Financial Lessons and Underpinnings
My parents were savers. My dad was cheap and my mom was simply not lavish. They didn’t require much, although they had their guilty pleasures. My dad would spend anything on fitness equipment and health products. This resulted in a private gym in the basement and a closet full of old running shoes that would never get thrown away. My mom, on the other hand was much more reserved. she would love to go on a vacation, but that was like pulling teeth for my dad. This resulted in not too many family vacations and less travel than they probably could “afford”.
My dad was an engineer and my mom was a school teacher. I grew up mid to upper middle class and I never had a sliver of financial struggle as a kid. All of my needs and most of my wants were granted. That is an immense privilege, and it is not lost on me. I was able to follow passions as a kid and spend a lot of time playing sports which was, again, a privilege.
I was not concerned with money when I was a kid and would often spend it as soon as I got it. This all ended around the age of 10, when i went to a family friends high school graduation party. My mom told me that Kyle (the kid), bought his own car, and she pointed it out to me. I had no idea somebody could do that, so i asked her how he did it. And she said some very simple words that probably changed my life forever.
I really looked up to Kyle, he had baby sat me when i was a kid and he was one of the cool teenagers that I looked up to in those years. My mom told me, “he saved all his money from working in the summer for 2 years.”
And that is when it first clicked for me. Not trying to brag here, but I’ve always known that I’ve had a different outlook on life compared to my peers. I’ve always been able to look ahead better than my friends and even the adults I came into contact with. I’ve also had a great proclivity towards delayed gratification. This is what I think my number one skill is. I mainly got it through diving. I realized early on that I had talent for it and I would talk to my coaches about goals that I had. I think he was the one that really distilled it down and instilled in me that the way to be great is to spend more time on the basics than anybody else and do more than anybody else. I will go over my diving career at some point but for now that will suffice.
Anyways, after I learned that kyle could afford a car after saving for a couple of summers, I thought to myself that it would be easier if I just started to save at 10 because then i wouldn’t need to save as much each year to buy a car.
So from there nearly every penny I made went into a bank account and it would stay there until I was getting ready to go to college.
It was around my senior year when I discovered my next large influences. Graham Stephen, and the Bigger Pockets Podcast. This would take me into college with a whole new world to discover in podcasts. We will get there though.
Throughout high school I would work at an afterschool program where I would watch preschoolers from school end, until their parents came to pick them up. It was good money for me at the time because I really never had a job and I didn’t really invest yet. but that was changing and in 2018 I would enter the investing game.
I didn’t really have many jobs growing up because I was training year round, but after all of that saving I basically ended highschool with around 7,000 dollars to my name. Which is not a crazy amount. I know.
But it’s less about the amount, and more about the psychology behind it. College is when I started to really get into personal finance. College became about more influences a lot of pods, side hustles increased, falling in love with learning, investing/trading…blah blah blah.
And That is what I wrote about in the next post. Enjoy, if you’d like. Otherwise, I don’t know why you would be reading this far.
-Nick
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