What I Learned Teaching Billionaire Kids About Money

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0:57When a parent says, I've got an entitled child, I'm like, well, who did that? If we keep on like taking away their opportunities to fall over and get back up again, then how do they ever stand up on their own? Jessica McGaulay is a psychological consultant, a mediator and founder of Dallington, where she helps ultra high net worth families and their children. I didn't have loads of money growing up, made a mess of my 20s. Everything I have today was born out of that. My son never needs to worry about those kind of things. And I really struggle with this idea of going, get into debt and mess up your life because that's good for you.

1:29Why would I want to do that to my child? All the families I work with, they all say about the importance of financial literacy, but then they leave it to other people to teach them that. I'm like, well, you should be talking about it. Also, round your table like this in your home.

1:47I'd like you to start by explaining what it is you do for a living, if that's okay. Yeah. I'm a psychological consultant, a mediator and the founder of Dallington. Dallington is a mentoring practice specifically for young adults from very affluent families. How do you get into that? Yeah, it's a really fair question. and there aren't too many of us around so it is quite niche. I sort of cut my teeth as it were in a family office advisory for seven years and they were advising very very significant families of mass wealth on how to manage their succession, their governance, best investment practices but also issues around like conflict within the family.

2:31So you're creating trust structures and constitutions and what I kept on noticing was well this is all very well and good but you start when they're about 30 and actually that's really tough if you're just turning up to the table to meet your trustee for the first time when you're you know full-blown adult and you don't have any of the language for it that actually younger people should be given an appropriate sort of educational curriculum that helps them understand this world. So you know how wealthy are these these people you're talking about so um i i have no sort of prescriptive they have to be a certain uh level of wealth but they do tend to be sort of between the you know 150 million up so very significant wealth yeah yeah so so someone's got like 10 mil you'd be like no no no not at all not at all because um i also think that actually and we'll come on to this but a lot of what I care about is that actually wealth and money are separate things and we shouldn't use these words so interchangeably and a big part of my work is that I work with people who have a hell of a lot of money and assets but wouldn't necessarily describe themselves as wealthy because wealthy is far more philosophical yeah um but would you describe them as wealthy um no the cash rich how would you yeah yeah happiness poor absolutely i think you we have to really so look money we can measure let's like i always think let's try and take the emotion out of it like money you can measure there are people to help you measure it there are spreadsheets to help you measure it um and that makes it a little bit easier to define whereas wealth there are people like me who start can help you measure it but it really is up to the individual to think about what is real wealth to me because if I don't know what it is then how will I know if I have it how will I grow it how will I protect it and when people say things like the classic one is wealth is my health it's my freedom it's security it's time with my kids I'm like you've said all of that do you have any of those things because most of the really you know money wealthy you know cash rich people I know don't necessarily have those things so they know that's what they want but they're not necessarily doing the things to make it happen so the exercise i try and do with families is what's your number what's your number where you feel that you have enough money to be able to actually start saying no to things saying no to that extra project or job or investment because even though it feels easy for you what is the time the stress those costs that are going to actually impact you and especially i'd say at our end of the the distribution which is less than 150 million a little bit yeah just under just scraping under just a touch um how relatable is it the the work that you do to everyday people's struggles do you think or do you think these people operate in a completely different universe it's a really good question because i think a lot of what i talk about with families and what we'll discuss today i think every family can adopt certainly when it comes to principles of parenting um but i also have a lot of empathy for the group that I work with that is rare.

5:51So if you think about that 150 million plus, and some of the families I've worked with are billionaires, they have absolutely a unique set of opportunities and resources for sure. We shouldn't disregard that. At the same time, the kids, the ones who've been born into this, also have a unique set of challenges because there isn't really a playbook for like, how do you grow up with parents of such status that every room you walk into people go oh it's teased you know that's their dad their mom you know it sort of speaks before you and I know that may sound like get your tiny violin out but I see real shame in some of my young adults that I work with who you know their parents haven't worked this hard so they can feel ashamed of it they really need to engage with it and understand why you know what's coming up for them yeah I saw the other day at Wimbledon Abby Clancy and Peter Crouch's 14 year old daughter was on the paper and the headline was something like what it must be like to be the child of two legends and I was like it's probably crippling in the sense of how am I meant to beat them yeah exactly I went to a party once with one of my friends who pretty wealthy guy and everyone asked me who my my dad was and I'm from my dad wasn't on the scene I grew up with just my mom in Birmingham.

