This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Millennial Money series, which details how people around the world earn, spend and save their money.

Jewells Chambers doesn’t look like a typical Icelander. In a country where 94% of people identify as native Icelandic, Chambers, a Black American woman, is among the other 6%.

She doesn’t sound like one either. Over the eight years Chambers has lived in Reykjavik, she’s developed a conversational level of Icelandic. “I still fumble on things, though,” she says.

Nevertheless, the native New Yorker has never been surer that this is the exact place where she always needed to be.

“It felt as if there was something magnetic that has been pulling me in this direction, and I still haven’t been able to put my finger on it exactly. But I know it has something to do with the nature, because that has been and continues to be such a rejuvenating piece for me,” Chambers says. “Every time I’m out on a hike or even just a regular walk, getting a little bit out of the city, I just feel really grounded.”

It’s a feeling she wants to share with the world. Since 2018, Chambers has run All Things Iceland, a podcast, YouTube channel and social media brand that explores Iceland’s nature, history and culture through the lens of an expat.

Running the show, which has more than 50,000 YouTube subscribers and 30,000 monthly podcast listeners, has been Chambers’ full-time job since 2020. The company is on track to earn the equivalent of $100,000 this year, from which Chambers will pay herself roughly $73,000 before money is taken out for taxes and contributions to a pension.

That’s not a fortune — especially in famously pricey Reykjavik — but it’s enough to fund the sort of life Chambers, 38, dreamt about in her youth.

“Being here, I feel safe. I feel at home. I’m really happy,” she says. “And that has transformed into something that continues to keep me here.”

Chambers says her dreams of living abroad began in high school in Brooklyn during economics class.

“While the professor was talking about U.S. economics and politics, something in my brain was just like, ‘I don’t think I’m meant to live in the U.S.,’” she says.

She’d have to wait for her wanderlust to take hold, however. Chambers hoped to study abroad while attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but things didn’t work out. “This was something that would hopefully, in the future, become a possibility for me. But it didn’t seem like I knew exactly the direct way that it would happen or how it could happen.”

In the meantime, adult life began. Chambers graduated from college in 2008 with a degree in engineering and about $60,000 in student debt. She moved back to New York City and took a fellowship doing digital marketing for a diversity and inclusion nonprofit, but was barely getting by.

Chambers eventually upgraded to a full-time gig, which helped alleviate some of the financial pressure, but still describes that period as “a limbo state,” “this jumble of trying to figure out my life, trying to make some money, trying to create a career path that made sense for me.”

One thing she had figured out at the time: her love life. In 2013, she reconnected with and began dating an Icelandic man she’d met in college and in two years, the pair were married. By 2016, he told Chambers he intended to move back to Iceland, and she agreed to follow him — on one condition.

“I am not moving unless I find a job that utilizes my skills,” Chambers recalls saying.

Luckily for Chambers, Iceland was in the midst of a huge tourism boom, and digital marketers were in high demand. “This was not a specialty that a lot of people in the country had, or even realized they needed,” she says.

After nailing down a job at a local tourism company, she embarked for Iceland in June 2016.

Working for that company proved to be a microcosm of Chambers’ conversion to a true-blue Icelander: challenging at first, but eventually eye-opening.

She recalls feeling like she’d never be able to remember her coworkers’ complicated names, let alone keep up with an office full of outdoorspeople.

“They were all mountaineers. They had climbed some of the highest peaks in the world,” Chambers says. “And coming from the concrete jungle it was like, I take the bus to work to get nature.”

But this was the job, she was told. If she was going to market nature hikes and kayaking trips and glacier climbs to potential customers, she had to get out there and do them for herself.  

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Once Chambers began personally experiencing the adventures Iceland had to offer, “my life changed,” she says. “Everything became about nature and understanding, respecting and then being able to market that out to our potential customers. And I loved it.”

It helped that Chambers was never made to feel like an outsider because of her identity. Rather, she says, the Icelandic people embraced her in a way that felt untethered to the racial baggage people carried with them back home.

“Living in Iceland has 1,000% had an amazing impact on my mental health,” she says. “The nature aspect has helped me in so many ways, [as has] shedding this idea that it always has to be about my skin color.”

By 2017, Chambers was settled in, and passing the winter days with limited daylight listening to podcasts. At the same time, seemingly everyone from her life back home was asking her about Iceland. Something clicked.

