1. My Parents Gave Me the Blueprint to Graduate Debt-Free From University

The real inheritance I received from my parents? A mindset of financial freedom, preparation, calm and consistency.

Two years after graduating from university, the Dutch government sent me an e-mail reminding me that it was time to start paying back my student debt.

The total amount I owed? Absolutely nothing.

I stared at the zeroes on my screen for longer than I probably should have. Not because I was surprised by the number, but because seeing it spelled out so explicitly made me feel extremely grateful. Many of my friends walked away with thousands of euros in debt, but after six years of university that resulted in a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree I’d managed to come out on the other side owing not a single penny.

Hearing this, big chance you’d probably make one of two assumptions: Either that my parents are very wealthy, or that I exclusively survived on instant noodles during those six years. Both are, however, very far from the truth.

The real story is much more interesting, and although my parents aren’t rich my lack of student debt can still be primarily attributed to them. Not because they paid for all of it, but because they’d silently spent years teaching me the habit that had made all of it possible.

They taught me to save. Not for anything specific, but for the sake of it. And their silent teachings, combined with a little bit of luck, are what ultimately allowed me to walk away from my student life with a clean slate.

€5 a Week

Looking back on my childhood, my parents deliberately established a system that allowed me to practice saving money much earlier than I realized. When moving to high school, being roughly 12 years old, they gave me €5 a week in cash to completely use at my own discretion. No negotiation, no expectations, no inflation adjustments, and no advances. About enough for two or three cafeteria lunches, or one if I went wild.

Every new week I was given the same choice: spend the money now, or hold onto it for something bigger later. Because once that €5 was gone, it was gone. No bailouts, and no exceptions.

There were weeks where I’d blown through the whole thing by Tuesday and spent the rest of the week watching my friends buy cafeteria fries while I sat there with a packed lunch. Still, making those mistakes was exactly the point. For a teenager five euro purchases were small enough that making a wrong one didn’t really hurt, but large enough that the consequences felt real.

And sometimes I managed to do the complete opposite. I’d hold onto my allowances for weeks, watching the small pile steadily grow to make sure there was enough when I wanted to buy something that actually mattered to me. My first big purchase, paid with my own accumulated savings from the weekly allowance and a newspaper round, was enough to buy a golden iPod Nano. I’d explained to my parents what I wanted and why, withdrew the money that had quietly been piling up, and bought it.

I used that thing for years, probably one of the best purchases I’ve ever made in my life, and after the purchase there was still more than enough left in my savings account. Silently and behind my own back, my parents had been teaching me something I would never have been able to put into words at the time: that saving without a specific goal allows you to spend freely during times you don’t yet know you’re going to need it.

The Buffer That Built Itself

In hindsight, I’m grateful for the slight friction that my parents introduced when I wanted to spend my own money. All of the money beyond my weekly allowance, like birthday money and earnings from small jobs, went straight into a savings account. And because I didn’t have my own bank card yet, any withdrawal to spend money required asking my parents first. Not because they were controlling, but because the friction forced me to slow down, genuinely consider whether I actually wanted something, and then clearly formulate to them what I wanted and why. 

I don’t remember them ever blocking a purchase. Nevertheless, by the time I finally got my own bank card at sixteen, a few weeks into a job at the local supermarket, I still thought it had come embarrassingly late because many friends already had received theirs at fourteen. My parents, on the other hand, had ignored all of my earlier protests with that infuriating calm confidence that has prevented many teenagers desperately trying to be cool from making serious mistakes.

And of course they were right. Because without easy access and the friction to think more diligently about my purchases, most of my money had simply been accumulating. By the time I could freely spend it, the habit of not saving first and spending deliberately was already locked in.

Some colleagues at the supermarket would spend their paychecks within days. New or upgraded scooters appeared in the parking lot, games were being played on phones released the week before. I could care less about those things most of the time. Not because I was more disciplined, but because I genuinely didn’t need or want them. I was a bit of a nerd, definitely not the demographic for looking cool on a Vespa while chatting non-stop with his friends on the phone, and since no one lost a bet and tried to turn me into prom royalty behind my back there was no social pressure to pretend otherwise.

So the buffer just kept growing without any explicit effort to build it. What had started as a weekly €5 training had started scaling up to real money, and the behavior was exactly the same. No target amount, no specific goal, just the quiet understanding that bigger numbers now meant more options later when they mattered.

What I couldn’t have known, however, was how far those options would eventually stretch.

When Saving for Nothing Saved Everything

I quit the supermarket during my first year of university. By my second year, I’d moved out of my parents’ house and started living in a student house. The buffer from those years of stocking shelves, supplemented by government study subsidies, covered rent and daily expenses without any need to panic. As long as I lived beneath my means, it would last me a long way. And living beneath my means wasn’t something I really had to force, the spending habits my parents had encouraged had become almost automatic.

But let’s be honest: three years of stocking shelves can, and never will, fully fund six years of education. In my third year, with the buffer steadily declining, I was fortunate to land a student member position in my faculty board paying €1,300 to €1,500. For a student, money like that was an absolute goldmine. I saved most of that salary too, the exact same way I had with the supermarket paychecks all those years before. 

My replenished buffer carried me through the rest of university, and by the time I walked out with my Master’s degree, my account sat close to zero. Not because something had gone wrong, but because everything had gone exactly right. Years of a quietly accumulating buffer, years of spending only on what truly mattered, and enough fortunate events to occasionally replenish the buffer.

So when my first real paycheck arrived, I could start building from zero instead of from negative. No debt, no monthly repayments, just a clean slate.

What They Actually Taught Me

Two years before the government e-mail, not too long after my Master graduation ceremony, I logged into the student debt portal for the first time. The screen loaded, and next to my name it confirmed that there wasn’t any outstanding debt.

I sat with the screen for a moment. Not celebrating, just grateful. Grateful for two parents who never once told me to save for university, never warned me about student debt, and never made me anxious about money. They’d just taught me to save, period. Build a buffer and trust that when something important comes along, you’ll have the freedom to say yes without hesitation.

They couldn’t have known that their €5-a-week experiment would one day carry their son, and his little brother as well, through six years of higher education.

As said, I watched plenty of even more privileged friends walk away owing thousands after graduation. They had similar opportunities, but used them differently. My parents’ mindset made a big difference, and it’s possibly one of the best things I’ve inherited from them.

It’s a mindset I still carry today. By the time I started earning real paychecks, saving wasn’t something I had to force. It was just normal. My parents figured it out and made sure I could too, for the rest of my life.