Afford Anything - How to Talk to Your Parents About Money, with Behavioral Economist Etinosa Agbonlahor

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

#636: Behavioral economist Etinosa Agbonlahor joins us to discuss "money scripts" — the unconscious beliefs we inherit or develop about finances.  Agbonlahor, CEO of Decision Alpha and former Director of Behavioral Science Research at Fidelity Investments, is the author of "How to Talk to Your Parents About Money."  She studied financial management at Cornell University and explains how these hidden biases create problems when we try to discuss finances with family members. You might assume everyone thinks saving money makes sense, while your parents operate under completely different beliefs. These conflicting scripts can derail conversations before they start.  Agbonlahor shares the story of a single mother who became so anxious about money after her divorce that she refused to buy her teenager expensive shoes. Years later, she realized she was trying to teach extreme frugality to protect her daughters from the financial insecurity she experienced. The key to productive money conversations lies in three principles: care, curiosity and cooperation. You approach with empathy rather than judgment, ask open-ended questions to understand their situation, and work together toward solutions instead of trying to be the financial savior. The conversation covers specific topics you should address with aging parents: debt, retirement planning, long-term care preferences, and estate planning. Agbonlahor emphasizes starting these discussions early, before a crisis hits.  You want to understand their vision for retirement — whether they prioritize security, adventure or leaving a legacy — and then assess the gap between their goals and current reality. When parents refuse to discuss finances, you might need to involve trusted friends, spiritual leaders or professional advisors who can have these conversations instead.  Resources Mentioned: Book: How to Talk to Your Parents About Money, by Etinosa Agbonlahor The Humble Dollar Forum Timestamps: Note: Timestamps will vary on individual listening devices based on dynamic advertising run times. The provided timestamps are approximate and may be several minutes off due to changing ad lengths. (00:00) Introduction to money scripts (00:56) What behavioral economics studies (03:03) Hidden money beliefs (04:34) Money script examples (06:16) Adult trauma responses (09:32) Personality and money (11:57) Trauma changes personality (12:55) Protecting future habits (15:17) Debt conversation approach (22:03) When to start conversations (27:53) Using "I" statements (29:51) Sample conversation scripts (33:36) Handling resistance (43:35) Parents' money frameworks (56:46) Long-term care planning (58:02) Stepparent conversations For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode636 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We all have deeply ingrained money scripts that operate below the level of our conscious, but that influence our actions, our attitudes, our habits around how we manage money. How do we recognize those scripts? And importantly, how do we talk to other people about their scripts, particularly when those other people are our parents or grandparents or uncles or step-parents or people who are very, very close to us, whom we worry about? To discuss this today, we are joined by behavioral economist Etiosa Agban Lahore, who is the author of the book, How to Talk to Your Parents About Money. Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything.

This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate and entrepreneurship. It's double-eye fire. And today we're going to talk about the letter F, financial psychology. Etiosa trained in financial management at Cornell. She is the CEO of Decision Alpha, a behavioral pricing firm. Prior to that, she was the director of behavioral science research at Fidelity Investments. She's also worked as a behavioral economist at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. She is the author of the book How to Talk to Your Parents About Money.

Welcome, Etty. Thank you for having me, Paul. I'm excited to be here. Thank you for being here. Etty, what is behavioral economics? And how does it tie into the question of how do you talk to your parents about money? Behavioral economics is essentially the study. behind how people make financial decisions.

More technically, you might think about behavioral science looks at how do we make decisions overall. Behavioral finance looks at how do we make investment decisions. Behavior economics looks at how do we make household economic decisions, saving, spending, etc. I've been a behavioral economist for almost a decade. As part of my work, as working with a very big investment bank,

talking with financial advisors who would have conversations with everyone from people who were in the middle class to very ultra high net worth people. And they'd come back to me around every time this people talk, or every time our clients talk about conversations with your children or with their parents about money, it gets really awkward. No one is sure what to do.

The kids don't want to ask for fear of looking a little bit like, we're excited for their estate and the parents are awkward about revealing what they have set up because they just have that anxiety around how do we have this conversation without breaking our relationship. So I was hearing that from the financial advisory. side of things. But I also had friends who were transitioning and having parents who were starting to retire. And so they also come to me and asking, how do I have this conversation with my parent about retirement and about what to expect? Now, naturally, any kind of conversation about money has its hang-ups.

We bring our biases to money. There's a lot of psychological implications that we bring to our money. And so me being a behavioral economist and having studied, what is the psychology behind how we make financial decisions, it was almost an easy way or having an insight or having those like specific insights into, okay, there's a way that we can have these conversations with our parents without necessarily breaking a relationship. And there's a way we can have them being mindful of the way we all make financial decisions and the psychology behind that. So let's unpack some of the psychology behind financial decisions because some of the money scripts that we learn, we're not necessarily aware of. Can you talk about that?

Absolutely. So when we talk about money scripts, we're talking about. about some of the hidden, unconscious, subconscious beliefs that we have either inherited or that we have adopted about money. Now, they are unconscious or they are hidden because we think that then this is where behavior economics comes into it, right? Confirmation bias. I assume that everybody else thinks like us. And so when we go out into the world, we're looking for confirmation around our beliefs. Everybody must believe saving is the right thing to do. Of course, how could you not save, right? How could you not be in the fire movement? That's the only way to do it. And so because we have some of these subconscious scripts, when we sit down to have conversations with other people

about finances, it can be easy for our scripts to start to leak out, right? Our beliefs start to be this. It's the standard. How could you not be saving for retirement? What are you doing instead? And that can then bring the accusation and kind of crumble the conversation. And so when we talk about money scripts, it's just being aware that we all have this hidden biases, we all have these beliefs around money. And because our society doesn't necessarily encourage us discussing money in the open like you do every day, Paula, because the shy-y doesn't necessarily encourage that, it can be very easy to overlook the fact that our beliefs are our beliefs and they're not universal beliefs. And so being cognizant of what is the money scripts that I have, what are my

beliefs about money, and how do I then make sure I'm keeping those in mind? Those are my beliefs. They might not be global beliefs. They might not be principles, right? They're just beliefs I have. Let me keep those in check when I'm having conversations with other people about how they do their money. What are some examples of deeply ingrained money scripts that you've seen? Things like having, and this is an interesting one, I had a friend whose parents are missionaries, and so her whole life she grew up with the script of, oh, God will provide. And so their whole life, they never quite necessarily had to have enough because things just happened. Truly, like, things were just like, there's no food in the fridge one day, the next day somebody stops by and has a

visit with them and bring some food. There's no money in the bank. The foundation remembers them and sends a check. So she grew up with this belief of you don't need to think about it or worry about it because, like, God is going to provide. She grows up, she becomes a doctor, she's making six figures for the first time in her life, and she doesn't know where the money is going. We had to have a sit-down session and go through and go, where is this money disappearing? And she realized part of the reason that she couldn't pinpoint where her money was going was because she had this inherited belief. around I don't need to keep an eye on my money because things are always going to be provided for me. It's just always going to work out somehow.

