It’s essential to cultivate a healthy money mindset from a young age. In this episode, Wade Reed sits down with his daughter, Emily, about developing a money mindset. Emily shares her journey towards financial independence and abundance, talking about the challenges she faced managing her finances in high school and how she learned to budget and save for future expenses like college, a career in dance education, and a family. Discover the power of proactive spending and conscious choices to unlock your financial goals and create a truly fulfilling life!
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Track It To Stack It: How A 19-Year-Old Found Financial Freedom!
Hey, Money Master. It’s Wade Reed here for another episode of The Wealth Acceleration podcast. Today, I have a special guest with me. It’s my lovely daughter, Emily.
Hi, guys. Hi, Dad.
I’m so glad you’re here with me.
I’m so glad to be here. This is so exciting.
It ought to be because you’ve never been on a stage like this before.
I know. I’ve never been on a podcast. I’ve always wanted to, but now I get to.
You’re famous.
I know.
Instilling Positive Money Mindsets: Teaching Financial Principles
I brought Emily on today because she’s 19 years old. She’s a young adult and since about the age of 5, I got onto a lot of the principles I’ve been sharing with you guys. I’ve been trying to train her with these positive mindset principles, ways to work through difficult emotional experiences, and positive upbringing about money, being open about the dialogue of money, what it is, how it works, and how to deal with it. Now she’s able to practice these principles as a young woman.
I wanted you guys to have some perspective on what it’s like both from a parent’s perspective, trying to instill these principles, and more importantly, the child’s perspective on what it was like growing up with some of these positive principles. Emily that’s our topic. What do you what do you thinking about money right now?
I think that it’s about to become my entire life. As I’m getting older, I’m about to serve another mission. I’m going to be heading away from having to focus on finances and providing for myself for a little bit, but as I get into going into college more. I finished my first semester at Weaver and I paid for it myself. It wasn’t that expensive but it was enough that I had to be thinking about it. It felt like it drained my savings account. I felt like a lot of the money I had been saving up and that my dad had been putting in my savings account was gone.
It was hard. There was a pin in my stomach. I was like, “Is this worth it?” He gave me more motivation as I went through that semester, and to remember that this is my education. I ended up with a 4.0 because I knew that I had paid for it. Continuing, I know I’m going to have a career that I’m going to be trying to pursue and a family that I’m going to help provide for and it’s going to become my whole world. I have to provide for myself, and I don’t have parents who always have food in the fridge and have all the bills paid for and everything.
That was a big deal. I was a part of that with you. We worked through what it was going to cost for a semester. It was around $2,800 if I remember. This is a university about 20 minutes north of us. It’s a smaller university. They’re very friendly to providing a reasonably priced education. That may shock you guys, $2,800 for a semester of school is reasonable. Many bigger universities are paying $10,000 per semester, which is a crazy lot of money.
Navigating Scarcity Vs. Abundance Mindsets: An Emotional Journey With Money
You made a big adult-like decision for the first time and there was an emotional turmoil and we’re still dealing with the topic of money mindset this month. Talk me through a little bit of the scarcity thinking versus the positive abundant thinking that occurred with that.
A lot of what happened before, I started thinking about saving up. You go through high school. You go through your younger years. You’re earning a little bit of money doing odd jobs with neighbors and around the family. At least that has been my experience, and you realize you do have a little bit of money to spend. However, in high school, a lot of my friends were earning a lot more than I was. They would eat out a lot and I would join them because for the experience. I wanted to go to Cafe Rio at least once a week or we would go to Zao or a bunch of different restaurants like that.
We would pay like $11 to $12 a meal. Every time I bought something, I would have this pit in my stomach like I didn’t know how much I was spending. I know that I probably have around $100 in my checking account. I know that I can afford this, but I don’t know if I can afford this because I don’t have a budget. I don’t know how much I’m spending. I had to guess myself completely. It made me nervous and it made me feel like every single time I bought something, I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be doing this. I can’t spend any money because I should be saving up, but I still keep doing it for the experience. You want to enjoy being with your friends.
You want to enjoy going out and having those experiences and then transitioning to the last few months, having a budget for the first time. I’ve been using the sheet that you provided, the spending tracker. It’s been so much better. I’ve realized I do spend a lot of money on food, but that’s okay because part of what I want to be spending money on is food. It’s going out to lunch to catch up with friends or going out with one of my siblings to connect with them. It’s rarely like, “I’m starving. I’m going to go get McDonald’s.” A lot of the time, it’s deliberate.
