Nobody ever sat me down and taught me money.
I had front row sits since I was 8 years old, money fights after money fights, and it broke my heart how two loving people who werent equipped with decent regulatory functions combined with financial illiteracy kept fighting each other, not realizing it’s TWO of them against problems, not each other being the problems.
…exhale.
That’s a story for another time, anyway.
So, I figured it out the slow, expensive way — be resourceful, make mistakes and learn and iterate, read everything, claw my way to competence. I love my parents for the best they could do. But the buck stops with me, and my kids are not starting where I started.
So when Olivia was three, I started teaching her how money actually works. Not someday. Then.
Here’s the part I had to get right before anything else: the goal isn’t to make sure she never has to work or worry. That’s not freedom — that’s just a quieter cage.
The goal is to build the habit and the capability early, so that by the time money matters, handling it is muscle memory, and money serves whatever she’s called to do instead of running her life.
I’m engineering the habit, not funding the outcome. That difference is the whole point.
The jar
Every week she gets a small amount — real coins, in a real jar she can see. She can spend it on anything she wants that we don’t already buy at home. But if she leaves it in the jar, I add to it. Leave it, it grows. Spend it, it doesn’t.
Nothing in the jar, nothing to grow.
A three-year-old can’t define compound interest. But she can watch a jar she left alone get bigger, and a jar she emptied stay empty. That’s the lesson in her hands before she has the words for it. And notice what I’m actually rewarding — not how much she has, but the decision to leave it. I pay for the behaviour, because the behaviour is the asset.
The breakfast
The other half of the same skill is wanting less than you can have. And this one was my fault to start with — I’d been letting her pick two or three things at the school canteen every morning and not finish them.
My mess, so my job to correct.
One morning she had youtiao, a donut, and a butterfly bun in front of her — all fried dough, all barely touched — and asked for a banana on top.
“No. There’s already three things here.”
“Nooo!” — crying.
“From tomorrow, you choose one thing for breakfast. You still get your iced milo.”
“Why?”
“Because buying more than you’ll eat wastes money and food. And if you force yourself to finish it, you’re just full and unhappy for no reason. Buy what you need, enjoy it, and we’ll get the banana next time — it’s better for you anyway.”
She wasn’t thrilled.
But she got there.
The next day she chose a banana.
The day after, fish finger.
What’s actually being handed down
It was never going to be a number in an account – it’s the wiring: leave the money to grow, take only what you need, and know the difference between wanting and needing before you’re old enough for it to cost you something real.
I’m accountable for what I transmit, not just what I leave behind. The money, if it comes, is the easy part. Whether they can handle it is the inheritance — and that one you build by hand, one jar and one breakfast at a time.
I didn’t get that handed to me.
They will.