So I don't need any financial discipline. I don't need to know where things are going. It's always going to work out. Fortunately, unfortunately, things were necessarily working out for her. And so we had to sit down and go through that. But that's an example of a money script where she had inherited from her parents this notion of things I was just going to work themselves out. I don't need to pay attention to my finances. It's going to be fine.

For them, it worked their whole life. They were fine, at least up till now, but for her, not quite the same, right? So that's an example of a money script that subconsciously, until we sat down and went, oh, that's the problem. That's why you're making all this money and not holding onto any of it. It was difficult for her to understand what was going on. And there can also be the opposite type of money script that sometimes forms in which people are a little too anxious.

Absolutely. So there's also manuscripts around, if I don't track every single penny. I had a funny story around this, actually. I was hiking the Grand Canyon last year. I was on a group trip, so, you know, show up and you meet a bunch of, like, new people. And I was having a conversation with this lady, because as soon as, I don't know if this happened to you, but as soon as you mentioned that you're in financing, any way possible, give people 30 minutes. They're going to spill everything to you.

I don't know. It happens with me all the time. I meet somebody within minutes. They're telling me, like, this is what's actually going out with the money. But she was saying to me that, so she has two daughters. Now they're adults, like in their 20s. They're doing really well. one is in medicine. They're both in medicine. Anyway, they're doing very well. But when they were younger,

her husband walked out on her. And so she found herself raising these two young daughters and having to go back to scratch and figure out, how do I build a career? How do I be a single parent? And she had this deep anxiety around money because for the first time in her life, she found that she was basically floundering financially. Her daughters were teenagers and one of them wanted to buy this pair of shoes and it was like $82 or something with a really expensive shoes. And she just was like, absolutely not. I'm not going to spend that on shoes. Daughters being teenagers, they prevail.

She buys the shoes. And she's so furious about having to have bought those shoes for her daughter. And it wasn't until we're on this, like on the grand can you, like maybe a decade later that she's like, I think what it was was that I was so worried about them finding themselves in the same position that I had found myself in where I was experiencing this deep lack, this deep anxiety, this deep having to like figure things out financially for the first time. And I was so worried that I was going to, if I didn't teach them to be frugal,

if I didn't teach them like you can't just have everything you want. If I didn't teach them to scrimp and save and prepare for the worst possible thing happening, they would turn out and they would not be able to handle a situation like I had found myself in. So she was trying to impart to her daughters with the error not wanting to buy them expensive shoes. This notion of you must crimp, you must save, you must track and you must hold on to everything with that kind of like tight-fistedness. when in reality she's like, they're fine. They're okay. Like, it worked out okay.

But that's another example of having a money script where, because of what she had gone through, her approach to money was track everything, be very, very careful about it, that anxiety and was informed by the things she had gone through in her life. So at the heart of it, all money scripts is really, what have we gone through? What did we learn? What have our experiences put in front of us? Those then inform and influence our subconscious approaches to money. I'm hearing a couple of things right now. One is that I'm hearing that money scripts are not just formed in childhood. They're also formed in adulthood. They're formed throughout life, often as an in adulthood that can often be as a trauma response. The second thing that I'm hearing, and actually this is one thing I'm kind of wondering, how does the concept of money scripts relate or overlap with personality? Because we might learn a certain set of money scripts, but then also there are some of us who just kind of naturally have a proclivity towards being.

a little bit more chill or a little bit more high-strung. In the Big Five personality paradigm, which has the acronym of Ocean, the quality of neuroticism is one of the big five personality traits. So how does that overlap? This is really an interesting question because there's a great paper, and it's called the Ant and the Grasper. It is about how some people have a personal savings orientation. And so some people naturally are predisposed to being better at just saving better because what is saving? Saving is you're giving up present rewards for future gain. And some people have a natural

proclivity towards being able to do that. It's just easier for them to save. I feel like I'm one of those people who I remember when I was seven, I had a little like storage tin. And we lived in Nigeria at the time. So we get like little, we'll get our allowance in like Nairanotes. And at some point in my storage tin, I had like a stack of bills, just a stack of Nairanotes.

There wasn't any need to do that. My parents provided for me. Like there was no real need to like save. the money. What was I going to spend it on a dose? I don't know what that money went to. But the paper suggests that some people actually have proclivity towards saving. Again, this is like an exploratory research. They built a personal savings orientation score. I think it's pretty cool. I try to have us incorporate some of our work in some of the organizations I worked with. But it's not yet a fact. I'm not saying that it exists for sure. I'm just saying it's a really interesting idea. And similar

to what you're saying, it's an interesting idea that our personality, type, right? So, are you more neurotic? Are you more open? Etc. Does that then inform and influence how we interact with our money? The thing about money is that we use money as a way of explaining who we are, right? It's almost like we project onto money our person, our personhood. And I've talked about this a couple of times where sometimes people associate debt with guilt because they look at having debt as being a bad person. And money is not an extension of your personality. it should be a tool that helps you live the life that you want to live. But if we treat money as an extension of who we are,

then it does make sense that maybe if I'm more neurotic, then that also then plays out in my counting pennies and making sure where every single dollar went. And maybe if I feel more relaxed, if I feel more in control, et cetera, maybe that means that I'm a little bit more open. I think there's some personality, there's some learned behavior, right? What makes a human being is what makes it what ends up being reflected and how that human being interacts with money.

