If you're like most parents, you're finding it hard to put aside funds for all of the future costs of raising a child while balancing your budget and keeping up with those unexpected expenses that you heard about but didn't realize when you started your family would be fairly extreme. In a recent study by the American Psychological Association, money was once again the top of all lists in terms of stress drivers for everyday american families, so in the spirit of reducing stress and attempting to find ways to spend more time with family in 2018, as a family we've decided to take an entirely new approach to putting aside funds into savings.

Our Old Method

In the past, we did what most families do, we put a little bit in savings each month and we would let the savings accumulate, but because of how easily accessible savings accounts are we were only a click away from transferring funds and buying our next "need". This happened to us almost monthly for a few years, and our savings accounts never met our goals, so we decided to change things up a bit, although not entirely in 2017.

The Experiment

Starting in 2017 we started approaching savings a bit differently by taking a portion of our savings and instead putting them into investments that are a little bit higher risk (heck, nothing is higher risk than having easy access to funds). We started investing in companies we knew a bit about and put some money into ETFs and we even started buying a little bit of cryptocurrency around May 2017 when most people thought the bubble would burst for Bitcoin when it hit $1700. After the remaining 6 months of the year, to our surprise we had excellent returns on all of our investments and a dramatic increase in our savings. Simply by investing our savings we put ourselves in a much better financial position than having the money readily available.

In 2018 - Our New Year's Resolution

In 2018 our resolution is to convert a little bit of each paycheck into cryptocurrency and a little bit of it into high growth investments. For cryptocurrencies, we store it on a hardware wallet for safekeeping and our investments are stored in a brokerage account online. The key here is that both of these sources are not instantly available to be used for other one off family 'needs'.

By making the process of getting our funds out a bit more difficult for ourselves, we are really able to set aside funds for long term family goals like college for the little one and we're able to get a higher growth investment that can also be converted to a more usable format in the event of a family emergency.

Some notes on CryptoCurrency

If you're not aware of cryptocurrency and what exactly it entails then I'd highly recommend reading a few guides by lurking through forums like bitcointalk.org or reddit.com/r/bitcoin or from sites like reliablecoin.com or if you're really interested, check out blockchain primer's from MIT, because as a parent, I know your future financial security for your family is of the utmost importance, and the technology behind cryptocurrency has to be the single largest technological innovation since the adoption of the internet and may have far reaching effects beyond those predicted to occur as a result of either artificial intelligence or machine learning. If you watch much news, you've probably heard of bitcoin, which is the largest of all of the cryptocurrency's on the market.

My Lay Explanation of CryptoCurrency

I like to think of cryptocurrencies and draw parallels to the evolution of the internet. In the beginning there was a group of websites and bulletin boards and people began to interact and share information at scale, this is a bit like bitcoin is for cryptocurrencies. Later on, the technology evolved and people started joining sites like myspace and facebook and mass adoption of the technology dawned a new era, which is a bit like second generation cryptocurrencies. In the beginning, because the internet lacked mass market appeal, there was very little commercial application or interest and then once a few smart people realized the potential the internet had to fundamentally change society, investors began pouring in, this led us to the dotcom bubble. We are most accurately in the evolutionary stage close to the dotcom bubble for cryptocurrencies. That does not mean that the technology or the currency will be worthless as owning pets dot com stock was in 1999. Instead, you should approach cryptocurrencies, many of which are sure to implode, in a measured approach and attempt to own only a small portion of a large variety of these currencies.

Why our family likes CryptoCurrency and High Tech High Growth Companies

Why? Because for all the pets dot coms of the world that went bust, many dominant forces arose and many tech companies saw great benefit. Just imagine where your savings would be if you were one of the first to purchase facebook, netflix, amazon and google. This is the current state of cryptocurrency, the third generation of cryptocurrency is already upon us, and an entirely new wave of cryptocurrencies is taking hold, transforming our global financial markets. In the last year the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed by nearly 1000%, now making the currencies worth more than almost any single corporate entity. Our family putting in just a few hundred bucks a month yielded more return than we'd have seen from five years of putting cash aside.

So while I am sure some extra money in the savings account would give us a few more nice to have items throughout 2018, a much wiser method of storing and increasing the value of our savings is to put it into cryptocurrency or other high tech companies we feel comfortable investing in, particularly in new industries and fields with the opportunity to disrupt daily life for everyone. Although this type of higher risk way to store money may not be for everyone, as a family we think that putting extra money each month into these stores of value and investments, instead of an easily accessible savings or investment account will ultimately yield the most value for our little girl. If you're interested in learning more about various cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin or altcoins, or high growth tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple and similar, then I highly suggest you dig in and read up on each before considering putting your hard earned money into any of them. Also, please do not ever put all of your eggs in one basket, spread your money and your risk wisely so that you can get maximum benefit at the lowest possible risk.