Remember the ads about some things being priceless? “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.” No matter what card we use or how we feel about credit in general, it was an effective campaign. And there was something to the message—some things are priceless.

In closing out the second year of this blog – this being the 24th post—and closing out 2025, I want to go boldly past the dollars and cents, the credit scores, mortgage rates, budgets and investments, and take a look at dollars and sense, with sense referring to why personal financial “success” is important beyond the numbers in our bank account.

Financial wellness means something different to all of us, and that’s a good thing. I don’t teach personal finance with “get rich”, “make a zillion bucks”, or “retire wealthy” as blanket ideals. I try to help folks learn how to manage their finances within an unruly and complicated system so that they can pursue their goals, whether that means building wealth, changing generational perspectives about money, or finding a way to do meaningful work without worrying about how much it pays. Again, our system is messy and loaded with potholes, and even if your goals are non-financial, it takes financial savvy to get there.

And that’s all very personal. For me, financial wellness has categories and milestones, some with $$ but not all. The example I offer today is about walking my kid to school.

(I Didn’t Know) The Impact of Better Money Decisions

When I began to rewrite my personal finance story, I was thinking about my future self, but mostly if not wholly in the context of building up my bank account, probably for the purpose of what it could buy me later in life. Not bad. And the future me stuff was right on target. But what I didn’t know at the time (or didn’t think about) was that a day would come when a stronger financial foundation would be used to fund choices that ultimately have nothing to do with money and are in fact priceless.

This is an excerpt from an essay I wrote a few years ago, highlighting (and counting) the time I was able to spend walking my son to school.

Starting from when he was about one, he has tallied about 1,500 school days. That is about 3,000 trips counting both directions. Five of those years have been in Spain, making up about 1,750 of those 3,000 trips. Of those 1,750, I estimate that I have walked with him on more than 90% of those days. That comes to about 1,600 walks to or from school with my boy. I would apply an even higher ratio from when we lived in Portland, with me having walked or driven him nearly 95% of the time. Let’s call that another 1,200 legs. I’ve walked him to school or back nearly 2,800 times.

I wrote that a few years ago and can now add a few hundred more to that total even though now he usually walks by himself, not necessarily wanting his folks tagging along.

Yes, That’s Priceless! What Does It Have to Do with Money?

The seven years we lived in Spain and all of those walks to school and other places, were largely possible because I was a stay-at-home dad. Part of the reason I could do that was my wife’s career, but if I had not gotten my finances straightened out years earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to sell my home, pack up a few boxes, move across the ocean, and use savings and investments to fund my portion of the adventure. My wife had a good job in Spain, but she was not making a huge salary, we lived in a spartan apartment, owned a very old car, and kept things really simple financially.

Specifically, but not necessarily in order, this was the path that led to those priceless walks:

  • Get spending under control
  • Use a budget
  • Pay off credit card debt and car loans and never go back
  • Save for a down payment and buy a modest (to say the least) fixer-upper home
  • Rent a room in that home for several years, offsetting expenses and paying down mortgage
  • Begin retirement saving
  • Investing savings and proceeds from home sale to help with Spain expenses and expectation of little to no income for several years

Questions:

  • Could I have still spent the time taking those thousands of walks with my son if I hadn’t gotten my finances in order?
    NO, I would have been working four jobs in order to manage my debt, or I would have been doing a job I hated just for the money and/or I would not have been able to be a full-time dad for those years in Spain.
  • What exactly was the payoff of improved money habits?
    For me, it was the freedom to decide, the power of choice, and the value of time.
  • Was there also some luck involved in all of this?
    YES, but it’s something to see how my luck in these areas increased once I stopped carrying thousands of dollars of debt at 21% interest.

I may not have known exactly what I was working toward when I restarted my financial journey, but one thing I am absolutely certain of is that the path to financial wellness has given me choices and paid dividends—a return on investment —well beyond what any stock, bond, or bank account ever could.

Now, if I can only figure out a way to fix our political system. Let’s see, first…

Seville, Spain, sometime in 2018, English conversation class for college students. The topic: money.

“Credit score, credit bureaus… Oh boy, it’s tough to translate something that doesn’t exist in Spain. In fact, nearly all of Europe and most of the world do not use credit scores and don’t have centralized credit reporting agencies,” I told this class, as I had told many before, both in Spain and the Czech Republic.

“Can you explain it to us?” they asked.

“I’m not sure, but I will enjoy trying,” I replied, wondering if they had seen Fight Club. 

The American economic system is complicated (in casual conversations a stronger adjective is needed), and navigating our system when it comes to personal finance is complicated times ten. This is true in a vacuum and is especially obvious when compared to other countries. Yes, “land of opportunity” still rings true, and I say that after living abroad for 10 years and having taught students from more than a dozen countries. But the costs of that opportunity (sweet economics pun for anyone paying attention to such things) are the sometimes mile-high and spiky hoops we must jump through to get to, and maintain, those opportunities.

What makes it complicated? Hmm… Let me see if I can think of a few things: 

  • Credit scores 
  • The cost of higher education and student loans
  • Relatively easy access to credit
  • Predatory lending, check-cashing businesses, rent-to-own, etc.
  • Health care costs and access to affordable insurance
  • Social security
  • The national debt
  • The non-stop marketing machine that drives consumer society

Exhale. I realized I was holding my breath as I was typing. I further realized that I’d better stop there so as not to turn the whole blog into a list.

Oops, I can’t leave this one off the list: a lack of financial education to help face those challenges.

I can’t say these issues don’t exist in other countries. But I can say from personal experience and research that Nobody Does it Better than US, and “better” in this case is not always a good thing. Yet even with those challenges, America is still near the top of any list in terms of personal economic opportunity.

Has it always been so tough? In some ways it was certainly tougher on Americans before stronger labor laws, social security, banking regulations, and relative progress towards economic equality for all regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity. But some things have gotten worse, or are relatively new problems, such as easy access to credit and the consequences it brings. Statistics on credit card use and debt are easy to find and understand, but not easy to put into perspective. One thing is clear: in 1970, less than 50% of Americans had a credit card, and now it’s over 90%. Yes, convenience and technology are a part of that, and some of the side effects of credit card use are objectively good (safety compared to cash, cross-marketing benefits, etc.).

All Together Now

The connection to the complicated American financial system is that when it’s so easy to get credit, it’s so easy to misuse it, pile up debt, and make a real financial mess. Yet, as a nation, we allow our 18-year-olds into this system without the educational foundation (a shield) to understand and protect against the double-edged sword of compound interest. 

The generations responsible for allowing financial education to be largely ignored have an excuse; it wasn’t that long ago that credit cards were not easily available, people got jobs that they kept for 30 or 40 years which provided health care and pensions, a college degree was not in as high demand or as expensive (adjusted for inflation), there were no 72-month, $40,000 car loans, and our life expectancy was not a decade or more longer than our career expectancy.

It’s no one’s fault that it’s so tough out there. Our society and its unprecedented economic experiment have evolved, and there is plenty of good in that evolution. It will be everyone’s fault, however, if we don’t catch up and better prepare our new adults to step into the financial funhouse that we call American capitalism.

So, I ask myself again today, “What can I do to help one student, one class, one person, not only survive our system but learn to thrive in it?” Won’t you join me?