[00:00:00] Ad – The Money Equation: Ladies and gentlemen, before we get going on today’s episode, I want to tell you something really exciting. On November 15th, 2023. I’m going to be having a workshop on the money equation, the time you give plus the value add equals the money you receive. We’re going to break this down for you, and I would love for you to come to my 90-minute workshop to talk about this money equation. There’ll be a live Q and A, it’s going to be a good time. You can go to DylanBain.com/Money-Equation. That’s DylanBain.com/Money-Equation. Link is also in the show notes. I’d love to see you on the 15th. And let’s get on with today’s episode.

[00:00:40] Intro: We’re saying goodbye to the rigid numbers and strict budgets, and putting relationships back at the heart of personal finance. This is more than a podcast, it’s an invitation to reimagine your money story and journey with us through a landscape of intuitive strategies and abundance. Join a community that nurtures transformative financial mindsets.

[00:01:02] Welcome to intuitive finance. I’m your host, Dylan Bain.

[00:01:13] Dylan Bain: I’ve just bought a brand new car. My old car had actually had a very unfortunate end to it, and I’m walking out of the dealership with a new Sentra. It’s actually the first new car I’ve ever purchased. And normally, I don’t buy new cars, but this time I decided that I was going to go to the dealership for two reasons. Number one, I wanted to have a clean slate. And number two, it happened at the worst time possible, so I was kind of in a hurry. And I’m really proud of this car because I paid cash for it. It’s a pretty big momentous occasion when you buy your first new car and you’re not going into debt for it.

[00:01:48] And so like any young man, I call my mom and I say, hey mom, I got the Sentra and it’s everything I wanted. It’s got manual transmission. It’s gunmetal gray. It’s got all the things. And she gets really quiet on the phone. And she says, but Dylan, why didn’t you buy a family car? And I’m crushed, because I paid cash for a car. Like, I walked in and I wrote a check. It was cool. Why is my mom not happy? And I said, well Mom, this was the car that was in my price range. It’s the one that fits my lifestyle. And she says, but Dylan, you have a family. You should have bought a car that’s got room for the soccer equipment so that you can take your kids to soccer games. I said, well Mom, the Sentra has a trunk. And she’s, but what will your wife think? You’re taking these long road trips. You need a family car. Why didn’t you buy a family car?

[00:02:34] I was like, what exactly is a family car? Well, a minivan or maybe a station wagon — not that station wagons really exist outside of Subaru Outback. But now I’m suddenly getting really upset. And I’m starting to argue with my mom, and we are descending into a fight about my brand new car.

[00:02:51] This, ladies and gentlemen, is an example of what discussing money with your family can look like. With my mother, and with my father, and with many of the members of my family of origin, Money is a really touchy topic, as it is with most families and most people. I’ve said this before on the show, and I’ll say this again.

[00:03:09] Most people are more willing to talk about their sex lives than they are to talk about their financial lives. This is not actually surprising. Money is this weirdly fuzzy, intimate thing that people just don’t want to discuss. And so, the way that they actually end up going to discuss it though, is through all these other little idiosyncratic, oblique ways to just try to needle people into living out the money story that they think you’re supposed to live out.

[00:03:38] In the case of my mother, what she really wanted was more grandkids. And so — and I’ve said this before — I have two daughters. They’re beautiful daughters, and my only regret with having kids is that I didn’t have more. But my mom was like, hot to trot. She wanted us to have more kids. She’s trying to think ahead to like, all the room that she felt she needed when I was a younger boy. And so she’s trying to encourage me into making what she thinks is a good decision. And this is an example of discussing money with your family of origin. Your family of origin is an amalgamation of everybody who’s come before it and everyone who’s adjacent to it.

[00:04:17] And so one of my good friends, Duey Freeman, when he talks about being part of the therapeutic community and giving therapy, who’s in the room with you, it’s not just your client. It’s everyone connected to your client. And that’s true when you’re talking to any member of your family of origin. Every single person that they’re bringing into that discussion has left an impression about the money story and how it’s supposed to actually go.

