Unlocking Financial Mastery: The Secrets I'm Passing Down to My Kids as a Property Developer and Educator

I’ve spent a lifetime🐓blocking myself financially.

I’m 39 years old and I’ve only just become self aware enough to get out of my own way. I understand now that wealth is a spiritual game and if I don’t think I’m worthy of being financially free then why would the universe conspire to help me achieve something that I believe I don’t deserve?

I'm on the right path now and all the pieces are falling into place: mentally, spiritually and also in the real world. My kids are 14 and 16 and I don’t want them to spend the next 25 years of their lives figuring out these things like I have!

They both have jobs now and are earning income which is amazing. First up I acknowledge, praise and support them for this. The management of the money that comes into their bank accounts is super important, so we spend time talking about this. We’re working through the Barefoot Investor Family Edition which teaches a 3 bucket system for kids: spend, save and give. This changes as they become adults but this is a great first step. I still pay them $10 a week pocket money as well. When I pay them this, normally Monday morning on the way to school, they move the money around into their different bank accounts and we discuss it as they do it.

We discuss comparative interest rates between different banks and they will investigate the different options and then we’ll discuss them. We also discuss fees and charges, and how these impact their savings and daily transaction accounts. These discussions normally happen whilst we’re cooking dinner together on a Saturday or Sunday night. Nothing too heavy, but as we’re preparing dinner we’ll spend 5 to 10 minutes discussing a particular topic which they will then spend a few minutes doing some reading on, and we then discuss their findings. They need to then explain to me what they’ve learnt theoretically and apply it to their own situation.

Importantly to me, I empower them to make their own informed decisions. Once we’ve discussed a topic, they’ve done a bit of learning about the topic and we’ve discussed their learnings, they can then make a choice. Do they stay with their current bank which is competitive but perhaps not the market leader, or do they move to the market leading product/bank for example. I support whatever their decision is, as long as it’s an informed decision and they can articulate why they’ve made that choice.

We discuss fees and charges as they apply to superannuation. Given they won’t be receiving much into their superannuation accounts, any fees that are charged would likely be disproportionately high. I have a self managed superannuation fund which I’m about to buy a property in, and I pay all the fees for this. We discussed whether it would make sense for them to have autonomy over how they invest money, learning how to make informed investment decisions in a fee free superannuation fund. They agreed that it would be and so when they do earn super it’ll be going into our smsf and they can then copy an investment portfolio allocation from one of the big super funds like Australian Super for example.

My poor girls! I drag them along to renovations that I’m doing and I have them help clean up development sites of building rubble! I pay them for this though, it’s not forced labour. They come along to see the before and after for some of the renovations as well. One in particular was a haunted house which was legitimately spooky af pre-renovation, they will always remember this place for the rest of their lives I imagine, and then they’ve seen the completed product as well. At the moment they have no desire to be involved in property, but I’m giving them some exposure to it at the least so that they may come around to join the family business in time.

I’m going to buy a house in my smsf and also a PPOR this year, so I’ll bring them along to do some inspections for these houses and they can be involved in some of the design and construction of our PPOR. I’m going to owner build it so they can be involved quite a bit hopefully.