What's a piece of obviously outdated advice from your parents that turned out to still be right

[Matthew51]

Every generation rolls their eyes at some piece of advice from their parents that sounds hopelessly old fashioned at first, and then years later you find yourself grudgingly admitting it was actually correct the entire time, so I'm curious what people's own version of that experience has genuinely been

Mine was my dad constantly insisting I keep a small emergency cash reserve on hand rather than relying entirely on cards, which felt completely pointless and unnecessary in an increasingly cashless world right up until the exact moment a payment system outage left me stranded somewhere with genuinely no way at all to pay for anything

There's a whole category of this kind of advice around genuinely basic financial habits specifically, pay yourself first before spending anything else, avoid unnecessary debt wherever possible, that all sounded hopelessly boring and outdated as a kid and then turns out to be exactly the foundational advice that actually keeps people financially stable as an adult over the long run

What's interesting is how much of this advice actually gets dismissed specifically because it sounds so simple and obvious on its face, not because it's genuinely wrong in any way, there's a real tendency to assume anything that isn't sophisticated or complicated somehow can't possibly be the correct answer to a given problem

Curious whether people think this pattern is mostly just a universal generational thing that repeats endlessly regardless of the specific era, or whether there's something genuinely different happening now given how much faster technology and general lifestyle patterns keep shifting compared to previous generations

[EdgeRatedR]

The emergency cash point is such a perfect example, felt completely paranoid and unnecessary until literally the one single time it actually mattered, and suddenly you're extremely grateful you kept ignoring your own instinct to stop bothering