It also makes me aware that if I don’t need to eat out, I’m not going to eat out. I feel like this food is the main thing that I spend money on. When it comes to gas, I know how much money I’m spending on transportation. I know how much money I’m spending on clothes when I go shopping. It helps me honestly be more deliberate and intentional about every single thing that I do, then it completely frees my mind to know what I’m spending and end up saving more money and creating a more abundant life.
Having a budget completely frees the mind to know what to spend on, and you end up saving more money and creating a more abundant life.
I remember this. There were times when you’d be like, “Dad, my friends are all going out to lunch. I don’t have any money for that.” I’d say, “Let’s look. Let’s open up your bank accounts. You’ve got savings that we’ve been setting aside for you that you’ve been setting aside for yourself. You’ve got your checking account. It’s available. How would you know what’s available?” “I don’t know, Dad. I don’t have a plan.” I would say things like, “It’s as simple as deciding for yourself, ‘Am I okay with $50 a month? Am I okay with $100 a month? Once you’ve made the decision on how much you’re willing to spend, then you should feel free to do it. I know I said it over and over but you kept doing it.
I still didn’t put it into action until I decided for myself because I am one of those people who’s like, “I want to decide for myself and it needs to be my choice.”
It’s something about graduating. It was like, “Dad I’m ready to do a little bit more adulting.” We put the spending tracker and planner in place and made sure that was a useful tool. I’ve been excited to see that she’s using it regularly and staying on top of the financial tracking. This other day, we were talking about tracking and my wife said, “Cash or check your money so you can stack your money.” I was like, “That’s brilliant.” Here’s a fun phrase for you, “You got to track it to stack it.” Thank you, Catherine, for bringing that to my attention. If you’re listening, I love you and I’m grateful for your insights.
Completing The Conversation For Better Emotional Resolution
Let’s back up a little bit. I have this very distinct memory of driving down the freeway with you in the back seat, probably in your car seat. Maybe a booster seat because you’re probably 5, 6, or 7 years old and your brother and my son, Johnny is 17 months younger than you. We were in the car at the same time. One of you was having a rough time and I had learned this tool called completing the conversation.
I wanted to start instilling this skill set into you because so many of us as adults, and all of you listening, I’m sure you can resonate with this. There are times when you feel unsettled about something. You’re upset. Negative emotions are happening, and then they calm down, but then something triggers, and it comes back up. We’re often doing that because we’ve had an incomplete experience with the emotion and the words associated with that.
We haven’t put some sort of definition or language around it. One of the things I learned was to follow through that negative emotion to what comes next and then what comes next and then what comes next. I can’t remember exactly what it was. You said you’re feeling hysterical and whining and crying. I said something like, “Emily, how are you feeling right now?”
I remember this. I mean my brother jokes about it. We were so annoyed, but it has been so helpful because unless it’s terrible moments, I would say, “Probably annoyed.”
You’re feeling annoyed right now and after you are done feeling annoyed, how do you think you’re going to feel?
Calm.
You might feel calm. Are there any other words, you might feel?
I might feel a little better.
After you’re done feeling annoyed, you might feel calm or a little better. If you start to feel a little bit better, how might you feel?
Okay.
After you’re done feeling okay, how do you think you’ll feel?
Happy.
As you feel happy, how do you think that will feel?
It’ll be awesome.
It’s as simple as that. It’s almost silly and ridiculous but at the same time, it’s so powerful to complete the conversation. It’s not that I feel bad or I feel good. Some emotions are happening in between that as well. Think of it like a stone. If you’re standing on top of this big stone, imagine it’s large enough to stand on top of and you are feeling on top of the world. Your arms are way up in the air and you’re feeling so excited. It’s a great day and then something happens that triggers you. Maybe a friend calls you a bad name. Maybe a co-worker says something that tips you off because you’re upset with him for whatever reason, and you start to feel negative. You start to go down the side of that round boulder. You start to slip a little bit, “I’m not feeling good. I’m upset about something.” Eventually, if you let that continue to ruminate, you might fall off the boulder and you might have to end up underneath it and you feel like it’s crushing you. It’s at that moment when a lot of us stop the emotional experience. We feel like we’re crushed and devastated. What do we do? Women were way better at this thing. Now, you call a friend and you talk it out.
