Latest / Mom's Money / I Want My Kids to Fail. Here's Why.

Transcript

I Want My Kids to Fail. Here's Why. · Mom's Money

• 0:03
  I want my kids to fail. Here's why. I want my kids to fail. Actually, let me make that worse. I am financially preparing for my kids to fail.
• 0:17
  Not because I want their lives to fall apart, and I don't have some rescue mentality, but because someday, somewhere, something will. They'll lose something they thought was permanent.
• 0:32
  They'll choose the wrong person, take the wrong job, make a bad financial decision, build something that doesn't work. Maybe they'll get laid off. Maybe they'll get divorced.
• 0:43
  Maybe they'll just wake up at twenty-seven and realize the life they built isn't the life they want anymore. That's life. And here's the thing I cannot stop thinking about.
• 0:55
  We financially prepare for a broken transmission. We insure the roof. We save for the water heater.
• 1:02
  We have deductibles and emergency funds and warranties, but almost nobody talks about financially preparing for the broken seasons of the people we love. I do, because I needed one.
• 1:17
  There was a season of my life when everything fell apart. I came home, back to Las Vegas, back to my dad, back to the house I grew up in, and I remember my bedroom.
• 1:29
  At some point, we'd ripped the carpet out because we were going to replace it. We never did. So the floor was concrete. There was a twin bed, bare walls, nothing beautiful about it, nothing Instagrammable.
• 1:44
  I wasn't walking into some luxurious guest suite thinking, "Oh, thank God, my parents planned for this." It was basically, "This is what we have. You can have it." And at that point in my life, I was embarrassed.
• 1:59
  I had debt. I had financial problems. At one point, I didn't even have a working phone. I felt like I had screwed up this version of adulthood I was supposed to be building, but I had somewhere to go.
• 2:12
  And now, years later, I understand what that ugly little room actually was. It was an asset. Not because of the resale value, because of its option value. It gave me somewhere safe enough to figure out the next move.
• 2:31
  That room said, "You failed at something, but you did not lose your belonging." Those are very different things, and I think that's wealth. This is Mom's Money Talk.
• 2:43
  I'm Ellie Ezra, the mom talking money like no one ever did for you. This is for the woman who's done managing money and ready to run her life like a business.
• 2:53
  I'm not a financial advisor, but I've built companies, sat in rooms with investors, and learned how money actually works. And here's the truth. You don't have a money problem. You have a systems problem.
• 3:06
  This isn't about budgeting harder or cutting lattes. It's about spending with intention, building assets, and thinking like the CFO of your household.
• 3:15
  Because if you're a mom, you're already running a business, the business of the home. So I'm giving you the playbook, one that makes your life feel lighter, not heavier. I believe households are economies.
• 3:30
  Come at me, okay? I think moms are already operating them, and I think wealth should give your family more capacity and more choices. And today, I want to add something to that definition.
• 3:44
  Wealth should give the people you love somewhere to recover. We've sort of confused independence with abandonment, and I think American culture has gotten a little weird about independence.
• 3:58
  Your kid turns eighteen, then twenty-two, then twenty-five, and somehow success means they should never need you again. Why? I absolutely want my kids to leave. Please leave. Go travel. Take the job.
• 4:15
  Move to New York or Dallas-Fort Worth. Build the company. Fall in love. Get your own apartment. Figure out who you are, and without me standing there three feet away asking whether you remembered your water bottle.
• 4:28
  I want independence for them, but I don't think independence requires us to remove the safety net.
• 4:36
  In fact, I think the safety net can create more independence, because when you know one failure will not destroy you, you can take bigger swings. I know that because I did.
• 4:51
  Having somewhere to go did not make me less ambitious. It made it possible for me to try again. That's a distinction I think matters. Support is not the same thing as rescue.
• 5:05
  I don't want to protect my children from consequences. I don't want to finance permanent irresponsibility.
• 5:12
  I don't want a thirty-eight-year-old child sitting in my house playing video games while I'm making lunch and paying a credit card bill. Absolutely not. But
• 5:21
  when life punches one of my kids in the face, I want our family to have enough capacity to say, "Come here. Get steady, then let's figure out what's next." This is a CFO decision. This is where the money comes in.
• 5:40
  Businesses plan for uncertainty all the time. They hold reserves. They have contingency plans. They insure themselves and their teams.
• 5:50