But other parts of it are absolutely, what did you go through and what did you learn from what you went through, right? That ends up being reflected in your finances as well. Is it possible that you go through something that is so traumatic that it changes your personality? Absolutely. 100%. There studies in psychology of a really long time ago,

this man kind of remember his name was working on a plant, has a horrific accident where like a pipe kind of goes through his skull. he goes from being this relaxed, chill person to he's irritable all the time, he's angry, he's literally a different person. Is this like a Phineas Gage type of a thing? Exactly, exactly. Now, obviously, part of what happened is like his actual brain chemistry changed, right? But we know from neuroscience that when we go through things, it can affect and change

our brain chemistry as well. So the fact that our personality can change as a result of having gone through traumatic events, I think that also probably it would be interested to see that then plays out and how people interact with their money, right? If somebody goes through some sort of traumatic event, does that mean that they change how they used to interact with their money? It probably does, right? It probably does. Right. So my next question then would be, knowing that our personality could change, our money scripts could change, our attitudes towards money could change, and therefore our behaviors and habits around money could change. how do we safeguard ourselves? Let's say right now you're in a spot where you're generally responsible with money. Given that those things could change, how do you protect against the

possibility that one day you might not be as responsible as you are right now? That's interesting. It's sort of like saying how do I protect against the fact that right now the version of a Tioza who sits across from you has hated bungee jumping, will never go bungee jumping. I cannot imagine the thought of jumping out of anything in my life. I'm not going to do ever. But I might get to 70 and be like, I don't know all the things. Let's jump off a plane, right?

I can't necessarily protect against that. I just accept that one day there'll be a version of you that might want to do something that you never thought you would do. But bringing it more seriously into the domain of money, I think that the best that you can do is make sure that you have resources that empower every decision. you're going to make or that you might want to make across the different stages of your life, meaning that in my early 20s, I had a job where I was working down the road. It wasn't making a lot of money, but I knew I wanted to save up for a master's, a PhD.

I wanted to do something else. So I made the choice to live with my parents for a long time and just kind of save up those funds. Those funds allowed me to go to grad school in the UK. Going to grad school in Yucca, allowed me to do something else and build my career and on and on, right? While I'm in my career, I'm making the choice of like, hey, one day, I don't want to jump off of the corporate ladder. And so I'm scrolling away money and just putting money away and aside. So that one day when I do make the jump, I'm like, all right, you have XYZ years of runway, like don't do crazy things.

But also I've empowered you, right, future Tiazza, to be able to make decisions that you want to make in the future. So knowing that you can't necessarily control for who you're going to be in the future, right? But what you can do is make decisions around how am I saving, how am I investing, what am I putting my money in? that then allow my future me to have options and to be able to make, if you want to go bunch of jumping, like, go for it. But like, I'm going to do what I can do to make sure you have the money to take care of yourself afterwards, right? Right. You mentioned earlier that many people feel a lot of shame around debt. You were talking about debt a few minutes ago. One of the tough conversations that people often have with their parents is, hey, mom and dad, do you have any debt? Or, hey,

mom and dad, I know that you have debt, and I'm worried about that because you're 75. How do you approach that conversation without sounding judgmental? That's a big one. With debt, because there can often be the shame, this guilt, because we tie our personality is so finely to money in a way that I honestly think is a little bit unhealthy. But with debt, approaching that conversation, it has to be from a perspective of care, from perspective of empathy. Also from normalization, a lot of Americans have debt, right? There was a study that came out a couple of years ago, and she said that even people

who make six figures, I live in paycheck to paycheck, which means one paycheck falls apart, and that's it. They're officially in debt with the rest of the country. And so I think that it's, first of all, starting by normalizing this. Hey, a lot of people have debt. It's not something to be ashamed of, but it's almost like, if your house is on fire, you don't go outside and go, oh my God, houses on fire, I'm such a terrible person. You go, the houses on fire. Let's work to put it out. So it's the same approach, approaching with empathy, approaching with care. First of all, normalizing it, something a lot of people have. Second of all, what does it look like right now? Let's just understand what the situation is. We're approaching this with curiosity,

which means we're not making judgmental statements. We're not approaching a conversation as though we are the savior who needs to come in and fix it. We're curious. You and your parent are going to come to a solution together. I talk about care, curiosity. and cooperation. So care is, I'm coming in with empathy. I'm normalizing the situation and making sure you don't feel like your back is up against a wall. Or like the parent doesn't feel like the child is coming in to attack them, point the fingers or anything. That's care.

Curiosity is asking open-ended questions. We want to explore what is the debt, what are the holdings, and then cooperation. What can we do? What are the solutions? A lot of times when parents and adults shouldn't are having this. financial conversations, I think adult children often feel the burden of being the savior. I must have all the answers before I start this conversation. I must be able to point to, you can do this or this or this. No, they're also adults. And so we get to come up with a solution

together. And so approaching that conversation around debt is just starting with that empathy. It's also normalizing it. And then it's also curious, where do the things stand right now and what can we do to start to tackle it in a way that's psychologically comfortable for your parent. At what point should that conversation happen? As adult children of aging parents, which I think describes the majority of people who are listening to this, when is it none of your business, and when is it time for you to have a conversation with them? When is your parents' health, none of your business? At what age does it officially become responsible for you to care by your parents' health? Probably around, I mean, I know that's supposed to be a rhetorical question. I

But if I were to answer that literally, I would say when there is a reasonable chance that you yourself are going to have to modify your own life in order to caretake for them. Yes. And financial conversations, if possible, should start at least one step or so before that. Because you want to understand how are they managing things right now. Before we are at the position of we're 85 and there's big debt, how are they managing things? What is the lifestyle? What do they want to do in the future, right? What are they working with? Just trying to understand that even before there's an issue, even before you're responsible for modifying your life, we want to try and have these conversations early enough that if you will have to modify your life down the line, you're aware of that, and you can prepare for that versus we're having a conversation, you're 85 and now I'm worried

about, well, how do I pay for the kids soccer camp and also pay for you to live in a safe place? So it's better to have those conversations earlier before you even think you need to be having them. Your parents are starting to approach retirement, maybe a couple of years before. Start the conversation even earlier. Just start and normalize having those conversations around money so that when it does really matter, you already have that habit of you have the trust, you have the transparency, you have the language as well to speak to each other around it. On that note then, what are some good ways of approaching, you know,

