Building a Degree Free Future: How to Use a Trust to Help Your Child Succeed (DF#190)

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:00]:
If somebody wants to go abroad or if they wanna live in a specific city and they have a trust covering their basic needs, they don't have to reorganize their goals the same way that many of us do when we want to stay in a specific place or move to a specific place. And we need to have a certain income in order to be able to make that goal happen. If that's the need, it's just different.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:22]:
Hello folks. Welcome back to degree free today. We are going to be going over what to do. If you have a trust for your child and they don't know about it. Surprisingly for us, this was a common problem that families had that came into the launch program that we've helped. And today we are going to be breaking down how to use those resources effectively to help get your child to their goals.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:44]:
One of the things that we've heard clients say when they come in with this unique situation is that their family offices who will typically help with the management of these types of things do not have educational design resources. They have educational planning as it pertains to college. And then if a child has a goal that does not align with going to college and buying a degree, then the family office doesn't really have the resources or the know how to figure out what best way to serve that child's interest. And they don't really have what we have, which is how do we figure out what their actual goals are. And once we figure out their goals, what things best serve their goals that are educational spend, but are not college. Because of that, we realized that we should probably do an episode on this because we can help parents who are trying to figure out what the first steps are and trying to figure out how do I help my child pick their path when they can do a lot of different things, because it does feel very overwhelming, not only their goals, but their priorities don't have to look exactly like most of ours do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:40]:
It was very interesting to see that this was a problem because this is just something that I'm just not very familiar with. And I did want to double click on and go deeper on what you were just talking about, which is with these resources and what we found with the families that we've helped in the launch program is that these young adults priorities are different. The vast majority of the people that come into our launch program, they want to know their child's options, mostly middle class families that just want to know their children's options so that they can make an informed decision. And then when they make that informed decision of which path they're going to go down, they have an actionable roadmap. If you bought the degree free way, you kind of know exactly what we do, but we take you a step further. We take them through their needs. We take them through their wants. We figure out which jobs go with those.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:27]:
Then we look at the skills for those jobs and we look at their current skills and we try to figure out which one of those make sense. And then we break it down to three jobs and we give them a roadmap of exactly how to go about to learn the skills to then get those jobs. The vast majority of people that come into the launch program, they want all of that. And they want to make sure that when they go and they leave the launch program, there's three options that they have, and they can go and try all of these different options. Awesome. So for those with trust, there are some similarities and there are some differences. Well, the similarities is they also want to know their options as well, but usually they already know what they kind of want to do. The biggest thing that most of us have to put in our needs column.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:11]:
Some of the people with trust don't have to do that. And that factor is going to be income. It's going to be money. Granted, they don't want to be poor, but it's just not one of the very first things that they're thinking about, which a lot of the people that come into the launch program are worried about. They're worried about the return on investment for all of these different educational options, which is why they come to us. For the trust people, it's a little bit different. Where they have specific goals that they want to reach, but they're just not really sure about how to get there. What we do is when they come into the program, we still have to walk them through their needs and wants because we still have to make sure that the route is still takes them and still helps them accomplish their goals.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:49]:
But at the same time, there's a lot more emphasis on what they already have an idea in their mind of what they want to do. That is the main thing. And we have to figure out how to do that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:58]:
I can hear some people probably bristling at this, but it is different. If I had wanted to become a painter and I had had a trust and it would have been okay for me to do that because my basic needs would have been covered. It would have been met. And so I don't have to worry about things as much like income and location. Because the other thing that happens is when your basic needs are covered, you can be a little bit more location independent as well. So if somebody wants to go abroad or if they want to live in a specific city and they have a trust covering their basic needs, they don't have to reorganize their goals the same way that many of us do when we want to stay in a specific place or move to a specific place, and we need to have a certain income in order to be able to make that goal happen if that's the need. It's just different.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:40]:
