Kelly Slater: Growing Up without Heat or Hot Water | Forward Progress

Kelly Slater recalls growing up on a fixed income, sometimes going without heat or hot water, and having no winter clothes. He says though his family wasn’t in extreme poverty, his Mom did have to sell her prized possession, a 1938 Gibson gold-top banjo, to get Slater to the World Championships. Plus, he describes not knowing how to handle his early wealth, and the financial lessons he learned after losing it all.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hey, it's Graham, it's Thursday,and that means we're offering
you another positive piece of a past interview.
Each week our team digs through the archives to find our
strongest feel good stories to present to you in podcast form.
This week, Kelly Slater, when you were growing up, after your

(00:21):
parents were separated and dad was out of the picture, money
was tight. How much did you move growing
up? Well, you know, I lived in one
house till I was 11 and then we actually maybe 13.
And then we we moved, we stayed in place for a couple years and
we moved again for about a year,moved again.

(00:43):
And we we probably moved three or four or five times like in my
mid teenage years. I mean, there were times when
heat or hot water were unreliable, right?
Yeah. I mean, but, you know, we lived
in Florida. It's not that cold, but some of
the winters to get cold. And I remember a few times my
mom just put in just enough money, decided to get oil to

(01:05):
heat the house. We had this one heater and we'd
be sitting there freezing and wedidn't really have like winter
clothes and stuff, you know, So we'd be really extra cold at
those times. How satisfying was it to be able
to buy the family a house thoughwhen you were?
At school it was nice to to be able to buy.
I bought a car and a house when I was 17, basically with cash

(01:27):
and I. Mean.
And that's when the money is like real too.
Like what? What?
What was that like? It was, it was nice.
My mom sort of barely had lunch money for us when we were in
elementary school. You know, we'd go to school with
like some coins. She, my mom used to talk about
later on, she would talk about how she would go turn the coins
in at the bank. So we, she, so we thought we had
dollars, but you know, she usually just had a lot of coins

(01:49):
and she'd turn them in and give us a few bucks for lunch.
But, you know, I look, I had it better than a lot of kids.
Like, I mean, there's homeless people out there.
I always had a roof over my head.
My mom made it work somehow. She made 500 bucks a week, kept
the roof over our head and fed us and, you know, raised three
boys basically on our own. So, but I think the only reason

(02:12):
I really talk about is that is that I try to let people know I
appreciate what I have. You know, I wasn't extreme in
extreme poverty or, or anything like that.
I just, we just didn't, we didn't have any extra cash.
And you know, if we want to go on a trip, my mom would often
times sell something, you know, like she had a guitar, she had a
banjo in 1938, Gibson Gold top banjo.

(02:36):
It was like her prized possession.
You know, one time I was going to go surf the World
Championships and we didn't havethe money and it didn't have the
sponsorship. So she sold the thing.
You know, it's probably a $30,000 instrument now and she
sold it for like 500 bucks, 400 bucks or something like that.
Do you recognize the significance of?
It I didn't then I do now, you know, now I look how wow, that's
that's pretty heavy, I mean. So your career took off, you

(03:00):
know, pretty quickly thereafter.And you're in your early 20s.
You at that point, I think made millions of dollars and you
realize you're broke. Yeah, I had made.
I had made good money for probably from the time I was
about, you know, when I was 16, I started making some money.
Maybe 15 I started making, you know, 100 bucks a week or
something. And then 16 I started making

(03:22):
them a few 100 bucks a week and then went by, by the time I was
17, I was making pretty good money.
Like here's the thing, if you, if you grow up without any
money, you don't really have good money skills.
Generally your family doesn't. And so we didn't, we just didn't
have that skill and, and know much about how to handle money.
So it's just that classic story,you know, go from rags to sort
of riches and and then back to rags for a little while before

(03:43):
you figure it out. Do you remember how you found
out and what that feeling was? Yeah, I do.
I do. I don't, I mean, that's kind of
personal. I don't like to talk about it
because it it's, it's, I don't know, that's just something for
for me. I but I I feel like I learned
the lesson. How to make you feel?
It really pissed me off, really pissed me off.

(04:06):
I, I was just really, really upset it, that was a, that was
something that took a long, longtime to kind of come to grips
with. But I look back at it and I go,
luckily it happened when I was 21 years old or 22 years old and
not when I was 35, because at that age, at that age, I was
able to, you know, kind of re reset my goals and, and go, OK,

(04:27):
look, now I'm going to make somemoney.
I need somebody to kind of help me with financial planning and
investing and to eventually get to a place where I kind of
understood what I was doing and taking care of my future.
I was. Going to say, what do you think
the best lesson you learned through all of that was just.
Just to plan out, have someone or multiple people you could
trust that can give you a a goodidea of how to learn it yourself

(04:48):
so you're not just totally entrusting someone else to
invest and handle your money. One quick favor before you
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