Does that always work though?
Sometimes it just validates where you get to the point that you get just as mad.
It keeps you in that negative cycle. Ideally, when you call a friend, a loved one, a parent, or a sibling, they say, “I get how you’re feeling. It feels so awful,” and we validate that. A lot of times, unfortunately, we go to logic first, “Why would you feel that way? That’s dumb. They didn’t mean it that way.” We try to logic out of it to try to help solve the situation. Emotionally, we need something different. We need to feel validated.
This comes from a lot of training I’ve been to. There’s one called love and logic. The idea is to love first. We express love through empathy. We acknowledge somebody’s feelings and we may not know exactly what they’re doing, but we can simply acknowledge it, “Yeah, that feels so bad,{ and then the mind can open up to the logic of, “Do you think they meant that? What could have they meant by it?” After you’re done feeling this way or after you’re done feeling the weight of this experience, what might come next? You then continue through that path.
Whether you’re talking to yourself in a mirror or they were talking with a friend, you can try to work through what’s the next thing. I know in the past that I have felt so bad. I started a little better. I started to feel a little bit more hopeful. Imagine yourself climbing up the other side of that stone, and then you get back on top eventually. There are multiple steps.
It takes a little bit of time. You don’t just go from A to B. You have to walk through it. Let yourself feel each emotion because life isn’t all happy or all bad. There’s a lot in the middle.
You don’t just go from A to B. You have to walk through it, so let yourself feel each emotion because life isn’t all happy or all bad.
Learning the language of emotions is helpful. Why in the world would be talking about this stuff when we’re on the Wealth Acceleration Podcast? It’s because we’re humans and money is an emotional thing. As you said about going to lunch with your friends, that’s not a money thing as much as it is a social thing and the engagement you have with peers. There’s a meaningful connection that happens. We use money to create the opportunity to do that. We hire somebody to prepare meals for us and to provide a place to sit so we can have that meaningful human interaction.
Money is much more of a means to an end. It’s not an end in itself. Good social relationships are an end. A good marriage, being a good parent and grandparent eventually, being a good partner in a business, being a good colleague at work, whatever it is that you guys are doing. That’s a big deal. Social interactions are probably the biggest thing that we do and enjoy. This morning, we both went to the gym separately but we used dollars. There’s the money for membership.
We used the money to gas the cars that drove us there.
Balancing Faith, Education, And Financial Wisdom: Preparing For A Bright Future
To pay for insurance to make sure if we get into an accident, we have peace of mind, knowing it’s not going to cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. Money is a useful tool to get more of what we’re looking for in life. One of the things that you’ve talked about is your educational pursuits. You mentioned doing a mission trip.
In our church, oftentimes our young people, 19, 18, and 20-year-olds will go out and do full-time missionary service to preach the gospel about Jesus Christ and share the good word. We’re strong believers in Jesus Christ and the good news is that this world isn’t about difficulties of life. There’s great joy that can happen. There’s hope.
We just came out of the Christmas season. We’re in the new year now. There are so many reasons to hope. We have such a bright future ahead of us. In our view, our belief in God, so the spiritual aspect of life, we’ve talked about physical, social, we’re talking about spiritual things, having a higher power to believe in and principles that can govern our life and our choices like the golden rule, do to others as you would have them do unto you.
When you look at principles like that, you generally have a more abundant life. We don’t get so sucked into the negative aspects. Many other people are blaming society, taxes, politics, and whatever else for their circumstances. We feel empowered to choose our own way and to be the masters of our destiny. Talk to us a little bit about your future. How do you see the money that you saved up and might be earning? How do you see a bright future?
With the skills that I’ve obtained in school, I’ll be able to pay for myself pretty far with support from everywhere. With the abundance mindset that I have, I know I’ll be able to pay for school to get me to a career that I want to pursue, which ultimately is dance education. I want to be a dance teacher. I want to teach kids with special needs. I want to help the world in that way, but I think in the future, that will be able to help me with providing for my family.
I and my friends call it a mom job. It’s something that we can do on the side too because ultimately, I want to be a homemaker. I want to stay at home and take care of my kids, and create an environment in my own home that is abundant, bright, full of light and truth, and be able to have the abundance to both create a career that could support me if something happened to my husband, as well as doing something that I love and everything in my life. Having this abundance will help me so much.