7:11No one had ever asked me who my parents were. And I realised, oh, that's the currency in this room of like, who's daddy? What they're basically asking is, how did you get rich? Yeah, basically. Because you didn't do it. The only thing that matters is who your parent is. And I was finding that's, it's a weird way to measure people up. It's a horrible way to measure people up. It just means that like, You're worthless. Yeah. Yeah. And all your successes, everyone will go, well, yeah, because, you know, because of where they came from. You could cure cancer and people would be like, yeah, because your dad was a billionaire.

7:37Yeah. Yeah. you take into consideration that absolutely they probably had a great education and their doors were open for them but at the same time if we take away every you know success or their own challenges um and disregard them especially in like your teens your formative years when it's so much about like carving out your identity for yourself isn't it that's why i'm a really big fan of sport like i really try and get all my young people into sport if they can encourage them because it's such a level playing field. Like once you're out on the pitch or the court or whatever, it doesn't really matter.

8:13Unless you dance Ronaldo. I'll go play tennis. Yeah, because it's such a woe is me thing, isn't it? But, you know, the best elements of my life are the things that I've struggled for. And the things I'm proudest about myself are like the mountains I've climbed. They get a lot of that taken away from them without any choice. you know they can't choose to have nothing and strive well this is you know one of the questions i were talking about before this is about the parenting piece and have you guys heard of the biosphere 2 experiment in arizona no so they have this experiment where it's a bit like you know the we have in cornwall or devon the um the bubble with the rainforest in it exactly so sort of their version of it where they're trying to see what it would be like if we hadn't made such a mess of things and what the soil would be like and give you know and um they're they're growing these trees and the trees are growing pretty quickly but then once they get to just before maturity they all fall over and the scientists are like what's going on here that i guess there are disease is there a you know a bug in here and they realized there's no wind there's no resistance and they'd forgotten to like implement the resistance because actually a tree to grow strong needs like a backbone basically it needs that like it's they called it stress wood and that needs to be able to stand up strong.

9:36And this is not just relevant to the families I work with. It's across the board increasingly with young people. But if we keep on taking away their opportunities to fall over and get back up again, then how do they ever stand up on their own? Sometimes I just push my son over. Honestly, I do all the time. I just push him over just so that he'll be like... Stress would. Yeah, because he doesn't have any siblings. So I push him over so that he'll be like... Because obviously I had a brother and a sister. We always used to wrestle with our cousins. He ain't joking. Yeah, so I just push him over.

10:02and he's like and he gets up and I'm like good boy yeah that's it just give him a bit of resilience oh absolutely so now when he falls over he doesn't cry he just gets up oh yeah not on the concrete or anything I do it on the carpet yeah just oh no that's wild one day he's going to be big enough to push you over I know break your hip the way he's growing like I'm a bit worried one day he's like my turn dad yeah yeah yeah I've been storing them yeah yeah okay so you know my my tendency as a parent I I didn't have loads of money growing up made a mess of my 20s miserable everything I have today was born out of that and I'm successful enough now to yeah my son never needs to worry about those kind of things and I really struggle with this idea of going get into debt and mess up your life because that's good for you because that was a miserable lived experience for me through that period and why would I want to do that to my child yeah it's really hard to um you're both dads aren't you yeah so it's what you're weighing up this thing of okay what were the challenges I went through as a kid that I kind of I see the real benefit of now that actually I really want my child to go through.

11:02And then for most parents, there's also what were the big or small T trauma is the sort of psychological phrase, which are the things I really want to shield them from that I hope they never have to experience. And you have to be really realistic about that. And some things are totally out of your control. But things like the debt stuff. So for example, blowing your budget, every child should have a budget at a certain point in their teen years and they should hopefully they should blow it like if they're not if you don't if you give a teenager a budget and they haven't blown it what are they doing they need to be expressing themselves and like pushing the boundaries that what's all about uh same with something like a phone bill for example they all go over their phone bill at some point but if you go it's fine i'll cover it i'll sort it out they learn nothing so it's about you can actually start teaching them the consequences like earlier on.

