How To Talk About Money With Your Family

Elevate your financial freedom in your 'Second Half of Life' with actionable tools and tips! In this video, we discuss budgeting apps, financial books like The Millionaire Next Door, and how to have meaningful money talks with your family or partner. Whether you’re exploring personal finance strategies, looking to boost financial literacy, or seeking budgeting tips, this is your guide to a better financial future. Join us for insights from our family’s annual Financial Summit and take charge of your money journey today!

Transcript

The Second Half of Life can have some difficult conversations, whether it's about relationships, plans for the future, or especially things like money. You got a lot of money? 
Wouldn't you like to know! We should maybe get on the same page with this. Maybe we should probably have a conversation about it today. Let's talk about money. 
Welcome back to Track Us Down! If you're just finding us. I'm Monique. And I'm Doug. Our channel is all about retiring early, moving abroad, but mostly living what we call a better second half of life. After over 25 years of working hard and raising our family, we retired from our careers, we sold everything and we began our second half of life. We make our base here on the beautiful island of Madeira. So today we wanna share with you three really big ideas. One is a format for you to have conversations about all things difficult, all things second half of life, including relationships, career and money. And we bring up money specifically because in our past videos on our family summit, we've talked about money and how it can be a very difficult subject to get into with your family, especially if you had a family situation that didn't talk about money. But what would that format look like if you were gonna do it seriously with your family members or with each other or just by yourself? What format could that take? We call it a summit, a family summit. We're gonna talk about why this format works so well and why we actually chose to do this with our family and we continue to do it at least twice a year. The next thing we're gonna share with you is an amazing budgeting app that's completely free. And finally, as part of our family summit, we always have a book to read, a book that we share. And if you'd like to read along with us, we're gonna be sharing the next book that we will be reading. So summit format, a budgeting app, and a great book to read for your financial literacy. Let's get into it just in case you're tired of people who are not professionals giving you advice on how you should do your finances. That's not what this is. Just to be clear, this is not financial advice. This is more of a format and a fun way to plan your better second half of life by having a concrete plan in place through a financial summit with yourself, your significant other or your family. It's fun and it's something that you can follow along and it really does make a difference. So basically in the family summit or a financial summit, you can have a list of whatever you want the content to be. We have our content that makes sense for us and our family, and you would have what makes sense for your family. Let's talk about what the format actually is. The format started off really loose. We talked about it last year in our financial summit video where we sat down with our boys when they were here visiting us here in Madeira and we said we're gonna have this family summit, a financial summit so that we can go over finances and best practices, especially for them going forward so that they don't fall into the same traps that we did as we were in our young adulthood and raising a family and spending and boring more than we should have. And one of the really neat things that happened at that financial summit is that it also helped us significantly. It gave us a lot more direction. We thought we were giving them direction, but I think we ended up getting a lot of direction ourself. Of course, whenever you learn something yourself and you start teaching it, it does reinforce it. So of course it came back to us a lot about why this was so important. It was great fun for us in teaching this, but it also really hammered home how important it was. And we learned a lot as we were going along ourselves. But ideally it was for the young people in our life. So like Doug said, the format was basically sitting down at a time designated and having the conversation that we wanted to have that included an agenda that included some formality to it. It also included some snacks and some drinks and more like I would call it a staff meeting or a small business meeting. What would you call it? The same. There's one thing Monique loves doing. It's making lists and making an agenda. So she was in her glory here. And you know what? It really played out very smoothly. I think all teachers will agree with me that it's a lot of fun to prepare an agenda and lay out the list that is part of what actually makes the format work. The fact that it's very formal is kind of weird and awkward, but the weird and awkward of the formality takes away from the weird and awkward of things you're gonna talk about. And we had a financial summit because both of us growing up didn't really talk about money with our parents. We didn't get a lot of advice in that way. And so we really didn't have a way to talk to our sons who are now adults about money. And so the weird formality kind of put it in its place and took away from the awkwardness surprisingly, and made for really open conversation. So it was funny, it was goofy, it was kind of eye rolling all at the beginning. But after the first one, because we had part one and part two after that first part, it just settled into normalcy. Now I know many of you are probably watching this and say, well, we've been talking about money in our family for a long time. And that's great that you came from that kind of background or you thought of this so long ago. I wish we would have, we never came from that background. But it's never too late to start again. And we wanna make sure that our boys have the best information are on the right track going forward for the rest of their life. 
