Why Money Feels So Personal: Understanding the Emotions Behind It

In this episode of ABC's Apparenting Adult Children podcast, host James Moffitt talks with John Hankins, a certified financial therapist and licensed social worker. They discuss the importance of financial literacy for young adults, the emotional connections to money, and the challenges parents face when supporting adult children financially. John shares insights on budgeting, saving, and managing credit, while James reflects on his own financial journey and the lessons learned from his parents.

Keywords

financial literacy, adult children, budgeting, saving, credit management, financial therapy, emotional connections, retirement planning, financial stress, financial education

Takeaways

• Financial literacy is crucial for young adults to manage their future effectively.
• Parents should lead by example in teaching financial management to their children.
• Understanding emotional connections to money can improve financial decision-making.
• Budgeting and saving are foundational skills for financial stability.
• Credit management is essential to avoid long-term debt issues.
• Parents often face challenges when financially supporting adult children.
• Retirement planning requires careful consideration of long-term financial needs.
• Financial therapy can help individuals and couples manage financial stress.
• The financial markets' volatility requires a balanced and informed approach.
• Open communication about money can strengthen family relationships.

Sound bites

• "Financial literacy is crucial for young adults."
• "Lead by example in financial management."
• "Emotional connections to money matter."
• "Budgeting is a foundational skill."
• "Credit management is essential."
• "Supporting adult children is challenging."
• "Plan carefully for retirement needs."
• "Financial therapy can ease stress."
• "Market volatility requires balance."
• "Communication strengthens family ties."

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction
• 00:00:00 Understanding Financial Therapy
• 00:00:00 Financial Literacy for Young Adults
• 00:00:00 Challenges of Supporting Adult Children
• 00:00:01 Retirement Planning and Market Volatility
• 00:00:01 Emotional Connections to Money

Want to be a guest on ABCs of Parenting Adult Childr

Richard Jones. I am an RN with over 34 years of Nursing Experience, much of that experience working with young adults in the corrections system. 

Hello, James here !

Please click on the subscribe button to gain access to premium episodes.

Please go to parentingadultchildren.org website and sign up for the email list and leave a review for this episode. 

If you have any requests for future topics send me an email to TalkPAC@proton.me

Please share this podcast with your friends and family. Now for today's guest intervi

Transcript

James Moffitt (00:00.829)
Hello and welcome to ABC's Apparenting Adult Children podcast. My name is James Moffitt. Today our guest is John Hankins. Is that how you say that? Okay. Hey John, how are doing?

John Hankins (00:10.104)
Correct.

Good, James. How are you?

James Moffitt (00:15.163)
I'm good. So, do me a favor and introduce yourself to the listening audience.

John Hankins (00:20.12)
Sure, I am a certified financial therapist and a licensed social worker. I'm 73 years old and I launched this career about three years ago after spending about 35 years working in IT.

James Moffitt (00:38.013)
Good for you. I wish I was as brave as you.

James Moffitt (00:45.107)
Well, I'm glad you're on the podcast and I'm going to read your little blurb here. You're on your, your pod match profile. So John Hankins is a licensed social worker, certified financial therapist and certified financial social worker. His diverse career includes a decade of work in community mental health followed by 35 years in a variety of positions in IT, internet and cloud services. He exited exited from conventional full-time employment six years ago at age 68.

So where did you come up with certified financial therapists? Where'd that come about?

John Hankins (01:24.28)
So the certified financial therapist refers to the Financial Therapy Association, which I'm sure you and most of your listeners have never heard of. This is an organization that's been around for about 15 years that's made up of mental health professionals and financial planners that really want to focus on the emotional connections in money. So from the financial planning side,

Financial planners want skills in how to deal with their clients and some of the emotional baggage they bring into the planning process. And for mental health professionals, they want to be able to have more skills in dealing with their clients in the area where money is a big issue in somebody's emotional well-being. So it's kind of a continuum. There are two different communities that have come together around this.

James Moffitt (02:21.436)
So, so after reading this and listening to you explain that, guess there's hope for me and my wife, right?

John Hankins (02:26.922)
Absolutely.

