The Barefoot Investor, Scott Pape, has shared an odd piece of advice to a mother debating whether she should allow her teenage son to invest in cryptocurrency.
Chloe said that 17-year-old son has been pestering her to use $1,000 of money she had saved for him to invest in BloFin, which is a centralised crypto exchange.
The mother wrote to Pape's column, published in the Herald Sun, on Tuesday to hear Pape's take on controversial investment.
Chloe explained she offered a compromise to her son, which was that if he got a job during the school holidays, she would agree that he could use whatever money he made to invest on the platform.
However, the teenager then accused his mother of 'holding him back' by keeping the $1,000 from him, which he argued could increase in value via the crypto punt.
'He might be right - I don't understand crypto-style platforms, but I do understand working, saving and not gambling money at 17,' Chloe wrote.
The mother admitted she feels 'behind' and asked if she was 'being overcautious' by refusing to handover her hard-earned savings.
'How do you guide a teenage boy who thinks the internet knows more than his mum?' she wrote.
In his column the financial guru has regularly highlighted young Australians' issues with gambling and the devastating toll addiction can have on loved ones, but he took a surprising approach to Chloe's question.
Let him lose it, he told her, but only if was money he'd earned himself, otherwise he would not learn anything.
'He's 17. He's bulletproof. He could lose the entire $1000 (given to him) and still not admit you were right,' Pape wrote.
Pape recalled investing in a 'special situations' managed fund when he was younger than Chloe's son and losing all his cash.
It was a hard lesson to learn, Pape said, but he believed it taught him more about risk and hype than any second-hand experience could have.
'Tell him he can invest the $1000 in BloFin – but I agree with you, only if he earns it first with a school holiday job. If he won't work for it, he doesn't get to risk it. Simple,' Pape wrote.
'If he earns it and loses it? That's an expensive lesson. But it's a cheap one compared to what he'll lose later in life if he never learns it.
'The goal isn't to protect your kids from making mistakes, it's to make sure the mistakes happen while the stakes are still small!'