Marjorie writes in with a very interesting question:

I’m a single mom with a four year old daughter. Each weekday, I take my daughter to stay with one of my aunts so that I can work to earn a living and keep food on the table. After Christmas, my mom sat down with my aunt and I and gave us a bunch of information about a few great preschools in the area. My aunt told me later on that she’s supportive, no matter what I choose. So, for me, the real question is whether or not my daughter would get enough benefit from preschool compared to days with my aunt to make the extra costs worthwhile.

I live next door to a single mother and I see time and time again how she is forced into making difficult choices about the devoted time spent with her children. Does she make a nutritious home-cooked meal or does she spend an extra half an hour with her girls? Does she spend some time in the yard with them or does she get some of the never-ending household chores taken care of? This comes in on top of the prerequisite day of work for a single parent, after which they’re exhausted but also often wanting a strong connection with their children. On top of that, there’s the money concerns – a single income household in the modern world is never easy.

When it comes to a choice between preschool and other child care options, I don’t think there’s a simple cut-and-dried answer to this because there are so many factors involved.

The first one – and the most important one – is your child. Is your child outgoing around others her age? Is she intellectually on par with other children her age – meaning is she capable of holding a writing utensil? Can she count to twenty or so? Is she curious about the world around her? If these things are all true, preschool likely doesn’t have a great deal of value for your daughter.

When things get murkier – in my opinion – is when several of those questions have negative answers. This can indicate a lot of things, from something as simple as social anxiety to a learning disorder or simply more focused one-on-one time. If you’re witnessing these issues and you genuinely feel concern about your daughter’s intellectual growth, I would lean more towards preschool. If not, I would lean more towards maintaining the caregiving situation with your aunt.

What about the money, though? Is the extra cost of a good preschool worth it when compared to a normal daycare if your child is socially thriving and developmentally on pace?

In a word – in my opinion – it’s not, unless the difference in cost makes no difference in your life. Here’s why.

If you spend that extra money to send your child to a top preschool, you’re putting an extra financial burden on yourself. This has several effects on your life. You’re more tied to your job than ever before because you can no longer afford to lose it, which means your boss has more power than before and your job is more stresful. You also have less money to spread around in other areas of your life, like an emergency fund or on something as simple as a stop at the ice cream shop with your child. On some level, these things are given up to afford that high-quality preschool – and these things have a negative impact on your child’s home life.

This basic idea is true no matter what you’re looking at in life. When you bump up the financial cost for something of higher quality, you’re paying an additional price beyond the dollars and cents. You pay the personal costs that go along with maintaining that higher level of income. If you can’t see the benefit in doing so, don’t do it.

To me, that’s an exchange not worth making unless there’s a clear and dramatic benefit from the higher-cost preschool. Never forget that early on, you’re the biggest impact and influence on your child, and if sending your child to the higher-cost preschool will put stressful burdens on you to disrupt that in any way, there had better be a big reward. If your child is doing fine, then I don’t see the benefit there.

No matter what you choose, however, do not let others make you feel guilty about it. Simply by asking questions like this and seriously considering the answer, you’re looking at the unique situations, gifts, and opportunities in your life to make the right decision for your daughter. You obviously love her. You obviously want what’s best for her. Never let other people attempt to use guilt or shame or other tactics to guide your choice.

A few years ago, an old friend of mine bought a fantastically expensive home, far larger and with higher quality furnishings than the home I live in now. I went to college with him and noted that after college, he worked at a minimum wage job for a year and had only been working at a solid salary for a little over a year when making this purchase.

“How could he afford it?” I wondered. So I asked him about it. He just grinned and said that he had a big bankroll.

For a long time, I figured that he had either done something illegal or something like that to earn the money. Eventually, though, I learned that his parents bought the house for him.

Today, this old friend of mine doesn’t have time to spend with me. Even though he’s only making about $26,000 a year (at my best estimate), he drives a Lexus and is constantly buying all kinds of different things. He spends most of his time with similar big spenders – and that’s not a group I’m a part of.

What I find most interesting, though, is his assumption that his parents’ lifetime earnings are his to spend however he likes.

For some people, this could be a happy arrangement. As a parent, I can understand the desire to want to make life easier for my children – to make sure they’re content, have social stature, and have the possessions they want and need. I can also understand, on some level, how it would be nice to simply have all of the things that I want without having to be responsible for earning them.

