Cox Family Holiday Special

What's it like to have a financial expert for a father? Find out as Adeline and Nora Cox join their dad, Adam, on this special Christmas episode. They're asking Adam some deeply personal money questions while bonding over their favorite family Christmas traditions!

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Transcript

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- Hey guys, welcome back to my channel.[rock music]- Welcome to "Common Cents on the Prairie™," a podcast dedicated to helping you demystify the sometimes complex topic of money. I'm Adam Cox, head of Wealth Management for The First National Bank in Sioux Falls. We're a community bank based out of South Dakota. In this podcast, we share expert insights from around the country and stories from our local community to arm you with the tools you need to make better financial decisions because the truth is, the more we talk about this stuff, the better off we're all going to be.[rock music] Welcome to our Christmas episode. I say that like it's an annual thing, but it's not. However, if you can believe it, we have actually done an episode every month for 72 months. So to keep things fresh, we thought we'd mix it up a bit and invite my two favorite slash only teenage daughters to join us today. In fairness, I asked their mother first, but she said two episodes was enough, so you're just going to have to settle for your daughters. Noted, so grab your favorite holiday beverage, warm yourself by the fire, and listen in while my girls peppering me with money questions I probably don't want to answer, merry Christmas. Please state your name and ages.- My name's Adeline, and I'm 16.- I'm Nora, and I'm 13.- How do we know each other?- I don't know.- I don't know you.[everyone laughs]- You're my daughters, welcome to the show. All right, well this is the last episode of the year, year six actually, we have done one episode every month for 72 months. Do you guys remember when I started the show?- No.- A little bit.- Little bit, do you remember recording some of the episodes in the kitchen? That was a long time ago, so when we first started the show, one of the things decided to do, is I had your mom on the show, and she and I talked about our money story. Twice actually, on two different episodes and those became really, really popular episodes. And in fact, it started this trend where other people have come on the show and shared their money stories with us and like really cool personal stuff, which has been fun. And those episodes are really, really popular, so we thought we would do this again. Although I couldn't get your mother back on the show, she said"Two episodes was enough, take your daughters." So here are my daughters. Welcome to the show, so today I thought we'd talk a little bit about some Christmas stuff since it's Christmas time, and some family traditions. And then you guys can pepper me with personal finance questions. Does that sound good?- Yup.- All right so let's start with a little... Got to warm up a little bit first. Okay, you ready?- K.- All right first question, favorite Christmas movie, Adeline?- Like the live action "Grinch".- Live action "Grinch", okay.- It's like sad, but it's good.- Okay, Nora?- I like "Home Alone".- "Home Alone", first one or second one?- First.- First.- First one's better.- Mine's "Christmas Vacation", obviously. Best Christmas gift you've ever received, Nora- Barbie Dreamhouse.- Barbie Dreamhouse, before I broke it.- Yeah.- Before I broke it.- Yeah, yeah.- Barbie Dreamhouse, 100%.- You too? So I crushed both of your dreams when I dropped it in that garage.- Yeah.- Yeah.- Okay, all right. Best gift I've received at Christmas is obviously Jesus, and also maybe private tennis lessons as a kid. Favorite holiday tradition, Adeline.- Maybe like decorating the Christmas tree together.- That's good like right after Thanksgiving?- [Adeline] Yeah.- Yeah.- Me too.- [Adam] Same?- Yeah.- Mine is being the only person in the family surprised by what you guys get for Christmas.- Yeah.- And missing out.- And missing out, I also love missing out.- Yeah.- We know.- I do, the joy of missing out. What's your dad's favorite thing to do for the holidays?- Not going to parties.[Adam laughs]- Not going to parties, that's very true. Adeline, what do you think?- Missing out.- Missing out, yeah.- Not going anywhere.- That's untrue. Well, no, it's mostly true. I do like Christmas at the Cathedral every year. I do like that and all the Hallmark Christmas movies.- [Adeline] Of course.- If you wanted one thing for Christmas this year, what would it be and do you deserve it?- You go first.- Clothes.- Clothes.- Because-- Do you deserve it?- Yeah.- You deserve clothes, interesting, okay.- Mine is a break.- Just a break.- I need a break.- You need a break?- And do I deserve it? Yeah, I would think so.- Stress, stressful life.- Yeah after finals, I'm done.