We always write in the third person at Gifting Sense. This post is the exception to that rule.

Yanely Espinal opens her new book “Mind Your Money” with the childhood story of when she first became aware of the fact that her family lived with scarcity. I have read and reviewed a lot of personal finance books over the years. This is the first one that made me recall my first memory of understanding – thanks to a comment from a middle school classmate – that my family lived with some sort of abundance. Up until that moment, I was just as unaware of the fact that my life wasn’t like every other kid’s as Yanely was.

I’m a lot older than Ms. Espinal, and grew up in Canada, so some of my college and early working year experiences were different just because University was then more affordable, and credit cards not as accessible. My early adulthood personal finance mistakes included:

• Running up a big long-distance phone bill before Telecom was deregulated.
• Not shopping around for the very best car loan or mortgage rates.
• Not maxing out every single tax-advantaged or employer-sponsored savings program.

But my parents had no language barrier, I grew up talking about money, and was married shortly after graduating. So, with two (albeit small) incomes and no debt, my husband and I made our way. Almost thirty-five years later, squarely in the third act of my life, I’ve become a very passionate champion for early basic financial education – for all the reasons Yanely discusses in her book.

“Mind Your Money” contains a lot of good information, including four unique discussions on:

1. Why credit freezing can be a good idea.
2. The importance of “negative visualization” to help you prepare for the failures/ lapses that life inevitably delivers.
3. Why selling stocks during a “sale” market makes no sense.
4. The difference between compound interest and compound returns.

But Ms. Espinal’s first-hand account of why “it’s much more difficult to dig yourself out of a hole than it is to avoid falling into one in the first place” is the book’s power.

At Gifting Sense, we admire her big, hairy, audacious goal: getting personal finance to be a standalone semester class requirement for high school graduation in all fifty states. Ours might be even bigger and hairier: we want every middle school classroom in the developed world to receive an annual workshop on why and how thinking before buying is a powerful and rewarding life skill. With a “teach the teacher” approach to scaling delivery of our free but award-winning and age-appropriate lessons, we think we can do it.