Nobody Is Coming to Teach Your Kids About Finance. Except You.

Puddle Jumper Parenting

(Photo: My daughter at my NY apartment when she was an early teen running her sneaker painting business.)

Inflation, student debt, outrageous medical expenses, and a housing market that is starting to look a lot like the movie, The Big Short, all over again…

Our kids are inheriting a financial mess in America.

Most Americans still talk about the “American Dream,” but the data looks more like an American Nightmare.

A few years back, I attended a one-week seminar by a Harvard Business School professor. It was a mini course in the current state of finance in America, and set up by my local business group in New York.

He pulled up a slide showing the data and harsh reality that the income gap in America looks identical to the income gap to Russia.

Households either buy cheap laundry detergent or buy the expensive, eco-friendly stuff.

There is no middle class, well, not much of one anyway.

There is the upper class, the rich, and the poor

And the income gap ain’t getting narrower, only wider.

And what are you going to do about it as a parent?

Financial literacy is a parenting responsibility. Not a school one.

During high school, I started to teach my kids about money and gave them the famous purple books (Rich Dad Poor Dad).

But I wish I’d started earlier.

Check out acorns early; it’s an amazing resource for starting them young.

At 17, my son Jackson and I bought a self-storage investment that he would manage through college.

He built a website, converted paper leases to digital systems, nearly doubled occupancy, and helped turn a modest real estate investment into something worth more than double what we paid for it in under two years.

When we sold, his equity stake was worth $50,000.

He was 19 and spent half of it like a drunken sailor on shore leave in Thailand that summer in Europe.

They he wanted a credit card…”To build his credit score.”

We had a conversation and I warned him about the high interest rates of credit cards and that they should only be used as a tool for points.

“Pay it off each month,” I said.

“Of course, Dad!”

And then, at the end of his sophomore year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, he called me.

“Dad, I’m really sorry, but I got myself into a situation. I owe $17,000-plus on my credit card and the interest payments are going to kill me.”

He’s always been good at math and knew he was getting eaten alive by the high interest payments.

I said, “Do you remember what we talked about?”

“Yeah, Dad, of course.”

“Then I’m not sure what you’re asking me. Welcome to adulthood.”

The line went quiet. I could hear the shock through the silence. I let it breathe.

I could have paid it off. I had the money. It would have taken me about four minutes. And it would have been the worst thing I ever did for him.

It took Jackson nearly three years to dig out from that hole. He did it himself. And when it was done, he actually called to thank me.

That is the story I want to start with, because it captures something most parenting conversations about money completely miss: the lesson is not in the information. It is in the experience.

Your job as a parent is to make them financially literate and then to make sure the expensive experiences happen while you are still close enough to catch them if they really fall.

Not after they are thirty-two and underwater on a car and house loan they cannot explain.

Wealthy people only use debt to purchase income-generating assets.

(Photo: My oldest Jackson, graduating from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland)

Buying income-generating assets like a business, a hotel, or an apartment building using debt that is serviced by the revenue is how the wealthy keep growing and maintaining wealth.

People who understand how money works use debt only to buy assets. The poor? They use debt to buy liabilities (furniture, electronics, that Disney vacation, etc.).

Let that marinate a moment.

The average American carries over $6,000 in credit card debt. Student loan balances in this country have crossed $1.7 trillion, spread across roughly 43 million borrowers, many of whom took on that debt at seventeen or eighteen years old, before they had any real idea what a compounding interest rate felt like over a decade.

The median home price in America has more than doubled in the last ten years. Entry-level housing in most major cities now requires a down payment that would have looked like a retirement fund to your grandparents.

I am not writing this to be grim. I am writing it because I have three kids, I have watched them step into adulthood, and I know what it costs when a young person enters this economy without a working knowledge of how money actually moves.

Not how it looks on paper. How it moves. Interest. Equity. Cash flow. The difference between spending what you have and spending what you owe.

“You must prepare your children for the world, not protect them from it.”

That line is in my book, Puddle Jumpers, and I mean every word of it. Nowhere is it truer than with money.

They sure as hell aren’t getting taught this in school.

Here is a number worth sitting with: only a few states in America currently require high school students to take a personal finance course before graduating.

And even in those states, the content is often taught by someone who has spent their entire career in education, a profession with one of the most stable, pension-backed compensation structures in the country.

No offense to teachers, I have enormous respect for them. But there is a gap between teaching financial literacy from a textbook and teaching it from a life that has included losing a business, burning through savings, navigating a divorce, and rebuilding from nothing.

I did all of that. I lost my first company. I lost most of my savings. I went through a divorce. I rebuilt. And none of that education came from a classroom.

