Why make it a mystery or a secret? All you have to do is follow everything up,with boundaries. Maybe it’s an opportunity to help your kid set up their first investment account and learn about index shares?
We’re still not convinced he needs to know specifics. We may change our minds. We’ve explained that we are FI and what that means. Maybe if he asks, we can get more detailed.
When he turned 13, we opened up a brokerage account for him. We double anything he puts into it. It may not be a good thing for him to get used to these kind of returns (vti and vbr)., haha. He needs a bear market to set his expectations for more historical gains!
There's a difference between hiding the truth from your kid and not sharing details that he can't understand. No teenager can really grasp what a 7 figure NW means. It's too abstract. They can barely grasp what a hundred thousand really means.
As an adult, if someone says $100K, we all immediately have a sense of the impact of that on our lives. A kid doesn't have that, can't have that. Hell, a lot of young adults can't even grasp what that really means until they've made 5-6 figure decisions like school loans, weddings, housing, HCOL vs LCOL, investments, etc.
You don't need to be nervous about sharing with your kid, but it makes perfect sense to communicate with him in ways that can actually make sense to him.
The only reason sharing your exact NW might make him not understand why you won't spend more on him would be because he doesn't really understand what that NW means.
So don't show him your NW. There's no reason to, but that doesn't mean you need to hide anything either.
I was about 13 when my mom started explaining what groceries cost. I was about 14 when she broke down how mortgage payments and car payments work. I was probably close to 15 when she really put it together in a picture of monthly cash flow.
She gave me a loooooong list of all of the things we could afford based on the extra cash we had monthly. It was crazy how many luxuries we could possibly afford. Except, we couldn't afford ALL of them, only a few. So even having a lot of extra money to spend, I started understanding that just choosing which luxuries to spend on means making hard decisions as to what you can't have.
I would see her spending a ton on my little brother's intensive educational supports and my dumb kid brain would translate that to "oh look, they have that much money to spend on him, they can obviously afford to spend that on me too!"
After that cash flow exercise with my mom, I really started understanding the level of lifestyle we could afford and what kind of trade offs were needed for every luxury we chose to spend on.
We were rich enough to afford almost any one given middle class.luxury, just not a lot of them. So maybe one big one in a given year, or a few small ones.
It made me feel simultaneously like we were quite wealthy, but also really showed me how important it is to be careful in how you spend. Because being sloppy with your choices in luxuries would block you from being able to have something you really wanted.
So perhaps take an approach more like that. Gradually bringing him along in terms of concepts that he can actually grasp.