Dinner Table Money Conversations – Episode 525  

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, we’re going to be talking about dinner, table, money conversations. And don’t worry, we’re not going to throw any food. We’re not going to have any fights and we will not talk about politics or religion, just money. So the other thing that everyone fights about, how about that? So this actually stems from a book and it stems from a conversation that we’ve been having many threads about. We’re using the prosperity thinking to do some addition, meaning we’re taking what’s good and we’re adding to it. So, Kim, do you mind kind of setting the system of what we’re going to be talking about today? Absolutely. Well, I would first encourage people if they are popping into this podcast episode

[00:52] singly to back up three or four because we’ve been sharing a lot of wisdom around this for the last few episodes and I’m so grateful to Scott Donald, his community at Gravy Stack and the book Value Creation Kid, for synthesizing in a way that I couldn’t have done better the perpetual wealth or legacy based thinking that we want people to be having around their finances. And so it is just invaluable to have some very purposeful discussions ready for dinner table time. Otherwise, what you get is this. How was your day? Fine. How was school? Great. I’m the mom. Let me try again. Do you have any homework? No. I’m the dad. I’m getting mad. Right. What do I? That’s how it is in many cases. That’s not acceptable.

[02:01] Get it. I get it. Yes. And it’s sad. And it comes because we’re not purposeful about dinner table time. And I even have one friend that was a single mom for a while. And she said, I am going to create enough money so that we can just go out at least three or four nights a week so that I can be fully present with my children. And I’m not trying to get food done also. Now, a lot of times, depending on the age of your children, you can include them in the food prep and some good conversations can happen then, too. But however it is that you want to get it done, let’s be purposeful about the conversations. And this can start at such an early age. I mean, you everybody has seen if you don’t have young children yourself,

[02:56] we’ve seen the two and three year old tantrum at the grocery store around the candy aisle or the trinket aisle. And so the first thing is if you just stay out of those aisles, maybe that would solve the problem. But dinner table conversations is what we’re talking about here. And frankly, that’s a perfect one. Right. Maybe your kids have even witnessed another child acting out in that space. And so asking why is a great way to deepen a conversation. So go back to the beginning, you know, how was your day? Great or fine or whatever one single syllable word you’re going to get asking why. And there’s a lot of proof that you can ask why seven times. There’s seven layers of questioning. You can look it up on the web that lots of people teach around getting to a

[03:50] deeper discussion. So that’s one tip that I have. And then I’ve got a couple others, but Spencer, I’m guessing that you guys have some family dinner table conversations that are awesome. And we want to try to get to the money conversations. What are some of the ones that you’ve used? Yeah, so we do. You mentioned one principle in there that we adopt, which is we’re being very intentional and we’re communicating that intention. So as you mentioned, your friend, she wanted to be able to be present and have good conversation. So same thing. We’ll say, hey, you know, tonight at dinner, we’re going to be talking about blank. And so we’ll mention that at breakfast so they can think about it during the day.

[04:31] If they think about it during the day, I don’t know. But at least the seed was planted and it’s not a surprise. So I’ll throw in a weird one that we do, but it works really well. So I am all about using Chad GPT and AI, like my family knows. And I’m like the biggest nerd around. I get it, but I just love it. So what I’ve done is I set up several prompts and I said, hey, Chad, you’re now a relationship coach and you can adopt many other roles of financial advisor, whatever that may be. It depends on how the prompt is. And I’ll say, we’re going on a walk for 10 minutes or I’ll even say, we’re going to have dinner for a half an hour. Give me some conversations and some questions that I can use.

[05:26] And it will sit there and it’ll go and it gives me those. And we’ll sit at the table and say, this is what Chad said. Let’s go through it. And it’s amazing because it is so intentional. They’re good conversations. They may go from easy to harder and the conversation moves about. So I’m adopting this new style and maybe it’ll work for a while. And then I’ll try something different. So using AI is our companion right now. That’s great. One of the things that I love to do when I’m being very purposeful around the conversation, I don’t think every dinner needs to be this way, but is to tackle a time of the month or the year when there’s a lot of financial things going on and be purposeful about bringing those facts into the conversation.