  When I was an assistant vice president at a corporation, they took out life insurance on me. They maintain unused capacity. They invest in things that might not pay off immediately, and they preserve options. Why?
• 6:06
  Because resilient organizations are not designed only for the scenario where everything goes right. So why would I run a family that way, my family that way?
• 6:17
  If I'm the CFO of this household, I don't wanna optimize our financial life so tightly that one person having one terrible year breaks the entire machine. That's not efficient. That's fragile.
• 6:31
  I want resilience, and resilience requires margin. Maybe your version of that's cash. Maybe it's an extra bedroom. Maybe it's keeping a house you could technically sell.
• 6:43
  Maybe it's being able to help with groceries for three months. Maybe it's flying across the country because your adult child calls and says, "Mom, I need you." Maybe it's paying for therapy.
• 6:55
  Maybe it's helping someone relocate after a job loss. Maybe it's buying them a couch, which brings me to my oldest son.
• 7:02
  My husband and I adopted his nephew before my husband was my husband and before my son was my son, when I was a girlfriend in my 20s. And that son, he graduated college. He got a job. He moved.
• 7:16
  He got his own apartment with his own perfect credit that we helped him man- manufacture. He's doing exactly what you hope a young adult will do, and I am so proud of him, and he doesn't need to move into my house.
• 7:31
  He doesn't need me to rescue him, and I still wanted to buy him a couch. He bought one himself even after I really wanted to.
• 7:38
  But I think we sometimes make this mistake where we believe helping our children somehow steals their independence. I don't think that. Sometimes you're not rescuing somebody.
• 7:49
  You're just making the landing softer, and I like being able to do that. This is one of the things I want my money to be for, not just a higher net worth on a spreadsheet.
• 8:04
  Capacity, the ability to say yes when yes matters. What if your house is more than a house? It's actually changed the way I think about my own home.
• 8:14
  Maybe one day, one of my children needs the house that I bought in my 30s. Maybe the big one does. Maybe the little ones do. Maybe someday there's a grandchild in that house, or maybe we rent it. Maybe we sell it.
• 8:28
  Maybe none of those things happen. I have no idea, but I like knowing that my family owns one corner of the world where the answer could be, "Yes, there's room."
• 8:40
  And maybe that isn't the mathematically highest possible return on every dollar. That's okay because this is where I think personal finance gets personal.
• 8:51
  The goal isn't to die having optimized every asset to its maximum theoretical return and also not to die with it then given to the kids.
• 9:00
  No, the goal is to use wealth to build the life you actually value, and I value optionality. So here's the reframe. Look, when my kids are little and something goes wrong, they run toward home.
• 9:15
  We don't say, "Sorry, you should have planned better." They regulate. They recover. They try again. Eventually, they're going to be adults, and life is going to have adult-sized versions of the same thing.
• 9:30
  I hope they still know where home is, not because I want them dependent on me forever. Because I want them brave enough to leave. That's the irony. A safety net can actually create risk tolerance.
• 9:46
  If you know failure won't erase you, you become more willing to try. Start the company. Take the job. Move somewhere new. Leave the thing that's not working. Start over.
• 10:01
  That's what wealth can buy, not certainty, the ability to survive uncertainty. So here's what I want you to think about this week.
• 10:10
  When, when you picture building wealth for your family, don't picture only retirement accounts and home equity and inheritance someday. Ask, "What am I building that gives this family options?
• 10:24
  What happens if somebody needs to come home? What happens if somebody needs six months? What happens if the perfect plan isn't perfect?
• 10:35
  What capacity are we building now so we don't have to make every future decision from panic?" Because I don't just wanna leave my kids money. I want to leave them resilience. I want to leave them optionality.
• 10:50
  I want to leave them enough safety to take risks, and yeah, I want them to fail. I want them to fail at all things worth trying. I want them to discover the wrong answer. I want them to bet on themselves.
• 11:07
  I want them to build lives big enough that occasionally something doesn't work out, and when that happens, I want them to know failure is an event.
• 11:19
  It is not their identity, and there will always be somewhere safe and soft to land. That's what home is. That's what family is, and to me, that's what wealth is for.
• 11:36
  Stop budgeting your life away. Start building something that pays you back. The goal isn't to save money. It's to build a life that money can support. Spend smart. Acquire assets. I'm Ellie Ezra. I'll see you next time.
• 11:55
  [outro music]