Having lived in an inner city setting for the past ten years, I’ve often been thankful for my family’s relative wealth. I never considered myself rich growing up, but the fact that I was able to go to PENN, live in a house in the ‘burbs, and travel a lot means that I’ve had privileges most others haven’t.
Lately, though, I’ve been feeling grateful more often, not about my good financial upbringing, but about my good financial management upbringing. In other words, my parents not only had decent money to provide for me, but they also provided me with decent money management principles.
For example, I can recall my dad teaching me how to keep a cash ledger when I was six. I got two cents each Monday night for rounding up all the plastic trash bags in the house and bringing them to the outside garbage can, and my dad made me record that in my ledger. Cash gifts from my grandparents, tooth fairy money, even loose change I found in the streets got recorded in that ledger. When my piggy bank got to be $40 or so, we’d go down to the bank and we’d deposit that money there.
My dad taught me about the stock market, too. Before you could use the Internet to set up a page to track all the stocks you owned, my dad would sit me in front of the TV during a business show and give me a list of ticker symbols and tell me to write down the prices and how much they went up or down that day. In retrospect, I suppose he could’ve just waited until the next morning’s paper, but at the time I watched that scrolling bar like our family’s financial future depended on it.
I’m realizing that not everyone was fortunate to have this kind of upbringing. Principles that come natural to me – start saving early, don’t get too deep in debt, build good credit – are foreign concepts to others. With a baby on the way, I strategize over things like 403(b)’s and 529’s, and I’m much more comfortable because of the foundation my parents laid for me.
So I was doubly blessed growing up: we had money, and we managed it well. Although the more I think about it, if I had to choose between one or the other, I’d have to now go with the latter.
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