James Moffitt (02:28.924)
good. That's good to know. So as we discussed before I hit the record button, I want to talk about two things here. want to talk about parents of adult children, know, ages 18 to 30 in that range, and parents helping them, helping to prepare them and educate them on how to do budgeting and how to do

you know, financial planning for their future, like starting a 401k or putting money in savings or what have you. And then I want to talk about the second prong of this. I want to talk about parents that have adult children living at home that are there for, you know, whatever reasons, whether, you know, it's very expensive to, to live, obviously pay bills, you know, and, our adult children, are kind of behind the eight ball when it comes to that, cause you gotta have, you gotta have deposits for everything and.

Like I said, you know, paying a mortgage, car payments, insurance, taxes, all of that, takes, you know, it takes a pretty substantial income to pay all of that. And sometimes our adult children, uh, they launch and they try and for whatever reasons, uh, they wind up back home, you know, and our parents don't want their kids live in the intent cities, obviously. Uh, so within reason, you know, we want the kids to be able to be, have a safe place.

John Hankins (03:39.448)
Mm-hmm.

James Moffitt (03:57.649)
safe space to come back to and to regroup and do some disaster recovery, have you, you know. And so I'd like to talk about those two topics. Just pick whichever one you want.

John Hankins (04:11.79)
Sure. Well, let's start with bringing up your kids and how you prepare them. And one of the things I would emphasize for parents, know, that are, let's just say parents in their 40s, and they have kids to teenagers and beyond, that...

In my work, one of the key pieces when I'm working with people around their financial stress, emotional content, what we typically go back and look at is their financial story, their money story. So as a parent, think about what is the money story you're giving your kids. If you and your husband are always fighting around your 15 year old about money.

They're going to carry that on. I guess my message is it's not just kind of didactic knowledge. It's not just, here's how you have a checkbook. But there's a lot of content in your house and a lot of things you can do to really prepare your kids just in terms of your own approach to money and what you're teaching through that. So that's number one. Number two is some basic lessons around

budgeting. It's amazing how many kids never really get shown a budget. I think that our kind of financial education in this country is really seriously lacking. if you can, and there's lots of stuff, free podcasts, free webinars, find some material.

for your kids, it may be that you're not so good at it. So find some material for you as well. Make it a family activity. So that's one part. think a second piece is the idea that time is your friend. When you're 20 years old, time is your friend. Start putting money away now. It is going to pay huge dividends 40 years down the road. That is a very, very

John Hankins (06:28.514)
difficult concept to absorb. I'm right there. So I don't have any silver bullet there of, here's how you make that work. But I think if you can start talking about that and thinking about that, even if it's small amounts of money, even if you just help your kids set up some kind of a savings account, if it makes sense, some kind of brokerage account.

James Moffitt (06:34.33)
Amen, brother. Preach it.

John Hankins (06:57.624)
just something where they start saving and they see that as their future down the road. Those, think, are the two biggest issues. Of course, other issues would come into it if your kids are them. They're coming out of college. They're starting a job. Understand what are your benefits around retirement plans? Do you get a contribution? Can you tax shelter some money?

some different pieces like that. Another piece I would say particularly for college kids, I think this is, I just think it's a disgrace what credit card companies have done in terms of, hey, you're 18 years old. have a credit card. Help your kids understand the real cost of credit and to steer clear.

James Moffitt (07:44.21)
Y'all got a story. I've got a story for that.

Ahem.

John Hankins (07:57.248)
of credit cards. mean, if you can do those three things, know, kind of budgeting, you know, saving for the future and managing your credit, man, you, you know, that's you're doing great.

James Moffitt (08:13.714)
So the first thing I want to say is that I was raised in the 70s and 80s. I got out of high school in May of 1980. So I was in high school from 76 to 80. And I watched my parents buy a home in the 70s. And they had a 30-year mortgage on it. And they paid it off in 15 years. So I think they made double payments, right? And so my parents told me how important it was

to pay your bills and to save. And I remember my dad sitting down at the kitchen table, writing out checks. paid, they pay their bills monthly at that time. They're ex military. They went to the commissary at Carlsville Air Force Base in the Fort Worth area, Dallas Fort Worth area. And I remember watching him write checks, stick one in envelopes, know, lick and stick and put it on, you know, go take it out to the mailbox, all this stuff, right?

But they never set me down and taught me how to budget. never, they never showed me on with pen and paper, pencil and paper. You know, there was no such thing as computers back then. There was no, there was no Microsoft Excel spreadsheet where you can set up your budget or any of that stuff. So it wasn't until, my later, well, I was probably in my 20s or 30s before I finally figured out, Hey, if you don't pay your light bill, they cut it. They'll cut your electricity off.