So even if you have been talking about money, there might be other areas that are difficult conversations that you want that you can use the same format. And there's something about having an agenda, taking little notes and making people accountable for goals and saying, okay, so do you wanna work on that the next six months? Let's put that down. There's something about that formality as awkward and weird as it is that actually makes everybody feel more comfortable. It's kind of like taking it off the family and putting it onto the agenda takes away the pressure on everyone. So what are the things on the agenda that you might go through in part one and part two of a financial summit with your significant other, by yourself or with your family? Well, you definitely wanna have an agenda and have maybe some goals that you wanna have, some books that you wanna read, some information that you wanna know, you wanna be taking a look at where your money's going. That would be the budgeting part. And you also wanna take a look at what your net worth is and where you are and where you wanna be. I think starting with net worth for everybody is a great first step. Once you've done that and you're consulting your loans or you're working on your debts, and we're not gonna get too far into that, you can read the books that we've read and follow along with the experts. But when you follow that plan and you have a set goal, you can see where your money is parked, whether it's working for you or if it's not, if it's making any interest or investments. And you can start to lay a groundwork once you have a bit of financial literacy and you read some of these books and you have a better understanding of how making money making work for you works. So as Doug said, that idea of having a book to read is really important for the family summit as well because ours is more of a financial summit maybe it won't always be. We've been reading financial books with our two sons over time, over years we've been saying, okay, this is the book we're reading. Let's read it together, take notes and let's talk about it. And the teachers out there will know what I'm doing here is because the second you bring in another voice other than just the parental voice or the spousal voice, you have a third person. That third voice adds to the conversation and it gives it a way of people agreeing and disagreeing that isn't against each other. But you're talking about that third person, Hey, he says this in the book, what do you think of that? And it works for finances really well, but it could also work in a relationship summit. It could also work in a career summit or whatever you're planning in your summit to have a book that sort of just gives you guidance. I think a great summit to add to that. If your finances are where you want to be and you don't need to do a tuneup on your finances, another great summit, maybe a fitness summit where you can sit down with your significant other or your family and say, Hey, what goals do we wanna achieve? How do we wanna improve our longevity and our health going forward? What are some of the things that we can do? Some of the things, the books that we can read that's gonna enhance our life so that we can live here in places like Madeira or Portugal or wherever you choose abroad and be more active and more fit and more healthy and just enjoying your better second half of life. So there are different ways to have a family summit without it being financial. We've done both. I like the fitness idea. That's really good. And it plays into that idea of having goals. And one of the things at the financial summit or your fitness summit, depending on what you wanna have is getting some concrete goals down for everybody. And everybody's sort of having an action plan. And we actually called it an action plan. An action plan for what you're gonna do in the next six months with your money, with your investments. And you're gonna come back to the summit, whether it's fitness or financial or relationship. And you're gonna report back what you've done and where things are at. And it sort of gives you that group where we're all cheering for each other to be successful, whether that's in getting to be a runner or getting stronger or getting better with money. So from educator to CEO, we can bring this home and make it a impactful thing for everyone involved. And the final part of a financial summit about the structure, the format or the family summit is these are the people you love the most. Whether you're on your own, you're gonna do it for you, you're gonna do it with your spouse or you're gonna have your entire family there. These are the people you love the most. And a lot of these conversations are very difficult or they tend to be very chopped up. They're a little bit of chat in the car one time you talked about this. But to take the time and say we're gonna devote an hour or two to sitting as a family and talking about things that are really important in life, whatever that is for you is really powerful. And I think that it brings a family or a couple even closer together. So we have some other things that tie into a financial summit that we want to talk about here in this video. But for the actual format and the structure of how we did it our first time, we encourage you to watch our video that we did last year on our very first financial summit with our family. We'll have it linked here and also at the end of the video, it's well worth watching 'cause it dives in deeper into the kinda the step-by-step beginning steps that we took. And it might work for you as well, but let's move on. Alright, the next part is exciting because I can't believe I'm excited about a budgeting app. Last year for our financial summit, we read Dave Ramsey's the Total Money Makeover. Now, we