Teaching our kids about money is not only about helping them gain financial confidence and steward it well, but it’s also about equipping them with valuable life skills. Kristen welcomes Scott Donnell, author of Value Creation Kid and creator of the app Gravy Stack to explore the concept of raising value-oriented children and introduce you to a unique approach to financial education that promises a brighter future for your family.
The foundation of financial literacy begins at home. Teaching our kids about good money skills is a fundamental responsibility of parenthood. It’s about helping them understand the value of money, its purpose, and how to manage it wisely.
In today’s episode, Kristen and Scott dive deeper into:
- This approach goes beyond the conventional money lessons. It introduces three types of value: material value, emotional value, and spiritual value.
- These skills aren’t just about money; they are life skills that prepare children to thrive in the world. The value creation mindset is the antidote to entitlement, instilling a strong work ethic and a sense of responsibility.
- A simple but effective three-system approach to financial education.
- Normalizing money conversations at home creates a healthy attitude toward finances. Children become more comfortable discussing money, making informed decisions, and understanding its role in their lives.
Investing in your children’s financial literacy isn’t just about money, it’s about their future and the future of your family. The return on your family’s investment can be immeasurable. By breaking generational chains of financial instability and fostering responsible, compassionate individuals, you’re creating a legacy that will benefit your family for generations to come
Take the Family Money Skills Class and get the support and guidance needed to financially thrive as a family. The program includes a self-paced course, fun activities, and an active live community for support. Get the GravyStack app for 30 days free when you take the Money Skills Class!
Find out more about the GravyStack app here.
Scott’s Book Value Creation Kid
Follow Scott at https://www.instagram.com/IamScottDonnell/
Introducing the Social Selling Leadership School: A 12-week Advanced Leadership Certification program for Network Marketers. This program was designed to give you everything you need to be a confident and transformational coach for the people you serve and help your team get massive results. This is the ONLY Coaching Certification program built specifically for the social selling market. Find out more and join the waitlist here!.
Thanks for listening! Do you have a question about network marketing? Kristen can help! Drop your question here, and she just might answer it live on the podcast: https:/Kristenboss.com/question
If you’re ready to learn the simple process of running your social selling business online, you have to check out Kristen’s live group coaching program! The Social Selling Academy: www.thesocialsellingacademy.com
Transcript for Episode #185: Financial Literacy for Families with Scott Donnell
Kristen Boss (00:03): I see you with brand new eyes. No, I’ve never been so sure. Take my, you are listening to the Kristen Bos podcast. I’m your host Kristen Bos. As a bestselling author and performance coach, I’m on a mission to share about sustainable and purposeful approaches to both business and life. Each week I bring relevant topics that I believe are necessary to create a life of purpose, significance and meaning. Entrepreneurship is about so much more than growing your bottom line. It’s about who you are becoming in the process and building a life that is truly extraordinary. Entrepreneurship is really just the beginning.
Kristen Boss (00:56): Hey bosses. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. This week I have my friend Scott Donald, who is a financial literacy expert on the podcast this week. I met Scott over the summer and his wife and they’re just such amazing people and when I learned about what he did, I’m like, Scott, you have to come on the podcast. So if you don’t know who he is, and if you haven’t heard of Gravy Stack, it’s going to be probably your next favorite word in your household. So Scott Donnell is a bestselling author of the book Value Creation Kid, the Healthy Struggles Your Children Need To Succeed. I love that title. With over 6 million families served, Scott is the leading boys in helping parents teach their kids good money skills. He is also the host of Smart Money Parenting, a Worldwide Top podcast for families, and now he is launching the world’s first bank account for kids and teens that like to play games called Gravy Stack.
Kristen Boss (01:52): You guys, this conversation I have with Scott and how we talk about educating our kids around money and how to teach them to not just earn money or see money differently. I don’t know about you, but I often think about, okay, how do I want my kids to grow up thinking about money and not just thinking about money? How do I want their literacy around money to be? I want my kids to be confident when it comes to knowing how to earn money and not just earn it, but invest it, save it, use it, stewarding it. Well, so I know you are going to love this conversation. Be sure to check the links in the show notes because he is going to be making an offer at the end that I know you’ll want to take advantage of. So friends, without further ado, listen to this interview.
