What Is Your Financial Story?

The power of narrative is often missed and misunderstood in the process of financial planning.

We all have an untold financial story that is working in the background of our lives. Bringing light to this story helps us to find our way forward.

I don't know when the first story was told, but I know that it was thousands of years ago. For as long as we can go back, stories have carried the power to pass along values of the family, community and broader culture. Modern day Hollywood has figured out how to tell the best stories, and they make huge money telling stories. They’ve become so adapt at telling stories, that I wonder if we have lost the ability to tell our own stories—the stories of our families, and the challenges and triumphs that they’ve overcome and yet to overcome.

Stories, when told by the people who have lived them, do not miss the little details of family history and the meaning associated with different events. Stories are often how we learn best, as there are strong emotions associated with stories, which tie into the facts and figures of our lives. Stories take us on a journey and carry us through to the next generation. Yet as I meet with people to talk with them about their finances, I am surprised to learn how little they know of their own story, that is, their family story—how they came to be, what values they stood for, and what direction the family is headed. Sure they can tell me a few details, the highlights, but the deep knowledge of family story is not there.

Yet more often than not, it’s the deep family story that continues to carry forward strong convictions and beliefs about how the world works and should work. People with all levels of educational achievement will often refer back to something their mother or father did, and how that has shaped the way they do something now. While they may gain new knowledge that advances the direction of the family, there is still a pull by the family back into what they’ve been told.

So as you face looking at your finances, what is your story? Here are 10 questions to help you start to open up and look at your own family’s story of money.

1. What financial successes did your family have?

2. Who made the money (did one member make much more that than the other)?

3. When where you left wanting for something but could not have it?

4. Who controlled the money and why?

5. Who spent the money and why?

6. What arguments over money existed?

7. How does your spouse view money?

8. How do you view money?

9. What did your family say about rich, middle class, and poor people?

10. What did you learn about money from watching your parents?

These are just ten questions to help you start to examine your own story around money. As we become more familiar with our family story around money, and how we want things to either stay the same or change, we then gain new insight into the directions that we can head.

In the stories we create, we want to look for places of consistency, and when there are exceptions to the rule. We want to start to look at how we want to rewrite the story so that it goes forward. While it is important to understand the story up until this point, we also want to start to look to the future to determine how we would like the story to look going forward. What would the script of your financial future include? How can you start to write into your new script?

In my next blog post see how your story may have led you to fall in love with a profession and not a person.

Written By: Ed Coambs

Edited By: Joey Glass

What Is Financial Wholeness?

This is neither about making more or less money. It’s not about the right investment strategy, insurance products or even estate plan. Rather, it is about the way that you relate with these key elements of financial planning.

Financial wholeness is focused on understanding who you and your spouse are as people, and what financial plans are appropriate for both of you. If you are a small-business person, nurse, corporate or government employee, your definition of financial security and then life objectives will be defined differently. 

Personal financial planning is only coming into prominence over the last 40+ years. As people have entered into mass affluence and lost the sense of security that came from an agrarian society of the early 1900’s, or pension based retirements of the mid to late 1900’s, a shift in thinking about how to give meaning to live and manage the resources to accomplish that meaning is underway. As we live in this new millennium, what it means to create financial security is evolving, and certainly there is not one definition that will work for every individual.

While financial planning is focused on what to do with your money, financial wholeness has little to do with the actual money that you have. Rather, it’s a concept that speaks to our relationship with money and the way that we approach using money in our lives.  All of us live with conflicting and often unexplored beliefs and thoughts about money, which drive the way that we use money in our lives. Some of these beliefs and thoughts are helpful, while others can have disastrous implications for the way that we live our lives and engage in relationships with our significant others.

So then financial wholeness becomes about finding congruency between what we say we believe and think about money and what we actually do with it. To get to financial wholeness, we start with openness to personal exploration and a willingness to look at ourselves in ways we have not yet considered.

Over the next year I will release twenty four blog posts that will take you deeper into understanding what financial wholeness can mean for you and your family.

The Next Post Will Be – What Is Your Financial Story?

