Yesterday we had a chance to walk with some friends through a local park.

Like us they are new parents "a little later in life" - that being early 30's. We all have careers in progress, under us or behind us. As we walked and talked it got me to thinking about what each of us can do to give as much advantage as possible to these new people in our lives.

Of course, there's the good home life - that's definitely a priority. It's one of the big reasons that I've left the engineering career behind and my wife and I chose for me to work as a stay-at-home dad. Not everyone has this option and making these kinds of choices just makes life a little more interesting. One of the things that our friends are going to do is that dad is going to take his son into work with him while he is still an infant. It is so important to them that they raise their son themselves that they are going to make it work.

There are other things to think about long term. "Being there" as parents is a big factor in how well our children will develop, but I also think about the long term financial challenges that will come. As our own son gets older he is going to have more expensive needs and tastes. And there is always the costs of advanced schooling hanging in the horizon.

It turns out that being an at-home dad has a unique set of challenges, but technical challenges are generally not one of them (unless it involves figuring out how to get the diaper genie to work properly). I'm glad that I discovered marketing on the internet and using this tool in network marketing. There is as much technical depth here as you want to get into, plus it gives me the chance to earn an income greater than what I would earn as a full time engineer.

I tend to have expensive tastes. Paradoxically, I think it comes from growing up poor and being denied so much at every turn. When I began to have my own money I would save up to buy the best I could find, not just what was cheapest. But I also took very good care of these possesions. It's not uncommon for me to be using something that is over a decade old - but was the best of it's kind when I purchased it.

Even the combined salary of an engineer and a doctor would not support those expensive tastes in addition to providing the very best for our son. There are caps to the potential income in both of those professions and you generally have to work within those caps. With marketing on the internet I have seen theoritical caps completely blown away and people earning as much as their imagination can generate.

That's the kind of income that I will generate for my family so that there are no opportunities in life missed because of financial constraints.