Kristen Boss (02:39): Hey bosses, welcome to the show. I am super excited. I’m here with my friend and special guest, Scott Donald, and we are going to talk about, nothing excites me more than talking about money. I know that sounds weird, but I feel very passionate about the subject. So we’ve tried to get this podcast on our calendars and seek it up for the last I know, eight weeks. And just between both of our schedules I’m like, I feel like the stars are aligning. We are here, we are having this conversation and I will say this might be one of the most valuable podcast episodes I will publish to date. We’ll just say that. So Scott, so glad you’re on.
Scott Donnell (03:15): Oh, so good to be here. Kristen, that’s a hefty goal, the best one ever.
Kristen Boss (03:21): Let’s go.
Scott Donnell (03:22): Let’s do it. Let’s do it.
Kristen Boss (03:24): So I am excited because this conversation about teaching financial literacy to families, you wrote the book, you co-wrote the book, the Value Creation Kid, and
Kristen Boss (03:36): Essentially raising practical, financially literate children who not only know how to because depending on the home you’re raised with and your context and your background or how you were educated, you might be really good at spending and earning but not saving and investing or earning and saving and not investing. And so we tend to have, if we can put it in buckets, we tend to have buckets that we’re very familiar with and we’re great at, and then buckets that we don’t even know exist and that we totally neglect and when we’re learning it as adults, I feel like first of all, I just think it’s the greatest disservice that we don’t teach financial literacy in our education system. I think it’s a travesty and I think, well, I don’t know, this is just my opinion, but I think there are some people that profit off of people being financially illiterate and I think I would like to see families be profitable because they learn financial literacy. The sooner the better. So let’s talk a little bit about the value creation kit and tell me why you wrote that book.
Scott Donnell (04:42): So we’ve helped about 6 million families now through all of our companies and we started this app called Gravy Stack. It’s the world’s first bank, an investing app that plays like a game. So you get on there with your kids, it’s a couple bucks a month, and then the kids are learning all the core money skills that we’ve learned from these 6 million families and we’ve been training and training and training and we know how to teach it to kids. That’s the biggest problem, right?
Scott Donnell (05:09): Schools dunno how to teach it. Banks don’t even care if you’re a kid, you don’t have deposits. And then the parents don’t have a roadmap. We surveyed a thousand parents. They’re like, we have no idea how to teach our kids this stuff in what order and even if they’ll listen. And so we know exactly how to build these skills with kids. And so Gravy Stack is the practical do-it-yourself app tool that’s a bank and games together in one and the average kid is saving mom and dad like a thousand bucks in the first month or two
Kristen Boss (05:37): With all the, that’s amazing. Okay, let’s explain because I can see my audience hearing that being like, I’m sorry, what? My kid’s playing this game will save me a thousand dollars a month. How so? At least how so? At least walk it out for me.
Kristen Boss (05:52): That’s compelling.
Scott Donnell (05:54): There are skills that a kid has to learn to be financially competent. You can’t just give kids an allowance and expect them to know about money. That’s actually a terrible idea.
Scott Donnell (06:03): Allowance Is to codependency. You’re just giving them money and maybe you make ’em do chores and this is what most all parents do. And well, you shouldn’t pay for half those chores. They should do those as part of their role in the family.
Scott Donnell (06:15): Then the other half the chores, they don’t have any concept of creating value with it. They just get a stupid list of things done for $8 or $6 or $10 a week. And then the worst is when parents are like, well, I don’t do allowance. I just do chores and my kids are the good ones that do everything. I say, congratulations, you have compliant children, but they’re learning nothing about money. You cannot homework money. Money, okay. Money has to be earned to learn about it. And when we wrote this book, value Creation Kid, the Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed, the point of the book is this, kids learn in two ways, having fun and real life experience. Having fun makes it intrinsically motivating.
Scott Donnell (07:02): And then real life experience is the practical skills that give them capability to actually succeed. This is why homework doesn’t work, especially with money. This is why the education system’s broken in a lot of ways. You have to make things fun and practical. So with us, we wrote this roadmap for families to be able to teach their kids to create value first. This is our number one lesson of financial skills. It’s the number one strategy and tool that we train all of our families. What the best families in the world teach. They say create value first. Money is not the first goal. Money is the outflow of creating value. It’s the store of value that’s amazing. Money is not good or bad. Money is a lot of poverty. Mindset is money’s bad, I got to spend it right away. When I get it, I got to hoard it because I’m scared it’ll be gone tomorrow.
