In the final episode of a three‑part series, host Brian Gubernick walks listeners through lessons 14‑17 of his "17 Essential Financial Lessons for Your Children" framework. He defines a loan, explains why loans can be risky, and suggests showing kids real loan statements to illustrate principal versus interest. He then demystifies credit scores, likening them to a report card, shares a personal story of a credit‑score crash during the housing market collapse, and recommends parents download and review a credit report with their children. Lesson 16 introduces "house hacking" – buying a multi‑unit property and using rental income to pay down the mortgage – with practical tips like pointing out duplexes on a drive and comparing room‑rental costs to chores. The final lesson stresses lifelong financial learning: reading books, listening to podcasts, finding mentors, and modeling money conversations at the dinner table. For each lesson, Gubernick provides concrete action items for parents (show statements, print credit reports, discuss rent equivalents, pay kids to read financial books). He wraps up by urging listeners to teach as many of the 17 lessons as possible, emphasizing the responsibility of adults to give the next generation a head‑start in financial literacy.
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Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today is the final part of a 3-part series on the 17 financial lessons to teach your kids. The 17 Essential Financial Lessons for Your Children. Remember, if you do not have kids, you likely still have some important young people in your world. We've covered 13 lessons so far in 2 previous parts. Go back a couple episodes here at No Days Off and listen to part 1 and part 2. But today, we're gonna cover lessons 14 through 17 and wrap up this series. So let's get right into it. Lesson number 14 of the 17 financial lessons to teach your kids. Lesson number 14 is: What is a loan, and when are loans a bad idea? So if you want to explain this to the kid, if you— I would use an example like, if you forget your lunch money and you ask your friend to borrow $5, you effectively have a loan that you must now pay back. So, a loan is anybody or anything that you owe, where you owe money. It's bad to loan money when you aren't sure how or when it will be repaid, or it's bad to take a loan when you don't know how or when you're gonna be able to repay it. So, teach what a loan actually is and when loans are a bad idea. Now, how do you go about maybe teaching this lesson? If you or your child or the child in your life that you're teaching about a loan, if you borrow something from a friend or a family member, give it back. So, something's been loaned to you, you have to return it. So, it's pretty easy to teach this lesson. An action item for you as the parent or older person in this child's world is to show your kid or the kid your home loan or your car loan you know, the statement, and show them how much of the payment is towards principal, so paying down that loan, but also how much of that payment is towards interest. This is another lesson kind of to teach along with respect to a loan is what in fact is interest. So show them a statement on your home loan or your car loan or whatever it may be where you can show principal being paid down, but explain there is a cost to borrowing known as interest. And show them how much is actually being paid in interest. Lesson number 14, what's a loan? Lesson number 15 of the 17, what is a credit score and how does it work? So a credit score is a report card, right, that tells you if you're doing a good job of paying back your debt, paying back the loans that we just covered in lesson number 14. How do you go about teaching this lesson? Tell a story. About a time when someone in your world couldn't get a house or couldn't get a car because their credit, their credit score was not where it needed to be. Explain, because I'm sure, you know, whether or not you're in real estate sales, you likely know somebody or maybe even have experienced it yourself firsthand. I actually have. When the real estate market crashed, my credit score crashed along with it. And I had to operate in 100% cash for a significant period of time, I've told my kids that story and explained due to the score that I had on my credit, my credit score, I couldn't go get a traditional loan and I had to build my credit back up. An action item for you, go to annualcreditreport.com and download your credit report, print out that credit report, and show them what's on it. Show them how it's tracking, the number of payments, the consistency of the payments. You might have difficulty showing how the score is computed, but you can probably show them what's gone really well, maybe where there's opportunity for improvement. So teach about the credit score and how it works, lesson number 15. Lesson 16, learn how to house hack your first home. When you buy your first home, maybe teach them to buy a duplex or a triplex or a house where they could rent out a part of it to someone else. So rent it to someone else and have that person pay that rent, which then gets taken to pay down the principal and pay the interest on the loan that they secured to buy the property. How do you teach this lesson? Talk about a time when you live with a roommate. Or point out a duplex when you're driving down the road and say, hey, there's a duplex. You could see there's 2 units there. What you would do is move into that one and then have someone move into the other. And every time that someone pays their rent, you are taking those dollars and putting it towards your loan. So teach the lesson of house hacking. I wish somebody would have taught me this, uh, early in my career. So I could have better understood the concept and became more purposeful around its use. Your action item, tell them how much money it costs to rent a room in a house like yours. I like, take the house you're living in right now. You know, for me, I've got, you know, 2 daughters, 13 and 11. They each have their own rooms. Maybe I could show them, hey, here's what it would cost to rent a room in a house like ours. And then if the kid, if your kid asks to be paid for, say, mowing your grass or doing yard work or whatever it may be, remind them how much rent is. I'm only kind of joking. I don't know if you're paying for chores or things like that, but, you know, teach them that if they were in fact paying rent, and I'm sure most of us probably are not charging the kids rent, but show them how that would work. Show them the concept and teach them how they can apply it in their world down the road. Lesson 17, the final lesson of our 17 financial lessons, to teach our kids. Lesson number 17, keep learning about money. Always be a student about money. Listen to books and podcasts, find mentors, hang out with the right people. As a parent, you've gotta model or lead by example. As a parent, you gotta discuss money at the dinner table and include kids in the decisions. I think that that is arguably one of the best things we could all be doing. Sure, I'm sure you wanna, you know, uh, have the right conversation and maybe you don't want to give them everything. But I think one of the most powerful things we can be doing to keeping the kids learning about money is actually discussing money at the dinner table, which call it what it is, previous generations did not oftentimes do that. Well, I think we're different now and we can have these conversations. Now, how do you go about teaching this lesson? Talk about what classes you took and the books you read. And how it helps you learn more about money. Tell them, you know, what you're taking today and what you're reading today and what you're aiming to learn. Just make the, the desire to learn more about money, the desire to always be a student, make it, make it very, very easy for them to see you in action, right? Show them that you're doing it and they could too. Your action item: maybe pay them to read some business or financial books. And then have them tell you after each chapter what they learned. There are so many financial books. Some of them may be a little bit too complex, but some of them in fact are not. And so, I would consider paying your kids to read different business and financial books and let them tell you about it. So, we've gone through 17 financial lessons. I'm gonna put together a summary of these 17 and we will make sure it's on our No Days Off site. I will probably reference it in the show notes. It's in this particular episode and other episodes. We'll edit those show notes so you have it. But these 17 lessons, I would love, love, love, love for you to teach all 17. But the reality is, if you don't get through all 17, but you pick 2 or 3 or 4 that are most important to you, and you start teaching or having conversations around financials, with your kids at a different level than you used to, I would consider this a win. I would be very, very happy with that outcome. I firmly believe that it is our responsibility as, as the older people, as the parents, as the influencers and the teachers, to make certain that we start teaching about money. Because again, and I said it in our very first episode of the 3-part series, many of us, you know, we had maybe great parents, great upbringing, but Money was not a conversation. And as a result, we had to— maybe we started a little late, maybe we didn't develop as quickly with respect to our financial knowledge as we wish we could have, and we had to make up for that. Let's try to get our kids off on the right foot. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity. To get better. So let's get after it.
