You Don't Need a Finance Degree to Raise Money-Smart Kids
For most of my early 20s, I avoided looking at my bank account balance.
Not because I was irresponsible, exactly. I paid my bills. I showed up to work. I even sent a small percentage of my income to a retirement account. But still, I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing with my money. If I swiped my debit card and it went through, I figured things were fine. I felt like I should have some kind of plan, but I didn't know where to start.
After I got married and combined finances with my husband, it quickly became clear we needed to figure things out. He brought a hefty amount of medical school loans to our marriage, and though I’d paid for my master's degree through scholarships and cash, I still had some loans from my undergraduate degree. Even with his residency salary and my income as a teacher, we couldn't make much progress on paying off the loans. So interest accrued. So much interest, so quickly.
It was time to dig deeper. I started looking–looking at the balance, at the statements, and at the numbers I'd been avoiding for years. And something surprising happened: the more I looked, the less scary it got. It was just math.
Over the next few years, I learned how to build a budget that actually worked, how to track our expenses without feeling like we were constantly punishing ourselves, and how to think about money as a tool rather than a source of anxiety. The biggest takeaway: financial literacy can be learned. I am not a financial planner. I'm a middle school teacher, and not even a math teacher. I figured this out because I had to.
Here's why that matters for you.
Most of us weren't taught this
I have two young kids now, and I want to make sure they have the money skills my husband and I did not.
Nearly two in three American adults say they never learned about personal finance in school. And according to a 2026 Intuit survey, 32% of parents question their own ability to teach their children about finances.
This means that the majority of parents trying to raise money-smart kids are working from a foundation they had to build themselves. We’re doing this while holding down a job, managing a household, and raising kids.
Sometimes, I find myself looking around and thinking that everyone else must know what they’re doing, but the research shows that’s not the case. If you've ever thought, “I don't know enough to teach my kids about money,” you're not alone. You're actually in pretty good company.
Not knowing everything is not the same as not knowing enough
As a teacher, my philosophy is "Know your content. Love your kids." But here's what I've learned from more than a decade of working with middle schoolers: you don't necessarily have to know every single thing about a subject to teach it.
I've taught English and writing, and now I supervise a learning support class. Am I an expert in teaching every single grammatical concept? Not really. But I know when and how to ask for help to figure it out.
As a teacher, I need to know where we’re going and what I’m teaching right now. I need to be willing to learn alongside my students and be honest about what I don't know yet. Frankly, the kids love it when I’m learning with them.
Money works the same way.
You don't need to understand index funds to explain to your seven-year-old why we can't buy everything we want at the store. You don't need a budget spreadsheet to tell your ten-year-old that saving for something takes time and patience. You don't need a finance degree to model what it looks like to make thoughtful choices with money.
What you need is to start and keep going.
You can do it, too
I'm a mom who figured out personal finance the hard way. I avoided my bank account for longer than I'd like to admit, learned to budget out of necessity, and now talk to my own kids about money in the same careful, intentional way I talk to my students about the things that matter.
You can do this too. Half the stuff you’re already doing as a parent is harder than this. You’re managing tantrums, teaching social skills, and supporting their learning. Teaching money skills, even if you’re not a math expert, is totally doable.
If you're not sure where to start, I made something for exactly this moment. My free Quick Scripts for Talking to Kids About Money gives you practical language for real conversations like what to say when your child asks why you can't buy something, how to explain the difference between wants and needs, and how to talk about saving in a way that actually makes sense to a kid.
No finance degree required.
Alaina Trivax is a certified teacher, financial writer, and founder of Let's Make it Grow — a resource for parents who want to raise financially confident kids. Her book, Follow the Money, publishes August 4, 2026 with Penguin Random House.
