Want to raise children who are not just financially literate but are financially savvy? Whitney Reagan, senior wealth advisor, and Christina Lynn, Ph.D., director, wealth strategist, share their advice for teaching your kids about money. They’ll cover the impact of the parent’s relationship with money and when to start having these conversations.

Transcript

Whitney Reagan: Parenting does not come with a set of instructions. Most of us are just figuring it out as we go, but today we are going to be offering something close to a playbook that will help you with raising financially savvy kids. Sounds great, right? Stay tuned for more.

Welcome. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. Hopefully, you’re a repeat customer, but if you are a newbie, this is Your Life Simplified, and I am your host, Whitney Reagan. I’m a wealth advisor here at Mariner, and I am joined today by a very special guest. We have Christina Lynn, who also works here at Mariner. She’s a colleague of mine and she is a Ph.D., a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER^® and an Accredited Financial Counselor®. That’s a lot of accolades, but most importantly, or from my perspective most importantly, she is also a mother of three and she recently wrote a book on this very topic at hand and had the idea for us to have an episode around this topic. So I’m super excited about this, and I am very passionate about it as well. Christina, thanks for joining us. How are you?

Christina Lynn: Hi, Whitney. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk about Kids and Money. Two of our favorite topics.

Whitney: I hope everybody is as excited and as passionate about this topic as we are and who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to hear about how to raise financially savvy children? So tell me, just jumping right in, I would love to know why you are so passionate. Why is this topic so important to you, so important that you wrote a book about it?

Christina: Yeah, so I have two teenagers and then also recently had a baby. So it was kind of like I am starting over, and I really did my best with the older two, but having a baby later in life, it just made me have a wider perspective on this. I wanted to zoom out and think a little bit more intentionally about how I am teaching the kids about money. And because I do this for a living and I love academia, I wanted to sort of document how I go about doing this, so I wrote a book on what I know about traditional financial planning principles and the counseling skills and about the psychology of money, and they’re all sort of tied together in this topic.

Whitney: That’s fantastic. And I think about you and I both being in the financial services industry and how we talk about money all the time, but it’s still challenging to teach your kids the right values and the right ideas about money. And so I imagine other people in different industries what they’re thinking and how they try to teach their kids about being financially savvy. So I just think that this is a really valuable resource and guidebook to just teaching your kids about money.

So, I love the way your book is structured and I hope that everybody researches this, but I love the way that your book is structured and how you go through chapters, and I think it outlines a lot of, it’s kind of like in a great chronological order of how you start to talk about money and where you go from there and as they get older and letting go of the reins and things of that nature. So, I just picked a few chapters that were really meaningful for me, if that’s okay. And I was hoping to just kind of pick your brain about them.

So, you start with saying, “looking from within.” I’m guessing this means for all of us parents out there to really evaluate how we are personally thinking and acting and behaving around money and finances. But I want to hear from your perspective, what did you really mean by this?

Christina: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. The themes that come up when people are starting to think about teaching kids money, they seem to gravitate towards teaching kids money through the topics of allowance and plans for college. And the chapter I wrote on “Start by Looking Within” is meant to go deeper than that. It’s not just those two superficial topics that somehow magically set your kids up to be financially savvy with money. It’s so much more important. They learn much more about money based on how they see you interact with money. What is your attitude towards all things finances? And personal finances touch nearly everything in our lives, so they’re watching how you respond to credit cards, income, second jobs, expenses like cabins and trips and school clothes. There’s all these different topics, expenses, money-related things that we deal with every day. Those are the things that they’re learning from. It’s not just the allowance and the college prep that are opportunities to teach them about money.

Whitney: That just made me think of “actions speak louder than words” because it’s really about your behaviors. You want to show them how you feel and you want them to learn your values around money and spending and the value of money and what something is worth rather than and how to earn. Right. That’s also important. How to earn something and then be able to save and pay for something that is important to you in the future.

Christina: Yeah. So start by looking within. You can do this by taking a moment to reflect on what are the things that you say regarding money. Do you have certain sayings that maybe you learned from your parents or that you say with your spouse? Things like “money doesn’t grow on trees” is a common one, but what is your speech around things that deal with finances? Because those are the types of things that are going to seep into how your kids will eventually handle money someday. And is that what you actually want to teach them, right? It can be a surprise when you start thinking about, “Okay, well this is the sort of thing I actually say around money-related issues and how I react around money-related issues. Is that really what I want my kid to learn about dealing with money issues?”

Whitney: Exactly. Okay. I love this already. I feel like we could go on and on for hours about this. We may have to do another episode, but I want to kind of move on so that we get a bunch of good information in this short amount of time that we have. So another one of your chapters says, “Start Talking about Money,” which we kind of have touched on, but you go deeper and say, how do you normalize finances with your children and really talking about them at a young age? So my question for you would be, what is a good age to start talking about money with your kids? Because I have, my oldest is five and he’s in kindergarten, and I’d love to know how to really start hammering it in right now.

Christina: Yeah. Well, if you sense that your five-year-old is ready to start talking about money, that’s not too early. There’s a rough rule of thumb around eight years old. But if that’s not hard and fast, so if you sense that they’re mature enough to start understanding elementary concepts, then start. And if they’re older than eight, it’s not too late to start either.

