I’m 41 years old, and I’d like to think if I knew what I knew now at age 18, I’d be stressing a lot less on a day-to-day basis. Who knows. I can’t say that I was all that interested in understanding how money worked or in questioning any of the financial philosophies of the people around me until my late 30s. It wasn’t until I entered the world of entrepreneurship, just four years ago, that I started to realize that some people use an entirely different rulebook that I was raised with.
In just the last handful of years, I’ve become absolutely fascinated with discovering the differences between the “haves” and the “have nots”. As controversial as Robert Kiyosaki is, the book Rich Dad Poor Dad was one of the reads that broke open my perspective. To no fault of my parents, they were Poor Dad as described in this book.
My mom was one of four children of a single mom, my dad one of seven. They got married super young to build their own lives. My dad went through an apprenticeship and became a pipe fitter while both of them worked a variety of jobs to make ends meet. Early in their marriage, Mom worked at a convenience store, where one night she got punched in the face for just existing (to give you some context on how nice of a convenience store it was). Eventually, Dad got a union job working at the local truck plant and they had my sister and I.
Mom stayed at home to raise us, though when we were young, she won vacations for she and Dad through her AVON sales. Every few years, we got to go on a family vacation too. Now that I’m an adult, I can see that Dad picked up overtime hours when we had extra expenses, and Mom had years here and there where she got jobs to supplement the family income. But as a child, my parents were just my parents and all I knew was that I wanted for nothing. My mom even got a job at our local liberal arts university when I was a Junior in high school so that I could get my college degree for mostly free. (A decision I see now as a huge sacrifice, though at the time it just seemed like creative problem solving.)
Our childhood consisted of very little discussion about money. I didn’t know what my parents made or how that compared to most anyone else’s family . (I mean, I could tell Dad wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer, but in my mind, we were just “everyone else”.) We didn’t discuss income, debt, expenses, or investments. I got my first job at 15 not out of necessity, but just because I wanted my own money to do with as I pleased.
The few “smart” financial moves I made in my late teen and early 20s had nothing to do with education and most all to do with luck.