Kelly Slater: Growing Up without Heat or Hot Water | Forward Progress

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0:44This week, Kelly Slater. When you were growing up after your parents were separated and dad was out of the picture, money was tight. How much did you move growing up? Well, you know, I lived in one house until I was 11, and then we, actually maybe 13, and then we moved, we stayed in place for a couple years, and then we moved again for about a year, moved again, and we probably moved three or four or five times, like, in my mid-teenage years. I mean, there were times when heat or hot water were unreliable, right? Yeah, I mean, but, you know, we lived in Florida. It's not that cold, but some of the winters would get cold.

1:30I remember a few times my mom just put in just enough money to decide to get oil to heat the house. We had this one heater, and we'd be sitting there freezing, and we didn't really have winter clothes and stuff. We'd be really extra cold at those times. How satisfying was it to be able to buy the family a house, though, when you were in high school? Yeah, it was nice to be able to buy it. I bought a car and a house when I was 17, basically with cash. And that's when the money's real, too. What was that like? It was nice. My mom sort of barely had lunch money for us when we were in elementary school.

2:08We'd go to school with some coins. My mom used to talk about, later on, she would talk about how she would go turn the coins in at the bank, so we thought we had dollars. But she usually just had a lot of coins, and she'd turn them in and give us a few bucks for lunch. But, you know, look, I had it better than a lot of kids. I mean, there's homeless people out there. I always had a roof over my head. My mom made it work somehow. She made$500 a week, kept a roof over our head, fed us, and raised three boys basically on her own.

2:41But I think the only reason I really talk about it is that I try to let people know I appreciate what I have. You know, I wasn't in extreme poverty or anything like that. I just, we just didn't, we didn't have any extra cash. And, you know, if we wanted to go on a trip, my mom would oftentimes sell something, you know, like she had a guitar, she had a banjo, a 1938 Gibson Gold Top banjo. It was like a prized possession. You know, one time I was gonna go surf the world championships and we didn't have the money and I didn't have the sponsorship, so she sold the thing. You know, it's probably a$30 ,000 instrument now and she sold it for like 500 bucks, 400 bucks or something like that.

3:20So - Did you recognize the significance of it? I didn't then, I do now. Now I like how, wow. That's pretty heavy, I mean. So your career took off pretty quickly thereafter and you're in your early 20s. At that point, I think you made millions of dollars and you realize you're broke. Yeah, I had made good money for, probably from the time I was about, when I was 16 I started making some money. Maybe 15 I started making 100 bucks a week or something And then 16, I started making a few hundred bucks a week. And then by the time I was 17, I was making pretty good money. Here's the thing. If you grow up without any money, you don't really have good money skills generally.

4:01Your family doesn't. And so we just didn't have that skill and know much about how to handle money. So it's just that classic story, you know, go from rags to sort of riches and then back to rags for a little while before you figure it out. Do you remember how you found out and what that feeling was? Yeah, I do. I do. I mean that's kind of personal. I don't like to talk about it because it's, I don't know, that's just something for me. But I feel like I learned a lesson. How did it make you feel? It really pissed me off. It really pissed me off. I was just really, really upset. That was something that took a long, long time to kind of come to grips with.

4:42But I look back at it and I go, Luckily, it happened when I was 21 years old or 22 years old and not when I was 35. Because at that age, I was able to reset my goals and go, okay, look, now I'm going to make some money. I need somebody to help me with financial planning and investing and to eventually get to a place where I understood what I was doing and taking care of my future. I was going to say, what do you think the best lesson you learned through all of that was? Just to plan out. Have someone or multiple people you could trust that can give you a good idea of how to learn it yourself so you're not just totally entrusting someone else to invest and handle your money.

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