Christine Landis graduated cum laude from the University of Southern California with a degree in Business and Managerial Economics and was a member of the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa College Honors Society. After seven years of climbing the corporate ladder, she served as CEO of a global fintech company for eight years, which she sold in 2018 for an eight-figure amount.
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The millions of dollars she made from selling her company allowed her to retire at age 36. But early retirement wasn't for her, and she soon returned to the business world to launch her passion project, Peacock Parent, a platform to help parents manage their time, home and schedules so they can maximize quality time with their kids.
Though Landis is now a billionaire, wealth is nothing new to her: Her wealthy childhood and her parents' money-management philosophy laid the foundation for her success and her determination to be as wise with her time as she is with her money.
“Growing up upper class definitely shaped the way I thought about time and money as an adult,” she says.
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Rich on paper, but not in everyday life
Landis grew up with highly accomplished professional parents — his mother ran her own business and his father was an oral surgeon — but their lifestyle did not outwardly suggest affluence.
“I always thought of our family as middle class because of the way we lived,” she says, “but now that I'm older I see we had a lot more money than I realized. It might be more accurate to say we had upper class money, but lived a middle class lifestyle.”
She stepped into the good life in her Payless shoes.
Landis' parents neither deprived her nor spoiled her.
“First-class tickets, a private driver, and a personal stylist were not part of my upbringing,” she says. “We lived in a nice neighborhood in a 5,000-square-foot house, and we traveled abroad once a year in the summer, to Hawaii every year, but we never flew first class. We always carried our own luggage and took public transportation everywhere. We shopped at the local Vons, bought clothes at the exchange military base, and went to the mall to go to Payless Shoes.”
Despite the public transportation and cheap shoes, Landis was getting a glimpse of what most Americans would consider upper-class affluence.
“The only thing my parents decided to spend their money on was to hire a weekly housekeeper and eat out at restaurants almost every night,” she says. “My parents both worked and didn't want to cook for themselves. We always rotated around the same group of restaurants: Asian, pizza, burgers, Greek, calzones, etc. So we were regulars. But again, none of it was high-end.”
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5 financial lessons learned as children that will help you lead a healthy, prosperous adult life
Landis is a wealthy woman whose parents, both secret billionaires, were also her first financial educators. Whether intentional or not, they taught her five important money lessons that she carried with her into adulthood.
Time is the best thing money can buy
Landis founded Peacock Parent after her time in the corporate world to help parents reclaim their most precious and irreplaceable resource: quality time with their kids, a lesson she learned while going to restaurants every night as a family, where restaurants were not so much a luxury for eating out as a luxury for spending time together.
“Family dinners, story time and card games are what I remember and cherish most from my childhood,” Landis said. “Times of connection, listening and sharing laughs.”
What she learned was that the true value of money is in buying time with family, and that lesson never left her.
“I made a conscious decision to use the money I made from selling my business in 2018 to devote more time to raising my children,” Landis says. “I'm buying time in the form of mobile wellness services so I don't have to rush around town to appointments, I'm offloading the less enjoyable tasks to a virtual family assistant, and I've even hired a personal stylist to dress me in clothes that work for my body type and eliminate the need to deal with salespeople. All of this helps give me back time and energy so I can spend more time with my family.”
Live well within your means
Landis' parents could have easily afforded first-class flights and concierge service, but they flew economy and carried their own luggage because those luxuries weren't what they really valued, and they couldn't afford both.
“Saving for retirement was very important to my parents,” Landis says. “Their financial goals were to send me to private school, pay off our mortgage, pay off our credit card statements in full each month, and never be in debt.”
Ms. Landis applied this lesson to her adult life: When she sold her company for millions, she bought a luxury car, but the spending spree ended there. Like her parents, she cannot afford to succumb to the ballooning costs of living.
There is no shortcut to hard work
Landis went to work straight out of school and dedicated herself to her job, working her way up to CEO in just seven years – again, inspired by her childhood observations of her parents.
“We both worked really hard,” Landis says. “My mom worked late nights doing bookkeeping and then got up at 5 a.m. to go to the office to keep to East Coast business hours.”
There's more to life than work and money — make sure you live before you die
Landis' parents instilled in her the value of hard work, and that work ethic was the foundation of her success, but she also learned that balance is important.
“To say they were both stressed would be an understatement,” Landis says. “They believed that if they saved up and tried their best to 'give it their all' for their family, we would all thrive in the end.”
But the real end came all too soon, and no amount of money could ever make up for it.
“My mother died at the young age of 66,” Landis says, “and, unknown to me, there were millions of dollars in the bank in my father's name. She had just returned from a trip to India, nearing retirement age, flying first class for the first time, finally able to spend all the money she'd worked so hard for all those years, when suddenly, her breast cancer returned with a vengeance and she passed away two months later.”
Life is a balance between spending time to make money and spending money to buy time.
The last lesson goes back to the first: in today's world, time and money are inseparable. We need both to live a fulfilling life, but too much of one means too little of the other. And those who manage to maintain that balance have mastered one of life's great secrets.
“My upbringing combined with the death of my mother drastically changed how I value money and time,” Landis said. “I studied economics and believe in staying on top of your family's finances, but as a society, we can go too far in our pursuit of safety. The reality is, we can't control the future, we can only live in the present. So I chose to buy more time for my family as a parent.”
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: I grew up wealthy — 5 ways it changed my perspective on money
