There is a moment, quiet and unforgiving, when you realise that the bedtime story you are reading is happening in a house that is either gaining value or leaking heat, and your child notices only the draft. Children do not weigh the moral elegance of minimalism against the vulgarity of excess; they register whether the shoes on their feet rub blisters, whether the fridge hums with enough food for a friend to stay for dinner, whether the school trip permission slip can be signed without a flinch. They will never love you more because the car is German or the watch ticks Swiss, but they will breathe easier when the car starts in January and the dentist can be paid tomorrow. Wealth does not purchase affection, yet poverty quietly withdraws it, sip by sip, as worry crowds out the space where laughter should sit.When you are twenty-five the horizon feels endless and the body invincible, so it is tempting to treat money as a vulgar afterthought, the sad preoccupation of people who never learnt to savour sunsets. The sunsets will still be there at forty, but they look different when you are calculating whether the credit-card balance can survive an emergency room visit. The hours you trade for dollars today are not being stolen from some hypothetical future self; they are being deposited into an account that will later buy your daughter the confidence to turn down the wrong job, your son the liberty to study something impractical that he loves, your partner the luxury of sleeping through one night without inventorying the bank balance in dreams. Every extra shift, every skill hoarded, every negotiation endured is a brick in the fortress you will eventually invite them to live inside.
This is not a manifesto for greed. It is a plea for urgency. The market pays premiums to the young because it assumes you can survive on caffeine and optimism, and it discounts the old because cartilage and courage both wear thin. While your back still tolerates double shifts, while your mind still absorbs code or case law or the machinery of finance, convert stamina into securities. Let compound interest perform its quiet alchemy while toddlers turn into teenagers; let the index fund you barely noticed in your thirties cover the tuition that arrives in your fifties. The alternative is to arrive at the moment when your child needs a safety net and offer only a lecture about the spiritual benefits of frugality. They will not remember the sermon; they will remember the concrete moment when they had to decline the internship of their dreams because the stipend would not cover rent.
Regret, in matters of money, arrives as a silent eviction. It is the day you realise that the house you thought was modest is actually unaffordable, that the retirement you postponed to pay for music lessons now threatens to become your child’s future spare room. Children do not ask for opulence, but they deserve insulation from the daily static of precarity. They deserve to imagine their futures in colours brighter than anxiety. Give them that palette. Work brutally hard while your knees still forgive you, negotiate ruthlessly while you still believe you are indispensable, save compulsively while the world still assumes you are too young to know better. Later, when they are launching their own adult lives, they will not remember the toys you withheld or the vacations you postponed; they will remember the absence of panic in your voice when they called to say they had lost the internship, the grant, the first love. That calm has a price, and the invoice arrives earlier than you think. Pay it while the currency is still your own boundless energy. The dividends will not be measured in yachts but in the unspoken certainty in your child’s eyes that the ground beneath the family will not suddenly give way.