We talked earlier about debt, but more broadly, approaching the conversation of mom and dad, how prepared are you for the future? How prepared are you for retirement? I talk about using eye scripts. So I've been thinking about savings. I've been thinking about investing. I've been exploring student loans. And why, did you know so many people in this country carry student loans? Isn't that crazy? When you guys were in my age, how did you do it? How did you think about navigating the situation? How are you thinking about what are you looking at? What are you looking forward to in the next XYZ with regards to your money, how do you feel about retirement, right? Curiosity. But we started a conversation with an I statement and why you want to start

with I is that you are also being vulnerable. You're starting with your own vulnerability. Because what you're about to have is a vulnerable conversation, right? Money's deep. It carries trauma, et cetera, et cetera. So you're asking them to have a vulnerable conversation. So you want to start by you being vulnerable, which is the I statement, something about yourself and what you've been exploring. And then with care, with curiosity, you open it up. to them. What do you think? The other reason that you want to start with the I statement and have the conversations like, what do you think? How do you explore? How have you thought about this? It's because instead of then, they're being you in the position of a teacher trying to help fix

your parents' errors, you both have the see-saw of, you're giving them advice. You're giving your advice. They're giving them a perspective. They're giving them a perspective. So there's that see-sor of like the roles that you're playing as well. But I do recommend you start with the I statement to open up those conversations. Can we walk through a couple of sort of sample scripts because these conversations, you can open them with an eye statement, but very quickly they can often devolve. Either the parent clams up and doesn't want to talk about it, or the parent gets defensive, changes the subject. There are a lot of kind of different ways in which that can devolve and you need to sort of be prepared. Yes. So can we walk through a few of those

examples? Yeah, absolutely. And before we do that, I also want to highlight there's two main things. First of all, expect a series of conversation, right? It's not going to be one major conversation that takes care of all the finances and then we never have to talk about this ever again. It's going to be baby steps. Maybe you get to two sentences in the first conversation and they're like, all right, let's talk about the garden. You know, and maybe it's, we get a little bit here, a little bit there, expect a series of conversations and plan to have ongoing continuous conversations. The second one is these conversations are hard, period. You're not going to get it right necessarily. There's no guessing it, right? They're difficult, period. And so give yourself grace. Give yourself grace for

the first one might be awkward. The first one might devolve. The first one might not quite get to where we're trying to get to, but giving yourself that grace and understanding this is a hard thing to do. And so we're just going to keep trying until we feel like we've got into a good place together. So let's say that you try to approach a money conversation with your parents. Let's say maybe one parent passed away and you're, you want to talk to the surviving parent about what their plan moving forward is. And already it's a highly charged emotional time. You then approach the surviving parent and say, hey, mom or dad, I know that you're processing a lot and this is a really difficult time, but I want to know how are your finances looking? Are you in debt?

Are you secure? I don't know anything about your financial situation. I want to make sure that you're okay. Let's say that you approach it like that and the parent immediately says, I'm overwhelmed. I can't handle this right now and shuts that conversation down. What do you do? Is it urgent that they have the conversation right then? I guess you don't know because you don't know anything about their financial situation. Okay. Because when people have experienced grief, and I know this is more of like in general a stonewalling conversation, when people have experienced grief, I always say, like, don't allow them to make any major financial decisions for a couple of months until they've kind of, it's just a grief is complex, grief is big. You want to give them a chance to process, work through it, and kind of be at a place of, okay, before you touch anything, just kind of have a chance to sit in the grief and then we can talk about and work through things.

Actually, I have an example in the book of a mom who was grieving her husband and just wasn't in a place to discuss finances for a couple of months until they were at a place of like, okay, now I'm open. Now let's talk about, can you help me with this bill? Can you help me, like, let's talk about the balancing checkbooks or however that plays out. But in terms of when people stonewall and say, I'm not ready to have that conversation or brush it off, it's okay to step back and bring it back up at a different time. You do want to be persistent. You do definitely want to bring it back up again so they understand, like, we are going to have this conversation. It might not be right now. And also exploring different times. and different openings, right? In general, that vulnerable, I've been thinking about my finances

and how things are going, I'm worried about, or how are you feeling about your finances? How do you think everything, how prepared do you feel now that we're like in this position with this partner passing away? Do you need any help? Can we help you with anything financially? Are things okay? And it might even just be that offer of help to start with, right? Do you need anything, do you need any help with anything financially? And that allows them to then say, actually, yes, he handled all the bills. I have no idea what's going on. Or he said, if anything happened, I should go talk to Gary, the financial advisor. And so I have a meeting with Gary on Friday and we'll know where things are. But starting with that offer of help might be a good way to start by

approaching that or getting around the stonewalling. What do you do if you bring it back up over and over, but they just continue to stonewall? I once gave the example of I live in a neighborhood. I There's a lot of dogs, but I don't have dogs, so I don't know how it works. But sometimes I see someone, like, trying to take the dog on a walk and a dog just sits on a pavement. They have no intention of moving at all. And what does the person do? They stand down until the dog is ready to move. They try with a leash and the jack.

And eventually, they're like, alright, when you're ready, I'm ready. That's eventually what happens. You can't force people to have conversations they don't want to have. That's the truth. And so this book only works to the extent that your parent is open and cooperative if you're able to get around the stonewall and unable to have vulnerability and empathy and care for each other enough to get to a good financial discussion or financial plan together, where a parent is absolutely not willing to discuss that, then who do they want to talk to?

Who do they trust? Do they have a best friend who they trust? Do they have a spiritual leader who they trust? Do they have, is there anybody else in their community who they look up to and who they would be willing to have a conversation with? Because then you might have to go to that person and say, they're not going to talk to me about the money. I'm worried about blah, blah, blah.

could you take them out for lunch and just ask a couple of questions? I have a mentor who a while ago one of their children was going through something and they were teenagers. So my mentor wasn't quite sure how to like, they just don't talk to her. And so she invited a psychologist that this teenager really liked. They just got her long as like buddy. She invited a psychologist to dinner and said, I would like to know this, this and this. If you could find a way to bring it up during the conversation, I just want to know what's going on. And so psychologists came as a friend of the family.