At sixteen, my own father put me off his boat in Tahiti during a family sailing trip after we had a blowup that had been building for weeks. I was alone. I had a few hundred dollars. I had to figure out how to get back to the United States from the middle of the South Pacific with no plan and no safety net. I hitched a ride on a 40-foot catamaran doing midnight watch shifts across 3,000 miles of open ocean to reach Hawaii, then flew commercial back to the mainland.

That experience did not specifically teach me about money. But it taught me something that underlies every financial decision I have ever made: there is no backup plan you did not build yourself. Nobody is coming to bail you out. You figure it out, or you don’t.

We have to teach our kids financial literacy because if you have wealth it buys you protection from life.

You want an ice bucket over your head?

A wealthy family with a kid that has cancer has a better chance of saving the child’s life than a poor family with the same diagnosis.

You can scream about how unfair this is (and I’d agree with you) but it will not change the situation.

What I told all three of my kids in their teens.

“Your mom and I have been through hell for you guys to have a good life. The only thing you owe us is to reach for your dreams and know that if you stumble and fall, we’ll always be here for you. You’ll always have a roof over your head. But there are no free handouts.”

That conversation happened once. What followed it happened for years.

There’s five things I taught my kids about money

The first was that earning is different from receiving.

An allowance for existing teaches nothing. An allowance tied to real responsibility teaches the relationship between effort and outcome.

The second was that interest is the most expensive lesson you can learn late. I told Jackson exactly what would happen with that credit card. He nodded. He learned it anyway, at a cost of three years and genuine stress. I let him. Because a $17,000 lesson at nineteen is infinitely cheaper than a $170,000 lesson at forty-five.

The pain was the point.

The third was that a bail-out is a theft.

Every time a parent absorbs the financial consequence of a child’s poor decision, they steal the lesson. They mean well. The impulse comes from love. But the result is a young adult who has no working model for what bad decisions actually cost, which makes them significantly more likely to make catastrophically bad ones when the stakes are real.

The fourth was that ownership beats wages, eventually.

Giving Jackson a small equity stake in the storage facility was not charity. It was education. He saw what it meant to own something that appreciated. He saw what it felt like to build value rather than just collect a check. That mental model is worth more than any finance course.

His sister now manages our family’s storage facility as her college job and she also has equity.

The fifth was that purpose drives financial discipline better than willpower does.

In Puddle Jumpers, I write about raising kids who know who they are and have the tools to thrive.

A kid with a clear sense of direction and a goal they actually care about will manage their money better than a kid running on obligation and habit.

What can you start doing this week?

You do not need a financial planning degree. You need intention and a willingness to have uncomfortable conversations.

Open up about your own money.

Not in a way that puts adult anxiety on a child’s shoulders, but honestly.

Tell them what things cost. Tell them what you wish you had known at their age. Tell them about the mistake that cost you.

Kids are not served by the fiction that their parents have always had everything figured out. They are served by parents who model honest self-assessment and the willingness to learn from being wrong.

Give them skin in the game early and often.

Help them read books early. Rich Dad, Poor Dad is a great, easy read.

A teenager who manages their own clothing budget, even a modest one, learns more in three months than a teenager who gets handed what they need every time they ask. Let them run out. Let them make the trade-off. Stand close enough to help them think through it, not close enough to absorb the consequence.

Stop bailing them out for the small stuff.

The parent who covers every overdraft, every parking ticket, every impulsive purchase is not a loving parent. They are a lender with no interest rate and no terms, and their kid is building a mental model where financial mistakes simply disappear.

That model will not serve them in a world that does not operate that way.

Teach them to think in ownership, not just income. The difference between someone who asks “how much does it pay?” and someone who asks “what does it build?” is enormous.

Start that conversation early.

The housing market your kids are stepping into is, by any historical measure, absurd. The student loan system in this country is, depending on your generosity, somewhere between broken and predatory.

I’m planning to have a conversation with my 19-year-old son this summer about buying a small apartment building in college.

He’ll use a loan to buy an income-generating asset and have a great tax write-off in the process.

I believe in the age of AI, people with income-generating assets will win the long game.

The cost of living in most American cities requires a level of financial sophistication that previous generations simply did not need at twenty-two.

We cannot fix any of that but you can prepare your kids early.

What you can do is send a young person into it who understands how money works, who has already made small expensive mistakes and recovered from them, who knows the difference between a want and a need, who has experienced the satisfaction of earning something and the sting of losing it through carelessness, and who has heard from you, directly and repeatedly, that financial independence is not just a goal. It is a form of dignity.

These lessons, taught early, compound.

That is the real inheritance you can give them. Everything else is just money.

Gracias for listening.

Brandon

PS-I have an entire list of financial resources for kids in the back of my book, Puddle Jumpers.