Our household has very open finances. We have dinner table talks about dollar cost averaging, compounded growth, and investing in broad mutual funds.
Kids have a bank account with debit card at 14, and a personal Vanguard account at 18, as well as a Roth IRA in which we match their taxable earnings.
And the kids know that making money is hard: they tutor, they create their own Kickstarter campaigns, they work as a cashier for extras.
They know how to make a budget and what things cost.
But no amount of your discussion or financial education is going change the mind of a very determined, strong headed youngster who “doesn’t want to live in the bubble of Silicon Valley anyway” and wants to pursue a non-technical creative course of live.
You need to expose them to people who have made bad decisions. Seeing how people live can be very illustrative.
The kids grow up thinking pursuing your passions and dreams is more important than accumulating money. And it feels so good and right until you find yourself broke and poor and your passion is gone, and you think life just sucks.
It takes no effort to throw down a spreadsheet. List their yearly earnings for the rest of their life. Throw in expenses like mortgages, vacations, food, then add in kids and family, medical emergencies, show them just how poor they will be if they go down the path of their shitty career. Many kids may be left wide eyed when they accept these numbers are true. There’s no extra money hidden away, no big windfall waiting to come out and propel them up the class ladder. This is it, this is their life. Good luck.