[herodoturtle]

Hey man, if it's any consolation, my folks had me when they were very young, and I barely spent any time with them whilst growing up. As immigrants we had it pretty tough financially, and they were always working long hours (always for someone else) to try make ends meet. They harbour significant regret about not being more present in my childhood.

These days they're of course much older, and I am in the lucky position to be able to look after them financially, but they're also filled with added regret about depending on me - they feel like failures because rely on me to cover all their expenses - despite my best efforts to assure them that it's ok.

So to your point, whilst having kids younger means you can spend more time with them when you're older, it's not necessarily the better solution if it requires a trade-off in terms of first establishing yourself financially - and from reading your other comments - it sounds like you and I both started off in life with relatively little, so I think the choice to first secure ourselves financially before having kids makes more sense.

I delayed having kids with my wife until relatively late (I was 37 she was 33), and whilst I know this will probably reduce the amount of time I'll get to spend with my children when I'm much older, the peace of mind that has come with having first established my SaaS before starting a family is immense.

In fact one could argue that the reduced stress alone will probably add 10 years on to my life :-)

Thanks for sharing your inspirational comments above and below. Enjoyed reading all of them. And congratulations on the success - I'm sure it is well deserved.

[bootstrapper101]

I know. We had kids around the same age.

In my case my big mistake was moving to US mid way in career. It disrupted by established life and I had to start over from scratch. If I had stayed in my native country, I would have been able to have kids earlier.

Thanks for sharing your experience!