Scott Donnell (07:56): Or they say money’s the end all be all. And nothing rips apart families more than saying money is it good? And it’s our idol, it’s our main thing. But when you look at your calendar and you look at what your mental stress is over and you’re worried about all these things with money, guess what? That’s your idol. Kids need to understand the money’s not good or bad. It’s a tool. It’s a store of value. That’s the point of value creation kid. We actually have three types of value. The first is material value that kids can create. Material value is what you create and produce in the world. Solve problems, find wants and needs and fill them. Have empathy, learn customer service, look around and find ways to hunt for creating value for everyone around you. What an unbelievable skill that is. We’ve been doing business fairs for 10 years for kids and now we have 1600 of ’em all over the world and the parents have said, this is the best thing my kids ever learned not to forget school. They’re paying for college. They’ve got two jobs that are creating value for everybody around them. They know cogs and profit and products and services and how to pitch safely and it’s just so powerful for the families. So the first type of value that we want to teach children to create is material value in the world. But that’s just one type.
Scott Donnell (09:12): There’s two more emotional value, emotional energy, like how you think and feel and help other people think and feel creates value. This is what makes a great friend. This is what makes the captain of the sports team. This is what has, honestly, this is probably the best way to get the job and get the promotion. If you can be lifting everyone else up around you, that is creating immense value, emotional value. And then the third type of value is spiritual value. Spiritual value is how you help other people connect to something above themselves.
Scott Donnell (09:53): This is probably the best cure to anxiety and self-doubt. Spiritual value. I love Jesus. I’m no holds bars. I love Jesus. That’s the best spiritual value ever done. Okay, he’s my savior. But there’s a lot of ways to create spiritual value. A great mission, right?
Scott Donnell (10:11): A business that has a compelling mission that aligns everybody towards a higher purpose and a higher goal. When we said we were going to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely at the end of the sixties, that united our entire country, probably the arguably the last time we were all connected. So spiritual value, we cannot undervalue the spiritual side of all this and to connect people to something greater than themselves. Not to put the focus on yourself, but to put the focus on others. And so that’s what we want to teach and we have a roadmap in here that just walks parents through how to do it. And the way to do it is to create healthy struggle. Healthy struggle is not trauma. It’s not tough love. It’s not abuse and neglect and forcing children to do a bunch of things. Healthy struggle are
Scott Donnell (10:59): Any academic or athlete knows this, but we have 90 healthy struggles in the book that talk about soft skills, hard skills, practical skills, business skills,
Scott Donnell (11:08): All those life skills that are emotional skills that help a kid learn capability, confidence, and to create value with it. That’s the cycle. So the more we can help our kids go through these healthy struggles to overcome great things, learn new skills, financial skills, all of them, then they gain capability. That capability immediately creates confidence. Not like the, oh, Kristen, you’re so awesome, pat on the back. You’re so pretty, you’re so smart. That’s not true confidence, that’s a false confidence. This is deep confidence. And then that is used to create value in the world in these three buckets. And that is the best parenting strategy out there. Forget all the other ones. Forget whatever free range or gentle parenting or helicopter parenting. Forget it. This is the best way to raise kids.
Kristen Boss (12:02): When I’m thinking about this concept of raising a child, that’s value creation first. It’s when you think of the, Hey, go and get a job done and then I’m going to pay you for getting the job done. When it’s about money first and value second or value’s not even on the table, what you’re essentially teaching them is the likelihood of them developing an employee mindset where they are only going to care about the job that’s done, likely not taking ownership of. When I think of my husband and I talk about this a lot, no one caress as much about the business as the business owner. Sometimes you’ll walk into a restaurant and the hostess will be there picking her nails, looking down and kind of showing up and be like, oh hi. You want a table? That’s someone who doesn’t believe in value creation first.
Kristen Boss (12:45): She’s just there to do the job, get paid, but she’s not taking ownership of, okay, how do I fully own this job and how do I bring value in the role I have? And so it’s this idea of you’re developing an employee mindset and there’s nothing wrong with being an employee, but I don’t think you’re going to be the most valuable employee because when I think about the people who we have grown and that have promoted within my own company, it’s people that are value creation first that are like, yes, I’m paid to do this job, but here’s all the other value that I can add to this job. Here’s the value I can add to the company. Here’s the value. I can do those things. And so when you create or bring up a value oriented child, not only are, I would just be surprised if they didn’t turn out to be entrepreneurs because that is what entrepreneurs do.
