The Money Model I Never Inherited

He's twenty-three, sitting at a kitchen table with a paycheque stub from his first real job. His first full-time position, benefits included, the kind of income that means something is supposed to happen next. He has a chequing account. He has, in the loosest possible sense, a plan. And he has absolutely no idea what any of it is supposed to look like.

A friend, someone he's known since high school, whose family had one of those dinner tables where money got discussed openly, mentions almost in passing that his parents started him with a TFSA at eighteen. He nods as though he already knows. He has never heard the word. He goes home that night and types "what is a TFSA" into a search engine at eleven-thirty at night, and a stranger on the internet explains a basic feature of Canadian financial life that, apparently, some people's parents explained to them years earlier at the dinner table.

That man is imagined. He has to be, because I don't tell other men's stories here, and because my own gap took a different shape. I went to school for financial services. By twenty-three I could have explained a TFSA to him without looking anything up. What I could not have told you, because nobody in my home ever talked about money, at dinner or anywhere else, was what a man actually does with one. I had the mechanics. The model is a separate inheritance, and it took me years to understand that missing it costs you in ways the first one can't cover.

Nobody Chose the Silence, and It Still Cost Us

I want to be careful here, because I've met men who've turned this story into a grievance, and I don't think that serves anyone well.

My parents loved me. They worked hard. They kept the lights on and the food in the fridge, and they made real sacrifices I didn't understand until I was old enough to see what those sacrifices actually cost them. We didn't talk about money at dinner because the household didn't have the language for it, and the households they grew up in didn't have it either. You can't give what you were never given.

But the effect is real regardless of the cause. A generation of men (particularly first-generation churchgoers, which is the category I landed in when I came to faith at seventeen) arrived at adulthood without a money model. Their parents were decent people. The church, which I'd argue has mostly stayed silent on this and pays a cost for that silence, gave them plenty else. Nobody connected the dots between what you believe and how you handle the money in your account.

The church gave me so much when I came to faith: a framework for relationships, some theology of work and vocation, an understanding of what marriage is for and what it costs, community, accountability, and a vision of the good life that reoriented almost everything.

The money section remained blank.

I'm convinced I'm not the only one.

What the Internet Taught Me (And Why That's a Strange Thing to Admit)

It is a little undignified to admit, but even with a financial-services education behind me, most of what I know about actually living personal finance came from strangers on the internet.

YouTube channels that worked through real numbers on screen, some excellent and some reckless, and at the time I could not always tell which was which. Instagram accounts that compressed one good money habit into thirty seconds. Books from a library hold list: Randy Alcorn's "The Treasure Principle" was the first time anyone connected biblical conviction and actual financial behaviour in a way that felt like it was meant for me. John Piper's writing on money through Desiring God, which unsettled me in the best possible way. CCEF resources on financial anxiety and shame.

Some of my picks were bad. I made investment decisions in my mid-twenties based on whatever YouTube had served me that week, and I have written elsewhere about what that cost me. An algorithm, it turns out, makes a poor financial advisor.

What I notice now, when money is what's underneath the presenting issue for a man, is that the embarrassment he carries about not knowing things is almost always proportional to how late in life he found them out. The man who first heard the word TFSA at thirty-four carries far more of it than the one who heard it at eighteen, and the information is identical. The gap between "I should have known this" and "nobody taught me this" is where most of the shame lives.

The gap is not your fault.

The Particular Ache of What You Weren't Handed

There is a passage in 2 Timothy that I come back to regularly. Paul is writing to Timothy (young, apparently struggling with something like timidity) and he grounds his encouragement in a specific piece of family history: "I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well."

Grandmother to mother to son: the faith came down the line, and Timothy received something.

When I read that passage, I feel two things at once. Gratitude that my wife came from a family where faith was handed down, where she received something I didn't. And an ache, because for a lot of men, me among them, the faith began with us. It had to begin somewhere, and if it began with you, you are the starting point for everyone who comes after.

The same is true with money.

Deuteronomy 6 contains one of the most beautiful passages in the Hebrew scriptures: God instructing Israel to teach his commandments diligently to their children, to speak of them when sitting in their houses and walking on the road, when lying down and rising up. The vision is of a faith and a way of life that flows naturally through a household, generation to generation. The conversation happening at the dinner table. The model being absorbed before you're old enough to know you're learning it.

Many of us did not grow up in that household. Our parents were decent people; the chain had been broken somewhere further back, and nobody repaired it before it reached us. We arrived at adulthood without the model, the way a man born to parents who never prayed arrives at faith without the vocabulary.

That ache is legitimate. Feel it, say it out loud if you need to, and then refuse to let it have the final word.

Where Nobody Taught You Leaves You Standing

A missing model says nothing about your capacity.

The men who build real financial health from nothing, with no inherited wealth and no father who explained compound interest over dinner, have something the men who were handed a model sometimes lack: they chose it, consciously and on purpose. They built the thing from scratch, which means they understand it in a way inherited habit never quite produces.

There is a grace in that.

Ephesians 2 is Paul's most compressed account of what grace actually is. You were dead, he writes, and God made you alive, and the timing is the whole point: he did it while you were still dead, before you had anything to show for yourself. That is the shape of the gospel. It moves toward the deficit at the exact moment you'd expect it to keep its distance.

Salvation and financial education are different things, and I mean to keep them different. The point is narrower. The God who meets men in their spiritual poverty does not abandon them in their practical ignorance, and the absence you're naming (the dinner table conversation that never happened, the model you never saw) sits well inside what he is able to redeem.

