There is an old saying that families repeat like a warning: shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. The first generation builds. The second generation maintains. The third generation, never having felt the weight of the building, spends it all and starts over in the same work clothes their great-grandparents wore. I have spent more than fifteen years building companies and buying real estate across Utah and California, and I can tell you the numbers are real. But the numbers are not what keeps me up at night. What keeps me up is the quieter question underneath them. Am I raising children who can carry what I am building, or children who will simply consume it?
That question is why I think about money at my dinner table as much as I think about it in my boardrooms.
Financial Literacy Is a Parenting Job, Not a School’s Job
Somewhere along the way, we decided that money was a subject for someone else to teach. The school would handle it. The bank would send a pamphlet. The kids would figure it out in their twenties, usually the hard way, usually with a credit card. I understand the instinct. Money feels private, even a little uncomfortable, and many of us grew up in homes where it was never discussed at all. My own parents did their best with what they knew, and a lot of what I know now, I had to learn on my own, standing in the middle of deals I did not fully understand yet.
I do not want that for my children. I have decided that financial literacy is a parenting responsibility in the same category as teaching them to be kind, to tell the truth, and to work hard. If I will not teach them how money actually behaves, the culture will, and the culture is a terrible teacher. It teaches that money is for display. It teaches that you are what you can afford. It teaches nothing about patience, ownership, or stewardship, which are the only things that make money useful in the first place.
So I talk about it. Openly, at their level, and often. Not with lectures, because lectures slide right off a child. With small, repeated, ordinary moments.
Start With Contribution, Not Entitlement
I am careful about how money enters my children’s hands. In our home, money is tied to contribution, not simply handed over because a week went by. That distinction matters more than it sounds.
An allowance that arrives no matter what teaches a child that money is weather. It just happens to you. But money in the real world is a response to value you created for someone else. I want my children to feel that connection early, while the stakes are small and the lessons are cheap.
Here is what that looks like in practice for younger children:
- Tie some earning to real contribution. Not every chore should be paid, because being part of a family means you help simply because you belong here. But there is room for extra work that earns extra money, so a child feels the direct line between effort and reward.
- Let them experience shortage. If they spend it all on something at the store and then cannot buy the thing they wanted next week, I let that happen. That small ache is one of the best teachers they will ever have, and it costs a few dollars instead of a few thousand.
- Talk about the trade, not just the price. When they want something, we talk about what it costs in hours, not only in dollars. That reframes money as a container for time and effort, which is what it actually is.
The goal is not to raise little accountants. The goal is to raise people who understand that money is earned by serving, saved by patience, and spent by choice.
Save, Give, Spend: Three Buckets, One Character
One of the simplest tools we use is also one of the oldest. When money comes in, it gets divided before it gets spent. Save. Give. Spend. Three buckets, every time.
The spend bucket is theirs to enjoy, and I mean that. I do not want giving and saving to feel like punishments that swallow all the fun. Children should get to buy something small and feel the joy of a choice they made with money they earned.
The save bucket is where patience gets built. We talk about what they are saving toward, we watch it grow, and we celebrate when they reach it. That waiting, that watching, is where a future investor is quietly born.
The give bucket is, to me, the most important of the three, and it comes first in our home for a reason. As a woman of faith, I believe that everything we hold is on loan, and that generosity is not the tax we pay on wealth but the reason we are trusted with it at all. When a child gives before they spend, they learn early that money was never meant to terminate in themselves. It is meant to move, to bless, to build something beyond their own wants.
Three buckets is a small system. But a child who runs that system for ten years does not have to be taught stewardship as an adult. They already are one.
Let Them See the Real Work
It would be easy, in a home like ours, for children to see only the results. The office, the properties, the outcomes that look effortless from the outside. That is exactly how the third generation gets ruined. They inherit the harvest and never once saw the plowing.