Kristen Boss (13:34): They look for problems in the world and they present a solution which is value. So it’s like inherently you’re not only, I mean at the very least you’re going to raise incredibly competent, capable, compassionate, good kids, which we always say, I just want my kid to not be a jerk. If you raise a value creation child first, of course they’re going to constantly be in every situation being like, well, how can I add? And I love that there’s the three material, emotional and spiritual. It’s like, how can I add emotional value here? How can I add spiritual value here? And it’s like those lenses, these aren’t just money skills. These are life skills. And I think I love how you’ve kind of laid that out.
Scott Donnell (14:18): It’s the precursor to the money skills. We have our core
Scott Donnell (14:23): This with all the families. Our family money skills course goes through every single one of the seven money skills and the four stages of each for children and we talk through, but the precursor to all this is the value creation mindset. And this is the antidote to entitlement. This is the antidote to literally inoculate your children against spoiling and victimhood and laziness and anxiety. This fixes it. And I think what people need to understand is not every kid’s going to become an entrepreneur, right? In fact, a lot of parents are scared by that word. Over 90% of parents hate the word because they’re like, is this code for losing my money and gambling everything and risking and going bankrupt? So then they never even want their kids to even know that entrepreneurship is a career path. But what I believe with 6 million families now I’ve seen this over and over, I could tell you so many stories. Every kid doesn’t have to become an entrepreneur, but every kid needs to learn to become entrepreneurial. The entrepreneurial mindset is the problem solving mindset. It’s the filling wants and needs, it’s the empathy and listening skills and good customer service is good listening and helping people get what they need. This is what makes a great friend. This is what gets you captain of the team. This is what gets you the promotion. Those are the critical pieces for kids to be able to get at a young age rather than the handout mentality. This is what all parents do.
Scott Donnell (15:50): Go, alright, we’re going to give ’em an allowance or we’ll just give ’em some money here. And then they try to split it up in their piggy bank between save, spend and share. If they’re lucky, that’s if they’re lucky. And then they’re like, well then we’ll maybe do a lemonade stand. That’s what most everyone does. So yay, we did it. We checked off the business box for a day and then they get ’em a bank account when they hit puberty. This is what all parents mostly do. They don’t know what else to do. And we’re saying is, oh, there’s a thousand things that we need to do around the dinner table on the weekends with our kids to really raise them to be financially competent and adding value everywhere they go for the rest of their life. So that’s what we focus on in training with the families and it really is the value creation mindset is the foundation.
Kristen Boss (16:35): That’s so good. I would love to hear just a tangible story you have from a family who they saw drastic financial change from doing the family financial course. I would love to hear a story.
Scott Donnell (16:50): Yeah, Ainsley and his wife and two kids, nine and 14, they went through our course. They’re using Gravy Stack. They’ve read the book and immediately they called it their value creation summer. So they immediately texted us within two or three weeks and they said, our kids have not asked us for money once. They haven’t even thought
Scott Donnell (17:18): Ask us for anything. They don’t have the greedy gimmes anymore. It’s gone. And it’s them going through our home economy system where they’re doing gigs and covering expenses. I’ll walk you through that in a second. We have a perfect system in the home that teaches these money skills that it’s not allowance, allowances, socialism, sorry for anybody who’s listening, we have the better answer that gets kids. We help kids become more financially confident, value creators. They’re doing things in the home that they’ve never imagined that their kids would do to help. The Ainsley texted us. He goes, my daughters went from arguing over who has to do chores now they’re fighting over who gets to do gigs around the home. We literally just flipped the entire thing on its head. I just, one of our friends, Chris Crone, his kids have 60 gigs around the house and they passed off 10 expenses to their kids that they were paying for, and now their kids are in charge of planning ahead for those things.
Scott Donnell (18:18): So now through our home economy system that we train on, the kids are budgeting for the first time ever, they’re planning ahead and setting goals. For the first time ever, they’re splitting up the funds between save, spend and share automatically. And then they’re covering needs first and then wants with what’s left. And they’re learning price of goods. I don’t need the Air Jordans. I’m good with the Reebok. When you give kids reasons to have to create value, they will jump in full speed ahead and that’s what we train in our home economy system. So do you want me to walk through those three E’s real quick?
Kristen Boss (18:53): Yeah, I was just going to say let’s walk through it because I can imagine my audience being like, what is a gig and what’s the expense and what’s, what is that? So let’s walk through it.
