210. Your Inner Child Is Still Running Your Financial Life

Why do you save things you could easily replace? Why does spending money sometimes feel uncomfortable even when you can afford it? And why do some financial habits seem impossible to shake?

Your money story started long before your first paycheck.

In this episode of the Money & Legacy Podcast, Laura Sexton looks at how childhood experiences with money can shape the way we spend, save, work, worry, and make financial decisions as adults.

Laura shares personal stories about conserving paper as a child because she did not want to be a burden, refusing to use stickers because she might run out, growing up in a home where money was rarely discussed, and discovering later that some of the financial realities of her childhood were very different from what she understood at the time.

But this is not an episode about blaming your parents.

It is about recognizing what you inherited so you can intentionally decide what belongs in your family's money story moving forward.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How childhood money experiences can show up in adult financial behavior
• Why scarcity can affect you even when you have enough today
• How to identify the money beliefs you picked up without realizing it
• Why not everything you inherited from your family needs to be changed
• How optimism, resourcefulness, work ethic, and generosity can become part of your financial legacy
• Why talking openly about money can help break cycles of shame and fear
• How to decide what you want your children to carry forward

Before you can change your money story—or share it with your children—you have to know what it is.

Look at how you behaved. Look at what you believed. Look at what is still showing up today.

Then decide what you want to keep, what you want to change, and what you want your family to carry forward.

Learn more about working with Laura Sexton

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Transcript

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Laura 0:00

Some of the things I inherited around money are things that I wanna keep. Some things I want to stop passing down, but I cannot choose between them until I can see them You are listening to the Money and Legacy Podcast with Laura Sexton. I'm helping families pay off debt, grow wealth, and build a legacy without sacrificing what matters most. This is where money feels easy.