- You're cooked, okay so we don't have to get you any gifts this year just a break.- I mean, that's what you want.[everyone laughs]- The thing I want for Christmas this year is probably... You know, probably a few bags of compost for the garden. And do I deserve a few bags of compost? Yeah, I think I do.[everyone laughs]- All right.- Last question, if you won $10 million tomorrow, what would you do with it?- Save it.- Save it?- Buy a castle.- Buy a castle.- And save it of course and well... Oh and like give it to like homeless shelters and stuff.- Oh okay.- Yeah but like, buy a castle.- So $10 million, you think you're going to be able to buy a castle, save, and give some money away.- That's the goal.[everyone laughs]- That's the goal, I like your sister's answer better.- Okay, well...- Okay well I would obviously save it. I might go on a vacation.- For like two days.- For two days.- [Adeline] Right.- That's all I can handle as you know. Okay now your guys' turn, you're going to pepper me with some questions. So Adeline, do you want to start first?- How did you learn about money?- How did I learn about money? You know, I've always been fascinated with money from a very early age. I just loved, when I was young, I did chores. Are you familiar with chores? I'm not sure, I don't... I don't recall.- Well...- Have you done chores?- I do mow the lawn.- Oh okay.- Yeah.- Yeah so.- Well anyways, when I was growing up a long, long time ago, I got a dollar a week for doing chores. And on the inside of one of your grandma's cabinet's doors, there was this like $1 for like, next to every week, or if I did something special, maybe I got another dollar, but I never got the money. It was just like imaginary money that was there saved up. And so I had it and it was like, I just was fascinated with it. And then as I got older, I started to learn more about personal finance and investing, and I got really, really into it. So I'd say mostly I was self-taught and then, you know, your grandpa, Grandpa Cox, he was retired most of my childhood. And so he and I got into like investing and learning about that together. So we took classes together and got to talk about that a lot like a couple old retired people, I guess.- So you never got the money?- Well, I did if I needed it but so your grandma, and I think you were going to ask me about this, about how I spent money. So your Grandma Cox would say, like if I said, "Hey I want some money, some of my money to go buy something." You know grandma, she can put the guilt trip on pretty good. So she would say something like,"Well, I guess if that's what you really think you should spend your money on." Which of course would make me go like,"Oh maybe I guess I won't spend it then." And so I just, I just almost never spent it. But if I did spend it, it was on baseball cards. Yeah how about that, so Nora that took your question. Adeline, next question.- Okay, what was your first job, and what did you do with this money?- I'll give you two answers to that. My first like job outside of doing chores at the house, I picked rocks or I picked... I picked grass and weeds out of rocks. You know, your dad doesn't have... Doesn't have working man hands, you know these-- Soft hands.- Yeah soft, small hands.- [Nora] Yeah.- Apparently very useful for getting in between rocks. So I had two neighbors who didn't have landscaping fabric underneath their rocks and so grass and weeds just grew up. And so I got paid a dollar every 15 minutes to pick that stuff out of the rocks. And I was just... I thought that was the best thing ever. Like I sit there and picked weeds and every 15 minutes I earned a dollar. And I thought, that's another baseball card pack, that's another baseball card pack, so I thought it was great. All my friends stopped doing it in the neighborhood, they thought it was the worst job ever but I thought it was great. But my first real job was, I was a janitor at Christ the King Church and Schools. You remember Christ the King? In the summers there I was a janitor, so I did like a lot of painting, cleaned the floors, waxed, cleaned toilets, did all... All the stuff you can imagine you'd have to do at a school and a church over the summer. I did that, and I taught tennis lessons for like five summers growing up.- And you never did that again? Painting, cleaning.- So you're saying I never do that at home?- Well...- Interesting. What did I do with the money? Again not much, I didn't spend very much but I saved it. I just like to save money, and once in a while I'd buy things but not very often, I just saved it and-- Buy your garden stuff?- I didn't, no I didn't garden then. I was probably a little burned out from gardening, from picking weeds all summer, so I didn't do any gardening but I did mostly just save it. Nora, next question.- Are you and mom, spenders, savers or investors?- Oh, that's a good question, all of the above. So mom, probably can't say mommy, but mommy, mom, she spends money on you guys, but not much else. I mostly just spend money on myself, and we're both really good savers and investors. So all of the above.