[06:21] So it could be something as simple as we’re going to dinner or maybe last night we went out to dinner. And I would love for you to guess how much dinner cost or how much your individual meal cost or that kind of thing. And then maybe we’re also going grocery shopping. So we’ll bring the grocery receipt to the table and just have some conversation around that like, for example, Todd loves to buy whole fillets. So like the whole backstrap and cut it up into steaks and it’s an expensive piece of meat, but it’s way less expensive when you look at it price per pound than buying the individual steak. So you could take a look at that or the grated cheese that is out there, right? The price of a block of cheese versus the price of the grated cheese and

[07:16] having a conversation around the value of sometimes purchasing which we absolutely do. And the value of sometimes having the grid at the block where you have to grade it yourself so that a child could help with that or what have you, which we absolutely do. And the difference in those price structures. So again, just takes a moment of purpose thinking to say, okay, what would be something that would be appropriate to discuss? Because I think it’s difficult for a lot of parents to bring too much data around money to the table. Like you don’t really necessarily want your children to know your income because they might accidentally share that. And that might be awkward or your mortgage payment or something like

[08:03] that, but stuff that’s pretty normal in the day-to-day operations of most families, fair game. And yet it’s got to have a little bit of purpose thinking done ahead of time so that it’s appropriate, especially if you have a wide age range in your family, because if you’ve got like a high schooler and then you’ve got a two-year-old or whatever, maybe not two, but five years old where they can gather some of the conversation, but not all of it. You want to have it appropriate. Or maybe you just even go forward with this is going to be a dinner for the high schooler and the five-year-old, this is one of those times where he’s asked to sit and listen, good skill to have. And maybe it’s the other way around.

[08:45] In fact, how awesome would it be to ask your high schooler to share what he thinks or she thinks that five-year-old needs to have in a conversation around money so that you get the whole perpetual wealth going right from the beginning. Absolutely. That is, that is so good. And I think where you’re going with this is that we’re being really intentional. We’re taking the time to involve everyone in this. We’re adapting the conversation by the age or whatever that may be. And we’re also not afraid to let the conversation maybe go over the heads of some other people. So for example, if you have friends over for dinner, you can go into deep conversation and ahead of the dinner with the kids, you can say,

[09:34] Hey, we may talk about business ideas or we may talk about travel or how their family operates. And, you know, your percentage of listening may be greater than your percentage of talking. And then there may be times that we call you in and ask you questions in the conversation. And so we understand that dynamic. You know, you’re mentioning the grated cheese as an example. You know, when I heard that story of your mentioning right there, it makes me think, you know, simplicity, you can say to the kids, look like the more hands that have to get involved in a process, the higher the cost will be, or the more that these bits and pieces move or the complicated, it can be a higher cost. And so how else can we adapt and change?

[10:23] What does this work in our life? And so there’s always a conversation to go. Right. And it’s so, so valuable for a child to learn to sit and listen. And know how to do that and know how to deal with their physical self and their fidgetiness and sit and listen. And it’s just frankly not being taught in the schools. And it’s an uber important skill. It is. Uh, one thing I’m thinking of recently, this is probably six months ago. So not super recent, but recent, uh, I’m involved in a, a small group. We’ll call it with a, an author named BJ Fogg and BJ Fogg is a psychologist and BJ is doing a lot of work with kids. And so BJ sent out a link to just a few of us about a new song that had been written, teaching habits.

[11:20] And these are tiny habits for kids. They’re cool. Right. I love this. Yes, it’s awesome. And so he wanted us to review this and think how this is going to work for the kids and the kid’s perspective. But he mentioned the complexity and the difficulty it is to take something that is difficult to explain even to teenagers and you don’t dumb it down, but you make it so that a little kid can understand. And so even BJ, arguably the world’s best psychologist at creating habits is going to his peer group us to then review, give feedback and talk and go through that. And that’s what the dinner table conversations can look like. It can be our own family’s prosperity conversations every night. And some nights we may hit home runs.

[12:17] Some nights we might strike out. But we still play the game. That’s okay. I love it. Yep. All right. We have a successes and gosh, there was a great other word for that learnings, basically winnings and learnings is how I like to say it. But there’s a successes and I had another word there that was appropriate and it’s gone. Yet it’s so, so important to help our family members know that that is part of life and it’s how you come back from that. That matters. And I’ve enjoyed BJ Fogg’s work for a long, long time. I believe you were the one that connected me to him. Fabulous material there. I can’t wait for that song to be out in the public. I’ll, uh, I’ll find it and then get you. If we, if it’s public now, I’ll, uh, put it in the show notes.

[13:06] If not, then we’ll let you know when it does. That sounds great. And for all of you listeners, the simple call to action is be intentional with your dinner table money conversations. And I imagine that you could do this maybe starting now as BJ mentions as one question at one dinner this week, and that might be enough to then stem for the next and we’ll go to the next and the next, but I will say just by listening to this episode with us and being a part of it, it’s the seed that’s planted that’s going to help you. So thank you for being a participant in the conversation with us today. Thank you for listening to the prosperity podcast to take control of your money and have it work for you, visit prosperity thinkers.com.