John Hankins (09:17.677)
Mm.

James Moffitt (09:40.659)
If don't make your car payment, they'll come tow it off in the middle of the night. You don't pay your rent. You don't have a place to live. So all of a sudden things were happening and I was going, okay. We need to set up a, we need to set up a spreadsheet and outline all of our bills and see, you know, the difference between the income that's coming in and the bills that are going out and define our needs versus our wants. Well, our needs are, I need a place to live, electricity, water, food, you know, gas.

car to drive around to go to work, blah, blah, blah. You know, and I, I probably didn't learn that until my thirties, honestly, you know, my early thirties. and so it's almost like, I don't know about, would, I would hope that other parents in the seventies, did a better job at training their children when it came to finances because mine, mine missed the boat. There was no, there was no financial boat in my house.

other than I my dad paid the bills, right? And so when you started talking about credit cards, my story on that is, you and I have IT in common, it's one of the common threads between us. So I was working at the College of Charleston, downtown Charleston, I don't know, 2000s, early 2000s. And I worked at the Bell South building.

And they converted the college turned the Bell South building into IT finances. There was like six floors and I think IT took up three of the six floors. And then one of the, one of the floors was for, for lectures for kids. Right. And so one of the things I noticed on the first floor, there was a, a bulletin board with all kinds of advertisements and stuff for the kids. And I come from a very conservative background.

And I'll just say that some of the stuff I saw on that bulletin board for the kids, was appalling to say the least. And, anyway, one of the things that I saw with my own two eyes was when the kids got out of class for lunch, right there at, at, at whatever the streets are, there was like a four way stop, right there, right there at the street. There was like a Starbucks in the corner and there were the credit card companies.

James Moffitt (12:06.918)
We're on all four corners of those streets with little handheld devices and they were handing them to the kids to sign up for credit cards. And it was just amazing to me how many kids signed up for credit cards. Didn't have an income of any kind, but they're getting these credit cards and are buying stereos and laptops and all kinds of electronic gizmos, you know, and then they get out of college with all this, the student debt and they wind up at home. Well, guess who's paying those credit card bills. It's not those kids.

John Hankins (12:08.888)
Mmm, wow.

James Moffitt (12:36.986)
parents were winding up having to pay those credit card bills or the kids didn't pay the credit card bills. And then they wound up out of college with, with student loan debt and credit card debt right on, right out of the gate. And I just, that really made me angry when I saw what the credit card companies were doing, starting them out young.

John Hankins (12:56.588)
Yeah, well, think it's worse now. think we're in this what I call is this frictionless economy where you look at, here's something that I want and it's 100 bucks and I haven't got 100 bucks. Well, no problem. We'll send it to you. And you're just going to make a monthly payment. Just sign up here. It's going to be eight bucks a month for the next five years. So they make it so easy to get into debt that, yeah.

James Moffitt (13:16.666)
Right. Right.

John Hankins (13:25.166)
It's really it's not not great. I did want to go back, though, because I think it's interesting with your parents that the fact that your parents paid off their mortgage in 15 years, it says something about their their sense of financial management. And it's it's sad that they didn't pass that on to you because it was it was in your household. I mean, if they if they had sat you down and talked that through.

then that, I think, could have had been an influential on you. My parents, my mother, my mother was the finance person in our house. And at some point, I don't know, I was like 15 years old. She was talking to me about mortgages. And I didn't know mortgages from anything. But she said, yeah, there's 30 year mortgage and you're paying these interest rates. the first 10 years, almost all of what you pay is in interest, which was like a whole concept that I had not even thought about.

James Moffitt (14:19.024)
Interest. That's right.

John Hankins (14:23.724)
And it didn't have any application to me then, when I was 15. However, when I was 25 and looking at that, suddenly the light started to come on for me. So it's these little seeds that can get planted that can bear fruit down the road. I also just wanted to add another piece was, so I don't think that there was great financial.

literacy in our household. the one thing that I I grew up in the in the 60s that for my parents, the one thing they taught me was you want money, you work. I always worked. And that to me and watching my own kids grow up, which is I have not been as successful in getting them to work. But that taught me a big lesson right off the bat of I got extra. My paychecks got X dollars in it. Here's my wants and needs.

