This entry was inspired by a comment from Let us spread the wealth in my last post.  In summary, I told a story of using an app to teach my young sons about crypto and passive income.  Then this comment made me realize that I hadn’t mentioned my daughter at all.  

I never became so much of a First Wave Feminist as the day she was born.  I have 4 boys, and she is my only daughter.  So yes, she is a battle-hardened princess, and I have no shame in stating that I worry more about her than I do my sons, especially in today’s times.  Now, she is 14 and is beginning to be interested in boys <throws up a little in mouth>.  And of course, I react to this as I do everything:  as a teacher.

Bruce Lee once said, “Instead of buying your children all the things you never had, you should teach them all of the things you were never taught. Material wears out, but knowledge stays”

Now, as a public school teacher I will never be able to hand my daughter a sum of money that will protect her for life if she doesn't understand how to preserve and grow it.  Let’s just pretend I was able to hand her 20,000$ cash as a wedding gift or her grandfather leaves her a sizable inheritance when he passes.  That money could easily be squandered by a foolish partner, taken in a divorce, or allocated to something other than her own personal security.  Why? Because you do not truly own money in a bank when you are married … or even if you are single for that matter … but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole just yet.

Hands down, one of the most important issues for young women to learn is financial independence, autonomy, true ownership, and the preservation of capital.  With the divorce rate in America being between 40-50%, far too many young women become financially entangled or dependent upon a partner that may or may not work out in the long term, and when it does not work out the results can range from sudden poverty, to manipulation, even to outright abuse because of a lack of finances on the woman’s part.  Obviously as a father and a teacher, I want to prevent this (not just for my daughter, but for any female student that I am able to instruct).

And so I wanted to teach her about the concept of autonomy and true ownership using crypto the same way I did my boys.  I took inspiration from the Islamic concept of Mahr, which is an obligation of a groom to pay his bride a sum of money that is solely under her control.  The purpose of this is to protect her in case of divorce – to allow her a means of sustaining herself while she transitions from being dependent to being independent.  Now, we love Islam, but we are not Muslim, so my daughter will likely not be having a husband that pays a sum of money to her when she gets married; she will have to understand how to do it herself with my help.

Now, she is older (14).  And so, I had to take a more sophisticated approach than a mere cloud mining app.  She also understands and hoards real money, so a few cents a day is not going to impress her lol (she is a natural hoarder, and I am fortunate in this).  As soon as she turned 13, I opened a youth account for her with Fidelity, which is an account that she has direct ownership of; no one can withdraw money from it but her. She even occasionally decides to put small amounts of money in the S&P 500 index fund I showed her and enjoys watching it grow.  As the guardian, I can freeze the account, but I cannot take anything from it once it goes in.

But, as a crypto advocate, like many of you, I want her to understand true ownership and not rely solely on a ledger at a bank or brokerage that says she is owed x amount of dollars.  Also, a traditional bank or brokerage is a very public source of funds; it can be discovered or halved during a divorce, bankruptcy, or other catastrophic life event.

So for the medium of my lesson to her I chose Solana.  I will explain my choice after I explain the lesson.

She overhears me talking about crypto enough that I did not have to explain the basics.  I explained that Solana was a successful blockchain much like Ethereum (she overhears a lot about ETH).  I showed her how to download Solflare on her phone.  We sat and wrote down the pass key on two notecards; she kept one in a safe place, and I kept one in a … safe.  I then gifted her 100$ in USDC and 20$ in SOL.  Her face lit right up when she saw the transfer hit, and then it dropped like a rock when I told her she wasn’t 18, couldn’t have an account with a crypto brokerage, and so had no real way to spend it lol.

Then I showed her how to stake the SOL, and had the talk about interest rates, the rate of compounding, passive income, and the fact that she was getting paid in SOL and not USD so that her earnings were also affected by SOL’s price fluctuations.  I then showed her how to swap USDC to SOL on the app, and I gave her my opinions on the ratio of USDC to SOL that she should keep (a very conservative opinion as I am not trying to push SOL to her or anyone as a primary long term investment; I am only using it to teach a lesson).

Then I made her a deal.  Once a week if she brought me a 5 dollar bill from her allowance and/or job, that I would match it and send her 10$ in USDC, and that she could give me any other amount of money she wanted to add, and I would use my Coinbase account to put it in her Solflare Wallet (taking a play off 401ks), emphasizing that this was the only money that she truly had possession of and that no one could take it from her without the keys.  I also made it a big deal that no one needs to know about this money other than me:  not her brothers, friends, boyfriends, no one.  It was for her and her alone in case she ever needed it.  Once she turns 18 and can open her own crypto brokerage account, then she can decide if she wants to cash the money out and/or continue with this method of saving for an emergency fund that she and she alone has control of.  

Now, why did I choose SOL?  I’ll be honest.  I wanted to use Ethereum, as it is the more established blockchain, but due to its high gas fees it makes depositing small amounts of money impractical unless you use a layer 2 solution such as Polygon, Optimism, Base, etc.  That is going to be a little too much for a 14 year old girl to learn to operate by herself in the beginning of her crypto journey.

I said it before in the previous article, and I’ll say it again.  Speaking as a high school teacher, if you can teach a lesson using an app on a student’s phone that has a simple, intuitive interface then you should.  It is a highly effective medium of education for children their age.  Solflare and SOL offer just that, and the low transaction fees make it ideal for a teenager and poor public school teacher to squirrel away small amounts of money at a time.

She even quickly found and bought a single Dogwifhat because she thought it was cute.  I frowned, but it is her money, and she should be able to do with it what she wants … <groans>