Scott Clair

I was born in Des Moines before leaving for college with stops in Iowa City, IA, Houston, TX, Boca Raton, FL, New Haven, CT. Then like many after my wife and I had our first child my son Quinn and the lure of moving home was strong and we took the plunge. Two years later my daughter was born and they are my rock.

Numbers were always something that came naturally to me and I pride myself on being able to explain what those numbers mean to audiences that may not be as comfortable with math. I have always said if I can’t explain something that others can understand that is a reflection on me not them.

So, when it came times to raise our kids the importance of teaching some basic life lessons around money was at the top of our list. After talking with other parents about some of the things they had tried we focused on a couple grounding principles in particular natural consequences, transparency, and the importance of how we spend our time and money.

Towards that end there have been a number of instances where we have tried to instill certain lessons in our kids. A few quick examples –    

1.) As soon as they started getting allowance we had a bank that split everything up into 3 parts – spend, share, and save. Spend they could do with what they wanted. Share they would pick the charity of their choice every few months and donate what they had accumulated. Save went into their bank account to use after they turned 18.     

2.) The doubling penny – there is a Math exercise that says if I paid you 1 penny on your first day of work and doubled it every day for 30 days and that was your full salary would you accept it. Most people think of course not on the surface – but when I had my kids work out the results they found a very different answer. This was how we introduced the concept of compound interest.      

3.) When the topic of cell phones came up – not surprisingly the kids wanted them before we thought we should have them. So we said if you can come up with the money to pay for the phone and you agree to use it responsibly you can have it. So that motivated them to find various odd jobs etc that they could do to work towards what they wanted and they valued it more because they did.

4.) One example of natural consequences when my son was a teenager he and some of his friends were messing around in the basement and long story short there was eventually a hole in the wall. So we sat the boys down talked about what had happened and let them come to an agreement on how much each of the boys were responsible for what happened then followed up with the parents to let them know the repair costs and that we were having Quinn personally pay for his portion but what they did was of course up to them.     

5.) One element regarding transparency, about the time both of our children were freshmen in high school we let them know what our plans were in terms of exactly what each of them would get from us towards college so that they could plan accordingly. By being up front and honest they understood what was or wasn’t possible and that had a direct impact on how they chose their college of choice because there were no surprises.  

From as far back as I can remember I always told myself when I grow up that I wanted to be a good father. Hopefully, looking back I can feel confident that I met that life goal as that was the only one that really mattered.