The problem is that the solution isn’t permanent – and when it fails, everyone suffers greatly.

In this situation, the parents are getting older and, at the same time, their financial resources are being slowly drained. Unless they are prodigous accumulators of wealth, there’s going to come a point where it will become difficult to make ends meet – and that point will come when it’s more difficult than before to earn money. When they reach the age that they’ll actually need their savings and investments, they may find that they’ve been whittled away.

On the other hand, when the support of the parents disappears, the child will be stuck without having learned how to live within his means. In fact, the child’s standard of life is so far beyind his/her means that, unless the child is very, very aware and centered, their life will enter a very difficult period, laden with debts and some incredibly difficult lifestyle changes. This disruption will alter almost every element of their life – and many of those elements will involve a serious downgrade.

If you find yourself in a situation like this, the best thing you can do is to begin the process of distinguishing and separating the finances of the parent and the child. It is far better to do it slowly, surely, and together than to do it abruptly, shockingly, and without personal support.

This way, the child will be able to stand on their own two feet financially and the parents will have the resources they need as they reach their later years (and, hopefully, have enough resources to truly enjoy those later years).

A final note: I’ve witnessed again and again that people who choose a $20,000 career believe (or pretend to believe) that they can live like they have an $80,000 career. A $20,000 career is likely to be much more personally and spiritually fulfilling than an $80,000 career – but it’s not financially fulfilling. Life is full of gives and takes – your career choice is just one of them.

Megan writes in:

Congratulations on your third child! My husband and I are expecting our second child in February. I hope you’ll write an article about how to save money when another child comes along.

Your wish is my command, Megan. Here are some of the ways we’re preparing for our third child.

Diapers
As I’ve mentioned before, we cloth diaper our children at home (we occasionally use disposables when traveling or when others are watching our children). Doing this drastically reduces the diapering cost for later children.

To reduce the startup cost, we bought many of our cloth diapers on eBay. Some people might be shocked at this, but the truth is that we’ve never had a bad experience buying them on eBay. Most of the diapers we receive are in really good shape – nearly unused. I think this might be because people tried partial cloth diapering (with just a few) and found that it didn’t work well for them. I’ll say that for us, cloth diapering becomes easier the more we do it. It’s actually easier to have our child wear nothing but cloth for a week than half cloth and half disposable – there’s less clutter, for one, and when you use nothing but cloth, the whole thing becomes utterly routine.

Anyway, after your initial outlay of money, cloth diapering is extremely inexpensive (and really environmentally friendly to boot). The first batch of cloth diapers we purchased are about to be used for the third time, meaning the cost per use of these diapers is already lower than disposables and is about to go substantially lower. We simply won’t have to buy many diapers for this baby.

If you plan on having more than one child, give cloth diapering a shot. It’s not really cost effective for just one, but the savings are huge with the second, third, etc. child.

Clothes
Unless you’re absolutely sure that you’re not having any additional children, don’t throw away, give away, or sell the clothes from your earlier children. Fold them up, put them in a storage tub, and put them somewhere out of the way. Later on, you might make a conscious medical choice to no longer have children, at which point you can sell off the clothes. Otherwise, a big tub or two of infant, toddler, and kid clothes is like a hidden treasure trove.

Again, we have a ton of these things packed away for the next child. Since many of the baby-sized clothes are only worn a few times per child, many of the items look practically new, yet they’ll be on their third use. All the way along, it’s worthwhile to save clothes that can still afford some wear, because many children’s clothes (like t-shirts, jeans, and so on) work well for both genders. (We tend to buy lots of greens and yellows.)

Beds
What about a bed? Our solution is simple – we’re just going to upgrade the bed of the oldest child by looking for youth beds at yard sales and the like. Then, his younger sister will move into his old bed and her younger sibling will take her crib.

Just like clothes, beds work well as “hand me down” type items. That doesn’t mean that the oldest child always gets the new items and the others get the used ones – quite often, his items are used as well.

Toys
We try to consistently buy our children small numbers of very open-ended toys for their birthdays and for Christmases – building blocks and the like. By buying small numbers of items, we don’t clutter up our home (well… not too much). By buying sturdy items, they can take a beating and can easily be passed down. By buying open-ended items – like building blocks and art supplies – we have items that all of the children can use, often together. Our two children now have big art days where we cover the kitchen table or the living room table with paper and allow them to draw to their heart’s content, for example, and it will be easy for the next child to join in.