They had dinner together and just casually, oh, what do you think about this? How would you, you know, just brought up the bits and pieces that my friend was able to understand. Ah, okay, nothing to worry about. It's okay. Right. So sometimes it might not be you who has a conversation. If your parent absolutely refuses to speak to you about it, you might have to get somebody else who they like, who they trust, who they respect, to have that conversation. Right.

I can imagine that for many parents, it would be awkward to talk to their children, their adult children about money because, to an extent they view their adult children as children, right? Exactly. It's like I touch you how to brush your teeth and put your shoes on. What are you talking about my money? Yeah. But it's also why you want to start this conversation as early and, you know, that position of let them teach you what they're doing with their money because then it gives you insight into how they manage it, right? And over time, that kind of balance of like, oh, this is what I'm thinking about doing? What did you do? Oh, I'm invested in this property. What did you buy? You know, over and over and over eventually you built trust at the point of them being like,

yeah, this is how we're thinking about retirement, this is what we have kind of saved up, this is how we're like, it might not be actual numbers, it might just be like vaguely like, yeah, we're going to buy this house. We're thinking we might do half the time here, half the time there, or we've been handed by student loans for the last 60 years and we're not quite sure what we're going to do about it, but we'll cross average when we get to it. And then I might be like, okay, let's have a real conversation and figure it out. But over time, slowly is how the conversations develop.

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Can you talk about that? Absolutely. So with the retirement conversation, the earlier conversations are really about what is the life you want to lead? in retirement? Is it more adventure? Do you want to travel all over Europe? Is it more hunker down leave a legacy? Is it more this guy wrote this book, Die with Zero? I believe it was. Is it more of a die with zero? Let's understand what is the life that you want to live in retirement. Okay. Where are you now which relates to that? Right. What is the gap between what you want to do a couple of years from now and where you are? If it's, oh yeah, we're good. We bought the house.

we bought, you know, everything was secure. We're okay with that. Then it's a conversation of, okay, let's keep going. Let's keep checking in. And, you know, if you need my help with anything, I can lean in, happy to, like, help out. As you get closer to retirement, there might be decisions around things like with your investments, you know, distributions, things like that. We can have those conversations or you can tell me what you're learning and teach me

about it as well. If it's on the other side of just want to get it to retirement and hopefully it's just a security to kind of like help me not live on cat food. Then let's talk about that and let's figure out, okay, maybe you need to work a little bit longer. Maybe it's, can we help you out for a while so you defer taking social security for as long as you can before, so it grows a little bit more. But the depth of conversations around retirement, it starts with what is the vision? What do they want to do in retirement? What do they envision it being like?

What is the difference between what they want and where they are right now? the next level then is can we bridge that gap if there is a gap or if it's you've crossed the gap you're okay great what are the things that you're going to need my help with or for as you get to that place right like let's keep talking or sometimes you just bring it every maybe you feel like they're okay every now and then you bring the conversation up and you just do a bit of a brief check-in but those kind of clear themes around what do you want where you know what do we need to do to like bridge that gap if there is a gap can help you understand the depth and the breadth of the conversation around the retirement planning.

Another element of having effective financial conversations with parents is understanding, at a more broad level, the parents' framework, their philosophy on money, the lens through which they view this. Can you talk about that? So in the same way, before you have those conversations, you want to be aware of the lens through which you view money, your biases, your beliefs, etc. it's also important to understand how your parent also thinks about and what their approach to money is. And also being aware that that can change over time. So when they were raising you, their priorities might have been to scrimp and save.

And so they had that kind of focus because the season of life that they were in required it. It's like if we need to take care of you guys, we need to make sure we hit all the marks and we have to be careful with the money around that. maybe in a different season of life, they've done all the things they wanted to do. And so they're in a place of, I'm investing in my own of the grandchildren's education. I'm spending money in ways that may not resonate or that you may not recognize from when I was raising you, but those are decisions I'm making now. So being aware that those scripts and those beliefs can also change over time in the conversations around money. It's also, what you're also trying to do is understand what is the framework, right? I understand that, you know, the fishwood analogy, right? What is water?

I understand the water I'm swimming in. What is the water that they're swimming in now? Right. I want to understand that because then we're not talking at cross purposes. I'm not talking as if you should be saving and, you know, scrimping and making sure that all your investments, you're maximizing it, whereas they're more in the space of, I did all of that, and now I'm going to spend it all. So it allows us to just understand and have empathy for the lens to which one is viewing the money at least.

And so fundamentally, this goes back to money scripts, right? It's kind of the recognizing what money scripts your parents hold. What money script they hold, what phase of life they're in, what they want to do and how they're viewing the money. It's really interesting. Sometimes the money scripts don't necessarily change. One of my parents, for example, it has always been, I would rather fly economy even if I could fly first class forever. I'd rather fly economy and just like, because I'm used to that. That's just BAU, like business as usual.

That's almost a habit, right? It's less of a, I believe that I fly an economy can save a few hundred more dollars that maybe my estate and my legacy plan doesn't need. But it's just a habit. That's what I do. I fly the cheapest way possible. And so the conversations we have with that parent is like, hey, did you know that comfort is a real thing?

And it's okay for you to try and experience that when you fly a long distance. We're not saying doing it every time, but every now and then, like, you know, live a little, like breathe. And so going back to the idea of everything at the end of the day is monoscripts, is our habits. It's also having these conversations allows us to start to open our parents' manuscripts a bit, right? While we're learning them and we're like understanding where they're coming from, what is a habit, what's a belief, what is a manuscript, it also allows us to put things in front of them, they may not have thought of, like, you could try this, you could do that. Have you thought about a walking group?

