My Parents Never Talked to Me About Spending, Now What?
Let me take you back to a Saturday night when the hottest place to be was the movie theater. You left the house in your flyest outfit, hair styled to perfection, shoes clean, and $20 tucked inside the purse you borrowed or maybe stole from your mom’s closet. That $20 could get you into the theater, a blue-and-red Slurpee, a box of pretzels with a side of cheese, and a couple of hours of escaping into a movie.
Did you catch it?
That was my introduction to spending and saving.
The withdrawal: $20 from Mom’s wallet.
The investment: Batman Begins, duh.
The payoff: A memory I still remember years later.
At the time, I had no idea I was learning anything about money. I was simply having a good Saturday night.
If you grew up in a household like mine, your early lessons about money probably sounded something like, “money doesn’t grow on trees” when your friends got the latest iPhone or fresh kicks you desperately wanted. There was never a bigger conversation about the value of working, earning, budgeting, saving, investing, building credit or planning for the future. IRA? A foreign language. Stocks? Something you heard on the news. Credit cards? Apparently, the devil.
I remember moving into my college dorm in Chicago, Illinois. As my parents and I walked through the front entrance, there was a Chase representative sitting at a table offering credit cards to students. With a stern look on his face my father said, “never get a credit card.” So, I didn’t. I learned about financial literacy through experience, mistakes, mentors, books, online research and plenty of trial and error. And the older I get, the more I realize that financial literacy is one of the most valuable forms of knowledge we can pass down to our children.
Since money is often a taboo subject, parents frequently wait too long to discuss it. If you’re a parent or will be one day, don’t wait, have the talk early, build the foundation and allow it to evolve with time.
So, what does money and the importance of saving and investing have to do with the MyEverheart app? We’ve thought about the most important conversations we missed having with our parents. What if you record a message to your child today that they could access at a certain time in their life. A time you might not be around for.
MyEverheart gives parents a structured, non-intimidating way to start building that foundation so that by the time your child and your grandchildren reach adulthood, the concepts are already second nature.
Where do you begin? Here is a series of prompts designed to break down financial concepts into personal, story-driven recordings.
Spending, Saving, Budgeting and Investing
Prompt 1: The First Paycheck
● Push Notification: Record a story about your first job! What did you do, how much did you get paid, and what was the very first thing you bought with your own money?
Prompt 2: Wants vs. Needs
● Push Notification: How do you decide what’s worth buying? Just because you have the money doesn't mean you should spend it. Leave a short message explaining your personal rule for distinguishing between something you need and something you just want.
Prompt 3: The "Secret Trick" to Wealth
● Push Notification: Teach them the "magic trick" of money: Compound Interest. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The same goes for saving. Record a quick video explaining the magic of compound interest—how money makes its own money over time.
Prompt 4: The Money Mistake
● Push Notification: We all make bad purchases. What was your biggest money mistake?
Prompt 5: The Emergency Fund
● Push Notification: Why do we save for a rainy day? Tell your child about a time when having savings rescued you from a bad situation, or a time when not having it made things much harder.
● Push Notification: Money is a tool. How do you use it to help others? True wealth isn't just about accumulation; it's about what you can do for the world. Leave a message about a cause you care deeply about or share a story about a time when being generous brought you more joy than buying something for yourself.
Tagging System: Tag your videos with a "Finance" or "Life Lessons" label. This allows the child to filter by category when they are older and actively looking for guidance on a specific topic.
Milestones: Set an "Unlock Date" for the heavier financial concepts. A story about a first job might be fun at age 10, but the video explaining compound interest might be perfectly timed to unlock on their 18th birthday.