Where I grew up, nobody talked about money. Not around the dinner table, not in classrooms, not even when it was running out. You worked, you earned, you spent, and you started over. That was the whole education.
So when I started making my own money — real money, more than anyone in my family had ever held — I thought I had arrived. I hadn't. I had no language for what I was holding. I made it, and then I watched it leave. Every bit of it. Not because I was careless. Because nobody had ever shown me what money actually is, or how quietly it slips away when you don't understand it.
What stayed with me wasn't the loss. It was the shame of realizing the lesson had been available my whole life, and no one had ever handed it to me. I replayed every decision for months, asking how someone could work so hard for something and understand so little about it.
And then one evening I caught myself watching a child — bright, curious, asking questions nobody around her was answering — and something in me broke open. She was going to grow up and inherit the same silence I had. Unless somebody chose to break it.
We send our children to school so they can earn money one day, but we never teach them what to do with it when they get it. We hand them the race without ever showing them the track. That stopped making sense to me.
So I decided to fix it. Not when they're 25 and already repeating my mistakes with their own paychecks and their own regrets. Now. While they're 8, 10, 14. While the habits are still soft enough to shape.
That's how Smart Money Series was born. Lili's stories teach the youngest ones through adventure — a little girl and her magical coin Goldie, learning about saving, spending, and giving in ways that feel like play. The simulations let teenagers actually run businesses and feel the weight of real decisions before those decisions cost them anything real. And the books go deeper — identity, entrepreneurship, investing, legacy.
This isn't a tech company pretending to care about your children. This is someone who learned these lessons too late, and who decided that no child he could reach should ever have to.
If you're reading this, your child already has something I didn't — someone who's paying attention. Start them now. The compound effect works on knowledge too. And on love.