11:57And when you say below a budget, you know, if you say there's your money to go out for today and then they can't get home, what do we do? What would you have done? Walk home. I've done that. I've run out of going big clubbing, run out of money from Oxford Street, walked for like 45 minutes home because that's the only way you can get home. Yeah, but you didn't have a mobile phone then. You couldn't call your mum. Yeah, that's a good point. You couldn't go walking. But then you've got to have an agreement with your partner. If you know, if the listeners here have partners that about where do you stand on that together and a big part of the work is also helping parents with their tolerance to know so the average parent is including myself i don't know about you guys i'm definitely more helicopter than my parents were my parents were like off you go you're fine love whereas the average millennial which i am parent is far more involved in their child's life than you know well we're tracking our kids through phones and things like this yeah but we're also like more more available like available like more pleasant like especially yeah we're better and we're worse in ways yes exactly that's it go go on your tablet for four hours i'll be in the next room like not not ideal but then like you said you know i have lots of fun with my my son we do lots of things we do things every weekend that i would have said were like birthday treats only like the experiences he does water sports and that are things he can do i want and learn drums okay let's let's do that for me it was like no too expensive yeah you know so we i think we are better parents in that sense even this morning before i was on the way to a podcast my son's like dad had bubbles and he like got these yeah you blow the bubbles i was like i'm running late but go on then yeah blew some bubbles i was only seven minutes no you're a great dad i can't say that my dad had time to blow bubbles with me before he went to work so no but but that's the thing like but he took on holidays but yeah it's just like it's more like different type of time call it like i've got time off we can go on holiday whereas now i'm like every day i'm with my son so it's kind of different i think the thing that generally millennial parents are really good at is rupture repair and in the way that our parents generation weren't so much so what i mean by that is if we mess up and we say the wrong thing or we shout at them because we're stressed most millennial parents i know will apologize and say that wasn't you or get down to their level and be like physically i'm sorry my love like you know had a bad day that's not your fault i'll pay i don't i tell off my son i'm like dad i still loves you even though he was naughty but i think my dad's ever said sorry to me for anything no he's i don't think he knows how to apologize to be honest i think it's a generational thing 100 and so i think our generation is better at that it also makes you tougher i feel so i'm like am i making my son too soft with all this like cuddles i give him and stuff so it's kind of like there's a very fine line of like am i over coddling my kid or am i being too stern so it's kind of but when it comes to like the treats and the money aspect of like that you say these experiences you remember how you felt as a child with your parents you don't remember we might remember like i remember like the doc martens i got all the sylvanian family of those weird little yeah little fairy little rabbits mini rabbit i remember like a couple of experiences of being like this is awesome on the whole that's not it it's the memory of like the time yeah and i was trying to say it to parents because what um you know financially wealthy parents do a lot of is gift and that's partly to offset some of the guilt maybe not being around so much they also one of the things i think it's really important if your your child or teenager 20 something is going through something be that emotional education work whatever just because you can pick up the phone and call the best expert in the world to come in and consult with them immediately myself included doesn't mean you should you know that sometimes all they want is like a shoulder to shoulder walk in the car they're the best conversations by the way when you get to teenage years like not face on and you're like, yeah, you're just chatting or I've heard parents say like at a match or something.

16:05So it doesn't feel so intense, but you're like next to each other. That really counts for something. Not saying, oh, I know the best person for this. I'm going to get you the best personal trainer on the planet, you know. Last time we recorded, Tamein, you were having some real dramas with your accountant. So how's that been going, mate? They're sacked. So drama sorted. They're a big corporate firm. they didn't really reply to my emails very quickly like took a week or two at times and they charged me way too much I mean I've got pretty simple taxes and yeah they were charging me thousands they saved me some money but yeah I had to move on slow and expensive pretty much yeah this is one of the reasons that we're really happy to be partnering with tax app it's a tech platform that makes self-assessment simple whether you're self-employed like me a freelancer or a director like demo big dog instead of sending endless emails bills and spreadsheets to your accountant, you just connect your bank, answer a few questions that are only relevant to you, and your tax return can be ready in as little as 15 minutes.

17:01TaxApp is really easy to use, and it's HMRC-recognized software, so it's safe, secure, and legit. The price is also decent, so if you're self-employed with one income stream, it's just£89 as a one-off fee, no big accountancy fees, and we also have a discount code, of course. If you need to file a self-assessment this year, give TaxApp a try. We've left a link in the description and use the code money10 for 10 % off your first tax filing. That code is money, M-O-N-E-Y 10. So what are you finding then that your clients, billionaires, this is a big struggle for, I mean, are there billionaires out there that have got it figured out and that are happier?

17:39You're only seeing the worst of the situation. I always think it's really important. Like we all know people with a lot of money and big houses who are unhappy. And we know people with not so much, you're really fulfilled. And then we know people who are really struggling without money and those who've got a lot of money who are really blissfully like nailing it. So I absolutely see that. The ones who do seem to be the happiest at that top end of financial income, they really have like the basics down. So they can communicate, they can deal with conflict. They've most likely done some of their own inner work, however you want to look at that, be that therapeutic or family work.