[00:04:42] And this is true when you talk to your romantic partner. Like, for example, I’ve shared on the podcast a number of different times where I’ve gone to my wife and I’ve said, hey, honey, we got to do this budget thing, or let’s have this conversation. And she freaks out. And it goes in this weird way, that I, for the life of me, I could not possibly imagine. But what I’m seeing here is that I’m no longer just dealing with my wife. I’m dealing with my wife, I’m dealing with her five siblings, I’m dealing with her mom and dad, and all of the things that they went through. I’m dealing with her parents divorce, I’m dealing with her mom’s parents, I’m dealing with her dad’s parents, and the poverty and the struggles that all went through that are now transmitting through the generations to my wife. And I need to be able to hold all of that.

[00:05:29] Discussing money with family is really hard because you’ve got your family of origin in the room, you’ve got your romantic partners’ family of origin in the room, and they might not get along. And this is really important for us to understand that discussing money with family is both hard and absolutely critical to success in our money journeys. There is no second place here. You either have to show up or you won’t. And if you show up, you buckle in because it’s going to be difficult. And why is it so critical? Because a lot of us have kids. And you might say, well Dylan, I don’t have kids. Well, that’s great. You might be an aunt or uncle. Any influence you have, any relationship you have, remember: when they’re dealing with their money stories, you’re probably gonna be in the room.

[00:06:17] And so how do you discuss this with your children? How do you make sure that you’re imparting a good money story to them so that they can thrive? Again, this isn’t easy, it’s just absolutely necessary. And I already touched on this a little bit, but just understand that money stories and money beliefs are generational.

[00:06:36] And I’ve talked about this story a number of times. To me, it’s a really core story for me. is the story of buying shoes for a new job. And brief recap, I have a new job, I need a new pair of shoes, I’m going — I have them in the cart on the online storefront, I go to click and my finger physically won’t click the button, and suddenly I’m sweating bullets and having a panic attack. And they were not an expensive pair of shoes.

[00:07:01] Well, where did that come from? In that story, I talk about suddenly being 16 again and having my mother dress me down for not taking care of my shoes. I had the cheapest pair of shoes we could buy at the Payless Shoes, they were white Reeboks. I was working on a farm, I was working my uncle’s construction crew, I was training for wrestling, I was doing all the things with this one pair of shoes that was cheap. And as a result, they literally rotted off my feet. And so now when she’s telling me like, you should have been a better steward of your resources. You should have been more responsible. Like, ah, this is now something that has been transmitted to me that I carry with me. Because when I was buying the pair of shoes in that story, I was 38 years old. Like, I had the 100 for the pair of shoes in cash in my bank account. It didn’t actually matter because that generational story from my mother had transmitted into me. Well, then that begs the question, where did she get it?

[00:08:00] Well, when my grandfather — her father, passed, I went to the funeral. And when I went to the funeral, her brothers and sisters, of course, all flew in to say goodbye to their dad. And we went out to the bar, in classic Wisconsin style, to discuss stories of my grandfather. And we had been there for like 10 minutes, when suddenly, my aunt starts talking about her father. My grandfather was freaking out when her feet got too big for her little tiny shoes when she was a very little girl because he was very poor. Because he was struggling. And then he would — he later came back and apologized to her, and his way of apology was explaining what it was like for him growing up in the early 1930s, in an orphanage in rural Wisconsin with a bunch of nuns who thought that material possessions were a sign of moral weakness.

[00:08:59] And so if you’re following that story, I have events that took place. in 1930 impacting me in the early 2020s. That’s insanity, and yet it’s very real. Our money stories, our money beliefs, are typically generational. And they’re going through each generation, and if we’re not conscious of it, if we’re not intentional with it, it’s going to continue to cascade. I have children and I’ve made the decision: my children will not have a shoes story. It’s not going to happen.

[00:09:33] And it’s also important to understand that what was a virtue in one generation is a vice in another. And this again, it can be seen in my own family story. My grandfather — again, my mom’s dad, was known to be able to pinch a penny so hard, it would make Lincoln squint and he could get blood out of a turnip. This was the phrase they would use blood of stone as some other cultural terms that people use.

