Preface

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

This was one of the happiest days of my life.

It was not my wedding day.

It was not the day I had a child.

It was not the day I celebrated a big family milestone or career achievement.

And ironically, it was not because it was the day I signed the contract for this book, which happened as well.

The joy came in a windowless conference room in midtown Manhattan on a gray spring day, where I sat with my husband and 24-year-old stepdaughter, signing piles of very grownup documents that would make Ashley a homeowner. The event followed two years of her living at home to save money after college, including the COVID-19 pandemic when we were all home all the time.

Looking back, I can remember so many times I thought this day would never come. This moment did not come without many setbacks and very tough discussions. Yes, at age 24 Ashley was buying a New York City co-op apartment. Because of the particulars that apply to the Manhattan market, my husband and I had to cosign. But it wasn't our money paying for the apartment or the closing costs. Nor would we be paying anything toward the ongoing costs of home ownership. Ashley was on her own for this project, as we liked to call it.

She would now be on the hook for monthly maintenance, a mortgage, and of course the Wi-Fi bill. If the building had an assessment, it was all hers. Laundry time? She was on-duty as well. The same goes for sourcing all the things that had to go into her new home and managing a new stream of bills, including homeowners' insurance and New York City real estate taxes. We were done. She was fully aware of every expense in her new and financially independent life. She had budget projections and a good-enough emergency fund.

Earlier that day we had done a walk-through of the L-shaped studio apartment that was to become Ashley's new home. She had been saving for this dream since she was 13 years old. While my husband, Neil, Ashley, and the real estate agents went around checking that the outlets were working and the appliances were functional, I stood there watching - and tears of both happiness and terror started to flow.

I was 23 years old when I became a homeowner. Like Ashley, I lived at home after college. As a journalist, my job didn't pay as well as her consulting job does, relatively speaking, so I had temporary help from my parents, with a specific cutoff schedule. We jokingly called it an exit strategy. That early and specific push to homeownership and the financial awareness that it forced me to understand were the foundation of my future interest in finding and sharing the best ways for young adults to create their own financial lives.

There is no one path. Homeownership is just one road that can be taken to create an adult financial life separate from parents or other family who may have taken care of you up to that point. We'll talk about many other potential routes to launching financial grownups here. But I do believe most of us share a common goal: To give our children the gift of knowing they have everything they need to be financially independent of us.

One of the experts you will hear from in this book, parenting coach Allison Task, explains why a focus on finances is so essential in helping our kids mature into their grownup lives. "One of my clients said to me, 'I do not want to deprive my daughter of the opportunity to earn and pay for their first shitty car. I'm not depriving my daughter of the pride of ownership.'" Task went on to explain that the mother is wealthy and could easily buy a fancy car, like the Porsches and BMWs that are all over their neighborhood. But she had a very specific reason for not choosing to do that. "Neurologically, there's something to the pursuit and the earning and the satisfaction of that thing [Mare] Winningham talks about in St. Elmo's Fire (Columbia Pictures, 1985):

Yea . ya wanna know what's great? Last night I woke up in the middle of the night to make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich . and ya know, it was my kitchen, it was my refrigerator, it was my apartment . and it was the BEST peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I have had in my entire life.

Who knew that in 2021, as I write this book, that urge to create one's own life and declare adult independence would have become so complicated - and even controversial? The coronavirus amplified a trend that has been growing. Countless adult-age children returned home to quarantine with their parents, including my own 21- and 24-year-olds.

At first this appeared to be a new complication for my mission to help parents raise financial grownups, a project I started several years ago. After all, young adults could now more easily fall back into childhood roles - and who were we to do anything but welcome them to extend their stay in our homes or return. It was a global pandemic. We wanted them safe at home: our home.

Countless millennials and Gen Zers were taking work calls and attending class on Zoom from their childhood bedrooms. Was allowance far behind? Did they expect Mom to make them a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and do their laundry, too? How was this going to work? And how much of a detour would this be for them in establishing their own financially independent lives?

Everyone's job seemed to be at risk or already gone. Family businesses were in crisis. No one knew what the future would hold - or when the kids would move out again.

Time went on. Families, including my own, settled in. We temporarily moved out of the city to a house in upstate New York, where we expected to live for "15 days to stop the spread," as the authorities famously put it. It soon became clear that was an unrealistic timeline and we were in this for the long haul.

Our first night at the house, we sat down and had a meal together. Our 12-year-old noted that this had never happened before with all five of us. He was right. We were always on different schedules and never thought to do anything about it. Talk about feeling like a bad parent.

Then family meals kept happening. Like many families who no longer had kids and parents coming and going from school, activities, and work, we started to really enjoy the daily ritual. We kind of liked having "the kids," around even though they were in their twenties, at home. A routine developed. My husband, stepdaughter, and I were all working. My stepson finished out his sophomore year at college virtually from his bedroom. My 12-year-old completed sixth grade via Zoom. We were all at home all the time. We were less busy. There was a lot less logistical planning and more hanging out. We weren't running late to get somewhere. There was time. We started talking more.

Some of those talks were with our older kids about our own finances, because sometimes they were in the room when things came up. We had avoided sharing much when they were younger because we did not want them to worry - or to know where we'd messed up. They had never expressed much interest. Their college tuition bills were paid, and as far as they knew we never had any stumbles. They had no idea all the ups and downs we had over the years. It became apparent that we had sheltered them too much by not giving them a realistic view into adult financial realities.

On the upside, it became clear that with so much upheaval in the world, the older kids were more willing to listen. They were hearing stories about massive job losses. They were worried and asking questions. They were paying attention to our answers. It was starting to sink in: their financial outlook was closely tied to ours.

And since they were quarantined, they had nowhere to go.

We had a captive audience.

We also started to realize that this financial dialogue was a two-way street. We were all stakeholders. The conversation was about more than teaching them financial independence from us so we could have our financial freedom. We needed our kids to know more so they could be our backstop in case the unimaginable ever happened. What if we needed them to take care of us? Living through the coronavirus pandemic created a new urgency to make sure our kids were ready for the next who knows what.

We were not alone. I started to hear stories of kids leaving school to come home and help save their parents' businesses. Many stepped up to help out with bills. Family finances tend to become a lot more transparent in a crisis. I have been so impressed with all the young adults who rose to the challenge of giving back to their parents when they needed them most.

That is the silver lining in this unique chapter of our lives. The time families are spending together has created a season of our family evolution where we have had few distractions and many opportunities to better understand each other. Families have bonded in a common mission: to protect the family financial ecosystem. It's one thing to "get financially naked" with your partner; it's another to do it with your kids no matter their age.

The door has been opened to financial conversations happening more often and more organically. It's pretty much impossible to filter conversations when you are with everyone all the time. People started to let down their guard while we were quarantined. Information leaked out. And we started to see things we used to be too busy to notice.

For my family, because we are all in the same place, all the time, the kids literally see how intensely my husband and I work. They see...