aware that material investments alone cannot replace the investment of our time, our affections, our love, our example and our physical presence in our family. Similarly, the returns cannot be measured on simply material terms but how our children will ultimately turn out to be adults with integrity, honour, competence, commitment, courage, forgiveness and compassionate understanding.

Success in life is much more than material success. If years from now, we can see these strengths of character in our children as adults, we would have achieved the greatest success and returns on investment as a man and father we could possibly have achieved.

Kirk Ho is a financial controller at a US multinational company and a father of four.