One evening in 1988, a 16-year-old was trying to leave the house. His parents were hosting a dinner party, and leaving by the front door — with its clear sight lines into the dining room — turned out to be a regrettable error. ‘Michael Collins,’ his dad called out, using both names as he always did, ‘tell us something you’ve learned in school.’ Parents summoning their children to perform like seals was common in the 1980s, he writes. They were officers and we were infantry. He was grateful no singing was required.
So he scanned the brain files and produced this: it wasn’t the Ancient Greeks or Romans who came up with the concept of zero. It was the Mayans. His father beamed — he loved that his son was studying classics at his Jesuit high school. Another satisfied customer, the boy thought, heading for the driveway. A few weeks later his dad watched ‘Stand and Deliver,’ the movie about the high-school math teacher Jaime Escalante, recognized precisely where the dinner-party bon mot had come from, and gave him grief for his cheaply bought erudition.
Thirty-seven years later, the invoice arrives
Last August a tree fell across his driveway and he was out assessing the damage when Jack, his 15-year-old, sidled up and spoke with uncharacteristic depth. ‘A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.’ His heart swelled with pride at the young C.S. Lewis he was clearly raising. The next day he googled the beautiful observation. Jack had taken it straight from the titular character of The Lord of the Rings.
That is a wonderful essay and it is also, if you squint slightly, a perfect description of how financial beliefs travel through a family. Almost nobody arrives at their money opinions through original research. They are handed down at kitchen tables and repeated with total confidence by people who genuinely believe they thought of them, and who heard them from someone who also believed that.
The inherited file
You know the contents. Never carry a mortgage into retirement. Real estate always goes up. Renting is throwing money away. Take Social Security as early as you can get it. Never touch the principal. Whole life is a scam — or whole life is the only thing that ever worked, depending on which relative you drew. The market is rigged. Put it all in the index fund and don’t look. Every one of those is repeated with the certainty of scripture, and every one of them is true for some households and expensively wrong for others.
And here is the thing that makes it hard rather than funny: the borrowed line is frequently good. Jack’s tree observation is genuinely wise, and Tolkien was a better writer than a 15-year-old. The Mayan zero fact is true. What did not get passed down alongside the line was the judgment about when it applies — and that is the part that decides outcomes. ‘Never carry debt in retirement’ is excellent counsel for a household with an uncertain income and a variable-rate loan, and it is a mistake for someone with a fixed 3% mortgage who liquidates a portfolio to retire it.
So the useful exercise, and it takes about ten minutes on a legal pad, is to write down the three money rules you are most certain about and then ask a slightly rude question about each one: where did I get this? If the honest answer is that a parent said it, or a colleague did, or you have simply always known it — that is not a reason to abandon it. It is a reason to check whether it was ever true for your particular numbers, or only for someone else’s.
Summer is nearly over and the question you have been carrying since June is still there. You do not wait for the tree to come down to find out which way it was leaning. Bring the statement and the three rules, and we can find out which are Tolkien and which are yours — there is no shame in either, only in not knowing which is which.