When Joe draws elaborate landscapes and Katie draws pictures of cars and houses, the youngest child can scribble. When Joe builds castles out of blocks and Katie builds towers, the youngest child can stack them. These are the kinds of toys they can all enjoy – and, to be honest, I quite often enjoy them, too.

Here’s the real key of all of this: if you’re thinking of having future children, keep the stuff you actually used. Put it in some storage boxes and stick it somewhere out of sight, clearly labeled. Similarly, focus your child-related purchases on sturdy things that will last through multiple children – plastic toys that easily break aren’t a good buy, but sturdy blocks are. Doing this alone will save you a lot of cash on future children without reducing their quality of life one bit.

Monica writes in:

I used to buy my daughter several new outfits before the start of the school year and then a few more items for Christmas. This worked well when she was less picky about her clothes. The last few years, though, she’s wanted nothing but a few specific brands of clothing – and those brands are expensive. I want her to have plenty of clothes to wear during the school year, but I don’t want to go broke during the process. What do you suggest?

I actually went through this myself when I was a teenager, but instead of wanting trendy clothes, I mostly just wanted high-end basketball shoes. I was usually quite content just wearing a tee shirt and whatever jeans were available, but the one thing I always desired were pairs of Reebok Pumps or Nike Air Jordans.

Now that the roles are reversed, I find myself looking ahead to my own children’s teenage years as well as looking back at how my parents handled such situations on a small budget. Here are the tactics that worked well.

Give clothes as a birthday gift or Christmas gift. This way, they get the clothes they want, but you’re not saddled with an additional cost, because your birthday gift expenses goes towards clothes instead. My parents did this for me a few years, buying me nice shoes for my birthday instead of as a part of going back to school.

Give them a “back to school” budget. State that you’ll give them a certain amount of money – say, $100 – to spend on back to school clothes with a basic requirement of buying so many pants, so many shirts, etc. Then let them make the decisions. They may be able to afford one “awesome” pair of jeans, but the rest will be pocket tee shirts.

Start your shopping at a thrift store. Let them dig through the racks and see what they’ll find. I’m often shocked at the amazingly good stuff available at thrift stores – my only explanation is people with way too much money and way too many consumerist values are jettisoning perfectly good stuff.

Buy them all low end stuff, then give them a certain amount of clothes allowance to buy more. In other words, buy everything they need at a minimum level of cost, then give them a certain amount with which to buy additional items – whatever they’d like. This lets them fill out the rest of their wardrobe with whatever “trendy” items they want.

You don’t simply have to buy a truckload of new “hot this moment” items for your child to wear each year. Instead, put some forethought into it and some limits. Let your child be involved in making the tough choices. After all, budgeting, planning, and making hard choices is part of growing up.

Recently, my son Joe had his fourth birthday. Sarah and I had made the decision that we were going to introduce the idea of an allowance to him after his fourth birthday, along with the idea of saving for specific goals.

In order to accomplish this goal, we decided to get him a Money Savvy Pig for his fourth birthday. Here’s the happy birthday boy with his pig (and an over-the-top goofy grin):

What is a “Money Savvy Pig”?
As you can see from the picture above, a Money Savvy Pig is a bank with four distinct compartments: Save, Spend, Donate, and Invest. The bank has four slots along the top – one for each compartment – and each of the pig’s feet provides access to one of the chambers to empty it individually.

The idea behind it is pretty simple – it makes it very easy and tangible for children to separate (and effectively budget) their money.

How We’re Using It
Each week, we’re giving him $2 in quarters for his allowance – $0.50 for each year he’s been alive. Thus, next year, he’ll get $2.50. We may at some point in the future change this rate, but it works for the time being.

He then splits the money into four roughly equal amounts. Two quarters go in the “Spend” slot, two quarters go in the “Save” slot, two quarters go in the “Donate” slot, and two quarters go in the “Invest” slot.

He is completely free to spend all money that goes in the “Spend” slot as he wishes. If he wants, he can take that money and put it in the other slots in his bank, or he can put it in his pocket and take it to the store with him to buy something small.

