A Letter to the Man Whose Father Never Taught Him About Money

I want to write to you about the conversation your father never had with you.

Not because that makes him a bad man. Probably it doesn't. Most of the men I know whose fathers never sat them down to talk about money had fathers who worked hard, kept the lights on, and quietly did their best.

The silence wasn't cruelty. It was inheritance. Your father didn't say anything because nobody had ever said anything to him.

But the silence has a cost. I think you know that, or you wouldn't still be reading.

You are an adult now. Probably with an income, probably with some kind of bank account, probably aware that there are decisions you are supposed to be making and you are not sure which ones, or how to make them, or what the consequences would be if you got them wrong. You may have a wife. You may have a daughter. You may be alone in a one-bedroom apartment trying to figure out what to do with the paycheque that landed on Friday.

You feel a step behind the men around you. The ones who seem to know what a TFSA is without looking it up. The ones who talk casually about contribution room and capital gains and renewing a mortgage like they are discussing the weather. You nod when those conversations happen. You file away the words. You go home and type them into your phone at eleven at night and feel a quiet shame at how late this all feels.

I want to say a few things to you about that, because I have been in something like that room myself, and because I sit with men in something like it now, and because I don't think anyone has said the right thing to you yet.

The first thing I want to say is that the gap is real, and the gap is not your fault.

That sentence needs to land in both directions. Many of the men I sit with do one or the other. They minimize the gap. It's fine, I'll figure it out, plenty of guys don't know this stuff. Or they personalize it. I should have figured this out by now, I'm thirty-two, what is wrong with me.

Neither response is honest. The gap is real, which means it has a shape and a weight and it will not close on its own. And the gap is not your fault, which means you are not deficient, and you are not behind some version of yourself you were supposed to be by now.

The chain broke somewhere. Maybe with your father. Maybe with his father. Maybe further back than anyone alive remembers. The conversation that was supposed to happen at a kitchen table, the one where a man older than you opens a piece of paper and walks you through what the numbers mean, didn't happen, because the man who would have done it didn't know either, or didn't think to do it, or didn't have the language.

That is not your sin. It is not even his sin, necessarily. It is a thing that happened to you, the way a lot of formative absences happen. By default. By silence. By nobody intending it.

I want to be specific about what got missed, because vague acknowledgement isn't useful and I don't want to leave you with a feeling instead of a picture.

Some of you don't know how to read a paycheque stub. Not really. You see the gross number, you see the net number, and you trust that the gap is taxes and not much more. You don't know what CPP and EI are taking, you don't know whether your employer is matching anything you should be claiming, and you don't know whether the deductions are correct.

Some of you don't know what a TFSA is for. A lot of you opened one when the bank suggested it, and it has $400 sitting in a high-interest savings account inside it earning almost nothing, because nobody told you a TFSA is a container, not a product, and that you can hold investments inside it. The 2026 contribution limit is $7,000, the room accumulates from the year you turned eighteen, and most men who have never seriously used theirs have tens of thousands sitting unclaimed.

Some of you don't know what an RRSP actually does. You know it's a retirement thing, and you may have a vague sense that the deduction is good for taxes. You probably don't know what your contribution room is, or that the CRA tracks it for you and tells you on your Notice of Assessment every year. You probably don't know how the Home Buyers' Plan or the FHSA changes the math for a first home.

Some of you don't know whether to be afraid of debt or not. You've heard "Romans 13 says owe no one anything." You've also heard people talk about a mortgage like it's normal. You don't know how to reconcile those, so you mostly avoid thinking about it and hope the right answer becomes obvious later.

Some of you don't know what tithing is supposed to look like in practice. You believe in giving. You don't know whether it is ten percent of gross or net, whether RRSP withdrawals count, whether you should give from a bonus, whether the church needs a regular automatic transfer or whether you should be moved by spontaneity. You suspect there is a right answer and you suspect you have been guessing.

These are not exotic gaps. These are the basic vocabulary of an adult Canadian financial life, and a lot of the men I love did not get them growing up.

The shame about not knowing them is almost always proportional to how late in life you found out you didn't know them. A nineteen-year-old who doesn't know what a TFSA is feels nothing. A thirty-four-year-old who doesn't carries a weight he can't always name.

You are allowed to name it. And then you are allowed to set it down.

I want to tell you the thing that I think is the central move of this letter, because the rest of it follows from it.

You do not need a father, in this specific area. You need an older brother.

I mean that in the New Testament sense. There are men in front of you who have walked some of this road and who would, if you asked, walk part of it with you. They exist. They are usually within reach. They are very often willing, and very often not asked.

