There is a conversation many African families never have openly. I mean, we talk about education. We talk about hard work. We talk about sacrifice. However, we rarely talk about money.
Not really.
We rarely talk about the pressure of leaving home and feeling obligated to prove that the sacrifice was worth it. We rarely talk about the expectation that success must be visible. That if you have made it abroad, people should be able to see it. The house. The car. The clothes. The private schools. The lifestyle.
For many immigrant families, especially those of us who grew up watching our parents build lives in foreign countries, financial success wasn’t just about security. It was about reputation.
And sometimes reputation becomes more expensive than reality.
For much of my childhood, I believed that money was fragile. Something that could disappear overnight.
Not because we were poor, but because I watched what happened when appearance and stability became two very different things.
For years, I thought my anxiety around money came from moving countries so often. It took me much longer to realise that it came from something deeper and from the every same people tasked with raising me. I watched two completely different philosophies about money play out under the same roof.
My father taught me the fear, while my mother taught me the solution, and somewhere between the two, I inherited both.
My father worked as a production manager in the oil industry. For a long stretch of my childhood, he made real money, the kind of money that buys a nice house, two cars, a wardrobe of designer clothing, the appearance of a family that had unquestionably arrived.
What I did not understand as a child, and only fully understood looking back as an adult, is that my father was carrying something much heavier than a salary. He was carrying an old, deeply rooted idea of what it meant to be a successful African man, providing for both his primary and extended family. This idea equated worth with visible wealth, treating the appearance of success as inseparable from its reality. Keeping up with the Joneses is a phrase that exists in every culture, but for my father, it was not vanity in the shallow sense. It was, I believe, tangled up with pride, with proving something to extended family, to a community watching from a distance, and to himself, that he had made it. That the sacrifice of leaving home, of building a life across multiple countries, had been worth it.
The problem is that pride does not pay a mortgage. And eventually, the gap between what we appeared to have and what we actually had became impossible to close.
When we moved to Norway, the maths got harder. We were living off his income alone, and my mother was not permitted to work, which is a separate conversation that deserves an article on its own. My father bought a huge house in the Norwegian countryside for 2.4 million kroner. With six children. Two of whom were already in university in the United States, their tuition and living costs entirely on his shoulders. In addition to providing for his family back home by sending money every month. And rather than adjust our lifestyle to match what was actually sustainable, he insisted that the rest of us, except my youngest sister, attend a private Christian school in Norway. A cost that, with hindsight, was simply not necessary.
He did his best to shield us from what was happening behind the scenes. I want to say that clearly, because this is not a story about a man who did not love his children or try to provide for them. He tried, relentlessly, in the way he knew how. But children notice more than parents think. I became hyper-aware of our financial strain long before anyone explained it to me. I noticed the credit cards maxed out with nothing left behind them, the quiet way certain conversations would stop when I walked into the room, and the slow tightening that happens in a household running on borrowed time.
In short, my father retired with very little to show for the money that had once moved through his hands. Not because he didn’t earn enough. Because he never learned and perhaps was never taught how to live within his means, how to separate appearance from security, and how to say no to himself in service of a future he could not yet see.
My Mother, the Quiet Architect of What We Actually Had
If my father taught me what financial fear looks like, my mother taught me, almost by osmosis, what financial discipline looks like.
She was extraordinary with money in ways that, as a child, embarrassed me and that I now recognise as one of the most valuable inheritances I have ever received.
My mother shopped almost exclusively at discount stores such as Fretex and Sparkjøp, the kind of places a status-conscious teenager does not want to be seen walking out of. She had, ironically, a real love of clothes, an eye for it, an enthusiasm for putting an outfit together, but she fed that love entirely through secondhand racks and clearance bins. She would find a piece with a small tear or flaw in it and use that flaw to negotiate the price down. Even in the stores that were otherwise far too expensive for our budget. She is, without ever using the language of it, an extremely skilled negotiator and an even more skilled saver.
I was mortified by this for years. I did not want to be the girl whose mother haggled over a five-kroner discount on a blouse with a small rip near the seam. I wanted us to shop like the families whose fathers also drove nice cars.
It took me a long time to understand that my mother’s frugality was not a character flaw or a source of shame. It was the only stabilising force in our household’s relationship with money. While my father’s instincts pulled us toward appearing wealthy, my mother’s instincts were quietly, consistently pulling us back toward solvency. I did not appreciate it then. I am deeply grateful for it now, because without fully realising it, she was teaching me the exact skill set I would need later in life. Lessons such as how to find value, how to be patient, and how to separate what something costs from what it is worth.
The contrast between my parents was not just a difference in money management style. It was a difference in worldview, played out in real time, in front of six children who absorbed both lessons whether they meant to or not.