This is the only thing I got. So I better manage it carefully. And yeah, I think that paid off for me.

James Moffitt (15:28.814)
One of the, one of the things that young adults don't realize, is that banks are predatory in nature and they are in the business of doing what? Making profit. That's what the bank is in business for us to take your money and hold onto it for you. So they can use that money to lend to other entities. Right. And, and they, they'll be happy to loan it back to you.

John Hankins (15:43.246)
Mm-hmm.

James Moffitt (15:59.283)
At an interest rate. so when you're young, let's say you don't have, you have no credit or you have bad credit or whatever. You have an established credit. So to get credit as a 20 year old or 23, 24, 25, whatever, what's going to happen is, is they're going to say, okay, well you, don't have, you haven't established credit yet. So we'll loan you, we'll happily loan you the money or give you a credit card, but you're going to have a 35 % interest rate. Right. Maybe not quite that high, maybe a little lower than that, but

John Hankins (16:27.182)
Yeah.

James Moffitt (16:29.362)
But the, they want you to pay the minimal payment on your credit card, right? They don't want you zeroing it out. They don't want you paying half of it now and half of it next by day, because they want to be able to keep accruing interest on all of that money that you owe them. Right. And so let's say you have a credit card with a thousand dollar limit and you're only paying them 15 or $20 every month. Well, you're going to wind up paying them $2,500.

John Hankins (16:37.304)
Sure.

James Moffitt (16:58.354)
At the, the end to pay that thing off. Right. And kids don't know that in young adults don't know that unless they're, unless they've been taught by their parents or they've, they've talked to a financial counselor or, know, and when I was in my twenties or early thirties, I didn't even know what a financial counselor was. Right. I didn't know that I needed to talk to somebody and get the knowledge that I needed to understand these things. You know, I, I, I.

John Hankins (17:00.6)
Right, sure.

James Moffitt (17:26.796)
learned and I'm still learning through the school of hard knocks, right? They're the consequences of making those mistakes. And of course, know, parents now, none of us want our kids to make the same mistakes we made. We want to educate them. We want to give them the benefit of our wisdom so that they can be better prepared for the future, right? And make better decisions with their money.

John Hankins (17:49.592)
Sure.

John Hankins (17:55.288)
That's the goal.

James Moffitt (17:56.838)
That's goal, right?

James Moffitt (18:01.03)
So tell us, go back to your 20s and 30s and give us a little peek into your coming of age and your financial literacy.

John Hankins (18:14.912)
boy. In my own financial literacy then, well, I, like I said, I always worked. And so I had this concept of this is my paycheck. These are, you know, this kind of instinctual kind of budgeting thing. I've always been a budgeting guy. And I don't know how much of that my parents baked into me or I just

It just was something that I was interested in.

James Moffitt (18:49.266)
So you are good at it, right out the gate.

John Hankins (18:52.046)
I wouldn't say I was good at it. I would put it another way. I didn't hate it. I wasn't afraid of it. There was things about it that I liked. when I was in, it took me seven years to get my undergraduate degree. I went to school part-time, worked full-time. Then when I finished my undergraduate degree, I took a couple of accounting classes, a couple of business classes. And then I got a

James Moffitt (18:59.474)
Gotcha.

John Hankins (19:21.71)
I went into graduate school and got a degree in social work. And that was, I borrowed money for that. I got a scholarship, paid all my tuition, but for my, I couldn't work full time, so I borrowed money to cover that. And then I went into a PhD program and I mean, I was a graduate student for five years and I was borrowing money every year. wasn't at, was, now this was in the 19, this was from 1979.

James Moffitt (19:42.864)
Wow. Right.

John Hankins (19:52.014)
through 84. so tuition, all that stuff was way lower. But I had the student debt. And then I got offered a job, a really good paying job. And the first thing I wanted to do was take care of my debt. I was just like, we got to get rid of this. And so I was just focused on that.

We got married, we had kids, we bought a house. And I was like, your parents. The first thing I did was, how much of this can I, how much extra can I pay every month to whittle this? OK, maybe it's not paying it off in 15 years, but maybe it's paying it off in 25 years instead of 30. And I started, then spreadsheets came along and I started building spreadsheets. So yeah, I just kind of gravitated towards that. I, yeah.

James Moffitt (20:46.898)
That's good. what advice would you give to parents that are listening to this episode about how to start their young adults on a path of financial literacy?