“It dawned on me, and I was like, well, I love listening to podcasts. I’m going to look up and see if anyone else is doing a podcast about Iceland,” she says. “I didn’t see any active ones, so I was like, you know what? I’m going to make a podcast.”

Chambers launched All Things Iceland in 2018, with a plan to make it at least a year airing one episode per week. “I didn’t have any expectations,” she says. “I didn’t know what people were going to say or think.”

When she began to receive positive messages and comments from listeners and YouTube viewers, she knew she had something real on her hands.

“At first, it was people reaching out to say, ‘Thank you, this was so helpful,’” Chambers says.

Then came the sponsors. “These Icelandic companies wanted to work with me, and it was like, ‘Oh, there’s money to be made.’”

By day, Chambers was still doing digital marketing, and in 2019, took a job as chief digital strategy officer at an advertising agency. It was a well-paid, demanding gig that Chambers says jeopardized her ability to work on All Things Iceland.

Between her job, her passion project and her marriage, “it was a big juggle,” Chambers says. “It wasn’t easy, and I didn’t love what I was doing enough for it to keep me going.”

By the time the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Chambers was already feeling burnt out and soon scaled down her hours. By the following August, she felt confident enough in the trajectory of All Things Iceland to quit her day job altogether.

These days, things are flourishing. Chambers’ one-woman company brings in money from ad sales, sponsorships and affiliate marketing. She also sells maps, travel consultations and private tours, all while working behind the scenes with corporate clients producing online and social media content.

All told, the company brought in about $50,000 in the first half of the year, out of which Chambers pays herself about $6,000 a month in total compensation.

This isn’t the first time Chambers as been a one-woman show financially. She shouldered much of the financial load for herself and her now ex-husband from 2016 through 2020 while he built a psychological practice. The pair separated in 2022 and divorced in 2023.

Chambers has a boyfriend who she began dating earlier this year, though the two don’t currently comingle their finances.

Here’s how Chambers spent her money in June. Virtually all of her financial life is conducted in Icelandic krona, converted here to dollars.

Conversions from ISK to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 USD to 139.085 ISK on June 30, 2024. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

• Housing: $2,031 for rent, phone and Wi-Fi
• Groceries: $545
• Cash savings: $428
• Discretionary: $423 on household items, house and car cleanings, wellness and entertainment
• Travel: $368 on an upcoming trip to Amsterdam with a friend
• Fitness: $352 on a gym membership and personal trainer
• Dining out: $321
• Life insurance: $73
• Gas: $65
• Unexpected expenses: $61 on an emergency visit and medication for a case of strep throat

Chambers’ biggest monthly expense is rent, about $1,941 per month for a 1-bedroom, 1-bathroom apartment in downtown Reykjavik, with a storage area and an indoor parking spot — a key feature for Icelandic winters.

She also spent more than $850 feeding herself in June, evidence that food, especially at restaurants, can get very pricey very quickly. Chambers estimates that an entrée at a restaurant in Iceland will typically run you $25 to $30, and you can expect to pay $7.50 or $8 for a cup of coffee in a downtown café.

A few major expenses you tend to see in American budgets are conspicuously absent from Chambers’ spending. Some of it has to do with her job. Because she has a brand partnership with a rental car company, she gets a company car on the house; she just has to pay for gas.

Other omissions are idiosyncratic to where she lives. Health insurance premiums? Not a thing in Iceland, which has heavily subsidized universal health care. Chambers did shell out $61 to treat a case of strep throat in June, though she could have paid less had she gone to her neighborhood health center rather than the emergency room, she says.

The other major difference is the way Chambers (and all Icelanders) are compensated. The number that actually hits Chambers’ bank account is net of taxes and a contribution toward her eventual income in retirement. Every company in Iceland contributes 6.35% of payroll to the Icelandic equivalent of Social Security and 11.5% to one of 21 pension funds, with each employee contributing at least 4% of pay.

For Chambers, navigating the complexities of being both employer and employee in a foreign country “has been a huge learning curve,” she says. “Getting an accountant to help me with that has been so crucial.”

In addition to her government mandated savings, Chambers stashes away a chunk of her income – usually 10% of her take-home pay — each month in a savings account. Eventually, she says, she’d like to explore the feasibility of opening a brokerage account, too, to boost her retirement savings.