Oh, maybe you're at the place where you actually do need a financial advisor. Maybe not as a time to start to think about estate planning. Maybe you should have some of those properties and trusts, right? in the same way they're also allowed to look at our lives and say, I feel like you should have my insurance for the kind of life you're living. So it's also that kind of give and take and that comes from that base belief of or that base understanding of where you now, what is the way of you in the world when it comes to your money and vice versa. What are some good questions that you can ask your parents to prompt a better understanding of their money scripts and their place in life? What makes you feel good now like in terms of spending money? what are you saving for?

What are you saving for? What makes you feel good now? What are some lessons that you've learned about money through out your life and have they changed? What does success look like? If you could live, not even success, what does a good life look like to you now moving forward? What are the things you still want to experience? I'm not asking like, what is your manuscript? What are your values?

We express those in the things that we buy. We express us and the things that we forego by. We express those and the things we're invested. Our financial decisions reveal our values and our beliefs, right? And so having conversations around, what are you spending? What are you saving? What do you still want to do? It allows you to start to understand, okay, they're in a place now where the script is,

they're moving slowly away from that. Everything is abundance, abundance, abundance, and I can just do whatever. And it looks like they're moving more towards we're thinking about you guys and how do we support you guys financially. And so we're thinking about legacy. and that's impacting our financial decisions, et cetera. So just bringing it back to what are you saving and what are you spending and what are you looking for

to those financial decisions, asking questions with curiosity, not condemnation, allows you to start to understand what are the beliefs, what's sitting behind those financial decisions. Yeah. What does financial success mean to you? What's your definition, your personal definition of financial success?

Moving off of the topic of money scripts, So we've talked about asking them about their debts, asking them about their retirement planning, and also more broadly getting an understanding of their money scripts. All of those topics that we've covered so far have been fairly general. What about more specific conversations around long-term care, long-term planning, advance health directives? I mean, these are things people really don't, some people really don't want to talk about. How do we approach? And what questions should we be asking? When it comes to down the line, what do you want? Do you want to live at home and have like a nurse who's with you if you need a nurse? Do you feel like you might want to be in like a retirement community with other people who are your age?

Do you want to downsize? Do you want to listen to your episode where you're recommending somebody live in Ecuador? Do you want to feel arbitrage and live in a different country? If you're from a different country, do you want to be a different country? want to go back home? It's the first broad question of what do you want, what do you envision in your latter days? Do you want to be at home? Do you want to be somewhere else? What's your plan? And the reasons, one of the reasons you want to have these conversations early enough is that you can actually work towards the plan versus if you're asking it when the plan is, whatever we talk about, we have to implement in a year. Maybe that's not the right time. But if you're at that place, it's also, okay, I know what you would like to do, what can we afford to do? What is reasonable? Maybe we actually can't afford to have a

full-time nurse in the house with you unless we downsized and took some of that money and then use it to pay a nurse. Maybe there's trade-ups who are making, but we start with what do they actually want to do. Next level around the POA advanced directives, all of those things, those come with the estate planning conversation. Want to highlight that not everybody's ready for that conversation. I still have a parent who absolutely refuses to deal with it. And I have written a book on it that they've read. So when they are ready to have that conversation. And it might not be, you know,

I know the book is how to talk to your parents about money, but sometimes it could be how to have another expert talk to your parents about money. And so it could be your friend Marlene has a great financial advisor or has a great estate planning lawyer who she was raving about. Maybe you guys can grab coffee and you can just have a chat with that lawyer. And the lawyer or the estate planning lawyer can work them through, okay, this is why you need a POA, this is why you need an advanced directive, this is why you need this part and that part. This is how everything comes together and makes sense.

You don't have to be the expert in the room all the time. And so that allows you to then go, okay, it's important that you have an estate plan. Maybe you don't do everything at once. Maybe you do the power of attorney to start with because health-wise, we just want to make sure that everything is okay. I can sign for you. I can help you make the decisions that you would want to make if you were not able to. So maybe we start with, I have a very limited power of attorney to help you execute certain things. And then we kind of go from there.

With the very specific niche kind of conversations, it's either, you know, use the book, we talk through like all of the different elements and angles you might want to talk or think through. Or have an expert, an estate planning lawyer, somebody else who can sit down with them and go step by step by step by step by step. This is how you think about it. This is why it makes sense. This is how everything fits together. I remember when I was doing my estate plan, and I will say I have a friend who's a lawyer, and she's very successful, high-powered, all the good things, has run her own law firm for decades. And she says the day you turn 18, you should have a will, you should have an estate,

you should have everything. As soon as you become an adult, you absolutely need to have that. And if you don't have that, the government will make one for you. So it is very important that every human being listening to this, if you can go like get all of that stuff taking care of, all of that to say, where you don't know what it is, that you should be talking to your parents about with regards to things like estate planning wills, power of attorneys, you can talk to an actual attorney. You can talk to somebody who's qualified to do this, and it can help you out with that as well. There's the estate planning piece, and then there's the end-of-life care piece. And you touched on this a little bit earlier because there's the option of at-home health care. There's also assisted living, and then there's also nursing homes, and those are all different. But I think a lot of people don't necessarily even know, like, okay, what is the difference between assisted living versus a nursing home?

and what are the costs for all of this? And how do we even start to wrap our heads around the just enormous costs that are associated with this? In addition to the difficulty of even broaching that conversation with your parents, there's also, let's say in the best case scenario, your parents are eager and open and happy to talk about it. There's also the very real dilemma of, this is all really expensive. How do we, how do we solve this? Research. Start with the, and they're really great websites out there. There's Humble Dollar.

It's Jennifer Clements. And it's a community of adults who are older or aging, talking about what they're experiencing. They talk about things like we chose our sister living because over time it transitions into as we get older and we need more help. That help is available to us as we kind of get. older in the system, right? So we might start out with, we have a nurse who stops by once a week.