John Hankins (21:04.226)
Well, it kind of goes back to what I was saying before. I think part of it is you have to lead by example. If you don't understand budgeting, you're going to have a hard time, and you don't value it. You're going to have a hard time convincing your kid. And it could be an activity that you work on together. That could be something that you really bond around. Let's look at the household budget.

Here, you need to understand what it costs to live here, what we have to spend for our mortgage, gas bill, all those sorts of things.

James Moffitt (21:37.906)
teach the value of the dollar. Right?

John Hankins (21:40.352)
Yeah, that's a, know, I think getting that lesson of this roof over your head isn't free. And there's a lot of little pieces. know, there's your taxes, here's your insurance, know, here's your utilities. You you need your, your roof's 20 years old. Well, you need to start thinking about that. You know, there's a lot that can be taught just by

James Moffitt (21:49.616)
Right, exactly.

John Hankins (22:10.292)
showing your kids what it takes for you to manage your household.

James Moffitt (22:15.814)
Right. That's good. So, do you remember your first paycheck you got?

Or the first couple of paychecks. remember the shock you, the shock value of looking at your paycheck going, wait, I worked 80 hours in two weeks and I make X amount of dollars per hour. And all of a sudden somebody has stuck their hand in the little, the pie and taken 25 % off the top. Do you remember that?

John Hankins (22:41.25)
Yeah, well, that's, I do. That was, I have to say, my first real...

Real job that was like I worked in restaurants and stuff, but I was in my early 20s and I got a job in a factory that was like time card. Here's your pay stub. It was all came off. It wasn't somebody in the back room, right? Filling out a check and just saying, here you are. And it was like, yeah, here's your here's your gross. And OK, here's your net. Because I got the job and thought, damn, you know, I'm making some money here. And when I got my first paycheck, it was like, well.

Hold on a second. Yeah.

James Moffitt (23:21.98)
That was an awakening, wasn't it?

I remember, I remember how upset I was, right? I was like, there's something wrong with this. This is highway robbery.

John Hankins (23:29.858)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think it even gets even more painful when you, and this is, I'll talk about this as kind of my second paycheck, although it was way down the road, but I had a job where, okay, we've got a 401k plan and we want you to contribute to that. And I think I was,

I don't think I did for the first couple of years, but I think when I turned 35, I said, you have to contribute. And suddenly it was like, whoa, what happened to my paycheck? It was a great plan because they contributed. It was the best plan I was ever in. It was stupid that I didn't start contributing right away, but I was much more focused on this is my paycheck and I want to.

James Moffitt (24:11.867)
Right.

John Hankins (24:30.774)
I want it all for me. There's a whole program that's been developed now around helping people save for retirement, where you can, some organizations are offering this, where you can sign up for an automatic increase in your contribution based on your raises. So I'm doing 3 % now.

When I get my next raise, I want to do 3.5%. I'm going to take part of that raise and make sure it goes into my retirement account.

James Moffitt (25:11.216)
I remember when I worked for, this, property rental company, vacation rental company off in Kewa Island, South Carolina, I worked for them for 10 years and I had a, one of their accounting people talk to me about it. I guess I was in my forties at that time and he was like, you got to, you got to, you got to open up a 401k and cause they, whatever you put in the 401k, they will match it. Blah, blah, blah. And so I did, he, he got me started. opened up a 401k.

Had them take like, I don't know, two, two or 3 % of my paycheck, put it in there. And every year after that, I did 1%. Every year I did an additional 1%. And it started building pretty quickly.

John Hankins (25:50.956)
Mmm, yeah. Yeah.

James Moffitt (25:55.57)
Yeah.

John Hankins (25:55.79)
Yeah, time is your friend in those situations. It's surprising. And it is reinforcing when you look at that.

James Moffitt (26:05.838)
Absolutely. So,

James Moffitt (26:11.868)
Let's talk about, let's talk about parents who have boomerang children, adults, adult children that we'll say they've launched out into the world. They're going to college. got student debt. They're trying to pay rent. They're trying to pay car payments for whatever reasons. They're not in a position financially where they can sustain that. Right. And they wind up needing to come back home. And so kids come back home and there's nothing wrong with that.

John Hankins (26:38.978)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've had a few of them. Yeah.

