For parents teaching the next generation what money actually means.
Articles and guides curated for raising teens on building a lasting family legacy.
Browse all LegacyPot Journal articles
Secondary school ends, and in most families the next step is not decided. It is assumed. University in the next intake, whatever course the grades allow, because that is what finishing school means. Nobody prices the assumption, nobody names the alternatives, and a decision that ...
At midnight on their eighteenth birthday, your child becomes a different legal object. They can sign contracts, register property, take loans, and be sued. Nothing about the day feels different, which is exactly the trap: the law flips a switch and most families notice years...
This is the last article in the raising-teens track, and it covers the years the track has been building toward: eighteen to twenty-five, when your child leaves your household's economy and starts their own. Families get this launch wrong in two opposite directions. Some cut: at ...
There is a tour that happens in almost every family, and in most of them it happens on the worst possible day. The heirs walk the land for the first time after the funeral, guessing at boundaries the deceased could have walked blindfolded. They open the business's drawer of...
Somewhere in your house, this week, a child will do a chore, and money will or will not change hands, and either way you will have taught a lesson. This is the part parents miss. There is no neutral...
The richest man in America drove to work in an old pickup truck with his hunting dogs' smell in the cab. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, could have bought any car ever manufactured, and...
There is a chapter in The WSJ Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter (Harper Business, 2011) that opens with a sentence so blunt it is almost cruel. "Some people are just born...
A girl of ten or eleven sits at a kitchen table and announces that she is fed up with the family money system. The system is not complicated. It is a recipe box holding five paper envelopes, each...
Somewhere tonight, in London or Houston or Toronto, a woman is doing a specific kind of arithmetic. Her daughter needs new shoes for school and there is a class trip coming. Her son's phone, which is...
In May 1780, in the middle of a war he was not sure his side would win, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail about why he spent his days the way he did. "I must study Politicks and War that my sons...
A twenty-seven-year-old man named Kamal once sat across from a coach and was asked a question nobody had ever put to him: describe your relationship with money. He answered the way most of us would,...
Two teenagers, in two different houses, ask their fathers the same question: can I join the traveling soccer team? The fees are heavy. In the first house, the father does the math and cannot make it...
There is a 32-year-old man living in his family's vacation home who cannot tell you what his own life costs. His father immigrated to the United States from China as a teenager, built a company...
At the end of her senior year of high school, a girl in Colorado got into her first-choice private college with a significant academic scholarship, and her father, delighted that the scholarship was...
Anyone who has ever tried to start a fire with nothing but dry grass knows how the story ends. The flame leaps up gorgeous and immediate, roars for a minute, and dies, because there was nothing...
Harper is 27, a social worker at an inner-city health clinic, living carefully on a public servant's salary. She works long hours with clients who live below the poverty line, and she is good at the...
There is a gesture James Hughes performs in rooms full of wealthy families, and it may be the most efficient piece of teaching in the entire literature of family wealth. Hughes is the American lawyer...
In the summer of 1963, in Houston, Texas, a nine-year-old boy went to his father and asked how he could earn some money. The father did not reach for his wallet. He ran through a checklist instead....
There is an old joke, and let us be clear from the first line that it is a joke, told for laughs and not offered as data by anyone. A Jewish mother is walking down the street with her two young sons...
There is a sentence parents in ambitious families say with pride, and children from ambitious families repeat, decades later, to their therapists. Philip Roth put it in the mouth of Alexander...
Picture the table. It is the first night of Passover, one of the most sacred holidays in the Jewish year, and the extended family is assembled for the seder, the ceremonial dinner: parents,...
In 1917, in Japan, eight branches of one extended family sat down to merge their soy sauce businesses into a single company. The family had been brewing since the 1600s; the company they formed that...
In 1972, in Manila, a father asked his daughter, then in her early twenties, to open a department store. The father was Henry Sy Sr., a Chinese immigrant to the Philippines who had started with a...
The scene opens with a father getting smacked in the face by his own toddler. Justin Whitmel Earley, a Richmond, Virginia business lawyer and father of four boys, has just walked in from work when...