18:23But for their children, and take this with a pinch of salt, but they have treated them as close to what reality will be like when they leave home. By that I mean there are consequences. You know, things don't just get brushed under. They have chores. Chores are, chores are godsend. Like all children should be doing chores. Not only do they feel good about it, but I always say to parents every time I do something that my child's supposed to be doing the only person whose self esteem improves is mine so actually robbing them every time that they could be making their bed or doing their homework or climbing a tree if I'm you know constantly lifting them up I feel better but they don't so I think that's really important and those are the families that just seem to really get on when you say consequences can you give some examples of yes the kinds of consequences that you think children should face yeah so i guess it's if um i i tend to work with teenagers and 20 somethings and so the consequences are going to be different because they're legally adults and things like that but for example um do you want to know more about child children no do your clients is fine yeah i mean anyone who's got a child is going to have a teenager one day and that's probably when the consequence is the most severe yeah you know your five-year-old falls over yeah get back up but if your teenager messes up big it can be pretty devastating right yeah so on the lighter end things like it's completely normal for you to um have a look over their UCAS application or their job application like any parent is going to do that do not do it for them otherwise it's your place that you need on theirs you know do not cover all of that for them if they don't get in do not pick up the phone and make something happen for them because it really robs them of any pride and and self-esteem when it comes to more things like consequences there's the money aspect which is things like blowing the budget making for example um one of my mentees last year was given a very nice budget for his first time at university he blew the whole thing in the first week we all know people who did that or maybe did it ourselves yeah his mom I did that like pretty much everyone in this room his mum was brilliant about it she was like the way that she communicated was amazing she was like oh my love I'm sorry that is rough that is rough but you're going to have to figure it out so you're either going to have to live on beans or you're going to have to get a part time job but I'm not going to bail you and in January you'll get your next instalment and hopefully you'll learn better that time but yeah I feel for you that this is going to be tough.

21:08Amazing. So she wasn't, you know, aggressive with him. She didn't like him make him feel scared. But she was like, this is the consequence of your actions. We're setting them up for, I mean, the best way to describe that is entitlement. I mean, entitlement being, I expect other people to either give me or sort out my problems or give me what I want, what I need. And really, when a parent says, I've got an entitled child, I'm like, well, who did that that typically a young person doesn't entitle themselves why do they think it's okay to just demand to get now i should add most of the people i've worked with are the opposite of that they are so humble and lovely and so embarrassed and they would not ever dream of acting that way but it does happen how would you go about fixing an entitled child then uh the parent okay it's 100 percent the parent and it's about what stage they're at so if you've got an entitled five year old that's much easier to deal with than an entitled 25 year old because some things have really got can you change them yeah yeah when they're yeah you absolutely can but it's much harder and it really the relationship will take a hit for a period of time but i always say to parents first of all you need to take responsibility you need to say to your child whatever age you you know what, I'm really sorry.

22:27I need to take responsibility here. I have let things slide for way too long. I have thrown in safety nets far too many times. It's not helping you. It's not helping me. And things are going to change and it's not going to feel easy. I'm just warning you. I think that's definitely a balance. Like definitely don't have 150 mil, but my parents were fairly well off when I was growing up. Now my brother and sister bled all their money, but they're just sucking it out of me. My sister loves to spend the money. But anyway, I went to... You're not bitter about that at all? No, not at all. You know, the firstborn always gets the most discipline, like the least money, but I'm the favourite anyway.

23:06I know. Anyway. Not entitled. No, it's not just the coolest. I went to, I was in boarding school. I went to boarding school. I got suspended and my dad was like, do you know how much I'm spending on your school fees? He sent me to military school for the whole summer in Nigeria on an island, so I couldn't even escape. like i couldn't swim off the island or anything and um it kind of changed like my perception he's like look you i'm paying on your school fees you're getting in trouble at school um and then like look at what you could be living like in nigeria with all these poor people like on an island like have it really hard been bitten by mosquitoes no air conditioning all that stuff so that kind of opened my eyes i'm like okay i'm very very lucky i'm very i should stop probably stop messing around in school so much so do you have clients who their parents i feel like it all comes from the parents and like if you start the right habits when they're young they always like do work experience know the value of money you're not getting money it's my money it's not your money like you can very easily kind of put the right um boundaries or guidance in for your kids oh definitely and also i mean it sounds like actually that was really positive experience for you i mean i didn't think so at the time no yeah upon reflection you can see i just wanted to be in london partying with everyone in the summer but i definitely learned something from it it turned the dial for you a bit somewhere so it did something so what i would say to parents is let's have a think about um what what is your child 100 responsible for in their life right now and depending on their age because that could be between 16 and 25 roughly is the group I work with mostly um now if they're 16 that's going to be less things than them when they're 25 but sometimes I'll get a genuine response that's like I guess they wash themselves I guess they sometimes feed themselves?