0:26

Hey, legacy builders. When I was a kid, I was worried about using too much paper. I loved writing stories. I, in fact, still have them, all of the ones that I've written either on paper, some ideas for stories written down, and I would just write these ridiculously long stories. I would hand write them, and then I would transfer them onto the computer and print them out. Now, this would be fine if I was just writing them normally, and I was getting to around 20 or 30 pages. But I was doing them 20 to 30 pages in one long, giant paragraph with reduced margins, no spacing. I wanted to fit as much as humanly possible onto every single sheet of paper. And the weird part is, nobody told me that I needed to do that. Nobody was like, "Laura, you're using way too much paper. You need to reduce the amount of imagination and storytelling that you're doing." Nobody told me that I was costing the family money. But somewhere along the way, I had learned that I needed to make what I had last. I didn't want to be a burden. And when I start thinking about my money story, that's one of the things that really stands out to me. Because our money story isn't only made up of the big financial things that happen in our childhood homes. Sometimes you see it by looking at how you behaved on a day-to-day. Some of those behaviors are still showing up decades later. So let me tell you, I have an issue with stickers. I still have an inability to use stickers because I don't wanna run out of them. Guys, I'm a grown woman. I have money. If I use all of my stickers, I can go buy more stickers. This is not a finite resource, and yet there's still this tiny voice in the back of my head that says, "Don't waste them. Save them. What if you need them later?" What, why would I need them later? I don't need them now. I'm just enjoying them So today I want you to look backward with me, not so that we can blame our parents or diagnose everything that happened when we were eight, but because before we can decide what money story we want to pass on, we need to understand that we're already carrying. Now let me tell you, I have made a really big deal about not saying anything to my s- my children when they're playing with stickers. This feels really silly, I understand that, but I need you to understand that this is something that I very consciously have to remind myself not to pass on to my children I wanna make sure that everything that I pass on to them is beneficial. And I know that I'm going to make mistakes, and I know I'm gonna mess them up, and I know they're probably gonna end up sitting in front of a therapist having a conversation about how mommy was always talking about money. I'm going to mess them up somehow, I know it. But what we learn about scarcity, about work, spending, joy, security, fear, what we learn about what enough is, is something that we carry forward. You didn't develop a relationship with money when you got your first paycheck. You'd already been learning about it for years, and some people say that when you're seven, your money story is already locked in. But guess what? That's not true. We can always change. But You do want to develop those good habits in your children when they are young because you want them to carry it with them forever So I think when we talk about our childhood money story, it's really easy to ask, did I see my parents budgeting? Did we talk about money? Did we have debt? Were we poor? That's one of those things. I keep seeing these memes go around the internet, and I crack up because people are talking about the things that in the '90s made them feel rich. Like, if you had a refrigerator out in the garage with drinks inside of it, you were a wealthy family. It's so funny because I completely agree. If you were a family in the '90s and you had a TV in your kitchen, you were a wealthy family, and it's so funny. Can you tell me, have you seen any of these? Can you think of something? Back when you were a kid, in your fundamental years, what were the things that people were doing that made you look at them and go, "Oh, they're a wealthy family"? My friends that had inflatable furniture, I just thought that their parents must have so much money There are so many things that we could look at and go, "Oh, those people were rich." Do you look at yourself and think the same thing? Because look, it matters whether or not your parents had debt when you were growing up, but I want you to go deeper. How did you behave with money? What did little you believe that you needed to do? For me, it was the paper. Somehow I absorbed the idea that I needed to make what I had last for a long time. Beneath that is something deeper. I didn't wanna be a burden. You have to ask about what happened in your house. What did you learn to do because of your financial situation? Were you the kid who never asked for anything? Did you hide what you wanted and keep it to yourself? Did you save everything that was given to you? Or were you the complete opposite? Did you spend everything the second you got it because you didn't know if you were gonna get more, or you felt like you could get anything you wanted any time you asked? Did you become really independent? Did you decide very early that when you grew up, you were going to make a lot of money? And if you did, why? What did you want to be? Are you doing that? Your behavior can tell you a lot about the story that you were writing as a young child. Some of those patterns, they're still there. As an adult, it's pretty funny how this has manifested for me. Do I buy paper? Yes. Do I buy stickers? Yes Do I have reams and reams of paper and hundreds of notebooks that don't have any words in them? Yes. Because I worry about finishing a notebook. How am I going to know if I'm ever going to get another one? Where I'm at right now is I have these special notebooks that I write in every morning, or usually do. I have not been waking up on time recently. But I write in them every morning. I write two to three pages every morning in these notebooks, and they have my hopes and my fears and my dreams and my goals all written down in them. A lot of prayers in these books. And they come in sets of two. And please know that when I open a new set, I start using book number one, I have to stop myself from going out and buying a whole another set. I wait until I have started using book number two to go buy another set. But these patterns are still here. I'm still worried that I'm going to run out of paper. Apparently, there's some part of my brain that believes the highest purpose of a sticker is to live untouched in a drawer forever, and that is absolutely ridiculous, but it's also very revealing. There