- Spending is a stretch.- Spending...[Adam laughs] You mean spending on you or just spending in period?- Period.- Period, yeah I know, we don't spend a ton of money.- [Adeline] Right.- Yeah okay, Adeline.- Okay, have you and mom always been that way?- Yes when we first met each other, we didn't have like any money. We had less than money because I was in school and I had a ton of debt, and mom was just starting off working and wasn't making very much money, I mean she barely had furniture. She told me, I didn't know this until... So we've been married a long time, I didn't know this until a few weeks ago there was... We were at a concert and there was... A guy was doing a song called "Layaway," have you heard of layaway? So basically stores used to, maybe they still do, instead of buying something and taking it with you, if you didn't have all the money, you could go and you could say, "I want to buy that couch, but I can't afford it right now but reserve it for me and I'll come in and make payments every time I can. And then once I've paid enough for the couch, then I can take it with me." They called that layaway. And so we were listening to the song called "Layaway" and your mom said, "You know after we met, I bought my first like set of like nice bed sheets and bedspreads and stuff." And she's like, "I put it on layaway." And I was like, "Oh, we had no money." Oh my gosh, we couldn't even buy sheets and so yeah we had to be... We had to be super good savers because we just, we just didn't have any money. And there was times where, and even after we both started working and making better money, there was just because of all the debt I had from school, so Grandma and Grandpa Cox paid for me to go to undergrad through USD. But then law school and my MBA were were on me, and I had to take on debt for that, so we had to pay all that back and so that was just a lot of money every month. So there was months where, you know, I'd want to go to Target and grab some groceries or whatever, and your mom kind of did the budget and watched the accounts closer than I did. And she's like, "You're maybe going to have to wait a week'til we get paid before you go ahead and go to Target." So yeah times were... Times were a little tight so we had to be really good savers. And we also knew we didn't want to live like that forever so we just saved and invested so, Nora?- What's a money lesson you learned the hard way?- Money lesson I learned the hard way, don't put all your money in one thing. So do you know what a stock is? Adeline's been taking personal finance right now, so Mrs. Bradfield can be really disappointed if you don't know what a stock is.- I know what a stock is.- You know what a stock is. So Nora, so think of... Alright, think of Starbucks. Okay Starbucks is a company that wants to grow and they need money in order to do that. So what they do is they issue stock and people can buy the stock. And when they do that, you give the company your money in exchange for a small, small part of the company, that's stock. So your dad, when I saved all of that money from pulling weeds and cleaning toilets, and painting, and waxing and stripping floors, and everything, I took it and I started to invest it in companies. And this was a time when the markets were really crazy and it seemed like it was really easy to invest in companies and the it would just go up. And so I made a bunch of money doing that and then I put it all in one stock one day and it was called AOL. Do you know what AOL... Have you heard of AOL? So you probably use Gmail for your email addresses, well back in the day before Gmail, before Google, there's a company called America Online, and that was AOL. And so like your Grandpa Cox, up until he passed away still had an AOL email address. And it's like, it's how you can tell how old people are sometimes is what their email address is, so he had an AOL address. So this company, AOL I put it all in that stock and then like two days later there was a big announcement and I had like $18,000 when I was about your age Adeline in the stock and it went almost all the way to zero, so I lost almost all of the money that I made investing. So good lesson to learn, happy I learned it when I was really young, although in retrospect it basically meant all of those years doing all that work were for nothing. But I learned a good lesson, don't put all your eggs in one basket.- Right.- Yeah.- How did you handle money when you first got married?- So when mom and I first got married, we... Before we got married, we had separate accounts. Like she had her money, I had my money, and when we got married we combined everything right away and so we could budget and figure out what was coming in, what was going out. And we had to, like I said before, we didn't have much coming in and we had a lot going out. So we had to be really, really tight with our spending, so we would sit down and we would have budget meetings and we'd plan out like how much we had paid for groceries and how much we were paying for rent and...