James Moffitt (26:42.674)
Yeah, I have to, I've still got one that she, she doesn't, she doesn't come back home to live necessarily, but I still help support her from time to time. Um, and when kids turn 18, obviously that's not the end of it. Yeah. It just, uh, it's just a whole new world. It's you, you change from the parent child relationship, uh, to a mentor or support person, right? That, that, uh, is there for them to come to hopefully.

John Hankins (26:51.0)
Yeah.

John Hankins (27:07.074)
Yeah.

James Moffitt (27:10.748)
Hopefully if you have a good enough relationship with them, they'll feel safe coming to you and talking to you about stuff. Right.

John Hankins (27:17.378)
I look at it as adult to adult. You you've moved into it, but there's still this other piece to it, but it's adult to adult.

James Moffitt (27:25.306)
Right. So let's talk about, parents that are listening to the podcast that have children that have come back and they're helping them get grounded and get their feet on the ground and, doing some disaster recovery and helping them to save money. And, know, before we hit record, we were talking about how, some parents, wind up, due to no fault of their own, they wind up having to, or choose to use.

you know, their savings to help, undergird or support their children so that they can, you know, live and, and, and launch out onto their own. And so, so you've got parents that are dipping into their 401k or their IRAs or selling stock or whatever it is they're doing to, to help their children. And can you just talk to that a little bit?

John Hankins (28:18.414)
Sure, James, I'm gonna just close my window here for a second.

James Moffitt (28:21.616)
Yeah, you're fine. Go ahead.

John Hankins (28:27.55)
So I think that this is a really complicated subject in a lot of ways. In one way...

You're saving for retirement. And if you're being successful at that and you're 60 years old, let's just say, 65, you're being successful at that, you look at what's in your retirement account and you can see a big number, right? A bigger number than anything you've ever had in your wallet. Here's a big number, but it's got to last you till the end of your days. it's...

James Moffitt (29:05.168)
Right. 10 or 20 years or longer, maybe.

John Hankins (29:05.887)
complicated. So I, yeah, yeah, yeah, my, my the investment advisor that I use tells me that he's I think they're telling me my life expectancy is like 101, something like that. So I think there is on the one hand, it's very easy to get into feelings of guilt around, you know, I've got this whole pile of money here.

James Moffitt (29:23.149)
wow.

John Hankins (29:35.886)
And I've got my kid who's struggling. I really should take some of this and help this kid, which is is a perfectly natural, legitimate feeling. The thing that I think is important in that is that you you have a plan, basically, you understand what the impact is, what what can you afford to do? You're not operating on just your feelings. You know, I want to make my kid feel better.

My kid just wrecked their car and I got to do something to save this kid and I'm to pull some money out of my IRA. Wait a minute. Let's think about exactly what are your options here for this? What can you do? And I think that is the way that I would kind of describe that is what are my capabilities? It kind of goes back to needs and wants, right? It's capabilities versus desire.

My desire is always going to be, I want to save my kid. I want my kid to be happy. But your capability could be maybe you can't afford, you don't have the money, or your kid, even though your kid has an addiction problem, whatever, there's lots of things you can't fix. So it comes back to the boundaries to some degree. I think.

Understanding what you can do and what is healthy to do is really important. So it doesn't mean you don't do anything, but understanding what's... Go ahead.

James Moffitt (31:13.564)
Well, one of the, one of the problems with pulling money out of your 401k or IRA or whatever is that there are tax penalties for doing that. You have to, you have to count the cost for doing that.

John Hankins (31:21.784)
Sure, sure, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that.

James Moffitt (31:26.906)
And you have to think about what is your plan for putting that money back eventually.

John Hankins (31:30.862)
Yeah, you you you you look at your let's say you're over fifty nine and a half. So taking money out is not, you know, there's no penalty for that. But you look at, I got all this money. I'll just pull some of this out. Wait a minute. You know, it's all that money. Yeah, there's a big slice coming off the top. So let's figure out. Let's look at let's clearly understand what is the after tax picture of this. You're looking at the pre-tax picture when you're looking at your your 401k balance.

What is your after-tax picture? It's exactly the same as your paycheck. Hey, here's your job. make, you know, hey, your salary's $100,000 a year. OK, what's my take-home pay? know, there's a lot. Yeah, it's the same, you know, it's the same situation, and you really got to understand it. But I think that this balancing your capabilities

James Moffitt (32:15.27)
Not a hundred thousand.

