Out of the mouths of babes….

The other day, I was talking to my nephew, who had just finished his first year of college. We were just talking about his experiences so far, whether he liked being in school, his friends, and his future.

As we talked about his future plans, all of a sudden he starts talking about investing and opening up a 401k account. This caught me by surprise because I was just thinking about all these things myself, especially in light of my previous post regarding retirement.

Woah, slow down, buddy.

This kid is only nineteen years old and he’s already thinking about his life when he hits his 50s?!

It completely blew my mind. How the hell did this child start thinking long term about the future when he was this young?!

I didn’t even start thinking about this stuff until my thirties.

He said he’d been thinking about all this because ultimately he wanted to become an entrepreneur. The one thing he clearly learned about himself while he was in college was that he wanted to become a business owner. (The fact that he admitted that he “worked” on himself during his second semester was incredible.) He said he wanted to become unconventional and not have to work for an employer forever. He wanted to become rich by starting to invest. All these things he learned from YouTube.

It made me so proud of him because this is exactly the way I imagined my life and the way I want to think about my future. And by osmosis, or whatever miracle, my nephew has decided that this is the dream for him, too.

I love the fact that we were both thinking about financial independence. It made me so excited that I have someone else to talk to about all these things. He seemed really keen to learn more. I’ve never seen anyone this young so motivated and so excited to talk about personal finance–especially in my family. I am pretty much the only one interested in anything remotely money-related. I never knew my nephew was interested in all these things, too.

Just talking to him about personal development, financial independence, owning a business, passive income, and investing made me feel really inspired about my own life. It motivates me to work harder and to earn more money. It’s given me the fire I need to succeed.

Deep down, I think that If I can succeed in becoming financially independent, I would be able to help out my nephew. My success can help another person succeed. If I am able to earn enough, I could provide the seed money to help my nephew start a business. How cool would that be? If I could provide the income to fund my own lifestyle and save for retirement, but yet have enough to invest in my nephew’s dreams, I would consider that the pinnacle of my achievements.

So now, after talking to my nephew, I have doubled my efforts into creating more passive income. I was just so inspired from our conversation! I loved seeing the excitement in his eyes as he laid out his dreams and the steps he needed to do to achieve his goals. He was so proud to show me his notes and his to-do lists. We talked about his business ideas, how to find capital, and how to grow it. We talked about how he would go about investing in himself through education and mining sources of information–specifically advice from professors and contacts. We talked about my own foray into real estate investing. It was so good to talk “shop” about all this to somebody so young–and so fearless.

I am so proud that he will get started early on his path to financial independence if he does everything right. I hope he continues to stay motivated and driven to succeed. A part of me is jealous that he’ll get started so young. But a part of me is glad that he’s already thinking about these things at such a young age. He then won’t have to work hard like me to “undo” the mistake of not starting young.

In all our talk about financial independence, though, I made sure to stress the hard work that needs to be done. It’s good to have dreams, but none of that will happen if you don’t work for it–especially for a broke college student. He said he knew that and he promised to double down on really finding a part-time job for the summer while he was waiting for school to start.

After all that, he went back to playing his video games.

It made me smile.

I hope that we both push each other to succeed.

But I just have to say: I wont lose to you, kiddo.