The men I have watched build real financial health from no inherited model almost always had one thing in common. At some point, they asked an older man, a Christian, ideally, an honest one, definitely, to walk them through something. A budget. A mortgage decision. What to do with their first RRSP contribution. A retirement plan that felt overwhelming. The conversation wasn't formal. There was no engagement letter. They just sat down for coffee and the older man taught them something, and the younger man stopped trying to figure it out alone.

The men who did not find that man tended to stay stuck. Not because they weren't smart enough. Because finance done in isolation, by a man who has internalized that he is supposed to know this already, becomes a kind of slow drowning. There is too much to learn alone. There is too much shame attached to admitting you don't know. The path forward is almost always relational before it is technical.

If I were sitting across from you, I would tell you this. There is an older Christian man in your life right now, at your church, in your extended family, in your workplace, in your small group, who knows more about money than you do and would be flattered to be asked. He won't be the perfect mentor. He won't have all the answers. But he will know one or two things you don't, and he will give them to you for free, and you will leave the coffee shop carrying slightly less of the weight than you walked in with.

Email him this week. Text him this week. It costs you almost nothing.

I want to bring something theological in here, because I don't want to leave it implicit.

Psalm 68:5 calls God "a father of the fatherless." That verse has been on a lot of wall plaques over the years, mostly applied to children who lost a parent. But the verse is not narrow. It speaks to every absence of fathering. The man who was there but never said anything. The man who said the wrong things. The man who was physically present but emotionally absent. The man who modelled fear or shame or grasping around money and left his son with that as his only inheritance.

The character of God does not leave the gap unattended. Where the human father was silent, God is present, and the things you didn't learn at a kitchen table you are now permitted to learn, slowly, from him and from the men he has put around you.

I am not going to romanticize this. The learning is still real work. God is not going to deposit financial literacy directly into your mind. But he has not been absent from your story in this area, and he is not absent from it now, and the embarrassment you carry about being behind is a thing he is more than willing to redeem if you will hand it over.

I want to say something to those of you who are already fathers.

You may be reading this with a daughter or a son in the next room. You may be feeling, sharply, that you do not want to repeat what was repeated to you. That instinct is right. It is also the kind of instinct that can curdle into anxiety if you don't put a frame around it.

You don't have to teach your child everything you didn't learn. You don't have to be the financial mentor your father wasn't.

You just have to be the man who breaks the pattern.

What that looks like, concretely, is this. At some point your child will get her first paycheque, or his. You will sit down with her at the kitchen table, the one your father never sat at with you, and you will walk her through what it means. The gross. The net. The deductions. What a TFSA is. Why you are going to help her open one this month. Why ten percent goes to giving before anything else. Why the rest is hers, but here is what spending looks like when it builds a life instead of consuming one.

You will not do it perfectly. You don't need to. You just need to be there in the chair. The chair itself is most of the work. The presence is most of the work.

You have time to prepare for that conversation. The years between now and then are years you can use to learn what you need to learn, so that when the conversation comes you don't have to fake it. Start now and you will be ready. Start now and your child will receive what you did not. That is not a small thing. That is a generational shift, and you are the hinge.

Let me tell you what to do this week, because I would rather you do one specific thing than nod at a whole letter and change nothing.

Pick one older Christian man you trust. Email him. The email should say something like this:

"I never had a clear model for how to think about money growing up, and I would like to learn. Would you let me buy you a coffee and ask you some questions? It might take an hour."

That's it. That's the message. The men you send that message to will almost always say yes, because being asked is one of the great honours of a man's later life, and almost no one ever asks.

When you sit down, bring a notebook. Bring two or three actual questions about a budget, an account, a decision you are trying to make, and listen more than you talk. Take notes. Go home and write down what you learned. Do the same thing again, with the same man or a different one, three months from now.

That is how you build a model. Not by reading enough articles. Not by watching enough videos. By assembling, slowly, across enough honest conversations, a working framework for a Christian man's financial life. The framework will not arrive intact. It will come in fragments, and you will fit them together over years, and one day you will look up and realize that you know things you did not know five years ago, and that you have become someone who can teach.

I will close by saying what I most want you to hear.

You are not behind. You are at the beginning of a chain. The men in front of you who seem to have it together started where you are starting, more of them than will admit. The thing they had was not a father with all the answers. It was the courage, eventually, to ask.

You have that courage. I am sure of it. Otherwise you would not still be reading.

The conversation your father did not have with you is not the only conversation that gets to define you. The one you have this week, with an older man, over a coffee, about a question you have been ashamed of for too long, is the start of something different.

Begin there.

If you want to read more about the experience of building a financial framework with no inherited model, this is the companion piece.