Lessons my parents taught me about money

Nah ! I ain’t rich. But I will get there. Slowly and surely.

Much like my parents did in their thinking. My folks were not born in a well to do family. Coming from a business class from a lesser know place in the north of the country, they never knew about budgeting and getting rich. They did not teach me that.

They did not tell me to think about making tons and tons of money, nor did they teach me not to make nothing ! Here’s a snapshot of the best things I seem to have learned from them.

Education is everything, spend money on it

My dad put his weight behind everything to make sure his kids went to good schools.

His foresight was that good education would pull his children out of the rut he thought he himself was in – the mess of handling small business and the challenges of falling sales and dwindling profits it brought. He spent every single dime we wanted on books and education.

His brothers disagreed with him, but 20 years down the line after he put his bet on education, he seems to have come out successful. As far as possible, we need to make sure to give the best of education possible to our children.

By Salvatore Vuono from freedigitalphotos.net

Greed is bad

When by dad’s brothers were splitting the estate my grand dad had left behind, my dad had two options : one of receiving a small business which was running just OK and another to receive a huge land with some litigation history around it but which seemed a mammoth investment in the long run; the latter looked luring to all the brothers.

My dad chose the former, saying that he did not want to take on anything he was not sure about at all however promising it looked in the future. He chose not to be greedy but at the same time not to take any risk.

I often come across the same scenario when I look at stocks I hold which I want to liquidate.

Work hard, money will follow you

You could be an intelligent person or an average Joe Bloggs, but you can have everything you wanted in life by doing hard work.

There is no replacement to that. My parents have had a challenging life, as does everyone, but they toiled to make sure we lived as we wanted (well, mostly !).

There was no free lunch from anywhere, hard work was the only solution. The important lesson is that we need to make sure that our children learn to earn their lifestyle and don’t get in on a platter – if we teach them to word hard, money will follow.

Keep money and relatives/friends separate

Maybe it was my dad’s own learning, but he always seemed to say that friends and relatives are good to have but to trust them to a limited extent as far as monetary transactions are concerned.

I have never had the honorable opportunity to test this factor but reading and hearing about people pulling the rug under theirs relatives and friends, I think this is a wise takeaway which I don’t want to get to experience in this life.