John Hankins (32:30.922)
What what's what's the right thing to do? What can you afford to do? That's it's it's it's really important to to to think that through and not just operate on pure emotion.

James Moffitt (32:47.44)
Right. So talk a little bit more about, you were talking about emotional baggage and how people look at their money situation and how emotions get wrapped up in all of that.

How do you approach that?

John Hankins (33:05.582)
Well, everybody has a money story.

James Moffitt (33:07.344)
Like the money story you were talking about.

John Hankins (33:14.67)
kind of a typical process. mean, nothing's really typical, but let's just kind of think about the general process is we look at and want to talk about what is your relationship with money. Everybody has a relationship with money. This might be a new concept. What do you mean I have a relationship with money? OK, well, it's like you have a relationship with food. You have a relationship with your partner. You have thoughts, feelings, and actions that are associated with money.

James Moffitt (33:43.42)
Right. It's a love hate relationship.

John Hankins (33:44.975)
OK, yeah, let's let's let's dig into that. And it typically starts with, know, what happened when you were a kid? What did you learn? What are the lessons that your your parents taught you? You know, maybe one of the lessons is they always fought about money. Money is a bad thing because, you know, every time my parents talked about money, they fought, you know, or I'll tell you my my money story. My mother always resented anybody that had more money than she did.

And we didn't we were not poor, but we were, you know, not rich by any means or even affluent. I mean, we got by OK. And my my mother could have had a much happier life if she were just focused on here's the good stuff that we can do. We have enough money for these good things that we do. But her point of view was always these people have more money. They look down on me. I, you know, I can't keep up with them.

She was our own worst enemy. So it took me, and I'm still trying to escape from some of that. But back to your question, it's things like that that we look at as part of the process. We look at, why are you here? That's always what I, when somebody shows up at my doorstep, I'm considering seeing a financial therapist. OK, why? What problem are you looking to solve? Tell me what a.

A success is in this process. What do you want to see come out the other end? And that can vary all over the map. I've had people that show up that have, I'm in debt and I'm trying to figure out how to get out of debt. I just inherited some money and I feel really guilty about it and I don't know how to spend it. And everything in between.

James Moffitt (35:41.618)
Got you. All right.

So I think you've already kind of just you've already told us what financial therapy is. Who can benefit from financial therapy?

John Hankins (35:55.756)
Well, I think it's quite a range. For me, my focus is on people that are at or near retirement that are experiencing a lot of anxiety about that whole process. So some of that may be financial. Some of it just may be much more about what's my identity, all of those pieces. But I'm pretty convinced that in today's world, the retirement process has been made so complicated. Here's all these

different pieces that you have to understand. You're saddled with managing your money. You may have a financial planner. That's a good thing. But still, at the end of the day, some of these decisions are up to you. As you were saying before, the market's crashing. my god, how am I ever going to keep this roof over my head? What's going to happen in the next 10 years? Excuse me.

people that are struggling with that kind of anxiety. And it doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have the money. It's just, I'm thinking of, you every night, you know, keeps me awake at night thinking about how I manage my money. That's somebody that can benefit from a financial therapist. For couples, you know, it's, have enough money, but we're always arguing about money. That's a couple that could benefit from a financial therapist.

I could give you lots of examples. Back to the family, I want to help my daughter, but I'm not sure if I have enough money, and I'm not sure if I should. Those people could benefit. I'm working with a few people who are the adult children who've come to me and said, please help my parents. They're struggling.

James Moffitt (37:46.588)
Alright.

John Hankins (37:49.582)
Can you work with him? I've had a few people that have come to me, adult children, and said, can you please fix my father? He doesn't want to see you, but he needs to be fixed. He's spent all of his money, and he needs an intervention. And I'm kind of, not there. Can't do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's quite a range.

James Moffitt (38:01.208)
no. Right.

Right, right. Dad's gotta come to you himself.

Well, I mean, especially once you become an adult, money is such an integral part of, know, money, money makes the world go around. Right. That's what they say. And, and you have to have money to live. You can't live without it because you, that's you, you, you have to pay for pay bills. mean, there are places on the globe that you can live on half of what we make here in America, you know, and live comfortably. but we don't live in.

John Hankins (38:20.075)
Yeah. Yeah.

John Hankins (38:38.189)
Mm-hmm.