What That Contrast Built in Me
Here is the part I think matters most, and the part that took me the longest to name honestly: growing up between those two approaches to money did not just teach me good financial habits. It also built something unhealthy in me, alongside the healthy parts. Both things are true at once.
I left home and immediately went into what I can only describe as survival mode. A mode I have, in many ways, never fully left.
I taught myself to invest, to save, to stretch every krone further than it reasonably should have gone. In university, I received 7,000 kroner a month from Lånekassen, the Norwegian student loan system. I made that number work in ways that still impress me when I look back. My rent was 4,000 kroner, all-inclusive, meaning electricity and everything attached to the apartment costs. I lived close enough to campus that I never had to budget for transport. I capped my food spending at around 1,000 kroner a month, and most times even less by using every student discount available to me, and bought only reduced-price items such as First Price – the cheapest tier. I collected coupons for fun and joined every payback and loyalty programme I could find.
And I still had money left over. I still saved. I still invested. I still had something resembling a social life. I was, by any external measure, doing remarkably well with very little.
But I want to be honest about what was underneath that discipline, because I think this is the part most financial advice skips over. It was not purely strategic. It was also fear-driven. I was not simply being smart with money; I was terrified of becoming my father. Terrified of waking up one day with nothing despite having had everything. Every krone I saved was, in part, an argument I was making against that possibility.
That kind of vigilance keeps you safe. It also keeps you tense. For years, my relationship with money was not one of confidence but of constant bracing and fear.
Where I Am Now, and What I Am Still Unlearning
Today, I can say honestly that I am stable. Comfortable, even. I am still frugal; that part of me is not going anywhere, and I do not actually want it to, but I am slowly learning to loosen the grip a little. I have noticed that I struggle to spend money on myself in the small, ordinary ways that most people do without thinking. However, I do let myself spend freely on travel. Holidays are the one place I have decided the return is worth it to me. The one category where I have given myself permission to feel that money well spent does not need to be money saved.
I have taught my husband what I know about financial literacy, and he has taken to it well. Partly, I think, because he did not carry the same inherited fear that I did, and so the habits landed on him as simple good sense rather than as emotional armour. I have also tried to pass what I know on to my sisters, with mixed success. It is a harder conversation than it sounds, especially with the sisters whose relationship with money still echoes some of my father’s old patterns, though thankfully not nearly as severely as his own.
Being the oldest gave me a different relationship to all of this than my siblings have. I saw the struggle most clearly. I was the one who stepped in to help my parents during the periods when money ran short. That position of being half child, half quiet financial witness shaped me in ways that are still unwinding, even now.
And constant relocation made all of it worse, not better. Every move meant starting over financially in some way, without ever fully resolving the financial wounds of the place we had just left. There is no stability to be found in a financial situation that keeps getting uprooted before it has a chance to heal. The instability was not just about borders and schools and new languages; it was about money never having the chance to simply rest.
I want to be precise about something, because I think it matters: this is not really a story about my father failing. It is a story about a man who could not unlearn an old framework. One built around being the sole provider, around visible success, and around living above one’s means as a form of proving something to the world in a new country whose financial systems and expectations required an entirely different approach. He carried something with him across an ocean that did not translate well to where we landed. I do not think that makes him a villain. I think it makes him a man who needed financial literacy, which he was never given, in a context that punished its absence more severely than the one he grew up in.
What I Want Other People to Know
My father’s generation carried the burden of proving they belonged, proving they had succeeded, and proving that leaving home had been worth it. I do not want to inherit that burden. I want to build something different, something quieter, and something more sustainable. A life where wealth is measured not by what people see, but by the freedom, stability, and peace it creates. Perhaps that is what growing up international has taught me after all: that home is not the house, success is not the car, and security is not the appearance of wealth. The richest thing I have today is something money cannot buy, which is the certainty that I no longer need to prove anything to anyone.
I want anyone reading this who grew up the way I did, or who is building a life as a migrant from Africa in the West, to know something my father’s life never quite proved to him: that you do not need a high salary or visible wealth to actually succeed here. You do not need the big house, the designer wardrobe, or the cars that announce your arrival. What you need, what actually protects you, what actually builds something that lasts past one generation, is security. Saving. Investing. The unglamorous, often invisible discipline of living slightly below what you could spend, consistently, for long enough that it compounds into something real.
There is more value, I have come to believe with total conviction, in quiet financial stability than in momentary pleasure or the performance of success. My mother knew this instinctively, with a Fretex bag in hand and a torn blouse she had talked down to half price. My father, for all his hard work and good intentions, never quite learned it. I am the product of both of them, the fear and the frugality, the bracing and the building.
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