With the “Save” slot, we had him identify something that he wanted that was much more expensive than a dollar or two. We told him to think about it and later he told us he was saving for a Batman action figure that costs about $10. So, we told him that he could keep adding to the “Save” slot and in a few weeks, we’ll count it up and see how close he is to it.

With the other two slots, we told him that for now, they’re going to just build up.

For the “Donate” slot, we’re talking right now about the various things that people can donate money to – the local church, the local food pantry where people who don’t have much money can get food, Heifer International, PBS, and so on. We told him that when he gets $5 in that slot, he can pick something to donate to. He has expressed positive interest in donating to PBS, so I more or less expect that to be his first donation in two months or so.

For the “Invest” slot, we’ve told him that it’s just going to build up for a while. Our plan with that is to wait until there’s a “lot” of money in it (from his perspective). Then we’ll use that money to introduce various ways to invest, starting with a savings account at the local bank.

Does a Four Year Old Understand All of That?
No, nor do I expect him to.

We’ve started doing this when he’s young so that saving seems like a completely natural thing to him as he becomes more aware of money and how a person can use it.

I don’t expect him to fully understand, and he doesn’t. For now, he really only understands the “spend” part and the “save” part of the bank – the other two are mysterious.

We are quite sure he understands the “save” slot. We told him that he’s free to put any money he gets as a gift into any slots he wishes and he chose to put almost all of it into the “save” slot because he wants the Batman action figure that he had chosen as a goal. He put a smaller portion of it in the “spend” slot and a bit each in the “invest” and “donate” slots.

We’re also quite sure he understands the “spend” slot, since he wanted to take a dollar out of it a couple of days ago to buy a Hot Wheels car for the race track his grandparents gave him for his birthday. We, of course, approved this, since it’s money he can spend as he chooses.

The other slots are a mystery at this point – they’re clearly there for him to grow into it.

What About Sibling Rivalry?
Joe has a two year old sister who loves to do exactly what her big brother is doing. So how are we handling that? We decided to start her on an allowance, too, but a much simpler setup is in the offing for her.

For her, we’re just giving her four quarters on allowance day (again, fifty cents for each year) and allowing her to put it in her bank. We don’t have any rules on how she can use it, but for now they’re really not needed. She simply enjoys putting “monies” in her bank, just like her big brother.

When she’s four, if Joe is seeing success with his bank and we’ve seen it as a valuable tool, we’ll get her one, too.

One big reason for doing this is the idea of peer reinforcement. If they’re both saving together, it seems more normal. It isn’t just them doing it – one of their peers is saving, too.

In the past, I’ve strongly advocated for families to introduce their teenagers to financial reality as early as possible. I know that in my own case, I went off to college with almost no idea of how to manage my money and it really showed in the spending decisions I made over the next ten years of my life.

Over the past decade, I’ve had the chance to intimately watch other families raise their children through the teenage years with lots of success and some failure. I’ve been impressed with some of the young people that are the core of Generation Y coming of age. Two in particular, my niece and my first cousin, are the kind of people that are a big net benefit to the world, and I would be incredibly proud if my own children turned out as well as they have.

At the same time, though, I’ve seen many tweens and teenagers spending money with reckless abandon, spending hundreds of dollars on completely unnecessary things and acting repeatedly as though money has no consequences at all. These people, I’m afraid, are headed down the same painful path that I went down.

When my children approach their teen years, what can I specifically do to teach my children the value of managing their money? This is a topic that’s left me thinking for a long time and I’ve been jotting down ideas and findings all the time. Today (finally), I had a chance to read through quite a few of these things and I was able to pull out several strong tactics that seem to work together to teach teenagers the value of managing money.

Start young. You’re better off starting too young than you are starting too old. Introduce an allowance as early as possible. Encourage their entrepreneurial behavior early. Introduce them to basic budgeting early on, too. You’re better off starting before they can fully understand all of the meaning than later on when their ideas for what’s normal have already been set, because it will take far more work to undo bad behaviors.

Don’t tie a basic allowance to specific chores. A basic, small allowance should be given without strings attached. It’s not a tool to leverage for good behavior, it’s a tool to teach basic money management. There should be certain behaviors expected in the home, but the allowance should not be a bludgeoning tool to force those behaviors.

