WHEN I WAS AGE SIX or seven, an older man came to our house. My mother answered the door. I couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but my mother mentioned the word “garage.” I then followed her to the kitchen and watched her make a sandwich with white bread, sliced bananas and mayonnaise. She then poured a glass of milk and went to the garage.
There, sitting in a lawn chair in our tiny garage,

IN AN EFFORT TO understand each other’s financial background, my fiancée and I began holding a money date night. These finance-focused conversations started out slowly. But they’ve become our way to talk about money and our future together.
As a financial planner, I don’t want to dominate the financial side of our lives. I believe household finances should be managed together and not individually. We view this date night as an opportunity to learn about our individual feelings toward money and what our goals are.

WHAT’S THE MOST important financial decision you’ll make in your life? Is it when to take Social Security? Choosing the right asset allocation for your investment portfolio? How about the decision to rent or buy a place to live?
I believe that, for many people, it’s who they choose to be their significant other. Together, you’ll decide how you spend your money and how much to set aside for retirement. There will be endless decisions dealing with money—and some will have a huge impact on your financial wellbeing.

LOOKING BACK ON MY 75 years or, at least, those after age 10, I realize I have always managed to make money. I never received an allowance or lavish gifts as a child, but it never mattered. I always earned what I needed.
Let me count the ways: raking leaves, shoveling snow, lemonade stands and—my favorite—rummaging through the trash cans in a local park for soda bottles. We got 2¢ for regular size and,

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT you, but there are things I wish I had learned when I was young—say, at the ripe old age of three or four. I wish I had learned another language. I wish I had started the violin. I wish someone had taught me math and not just how to count to 10.
I believe we can learn all these things and more at a very early age. Why? Because we are human sponges when we’re children.

USING HIS CONTACTS and connections, our son landed an interview with a New York City health-care system. He was hired as a business analyst and started work in August 2016.
Along with his roommate—also a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania—our son chose to live in Jersey City, N.J., because it’s cheaper than Manhattan, plus his roommate’s job required that he split time between Newark, N.J., and Manhattan. The rent on their 600-square-foot apartment was $2,500,

GETTING INTO COLLEGE is a complicated business—and it doesn’t get less so once your teenager is accepted. There are countless financial challenges and discussions related to tuition, ongoing expenses, buying books, transportation and more. For us, all the logistics were a little more involved, because our son decided to attend the University of Pennsylvania, away from our home state of North Carolina.
In addition to the “big stuff,” we wanted to make sure our son was successful managing his everyday finances.

IF YOU READ ARTICLES about adding your children to your credit cards as authorized users, there will often be experts quoted, offering all kinds of dire warnings. They’ll say you need to make sure your child is responsible and won’t go on some crazy shopping spree.
We had no reason to think our son would do that—but we also didn’t see any reason to take the risk and put temptation in his wallet.
As I mentioned in my previous article,

UNTIL OUR SON TURNED 15, most of our financial education efforts focused on having conversations about money, but in different buying contexts. How we decide on food purchases. How much we budget for clothes. Why we use credit cards. What a credit card bill looks like. The consumer research we do before making a major purchase.
We figured no one conversation would stick, but the knowledge and the ideas would create a general understanding over time.

TWO DECADES AGO, I read an article in The Atlantic magazine about building a home bank for small children. But this wasn’t a bank that would sit on a shelf or table. Its home was in an Excel spreadsheet—with a phenomenal interest rate of 300%.
If real, that kind of return would end the debate on index vs. actively managed funds. Fortunately for banks and mutual funds, the Belwick Bank—named after the street we live on—only had one customer: our four-year-old son and his weekly allowance of $1.

I FEEL FORTUNATE there weren’t any iPhones or iPads when our son was a toddler. I’ve recently seen two-year-olds mesmerized by the magic of a smartphone. The kids can whiz around a screen like they were born with one in their diaper pocket. It scares me to think how we would have managed these “toys” if they existed in the 1990s.
But they didn’t. From our perspective, Saturday morning cartoons were the biggest threat to our child’s financial development.

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE, when your child is five pounds and 19 inches long, that one day he will be a responsible adult with friends, a college education, a job, strong opinions—and a credit score.
Getting to that point is part of the adventure of parenting.
Where to start? After getting our son’s birth certificate finalized and receiving his Social Security number, one of the first things we did was set up a 529 college savings account.

OUR DECEMBER financial tradition is for my wife and four daughters to frolic in the holiday shopping minefield, while I decry their irresponsible behavior and try to establish some semblance of financial stewardship. In response, I receive heavy sighs, eye-rolling, and other displays of deep and abiding affection.
Maybe not coincidentally, December is also when we do our financial planning for the year ahead. There is no shortage of such discussions on the web.

THEY SAY OPPOSITES attract. In many ways, this is true of my husband and me. When we met, I was very frugal. My husband was on the other end of the spending spectrum. But we’re still together 21 years later—and we have managed to make this work in a way that’s been good for both of us.
We both well remember that first visit to the grocery store. Before we moved in together, I would go down the aisles with coupons in hand,

“IT HAS LONG BEEN important to us to help our children and 12 adult grandchildren learn some of the fundamentals of saving and investing,” wrote Henry “Bud” Hebeler in a Feb. 26 email to me. “I sent them each a booklet that I wrote, illuminating the key elements that I have talked about in the past. To test their comprehension, I sent the following message.”
Bud died in August, nine days after his 84th birthday.