When was the last time someone sat you down and taught you what to do with money? Not how to earn it. Not how to spend it carefully. But what to actually do with it, so it works for you instead of disappearing. Take a moment. Think about it. For most of us, the answer is never. And the strange part is, nobody noticed. Not our parents, not our teachers, not the adults who sent us on grocery runs and called it a lesson.
I spent a good part of my childhood running errands. Grocery store. Market. Whatever needed fetching. Adults have a theory about this. Send a child on errands and they learn the value of money. They will count change. They will carry weight. They will understand that things cost something. And sure, I got good at arithmetic. I could add and subtract. I came back with the right items and the correct change. Mission accomplished. But here is what I did not learn. I did not learn that money could grow. I did not learn the difference between spending and investing. I did not learn that the purpose of earning is not just to spend more efficiently. Nobody handed me a list that said: here is how money actually works. Here is what the people who have it know, that the people who don’t, were never told. I was being trained to be a very reliable consumer.
The two books I read recently, The Richest Man in Babylon and Rich Dad Poor Dad, made me quietly furious. Not because they were bad. Because they were so good. Because the ideas in them are not complicated. Because a child could understand them. Because nobody told me any of this when I was a child. One book was written in 1926. The other in 1997. Between them they have sold hundreds of millions of copies. And yet here we are, generation after generation, still sending children to the shop and calling it financial education.
I don’t say this to blame anyone. The adults in your life probably did what they knew. We pass down what we were given. But I keep coming back to one question. What exactly were we given?
Leave a Reply