Thanks for all the replies. All very enlightening and food for thought...
First of all, I should have rephrased it to indicate if I die young without teaching them about money FIRST. Passing the knowledge is MORE important than passing the money.
If I could have it my way and practice stealth wealth, my kids will never know until I check out. In the remake of the movie "Sabrina" with Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond, her father, who drives for the wealthy Larrabees tells her one day very casually that he is actually a millionaire himself but she grew up above the garage perfectly happy being the daughter of the chauffeur. I love that image, a decent life and my children (family and friends) having no idea of what I have.
In addition to the day to day lessons about money I try to tell them about, I'd like it if my kids go to formal financial planning education by the time they are in High School. A refresh during college would be ideal, in case I'm not around. It's too bad there isn't a course out there that summarizes all basic personal finance knowledge. I'm thinking about the 5-hour defensive driving class available in the US. I have taken that class twice in my lifetime and give it a lot of credit.
About money, I have learned from my own mistakes and from a lot of books borrowed from the library....but it's hard to condense all that. As I said in the beginning, that knowledge is something I wish to pass to them, to understand how money works, the importance of savings and the simplest tenet of spending less than you earn.
It won't matter what you teach them really, unless they are stable and reliable kids that grow up to be the same as adults. Nature AND nurture matters - I say nature plays a much bigger role in things than most think.
My sister and I were raised exactly the same - by basically frugal parents (and in my dad's case, outright cheapskate) that tried to teach us how to save and budget and how debt was bad (but neither understood investing really and had no instruction on this growing up - had to learn that on my own).
Sister was flighty and impulsive from an early age. I was a stable, responsible kid. We grew up to be exactly the same as adults. I learned how to manage my money and investments and FIREd last year, while sister is blowing through massive amounts of money on vacations, junk, and toys after we received an inheritance from our father.
I could have been the one to write what you wrote Frankies Girl which applies exactly the same to my life. My sister always lived for the minute and never looked down the road and when I look back at the characteristics she exhibited as a very young kid and how she turned out to be I think NATURE plays a much larger role (>65%) than nurture. My sister an I had pretty much the same upbringing but are complete opposites and always have been. She made things pretty difficult for me growing up and one of my greatest fears was having a daughter because I would lose my mind if I had to go through raising a daughter with a similar character as my sister. We financially struggled growing up and that had a huge influence on shaping me, but at the same time if I inherited $XX,XXX+ amount of money I would be so much further ahead of the game because I think I make intelligent decisions/investments. Some of my friends have inherited large amounts of money, and it does make me jealous, especially because they do stupid things with it (high end; house, cars, vacations, etc...), if only I was given money, so I could make more money with it, so I could retire earlier, then set my kids up well so they would be ahead of the game. In the end it all comes down to the character of the person and there's only so much of that you can shape.