Written By: Ed Coambs

Edited By: Joey Glass

Money As A Means Of Social Connection

From barber shops to country clubs, money often grants us social connection within our community. This is why it is so difficult for people to give up their patterned ways of spending money. It is not that they lack self control or will power, but often times changing the pattern of spending means a loss of social connection. It may be happening at very intimate levels like your neighborhood where you are known on a first name basis, but it also happens in those more anonymous places like the movie theater.

For every level of income, there are expected levels of social engagement. When we lack the basic resources to be able to engage at our "appropriate" level, we feel a disconnection from our community. We may not be able to fully articulate what or why we are feeling disconnected,  but there is a deep awareness of not being able to participate in "standard" social commitments of our social class.

Social connection occurs at many levels and in many ways. This is why we must develop our critical awareness around the need for social connection and how having money helps to facilitate our connectivity to the community and culture that we live in.

When I have talked with people who were raised in a low socioeconomic position within their community, they often have a strong dislike and frustration, with those who possessed obvious signs of wealth. At the same time those that had sufficient resources at their finger tips often where not fully aware of their social privilege. Sure they may nod their hat to the wealth of experience and consumption they had relative to others, but they would have to look above their social class to feel the same feelings of inadequacy that those from a low socioeconomic position felt toward them.

Recently, I met with Sally whose husband had taken a significant pay cut with a new job. She was recounting how she previously could not understand how people could go into home foreclosure or not afford some of the basics of life. She had lived with privilege, (to no fault of her own) which prevented her from understanding scarcity and struggle. That was until her husband lost his ability to earn a large income. They too then faced and narrowly escaped foreclosure on their home. As she told me this story, you could see the realization in her face that she had misunderstood what it was like to live without money. She thought other people just had issues with poor money management; now she knew that other life circumstances may have affected their financial picture.

When financial planners, relatives, or friends tell you to stop spending so much money, what they are not taking into account is your underlying desire to maintain social connection. Sure, we can all exhibit a certain level of personal control over the way that we spend money. However, we must account for the change in personal and social connections that will happen if we stop spending our money in certain ways. There are deep sociological and psychological factors that are driving our desire to remain connected to our community. This is what makes it difficult to change our spending patterns.

I have heard of doctors, attorneys, and executives who are all seemingly unable to stop the spending, even when it is obvious that it is putting them close to financial ruin. Yet, it is at these very moments that the objective information no longer makes sense to these individuals. Rather, they are trying to deal with the emotional fall out of being disconnected from their community. In moments of desperation, they often fall into making more and more irrational decisions in attempts to overcome their anxiety of not having enough. These individuals will take larger business risk then what is otherwise prudent, or may start offering unnecessary procedures all in the hope of generating more money.

If you must curtail your spending for any number of reasons, recognize that this is a serious challenge and one that will have bumps in the road. It is not as simple as just telling yourself to stop spending. Having a plan will help, but having emotional and relational support will be even more important during this process of adjustment. The process of change usually occurs over months, if not years. Expecting the changes to happen in a day or week, will set you up for disappointment.

Frustrated By Simplification

How many "5 Steps to Financial Freedom" books have you read? How many articles have you read promising to "Lose 10 Pounds + Get A Flatter Stomach Now"? These short, simple lists seem like magic fixes until we go through the steps and then don't get the results we expected. Too often, these simple fast fix lists are like McDonald's fast food, tastes good in the short term, but in the long run it is likely to leave you out-of-shape, frustrated, and tired.

Instead of always running towards simplicity, we need to face and embrace the complexity involved with our marriage and our money. While lists are one of the very things that makes life manageable, at the same time there are often other steps that are not included or explained that are necessary for successfully completing the process.

This became glaringly obvious to me while I worked with my 8 year old nephew on a model car. The kit named 8 steps to assemble this car. What the instructions took for granted is that there are "steps between the steps" that will make the official 8 steps easy.  As adults there are many lessons we learn (that we forgot that we learned) which make it easy to put together a model car. This is accumulated knowledge.  Anytime that we have things boiled down into a "simple" formula, it may serve as a basis for understanding. However, it will not be a full foundation to build upon, especially for someone that does not have the same life experience as you.

The real fruit in understanding most subjects is not in the simplicity but rather in the complexity. With complexity, there are often fewer definitive answers and many more questions. Yet, it is with the development of complexity that we are then able to reduce the information into manageable pieces.