In the shorter term, though, she’s saving to buy a house with her boyfriend.

She’s hopes to continue to grow All Things Iceland as a brand and a business. As the business continues to expand, Chambers hopes to hire people to help with the nitty gritty of the job so she can focus on being more creative.

Eventually, she says, she’d love to have her own travel show — based out of Iceland, of course.

“When I made that decision and stepped my foot down that day when I came to the country full time, it just felt right and it has continued to feel that way,” Chambers says. “So for the foreseeable future, Iceland is my home.”

 What’s your budget breakdown? Share your story with us for a chance to be featured in a future installment.

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In 2020, Kristina Knighten, 38, and her husband, Paul Cordier, 46, closed on their dream home in Lago d’Iseo, Italy.

They bought the two-bedroom house for 23,000 euros, or $24,973, at the time.

“It looked like a house you drew when you were a kid with the pitched roof, the door in the center, and the two windows upstairs,” Knighten tells CNBC Make It. “It was really cute and just steps away from the train, steps away from the lake. It felt too good to be true.”

The couple started renovations on the home in March of this year — it needed a new roof, for example — and estimated the renovations would cost about 100,000 euros or $108,578.

“It was going well, and we were making good progress but unfortunately, the costs increased by 25%,” Knighten says.

The couple decided to go the DIY route: “When we looked at the invoices, labor is the biggest cost, so if my husband can provide the labor, then maybe we’ll get this over the line.”

At the start of renovations, the couple was living in a nearby rental apartment and had hoped they’d be ready to move into their new home by the time the lease had come to an end. Unfortunately, that was not a possibility and the couple had to work fast to secure new housing.

At the same time, Cordier’s sister was getting ready to close on a home in Italy of her own.

“She wants to eventually relocate here as well, so we had been keeping an eye on properties for her,” Knighten says.

“Luckily, she liked this apartment, which happens to be across the street from our house.”

Cordier’s sister lives in Bangkok and never saw the apartment in person. Cordier acted as her power of attorney in Italy to help her close on the property. She bought it in an all-cash deal for 39,000 euros, or $42,604 and the couple moved in.

The apartment hadn’t been lived in full-time since 2002. The previous owners, who inherited the property, occasionally used it as a vacation house.

Some of the things the couple found inside were a calendar from 2006, a chest of drawers from the 1920s, old photographs of a competition the town used to host, and old bowls with recipes hand-painted on them.

“It was absolutely covered in dust and smelled very musty. It needed a lot of paint and the plaster was crumbling off the walls,” Knighten says. “Even after we had the electricity turned on, we had to make sure it was safe because it’s a very old building.”

The apartment’s layout is quirky, Knighten says. For example, the bathroom is an outhouse, with a toilet, shower, and tile.“We jokingly refer to it as glamping.”

The ground floor has an open living room and kitchen, but to access the two bedrooms, you have to go up an external staircase to the second floor. The bedrooms are railroad-style, so the couple has to pass through one room to get to the other and back out to the common areas.

One thing this apartment has that the couple’s house doesn’t is a backyard overlooking the lake.

“If this had been on the market when we bought our place, we would have bought this instead,” Knighten says. “We don’t have any outside space at our house and since we’ve been here, we go out and have a glass of wine. It’s just really nice.”

Cordier’s sister is saving up to renovate the old apartment and doesn’t plan on moving to Italy for another two years. She isn’t charging the couple any rent, and in return, they are fixing up the property as much as they can.

“We cleaned up the backyard, we cleaned all the furniture, we painted the walls and just trying to make it nicer while we are here,” Knighten says.

Knighten and Cordier hope to be moved into their house by Christmas but are thankful to have this current space just in case that doesn’t happen.

“We’re in a very fortunate situation where we can stay here kind of as long as we need for free,” Knighten says. “It’s not ideal. I don’t want to be having to go outside to pee in the middle of winter but we will do it.”

Conversions to USD were done on August 13, 2024, using OANDA conversion rates of 1 euro to 1.09 USD. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

Want to be more successful and confident with your money? Take CNBC Make It’s new online course. Our expert instructors will help you master your money and discover practical strategies to boost your savings, reduce debt and grow your wealth — in a way that works best for you. Enroll in ”Achieve Financial Wellness: Be Happier, Wealthier & More Financially Secure″ to start your journey to financial freedom today! Get a 30% discount with the coupon code EARLYBIRD until September 2, 2024.