As we were starting this podcast before we started recording, you talked about this idea of being self-sufficient. Your mom and I have been training you on the value of education. Education brings the ability to have marketable skills, things that you know how to do effectively so that you can go work for somebody or perhaps start your own business at some point. Dance and dance education, you’ve been a dancer. You’ve worked for a local dance company. What have you noticed about how these moms are running that business that is inspiring to you?
I think it’s how much they love it. It’s cool that I’ve seen the stresses behind that. I’ve worked closely with the owners. They are my favorite people and I’ve seen that a lot goes underneath the surface, but ultimately, they do it because they love it. They’ve found so much purpose and joy in what they’re doing despite the casualties that have happened, and despite trying to put together this small little dance studio that keeps growing. There’s been so much joy and purpose I think that they found.
These moms don’t have to work. They’re trying to do something for their kids but also providing for hundreds of other kids in the community. You’ve been a part of that and have always been a part of that. Businesses are beautiful things. Businesses provide solutions for communities. They offer job opportunities for people. there are probably a dozen other moms or educated women who have a love for dancing, and who have their kids in dance classes. They are the choreographers and the teachers for these kids. What’s the age range?
We have a mommy and me class, so it’s like one and a half. The moms will dance with their little kids. I just graduated from it as an 18-year-old. They have a whole range. I think we have around 20 moms and I think it’s beautiful because they get paid for doing what they love. We also have adult classes so they get to dance themselves and they get to have their kids have a community and have a place to go. They’ve provided this resource that has helped so many kids around and all the little cities in our area.
The Role Of Money And Business Knowledge In Successful Partnerships And Marriage
There was something else we were talking about related to partnerships, so self-sufficiency. Marketable learning skills. Looking at the behind-the-scenes of how these women are doing this business. As you consider doing that yourself, you have some ideas already of how to do it. As you get married, what do you think is the role of your understanding of money and business, how will that play into your communication with your future husband in dealing with the responsibilities that come with a married partnership?
Already having an abundance mindset, I’m going to find someone with a similar mindset. I don’t think I’ll marry someone who has been in a state of poverty. If they’ve struggled then they’ve come over the top and they know what it’s like to save their money and to be smart about what they’re doing, and who knows the important things in life.
An abundance mindset attracts a similar mindset.
I think that’ll come into my future marriage where we’ll discuss what we need to save, what we need to spend our money on, and the priorities in our life, whether we want more, if we want to travel more often, or if we want to do adventures at home, or if we want to save up to buy a bigger house or whatever we want to do, having the abundance to know and mindset to know that we’re working together and that we’re in control. We know what our goals are and how we can accomplish all those together.
Developing A Growth Mindset: The Value Of Being Proactive
I love that. In the abundance mindset, one of the growth mindset is being proactive. We’re big fans of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There’s a teen version of that that you had a class about. It’s the value of being proactive. What do you recall about that?
I think the name of the chapter is Proactive Instead of Reactive. Essentially, it talks about when you’re in a situation where you can either choose to be reactive and you can let everything be someone else’s fault and be like, “That person did that to me,” or “That situation happens so I can’t save my money. It’s not in my control. You’re just reacting to what life is throwing at you versus being proactive, and taking what you’ve been dealt with the cards you’ve been dealt, and using them to create a better life to have that growth in your life.
Proactive requires being willing to think about what you’re about to do, not just react to it directly because we all react. That’s a human trait. Stephen Covey says, “Between stimulus and response.” In the body, there are nerves and nerve endings. At the end of a nerve ending, I think it’s a dendrite. There’s a gap between the ending of a nerve and the next nerve. In that gap, there’s a choice. There’s an opportunity for us to choose between stimulus, thoughts, or situations causing the emotional state. Between that and your action, there’s a choice to be proactive or reactive.
If you choose proactivity, you’re more likely to see things for your benefit as opposed to it happening to you. In the last episode, my friend and I talked about how things happening for you rather than to you. If we can shift just that one word and ask the question, why is this happening to me, it helps us to stay proactive. It helps us to stay abundant and to believe that there’s a silver lining in it and that we can find some solution that’ll make us even better than we were before.
