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.

The Damage of Shock and Awe

Last night I watched a few minutes of The Biggest Loser and while admittedly I used to enjoy the show and think that what they where doing for people was really tremendous, I now have my doubts. In the last three years I have learned a tremendous amount about how people change and make change last over time.

In our culture we celebrate shock and awe, pull your selves up by your boot straps, and 5 steps to change your life. While these tactics work in the short run, they seldom leave the person in a better place in the long run. At the core, these methods use guilt, shame, and coercion to get people to do what they "should" do. Why are they so popular, because they get results quickly. Which is what so many of us are hungry for, yet what we don't see after the entertainment of watching someone being radically changed, is them slipping back to their old ways often coming in the forms of rebellion.

The real process of change for the positive is a long and slow one, seldom with quick and obvious signs of change. Yet over time, real transformation begins to emerge. This type of transformation comes from internal motivation for change, change that can not be imposed from the outside, but rather can be facilitated by a trained professional who is truly vested in the best interest of the person desiring help. Being able to help people change is hard nuanced work. It can be painful and slow for the facilitator of change, but when they are able to stay in the process and walk alongside, not in front of or behind the person desiring change, then lasting change can begin.

How do I know all of this is true, well sure I have read loads of books about it and earned two masters degrees, but this is not what helps me know about the change process most, rather it is my personal experience of growth. I have experienced both the shock and awe methods of change, as well as facilitated change. The lasting change in me, that leaves me feeling deeply stable and secure has come out of facilitation, not a process of I know what is best for you.

I have only begun to realize my own internal motivation for change, and while sometimes it has not always come out of proper motivation, it has been the strongest propeller of change. Fourteen years ago, I could not have ever imagined having two graduate degrees and one advanced professional certification. The change has been long, slow and difficult, it has had moments of triumph and utter despair, but I am a different person.  A person who is well equipped to help others make lasting change. Am I am done in the growth process? Not a chance. There is still much to learn, and I know that it will be a life long journey that no six week program is going to satiate.

When we only look at growth or change as a six week program, or five step plan we are destined to frustration and despair. While those programs can serve as catalysts for moving forward, they alone will not sustain your growth. Your desire for growth and change must come from within.

Don't Shoot The Messenger

Making good financial decisions can be hard work. Most of us arrive in the adult world never having taken one class on personal finance. Sure, you saw your mom use her credit card at the department store and your dad go off to work every day. But what did you really learn about how to effectively manage personal finances?

Family life can be very demanding, and the basics of living often don't get covered in daily conversations. Heck, many of our parents never learned how to manage their personal finances, so can we fault them for not teaching us how to do the same?

Our families are the messengers of life lessons. We grow up watching our parents’ every move. We are students of what they do and don't do. We notice the small things, like when Mom says she’s a saver, but never seems to have money for the really big things. Or when dad gruffly reflects, "Another day, another dollar.” These messages  teach us to view money in a certain way. The family language of money often has to be decoded, and we must examine the money messages our parents give us. Unless we tackle our financial uncertainties, we can be left feeling stuck, frustrated and scared about managing the financial resources we have.

Yet, in rare cases, there are those who feel financially secure. Yep, I said it: there are people out there who feel totally, unconditionally, 100% financially secure… but they are not who you think they are. They are not always the richest people in town - they are the people who have a good sense for what money can and cannot do for them in their life. 

How did these people get to a place of financial security? It was not magic, I can assure you. They took the time to look at what they learned from their family, determined what was helpful, then intentionally integrated that into their way of living. They also determined what negative views of money they had and let go of them. The financially secure identified the gaps in their knowledge of how to manage money, and then took time (and continue) to learn how to better manage the resources they have. Common learning experiences include reading books, attending classes and finding trustworthy advisors to help teach them how to manage money and expectations well. 

IMPORTANT LESSON: While learning to save, budget, and invest is important, the number one tip to financial security is to learn how to manage your expectations. It is the gap between where we are and where we expect we should be at any stage in life that is most likely to make us feel financially insecure. 

Don't get upset with your parents because you did not teach you everything you need to know about money. Don't have an attitude with your wife because you are not on the same page about money. Chances are your spouse didn't get all the right money messages, either. There is a significant possibility that you and your wife share some financial views. Likewise, there is a strong possibility that you will also think differently on certain topics.

To address the similarities and differences in money management approaches in your marriage, take time with your spouse to list out where you are on the same page and where you are different. When you identify those differences, realize that neither of you may be right, and that there may be other options for managing that situation then what you have considered. This is where learning about personal finance together can introduce new ideas to your family. If you don't take the time to study personal finance, then all you will have to base your decisions on are the lessons from your own family, which won’t always serve you well.

Feel free to give me a call to talk more at 980-275-1627.

Ed Coambs

Edited by Reena Arora of Arora Media, connect on Facebook

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Making More Money Isn't the Answer

Who hasn't at times felt overwhelmed by the feeling of needing to make more money? I know I have. Even after years of studying personal finance and putting into place practices to define what’s enough for my family and me, I still get caught up in the day-to-day grind of feeling like everything will be okay if I just made more money.

However, that’s not what  your family needs most from you. Rather than money, they really need your presence and engagement. In our fast-paced culture, it is easy to move quickly and not take the time to reflect on our priorities, so let this be one of those moments when you hit the pause button and really look at what is influencing you. 

Take time to answer the following three questions and include the values that they stand for (i.e. Wealth, Family, Compassion, Hardwork, Balance, etc). For example I love the show Shark Tank, and if that was all I watched then I would think life is all about making deals, more money, and creating businesses.

1.    Where do you work?

2.    To which organizations do you belong?

3.    What type of information (t.v., internet, magazines, and books) do you consume? 

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, we consume daily messages from the outside world through a number of sources about how to live our lives. There is meaning in all communication, as well as an underlying value. When we become highly attuned to the values of the communication that we are receiving, then we can make conscious decisions about what to do with it. 

Recently, I have really enjoyed listening to the business podcast “Entrepreneur on Fire,” but after a while, I realized I moved from enjoying and learning valuable insights about the journey of becoming an entrepreneur to being consumed with thinking about how I could grow my business and (as a natural outcome of that) increase my income. While there is a time and place for learning how to grow your personal finances and business, if left unchecked, other priorities and values will get overshadowed like spending time with family, community events, personal spirituality, etc.  

When you start to feel like making more money is the best use of your time, it is time to stop and evaluate the messages you are taking in.

Feel free to give me a call to talk more at 980-275-1627.

Ed Coambs

Edited by Reena Arora of Arora Media, connect on Facebook

For all your communication needs, she is all you need.

Grow your marriage by getting all the latest blog posts.

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