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When Warren Buffett shares details of his personal finances, people tend to pull up a chair and take notes. When you’re one of the wealthiest people on Earth, you must be doing something right.

While Buffett’s acolytes are chiefly interested in strategies for amassing more money, they recently received a lesson in how to give it away. Earlier this summer, the Berkshire Hathaway chair shared details of his latest estate plan with the Wall Street Journal.

Buffett still plans to make good on his promise to donate significant portions of his wealth to a handful of charities, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, while he’s still alive.

When Buffett dies, his remaining billions (much of it in Berkshire stock) will go into a charitable trust overseen by his daughter and two sons. The three must decide unanimously which charitable organizations to donate to and in what quantities.

“I feel very, very good about the values of my three children, and I have 100% trust in how they will carry things out,” Buffett told the Wall Street Journal. Plus, setting things up this way allows Buffett’s beneficiaries to respond to changes at charitable organizations and the laws and regulations that govern them.

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“I like to think I can think outside the box, but I’m not sure if I can think outside the box when it’s six feet below the surface and do a better job than three people who are on the surface who I trust completely,” Buffett said.

All joking aside, there is much to be learned from Buffett’s approach to estate planning — even if you don’t have $100 billion, or even $100,000, to give away.

“He’s really shown a lot of forethought. And he’s built in flexibility from the beginning, because it’s evolved,” says Jose Reynoso, head of advanced estate and tax planning at Citizens Private Wealth. “Start early and build in flexibility is a good idea whatever your level of wealth is.”

Even if you don’t think you have much to bestow upon your heirs, having an estate plan means you get to decide what happens in the event of your death or incapacitation — not someone else.

“As a general matter, if you do not have an estate plan, the state will provide one,” Reynoso says. That may very well mean health care and financial decisions running contrary to your wishes.

To avoid confusion — and to keep your loved ones out of a lengthy and expensive legal process — you’d be wise to put together a basic estate plan. This might include:

1. Beneficiary designations. Certain financial instruments, such as investments, bank accounts and life insurance policies, allow you to designate a beneficiary who receives the contents of your account upon your passing. These designations typically supersede a will, so it’s essential to keep them up to date, especially following major life changes, experts say. Failure to do so is “the No. 1 mistake most people make” with investment accounts, Ed Slott, a certified public accountant and founder of IRAHelp.com, previously told Make It.
2. Simple will. A will designates how you want your assets to be distributed in the event of your death. This is an easy one to draw up — templates can be found for free on websites such as LawDepot.com. “A will is a simple slam dunk for most people,” Sheryl Garrett, a certified financial planner and founder of the Garrett Planning Network, told CNBC in 2022.
3. Powers of attorney and advance directives. These can go by different names in different states, but the general gist is that they lay out your wishes and allow you to designate a decision-maker for you should you become incapacitated.

Of course, things can get more complicated from there, and you’d be smart to consult an estate attorney to see what might work best for you. It may make sense to set up a trust, just like Buffett.

The important thing to have in common with the billionaire, however, is the process: starting early and communicating often.

“It’s a well thought out and communicated plan among the family,” Reynoso says of the publicly available information from Buffett’s plan. “That communication can help avoid issues that can come up down the line.”

If you, like Buffett, want a significant amount of your wealth to go to charity after you pass, you’d traditionally set up a charitable trust (like Buffett has) or a private foundation. However, these are costly options typically reserved for the very wealthy.

Luckily, you can achieve a plan similar to Buffett’s through a charitable account called a donor-advised fund.

“So many Americans need to learn about these, and a lot of them still don’t understand them,” says Nicholas Yeomans, a certified financial planner, estate planning specialist and president of Yeomans Consulting Group. “A donor-advised fund is an excellent, low-cost way to bless the organizations that you care about.”

Here’s how they work, in a nutshell.

A donor-advised fund is an account that you control whose funds are earmarked for charitable giving. You typically open a DAF with a community foundation or through the charitable arm of a brokerage firm, such as Vanguard or Schwab, and there’s often no minimum deposit.

You can deposit assets, including cash, real estate and stock, into these accounts and, as the donor, choose how to invest the assets and where to donate them.

