Family

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.

ONE OF MY FAVORITE activities as a child was to play with a tomahawk at my grandparents’ house. Yes, that was in the days before the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But in this case, it wouldn’t have made a difference: This particular tomahawk was no toy, but rather the real thing. It belonged to my grandfather. His name was Walking Buffalo, and he was a member of the Assiniboine, a Native American tribe who live on the Plains of Montana.

TOWARD THE END of high school, I landed in some predictably adolescent legal trouble: I purchased alcohol underage and had to shamefully explain what happened to my parents. As I dejectedly declared that I would pay the fine and admit guilt, my parents—concerned about potential career implications—instead insisted that I hire a lawyer with my own money. I had to work for more than a year as a busboy and caterer to reimburse my parents for the cost,

THE SOUND AND SMELL of the Pickle will be forever burned into my memory. As a wannabe cool teenager, getting rides to school and soccer practice from my parents in their inherited 1976 green Dodge Aspen coupe with whitewall tires—a.k.a. the Pickle—was beyond embarrassing.
Sometimes, my parents would honk pulling away, just to add insult to injury. Needless to say, it took a bit of humble pie to finally understand the lessons my parents were teaching me,

WE’RE ALL CONSTRAINED by the income we have and the wealth we’ve either amassed or had handed to us. Result: Those on low incomes struggle to cover daily expenses. The middle class pay for today, while also socking away money for their own future. What about the rich? They often use their wealth not only for themselves, but also to help future generations.
These are, of course, gross generalizations. Some folks on low incomes manage to save surprising sums for their own retirement.

I DON’T THINK my parents ever had any sort of five-step plan to teach me about money. I was always parsimonious, so they weren’t very focused on how I spent. They did, however, teach me two powerful life lessons—which changed not just the way I thought about money, but who I am.
Everything has a cost. I attended private school from fourth to ninth grade, coasting by with B plusses and A minuses.

I RECENTLY RECEIVED an email from a friend asking, “What financial advice would you give to your younger self, now that you’re older?” I had to think for a while. But once I sat down to reply, I realized my attitudes about personal finance were already well-developed by the time I was in my 20s. I also realized my financial beliefs had been shaped, in part, by growing up in a family where money wasn’t exactly plentiful.

IT’S LONG BEEN an idea that’s captured my imagination: Get a child invested in the stock market at a young age and then leave compounding to work its magic. If stocks notch four percentage points a year more than inflation—which many would consider a conservative estimate—$10,000 invested at birth would be worth $230,500 at age 80. That sort of success would, I suspect, give a significant boost to parental popularity.
When my kids were born,

MY SISTER JUST HAD a baby, our family’s first grandchild. That officially makes me a PANK: a Professional Aunt, No Kids. This often-overlooked demographic takes an active role in the lives of children they’re close to. They spend not only time, but also money: 76% of PANKs lavish more than $500 a year on each of their nieces and nephews, resulting in some $9 billion in annual purchases.
The opportunity to buy adorable items for baby Henrik is not lost on me.

WHERE DOES A TEEN turn for advice on money? I went to my late father. My conversations with him are burned into my memory like software on a computer.
“Do what you love and make it pay.” “Give your all enthusiastically.” “You can get whatever you want if you are willing to work for it.” “What you make is important, but what you do with what you make matters more.”
When I was 15,

LIKE MOST PARENTS, my wife and I spent time and money building a happy and balanced childhood for our four children. That encompassed things like vacations, cub scouts, church, music, and youth soccer and baseball. But it also included trying to pass along values like hard work, thrift, generosity and education. We never hesitated to speak about our finances around the dinner table, although we only shared specific numbers when the kids got older.