This goes back to our gym experience this morning. The stress we put on our bodies allows our muscles to get stronger. If they don’t break down a little bit, they will never get stronger. You have to do that emotionally and develop resiliency. We have to do that with the relationships that we have. As money gets scarce in reality, there are times when you might lose a job and you don’t have a sickness. When the economy does change, the circumstances around us change.
When you recognize that you still have control over what you do have, you can only control what you have control over, which is your decisions as an individual. If we have that abundance mindset, we can know, “I’m going to get through this. I may have to use up some of my savings.” That’s what it was for. It hurts though. I’ve had clients telling me, “Wade, I hated using my savings but I was glad that it was there. I had to rebuild it but it was there.”
We give money a purpose. Part of that purpose is delayed spending. Savings are delayed spending. It may be spent on education like you’re about to do more of. You have this missionary service you’re going to do for the next eighteen months. You have the car to maintain when you get back. You have the consideration of your housing situation. There are all these responsibilities, but you can deal with it.
It’s in my control.
No one else gets to determine what you do or don’t do. One of my goals for you all is that money is no longer the primary reason why you do something or don’t do something. It can be secondary. Money is always a part of the decision, but don’t let it be the primary thing. I just can’t afford it. As Emily was saying earlier, she didn’t know what she could afford. She didn’t have a plan. If you’re willing to do some planning, you can then track what you’re doing with that plan and make adjustments to it.
Everyone seems to hate the word budget, but it’s such a useful thing. A budget is a spending planner, a cashflow plan. It’s a way for you to test out different categories of spending and say, “I’m going to create a limit that I think is reasonable. It’s just like a time limit on something. If you have a time limit, you tend to get it done. If you have an unlimited amount of time, we delay and delay.
It’s the same way with money. If we don’t put a limit on ourselves, we tend to spend everything. When we want to go do something cool, we don’t have the money for it. We have to go into debt. I see so many people who have borrowed on credit cards and high-interest credit cards to do those things because they didn’t have a plan.
One last quick story and this isn’t specific to you but it was a young person. I had somebody about your age, Emily, when I was in banking. This was when you were brand new. You’re a wonderful four years old approximately. I had this young man who would come in and he would say. “I don’t know what happened. I have all these fees on my account.” He would get overdrafts like $25 here, $25 there, and one time, he came in and they piled up.
He didn’t realize that when he swiped his debit card, every time he did that when he was overdrafted, each transaction cost him $25 extra. The bank out of convenience would allow those transactions to go through so we didn’t have the embarrassment of not being able to buy what he was buying. He came in and said, “I didn’t know that. I didn’t understand that.” I said, “Here’s the deal. Take this transaction register.” It was one of those old checkbook transaction registers. I said, “I’m going to waive half your fees. I’m allowed to do that. I’m sorry, I can’t do all of it, but I’m going to waive half your fees for you. Let’s make your deposit so we know exactly what your balance is after the fees are recovered.”
We put his beginning balance at the top of that. I said, “All I’m asking you to do is track. When you check against that, if it’s $1,000 and you spend $50 somewhere, subtract it off and see what you have.” I ran into him a year or two later at a tire store or something. He was like, “Do you remember me? I was a client at the bank.” I was like, “Yeah, I remember. He’s like, “I have to tell you this. That transaction registry you gave me. I went from having negative balances all the time to having $2,000 that’s in my account.”
That’s amazing.
At the beginning of this episode, we talked about tracking it to stack it. It turned this kid’s life around by simply tracking his money. That’s why I created this spending tracker and planner tool. I wanted my daughter to have the same sort of experience. Have you had a similar feeling?
Yeah. It feels so good to know what I’m spending and what I can save. I feel like my savings have gone up because I know what I’m spending my money on.
The mere act of having a tracking tool helps you make a better decision about whether or not to spend, which means you’re more likely to save, which means you’re more likely to have the opportunity to do other cool things like go on a cool trip or pay for a new car or do the education or whatever. It’s such a fun thing.
Guys, thanks for listening. I love you. If you find this content valuable, please drop a like, subscribe, and drop a comment on YouTube. Do a review of this. Share it with your friends and family. That’s the most important thing. I can’t help thousands of people unless you are willing to share this. I’m so grateful for your willingness to do that. I love you and we’ll see you in the next episode.
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About Emily Reed
She is also passionate about using her talents and energy to make a positive impact in the world.