The major draw, for living donors, is that you can get immediate tax deductions for donating to the fund, but can decide where the money actually goes later down the road. Should you die before deciding, a named successor can take over your account.

Plus, if your fund contains appreciating assets, such as Berkshire Hathaway stock, neither you nor the charity of your choice owes capital gains tax when you make a donation.

It’s a vehicle that is perfect for someone looking to emulate Buffett’s model on a smaller scale, says Yeomans. Naturally, it’s always a good idea to talk to an estate planner or other financial professional before setting up such an account.

“You can fund [a DAF] while you’re alive, but you can also fund it at death. And what’s really cool about it, is that it can give indefinitely,” Yeomans says.

That means you could set up multiple funds for your children to direct toward charitable causes of their choosing after you’re gone, says Yeomans. Or you could make receiving other parts of an inheritance contingent upon deciding where money in the DAF goes as a family — kind of like the Buffett setup, but simpler.  

″[Your DAF] can be perpetually giving to those churches, charities, museums — the things that you care about,” says Yeomans. “It doesn’t have to have a separate tax ID number. It doesn’t have a board of trustees. It doesn’t have to have all the stuff that can take away from that money and be complicated and convoluted if you’re just someone in middle America looking to make an impact.”

Want to be more successful and confident with your money? Take CNBC Make It’s new online course. Our expert instructors will help you master your money and discover practical strategies to boost your savings, reduce debt, and grow your wealth—in a way that works best for you. Enroll in ”Achieve Financial Wellness: Be Happier, Wealthier & More Financially Secure″ to start your journey to financial freedom today! Get a 30% discount with the coupon code EARLYBIRD until September 2, 2024.

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The foods in your daily diet play a major role in how healthy you are and how long a life you live. In fact, one of the key practices of people living in blue zones is eating a diet of mostly plant-based foods of fruits, vegetables and nuts.

In past interviews with CNBC Make It and other publications, many centenarians credited their diet for living a long, healthy life.

Here’s what four people, ages 99 and older say they always eat and also what they never do.

Elizabeth Francis, the oldest living person in the U.S. who is 115 years old, told ABC 13, that she eats “everything.”

But Francis “always grew her vegetables in the backyard. I never saw her go to a fast food restaurant as much like Chick-fil-A and all the places I liked to go. She never did that,” her granddaughter, Ethel Harrison, told TODAY.com.

Francis has also never smoked and doesn’t drink alcohol, Harrison noted.

At 102 years old, Deborah Szekely still helps to run her fitness resort and spa three times a week. Szekely has followed a mainly plant-based diet since her childhood.

“I’m a pescatarian. And I actually have been fortunate of never eating meat because of my parents,” she told Make It.

Her typical breakfast, lunch and dinner looks like:

• Breakfast: Yogurt, a banana and whole grains.
• Lunch: Salad at home, she said, or lunch at restaurants.
• Dinner: A meal of fish, salad and a baked potato or she tries something new.

Her diet is very similar to the Mediterranean diet, and it includes fish, whole grains and fruits and vegetables.

Shirley Hodes, who was 106 years old when she spoke to Make It in March of last year, said she aims to limit the animal fat that she consumes and only drinks skim milk.

“I did like to eat a simple, balanced diet without too much sweets,” Hodes said. She was adhering to the guidelines she was taught in the Red Cross nutrition course she took during the Second World War.

When Forbes spoke to Daisy McFadden in 2010, she was 99 years old. She shared what she usually ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Her meals usually included:

• Breakfast: Oatmeal, cranberry juice and a banana.
• Lunch: Salad with beets, cucumbers, tomatoes and chicken or fish
• Dinner: Lean meat and steamed vegetables
• Dessert: Fresh fruit

“I don’t drink soda at all, and never have,” McFadden told Forbes. She drank water, juice, milk or iced tea instead.

Want to be more successful and confident with your money? Take CNBC Make It’s new online course. Our expert instructors will help you master your money and discover practical strategies to boost your savings, reduce debt and grow your wealth — in a way that works best for you. Enroll in ”Achieve Financial Wellness: Be Happier, Wealthier & More Financially Secure″ to start your journey to financial freedom today! Get a 30% discount with the coupon code EARLYBIRD until September 2, 2024.