Scott Donnell (19:02): Yeah, we have cuss words. I’ll start with this. We don’t say sales, we don’t say entrepreneurship. We don’t say business, we don’t say chores and we don’t say allowance. Those are the five words
Scott Donnell (19:11): Kids hear them, they think homework and they rebel. They don’t like ’em. What we did is we shifted the whole thinking to this idea of, Hey, did you know that between the ages of six and 16, you should have about 12 types of expenses your kids should start to cover on their own. Okay, so we started there When a kid earns, they learn. And when a kid has expenses to cover, they have the motivation to earn and create value. So we created the three E system. This is what’s ripping all over the world. Families are getting the most transformation from this system and we automated it in gravy stack for you. So you don’t have to have whiteboards and stickers and point systems. It’s the nightmare. We made it super easy in repeating for you. So the Gravy Stack app is this, three Es number one, expectations, number two, expenses, and number three, extra pay, which we call gigs. So expectations number one, these are the things your kids should never be paid to do. This is why allowance and chores doesn’t work.
Kristen Boss (20:15): Yep.
Scott Donnell (20:16): You should never pay your kids to make their bed, clean their room, brush their teeth, do their homework, even dishes and trash. That is their role in the home and a few other things, but you get the idea you shouldn’t be paying for those things, not even on a list of things that they get paid allowance for. That’s why it’s such a problem. Those are the expectations. If you want to keep our last name, you’re doing these things right? This is the table stakes. Number two, expenses. Most parents miss this one. There are so many things that your kids can start paying for at age six, five. Even our app starts at age six. So we say age six is where you start going on this. And by the time they get their driver’s license, they’re covering ’em all. Alright? It starts with toys, trinkets, games, tech. You want to give your iPhone later on when they’re teenagers or the phone, they should make every penny for that iPhone. They will treat it like it’s absolute gold and two or three years later it’s going to be in perfect condition. But that should be later on. I have rules on those and technology later too. But birthday presents for friends is an expense kids should pay for. That’s
Kristen Boss (21:27): Great.
Scott Donnell (21:27): How many times did you as the mom or me or my wife? You buy the present, you wrap the present, you get the card.
Kristen Boss (21:34): So guilty, guilty.
Scott Donnell (21:36): So are we. And then the kid chucks it on the table and doesn’t ever think about it. They don’t even know what the present is half the time. That’s not a generous kid. How are you going to teach your kid to share and generosity with that? What about the kid making the extra 15 bucks after they’ve saved and shared, they get the present, you help them wrap it, then they bring it into the party and they’re like, open this right now. I want to see your face. I got this for you. That kid is generous for life. And then social outings is another expense. Clothes and extra sporting equipment. There’s so many things that we have on our list in Gravy Stack that families can pass off. And now when you do that, your kids, you just saved hundreds of dollars a month. By the way. Some families are paying their kids $500 a month in Gravy Stack.
Scott Donnell (22:24): Okay? The average is 150 to a hundred, but now the kids are covering expenses. So the parents are net net even. They’re like, oh my goodness. These kids are learning all these skills by covering their own expenses and learning all the financial competency. So the three third E is extra pay. Did you know there’s 55 things around your house right now in our app that you could do to make a few extra bucks around the house as a kid, if you want to sweep the garage, wash the Windows yard, anything in the yard, right? Stuff with your pool. If you have one, make a meal, clean a bathroom, organize a closet, alphabetize my books, plan the next family trip on a budget, cancel our subscriptions and get half the cut. There’s so many gigs. We call ’em gigs because it’s all inside of Gravy Stack, which is a game and a bank together as one.
Scott Donnell (23:15): So now the kids see all this as fun. Now they’re intrinsically motivated to complete things around the house that you never thought they would do or you have all this fights and exhaustion and conflict about kids doing any little chore. Now we’ve flipped it all on its head. So now kids are making so much value in the home, they’re getting rewarded and they’re covering their expenses. That’s how they learn to budget, plan ahead, price of goods, trade-offs, setting goals, all of it. And then the last piece we created, my favorite one, it’s called Brain Gigs. So we don’t just have gigs that are action gigs.
Scott Donnell (23:52): Your kids need to learn to make money with their brain. It’s what you and I do. So we added in action and brain gigs on the list and it’s auto repeating. These can be monthly repeating, weekly, daily. They could be one-offs. And it’s just this printout for the fridge. We email you every Sunday. The kids’ payday is on Saturday night. They click off what they’ve done each week and that’s their payday. It goes through their money machine and gravy stack to their save spend and share. It’s just perfectly automated for families. And the brain gigs are things like this. If you read this book and give us a report on three ways you’re going to apply it to your life right now, five bucks, 10 bucks an article, love it. A TED Talk prager you video, don’t eat sugar for a month. That’s a $15 game right there.
