Remember, these questions are meant to guide your reflection on your financial journey. You don’t have to answer all of them. Use them as a starting point for your journaling, especially if you’re unsure where to begin. The aim is to help you articulate and understand your financial experiences and the lessons you’ve learned.
Easy
Uncomfortable
Fucking Brutal
All right, we’re gonna talk about finance now.
Money.
Money. Okay.
The big ideas here is we’re talking about financial principles. “How do you view money? What is your relationship to money? How do you deal with financial challenges? Do you budget? What financial sacrifices have you made? What lessons have you learned around money and finances? This is a bit touchy for some folks, but we’re getting into the meatier stuff now.
Yeah. I mean, I’m not a money guy. Like I’m not good with numbers and finance and it’s never really a motivator for me. Like I’ve always, you know, this is great. This is something I would tell my kids, right? For this, I, I would literally be like, “Hey, look, you know, money is always difficult for me and, you know, we don’t have a lot of money, but I, I worked really, really hard. So that you could have these things, right? So you’re not getting a lake house, you’re not getting a Ferrari. I don’t have that kind of things to leave you, but what I do wanna tell you is why I did what I did, why I could have made a lot more money if I would’ve been unhappy and did this, and why I made less so I could have freedom.” Like really important lessons around money and finances that are gonna take them a long way. These are things that people, I mean, parents should be teaching their kids anyway. We do. We do. But schools should be teaching these types of things. Yeah. Right. So you could get real down and dirty on specifics of setting up bank accounts and savings, and you could go high level. “Here’s the relationships you should have with money and how, you know, you and mom did it, and however, whatever.” There’s a million different directions.
There is, and I think in my opinion that what you just mentioned is the most important aspect. That’s where people get really off the rails, right? They have toxic relationships with money, so there’s tons of resources on there out there for them to. There’s apps on their phones that are gonna help them with a budget. I think the real value in this conversation in this module is talking about your perspective on money and finances, including your own family programming because I brought a lot of baggage with me from my childhood around money and finances, and I hopefully have broken some of those terrible patterns. But that’s what we’re talking about here.
Yeah. So check out the prompts, go through, decide which questions mean something to you here. And then, just go do ’em. Put some content out there, that’s gonna help them moving forward in their life. And try not to talk about anything specific to the time, like, U.S. dollar or cryptocurrency, because when they watch this, 30, 40 years from now, or look back five years from now, none of it might make sense.
So if you’re done, if you think you’re ready to go do this, go do it. We’re gonna do the longer explanation about this now.
All right. So should we take a look at some of the questions here? We’ve got some of the prompts. Alright. Some of the easy ones. We’ll start off easy. “What are some key principles you follow in managing your personal finances? Can you describe a financial goal that you set and achieved? So, you know, this is kinda low level, getting a win, telling stories about some financial stuff that’s not too difficult.
Yeah. Like, you know, hey, here’s, I got my start. You know, I didn’t make money when I first got out of college, and here’s how I went from here to here. Here’s how I started my business. Here’s the financing I used. Here’s how mom and I split the money and you know, this and that… I think it’s important stuff. Instead of them having to figure it, I mean. Again, instead of them having to figure everything out. I want you to imagine this scenario for a second: your grandkid or your kid is in their thirties or forties and they’re thinking about starting a business and they’re sitting around one day instead of watching whatever social media channel there is, TikTokazon or whatever, they start watching the videos that you made and they go, “You know, dad said something right there. That changed my whole perspective on how I’m gonna start this business.” That’s what we’re talking about, right? That’s why you’re doing this.
Absolutely. You can kind of work your way up to some of the more emotionally charged questions like, in the uncomfortable category, there’s things like, “What financial challenges have you faced and how did you overcome them? How has your approach to money and finances changed?” And, “What’s the most valuable financial lesson you learned and how did you learn it?”
See, I consider those not fucking… are those fucking brutal?
No, those are working up to…
So those are like the easy. So there’s fucking brutal versions of these.
All right, here’s fucking brutal. “What sacrifices have you made for financial stability or growth? And do you have any regrets about them?”
Yeah, that’s like a really authentic question where you could get really transparent. I mean, let’s face it, most of us have money problems, right? We are always chasing. If you could go back and do things differently, like this is the one thing I always talk about with my wife. Man, why didn’t we go 20 years ago and buy a bunch of houses and properties in the parts of town… like the mortgage would’ve been nothing. It would’ve been like $180 a month. We could have afforded it. And now you could sell those properties for hundreds of thousands of dollars. But we didn’t have the foresight because we were so focused on the family. Like, I’m making a video right now, right? This is something I need to tell my children. You know, think a little bit ahead, and take a couple risks financially because I know a lot of people who have their entire retirements, are completely built off of the income they did from buying an office building 25 years ago. Or buying a house in a neighborhood that’s now in Tremont. Or some neighborhood around us. That’s a really important lesson. And I show regret when I talk about it, but I want them to understand that. So when they are thinking about taking a risk, they’re going, you know what dad? You know, he told me in the video, he said, “I wish I would’ve done that.” And maybe they go do that. Doesn’t that make you feel good sleeping or dying, knowing that that advice got to them? Right. You may have not given it to ’em now, but maybe they’re getting it after you’re gone.
Jim, there’s also something that I’m glad you touched upon it here, that is gonna start to become a factor in these videos or audio that you’re leaving, which is your relationship to your significant other. We can’t tell you the best approach for this. We can’t guarantee you that the videos or the audio that you create won’t eventually be seen by your spouse or significant other. You have to navigate that. There are gonna be some things I know I’m gonna say to my own kids that would be really uncomfortable if I said to my wife, but I might have to say them anyways. And there might be other things that I don’t share because it would be too hurtful or painful. And I think we’re starting to get now into the topics where, they’re gonna become more emotionally charged. And, I want you to keep that in mind. I want you to be thinking about, “What if my significant other saw this? How would they feel about it?” And again, we don’t have any solution. We don’t have any prescriptive way for you to handle that because we don’t know your situation, but you need to be aware of it.
Yeah. And again, this all comes down to how transparent and how open you wanna be with this, which is why we’ve categorized these into “really easy” and into “fucking brutal.”
I mean, as an example, maybe this is one you skip. There could be some that you’re like, “I just don’t even want to go there.” That’s fine. We’re not saying you have to do all of these the way we’re laying them out. We’re just giving you all the tools so you can decide which ones to pick up.
Again, the point is just to do something, you may end up not doing this entire section, like you said. You may just do everything in an entirely different section of relationships or career or… You may not even touch finance. You may never even talk about your relationship with your spouse or anything. We’re just guiding you, right? We’re helping you and giving you the prompts and the motivation to go out and just get it done. You may end up with three videos or you may end up with 300. It’s up to you.
Alright. We ready for the next one?
Yep.