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Growing up in rural Michigan, Nina Job got familiar with peers and people in her community following a “traditional trajectory.” That meant “you go to college, you get married, you have 2.5 kids, you know — happy home, white picket fence type-thing,” she tells CNBC Make It.

But moving to New York gave her a new perspective: “I remember being 20 and so surprised to meet single people much older than what I was used to ever seeing back home who were happy.”

The varied domestic situations she encountered “opened my eyes to the possibility of so many different lifestyles, and just non-traditional family setups,” the now-36-year-old says.

Now, Job is among the growing number of Americans who are choosing to live a child-free life. The U.S. fertility rate fell to a record low of around 1.6 births per woman in 2023, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Societies need to maintain a fertility rate of roughly 2.1 births per woman in order to sustain the population — in other words, to make sure there are enough people to keep the workforce up and running. Fewer babies can mean fewer workers, fewer taxpayers and, as a result, shrinking economies.

These demographic shifts have raised some alarms for economists, as well as certain politicians and public figures who frame the decline as indicative of moral decay. Not wanting kids is “a form of selfishness,” the pope declared in 2022.

The reasons that more Americans say “no” to parenthood are more complex than they often appear, though. Becoming a parent is expensive, but money is not the No. 1 reason given for remaining child-free. In many cases, Americans simply have more options — and realize that they can pursue happiness in other ways.

“I think I was just raised on, ‘This is what success looks like,’ and it’s this traditional family setup,” Job says. “To be able to come out here and see it work 1,000 different ways made me realize I could have that.”

Many Americans want children. Just over half of adults ages 18 to 34 without children say they are interested in having them, a 2023 Pew Research survey found. However, the responses don’t break down evenly by gender: 57% of men say they want kids, but only 45% of women do.

For those who do want children but end up putting off or even forgoing parenthood, a prevailing narrative is that it’s simply too expensive. Perhaps babies have become a “luxury item,” a 2023 Vogue article pondered.

Raising a child in the U.S. is particularly pricey, and families can’t count on much help from the government. “America’s welfare system is pretty generous for the elderly, but relatively stingy for kids. Comparing the United States to almost 40 other countries in the OECD, only Turkey spends less per child as a percentage of their GDP,” the NPR podcast Planet Money recently reported. 

The U.S. is, famously, the only wealthy nation that does not mandate any paid parental leave. Here, “only about a quarter of American workers — regardless of gender — have access” to it, according to Planet Money.

And U.S. parenthood has gotten even more expensive in the last couple of decades. Day care and preschool prices spiked by about 263% between 1991 and 2024, according to a KPMG analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The total estimated cost to raise a child in 2023 from birth to age 18 is over $330,000, according to a Northwestern Mutual analysis.

Still, just 36% of childless adults under age 50 say they couldn’t afford to raise a child, Pew finds. An even smaller 12% of adults over 50 without kids say affordability was a deciding factor.

Of those under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have children, 57% say they just don’t want to, Pew finds. Other major reasons for being unlikely to have kids include wanting to focus on other things (44%) and having concerns about the state of the world (38%).

That’s a stark difference from older adults. Among those over age 50 without children, 31% say they never wanted to, per Pew.

A large contributor to the declining birth rate in the U.S. comes from a drop in unintended pregnancies, the rate of which in the U.S. fell by 15% between 2010 and 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other words, more people who don’t want to become parents can avoid it, thanks to advances in contraception and reproductive technologies.

And an increasing share of adults under age 50 say they never intend to have children, a separate Pew study found. That group grew from 37% of adults in 2018 to 47% of adults in 2023. 

If costs aren’t the deciding issue, why don’t younger Americans want kids as badly as their own parents seemed to? For many, it’s because the demands and requirements of parenthood itself have changed.

Callie Freitag, 33, lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she works as a public policy researcher, demographer and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. She and her partner “arrived at the decision not to have kids because neither of us feel interested in being responsible for the care and feeding of small children,” she tells CNBC Make It.

“We’d rather spend our time, energy and resources in other ways. We love being aunt and uncle, but prefer not to be on the clock watching children 24/7,” she says.

Her goals include continuing to build her career, traveling and engaging with her community. Those are possible to prioritize with kids, she acknowledges. But “having children adds layers of complications.”

“Having children is expensive, time-consuming and exhausting, especially in a country that does not adequately prioritize affordable child care or paid family leave,” she adds.