24:48They're responsible for their phone? Like, I'm not paying for it? No. Okay, so they're not responsible for much. That's not on them. Don't turn around to us when they're 21 and 25 and say, they can't do anything for themselves. Well, because it's being done for them. So again, a habit, and this doesn't just, this isn't just affluent parents, but it's about sitting down and going, okay, what are they currently responsible for in their life? What do they need to be to look after themselves and what can I just start to stop doing like slowly slowly yeah so my my son is 12 and um he's diagnosed with ADHD like he's got a formal diagnosis so he seeks things out all the time and he's he's pretty full-on sometimes he's a legend I love him uh but I know that I'm probably not being as good as I should be with him and I worry that long term he might he might suffer for that because yeah like i said i come from a background where i couldn't have anything so i my tendency is to be like you know you can have this thing or that thing it's not really gifts it's experiences but i worry that um that's not the best way so i don't really i don't know how to approach it to make sure that he's well-rounded well well first of all we're having this conversation so he will be because you're self-aware enough and it's the parents who aren't having this conversation and then worrying when they turn out, when they're 18 and 20 and can't do things for themselves, whereas you're already aware of it.

26:19Now, there has to be this middle balance also, like you say, of you've worked really hard and you want to be able to enjoy, you know, some of the fruits of your labour, and some of that is spending time with your son in experiences that you want him to have. So that's all right, but I think as long as the flip side is there and that, again, I would just do an inventory of, what does he currently have to manage for himself you know like does he have um does he have to clean his room do his homework do you have how much stuff do you have to oversee to make sure it gets done but he lives with his mother so he doesn't live with me so i have kind of like a limited influence and i'm and i'm fighting a battle on the other side if that makes sense so do you have any recommendations for people that are in that kind of position most parents even if they're if even if it's difficult between them when they've split up they will be able to come together for things around the child so even if you're making agreements going this is going to help him in the future and you can both agree to that otherwise what you can get is this sort of good cop bad cop as you might have already experienced um what i will say is having seen the other end of this i've run dallington for 10 years now so i'm starting to see some of you know the aftermath of the work good aftermath i should say that's probably the wrong word the impact that's a much better word the impact the positive impact is that in really wealthy families when there's a divorce and it gets tricky you can be sure that money will be thrown around to try and you know gain popularity and that you've been taken on this holiday well now you're going to go on this holiday it's got nothing to do with the kid it's got it's all to do with the parents and their competition now the ones who turned out to have the better relationship with the parent are the ones whose the parent had the boundary they were the ones who said no i'm not going to do it they're going to let them just do whatever they want because they felt guilty yeah they were like my relationship with you is more important i'm not going to throw money at the situation i could but i'm not going to and and they'll kick off and they'll be upset with you and they'll say well i'm gonna go to mums or dads because they'll give me this and they'll let me stay out all night but they know that really you know love and care does come from boundaries and children need boundaries see that i appreciate that though or does it the time so it's like yes it's definitely like delayed gratitude it absolutely delays 100 and it's hard because i think as uh as parents like you want your child to like you of course you know and it's almost like you want them to think you're a legend yeah they go from a point of your child's age where they see you as like god yeah they're they start i know more than you do they start to slip away they slip through your fingers and they go they go to their friends i'm so scared about that day i don't need you i mean i'm not quite there yet but i can see you know for me it it's it's that balance of they you shouldn't be their friend you should be their parent and that's a really hard thing to kind of do especially when it's a split situation or you feel that there's a counteracting force pulling the other way it's really tough really really tough but you have to decide what your principles are in your household and I always think it's childhood teenage years early 20s the art let's just you know it's up and down it's so all over the shop if you can create a space environment in your home you can't control the other home you can't but in your home that they know whenever I go to dad's this is what I'm going to expect this is the kind of person these kind of meals we're going to sit down at a table these are his rules there's so much safety in that and so i i just stick with it and it does you will reap the rewards for it yeah thanks you know they say like our children's habits are formed money habits are formed keep hearing around the age of seven would you agree with that yeah um do you think that there's a problem with being too financially open with your children because i mean obviously i've got friends like oh we can't afford that or oh that costs a lot of money then the kid like a year later will be saying oh i can't afford that or we don't have very much money in our house but at the same time can you say oh we've made loads of money daddy just did a big deal and then so how transparent should you be with your kids especially when they're under under 18 or under 16 i think what's tough for our generation and comparison to our parents is cashless society is that we're bringing them up in and when you're young as you're sure your children you see they want to touch everything yeah you're clean class you're good they want to touch everything actually it's really good because you you create a relationship with something you get a feeling about something but they don't carry cash they don't know what the difference between notes and coins is and they just see us beeping things and so as pointless as this may sound I'm I've reintroduced so my child's six and a half nearly seven, my oldest.

