I’ve made lotsa mistakes in the area of everything personal finance. Lotsa. Thankfully, aside from the minor matter of taking out many tens of thousands of dollars in loans to attend a meh law school (I may or may not understand the meaning of the word “minor”) none have been debilitating. Most other major mistakes — like probably buying too much condo house — could/would have been a lot worse. But our reasonable frugality, combined with rising incomes, mitigated many of the the bad effects.
Silver is gold
Being the contrarian thinker I am, I’ve thought back to these mistakes and found a very silver lining in them. For example, while I was pretty dirt poor during law school and for several years after it, the experience caused me to learn many valuable lessons. I wrote about some of them in my post “Law School Broke Me.” Those lessons have served me extremely well. And I’m not sure if I”d have learned some or many of them but for the condition I found myself in.
As for buying probably too much house, here’s what I mean. We could have borrowed $X each time we bought a condo. But we instead borrowed lesser sums. So we weren’t completely behind the eight ball. Each time tho, we did put down a down payment that all but completely depleted our savings (to say nothing of our emergency fund). And while our mortgage payment sums weren’t putting us underwater each month, the margin between our monthly expenses and income was initially not nearly as high as would make us feel safe. As mentioned, because of our spending habits and rising income, the margin grew over time. But things were more precarious than we’d have liked for a while. Again, this was a lesson we learned because of the mistakes we’d made.
A last example of a mistake I made was my incredibly stupid decision to buy an individual stock when I did no homework on the company, and when I had no business gambling money in the first place. I wrote a about that in my post “I Lost $750, and I’m Sort of Happy About It.” I gotta admit, the speed with which my investment turned to dust was pretty impressive. The lessons I learned from this mistake were seared into my flea-addled brain.
The sins of the father shall not be passed. . . . But the lessons should.
As a parent, I consider my job — after ensuring the safety of Thing One (The Elder) and Thing Two (The Younger) — to be helping ensure that the kids are set up to succeed, thrive, and be happy. That’s no mean task. And there are oodles of ways to accomplish it. The Missus and I Reasonable people can firmly believe that those who don’t agree with them are wackadoodles differ on the best approach.
On the one hand, there are the folks who give their kids everything, unconditionally, as a way of showing off to the Joneses that they’ll do anything to help their kids get a leg up. That sometimes costs the parents dearly. Parents who don’t or can’t give their kids (much of) anything beyond the bare minimum lie on the other end of the spectrum.
And then there’s the vast middle, where we’ve been all along. Pre-discovery of FIRE, I was of the mindset of erring more on the side of giving the kids more than less. This included, notably, having the goal of fully funding four years of education, room, and board at our state’s flagship university.
But I’ve since moved further to the other side of the spectrum. With regard to college funding, I wrote about our change of course in my post “Higher Learning.” But that extends to other areas, too. The reason goes back to those mistakes I made. Because of all the learning I’ve had over the years, the education that came out of my mistakes was at least as valuable as any formal education I received at any time.
Lesson the pain
So I think depriving the kids of any opportunity to learn things the hard way does them a great disservice. That said, knowing what I know now, and not wanting Thing One and Thing Two to suffer to the degree I did, or to put them way behind the eight ball from the get go, the plan is to cushion the blow without eliminating it.
So, for example, we’ll still be funding a portion of college (should the kids decide to go). But not all of it. The balance will have to be made up by one or more of the following: scholarships, grants, income, and the kids’ savings. Loans are not off the table, but any amount need not be too great should each kid make half-way smart decisions on where to go to school, and to graduate in no more than four years.
And while we once may have (within reason) bought the kids discretionary things that they could buy with their own money, we now typically say “You want it? You pay for it.” We certainly won’t subsidize them as they become adults. Assistance with down payments, monthly bills, “adult allowances,” any any number of other financial boosts that other parents apparently make (to my horror) are beyond the pale for us.
Are we making the right decisions? I dunno. Have we moved far enough to the other side of the spectrum? I dunno that either. So maybe this will be another one of those educational mistakes we learn from. Which would be pretttty ironic, don’t you think, Dear Reader?
But I’ve given all this a lot of thought. And I’ve read the accounts of many others to whom less/little was given, and the value that had for those persons. I also know firsthand the value of the lessons that I learned from our mistakes. And we’re all along trying to impart knowledge to the Things One and Two about how the world works, the mistakes we’ve made, and our expectations of the kids and how they can efficiently achieve them. This should set them up well.
So I think we’re striking a balance that allows the kids to succeed, thrive, and be happy while learning and understanding that those things come with a cost that they have to pay. And that’s worth paying.
Hopefully any knock in the head they suffer will won’t be debilitating, but will be enough to impart lessons.