Offer extra allowance in exchange for specific extra tasks. If you have extra tasks that go above and beyond normal household duties, you should offer a separate payment to your child in exchange for the task. Allow them (or even encouraged them) to negotiate for the exact amount so that they can learn the art of negotiation.

Make basic budgeting part of the equation from day one. I’m a huge fan of the Money Savvy Pig for this purpose. A child’s budget should be very simple, especially at first, and that’s exactly what the Pig helps with. It just splits a child’s allowance into four pieces – spending (they can spend it on whatever they want), saving (saving for a bigger goal), donating (giving to some cause), and investing (learning how to invest money). This forms a perfect simple budget for children. Later on, you can work on more complex budgets with them, with multiple savings goals and so on, but this type of thing forms the backbone in their mind.

Open bank accounts when the “investing” portion grows large. When they’ve built up quite a bit in the “investing” portion of their budget, take them to the local bank and open a savings account for them. Have them deposit their money. Then, when there’s an interest statement, show them the interest that’s been earned. As they grow older, you can talk about other investments with them and allow them to try these investments (stocks and so on). Set a very long term goal for their “investments,” such as college or a house down payment (seriously) so that they can begin to get a taste for the long term, plus it allows you to differentiate between short-term savings and long-term investments.

As their money grows, move to a checking account. Migrate toward allowing them to manage their entire budget themselves, incorporating saving, spending, donating, and investing to their own desires. One big step in this direction is their own checking account with a debit card – a great tool for a pre-teen. Make the card only able to access the checking account.

Give them a credit card when they’re teens. Gulp. Many parents avoid this because it seems like a recipe for disaster, but it actually serves a very important purpose. By giving them a low-limit credit card while they’re in your home, they can learn about how to use a credit card – and, likely, the dangers of getting into debt with them – while there’s still a safety net. Ideally, you want them to get into a bit of debt with it so that they can see the pain of interest.

Show them your monthly budget. Seriously. Show them how much you earn in a given month, then how that money breaks down into mortgage payments, car payments, electric bills, food, and so on. This is a firm taste of the real adult world, something that teenagers crave. Let them see the reality of adulthood and how expensive it is. Talk about the choices that you have to make along the way.

Work on distinguishing between wants and needs. This ties in perfectly with showing your children your monthly budget. Some of the items are needs – your housing, your electricity. Others are wants – entertainment. Others are somewhere in the middle – food spending. The better you’re able to distinguish between needs and wants – and to control those wants – the more likely you are to teach them to control their own wants. That’s one of the biggest keys to adult personal finance success.

This is my gameplan for raising my children to better manage their money. Hopefully, you can pull out a nugget or two for your own children or grandchildren.

Margaret writes in:

I have a twenty four year old daughter who is still living at home. She went away to college, but moved back in after college while looking for a job. She’s had a good job now for two years, but has made no move at all to move out. She does give me money for groceries and for bills, but she spends the rest of her money as soon as she gets it on clothes and cell phones and laptops.

I think it’s time for her to move out, but I know that if I kicked her out, she would have nothing to fall back on. What credit she has is pretty poor.

So I’m stuck. What do you suggest?

I suggest putting the impetus back on your daughter. This is how I would handle the situation.

Here’s what I would do. I’d sit down and have a heart to heart with her. Explain, quite simply, that you’ve been happy to give her a place to live while she gets back on her feet, but now it’s time to move on. Most of the time, children in this situation will do everything they can to delay moving out, so you’ll hear a lot of excuses about how she doesn’t have enough money, she’s not ready, and so forth.

So change the rules a bit. Offer to let her stay there for one more month if she opens up a savings account. At the end of each month, as long as the balance in that account is $500 (or $1,000) higher than it was the month before, she can stay for another month. Otherwise, it’s time for her to go.

This little move achieves both your goals and her goals. Your goal is to have your daughter become responsible for her own money to the point where she can easily move out of your home, a goal accomplished by her having a wad of money in the bank. Her goal is to prolong the situation – and you’ve given her a route to do that.

Eventually, what will happen is that she’ll begin to realize the money she’s saved up can be enough to help her buy nice living quarters of her own without Mom constantly there overseeing things. That’s a big difference from the state she’s in now, where the idea of moving out is far in the nebulous future. When that option becomes tangible and real, she’ll want to move out.