30:58And he's got a wallet and cash. And he is going to learn what it feels like to go to the shop, exchange money, give that much. Why have I got that much back? Also look after it, because you know what, if you put a tenner in your jeans and you put it in the wash, well, I think it probably survives. But, you know, it's important to look after your money. Whereas if it's all in the cloud, I mean, so I think having an actual tangible relationship with money at a young age is quite good yeah um because otherwise there's a disassociation between if it's real or not must have said to me before i've got no money he's like well just use your phone because he doesn't understand that the phone is is the same thing yeah it's connected to the bank account but again he he's so he loses everything so you give him a wallet with a tenner in it he'd probably lose it but that's okay he probably needs that to happen he probably exactly needs that to happen he needs to be upset that there was something he wanted to buy now he can't and you're going to really struggle in that moment because you're going to want to go oh I'll just give it to you don't you can't so I think that's really important I also encourage parents to get give save spend boxes so they're like they've got the three compartments and you can see so you're trying to introduce that sort of so some of your money you may want to give to charity philanthropy whatever is right for your family spend that's I'm going to the sweet shop lego whatever the latest thing is um and then save and then you can start to see how they divide their money so i remember my son giving him his weekly allowance after he'd done all his chores and etc and um but he'd been in trouble that day because he'd done something naughty and he was like i should put all my money in the in the gift box because it was he was like i feel bad i was like interesting isn't it like how he's related to that my son loves his piggy bank but that's a great idea.

32:46Well, he's too young to know what the difference is, but he loves the piggy bank. So that's a great idea. Different compartments. My son's got a little brokerage account. Nice. Show him the returns. Love it. What I don't want him to do is hit 18, get a junior ISA and just blow it all. Yeah. So I want him to understand the benefits of compounding. And I think, you know, he didn't get it at first, but now he sees over the last three, four years, it's gone up like 40 % and he's like, wow. I know he understands the function of it. they're just buying a global index but i just try and loop them into it yeah my my partner currently he's like you're too you're too open with them about about money in terms of i'll say anything you know how much money did you earn last week and i'll tell them and then they're gonna tell their schoolmates i don't need to my dad made this last week no but i i mean i just i don't know i don't want them to grow up and think that money is a shameful thing okay so i would say the same thing about money, sex, death.

33:41They're the three sort of, oh, how do we broach this? When do we talk about it? You know, most of us are either, you know, in the same bracket with all those things about how comfortable we feel with them. And so I would think the same thing. So how do I feel about talking about, you know, bodies and sex and all those things? If your child's got questions, how comfortable do I feel? Do I just go, oh, go and talk to your mum about that or do I feel able to answer it um it's the same with money you know they know already and if you're not teaching them someone else is absolutely do you want to yeah do you want to intersect that influence I had a funny thing that like my son did his sex education lessons when he was like 11 and we're in the car so what do you do at school today is that we had uh these lessons on sex and uh I was like how did that go he's like I know what you did to mom

34:34it's what you did yeah i know what you did i know what you did so oh my word yeah i was like don't worry mate it was over quickly it was pretty uneventful yeah but it was just a way he's like i know what you did oh that's so funny so yeah and and but it made me in that moment realize like he knows way more than i think he does the other day we were messaging and he and he was genuinely funny at 12 years old was like intelligent levels of funniness linking back to something we mentioned earlier before and in that moment i was like stop talking to him like he's a baby yeah he's clearly pretty sharp at this point and i'm still speaking to him like he's eight you know i'm behind where he is in in terms of where his developments are yeah so hopefully talking to him about investing and what i do and definitely why i buy assets is a good thing absolutely look this is all the families i work with they all they'll say about the importance of financial literacy but then they leave it to other people to to teach them that i'm like well but you guys have made significant wealth so you should be talking about it also around your a table like this in your home you know why are they having these lessons either unlikely at school but in an educational setting or in your family office or you know wealth manager or bank these should be home conversations Yeah.