- Do we get to eat this week?- Do we get to eat this week? And, "Oh my gosh, you're pregnant, how are we going to afford that?" And we want to buy a house someday. So like we had to be really tight with our money and watch it really, really closely just because we didn't have a lot and we wanted to save up money and so yeah it was just, we just had to work together a lot. And it was good though, like it taught us to work together, taught us to communicate, taught us to prioritize things like eating versus other things and so paying off debt, like it just, it taught us a lot of really good lessons. But yeah we had to be really, really tight with those conversations, the good old days.- [Nora] Sounds fun.- Yeah.- What was the first big purchase you and mom saved up for?- A wedding.[everyone laughs] No that was probably the first thing that we had to save up quite a bit for. So you know, I bought mommy an engagement ring, so I saved up for that. She bought me a couch, kind of like a swap for the engagement ring. Like, "Hey, you want to get married?" She's like, "Hey, you want this couch?" So it was a beautiful thing, right? I still have that couch, as you know, but so those were probably the first two things we saved up for and then right after that, a wedding. And you know, people spend so much on weddings, like, it's crazy. Your mom and I got married and went on a honeymoon for I think it was $8,000.- Oh...- Yeah I know people who spend more than that on wedding dresses now so... And we're still still married.- That's great.- That's good.- Just worked out fine. It was a, you know... A pretty miserable honeymoon on a ship but, Adeline?- Do you have any advice for young savers?- I do, so I think for people who are just starting off, the biggest lesson to learn is to live on less than you make. So it's always good to have margin in your life and so if you make $10, you need to learn how to save some of that. And so live on less than you make, start saving early and investing early because that your money has more time to compound and grow, and avoid debt as much as possible. Okay.- Okay.- Now I get to ask you a few questions.- Oh yay.- You ready?- I'm so ready.- Okay. When you go to the store, how do you avoid impulse purchases?- You.- [Adam] Me?- You say no.- I say no, [Adam laughs] that is effective. How about you, Adeline?- I just don't,- You just don't.- I just don't spend money.- You're like your dad?- [Adeline] Yeah.- Just try not to think about it as much.- It's not in my nature.- Okay that's good. What do you think is one thing worth spending a little extra on?- Probably something that'll last and something that you'll use all the time.- Yeah, same?- Mm-hmm.- Okay how about best money advice you've received from your parents?- Save.- Save.- Probably when you guys say like, "You don't need that." Or something like that.- Like, "Will you need that in your life?"- Is that really that important? So I got a little bit of grandma in me, huh?- Yeah, yeah.- Little guilt.- [Nora] Yeah.- Oh that's fun. All right, well that's all the questions I have.- I have one more question though.- Oh you do?- For you, yeah.- A surprise question.- I do have a surprise question.- If you could have one wish in this life for us, what would it be?[Adam sighs]- That's a heavy question. If I could have one wish in life, you know, I think that's pretty easy. I just, I just want you two to be happy.- Is that true?- You'll be happier when, you know, I'm not around as much to make you unhappy with money maybe, but no, I don't know I just... You know, I think as a parent you always just worry about your kids all the time. And even when you get older and you move out, we'll still be worrying about you. So probably the best thing that we could ask for is that you guys would be happy,- So sweet.- So cute.- Cutest ever, right?- Cutest.- The cutest ever. Okay you two, thank you so much for joining. Mommy missed out, right?- [Adeline] Yeah.- Right this was great and merry Christmas.- Thanks.- Like and subscribe.- Yeah like and subscribe.- Like and subscribe, oh there you go.- Turn on that notification bell.- [Adam] I hope you found this helpful. If you did, please subscribe and share with your family or friends. If you have a topic you want us to cover in future episodes, send us a note through our website. And if you're at the point where you want an expert opinion on your finances, reach out and we'd be happy to start a conversation. And remember any comments, insights, or strategies discussed on this podcast are intended to be general in nature and therefore may not be suitable for you and your situation, whatever that may be. Before acting on anything we discuss, please consult with your attorney, CPA, and/or your financial advisor.