You are not in deficit to your father's silence.

The silence left you a gap, and a gap is something you can build across. You are a new creation with the capacity to build something your family line lacked, and the building is itself a kind of faithfulness. It is also work you are meant to do, because caring well about money is part of the discipleship Jesus asks of us.

What Actually Taught Me

I said strangers on the internet. Let me be specific, because naming real sources is more useful than gesturing at "resources," and because the specific mix of what actually helped me says something about the shape of the problem.

Randy Alcorn's "The Treasure Principle" was the first thing that gave me a theological framework for generosity with the guilt trip left out. It's short (I read it in an afternoon) and it reoriented how I think about ownership, which reoriented everything else. The core idea: we are managers of what God owns, and that includes what we earned. That one shift in framing did more for how I think about money than any budget spreadsheet.

John Piper's writing through Desiring God challenged me on the relationship between comfort and contentment in ways that were uncomfortable in the best sense. Piper insists on tracing your financial anxieties to their root, and the root usually sits somewhere deeper than the money.

CCEF has some of the most honest writing I've found on money as it tangles with anxiety and with marriage, and on the shame that sits under both. It is pastoral care shaped by counselling, for people whose financial situation has become a spiritual and relational crisis, and anyone after technical financial advice should look elsewhere. It is worth recommending to other Christian men.

On the practical side: a library card. Books I couldn't afford to buy but could borrow. Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money comes from outside the church and is still one of the most useful things I've read on how people actually behave with money versus how they think they behave. The CRA's own website for Canadian specifics: the rules here differ from the American rules, and a lot of the most popular financial content gets the Canadian context badly wrong. (The 2026 TFSA contribution limit is $7,000, for the record, and your total room depends on your year of birth. The American podcasters tend to get both wrong.)

The pattern, looking back, is that I assembled a framework from a lot of different sources, each contributing something the others didn't. The theology came from one direction. The mechanics came from my schooling. The application came from YouTube and Instagram and a library card. None of it arrived as a package. I built it piece by piece, over years, and made mistakes along the way.

That is a legitimate path. Slow and assembled is still built.

The Sacred Work of Becoming the One Who Breaks the Pattern

My daughter is a toddler. She has no idea what a TFSA is, and this seems appropriate. But she will, eventually. And when she does, I intend to be the one who explains it. There are people who could explain it better. I have decided that the silence that surrounded me growing up would not surround her.

For some men reading this, the most significant financial act of the next decade will be deciding to be the person who breaks the pattern. Opening an RRSP and paying down a line of credit both matter, and this one will outlast them. The father who sits down with his daughter at sixteen and explains what a TFSA is and why compound growth inside one will matter when she's forty. The man whose kids grow up in a household where money gets talked about as a stewardship question, in a normal voice, at a normal table.

Proverbs 22:6 says to train up a child in the way he should go. I read that and feel something complicated, because many of us were not trained, and the proverb makes clear that something was lost in that. But I also read it as a commission: you know now what you didn't know then. The training can begin with your children even if it didn't begin with you.

This is a kind of spiritual recapitulation: receiving in adulthood what you didn't receive in childhood, so that what you hand on to those who come after you is something you had to build. There is a real argument that what you build yourself is the greater inheritance of the two.

Write Down What You Actually Believe About Money

Write down what you believe about money. The honest version, the one you can read off how you behave with it, what you feel when you think about it, and what you tell yourself when you spend or save or avoid opening the banking app for three days running.

Then sort what you wrote into three columns: what did I inherit from my culture (advertising, the men around me, what my household modelled), what did I inherit from Scripture (what I've read or been taught or come to believe from my own time in the text), and what is a genuine gap: something I don't know or haven't figured out yet.

Most men find the first column longest. Let that be information about where you started; nobody is grading it.

You cannot fill a gap you haven't found. And a belief absorbed from culture without examination will run your financial life without ever being traced, unless you stop and look. If you believe, at some unexamined level, that your worth is determined by your net worth (and most of us have absorbed some version of this from the air), then every financial decision you make will be distorted by that belief. You'll avoid the numbers because the numbers feel like a verdict. You'll spend to manage your feelings about your income. You'll find generosity genuinely threatening, because giving feels like losing ground in a game you're already behind in.

Write down what you actually believe, find the gaps, and then start filling them, one book or one honest conversation at a time.

Knowing where you are is enough to start with. The whole model comes later, piece by piece, the way mine did.

The Starting Line Looks Like This

I think about that imagined man at his kitchen table sometimes. The paycheque stub. The friend who mentioned a TFSA in passing. The search engine at eleven-thirty at night. I made him up. The gap he stands in is real, and I stood in my own version of it.

Bitterness about what wasn't handed to me would be inaccurate, and it would be useless. My parents gave me what they had, and the gap belongs to a longer story than either of us. What I carry is closer to gratitude, for the teachers who stepped in wherever I found them and for the grace that met me in the gap. It is a strange and genuinely humbling thing that a man can learn something foundational at any age, from any source, and build something real from it.

If you have no inherited money model, you are standing at your own starting line, level with any man who was handed one, and that line is the beginning of something you get to build.

The inheritance you weren't given is the one you get to build.

That work is worth something. Start it.

If shame is part of what sits underneath your relationship with money, this is worth reading. And if you're working out where your heart is actually anchored in all of this, this is the page that matters most.