35:52And who better to speak to my son about money than me? I'm a finance YouTuber. Talk to him all about the things you got wrong. I do that all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And they're dead interested in that. Yeah. They like to hear about this stuff. That's rare though. Yeah. Like for parents to talk about mistakes to their children, I feel like it's not a common thing. Do you think? Well, he will ask me why I'm not with his mum. So I'll explain, you know. And it's a hard thing to balance between being like honest and biased to my perspective of it, you know, because there's two sides to every story but yeah i don't i don't know i want him to feel that he can talk to me about anything so if he asks me something i've got to be able to talk to him about it in a way that's like age appropriate right absolutely but in in order for him to feel he can talk about anything he has to know you're human therefore you're flawed and you've made mistakes and like i said with repair like you say sorry you're like i'm a flawed human i'm gonna get it wrong but i'll try my best yeah yeah when you get angry in those moments yeah how about yourself with your kids because i always find it really interesting people that sell services as experts when they have their own situation at home surely there's moments where you're like i'm crap at this oh god of course yeah but we have so i have two and a half and a six and a half year old so i also think it's really important that kids do have a childhood and don't have to while you can introduce certain topics you also want them to be fancy free in their own imagination and not be concerned think about me banging his mouth ideally yeah that me that's good things like that

37:21but when it comes to the topic of so like wealth and versus money we talk about that about values and gratitude i'm big one for gratitude because i think the the quickest way to feel wealthy is to do a gratitude exercise of any kind suddenly if you think about what you've got in your life if suddenly you're like, God, I'm really wealthy. I've got all this stuff. I'm so lucky. Instead of looking at what you haven't got. So I try and instill that in him. Look at all things that we have. Look how lucky we are. We do highs and lows of the day. Yeah. Yeah. You go, what's your high and low of the day?

37:57He likes doing that. They ask us sometimes. They go, what's your high and low of the day? Yeah. Yeah. You should do it with your little man. Yeah. What's your high of the day? Yeah, because if... I do already. I'm like, what did you do today? What did you have fun with your job? But yeah, Hining Low is quite interesting. Because it's, you know, on face value, I have a dream job, but you can often get wrapped up in the moment of just the scramble of work and the pressure and the desire to build. I've become so much happier by, you know, labelling things and going, I'm really happy about this. Like sitting on a train, doing work, travelling down to London to film a podcast is an amazing privilege.

38:34I could easily go, oh, this is such a blag. Stuck on the Avanti West Coast train. Gotta wake up early today. Well, actually, this is like amazing. So every day I try and say like, I'm really happy about that. And that's been really good for me. I think I'm just generally a grateful person, but like everyone else, I'm like, oh, I want more money. I want this. I want more followers on Instagram. T is making money. Follow me. I always want more. But like when I injured my knee for like two months ago, I realized I'm like, okay, I make all this money in crypto. I can do really well in the podcast.

39:07But like, I really just want to be able to play basketball. and something I took for granted being able to run. Like once my knee was injured, I'm like, wow, like all the things I've got going on, like the only thing I want is my leg to be fixed. So like you take running or walking or going to the park for granted because you just think I can walk. But if you get a car crash or you injure yourself, you realise, oh wow, I was taking that for granted. You see, I really love playing basketball. I miss it. So things you just do every day, taking my son to the park, I couldn't do that for like a month because of my knee.

39:34So yeah, there's a lot of things you don't realise you should be grateful for. And they're all the things you've both just described are things that anyone can do and anyone can have. And that's why I really do think the term wealth is for everyone and everyone can feel wealthy if they're willing to define what it is for them and then stick with it and be like, well, if to me, you know, time with my kids or freedom or my health is number one, then you prioritize it. yeah a big worry for me about a potential regret is that when I had my son I was like okay now I need to get wealthy so that I can give him a better life and that's become an obsession and now I'm essentially there and then I think oh no I should have just spent more time with him you know I spent a lot of time with my son but do you know what I mean it's like it's almost your motivations are in a good place but they end up I don't know if that's the male of the house is like that as well if that's a male condition to be like i'll provide and i'll go and do this thing or yeah i think that's fair to say i that that that exists but there's also you you sound like you're also it's a response to maybe your upbringing i don't know because you know you won't have necessarily heard your dad talk like that my dad wasn't on the scene okay so yeah so you're that's understandable that you wanted to make this life for your son and what i would say now though is are you still on that right race and if so why and remember that question like at what cost yeah what's your number every year that you need to be able to when I say switch off I mean really really switch off switch off and be there because actually it's too easy now now that you've got a following now that you're you know it's going well the stuff that you wanted for years to you know that you chase for is coming to you I'm sure so it's hard to say no to it It is.

41:22And there's like a sense of like purpose beyond me, like a sense of responsibility to people of the UK to help them so that they can have a better relationship for their kids or life for their kids. It's kind of, it feels bigger than me in terms of I should pick this up and run with it and help as many people as I can. But then at the same time, I worry that one day I'll turn around and go, the one person that really mattered, I didn't help as much as I should have. You know what I mean? Yeah, of course. I want to be a good dad, but I want to be a good citizen to the UK. And also, I have my own ambitions.