Whitney: Good. And I might have to get your advice on something. I am supposed to be a guest expert in my kid’s school, and I don’t think that being a wealth advisor is very exciting for kindergartners, so I’ve been trying to figure out how I can be that guest expert, and I was going along with maybe setting up a lemonade stand and teaching them, okay, if you’re setting up a lemonade stand and you have to buy the supplies what you earn, you could use that money to go and buy an immediate instant gratification, an immediate toy that might be like a race car. But if you save and you save for a longer period of time and help that money grow, maybe in a few months you could buy something like a skateboard and hopefully them, I don’t know. What do you think? Is that something that might resonate?

Christina: Yeah, I think that those are going to be lucky kindergartners to have you come and present on that.

Whitney: Well, I’m trying to be exciting because financial advising sometimes isn’t that exciting for a five-year-old.

Christina: Yeah, maybe you need to frame it. I can make you rich. Just listen.

Whitney: I love it. Okay. Brainstorm session, but tell me more if you have any tips or ideas about sharing something with younger kids. I think I’ve seen you talk about this before.

Christina: Yeah. So what I mean by normalizing money discussions is that we as a culture tend to shy away from talking about money within our family unit. Maybe this is softening over the generations, but I know you and I have talked about before that our parents kind of shielded us from money conversations, maybe because money was stressful and they fought about it and they didn’t want us kids to see that or just the whole host of other reasons. But what you’re doing by shielding your kids from adult money conversations is you’re robbing them of the chance to learn from it. They are going to learn, first of all, like we talked about by watching you and with your behaviors and how you react to things, but also from hearing you discuss money-related issues, which again touched so many areas of our personal lives.

But it’s important to set a positive tone. We don’t want to talk within the family unit and it have it be tense because then they’re going to carry that when they get older, and it’s going to be a source of tension for them that they’ll eventually have to work through on their own. But if we can think intentionally about how we talk about money and make a point to talk about how we handle money-related issues as a family, you are going to boost their maturity when it comes to money matters. So again, don’t isolate money-related conversations behind the scenes so that your kids don’t see, but you want to hear them talk about these principles that we know that you’re either working on or that you already have mastered. And that is like you’re saying about the lemonade stand, saving a certain percent, budgeting a certain amount to have fun with, preparing for emergencies, how to avoid money mistakes, those types of things. They’re going to learn so much from hearing you talk about it.

Whitney: Well, and so there’s so much valuable stuff that you just put into that response. So for one, kids are a lot more perceptive than we probably give them credit for. And if you’re stressed about money or if you’re talking about it and you are tense, like you said, they are going to carry that with them, and I think that’s important to realize, but not to shy away from it because I agree with you 100% our generation when we were younger, I think it was more for our parents’ generation, I should say. I think it was more like, a faux pas to talk about money and talk about struggles with money and talk about how they might have to struggle through something to get us what we need. And I wonder if I would’ve had a different outlook on finances if I’d understood that struggle that they had to help us just get whatever we really needed. And we never thought that there was a struggle. So I just think that’s a fascinating viewpoint.

Christina: Yeah, we as parents don’t need to pretend like everything is absolutely perfect when it comes to our finances. Letting our kids see that, hey, we have these goals that we’re working towards and there’s some challenges that we’re working through, those are really great learning opportunities for our kids. And even though they’re not responding to it or commenting on it now, fast-forward 10 to 20 years, it could shape the way they handle money in the future.

Whitney: Yeah, and just understanding that sometimes you don’t get, you have to choose, you can get this or you can get this. You can’t get both. Just small things like that I think it’s an important foundational lesson for kids. Okay. So the last topic I wanted to talk about is, or another chapter of your book is something that you phrase, “Craft Your Cocktail.” And I want to know what you mean by this. It’s not something about drinking with kids, right?

Christina: It’s not happy hour related, no.

Whitney: I’m joking. I figure it’s something along the lines of making it work for your family, but I want to from you.

Christina: Yeah. I think that we get people coming to us, Whitney, expecting that there’s these black-and-white answers to raising financially savvy kids or even when it comes to wealth management in general, the truth is there’s a lot of really good options on how to raise financially savvy kids. You can make your own decision about what works best for you and your spouse or partner, and that’s going to look different for every family. Now there are — so anyway, when it comes to certain things like allowances or first cars or first jobs, school clothes, the list goes on, preparing for college, every family is going to have a different idea of what’s right or how they want to handle it, and that can be the right way for them. You just need to make sure that it fits into your financial plan. It’s not only aligned with your family values and your spouse’s values, but it also is conducive towards working towards your financial goals, if that makes sense.

Whitney: So I feel like, Christina, we have covered a lot of ground today, and I want to ask you so many more questions because this has been lovely for me. I think this is so important because it helps the future generations and our future if we teach our kids to be financially savvy. So I appreciate your expertise and you writing a book, and I think that if anybody wants to follow some more of your tips or hear more digestible tidbits, and they can find you on LinkedIn. So thank you so much for joining me, Christina, this has been a real joy and thank you to the audience. Thanks for joining us. I hope that you guys had as much fun as we did, and you learned a little bit about raising financially savvy children. And if you did like and enjoy what you heard today, please like, subscribe or follow on wherever you listen to your podcasts, and we will hopefully see you again next time. I hope you have a great rest of your week.

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