My supposed frugality is a damn lie, thanks to having four kids.
Notwithstanding my humble beginnings — growing up on the outskirts of Soviet Moscow, I come from an affluent family.
In the 1990s, when much of the Russian population was impoverished by the turbulence that the abrupt transition to the market economy had brought, my father made a successful transition to entrepreneurship. No, he wasn’t an oligarch, not even close. He founded a food business, from scratch. He did this after doing an internship in Germany, having made a U-turn from his career working for a large Soviet enterprise. He had his share of “turbulence” — you could not not go through it in the 1990s in Russia but he was successful, by most measures. He was able to send to me an elite boarding in England where I spent four long years and I then continued my education in the UK and the US.
So there was money in my family and I was always just a step away from people who had more money, often incomparably more (“loaded” as we used to say at my boarding school!). Already by the time I was making money myself — I started my career in investment banking in London in the early 2000s, there weren’t many luxuries that I hadn’t seen or heard about.
On balance, I think it was a good thing — all that early exposure to the world of the rich and affluent. Well, maybe it’s a bit more complicated. The exposure itself wasn’t good or bad but coupled with my various versatile life experiences — in education, work, and personal life — it shaped my attitude towards money. For good or bad, I don’t care much about it. I’ve been through ups and downs, successes and failures. I made mistakes and experienced hardships. I was in debt. I still am. I’ve dealt with a lot of mid-career struggles, courtesy of my experiments, appetite for risk-taking and outright dumb mistakes.
Still, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t care about money. Yes, it plays an important role but money is never an intrinsic motivation for how I live my life, and how I make my choices.
What influenced me too is my Mom’s frugality. She saw it all too — the rags and the riches. She married my dad when he was a poor student (and she’d come from an affluent family) and saw him become very successful. Never-ever did she fall for anything shiny and luxurious, even when she had every opportunity to indulge and share in my dad’s success. Maybe it was one of the reasons why my parents divorced after twenty years together, but that’s a different story.
Like I said — I don’t care much about money. I’m not saying this attitude is good or bad. In fact, I do know that I make a lot of mistakes because of it.
Am I frugal? Am I minimalist? I think so. My only indulgence is… running. I’m finally spending a lot of money on my running shoes, now that I’m running 80–90 miles every week.
But I truly don’t care about anything else. Clothing, food, cars — I don’t give two shits. I can eat healthily on $10 bucks a day, give or take, and that’s taking into account a lot of calories I burn because of running. I own one pair of jeans, bought at Target. My most beloved gadget is my $250 Garmin watch (running again!) that I’ve had for two and a half years. I still have some old iPhone that doesn’t have face recognition.
That’s not to say I don’t care about making money. Well, maybe I don’t. There were years when I made a lot of money. Hundreds of thousands. But it was never my obsession, never a goal. I had to make money to support my large family.
My large family… There we go. We had our first kid when I was just twenty-five. It was my decision. I came home one day and told my wife — let’s do it, let’s have a baby! She was twenty-one. I was working for Morgan Stanley, making good money, my career prospects looking stellar.
Two years later we had our second kid. I wasn’t working then but I still had the swagger — I was a student at Harvard Business School.
Fast forward a few years and we had twins. So four kids.
Well, that’s not so frugal, is it? The very intention of having many kids, let alone actually having them…
Now I’m paying the price. I’m literally paying the price!
And just like I love my running, my family likes being active. We aren’t the couch type. Maybe few families are the “couch type”, but we are on the extreme end of the range. All of my kids are competitive athletes. The menu has it all — playing for college, playing professionally, or simply doing the usual after-school activities, every day. The travel, the gear, the coaching… Every day, there is something.
Damn, it adds up. A lot. And there is no end to it. It’s getting worse.
So there — my minimalism, and my supposed frugality — all but destroyed by deciding to have a large family!
But it’s Ok! It’s all about the choices we make…