Simplicity gives the appearance that complex problems are approachable and achievable. But if you have ever spent any time working on your finances, you know that it is never quite as easy as a 5 step program, or a one time effort. Becoming proficient at managing our finances often takes years of practice, mess ups, reflection and yes successes.

When things are not as simple as they seem, we should not allow that to be a barrier to making progress. Instead it should be a realization that we have a problem in front of us that is going to take more work to solve. We may need additional tools, knowledge, perspective, and experience before we are able to solve the problem.  Referring back to the model car, I have developed skills that my nephew has not. So while the simple steps are easy for me, they are not easy for my nephew. I am not better than my nephew, but rather I have developed the necessary knowledge to read instructions, interpret what they are telling me and render a completed model car. I trust that with practice and experience he will also be able to build a model car on his own. Until then, he is going to naturally experience some frustration with completing model car kits.

As you face financial problems that you wish where solved by easy steps (but are not), consider asking for help. There is a good chance that there is someone who can come alongside you and help make sense of those seemingly simple "5 steps towards Financial Freedom". It is in relationship with others that we can engage in the complexity of a problem, and receive the needed guidance to move forward.

From Simplicity Towards Mastery

We run around frantically looking at our most vexing problems in life for simple solutions. For many people they are either marriage and money. We as a culture are hungry for answers and yet seldom find satisfaction in the answers that we receive. Why is this? I would suggest that we have become accustomed to bland and dull information. Information that is broken down into tiny pieces for us, but with no way of putting it all together. Sure this is the very promise of 12 step programs, 7 habits, etc. Yet the reality is that a journey into deep knowledge can not be summed up in a few simple steps or 5 minutes a day.

The path to mastery is fraught with challenges, set backs, frustrations, and yet for those that choose to journey on the path towards mastery find great joy in the journey. They are not disheartened by setbacks and frustrations, rather they embrace them as they come. At the same time I am not saying pursue them either. This is the place that I have often allowed my own mind to wander. That somehow I have to make the path to mastery difficult or it will not be worth it. This is all wrong, rather it is in the pursuit of mastery that the challenges will come, and with those challenges eventual solutions.  This all of course does not happen in a straight line or on a fixed timeline as much as others would like you to believe.

Think about it, how much would you have appreciated your kindergarten teacher telling you that if you would just learn the alphabet that you would then be able to read. Not the case at all, the alphabet is the simple 26 charters that lead to the development of our language but mastery of the alphabet does not give you mastery of language. Sadly this is what we get with 8 step articles, we get building blocks, but not the whole thing.

Simplicity is important, as it helps us to bunch information together, but at the same time if we don't take the time to dig deeper into the meaning behind the simplicity then we can never fully appreciate the simplicity that is before us. Again with the alphabet. If we were taught that the alphabet was enough to succeed, we would say that is foolish. We all recognize that the alphabet seems simple because we memorized it by the end of kindergarten but we would be missing the significance of how it has deep meaning in our life given the complexity of ways in which it is used in our life. And so the same is true of our marriage and money. We can acknowledge basic patterns about marriage and money from an early age, but if we do not take time to become students of both subjects then we will remain shallow in the way that we go about approaching these relationships.
The reality is that your elementary education teachers are much like your parents in that they lay the foundation for your understanding of a subject, but they can not be an end point of your education. In order to reach the deeper uses of the alphabet you must continue on in school, and the same is true of our marriage and money. If we stop at what our parents taught us then we will be sorely disappointed with life, just as we would if we stopped our education at the 5th grade.


Both Marriage and Money are exceptionally complex topics that can not be reduced to a simple formula. Our understanding and engagement with both subjects and then how they interact with each other are significant and will not be easily mastered. Yet you are not alone on this journey. There are people who are further ahead of you on the journey that can help mentor and grow you as you face the challenges that come with dealing with marriage and money.

Compassion Changes Family Finance

Fighting with your spouse is readily acknowledged as one of the biggest challenges of marital life. It is often as if couples are from completely foreign countries and do not understand each others financial culture. Yet when the fighting ensues, there is often much that is provoked just below the surface of the argument that is creating the real challenge. These issues below the surface can be related to past suffering. In the September/October 2014 Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy article titled Family Therapy and The Science of Compassion author Laura B. Wallace highlights the importance of building compassion for improving family relationships. She says "Compassion means seeing and responding to suffering". How we see the problem before us and how we respond will in large part determine the outcome of the argument.

