What teaching a daughter to get rich really sounds like

In my house growing up, money had two voices. One handled the groceries. The other had the grown-up conversations. I didn’t clock it as strange at the time — it was just the way things were, the same way Dad read the paper at breakfast and Mum knew which brand of detergent was on special. The split felt so baked into the wallpaper that I never thought to question it.

Jannese Torres did.

Now 40, host of Yo Quiero Dinero and author of Financially Lit!, Torres remembers the same split from her own childhood. Except she decided her 15-month-old daughter would not inherit it.

“The women managed the day-to-day budget and made sure all the bills got paid, but the men were the ones who had the ‘grown-up’ conversations.”

— Jannese Torres, The Guardian

$13,000 already seeded across a 529, a brokerage account and a Roth IRA — the plan she’s building is a million-dollar portfolio before her daughter turns 18. Even for someone who turned a food blog into a personal finance platform, that’s striking. The maths, at least directionally, works: $2,000 a month over 17 years, compounding at market returns, lands somewhere in seven figures. But the maths isn’t the point.

Forget the portfolio allocation. What interests me is the sound of the conversation. Torres talks about money the way I wish someone had talked about it to me at fifteen: as a tool you hold, not a test you pass. “I’ll teach her how to use money as a tool,” she says, “and to know that money doesn’t do anything you don’t tell it to do.” There’s something in that phrasing — a clarity that years of anxious budget talk never managed. One sentence and you’re told you can steer, not just save.

Her choice of vehicle says as much as the destination. Rather than carrying the full $2,000 a month herself, Torres has recast the whole thing as what she calls a group project. Friends and family contribute to the 529 instead of buying physical gifts — “toys collect dust,” she says, flatly. She’s already funnelling $625 per social media modelling post featuring her daughter straight into a Roth IRA. And the 2024 rule change that lets families roll up to $35,000 from a 529 into an IRA? That means the money follows the kid whether university happens or not. The monthly ask, she says, can be as low as $50 to $100.

“Even finding an extra $50 to $100 a month to put into one of these accounts can feel super prohibitive. But when we look at the ability to have friends and family contribute, I think that makes it less of a burden. Knowing this can be a group project is important.”

— Jannese Torres, The Guardian

Strip away the specifics and the group-project framing does something else entirely: it strips the shame out of not being able to do it alone. Australian parents, in my experience, carry a particular kind of quiet anxiety about failing to give their kids a financial head start — an anxiety that escalates with every headline about housing affordability and stagnant wages. Tell someone they can ask Nan to chip in rather than buying another stuffed toy and it stops being financial advice. It’s permission. And permission, for a lot of us, is harder to receive than a spreadsheet.

Meanwhile, the American conversation has added a new vehicle: the so-called Trump Account, a government-backed children’s savings program launching in July 2026 that seeds eligible newborns with $1,000. One financial planner who tested the app for his own child concluded he still preferred his existing 529-plus-brokerage strategy, partly because the investment flexibility is narrower. One account doesn’t beat another. What’s shifting is the conversation itself — what we owe our kids, financially — and the products are multiplying to meet that shift.

Look past the account types and there’s a deeper layer to this. Her parents filed for bankruptcy. She grew up terrified of credit cards. So she did something that would have sounded insane in the household she was raised in: she put her 15-month-old daughter down as an authorised user on her credit card to start building an 800 credit score. Now she pays for everything on plastic and chases travel rewards. In Torres’s retelling, credit isn’t the thing that ruined her parents. It’s a lever. One her daughter will learn to pull without the flinch.

That inversion — from inherited financial terror to deliberate financial agency — that’s the real story. Bigger than products, bigger than the numbers. It’s about what you pass down when you’re aware of what you’re passing. And it lands differently when you know that Torres is a first-generation Latina whose career has been, in part, about closing the gap between what her community earns and what it keeps. Latino households in the US contribute an estimated $4 trillion to the economy, yet the wealth gap between white and Latino families remains stubbornly wide. Torres’s project is, among other things, a refusal to let that gap keep widening in her own bloodline.

“My whole goal is making sure that she has as many options as possible, because I didn’t have that for myself.”

— Jannese Torres, The Guardian

Not everyone buys the framing, of course. Melissa Houston, writing in Forbes, argues that financial literacy alone isn’t what holds women back — the space between knowing and doing is structural. Women, she contends, are risk-aware rather than risk-averse, and an industry that keeps messaging them to “save more” instead of “invest earlier” is missing the point. Torres’s project lands somewhere in the middle of that tension: the saving is real, the accounts are open, but the reframing — the line about money doing what you tell it to do — is what changes the behaviour.

Then there’s the class question, which I can’t quite shake. Two thousand dollars a month is a mortgage payment in some Australian suburbs. The side-hustle logic — Torres herself went from engineer to food blogger to podcaster — works beautifully if you have the time, the skills and the energy to monetise something on top of parenting. For the single mother working shifts in Western Sydney, “earn more” isn’t strategy. It’s a second job she doesn’t have the hours for. That’s not a criticism of Torres, exactly; it’s simply the gap between her biography and the biographies of the people who might most need her advice. Every finance guru has one of these gaps if you look closely enough. Does the framework survive the translation? That’s the question.

I think Torres would acknowledge this. The $50-to-$100-a-month version of the plan — opened up by the group-project logic — that’s the one that translates across postcodes. Moneysmart’s guidance on teaching kids about money recommends starting early, keeping the conversation regular, and using real dollars rather than hypotheticals. An investment bond or a minor trust account, seeded at fifty bucks a month and topped up by relatives at birthday time, won’t mint a millionaire. But it’s something. And something, for a lot of families, is meaningfully more than nothing.

Different architecture, same emotional register — that’s the Australian intergenerational conversation next to the American one. Different tax wrappers, different housing assumptions, a super system that already does some of the lifting. But we’re living through a period where the old deal — work hard, buy a house, leave something behind — feels broken for a large chunk of people under forty. Seen that way, a mother building her daughter a portfolio isn’t a personal finance story. It’s a story about looking at the economic facts of the period you’re living through and deciding, calmly, that your kid shouldn’t have to start from zero because you did.

What Torres is doing, at bottom, is editing the family script in real time. The grocery budget is still there. Someone still has to know which detergent is on special. But the grown-up conversation — the one about options, about agency, about what money can be told to do — that one belongs to her now too. And that shift, more than any account balance, is what her daughter will inherit.