The Legacy
I used to think and feel very strongly about leaving my kids something when I passed, so that they could have a good financial start. This isn’t going to happen. But what I have done instead is teach them how to survive and make money.
Let’s face it. We have reached the half way point. We have surmounted environmental, biological, physical, geographical, emotional, and mental hurdles to get this far. Woohoo! But we are on the downhill run. There really isn’t much time left to dilly dally. We have to get it done. Amongst all those challenges we have faced and conquered to get this far, a price was paid, literally. Our financial state is nowhere near what we thought it would be by now and that financial nest egg we wanted to leave our kids has been raided by various eagles.
Recently, I lost everything. You can read about the idea in Plan F and I still have a few posts to add to that series, but for now (spoiler alert) it didn’t work out. So my grand plans of saving for my retirement and leaving a financial legacy (positive not debt) to my kids was shattered into tiny iddy biddy pieces. This was the hardest part of the failure for me. I had nothing left to give them when I died.
I was crying with them as I processes my loss and told them over and over how much I had failed them. I had failed to provide the one thing I had been working toward my entire working life. A financial future for them. Something they could build on. I wanted to give them a chance to house themselves in this impossible market. What they told me changed my whole outlook.
They told me that it was not my responsibility to do that. I said as a parent of course it is. It is my duty. This has been drummed into me since my own pre-birth from the genes of my father and his father who had provided for the next generations.
They told me that I had already taught them enough to survive. I had given them the tools to make money, survive emotionally in a harsh world, to save, to find bargains, to budget, to be frugal, to be minimalist. They did not need gadgets and all the things. They did not want to own property. They were not going to have children. They only had to look after themselves and I had given them all the tools to do this.
So if I died today, tomorrow or in the next few months, I have already left a legacy. The legacy of teaching them to be independent. They all have healthy savings thanks to my two mantras I taught them before they started their first jobs – save half your pay and live off halve and absolutely under no circumstances ever, get a credit card.
My legacy is my mistakes. What I have shown them not to do. What I have taught them to do. They have learned by observation of my resilience. They have seen me go through the shit and come out the other end still fighting, several times, and they know that’s it’s possible. They have seen money ebb and flow through my life and they understand it won’t be a static thing in theirs.
This is my legacy now. I’m still working on trying to leave them something. I believe I have at least another 20 years to build up some sort of financial base again but who knows? Nobody. All I can do is keep getting up in the morning, writing, earning money and saving and with these activities compounded each day, I should have something to show for myself in the next 20 years.
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