Scott Donnell (24:41): Parents need to teach kids that when they create value with their brain, there’s a financial reward because that’s what most of the higher end jobs in our country do. Why are we waiting until kids are out of college to pay them to use their brain? This is ridiculous. So that’s why we have action and brain gigs and all the best families we’ve studied to build this thing. We built this on the a hundred best families in the world. That’s what we train on. That’s what our Family Money Skills course is based on. Our workshops at Gravy Stack, all of it. So this is what all those families did one version or another, and none of them did allowance. Surprisingly, the best families in the world, none of them ever touched allowance. It’s fascinating. I thought a few would, but none of them did. But their problem was having the whiteboard and the list of things the kids could do and they have to maintain it every couple of days. It was a nightmare. So we had the gig system in Gravy Stack replace all that. Now they’re all using it with their kids and grandkids and they love it. So that’s the beauty of Gravy Stack.
Kristen Boss (25:41): Oh my gosh, there’s so much I want to say to this, but I am picturing someone hearing this and then being like, ah, crap. Alright, my kids are 10 and 12 and I’ve been paying them to make their bed. I’ve been paying them to do. I’ve been paying my kids to exist in this house and just share in their load. So I can imagine a parent being like, oh, hold on here. Okay, what if I want to do this? I want to teach my kid to be value creators and I’m about to tell them the things that they’ve earned money on are now worth nothing. And have you seen families be able to turn it around
Scott Donnell (26:23): Oh yeah.
Kristen Boss (26:23): Kids that maybe grew up on a different system or they’re just used to mom and dad like, Hey, where’s my allowance? New rule, there’s a new sheriff in town.
Scott Donnell (26:32): Yeah. Well let me start by saying this. I can only give you so much in 30 minutes right now, but if they do the family money skills course, it’s going to change their life on dinner table.com, put the link in the show notes for everybody. Go get that Family Money Skills course that will transform your kids at any age. This is young kids, kids, teenagers, adult kids that maybe are still living at home or struggling in their early twenties in college. They’re right out of college. They’re calling you all the time they’re messing up or even grandkids. We have parents of all ages using our family money skills course to master those money skills. But I will give you this piece of advice. Okay,
Kristen Boss (27:15): Yeah, let’s hear it.
Scott Donnell (27:16): We trained much deeper on this in the course, but I’ll give you the high level. If you can go to your kids and say, Hey guys, we’re going to make some changes because mom and dad want to give you more freedom. That’s it. We want to give you more responsibility. We want to trust you more. And every kid, those are the three hot buttons for every kid. They’re like, yeah, I want more responsibility. I want more freedom and trust for mom and dad. I want more of a rope. I want to be able to, I can make this. That is the best conversation to have when you start the gig system, you go, alright, here’s the deal. Mom and dad want to actually give you an opportunity to create more value around the home and earn more. And we want to give you guys more choice and freedom to cover certain expenses that we’ve always been covering, but we want you to learn how to do this and we’re going to give you opportunities to make maybe double the money, triple the money, five times the money in the home by creating value first. Then you guys are going to start to learn responsibility and freedom and you’ll get our trust from This is how you get more trust from parents. Kids always say this, I want more independence. I want more. I actually don’t believe in independence. That’s another topic. I believe in interdependence. But kids all want
Kristen Boss (28:26): Mhm.
Scott Donnell (28:27): They want that. So it’s almost a no-brainer when you frame it that way with children, teenagers, anybody. They go, oh my gosh, I just got the roadmap to get more freedom and responsibility and trust from mom and dad. That’s the win. That’s why this is when I talk to a kid, it’s like 10 seconds. They’re like, yep, I’m in. This is sweet. When parents use those, all of your audience right now is going to be rewinding 30 seconds. I know this has happened. Every time I talk about this,
Kristen Boss (28:55): I know
Scott Donnell (28:56): Your highest play in this episode will be the last minute of talk. They all want to literally memorize what I just said, and then they want to repeat it to their kids. That is such a powerful conversation. And we believe in money conversations in our family money skills course.