Take a minute to reflect:

How compassionate are you?

How compassionate does your spouse think you are?

What would change in your life if your level of compassion increased?

These are important questions to grapple with. I trust that all of us have room to grow in our ability to provide and receive compassion, especially when it comes to interacting with our family and finances. When our compassion grows, our ability to engage in the difficult topics of our marriage and money will increase.

The Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education has helped advance our understanding of the role of compassion in developing deeper levels of connection in our lives.
The center identified three types of compassion, which are; compassion for others, receiving compassion, and self compassion. Of these three types of compassion which is most difficult for you? What blocks you from experiencing compassion in this area of your life?

As we focus on building the three types of compassion, the solutions that we need to our problems will start to emerge. Sadly as long as we are not experiencing compassion, the pathways to finding positive solutions to our problems will be difficult to find. In counseling the idea of unconditional positive regard which parallels compassion is a key ingredient in helping people grow. Many therapists have found that once a person feels accepted for who they are and where they are, that then becomes the place that the person starts to experience the freedom to move forward in their life. There is an implicit trust that the solution is within the client, and that from experiencing unconditional positive regard the client will feel (not just think) like they can move forward.

My experience tells me that each of us has an easier time with one area of compassion and struggles with the other two. However, if we are not experiencing the three types of compassion then we are not experiencing the fullness of compassion. I see this often playing out in the caring professions, where the professionals have great compassion for others and will spend endless hours serving others, but will not take the time for themselves, or receive care for themselves.

As we slow down to reflect upon compassion for others, receiving compassion, and self compassion what feelings are being evoked in you? What types of resistance are you experiencing in your gut? Become aware of these responses and try to put names to them, as they are what is going to help guide you into deeper levels of compassion. Our resistance points are what will block us from giving and receiving more compassion.

Ultimately compassion is not something that is so much talked about as it is experienced through touch and tone/quality of voice. Growing these areas can help add substantial quality to your relationships. As our levels of compassion for our spouses and ourselves increase it makes approaching the difficult subjects of family finance all the more easier.

What are those areas of family finance that have felt unsafe to address? Hold this experience in your mind, now go to a place in your mind where you have experienced compassion. What did you experience with compassion in another area of your life, what was stirring in your body? Now how can you hold onto those summoned up experiences, and focus on addressing the family finances. Go slowly and with compassion in mind as you try to address the family finance issue at hand.

Investment Charts, Helpful or Not?

Warning, nerd alert. I had the chance to meet with two wonderful financial planners recently. While I was waiting for our meeting to start, I was looking at some charts that they had up on their wall. One 

of the charts was of the stock market over the last 100 years, along with different events that happened during that time period. One line of the chart included the different presidents that have been in office over the last 100 years.

As I was looking at the chart and making sense of the information, Jenny one of the planners walked into the meeting room. She and I talked for a minute about the chart and how they use it to help communicate with their clients about investing. Jenny made the observation that despite what her clients believe about the current president, the stock market has performed positively during both democrat and republican presidents. This discussion reminded me of two important investing lessons.

1. The need to look at the big picture

2. Our assumptions about why things happen can be wrong

When it comes to investing we all have to contend with our emotions, perceptions of risk, and why we think things happen the way that they do, but when we can look at data and talk with someone else about our perceptions, we then have a chance to see things in a new light.

Before I loose you, I realize that the very idea of looking at investment charts is intimidating. Yet this may be the very thing that you need to consider for overcoming your fear of investing. Having a professional help answer all your questions, can in turn help you feel confident about making the best decisions for your family. None of us have perfect information, but professionals through their years of education and experience can usually help put things in perspective.

When it comes to investing, the more that you understand, the more likely you will feel confident to use investing to provide for your families future. Too often the investment world is positioned as a risky one, yet with a good advisor on your side, you will grow in your confidence about inventing. The planners that I met with are members of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors. This group has very strict guidelines for membership and client advocacy. I trust that these professional would be well qualified to help make sense of investing for you and your family.