Parenting culture has shifted over the last couple of decades, while millennials and Gen Zers were growing up and forming their opinions on what parenthood should look like. The mindsets of many people in those generations have changed accordingly.

The stakes feel extremely high, and the concern about possibly messing up is real, Paula Fass, a cultural historian and professor at University of California, Berkeley, tells CNBC Make It.

“I do think that, right now, there is fear about child rearing and parenting, a kind of general anxiety that penetrates the younger generation. So they’re conflicted about whether it’s even worth having children, when so much is expected of you as a parent,” Fass says.

Today’s parents spend more time with their children than parents of yesteryear. Mothers in 2012 spent roughly twice as much time — an average 104 minutes a day — with their kids as moms in 1965 (54 minutes per day), a 2016 study found.

Meanwhile, fathers spent four times as much time on child-care duties in 2012 — an average of 59 minutes per day, up from 16 minutes in 1965.

The expectations to be “always on” when you are a parent can be discouraging or daunting to adults who want to have kids but also want to continue pursuing their careers, hobbies or other passions. That could contribute to a sense that would-be parents have to reprioritize their own lives, and even reshape their own personalities, if they want to have kids.

Parenting doesn’t just require more money and more time than it used to. Safe, trusted advice can be harder to come by.

Earlier generations of Americans had a singular national expert, Dr. Spock, who was widely regarded as a trusted source for parenting advice, Fass says. These days, “there’s anxiety without an answer,” she says.

“You go online and there are 10 or 15 different perspectives on what should be done about a particular [parenting] thing, and not only are there different perspectives, but there’s a lot of slamming of the way people do things.”

Parents may feel pressured to do everything in their power to give their kids a childhood they think will put them on a good path. The list of “musts” can include “gentle parenting,” specialized schooling, elite sports training, state-of-the-art technology and more.

Brianna, a 29-year-old living in Connecticut, knew for most of her life she didn’t want to be a parent and chose last year to get surgically sterilized. Her name has been changed for privacy concerns.

“It’s something that I’ve wanted for as long as I’ve known that it was a thing,” she says.

Nonetheless, it took years of documenting with her doctor that she was set on her choice before she got the greenlight to proceed with the procedure, Brianna says. When the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe vs. Wade came down and abortion restrictions went into effect throughout the country, Brianna’s doctor became more willing.

In her case, adopting a dog four years ago helped solidify her choice to not become a mom. “The amount of stress I feel in making sure that she’s living her best life and is healthy is not an amount of stress that I would want a child to have to deal with,” Brianna says.

“I’m very neurotic with her,” she says. “I know I would be even more neurotic with a human child.”

Declining birth rates aren’t unique to the U.S. Countries around the globe have seen their birth rates begin to or continue to fall, as in the case of South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world.

Plenty of governments have taken steps to try to encourage their citizens to expand their families. South Korea increased a monthly allowance for families with newborns through their first year. Taiwan has introduced a cash benefit and tax break for parents as well as expanding its paid family leave compensation.

Few of these policy solutions have made a significant difference. Even countries like Norway, which are known for having robust family support policies, have started to see birth rates decline.

To a certain degree, that’s expected, Jessica Grose reports for the New York Times in an essay titled, Stop panicking about the birthrate. “There’s a pattern that occurs when both incomes and quality of life go up; societies move ‘from lots of births and lots of deaths to fewer births and longer life expectancies,’” she writes, citing demographer Jennifer Sciubba.

“In addition, the more educated a population is, the more both men and women tend to delay becoming parents and have fewer children overall,” Grose writes. “It’s tough to argue that more education and longer life expectancies are bad things for humanity.”

Whether something needs to be done about this situation at all on a policy level is debatable. “There are several reasons not to worry about falling birthrates,” writes demographer Leslie Root for the Washington Post. After all, “the U.S. population has continued to grow over nearly four decades of sub-replacement fertility rates,” she writes.

For individuals, of course, the decision to have children remains a highly personal one. And the Americans who increasingly prefer to opt out of parenthood may still be pro-family or pro-child in general.

“I love kids,” Job says. “I want to be able to help other people with their kids in moments where they’re really struggling.”

“Seeing how much work went into [having kids] from such a young age, I was like, ‘This is a lot,’ and you have to decide at some point,” she adds. “You can have anything you want. You can’t have everything you want.”

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