Sjef’s Why: A Journey to Financial Wellness

Sjef Tijssen

Board Member, 5 Buckets Foundation

I was taught the value of money early. Pocket money was minimal, and deliberately so. By twelve I had my first job, because the expectation at home was that if you wanted something beyond the basics, you earned it yourself. I learned what an hour of work was worth before I had any real money to manage, and that lesson has stuck with me ever since.

Studying accounting later gave structure to what I’d absorbed informally. It made the mechanics explicit: how money compounds, what debt actually costs over time, why saving early matters even if it’s only a little. None of these are complicated ideas, but most people are never taught them, and the difference between knowing and not knowing shows up over decades.

Living in several countries showed me how much of what I’d assumed was universal is actually cultural. Attitudes toward debt, saving, homeownership, and even talking about money vary enormously from place to place. Moving to the US brought that into sharp focus. Credit here is extraordinarily easy to access, and the system is designed to make borrowing feel frictionless. This works great if you understand what you’re signing up for, and quietly works against you if you don’t.

That’s what I want to contribute to. Not telling people what to do with their money because circumstances differ too much for that. The goal is making sure people have the knowledge and tools to make a genuinely informed decision for their own situation. If someone understands the tradeoffs in front of them and chooses deliberately, that’s a good outcome regardless of what they choose.

Helping more people get to that point is why I joined 5 Buckets.

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”

Chinese proverb

This why belongs to

This blog features the “Why” of Sjef Tijssen, Board Member at 5 Buckets.