All right, so here's the thing about today's episode.

If you don't have kids, and even if you never want kids, I think today's episode will be

important to you. I hope so at least. Because here's what this is about.

I have two kids.

They are four and eight years old.

And when both of them were born, I'd say just a day or two before they were born, I wrote both of them when I wanted to teach them about money.

Now, that's a weird thing to do for an infant, for a newborn to be thinking about that, but A, I'm a financial writer.

And B, I think it was a great exercise to take a step back and ask and say if there were 10 pieces of financial

advice that were so important to you that you really wanted to make sure that you

instilled these lessons in your children, what would they be?

And also when you form this as a letter to your children, you make sure that those lessons

are very easy to understand, succinct, not confusing, no jargon, no formulas.

So I did this with both of my kids and I loved it. It was such a fun exercise to go through it.

And so my daughter will be five in a couple weeks so I was just thinking about this the

other day and I want to go through with you today the letter that I wrote her about

financial advice that I wanted to teach my children and maybe this will be

useful hopefully for your own children but again even if you don't have

any hopefully you will enjoy these as much as I did for myself when I wrote them.

All right, so let me just start going through some of these.

The first one was, it is easy to assume that wealth and poverty are caused by the choices that we make, but it is even easier

to underestimate the role of chance in life.

Everyone's life is a reflection of the experiences that they've had and the people who they've met,

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