Each of us have had childhood experiences which form the patterns and emotions around money that rule over us. I personally found it useful to reflect back on my early life and understand how my experiences impact me even today.  I also see in others how their early experiences frame their relationship with money, both good and bad. As you would expect, my parents had a critical role in forming my beliefs about money and how it influences life.

I grew up in the Northeast-US, in a blue-collar and predominantly white Catholic town where many of the citizens worked in the jewelry industry or related supply chain.  Most of my friends and influences were lower or maybe middle class at best. I had few role models who had any wealth or much career success. My mother, who came from a solidly middle-class family, stayed at home to care for me and my three siblings.  My father worked a variety of sales jobs, but never experienced much financial success.

My father was born in the 1920s and grew up somewhat poor (happy, but without many comforts). His father, my grandfather, had a third-grade education and traded his labor for wages. Since he did physical labor, he made less money as his body broke down with age, so the family didn’t have a lot. My father went to public school where he did well academically, but he really excelled in one sport.  Through the financial support of local businessmen, he and his teams were able to go to the high school national competitions and his team was the national champion his high school junior year.

This national stage was the lucky break that changed the arc of his life. He had a critical role for his team at the national championship in the spring of his senior year and he caught the eye of a college coach who was scouting for future recruits. As my dad tells it, the coach approached him and asked him if he was committed to a college.  My father had not even applied to college since his parents couldn’t pay for him to attend, so my father said no. The coach said, how would you like to attend the University of Pennsylvania? My dad didn’t know of many colleges, and certainly not those out of his state like UPenn.  He told the coach that his family couldn’t pay but the coach said that not to worry about it. Imagine that today – being told not having to worry about how to pay for your child to go to an Ivy League school!

After graduating college and a stint in the Navy during World War II, my father took a good job in sales support for a cloth-weaving machine (“loom”) company. Well, the clothing industry in the US went through difficult times over the next 30+ years, eventually moving offshore to countries with cheaper labor, and my father’s career and earnings suffered. My mother was very smart and driven, and put a lot of pressure on my dad to provide for the family, but he struggled to meet those expectations. They tried to hide the friction, but over time that becomes obvious even to young children.

My older brother (10 years my senior) tells a story from the 1970s, of which I was unaware because of my age at the time. One day our family needed milk but my parents didn’t have any money. A friend of my grandfather’s had given my parents a collection of coins from the 1800s and early 1900s, so my mother went and got a silver dollar (much more valuable than a dollar even at that time) from the collection, gave it to my brother, with 15 cents of spare change, and asked him to go to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk.  He said that he felt weird about it, since the silver dollar wasn’t in circulation at the time. He went to the store and gave the money to the clerk. She accepted the money for the milk, and she probably smartly switched out the valuable coin for a dollar from her purse!

In my youth, bank passbooks were the norm. You kept a little book where the bank teller recorded transactions – deposits, withdrawals, and balances. My parents opened an account for me for gifts from my grandparents. I took great care with the passbook and liked to see how my savings grew. One day when I was 10-years-old, I noticed that my parents had taken several hundred dollars out of my account, so I asked my mom about it in a panic. She said that the family needed a loan from me to pay some bills, and I remember being very confused about it at the time. I wanted to help the family, but it was “my” money!

Seeing the financial struggles of my parents early in my life made a deep and lasting impression on me. My parents loved each other and were great role models in so many ways, but I saw how the lack of money caused the few fights they would have. I remember being concerned we might lose our house and, although I don’t remember ever going hungry, I now see how my mother stretched grocery money. Those experiences made me believe that having money made life easier, and not having money created friction. I’ve come to realize that it is more nuanced than that, but I fiercely believed it for many decades.

Further, because my parents never had much money, they never made any effort to learn how to manage it. I guess there may be different schools of thought – why worry about managing money if you don’t have it? But if you never learn the basics of money management like saving, planning, insurance, and investing, you certainly won’t build wealth or keep it for long. There are many stories about people with modest incomes dying with millions because they saved and invested wisely (and luckily) over many years.