Three, four, five, six, seven years later, it's transitioned into we have somebody who's around the house full time, right? And it's like an assisted living program. People talk about what is the reality of what they're experiencing. Or we've chosen to downsize. And so this is what it looks like for a cellar big house that we raise a lot of children in. And now we're in a smaller community. It's 55 plus. And so here's what we're experienced with the HOA. Here's what they actually talk about the granularities, the actual day-to-day. So it's not theoretical. It's people who are your parents' age talking about what they're experiencing day-to-day. And that's a humble dollar community? The humble dollar community. Jonathan Clements runs it, but it's fantastic. And it's a

great place to go and just kind of poke around. Also ask questions because it would be answered, presumably by people who are in the same stage of life as your parents. Outside of websites like that, even just going, just typing in the basic question of my parents is this age. If we don't have a lot of money, what are our options, what are the options that are available to us in terms of helping them retire, like, live comfortably? What are the insurance options? Will Medicaid cover some of it? Well, you know, just understanding, like, what are the options that are available to us?

There's a lot of great websites out there that can help you do that. And just starting with that basic, like, the searching of it. You talked earlier about estate planning attorneys and how important they are as part of this. Are there other experts who can help with this component of it? Outside of financial advisors, I can only think about people like maybe in the insurance industry can help or actually going directly to the nursing homes, the assisted living facilities, actually going to the 55 plus, the program directors for the 55 plus communities and understanding what is the difference between what you offer, what does it look like to live in a 55 plus community, who is it best for, who level of health,

need to have versus what if it was a sister living? What does that cost? How do the cost change year over year as my health needs get deeper and more complex? I feel like it's a little bit fragmented. There might be professionals who bring all of this together and can put it into one place, but I'm not aware of. Doesn't mean it don't exist. I just don't know. Yeah, but a fee-only fiduciary financial advisor is always a good first step. I will say, I lived in a 55-plus community when I was 19. How? My parents had a house there. They used it as a second home. And so they were rarely there. And so I just kind of moved there and set up shop. And I was the 19 year old in the 55 plus community. It was great. Everyone just loved you.

Yeah. It was so great. I was like everyone's collective grandchild. Oh, man. That must have been amazing. Did you just like had dinner prepared for you there? Dinner, breakfast, lunches, everything. Yeah. The neighbors loved me. It was wonderful. One thing that strikes me as we've talked about having financial conversations with your parents is that it's clear that this is, as you said in the beginning, this is not just a conversation. This is a series of ongoing conversations. Should there be some sort of structure or routine around this? Should there be like quarterly check-ins? Or is it more organic? I think it can be more organic, but it also depends on your family and what their nuances are. Some people, like my Dutch friend, would strongly prefer to have very structured check-ins with her family. It depends on your family, but as long as they're consistent, right? And it doesn't have to be a formal.

We're going to sit down and talk about the money stuff today more organic. But in the back of your mind, you know, okay, when I see them at Thanksgiving, we're going to have a conversation about finances. Maybe we'll talk about where they are in terms of – And it's also important, actually, before you have this conversation, any conversation, just understanding what it is you want to get out of the conversation. Do you want to learn something about what their financial position is? You want to understand where they're looking forward to get to in the future?

Or is it just, where are you right now? How's everything going? Do you need my help with anything, right? So understanding what it is that you specifically would like to get out of the conversation also helps it not be a muddled conversation where nothing really gets accomplished and no one is quite sure what's going on or, you know, you get to brush up. and that's it. Going back to the routine of it,

it doesn't have to be like a formal every Tuesday we sit down and talk about it. It can be a little bit more organic. It could be, hey, if you don't live in the same state or in the same area as your parents, it could be whenever I see them, you know, if we're together for Thanksgiving,

if we're together for Christmas, if we're together over Easter or whatever that looks like, we'll have a brief, a like, kind of, how are things going? It might be that you initiate the first, couple of times, you know, just a light sort of checking, right? My parents are Nigerian, for example. And so in Nigerian culture, we don't have direct conversations. We kind of go around

the room to like get to the issue. And so we might go around the issue and like get to a place of like, well, by the way, you're going to do X, Y, Z with this property. Like, where did you get to with that? Oh, you know, you know, I can ask those questions that I built on because I have knowledge from the last conversations that we had. And so in the same way as you continue to have those conversations, those routine conversations. It's not always that there's a formal agenda. You might want to do that if there's something you are both working towards. But if everyone is in a good place and you're not necessarily working towards something specifically, then it could be just that checking of where are you, how are things going, et cetera. But you're doing that

with some sort of cadence, right? It's not a formal set calendarized date, but it is whenever I see them or every so often every quarter, I have a brief, just kind of like a light checking. It doesn't have to feel like an overt thing. It's the same way you have a casual conversation about their health, you're doing the same thing about their finances. How often should you ask your parents about their health? A lot. All the time.

I also occasionally one of my parents would tell me something that freaks me out. I'm like, what? Why didn't I know you were doing this? Just health-wise, I banged the drum about like gyms and walking and until they finally was like, all right, if we sign up for a gym, maybe she'll shut up. So we won that battle. But I think when you care about somebody, and we assume that everyone who's listening to this

and has been plugged into this for however long we've been talking, cares about their parents, which is why they've stayed around and stuck around for the conversation. But when you care about somebody, you don't need a formal structure to express that care, right? There's a way of just, as I'm checking in with you, as we're catching up on what's going on with our lives. I'm like, how are you feeling?

They say something on like your ear kind of like, Why are you having trouble walking? Why your knees hurting? Tell me more about that, right? It's the same way it happens with the money. Oh, you bought a new car. Tell me more. How should you approach, you know,

it's one thing to have a conversation with your parents. But when it comes to step-parents, particularly step-parents that maybe a person only met when they were older, a step-parent that you didn't necessarily grow up with from early childhood, should any of these recommendations be modified and if so, how? It depends on the depth of a relationship they have with a step-parent. If they're very close and they're checking with each other often and it's almost like the step-parent has become like a sort of surrogate parent, then you can sort of copy and paste

of those things to it. If it's more of this one step removed, so the depth of relationship isn't there, then maybe the conversation is more with the actual parent and less with the step. parent. It depends on what that depth of a relationship is and how open they are also to, because you're not necessarily, you're not their child. Do they see you as their child? Are they open to having that conversation with you? Because if not, then maybe you're not the best person to have the conversation with them about it. I think part of all of this is understanding and is having that self-awareness, right? Of even though I feel like I have opinions about what this