James Moffitt (38:40.528)
those places we live here and, you know, in the great realm of capitalism, right? And I don't really want to get into politics too much, but, you know, the trade war and the tariff war that's going on between us and all these other big geopolitical entities, you know, the, the,

One of the things that happens is that the increased cost of doing business is going to trickle down to guess who? The consumers. We're going to wind up paying $12 for a carton of eggs instead of four, you know, or whatever. So the cost of goods and services goes up exponentially when there's a trade war. And who knows, who knows how that's going to turn out. But it affects the,

John Hankins (39:17.262)
Yeah.

James Moffitt (39:38.374)
The financial markets, know, you know, financial markets have been taking a huge hit in the last, I don't know, two months. Right. and, so that's affecting everybody's bottom, you know, bottom dollar.

John Hankins (39:45.134)
Yeah.

John Hankins (39:52.014)
Yeah, yeah. Well, all I can tell you is, and I've spent a lot of times looking at the volatility in the financial markets. I think it's a really fascinating topic. Probably some of this just comes with age, OK? So I.

I lived through 1987 crash. lived through the dot com. was working on IT. I was working at IBM and the doc.com crash. I went through 2008. I've seen these crashes. I believe that.

We have volatility. The market goes down. The financial markets have been around for a very long time, way longer than this country. So financial markets are kind of a feature of our civilization. And I believe that they will. This one, yeah, we're in some some volatility now. I believe this will come back. It might it might get really bad. mean, it could be like 2008 where the market really took four years to to come back to to to where it was.

from 2008 to 2012, it took four years to climb back, and then it took off. Then we've had some great years since then. My own belief is that we have to just stay the course. And if things really are, if this time is different and things are really way worse, then I think we'll get into bigger problems where how much we have in our 401k is gonna not matter that much.

James Moffitt (41:33.041)
Right.

John Hankins (41:33.893)
There's a lot of other things where things could get much worse.

James Moffitt (41:38.299)
absolutely. Well, there's talk about recession and all that stuff.

John Hankins (41:42.924)
Yeah, yeah. But but my my message is in terms of of your, you know, investing is if you're if you're not planning on retiring in two years, stay the course. If you are planning on retiring, you should your plan should have some money that is not tied. You you've got some diversification. You've got something in fixed income. It's not all in in the stock market. That's really key. And that's really where

having a good financial planner comes into there. I've built for me, I've done all my own financial planning. I've built for me a plan that I'm very, I can sleep at night. I think I've got enough money to see me through. I've got enough in CDs to see me through, anticipation of this, to see me through two or three years of really bad times. So that's...

It's not it's it's not it doesn't solve the problem. But yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I said, you know, staying up and, you know, lying awake at night and worrying about it's not going to solve the problem either. guess my message is kind of you're not alone in this. We're all in this together. We're going to figure it out. There are people like me that are here. If you need somebody to talk to.

James Moffitt (42:50.428)
Well, and that didn't happen overnight either.

John Hankins (43:13.224)
you know, please get a hold of me or, you know, somebody in your community.

James Moffitt (43:20.528)
Right. Do you have, you have, do you have a website or do you write a book or what's your.

John Hankins (43:22.087)
Don't keep it bottled up.

Yeah, yeah. It's www.financial-therapy.me. And I'll send you all my links.

James Moffitt (43:37.936)
Okay. Good. Good. Well, I think this was really a really good conversation. and, John, had to think of what your first name was John. This was a really good conversation. Thank you for being here. to the listening audience, I want to say thank you for the privilege of your time. thank you for John. Thank you for being on the podcast episode. You can listen to this podcast on captivate.fm.

Amazon music, I heart radio, Apple podcast, and public radio. You can watch the video episode on rumble.com. That's r u b l e.com. Our website is located at parenting adult children.org common spelling and the website. get my contact information. You can send me an email, leave me a voicemail and I'll get, I'll get back to you. The blog has an upcoming show schedule where you can see what the next two months worth of shows who's going to be on it. All of that.

and there's a place where you can leave a review for the podcast episodes you're listening to you at the very top of the website. There's a review tab that you can click on. Also, if you're listening to this podcast episode on Apple podcasts, they got a place right there on your smart phone that you can click right there and leave a review while you're listening to it. I release a new episode every Friday morning at 8. And again, thanks for being here and John, thank you for being here and everybody have a wonderful day.

John Hankins (45:03.822)
Thank you, James.