Discovering Your Family Money Tree

Where do your money beliefs and behaviors come from? How have other members of your family influenced your attitudes about earning, saving, investing, giving, and spending?

Year-end provides a great time to evaluate where you have been and where you might be going.

Like most women, I have worn many hats. I am a daughter, a mother, and a wife. A kindergarten teacher, estate-planning lawyer, investment advisor, consultant, and developer of leaders!

Along the way, I conducted wealth workshops in which women consider whether their money beliefs and behaviors align with their value. This involves being aware of these beliefs and behaviors and where they come from.

One of the most popular and enlightening workshop exercises involves drawing a family “money” tree. Using a family tree template, draw paternal grandparents, maternal grandparents, and parents. If siblings, spouse, children, and grandchildren are important to your thinking, make a bigger tree.

Note the money beliefs and behaviors of your family. What are the earning, saving, investing, giving, and spending habits of the people on your tree? If you have one parent that spends and gives lavishly while another is frugal and cautious, how has that influenced you? What about your siblings? Your children? How have they influenced your beliefs and behaviors?

Another fun thing to add to your tree is a “money saying” that you attribute to a particular person. (“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” “The best things in life are free. “A penny saved is a penny earned.”) How have these savings influenced your own thinking?