weren't in a position where we were in debt and looking for answers, but we were pulling information that he had that was applicable to us. And I think it was a good book to read to give our boys just heads up and warning about the power of debt and how you, that's not a direction you wanna go. Luckily we are not in a debt situation. We took care of that a long time ago. But it is still important to keep revisiting those principles so that you don't first of all fall back into that trap. But most of all that you can pass that information along and make sure that your family, if you have kids, do not fall into that same trap that we did years ago when interest rates were low. You could borrow money against your house, you could live a little large and it can really hamper your goals for an early financial freedom. So it's good to, even though you don't fall into that camp, still good to revisit that type of information just for your own peace of mind. And for others. It was a really good book. But another thing we found in that book that was awesome for all of us was his free budgeting app. Every dollar counts. It is a great app. It doesn't have to have all these bells and whistles and ties to banks, although I think it might even do that. You have your income that we're living on here in our second half of life. And then everything your categories that you want from restaurants to house maintenance to cars to gyms, you name it, you can have a category for everything. It's just a great way of keeping track of what you have coming in and what you're spending going out so that you can end up in the positive at the end of each month. And you can live a long time on what you have. And what I really like about the app is it's sort of in the premise of these are the dollars that you have coming in. Make every dollar matter, give every dollar a job and it's working for you. For us, it was really neat to see where our money was going and where we were maybe overspending or, and maybe where we can spend a little more or save a little more. Like even saving for holidays or Christmas or travel things that are important to us. And for our boys, it gives them a structure. It doesn't need to be directly attached to your bank, so it can be separate, but it does give you an easy way to jot in the money, the things that you're spending and gives you a really good visual at the end of the month of where your money is. It's also a lot of fun. There's something empowering and fun of being in control of your money, 
making those entries each month and deciding where you wanna spend your money and just watching the savings rack up, seeing where you're overspending. 'cause it can be very surprising sometimes restaurants. So it is a great tool, whether it's the every dollar budget app or your other favorite budgeting app. We highly suggest that you get into that even in your second half of life. It is so worth it and empowering. And finally, we've had a chance to meet up with a lot of you and we've heard some really interesting family summits that people have done. We had one of our subscribers, friends who let us know that they had a family summit and ended up giving their children some money for investing and gave them some goals to reach without money and began teaching about long-term investing, which I thought was really neat. And we had other subscribers who talked about having more of a relationship summit, which was a take on our FA Financial summit. So that was really neat too. So if you do have a family summit, do let us know what kind of summits you ended up having and if you enjoyed the format, there's something so rewarding of first of all, learning that information and how you feel in control and empowered, but also passing it on to somebody that you care about. And then here we are one year later seeing what they're doing with that information and it's already become a snowball effect. There's so much more financially literate, they're teaching it to others and they are growing their finances, they're in controller finances. And as a parent, that is just so comforting. And don't forget that part of the Family Summit requires that third person, that third voice. So usually a book we have read Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover last year and a few other books. They're all linked in our Amazon store Linked Down below. If you wanna check out the books this year, we've picked The Millionaire Next Door. That is the book that we are reading as a family that we are gonna discuss when we meet again in the summer as part of our Family summit. So if you'd like to read along with, 
check out the link below, community is great, especially when it comes to financial literacy. If you have recommendations, let us know in the comments down below. And all in all, all of this leads to what we call a better second half of life, which is what we like to talk about on this channel. So if you enjoy a good conversation about living longer, better, a better second half of life, please like and subscribe to our channel. And on that note, if you would like to support our channel or also have one-on-one contact with us, please check out our Patreon page or we have access to personal contact and dialogue with us, with you, something that we always enjoy. And make sure to tune in for the next video where we put out another one of the original Madeira Cost of Living videos, the ones that started it all, where we detail our cost of living here as it changes year to year. It's been over three years now. You can go back from the beginning and see where we started and we detail it each year in February, once January's under our belt. It's the original and it's the best. Thank you for spending some of your day with us today. And as always, check back in and Track Us Down!