When I was 22, I bought a bracelet. It was the kind everyone seemed to be wearing that summer in Utrecht, and I paid €400 for it without thinking about it very hard. I wore it for a few months. Then the trend ended and it sat in a drawer.

A couple of years later, when I was clearing out for a move, I put it on Marktplaats. Someone offered me about €100 and collected it the next day. Three quarters of what I'd paid had quietly evaporated, and I never thought about it again.

What it actually cost

I didn't think about it again, that is, until I started learning about investing in my late twenties. One day I ran the math.

If I had skipped the bracelet altogether and put that €400 into a global all-world ETF in 2010 instead of letting it disappear into whatever 22-year-old me wanted that summer, by today (sixteen years later) it would be worth over €1,000. More than 2.5x what I paid, just for sitting in a low-cost index fund. Not life-changing on its own, but that's only the boring early part of the compounding curve. Leave the same €400 untouched until I retire and, on the same average return, that one impulse buy quietly turns into several thousand euros.

For one piece of jewellery I wore for three months and sold for a quarter of what I paid. Multiply that by the dozens of small impulse purchases of my early twenties and the figure gets uncomfortable.

This is not a "stop buying things" sermon

I don't regret being 22 and broke and wanting nice things. I'd do it again. The bracelet was part of the texture of being young and figuring out what I cared about.

What I wish I'd been told, what nobody told me, is that the same €400 could have been doing two things at once. It could have been a bracelet, or a future. I didn't know there was a choice. I thought money was just for the thing in front of me, and "savings" was something old people did with the leftovers.

What I want for our daughter

I don't want Nora to never buy nice things. I want her to know, by the time she's 22, that every euro is a vote between today and a future version of herself. Sometimes today wins. Sometimes the future does. Both are valid. But she should know there's a tradeoff, because nobody tells you that until you've already made fifteen years of choices.

Money literacy is what saves you from learning these lessons retroactively. A child who understands compounding doesn't need to be a saint about every purchase. They just need the muscle memory of "is this worth it, given what else this money could be?"

That muscle memory is what FromUs.to is trying to build. The page itself is a working example. The €25 her grandmother sends today turns into roughly €100 by the time Nora is 18. The kid grows up seeing compounding happen. By the time someone tries to sell her the 2046 equivalent of my €400 bracelet, it'll be on her wrist for a year, not three months, because she'll know what else it could have been.

Ben