Do children pages need sub-folder in URL?

The strategy is to have a 2000 word authority page www.domain.com/finance

And to create 10 different 500 word relevant children pages such as wwww.domain.com/finance/tips and www.domain.com/finance/ideas etc , each of which links back to parent page

My question is, how important is the sub-folder in the URL for this strategy? Lets say the children page URLs must be www.domain.com/finance-tips (instead of /finance/tips) is this a huge issue? I feel like the SEO power of this strategy shouldnt be greatly affected in terms of the interlinking juice I am sending to the parent page, despite not having a subfolder, right?

TIA!

Update to anyone interested:

I conducted 2 experiments:

1) I published 14 child pages for domain.com/finance
ex of this page was: domain.com/finance/corporate - each page was 350 words original content, and links back only to the parent page domain.com/finance
target keyword: finance
sub target keyword: corporate finance

2) I published 14 separate pages for domain.com/sports
note: these were not child pages, rather just hidden blog posts (pinged to google)
ex of this page was domain.com/basketball
each page was 350 words orig content, and links back only to the parent page
target keyword: sports
sub target keyword: sports basketball

It has only been 6 days but results are as follows:

Experiment #1 shows strong rankings for all sub target keywords, but the parent page and keyword of finance has not budget much. (It went from position 30 to 25).

Experiment #2 shows hardly any ranking improvement for sub target keywords, but the parent page and keyword sports went from position 25 to 8.

In terms of keyword difficulty they appear to be about the same. The experiment is obviously far from over and I'm trying to figure out why they yielded different results. If anyone has any questions or areas that they recommend i should look into in order to properly investigate this further I'd appreciate it!

TIA