204. The Money Tree: What to Water, Prune, and Replant in Your Finances

What if improving your finances isn’t about completely changing who you are—but learning what to water, what to prune, and when to plant something new?

In this episode of the Money & Legacy Podcast, Laura uses the story of three trees to explain how your natural money habits, unhealthy financial patterns, and developing skills all shape your financial future.

You’ll learn:

• How to recognize and strengthen your natural money tendencies
• Which expenses, debts, and habits may need to be pruned
• Why intense debt payoff can sometimes cause the joyful parts of life to atrophy
• How to recover when a new budget or money habit doesn’t work the first time
• Why your children need to see you learning, adjusting, and trying again

Your financial legacy isn’t simply the destination you eventually reach. It is the way you live, grow, and lead your family along the journey.

Ready for support building a values-based money system that fits your life? Email Laura at laura@accelerateyourlegacy.com.

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Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants-50 0:00

I've got two trees on my property. One is thriving and the other not so much. So what do we do next?

Laura 0:10

You are listening to the Money and Legacy Podcast with Laura Sexton. I'm helping families pay off debt, grow wealth, and build a legacy without sacrificing what matters most. This is where money feels easy.

Audio Only - All Participants-50 0:23

Hey, legacy builders. I know I'm starting out talking about trees, and there are so many directions I can be going with this. But today, I wanna talk about thriving and not thriving when it comes to these trees. I've got two trees on the front of my property. They were planted at the same time. They came from the same nursery. Everything about the trees is exactly the same except how they are currently, growing. It's like a tree, but it's kind of like a bush. It's a decorative thing in my front yard. I probably should have looked up the name of these two little trees, right? So we've got two of them. They're both facing the same direction. They get the same amount of sun, the same amount of water as far as I'm aware. They're growing differently, and I thought that was interesting, and I think that there's something to be said here about our children. I've got five children that are all growing up in the same house. They have the same two parents. They have the same DNA, more or less, and they're vastly different people,. The same is true with your money. You could have all of the same beginnings and go down completely different paths than your siblings. You could have the exact same job as somebody else and do different things with your money and have a different outcome. You are your own person, and for this scenario, you are your own tree let's talk about these trees, one that is thriving and one that is not, and what it is that we are going to do as a family to fix these trees. Now, we could have ignored the tree situation. When we go outside and look, there's one of them, the one on the right side of the house, it's lush, it's thriving, it looks amazing. The one on the left side of the house was thriving in the front and dead in the back. And I mean actually dead. It was brown and a hazard. So we could have ignored it and hoped that it was going to work itself out, sometimes nature just comes in and fixes plants to be how they want it to be. Or they're supposed to look like they're dormant and then they come back to thriving. Nature does that sometimes. But instead of just ignoring the problem and hoping that it would work itself out, which you do with money sometimes, and you know that you do, instead of that, we made a couple of very intentional choices. So the first thing we did is we decided to continue to water the good tree. Now, as far as your money is concerned, in this analogy, the good tree is your natural bent with money. One of my children is a natural spender. You give her a dollar, she spends two. I've got another child who's a full-on giver. He just wants to give his money away. And I have another child that's a saver. She doesn't see anything that's worth her time and her money right now, so she's not gonna spend her money. She'll wait till next time You have a natural bent when it comes to your money, and so do your children, and you wanna make sure that you nurture that and you give that attention and you help it grow because that is a very important part of your money psychology. I don't want you to ever get to a place where you feel like you have to change. Now, if you're a natural spender, we have to put guardrails up. Obviously, we have to make sure that you are getting fed in the right way, where you get to spend your money on things that you have permission to spend your money on. But we also have to teach you to also do the other things, the saving and the giving, right? So we have to give it nutrition. So if you're a natural spender, we intentionally give you spending power. If you're a natural saver, we intentionally give you things to save for. And we just have to pay attention to it and continue to water that. Let it grow how it grows, and know that it's okay for you to be that way We don't, however, want to overwater. If you overwater something that is good, it will die. It will drown. A tree that is overwatered becomes firewood. We don't want to overwater. You don't want to give it too much nutrition. If you're a spender, we don't want to spend too much. The tree on the left side of the house, well, it looked good from the front, but from behind it was dying. This is the opposite of your natural money behavior. This is the tree that needs some help. And this is the part of your money behavior that's going to need some extra time and attention to be cultivated to grow in a healthy manner. So what did we do to our dying tree? We pruned it. We had to cut away the pieces that were not alive, and what we found was there was a second Trunk to the tree. Now, I thought it was all one trunk, and I was like, "We're gonna have to take it all the way out and throw it away." But it turns out there was one trunk that was healthy, and then there was one right behind it. They have the same root system, but they came up in two different trunks. Do not ask me how. I do not know how these things work. So the one that came up behind it, the second trunk, we cut off. Now, it was bigger than the front one, and it had more branches than the front one. However, it was dead. So we cut it off. And you know what happened when we pruned the part of the tree that was dead? The front part of the tree started to encompass the back, and the branches started to grow in and cover the dead area. Now, our tree is smaller now, but it's completely