person should do, I'm the right person to brush that with them. I might have. have opinions about what my step-parents should do. I might write a person to have that conversation. If yes, then, like, I have the scripts and I have the tools with which to have those conversations. We have an okay-ish relationship, but maybe they'll be more upon if this was coming from one of their children that they gave birth to. Maybe I have a conversation with that person instead around, hey, just so you know, da-da-da-da-da-da, blah, blah, you know, I'm having this conversation with my dad. Maybe you want to have it with your mom as well. So just understanding and having that self-awareness of what is your role and what is the depth of relationship will help you make an informed judgment about how to approach conversations with step-parents or other types of

relatives or friends. Right. Yeah, because I was thinking that actually as we were talking. For a lot of people, there are people who play a parental role in their life who are not technically parents. So, for example, maybe you were raised by a grandparent or you were raised by an uncle and aunt, or maybe you even have an older brother or sister who is significantly older than you, maybe a sibling who is 10 or 15 years older than you. And so you actually have more of a parent-child relationship with your eldest sibling. You know, if there's a big age gap between the kids. Yeah, absolutely.

And it all goes back to what is the depth of relationship, right? What is the kind of relationship I have with them? Would it be open to this kind of conversation? Maybe I broach it with some of those eye statements being vulnerable and see where things go. If it's a shutdown immediately, then somebody else needs to have this conversation with them. Right. If you're open to it, then, yes, let's have the conversation with that care, with that curiosity, and let's cooperate on a financial plan that makes sense for them, even if their financial plan is,

let's get you a financial advisor. Right. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they'd like to know more? They can find me at Etiosa.com, and that's E-T-I-N-O-S-A-A-com. And the book, How to Talk to Your Parents About Money, is on Amazon, in the print, and in the digital form. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Thank you. A big fan of team afford anything. I think there's a level of excellence that you guys have brought to everything that you've done. And I'm a massive, massive fan of that. As you know, love Sunny. Love all the work you guys do. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

And you are a student in your first rental property. I am. I loved it. And I still have a bunch of properties now. I'm not going to say how many. But I still have the very first one I bought because of the course. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, just chugging along, doing well, same tenant for all these years. How many years have you had the same tenets? It's been like five years. Can you believe it? It's been almost five years because I think I took the course in 2020. I registered for it in 2019. I took it in 2020, if I'm correct. Yeah, I think we're like in COVID lockdown. So I sat down and I took the course and bought the property while I was in Australia buying a house in America. It was a crazy experience. But yeah, I still have the house five years later. It's done very well for itself. Wow, that's incredible. I love hearing the success stories like this from our. Our YFRP students are your first rental property students.

Yes, yes, yes. And we've done many more since then. So it's been good for us. Congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Etiosha. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation?

Key takeaway number one, your financial scripts are invisible, but they're powerful. So we all carry these hidden beliefs about money that we're not even aware of, right? And these are called, quote unquote, money scripts. And these money scripts shape every financial. decision that we make from how much you save to whether or not you feel guilty about spending. You know, it goes beyond just spending. It goes into retirement planning and the way that you invest. Like, these are all shaped by your invisible money scripts. And the problem is we assume that everybody shares those same hidden money scripts. And that creates conflict when we talk to

family members who operate under a completely different set of invisible scripts. And so, unlocking these unconscious assumptions, these hidden money scripts, is a big part of being able to have productive conversations with other people, including your parents, about money. Confirmation bias. Assume that everybody else thinks like us. And so when we go out into the world, we're looking for confirmation around our beliefs. Everybody must believe saving is the right thing to do. Of course, how could you not save, right?

How could you not be in the fire movement? That's the only way to do it. And so because we have some of these subconscious scripts, when we sit down to have conversations with other people about finances, it can be easy for our scripts to start to leak out, right? Our beliefs start to be this. It's the standard. How could you not be saving for retirement? What are you doing instead?

And that can then bring the accusation and kind of crumble the conversation. So that's the first key takeaway. Number two. Start money conversations with vulnerability rather than advice. The secret to having really productive financial conversations is not to have all the answers. but rather to ask the right questions. And in doing so, share some of your financial struggles, share some of your financial story. This creates a more collaborative dynamic, a give and take, like a mutuality, a reciprocity,

so that you're learning from each other rather than lecturing your parents. I talk about using I scripts. So I've been thinking about savings. I've been thinking about investing. I've been exploring student loans. and wow, did you know so many people in this country carry student loans? Isn't that crazy? When you guys were my age, how did you do it?

How did you think about navigating the situation? How are you thinking about what are you looking forward to in the next X, Y, Z with regards to your money? How did you feel about retirement, right? Curiosity, but we started a conversation with an I statement and why you want to start with I is that you are also being vulnerable. Finally, key takeaway number three. You can't force people to have financial conversation. if they don't want to have them, because some people are going to refuse to discuss money,

no matter how carefully you try to approach the topic. And so when that happens, you just have to accept that you can't control other people's willingness to talk about money because money's a really sensitive topic. But maybe if they are not willing to talk to you about it, if your parents aren't willing to talk to you about it, maybe they're willing to talk to somebody else, a trusted friend, a trusted advisor, as long as someone. is having that conversation attrusted someone, ultimately what matters is that your parents are taken care of

and ensuring that someone is having those conversations with them paves the road for that. I once gave the example of I live in a neighborhood that has a lot of dogs, but I don't have dogs, so I don't know how it works. But sometimes I see someone like trying to take the dog on a walk and a dog just sits on a pavement. They have no intention of moving at all.

And what does the person do? They stand down until the dog is ready to move. They try it with a leash and the jack and that. Eventually, they're like, alright, when you're ready, I'm ready. That's eventually what happens. You can't force people to have conversations they don't want to have.

Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Etiosha, Agbon, Lahore. Thank you so much for being part of the Afford Anything community. If you enjoyed this episode, please do three things. Subscribe to our newsletter, Affordanithing.com slash newsletter. Leave us a review in your favorite podcast playing app. And share this with friends, family, with your parents.

Share this with your parents. Share it with parents, stepparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts. Share this with that elder generation in your family. Thank you again for tuning in. This is the Afford Anything podcast. I'm Paula Pant, and I'll meet you in the next episode.