What if she says that this is impossible? Simply tell her you’d be happy to help her figure out how to manage it. Point out that her income significantly exceeds the amount you expect her to save. If it results in a fight, stick to your guns and remember that she’s actively choosing not to progress forward. That’s much different than merely spinning her wheels, which is what was happening before. If that’s the situation, you have to cut her free and let her make mistakes on her own.

What if she’s on board strongly with the idea? Encourage her. Give her a copy of the book Your Money or Your Life as food for thought. Offer to counsel her in any way that she wants, but don’t push – quite often, the path to learning how to manage one’s own resources is a solitary one. You might even end up pointing her towards The Simple Dollar or other such websites for other ideas.

Remember, the end goal here isn’t to merely extract your daughter from your home, but to make sure that she’s self-sufficient enough that this won’t be a continuous problem in the future. Give her all you can to make her self-sufficient – if she chooses not to, you’ve done all you can. That’s what good parenting is, in the end – making sure your children have the tools to succeed on their own and that they know how to use those tools.

Good luck, Margaret.

A young reader writes in:

I’m a high school senior and I’m going to college next fall. When I go to college, I want to be completely independent, paying my own bills. My parents insist that this is financial suicide and that they should support me through college. What do you think is the right way to go?

Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I left my parents’ house and went to college. When I left, there was a pretty implicit understanding that I would not be moving back in with them in the future. Sure, while I was a student, I could spend between-semester breaks living there and I could live there in short spurts after college if necessary to facilitate moving on to somewhere else, but my parents’ home was no longer my own. It was up to me to find my own way in the world.

This flies squarely in the face of many parenting trends today in which children often live with their parents throughout college and afterwards, sometimes for many years. The reasons are many, usually revolving around the child’s inability to earn a sufficient income to be financially independent.

Even when children reach a point of “independence,” meaning they don’t live at home, many parents still provide some sort of regular financial support, just to help the children make ends meet.

My belief is that I learned much more valuable lessons by having to make it in the real world than I ever would have back under my parents’ roof. Yes, even if that means a very low standard of living during one’s twenties if necessary.

I’m not saying that parents shouldn’t help if a child completely loses everything. However, there’s a big difference between a helping hand and long term support of a lifestyle.

Short term help in a problematic situation is great – it’s the type of thing that strong relationships are made of. The ability to rely on someone else for a short while when life has knocked your feet out from under you is a tremendous boon and I absolutely do not begrudge parents for helping out in those situations.

The problem comes when that help progresses into expectation and reliance. Any situation in which an individual is unable to be independent and is reliant on someone else is dangerous to both parties. It hurts the parent by taking money away from their future plans, ensuring that they’ll be in the workplace longer and will have fewer assets to rely on late in life. It hurts the child by denying them the skills they need to survive in a world that will eventually not include the parents. Plus, it extends the inevitable ending of support to a later date when it’s quite likely to be much more uncomfortable for both parties.

Yes, financial support of one’s children in adulthood makes life “easier” for them in the short term, but it makes life harder for them in the long term. Such support stunts the budgeting and money management skills that they’ll need to survive when they actually do become independent. It also encourages the establishment of a pattern of spending that exceeds their real income.

The real danger, though, is how it impacts you. The money given to your children when they should be independent is money that’s not going to support your retirement. You’ll have to work longer – and if you’re unable to, you’re much more likely to become a late-life burden to your children than you would be if you invested in your retirement now.

I’ve witnessed this phenomenon with my own eyes. My grandmother gave tons of support to her children, even in their adulthood, and during her final years, she barely had enough money to keep the power on and wound up having to fully support one of her children. If she had completely cut the cord when the children entered adulthood, she would have been able to enjoy a financially comfortable retirement – instead, her final years were fraught with financial and personal worry.

My conclusion, if you haven’t figured it out, is that delaying your children’s independence for longer than necessary is detrimental to both parties and should be avoided. If you’re still relying on your parents – or if you’re a parent still providing support to a child that should otherwise be standing on their own two feet – now’s the time to break that cycle. It’s the only way both of you can thrive and grow freely.

To the young lady who wrote in initially, tell your parents to take that support money and put it towards their retirement by bumping up their 401(k) contributions by 2 or 3% a year. Suggest to them that this retirement savings is actually a benefit to you because it reduces the chances that they’ll be a financial burden to you later in life while also giving you the opportunity now to figure out how the world works.