Scott Donnell (29:14): We want the money to be a normal conversation in the home. When we surveyed the thousand parents that said, we have no plan or roadmap at all, please help. And these were wealthy, middle income, low income, all across the spectrum. Well guess what? The kids said this might be the greatest reason why people need to get this training. The kids said, we don’t want to talk about money because it’s the biggest fight in our oh man. Now intimacy and money, those are the two issues in most marriages and families and they wreak havoc, but the kids don’t hear about the intimacy stuff that’s in the bedroom. What they hear is money stuff all the time. They see mom and dad just trying to make money all the time, trying to cover the bills all the time. They hear things we can’t afford. That money doesn’t grow on trees. Do you know how hard I work to get you guys this? You just wasted it.
Scott Donnell (30:13): That’s what they hear all the time. And so they’re like, forget it. I don’t want to cause more conflict. Money is a source of conflict, not a source of a store of value. It’s a source of conflict in our home. And this happens across the spectrum, wealthy or not. This is a big issue. And so kids say, forget it. I’m, I’m going to chill. I’m going to play games, hang out with my friends, do school and sports and then I’ll deal with the money issue when I’m out on my own and I have to figure it out later. They got their food, shelter, clothing covered. What do they have? What do they care? So they’re like, forget it. And so that’s why we say we have to make money be seen in a positive light. It’s a reward for creating value. It’s not the end all be all, but you better make money work for you or you’ll be working for your money for the rest of your life. So kids have to understand this and we have to make these conversations in the home just more seamless, more natural. And we have hours on this training in our workshops and course. So if this hits anybody,
Kristen Boss (31:14): I love that. If
Scott Donnell (31:15): This hits anybody deep, just get that course. Get the Family Money Skills course and we will walk you through every single step how to have those conversations. We have 200 money skills convos to have at dinner tables and on the weekends with kids. And once you do it, I mean the financial return alone is awesome. I mean, the parents that have done our course are like, yeah, my kids just made a thousand bucks on a weekend. I think we have over a hundred kids now. That made we have a challenge. It’s like, Hey, let’s make a thousand bucks on a Saturday. And we give them over a hundred business ideas to go create value and make it, and they’re doing it and they’re loving it. But yeah, that’s all in there in that course.
Kristen Boss (31:55): That’s so good. And I am really glad you talked about normalizing money conversations in the home and it not, because I do think that happens so often as a kid thinks I don’t want to cause conflict, I don’t want to bring up the money, and then they end up becoming adults who don’t know how to broach the conversation of money. And when you don’t have the education around money, you lack confidence around money. And then you’re looking to other people to hopefully give you the answers or you’re hearing it handed down or you just take what you heard as a kid. It doesn’t grow on trees. It’s really hard to come by. You have to work really hard for it. Better hope you can get a promotion for that. All those things becoming, they grew up being dependent, dependent on others, dependent on the system, dependent on what other people say instead of like, oh, I have the skills, I have the capability, I have the confidence, I have the competence to go out and create value in the world.
Kristen Boss (32:48): And I think this offers a sense of emotional security for the child when they go out into the world on their own. Because I know for me, I had the privilege, part of my privilege of growing up that I’ll own is that I was from a upper middle class family. So I knew if anything would’ve fall apart that mom and dad would be there to get me out of, of my money woes, I will say, because I made poor money decisions and I kept getting rescued. What happened was there was a story of shame that started to create in my adulthood where I saw myself as the child that constantly needed rescuing
Kristen Boss (33:32): My parents, even as an adult. And I felt such shame from it. And I will never forget when I healed that story. And I wrote my parents the very last check I ever did in full of thanks so much for everything. I’m okay now. And now realizing I actually now have the skills, the confidence, and the competence to take care of myself. You cannot put a price on that. You cannot put a price on that. So if people are like, oh, I don’t know if I can afford the course. I’m like, even that you saying if it’s a source of conflict in the home, how much is resolving that conflict worth to you? And then gifting your children a different future around money. Because I believe when we heal our money stories, we are breaking generational chains and we are also passing on those healed stories to our children. But if we have money, trauma, we’re passing on the money trauma. So you have to break the cycle, right? Yeah.
Scott Donnell (34:30): This is an investment in the next generation. Kids are not an expense, they’re an investment. The financial reward is millions of dollars over the next several decades. And when you do this course, but you got to think about it differently. Let me just share this quick story. Can I show you a fun story about this that might make it land?
