Your Money Rules Were Written 30 Years Ago. Not by You.

I was thinking today about my daughter, and about how much I want to teach her everything I wish somebody had taught me, instead of letting her learn it the way I did, which was the hard way, at full price. And that got me thinking about what I was actually handed.

I grew up with very little. The rules of our house were simple. Go to school, work hard, save. That’s it. That’s where it ended. The stock market was scary and risky, something other people did. Real estate was too difficult, too much of a pain to even get into. And debt was one word with one meaning. My parents never used a credit card, never had a car loan, never had a home loan. If they couldn’t afford it, they didn’t buy it, and nothing in our life ran on borrowed money, ever.

And it wasn’t anyone’s fault, because the rules matched the world we could see. The whole world around us was working class, blue collar, paid by the hour, working as hard as anybody can work. Owning a business or building something or creating value, none of that was ever a discussion, because nobody we knew had ever done it. The only people with a little money anywhere in view were the few doctors my parents knew, so the only door to money anyone could point at was a diploma, which is exactly why school was the whole plan. When everyone around you is working class, that is all you know.

And honestly, some of those rules were smart. They never owed anyone a dollar, and nothing could ever be taken from them. But the same rule that protected them also held them back, because there’s no scale in it, no growth, no doors opening. They worked hard their whole lives, and the math never paid them back the way the work deserved. That’s where I learned something my house could never have taught me, that saving alone has a ceiling, and at some point the money has to go to work too.

Then there were the rules I wrote myself, on top of theirs, and mine were worse. The people saving everything looked cheap to me. The people not investing looked lost. The people spending big and living large looked like they’d figured it out, and for a kid who grew up with very little, the fancy stuff pulled hard. Fast money was the language of the guys I ran around with. And here’s the honest part. Good advice or bad advice, it almost didn’t matter, because I was stubborn and thick headed, and I still had to go learn it myself, at my own expense, and it was expensive.

What nobody explained might be the longest list of all. Nobody explained the difference between rich and wealthy. Nobody explained risk, or what makes it different from the market just having a loud week. Nobody explained compounding, and by the time somebody finally did, I was too busy making money and spending it to care. Diversification did not exist where I grew up. And good debt and bad debt never came up, because in our house it was all just debt, and all of it was bad. Rich was something that happened to lucky people. Nobody said it was something you could build.

And more than any single lesson, what I really didn’t have was a person. I wish I’d had a mentor, somebody I trusted enough to actually listen to, and I didn’t. There wasn’t anyone around me whose life made me think, that’s who I want to be later. So I went the long way.

But here’s what they did give me, and it turned out to be the part that mattered most. Work hard. Never give up. Keep going. Don’t spend everything, save for a rainy day. They truly meant save, just save, and these days I translate it to save and invest, but the bones of it were right. It took me years to actually follow any of it, and I built the rest myself, through trial and error and long hours and mistakes that cost me plenty. But every time I got knocked down and kept moving, that was them. That part was always them.

Here’s why I’m telling you this. You got handed a set of rules too. Different house, different rules, same delivery, nobody sat you down and explained them, you just absorbed them at a kitchen table before you were old enough to question anything. And unless you’ve stopped and actually looked, those rules are still driving. Some of them are protecting you right now. Some of them are quietly costing you, the same way some of mine cost my parents and some of mine cost me.

On Tuesday I’ll tell you about the one rule of theirs I kept exactly as they gave it, word for word, because that old-fashioned rule is the reason I survived 2008.

And for my daughter, here’s the plan. I ended up becoming my own teacher, I still study this stuff every day, and the skill I work on hardest is making the hard simple, for the people I love and serve. She’s getting the explanations I never got, and the person I never had, before she needs either one, so the only rules driving her someday are the ones she looked at and chose.

Talk Tuesday.

— Mateo