41:56I want to push it and see how far I can go. I don't want to be one of these people that just gives up their life for their kid. There are two things I want to say to what you said. One, which is all parents, and definitely all successful parents, like I would say this, they all say, I'm doing it for you. And I've said that before. Let's not kid ourselves. like you know if you're doing this you're doing your dream job you've created you're not working for somebody else you are like you say you you feel like you're responsible for a bigger purpose but you love what you do therefore whilst you are doing it on some level for your child you're also doing it for yourself that's fine but it's we shouldn't put that on our kids like i'm doing all this for you because we are doing it for ourselves they didn't ask us to do it no no they didn't and that's fine but we have to i think we should own that the other thing is just being having tech free and it can be be realistic it can be like three days but text free time away from your home environment and it can be camping or it can be in another country or whatever is amazing and you can start young really young with your child you know what you know they love trains and buses and they love all that stuff you know so much and if you're not on your phone suddenly they are less frustrating because you are able to be like in the mode you know and get with it and they love it are your clients first generation the parents are they first generation rich typically or are they like family like old money yeah typically most of my families are first the parents first gen kids a second but we do have a few third or fourth okay and things do change Do you notice a difference between the two in terms of the attitudes around money and management down the generations?

43:41Definitely. So I think an important thing to note is culture, because the first generation will have typically come from, like you've explained it in terms of your family. Typically, again, I'm being very general here, the first generation mass wealth, the matriarch or patriarch, the person who's created that wealth, most likely didn't come from much wealth themselves. themselves more likely working class background maybe a single parent household they struggled they did have um what we might call blue collar jobs you know like actual hands-on jobs from a young age they um knew the value of money because they were holding it they had to go and get some of the groceries themselves then they made it and then they're bringing up their children in a middle class or upper middle class environment with private school with holidays with internships relationships um and basically the complete opposite that they grew up with and it's cultural they're two different cultures as as the generations get bigger the tree imagine the family tree it gets bigger because there are more children there are more marriages everything just gets it gets more complicated in some ways it's wonderful but it then you start to need more advisors you need people managing your money you need them managing your estate you need lawyers you need people managing your tax, all of that stuff.

45:00So suddenly, you have this sort of like ecosystem of people around you. And what's good is that over the years, if you've got a lot of money, you know the best in breed places to get that advice, technically. You don't necessarily know where to get it emotionally. Because as it gets more complicated, you do also need people to have like the difficult conversations which is for example if your brothers and your fourth generation and only one of you wants to join the family business and the other one doesn't how does that work how's that work financially um in terms of legacy and it's not that you don't care and you do it's just that you have a different skill set or passion you want to be in science and you want to be in finance or you know so these sorts of conversations need to happen earlier and not when there's a problem, not when the money's being divided or there's a death.

45:53Yeah. I was watching this fascinating documentary the other day. It was like, where's all the Vanderbilt money gone? Or it was one of those kind of Rockefeller families. And they now, there's not a single one of them that is a millionaire, even though two to three generations ago, they were the richest family ever. And it's because they spent it all on property and then it just goes down the family tree till it's diluted to the point where there's nothing left. Well, I would argue what happened was that they focused all of their investments and their effort and their care on the technical and another on the people.

46:24And let's be honest, at the end of every transaction is a person and the people are the ones who are going to make some mistakes. So like we need, you know, everyone talks about the great wealth transfer. Yeah, the inheritance down from the boomers. Exactly. my biggest message on this is don't just focus on the technical give equal weight to what does this mean emotionally for my family because if we just see inheriting loads of money or assets as a gift and not as a responsibility then you're going to miss something i'd like to ask you a question um not related to this but i think you have an interest in access to a portion of the uk population that get a lot of um commentary around them at the minute around taxation how do your clients feel about inequality and the discussions around taxation against the wealthy it's a tough one because i don't think it's uh it's divided um and like i said i'm not a financial advisor so i don't have too many of these conversations but it does come up now what's interesting is the children the inheritors they're all for it they they they carry quite a burden that actually that is the right thing to do.

47:36They are heavily involved in changing the investments to being all ESG. They really care about the companies and the boards and they will look up who are on the boards of these companies and what their philanthropic endeavours are and how much they actually care. And is this just greenwashing? And they really care, which is amazing to see. But it's the parents who I think probably find it a bit tougher to swallow. Well, they've paid the tax on the way up. They've taken the risk. And they probably think, I've paid my share, right? Because regardless of percentages, the bill they've paid would have been a big bill.