Scott Donnell (34:49): This will Land with parents really well. Okay, so when we moved into our house, we got our dream house a few years ago. We had to get the furniture, the carpets, the landscaping. So we brought in these unbelievable landscapers and they put this perfect plum tree right outside here on the front, right side of the yard. And it was gorgeous. They got the perfect plant, perfect, no shade, watering systems. They got it propped straight, gorgeous. They nailed it. We paid them. Well. The next day we wake up and Amy, my sweet Amy, my wife and our four kids. So Amy goes, yeah, we need to get one on the other side too. And I go, I can do this. So I go, I’m like, I’m going to be the do it yourself dad today. I’m going to show you. And I go, I get the greenhouse, I get what I thought was the right plant, turned out to be the complete wrong plant.
Scott Donnell (35:42): I get the soil that I thought, I get the sprinklers set up. A couple hours later, me and my neighbor Bennett, we put this thing in Baa bing baa, boom, it’s in. Look at that. We did it literally like three days later. It starts lop siding and it starts falling over a couple months later. The good tree is five feet taller than my do it yourself tree, right? And then literal, the first storm came. The first storm came and my tree just lopsided over. So the point of saying this is you need an expert to cover your blind spots. You need help from people that do this every single day in and out, especially when it comes to kids, because kids are like seeds. They’re literally planting trees. You don’t know how you’re going to do until they’re 30, 40 years old. And you have to make sure that you get these things right with your kids, especially in your home.
Scott Donnell (36:45): So they can learn the skills, have the small failures, not the catastrophic ones later. You want them learning, you want them growing. And then you’ve got to get the experts to be able to plant the right seeds to steward them the right way. So that’s how we think about raising kids with these critical skills, the financial skills, the heritage training we do, giving them the tools to succeed that no one else is teaching. That’s the point. So that’s why it’s like an investment. You don’t know how you’re going to do for decades to come, but the return on your family, not just their financial success, but the return on your family is just, it’s a thousand x when you really think about it the right way. So that’s the point. I hope that people understand that piece because critical,
Kristen Boss (37:31): I think that’s so good. And I think of parents are often thinking of their kid’s future saving up for college, they’re saving up for weddings. I’m like, okay, yeah. But also there’s a greater r o i on the table here than just saving up for a college education. And if you can actually have a value creation kid, I think that college education fund gets funded a whole lot faster. And when you learn that you can actually pay your kid to work for you and your business, there’s all kinds of fun tax strategies and all those things we could go all day about. But I’m just saying learning to see the return on investment and the return on the value given back to you and how it changes family conversations, how it changes family dynamics. I just can’t imagine how many parents feel like they are having tension with their teens or their young kids because they feel like their kids are entitled, not grateful, not taking care of the things they buy. I can tell you, this comes up for me where I’m like, don’t you appreciate the toy I just bought you? And I’m like, oh, toy budget. I’m like, I’m so excited. When my Scott gets home, I’m be like, Scott, we’re doing some things, which my husband’s like, he’s big on your principles too. He’s like, oh, value creation kid. I’d love it. I’m like, yeah, but we need to implement it yesterday. So
Kristen Boss (38:48): I am excited for this. I am so thankful that you came on the podcast to just share this vision you have. I know you feel so passionately about helping families and kids in this area, and I truly think, I feel so strongly that it’s an injustice that kids are not taught financial literacy at a young age in our education system, and it’s a huge oversight. So I’m glad you’re here. We’re going to put the course in the show notes. So if someone’s like, I’m ready. We got to change my family financial path right now, they can go and do so and hit the link in the show notes and grab your book. The Value Creation Kid. Every Family Needs to own that book. Try out Gravy Stack with your kids. It’s a fun game. It’s screen time. You won’t be sorry that they’re doing So, Scott, it’s just so great having you on the show.
Scott Donnell (39:35): Thank you so much. And we’ll give a free gift to anybody who does the Money Skills course, the Family Money Skills course. We’ll give them Gravy Stack a code to get into Gravy Stack and use it for free.
Kristen Boss (39:48): I love it. That’s such a great deal. Alright, well thank you so much, Scott.
Scott Donnell (39:52): Thanks so much for having me.
Kristen Boss (40:01): That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Listen, as you love what you heard here today, I would love for you to leave a real quick rating and a review. This helps the show get discovered by new people. Be sure to take a screenshot of today’s episode and shout us out on Instagram. We’ll shout you right back out. If you’d like to find additional resources or discover how to work with me, head to kristenboss.com is start right.
