There has been plenty of discussion lately about personal finances. Maybe it made me wonder where people get their money using habits and I started to go back in time. So, while traveling back from work today I tried to find out important factors from my past.

My parents have a big role here. They are entrepreneurs and I have been following closely ups and downs of their small business. Now they are retiring and I think they made a good choice when they decided to start it over 30 years ago. There were times when the company was highly profitable and times when it barely profited enough money for food. And everything between those extremes. From this I think I learnt to have some buffer funds and not to consume everything as the income level can be volatile.

In addition of the business knowhow I learnt how to plan my money usage. I had my weekly allowance but it was not too big. Sometimes I could get some extra by lawn mowing and similar tasks. I also learnt how nasty feeling it is to lose money by playing a slot machine, by breaking a lamp of my brother's bike or by other stupid things. Most of my income ended up in my piggy bank. Those savings in my piggy were taken regularly to the bank and I was following my progress from my account book (time before online banking). I learnt what is interest and some other basic knowledge related to money.

Eventually I gathered enough money to buy something more expensive. My parents usually funded half of the purchase if it was sensible otherwise. But this way I had to plan before hand what do I want and is it really worth of it. And it kept me away from buying sweets all the time.

While I got older I was able to get my first summer job in a garage. The job was really boring and I had to bike 10 km to get there. It lasted a little bit over one month but it was long enough to gather money for a 28.8 Kbit modem. After that summer I worked almost every year, mostly in local post office, until my university studies. Just before finishing my high school studies I experienced my first scam.

This event took place next to a gas station where a man approached me and my friend. He asked whether we were interested to check some loudspeakers. Every guy in high school was interested in hifi so we took a look. He was selling a pair of speakers which were left overs from an order. And of course he could sell those to me with nice price. Unfortunately I got greedy and I did not check things carefully enough - even though I did not believe his well practiced marketing speech. I ended up thinking that I am about to make a very good deal with those Acoustic Response 707 speakers. I think I paid something like over 200 euros for those. The real value was closer to 40 euros and the worst thing was, that there was an article about those scam speakers in next hifi magazine. That ruined my chances to sell them to some other fool and also the whole school knew about my great purchase.

During my university studies I did not want to take study loan so I tried to cope with standard government student support and summer jobs. I also tried to avoid asking anything from my parents as I wanted to be on my own as much as possible. But that changed when I moved together with my ex-girlfriend. I was not anymore only one deciding how to spent money and that caused a lot of conflicts and tensions.

Today I am working full time and I am curious about finance and economy sector. Most of the time excess money is sitting in a time deposit so I am not investing aggressively. I think over my purchases carefully and I buy everything with cash or direct debit. I am also rather skeptical when someone is offering me opportunity to get rich with some strange scheme. I think this behavior is sum of many events and contributors from my past and very likely it will remain similar.