[00:09:57] The point being, is that he was insanely frugal and, you know, if you watch him on video, if you subscribe to me on Instagram — I don’t exactly have a full head of hair. I started shaving my head in my early 30s and when my grandfather again — my mom’s dad — this man that I’ve looked up to who’s got these funny stories that started in an orphanage in rural Wisconsin, is asking me, Dylan, why are you shaving your head? You look like a skinhead. He couldn’t understand it. He used to give me such crap about how antisocial my choice to shave my head was. And the one day, I said to him, Grandpa, if I don’t shave my head, I gotta go to the barber, and that’s gonna be $25 every time I walk through that door. And I gotta do that every other week. So it’s $50 a month. And for $50 a month, I can get a year’s worth of razors. For $50, just once, I can get a year’s worth of razors. I’m saving a lot of money doing this. And he stopped for a second. He looked at me and went, well yeah, that’s smart. Now you’re talking my language. Way to go, tiger!

[00:11:04] And that’s when it hit me. My gosh, his virtue was to save good money. And his vice was to not have a hairstyle that portrayed success. He associated me shaving my head with skinheads that he had seen as he was raising his family. And now we fast forward, the bald head and bearded guy in his middle ages is a very popular look right now. It’s, in fact, a virtue. And we don’t look at the comb over in his generation. They all would comb over, over their bald spots. And that was how they got to preserve that head of hair. And so they comb over — not that it was fooling anybody — and that was virtuous in their time. But in my generation now, if somebody did that, we’d all be pulling them aside and be like, hey bro, I don’t know if you knew this, but you’re going bald and you’re not fooling anybody. So like, I got the clippers in the car, we can take care of this right now. You’re going to look great with no hair.

[00:12:03] This is a conversation that I’ve actually had with people as they’ve started to lose their hair. The other thing that, to understand is that, every generation has what they think is virtuous spending and what they think is a spending advice, whether or not it’s a relationship with debt or whether it’s the groceries that you choose. Again, in my family of origin, you always buy the cheapest groceries possible. But as I’ve gotten older, and as I’ve gotten to know my body better, I’ve started to realize like no, I actually have some very specific dietary needs, particularly when we live in an anti human society where our food system is designed to make people money, not to actually keep us healthy. And so when you start looking at that, I spend a lot of money on good food. Good food is expensive. But to my parents, that’s a vice. To me, it’s a virtue.

[00:12:54] Things have changed, and prices have changed over time. For example my grandmother before she passed — now this is my dad’s mom now — she would always just marvel over like, oh, your generation is so wealthy, you all have cell phones. And to think about it of like, she’s thinking when she thinks cellphones — the smartphone that I have with my Instagram, my email, and a camera that’s far better than a camera that she’s ever owned. That’s a modern marvel, but she doesn’t fully understand that. Instead, she’s just thinking that that’s luxury, and not understanding that that’s actually required to economically participate in our economy. And what’s more is the price point to her seems crazy because she’s still translating back to the 1970s when she was buying landlines and groceries and stuff like that for her kids.

[00:13:45] And then when my dad purchased her — it was actually a phone that was mounted into her car, so that if she slid off the Wisconsin roads there in the wintertime, she could call for help. And that phone was just outrageously expensive in her mind, but it’s about the same in real term dollars as an iPhone. So when you factor in inflation, it’s actually a lot cheaper for us to have our iPhones now than it was for her to have that phone mounted in her car. But as the prices have changed over time, its industrial capacity has changed. With the industrial capacity growing on a global scale, this is why you can get a TV that is just gigantic by standards of my parents and my grandparents at a fraction of the price that they paid for their small little cathode tube TV. And so they might look at it and go, wow, you’re just spending so far over the moon. But they’re not understanding the economy has changed. What was a virtue in one generation might be a vice in another and vice versa.

[00:14:42] One other point to point out with generational money beliefs, and I see this a lot when people come into the coaching practice. Generational money beliefs, when you look at it and you look at your family of origin and you say, you know what, I’m just not going to be them. I’m going to do something completely different. And so you do the exact opposite of whatever your family did. I got to tell you, my brothers- and sisters-in-finance, when you do the opposite of your family of origin, you are still letting them control the story because they’re still in charge. Whether you do exactly what they tell you to do or the exact opposite, they’re still driving the car. The freedom on this looks like when you decide what it looks like for you without their input. That’s how this works.

