Neelam and Prab Sethi inspired their son Ramit, the author of "I Will Teach You to Be Rich," to negotiate.
Though only a third of 2012 has passed, Zac Bissonnette is already a strong contender for the cheekiest author of the year award.
What was the best thing your parents did for you that helped form your money habits?
Ron Lieber writes the Your Money column, which appears in The Times on Saturdays.
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His new book, “How to Be Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking Than Your Parents,” is filled with reasonable advice about debt and savings for young adults. But the 23-year-old author — this is his second book that the Portfolio imprint of Penguin has published — also compares financial services professionals to rapists and says that big, national banks are run by morons.
What really stopped me in my tracks, however, was the title. As out there as it is, it’s also a sly bit of genius.
Richer. Smarter. Better looking. This is a lot of what book-buying parents want for their young adult children. So rather than wondering whether Mr. Bissonnette’s own parents resented being called out in this fashion, I seized on a different question:
Who raised him, anyway? And how do you produce the kind of a twentysomething who knows so much about money at such a young age?
Mr. Bissonnette isn’t the only young adult who has written or advised his way into semi-guru status in recent years. Ramit Sethi, the author of “I Will Teach You to Be Rich,” has trodden similar ground, and financial advisers like Lauren Lyons Cole and Brittney Castro are also making a name for themselves dishing out plentiful helpings of financial common sense.
So I called them all — and their mothers and fathers, too — to ask for some parenting advice.
Turns out there were no compound-interest workbooks in any of their homes. Nor was there reading aloud from credit card terms or “The Millionaire Next Door.” But all of the offspring had a visceral memory of a habit or tactic they learned from their parents, which formed the foundation for the advice they give to other young adults today.
THE NOTEBOOK The Rev. Keith Oglesby, Ms. Lyons Cole’s father, paid his way through Georgia State University in part by running a by-the-pound business called the Coffee Bean Barn in Atlanta.
And he did it by tracking every cent he spent. “I was able to make a dollar last,” he said. “And when I sold the business, that money seeded some of the life my wife and I made together.”
When Lauren, his eldest child, went off to college, he handed her a small spiral notebook to track her own spending, not really thinking she would do it.
Ms. Lyons Cole, who is now 30, still has that notebook tucked in her apartment in East Harlem, along with all the others she filled out from the first day of college until she started tracking her expenses on Mint.com in 2007. The early entries from her freshman year at the University of Florida include $1 given to a homeless man and multiple entries for fast food at Chick-fil-A.
“This will make me sound like a money anorexic or something, but it was about having a sense of control, of knowing what was happening,” she said. “There was something about that routine that gave me a foundation at a time when everything was changing around me.”
Ms. Lyons Cole said she realized that financial planning was the right career choice after years of being the person at the party who meets new people and finds out their salary, rent and student loan payment in the first conversation. And part of the reason she has succeeded may be because her clients want to mimic the way she manages to afford to travel for at least a couple of months each year.
“I don’t believe in budgeting and don’t put limits on myself, but I do have awareness around my spending,” she said. “Like someone who eats healthily, it’s just a consciousness.”
THE FLOOR MATS A running theme throughout Ramit Sethi’s book, blog and courses is the idea that we should all negotiate like Indians do. When I asked his mother, Neelam Sethi, whether anyone might take offense to the idea, she seemed surprised.
“That’s the way we grew up,” she said. “You never purchased anything without bargaining, whether it was milk or eggs or fruit.”
It’s the big purchases, however, that had the most impact on the 29-year-old Mr. Sethi, a Stanford University graduate who often tells the story of watching his father, Prab, a mechanical engineer, negotiate for days in pursuit of a fair price on a Honda.
And why was the teenage Ramit dragged along for all the negotiating sessions? “When we were growing up in India, big purchases were very rare,” said Mrs. Sethi, a teacher who moved to the United States in 1982. “You had saved up for it and talked about it for years, so you would take the family along. Then, you’d stop at the temple before you went home to say blessings for being able to buy something.”
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