So I let my children see the real work. Not the glossy version, the actual version. The tenant who calls at an unfortunate hour. The deal that falls through after weeks of effort. The long stretches where you are pouring in and nothing is coming back yet. I want them to understand that the assets they may one day be trusted with did not fall from the sky. They were built by someone who kept showing up on the days it was not fun.
I also let them see the good. I let them into our family’s why. We talk about what we are building and who it is for, so that the work has a shape they can understand. When children know the purpose behind the effort, wealth stops looking like a magic trick and starts looking like a responsibility they might be honored to carry someday.
Children who fostered a garden do not tear it up. Children who only ate from it might.
Teach the Ownership Mindset, Not Just the Wage
Here is the lesson I most want my children to carry, because it is the one that changed my own life. There is a difference between earning a wage and owning an asset, and almost no one teaches it to the young.
Most people are raised entirely inside the wage mindset. You trade hours for dollars, and when you stop trading hours, the dollars stop. It is honest work and there is no shame in it, but it has a ceiling, and that ceiling is your own exhaustion. The ownership mindset is different. You buy or build something that produces value whether you are personally standing there or not. A business. A property. A skill that compounds. The asset works even while you rest.
I try to plant this early, in language a child can hold:
- The lemonade stand is not the point. Owning the stand is. We talk about the difference between being the kid hired to pour and being the kid who owns the whole operation and pays a friend to help.
- Point out ownership in the real world. When we drive past a building, I sometimes ask, who do you think owns this, and what do they earn while they sleep. It plants a seed that the world is full of things that can be owned, not just worked at.
- Praise building over spending. When a child saves up and buys something that makes them money, I make a much bigger deal of it than when they buy something that only entertains them. Kids pay attention to what earns your delight.
I do not want my children to grow up believing their only options are to work for money or to spend it. I want them to know that money can be planted, and that planted money is the closest thing to freedom that money can buy.
Wisdom Before Wealth, Character Before Capital
For all the practical systems, I keep coming back to a conviction that sits underneath all of it. I would rather raise a child of deep character with little than a child of no character with much. Money in the hands of an unformed person is not a blessing. It is an accelerant. It simply makes them more of what they already were.
This is the faith frame that shapes everything else for me. Scripture is full of warnings about wealth, not because money is evil, but because money is powerful, and power reveals people. So in our home, the goal was never to raise rich children. The goal is to raise wise ones, generous ones, people who can be trusted with much because they were faithful with little. Wisdom before wealth. Character before capital. If I get the order wrong, no amount of money I leave behind will help them, and it may even hurt them.
This is also why I believe so strongly that we must pass down values, not just money. Money with no values behind it is exactly the inheritance that gets squandered in a generation. But values, once they take root in a child, become the thing that protects the money, multiplies it, and points it toward something good. A child who has internalized patience, generosity, work, and stewardship does not squander an inheritance. They steward it, and often they grow it, and then they hand it to their own children with the same story attached.
That story is the real inheritance. The money is just the part you can count.
What I Hope They Carry
I will not get all of this right. No parent does, and any parent who claims otherwise is selling something. There are days the buckets get skipped and days the lessons land flat and days I am too tired to teach anything at all. Parenting, like building companies, is done in the ordinary repetition, not in the perfect moments.
But here is what I am aiming at. I want my children to look at money and see a tool, not a trophy. I want them to know the deep satisfaction of owning something they built. I want them to give before they are asked, save without being nagged, and understand in their bones that they were entrusted with resources for a purpose larger than their own comfort. If I can hand them that, then whatever else I leave behind is safe in their hands.
Because the goal was never to build wealth that impresses people. The goal is to raise people who can be trusted with wealth. Get the people right, and the legacy takes care of itself.
If this is the kind of thinking you want more of, I share the operator’s view of business, faith, and family in my newsletter, Operator’s Notes, and I go deeper on the numbers and the people behind them on my podcast, The Broker’s Table. I would love for you to pull up a chair.