[00:15:23] But understand, you’re going to have a gravity towards doing what they thought was a virtue for them. Because at the end of the day, we all want to make our parents happy. We want people to be proud of us. Or we’ve been so bitterly disappointed in our lives that we’re going the other direction. You know, fuck them! I’m not going to follow them. I’m not doing that. And yet, because you’re doing the exact opposite, it’s just a mirror image and they’re still in control. If you want to be free of these generational money beliefs, if you want to be able to discuss your money with your family, it’s going to be a process. You’re going to have to get real uncomfortable in order to even start having this conversation at all.

[00:16:04] One way, and I’m just going to give you one suggestion on how to do this today, but I’m going to really break it down on a granular level. One way that you can do this is to create your own family financial vision. There is such power in having a solid vision for any aspect of your life. When you have a vision of what that life can look like, it serves as a North Star. You place it in the sky and you navigate the rest of your life by it. It becomes your why.

[00:16:35] And I’ve shared on this podcast before, when my principal asked me to commit fraud and I realized that teaching was just no longer going to be a career for me, that I had to get out of the educational space. What was my vision? My vision was, there’s got to be more. I want a house with a yard where my kids play with a green ball while I grill steaks on the grill, a food I could not afford at the time, while my wife comes to me and says, I love what we built. That was my vision. That vision took me through five years of hell. Five years of working harder than I ever thought I was capable of working. Five years of climbing the income ladder on an average of 18% per year in W-2 employment. I didn’t go start a business, I didn’t have a million dollar idea, I didn’t go buy a wrapped Lambo. I figured out a path to get to that vision and I marched with an implacable advance toward it. That vision became my why.

[00:17:34] So when you have a vision for yourself — and I’m not here to tell you what that vision should be, you have to write that for you. You have to write that for you, not for a generational money story, not for your fan, your spouses or your partners, family of origin, not for your brother or sister, not because somebody — some talking head on some news program told you this is the way to go. It has to be a vision for you. And it’s got to be able to hit home into your heart. Because when it does, now all the other hard stuff starts to become easy. And that is the power of vision. You need to craft and create a family financial vision. And that family financial vision will change over time. And like I said, for me, it was a house with a yard, kids with the green balls, steaks on the grill, compliments from a wife, drives me through five years. That’s great.

[00:18:22] But what happened when I hit year five? When I had the house and my kids were playing with a literal green ball that I bought them on the first day we moved into this house, because I wanted them to play in the yard with a green ball, because it was part of my vision. And I bought a grill. And I bought steaks. And my wife actually came up to me and said, wow, it’s amazing what we built. And at that moment, I just felt such victory, such satisfaction, and also terror because my vision had come true. Now what? And what I eventually settled on was, I have the house, now I have to make it what is a home. Again, I had to rewrite my vision.

[00:19:02] Your family financial vision will change over time. And that’s okay, it should. Because as you change over time, as you advance your life, as you go through the hard process of dismantling generational money stories and being able to discuss money with your family, you’re going to uncover things, you’re going to process it, you’re going to alchemize it, you’re going to deal with it, and you’re going to become a new person. That will change your vision and that’s okay.

[00:19:25] But you also need to communicate to the people around you. You need to surround yourself with people who share that vision, who buy into that vision. If you are in a partnership, you better tell your partner, because the biggest mistake that I made was I never told my wife what we were doing. For five years, I led her blind towards a house she didn’t know she was going to get. And when we got it, and I turned around, my marriage was in shambles, I was near divorce, I had no idea what I was going to do, and I had to start really looking inwards for myself. Because I didn’t communicate it. Because it was my financial vision, not my family’s financial vision.

[00:20:00] And when I finally shared it with my wife, one of the things she said was, honey, I wish you had told me. I wish I could have dreamed with you. I wish that I could have been there to have those conversations with you in the middle of the night when you were feeling scared. ‘Cause I knew something was up, but I just didn’t know what it was. And what it was, was I was afraid that I wasn’t going to make this vision a reality. It’s going to change over time. You got to make sure you communicate it.

[00:20:24] It also will create the business case for your money habits and the business case for your relationships. Does this relationship serve me? Does it fit into the narrative that I’m crafting, the money story that I’m creating? Does it fit into my vision? There’s a business case for it. A lot of people forget that your marriage or your relationships, that where you are in a common enterprise together, is a shared business. And even if you’re not in a relationship, you still are a business of one. You’re a sole proprietor at “You, Incorporated.”

