Think back to the child running errands. The one sent to the grocery store with a list and exact change. The one who came back with everything accounted for, mission accomplished, having learned nothing about money except how to move it from one hand to another. That child was me. That child was probably you. That child is, in many homes, still being produced today.
We mean well. That is the part that makes this complicated. The adults who sent us on those runs were not negligent. They were passing down what they had been given. The belief that proximity to transactions teaches financial sense. That counting change builds money wisdom. That carrying the weight of grocery bags somehow prepares a child for the weight of financial decisions. It does not. It never did. It just felt like it should.
What we actually teach children when we send them on errands is compliance and execution. Go here, buy this, come back with the correct change. These are useful life skills. They are not financial ones. A child who has run a thousand errands still does not know what an asset is. Still does not know why saving a portion of whatever they receive matters. Still does not understand that money left to grow quietly over time becomes something entirely different from money spent the moment it arrives.
The knowledge is not complicated. We have established that now. Two books, both of them decades old, laid it out plainly enough for anyone to understand. A portion of all you earn is yours to keep. Money has the ability to work for you if you let it. The difference between spending and investing is the difference between a life spent running errands for money and a life where money eventually runs some errands for you.
This is teachable. It is teachable to children. It does not require a finance degree or a sophisticated vocabulary. It requires someone who knows it to sit down and say it out loud.
So here is the question I want to leave you with. Not a rhetorical one. A real one. You have children, or you will, or you know some. You now know things about money that nobody taught you when you were young. Things that took you years and two books and a certain amount of quiet frustration to finally understand. What are you going to do with that? What will you teach them? And more importantly, when will you start?
The errand can wait.
This is Part 5 of The Money They Never Taught Us. Click here for Part 4. https://nonaspensieve.com/the-money-they-never-taught-us-part-4-the-first-rule/
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