Hey there. I hope that you're loving this episode of the degree free podcast. We spend a ton of time every week creating this content for you. So my only ask is you take a quick second to leave a review or thumbs up on whatever platform you're on. It's one of the best and easiest ways that you can support this podcast, and this simple action can help bring more people into the degree free community. At degree free, we wanna help as many people as we can thrive and succeed without needing a college degree. Your review will be a step in that direction. If you could do this small favor right now, pause this and leave a review.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:11]:
It would truly mean the world to us. Thank you and back to the show. So for parents that have children that have trust, we're gonna walk you through the things to do or the things to think about. The best thing that we have is depending on how big the trust is. We have many options open to us when it comes to actually learning when it comes to building the skills to then build a successful career in whatever career that they want to go down. Building the skills to go ahead and apply or start work in a certain industry, whether or not you want to start your own business or buy a business in a certain area, or or if you just wanted to try to go get your child wants to go get a job to have all these options. That's where the advantage really comes out. But when we start, we start all at the same place, just how we start with everybody else.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:56]:
And that is the job limit inventory. The first thing that you have to do as a parent is go through their job limit inventory. Your job limit inventory is a list of jobs that your child knows about. The very simple way to do this. If you don't have the degree freeway workbooks is to just sit down and get a blank piece of paper and have your child write down as many jobs or types of work as they can think of. The reason that we want to do this as parents is because you need to know what menu of jobs and careers or types of work your child is picking from. And that's because you want to know what their limits are. Because if their limits are very small, you have the opportunity now to expand their field of view, to expand the options that they're aware of.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:29]:
And that's where vocational creativity comes in. And vocational creativity is an exercise that Ryan and I have invented in order to help parents expand the types of jobs their kids know about, and also the types of work in industries that are unseen and not obvious, not typically taught about in schools. And you do this by asking your child about different things they're interested in gear, games, sports, etcetera. And just having them think about the types of jobs that have to happen or do occur in order to bring those things about so that someone can actually buy them from a business services, products, different things like that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:03]:
The next thing you have to do is go through their needs and wants and the needs and wants come into four different categories. And there's a bonus category, which we say doesn't apply to most people, but it might apply to you because their biggest thing, which is money or income doesn't matter or might not matter as much. The four things that we have to think about is we have to think about money. We have to think about schedule. We have to think about work environment and then we have to think about location. So money is very simple. It's just the amount of income that they need. Schedule is going to be, do they need weekends off? Do they need to be home at night for whatever reasons? Personal reasons, professional reasons, anything like that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:43]:
Work environment can be a multitude of things, but to make it easy, do you want to work inside? Do you want to work outside? Do you not need to sit down due to health reasons? Those types of things. And then location is going to be, are you in a certain town? Are you in a certain country? Are you just generally living abroad? Those types of things. The fifth thing, you know, we don't talk about much here and we go through it in the degree free way. You can get your copy at degreefree dot com forward / book. The fifth thing that we go over in there is industry slash type of work. And we say in the industry slash type of work that it is a danger zone for the vast majority of people. You really should not put anything in there for those with trust. It might be okay to put something in there.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:24]:
And the reason why we say don't put anything in there is because when you put something in there, your child is now constrained to that industry or that types of work, pay bands, pay caps, schedule, location, all those types of things, because you put that first, they are subject to all of the things that that industry is subject to. It's a very dangerous place to put a need, but for those with trust, depending on the size of it, it might be okay to put things in the industry because there's two things. Maybe money doesn't matter anymore, which is okay. Awesome. And then two, you have the resources to then pay to learn or get your child in to whatever skills or whatever academies to then learn to be into that industry or whatever. So you have the resources to basically put into and invest into your child and into their future to make that industry work for their life, whatever that industry is.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:20]:
Correct. And it's just a different calculation. Like we say about everybody that comes into the launch program that we work with, everybody has a different set of tools. Some kids come in and they have GI bill money from a parent. And that's different than somebody who is lacking that. And the reason is because if you have specific resources, it can dictate and alleviate certain factors that the rest of us have to account for when we are picking work specifically our first career, so that we are able to get to the larger life goals that we have. But for some people, they have different resources allocated in a different way. And because of that, they're able to pull different levers at different times.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:55]:
And that's why it's acceptable depending on, like you said, the size of the trust and the terms of it and how it's going to work. So now that we've talked about needs, let's talk about interests because your child may be uniquely positioned to pick based on interest. This is why it is important to go through vocational creativity with them because you still don't want them to be limited to something just because they don't know about that many things, which all young adults in United States are at risk for, because many of them just don't know what types of work are out there. But because your young adult may be able to pick based on interest industry type of work alone, make sure that they're not limiting themselves based on what they're good at now. This is actually advice for everybody, but many young adults will say, oh, well, I don't know anything about that. Well, of course they don't. They're 18, 19, 20 years old. They don't know anything about anything.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:42]:
And so don't let them limit themselves based on what their skillset is now, just because they are so young. So they don't have to be good at things now. What they have to have is they have to have the interest and the motivation to learn that thing. Help them think about and break down big projects or goals that they'd like to learn about or things they'd like to build. This could be businesses. This could just be personal projects. And then what you do is you find a master and hire them to teach your child how to do those things. This is something that takes a lot of time.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:13]:
It takes a lot of vetting, takes a lot of energy. We know we do it. And that's one of the things that your child's uniquely positioned to be able to do. Your child wants to be a painter. Okay. We'll go find a master painter and have that person teach your child how to do their style, how to do what they do. Your child wants to learn a language, find a really skilled language tutor and see how quickly you can get them to speaking that language. Your child is interested in software development.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:35]:
Okay, great. Go find a teacher who teaches that specific thing and then get them to a finished product, a finished something that's been pushed on, get as quickly as possible so that they start to see return on their learning and on their interests and get them past that whole. Oh, I don't have that skillset yet. Just because they're young.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:51]:
Yeah, absolutely. It's using these resources as a shortcut basically to getting them the skills that they need to build the life they want and to reach the goals that they have with the skills that they need to reach those goals.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:04]:
What are the things that people will tell us and the reason that they'll find us to begin with, if their child is in this unique situation where they have a trust and their calculations for what their educational spend are different from other people, and they don't have to optimize for income in return. One of the things that I really do want to push parents to do here is make sure that they are encouraged to learn anything that sparks their interest. Because if it does spark their interest, then what you're looking for is you're looking for exactly, as you just said, streamlined options so that they're not sitting in a classroom being bored. The biggest advantage is that if your child doesn't want to sit in class and sit through classes that they find to be boring or useless, which is a direct quote, as you know, from some of the kids that we've worked with in this demographic, they don't want to sit in class and they don't have to sit in class. So don't make them sit in class for the sake of sitting in class. If your child has an interest and they wanna pursue something and they are really, really are interested in learning it, encourage them to do so and put down every paver in front of them to help them do that. And the thing is people who do not have trust can do the same thing with their kids. They just have to do it a little bit smaller and they should do it a little bit faster because the time matters a little bit more when you're trying to optimize for income at an earlier age, because there are needs that have to be met.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:17]:
So it's just a little bit different. But if your child is in this position, that's great. They have a wonderful advantage that they're able to just go and actually follow their hearts because they don't have to worry about having their basic needs covered and they should use that to their full advantage. If you are in this position and your family office doesn't really have a resource outside of college advising, because typically that is one of the reasons that people will come find us because their family office, their wealth management firm basically doesn't have any resource outside of referring them to college counselors and college admissions counselors, which is not really useful because if your kids don't want to go that route, they're not gonna be of much use other than trying to put your child into some college track because those are the only tools they have. If you only have a hammer, everything's a nail. If your child has a trust and they don't want to buy a college degree, they don't have to. There are other ways. It's a lot of vetting, a lot of calling, a lot of very custom work.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:10]:
So if you need help with that, degreefree.com/launch. Also, if you're listening to this and you're a wealth advisor, a trust manager, a financial advisor, or you work for a family office and you're going, oh, that would probably really help some of our clients. You can also contact us at degree free dot com forward slash contact. You can go ahead and shoot us an email about that. We're happy to jump on a call and explain how we can help these clients because they do have a different set of needs than a lot of people.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:34]:
Yeah. And that's pretty much it for this week, guys. Until next week,