16 Mar What we are teaching our 4 year old son about money

Myficapsule was named and always centered around documenting a journey for others to benefit from, my son primarily, and for my wife and I to look back and appreciate the journey for what its worth.  While I’m starting this in my tenth year of marriage, I can only imagine if I waited another 5 or 10 years, how difficult it would be to remember the earliest of years.  We’ve lost so much already by waiting 10 years to start that small details could have lead to multiple posts and entries that I’ll never be able to go back and capture. Fortunately, this post was centered around what we are teaching our son about work, money and mindset, and I had the perfect story to capture the message.

If you’ve read previous posts I’m sure you’ve seen the word laundromat a time or two, and I promise for as much as I write about them I talk about them 100x more at home with my wife as we deliberate and discuss opportunities up for sale.  This week was no different I that sense but completely different in a laundry that I found for sale through networking and at the time of writing this, I’m just 3 hours away from actually going to see the location, and I’m pretty sure we are going to buy it.  In any case, this brings me to my son and what we are teaching him in general, and what he experiences in our household.  There is this restaurant in Rochester, MN called Newt’s.  Newt’s is this novel concept in my head that some day I’m actually going to enter their establishment, sit down, and order one of the burgers I’ve seen on their 6,000 billboards they have on Highway 52 between Rosemount and Rochester.  Every time I go there, I see one of these signs, I say I’m going there next time we come to town and it never happens.  This week I said to my wife, “when we buy this laundromat, I’m getting my freaking Newt’s burger to celebrate, finally!” and my son responds (mind you, he’s 3 years 10 months old) “Papa, if you buy that laundromat you’ll have EARNED that burger!”.

Cue up the tears fam, I can’t even take it.  This might not seem significant to everyone out there, especially if you don’t have children, or even if you do perhaps you aren’t as intentional as I am about certain things.  I realize that could sound like a humble brag but it isn’t intentional, its just who we are and what our belief and value system is that we hold near and dear.  We don’t use the word deserve, in our house.  Nothing is deserved and everything is earned and ideally worked hard for.  I don’t say what I’m about to say to pick on my wife, but several years ago at her former job she was going to go in and ask for a title promotion that came with a pay raise.  I asked her what she was going to say and she began and eventually said “and I think I deserve it”.  We worked on her delivery and removed the word and input “earned” instead, and it came across much more impactful and she got the gig.

We regularly talk with our son about money, not in a greedy sense but about what to do with it and why we do the things with it that we’ve chosen.  We are intentional about saying things like “we don’t treat things like that in our house, mama and papa worked hard to earn the money to buy that so we treat it well”.  This isn’t anything that is new, I just think we are more intentional about it and probably more important than anything, we remain consistent in our approach to these things.  He’ll ask us why we have renters in our house and we’ll flip it back on him and say “why do you think we have renters in our house?” Half the time he’ll respond that he doesn’t know or ask if we are going to move into that other house, the other half the time he’ll say “because they pay us money”.  It doesn’t end there, we ask back “and what do we do with our money?”, he’ll respond with one or two of the following and then we coax the remaining items out of him: Give, Spend, Save/Invest.

My son is nearing 4 years old and we find ourselves in a tug of war between giving him nearly anything he wants because we can afford some of the more basic asks that he has, and the complete opposite of just not constantly buying stuff that he can clearly live without.  If we bought him something every time he asked not only would those $5-$20 purchases add up over time, they’d add to the toy collection already spreading across my house.  Its this delicate balance between wanting him to be able to have cool stuff that we didn’t have when we were kids, but not going over the top either. For his 3^rd birthday we got him a battery-operated Case IH Tractor Power Wheel with a trailer.  This was splurge that I just didn’t care, we never had one as a kid, we have the means and we’ve gotten some serious hours and use out of that thing! I’m not beneath buying one on facebook marketplace or craigslist as a used birthday present to save money but the Case IH is important in our family and all I could find used were John Deere.  Any farming family readers will understand this, its a non-negotiable in our house.  Loyalty to red tractors lead me to a brand-new purchase around $290 or so before my red-card discount and a coupon versus likely $100-125 on a used purchase.  Oh well, it’s a good thing we are buttoned up financially so we can splurge on things like this periodically.

My wife is really good about telling our son that something he asked for in the moment today, he can remember and ask for around his birthday or Christmas.  He does remember that and will say for the next several days he is going to ask for whatever widget it is that he wants and my wife or I will remind him “just because you ask for something for your birthday, doesn’t mean you are going to get it, right?” he’ll respond “maybe I will, maybe I won’t” or “I’m definitely getting it for my birthday”.  Overall the message seems to be sinking in for him and we’re happy to see that, he’s a good kid and in general “get’s it” and goes along with our direction.

We are intentional about teaching our son about money because he’s learning about money whether we like it or not.  Whatever your attitude maybe and actions surrounding money are, they will pick up, therefore I’d rather be on the forefront of his knowledge than try to help pick up the pieces when he’s older.  We don’t have any intentions of trying to send him down a specific path or expect that he eventually take over whatever assets and businesses we’ve accumulated, but we do want to ensure we’ve done all we can to make sure he understands it, how we did it, and how he can implement it in his own future 20 years from now when he’s out of college or wherever he’s at in life.  We’ve been aiming to teach him that money is earned versus deserved, we value the things we’ve chosen to buy with it, and we give, spend, and save/invest our money whenever we get our hands on it.  Hopefully these lessons stick with him, paired with this vault of stories on our financial journey and he’ll be off the races far ahead of what we have accomplished ourselves as adults.