healthy, and it's thriving. But we had to intentionally cut off parts of it that were killing it. And if we had left that bigger trunk there, the dead one, it would have eventually killed the front as well. When we don't prune away the things that are zapping our energy or stealing our money, so this would be credit cards that you're paying interest on. This would be car payments. This would be those subscriptions that you were signed up for, that you signed up for a long time ago and you don't even remember, or you pay for Paramount Plus, but you haven't watched anything on Paramount Plus in three years, but you're still paying for it These are the things that we have to prune away. And when it comes to your money behavior, if you are not careful, you can atrophy. You can start to be so focused on one area of your life that you forget the rest. So I see this a lot with my clients that are paying off debt, and we are so intentional with paying off debt, and we are absolutely ridiculously overwhelmed with this is our whole goal. And trust me, part of that is wonderful. When you are in the season of paying off debt, I want you to be aggressive and vehement about it because I want it to be a very short period of your life. I don't want you to be aggressive and vehement about paying off debt for a long period of time. That would be obnoxious and, and hard. But I want you to be vehement about it in the short term because the faster we can get out, the faster we can get on with our life. However, I have a lot of clients that have been paying off debt for so long that when we get done paying off debt, they forget how to live. The living side, the joyful side of their life has atrophied. And so we have to learn how to go from intense paying off debt to living a little. So sometimes as we get closer to the end, we can talk about, okay, what is life gonna look like? And we have to really work through that because that part of our life has started to shrivel. Again, this goes back to my whole philosophy of values-based money systems. I want you to focus on who you want to be eventually, the legacy that we're gonna leave. Who are we, who do we want people to say we are when we walk out of the room? And that's the work that I do with my clients. It's not all debt payoff all the time. It is, what are your values, who do you wanna become, and how do we get you there? And sometimes that's debt payoff full throttle as fast as we can, and sometimes we build in celebration, and sometimes we have to go back to what is your natural bent and how can we celebrate that while we are accomplishing the goals that you have to get you ultimately to where you wanna go So we've got this thriving tree, and we have this dying tree that hopefully is not dying anymore. I think we've turned a corner now that we've done the pruning, and it's starting to look like a full tree again as it's encompassing the back part as well. So here's the other thing we did, because we did three things. The third thing we did was we bought a new tree I know what you're thinking. You're like, "A new tree? If I have one of the trees is supposed to be what I'm good at, and one of the trees is supposed to be what I'm bad at, Laura, what in the world could this third tree that you bought be?" Well, my friends, it's a new skill. It's a new skill, and a new training, and a new thing that we're going to add into your system. Now, I will tell you, this new tree that we got, it died. We bought a third tree, and it died. And you know what? That's okay. We're gonna go out, and we're gonna buy another new tree. And sometimes when we get new skills, especially when it comes to our money, we fail. We s- fail once, we fail twice, we fail three times. We fail with new things. I don't know if you've ever seen a, a baby stand up and start walking. They don't just all of a sudden go, "I'd like to start walking today," and stand up and walk and never fall down again. I'm a grown adult, and I still fall down occasionally. Babies, they get up, they take a step, they fall. They get up, they take a step, they fall. This happens. And now, what do we do for babies when they get up to walk? We give them walkers. We hold their hand. We give them tools. We walk alongside them. We make sure that they are steady on their feet. We give them pillows. You need new skills, and if you are having trouble acquiring a new skill, you bring somebody in to walk alongside you, to give you the guidance, the, the hand-holding, to make sure you don't fall off a cliff. These are fabulous things to have. My husband and I are going to buy another tree. We're going to try again, and we're going to change the way we did it because the first time we bought the tree, we thought we were doing the right thing. We did not do the right thing. We're going to adjust because that's what you do. You make adjustments. You try again. When it comes to your money, it is so easy to fall off the wagon, but it's so much better if you get back on the wagon, and now you've learned a new way to stay on. You've learned a new way to not fall off. You learned a new way to get you to where you ultimately wanna be. I've been listening recently to a book on the Oregon Trail. If you grew up in the '90s like I did, that was one of your favorite parts of social studies, playing the Oregon Trail. But I've been reading about different stories and things about the people that were actually traveling, and you know what? A lot of them didn't make it, but they were all willing to try. And I promise you, no matter what you want to do in life, if you are willing to try, you are going to get so much more out of the journey than you would ever get out of the destination. And your legacy is not the destination. Your legacy is how you act on the way to where you want to go. So my friends, you can continue to water your good tree, you prune your dying tree, and you buy a new tree. All of those are different potential strategies And what they show is the potential within you. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are able to do the things that you ultimately want to do in life. You have the power to create the financial legacy that you want to leave, and the relational legacy, and the mindset, and the tools, and the habits. All of those are within your control. Your kids are watching you, so decide how you want them to see you, and then be that person All right, my legacy builders. I'm gonna go outside and water my plants, and I hope that you know that whatever it is you choose, I am here to walk alongside you. I would absolutely love to be your guide, to walks beside you, to hold your hand as you learn a new skill. If you need any help, please feel free to reach out to me. You can send me an email, laura@accelerateyourlegacy.com, all right, my legacy builders, until next week, go out and make a difference