I spent a few delightfully slow days with my kids in the Cederberg during my recent break, with fresh (and very cold!) mountain air, gentle walks, reading, knitting and a fire at night under starry skies. The cold forced us to snuggle either in bed or by the fire and created space for conversations we probably wouldn’t have had if we’d stayed home.
One of these conversations was particularly challenging for me, a conversation about money in our family. You would think this would be easy for me, but talking about my own money with my kids elicits so many feelings. Feelings of regret and even shame.
I have always felt inadequate, not good enough, like I could have been further along on my financial journey. There’s always the voice in my head that says a financial planner should have done better, managed my money better, communicated better, taught my children better and set a better example.
However, one of the reasons I do the work I do now is because of the money mistakes I made early in my life. Those mistakes are what led me to write a book for women on money before starting Foundation.
For me, the challenging part was never the product selection or the investment strategy, because that’s what I know well. I do with my savings what we advise our clients to do. The challenge was navigating the family's financial needs in a changing environment. It was putting boundaries in place around money. It was having the hard conversations in a productive way.
In many ways, it was not talking enough about money and not knowing how to handle those conversations well. I’ve become better at this recently, but it’s also partly because my kids are older. They’re now able to understand and process the complexities of our family’s money history and current reality.
When they were younger, I was worried that those conversations would provoke anxiety for them. I didn’t want my own fears to transfer to them, but inadvertently, in avoiding the conversations or not having honest enough discussions, they have.
In our conversations with our kids, or even in our silence, we can never hide the truth. If we’re anxious about money, that anxiety will emerge in some way. A small request, like a new water bottle, can spark a massive confrontation about spending when we already feel that we are not frugal enough.
Looking back now, I wish I had been more honest about my feelings around money with myself, and with my family. Often our feelings only become visible when we talk about them. I wish I had spoken more about money in general.
Maybe that’s the real work. It’s not fixing the feelings before they show up, but being willing to sit in the discomfort of it with our people, by a fire. I don’t know if I’ve earned the right to feel proud of that yet. But I’m getting there, one cold Cederberg night at a time.
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Kind regards,
Sunél