are things that we do with money today that make perfect sense when we look at where we came from. Maybe you make plenty of money now, but you're still afraid every time you spend money. Maybe you have a fully funded emergency fund, but spending from it actually feels like an emergency and you need an emergency fund for your emergency fund. Maybe you hoard food. I have seen that tendency in my eldest child where she will eat off of somebody else's plate before she eats off of hers because she's afraid she's not gonna get enough, which is crazy because there's more on the stove. Maybe you can't throw things away, or you're always worried that the other shoe is going to drop any moment. Maybe you know exactly how much money is in the account every second because without knowing that, you feel completely out of control. Or maybe you go the opposite direction and think, I did not get to have things when I was young, so my kids are going to have everything." And now you have a very hard time saying no. You see, sometimes today's behavior makes a lot more sense when you understand yesterday's story Now, not everything we inherited was bad. I really wanna make this point because I do not want this exercise to become, "Well, everything my parents did was wrong," because that's not true, and it's also not the point. There are things from my childhood that I am deeply grateful for. The school that I got to go to, an absolutely amazing blessing, and I've worked very hard to find a school like that for my children. My parents had to work extra hard to make that work financially. But my mom always made it work. Didn't matter what it was. If we had a project going on, she was gonna make it work. If we didn't have everything that I thought we may have needed to make it perfect, doesn't matter, we're gonna make it work. It may not have been Pinterest worthy. It may not have looked like somebody else's, but it got done and there was joy in the making of it. I think that's a huge reason why I'm still such an optimist. There is something in me that believes that we will figure it out and it will all work out. I also have a strong desire to work and make more money. Some of that came from seeing that money mattered, and it didn't always go to the beautiful things, and it didn't always go to the things that I necessarily wanted. But I don't have to look at any of that and say, "Well, that's a wound that I need to get rid of." No. I like working, I like building, I like creating opportunity, and I want my kids to like working, to like building, to like creating opportunity. So when you look at your story, don't just look for what needs to be fixed. Look for what deserves to be carried forward. What did your parents give you that you want your children to have, too? Here's a very short, non-exhaustive list that you can add to. Did they give you resourcefulness, generosity, work ethic, optimism, contentment, creativity? There's a lot of good that comes from your story, too. And then, of course, there are things that we wanna change. We had cars repossessed when I was growing up. Now, I did not understand that that is what happened until I was much older. In fact, it was when I was talking about bankruptcy in my own life that I learned about these things. We didn't really talk about money, and I understand why, because it was a protective mechanism. You don't wanna worry the kids, don't wanna have hard discussions, and maybe sometimes we don't know what to say. I get that So instead of saying nothing, what I have decided to do in my own family is to do something different, to say something, to talk about it. I want us to talk about hard things. I want my children to be able to come to me with any question, any struggle, any frustration. I want them to know that I'm a safe place, a safe sounding board. Look, my children do not need to carry adult financial distress, but I want money to be normal. I want them to ask the questions. I want them to understand what's happening at an age-appropriate level. Sometimes money's tight, and we have to be okay with that. And sometimes we make mistakes with money. Guess what? The kids need to learn. Let 'em make mistakes when they're little, because they're going to make mistakes. Wouldn't you rather it be when they're young as opposed to when they're on their own and then they need to come to you for help? Come to me for help when you're little. I can definitely fix that small mistake. It's gonna be much harder on me and my family to fix a bigger financial mistake, and sometimes we can't fix it. Sometimes it's too much Teaching our kids that sometimes we make mistakes, sometimes we have to wait, those are good things. Those are things that mean that money is not scary, it is not shameful. We get through them together So that's something from my childhood money story that I'm choosing to be different. In my house, we talk about money openly. You get to be the one to decide what the next chapter looks like. So you're gonna have to do a little bit of work. You're gonna have to think about yourself as a kid, not your parents, you. What did you do around money, around things? What did you ask for, and what did you refuse to ask for? Were you a saver? Were you a spender? I want you to reach out and tell me, what did you think rich people looked like? And maybe more importantly, what did you think poor people were like? What did you think happened in the world when money runs out? And then go ahead and ask, where is that little kid still showing up in my financial life today? Because once you see it, you can't unsee it, and you get to decide what you wanna keep, what you wanna change, what you want your children to learn from your mistakes, what you've decided that your children will not carry forward. This is legacy work. Legacy's not just the money that eventually lands in somebody's bank account. I say it all the time. It's the habits, tools, and mindset that we leave behind. It's our beliefs. It's our way of life. It's the way we talk and the way we show our kids what money means. Before you can share your money story, you have to know what it is, and your story is probably bigger than, "Well, we had money or we didn't have money. My parents were good with money or my parents were terrible with money." No. Look at how you behaved and what you believed. Look at what you're still doing today, and then decide which pieces belong in the story you're writing for your family from now on Some things that we inherit are worth keeping, and some things are worth changing. But we don't get to choose between them until we see them clearly. All right, my legacy builders. That's it for this week. Go out and make a difference