[00:20:59] You’re running a business. It’s your life. So having a business case, and understanding what the business case is — what are we building? What are we doing? When there’s something’s confusing or we have to make a decision, what is the North Star by which we make the decision? That’s the business case for your money habits. Why am I saving? Why am I saying no to the latte, or saying yes to the latte? Why am I deciding that, you know what, if the boys want to hang out with me and I really want to hang out with them, I got a couch, I got a TV, and it’s going to be far easier for me to make wings here. And by the way, the beer’s cheaper too. That’s the business case for a relationship.

[00:21:30] If you’re looking for a way to really put a pin on this, you should sit down and write a spending and an investing statement. Write down a statement now when you’re well resourced, when you’re in the room, when you’re feeling good, and write down your spending vision. This is a nice statement. I spend money on good food. I manage my credit card debt. I make sure my bank account has enough in it. These things, principles, put them down. I pay off my credit cards at the end of every single month. I save 10% of my income. Write those things down. Write them down when you’re feeling good, you’re feeling resourced. Not when you’re panicked, not when you’re feeling crazy, not when the walls are closing in. But when you’re feeling good, on your best days, when you’re your best version of yourself. Write down what you’re going to be doing, how you spend your money, how you manage money.

[00:22:18] And then do the same thing for if you’re investing, if you have a 401k. What do I do? And when the market drops, I will dot, dot, dot, fill in the dot, dot, dot. I can tell you what mine is. Mine says, when the market drops, I understand everything’s on sale. Buy, buy, buy. That’s me. That’s number one. That is my number one thing. I know mathematically that works. I know emotionally that’s hard. I know that every time the market’s dropped since I’ve written that, I’ve had to read it and look at it and go, ugh, I’m going to do this. I don’t want to do this because I’m scared, but I’m going to do it because when I was well resourced, when I was well put together, when I was looking at the math, I know this is the right choice. And future me will thank present me for following what past me wrote down. Great, let’s do it. Write these things down. Discuss your money with your family. Face your generational money beliefs. Create a family financial vision. This is like, so many things when it comes to our money. It falls very heavily into the bucket of, this isn’t easy, it’s just worth it.

[00:23:19] And going back to my Sentra, I still have the Sentra. I like the Sentra.

[00:23:24] It’s one of the few manual transmission cars that rides around on the roads of Denver and I take great joy in that. It’s paid off. I’ve never had a lien against it. They handed me the title on my way out the door. But you know what? My mother’s never understood. She’s never understood despite the fact that car has carried me from my front door in Denver to her front door in Wisconsin. I have brought her her grandkids with it. I have made trips for her. I have an extra car during the holidays. She still doesn’t get it. Why didn’t I buy the family car?

[00:23:54] Do you know what? I don’t need her to get it. I was able to discuss this with my wife and with my kids about what the Sentra is and what the Sentra means. And even though I could have purchased a higher, “higher” class of car, I chose a Sentra. Why did I do that? Even though my mother didn’t understand, I had a much clearer idea of what I was doing and why I was doing it because her and I had the argument. Because I had to sit down and actually ask, why didn’t I buy the family car? Why did I make this choice? Let me sit down — I did it for a reason. We’re humans. We don’t do things without reasons. So why did I do it? Sit down and be like, oh yeah, I did it because that fits my lifestyle. That fits the story I’m writing. That fits my goals on a 10 year basis.

[00:24:40] And this gave me an opportunity to realize, oh my God, if my mom is having this conversation with me, I bet you my mother-in-law is having the same conversation with my wife. This was an opportunity to be really curious about her money stories, and who she was bringing into the room, and sit down and have a long conversation about money. And when I did, I had that conversation with her. It was again, not easy, but so worth it because I was able to see her in a completely different light. We were able to sit down and actually write down a spending and investment statement. that we both were emotionally bought into, we have stuck to for almost five years at this point. And it’s been amazing. It’s a touchstone for both of us. It has helped us make a better relationship both for ourselves, with ourselves, and with each other, but also for our children.

[00:25:27] And at the end of the day, They’re worth me having these conversations.

[00:25:31] Outro: Thanks for listening. The conversation doesn’t end here. Please share the show with friends and make sure you keep up with all the latest updates on Instagram and Threads @TheDylanBain and dive deeper into the world of finance with me at DylanBain.com, where you’ll find insights, resources, and strategies to reimagine your money story.