Ep #80: Basic Financial Literacy for Kids with Anthony Delauney

Welcome to the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast where moms and teachers come to learn all about kids’ brains, how they work, how they learn, how they grow and simple tips and tricks for raising the most resilient, kind, smart, compassionate kids we can. All while having lots of grace and compassion for ourselves because you know what? We all really need and deserve that too. I am your host, Amy Nielson. Let’s get ready to start the show.

Amy: Anthony, welcome to the show. I’m so excited to have you on today.

Anthony: Thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Amy: Yeah. And we’ve just been chatting a little bit before we got started because there were some technical issues like life and it’s great. So, thank you for your patience with me. And I’m so excited to talk to you because we’re going to be talking about, first of all, I love your name, Financial Dadvisor, this is your title. This is fabulous.

Anthony: Well, I can’t say I came up with it. Someone once coined it for me and they said it’s perfect. I’m a dad. I’m a dad of a 14 year old and a 12 year old. And I’ve been a financial planner for two decades. So, advisor dad, bring them together and make some fun out of it so yeah.

Amy: I love it and making up words is a joy place for me. So, this is fantastic. Okay, so talk to me a little bit about what you do. Because this is so cool, childhood financial literacy, which I think is just such an underserved area. So, I’m so thrilled that you’re doing this. You’ve said you’ve been doing this for 20 years. How did you get into helping children, starting that young? What got you there? Because that’s not something you hear about a lot, I think.

Anthony: Absolutely. So yeah, I basically started in the financial services world right out of college. And in that period of time over the past 20 years I’ve gotten married, purchased my first home, had my first child, moved, had a second child, all those fun stages of life. And as the years passed, I realized that I really had a passion and a love for working with families because it’s hard enough to figure out life on your own. But then all of a sudden, when you have to incorporate a spouse or partner and then kids into the mix.

The analogy I like to use is if your life is like a puzzle box. We’ve got puzzle pieces all over the place. And it just became a lot of fun to just help families figure out this puzzle piece, kind of build the framework of their lives and plan for the future and realize, hey, there is hope. We can make this stuff a reality. It’s a little scary at certain phases, and we get pretty tired, especially with kids. So, they can absorb a lot of our energy sometimes.

So, I just found that I loved it and families became my passion. And as the years progressed and went on and on, one big question that always would get asked is, how and when do I start talking to my kids about finances? Because this stuff is interesting. I wish I’d learned this stuff when I was younger, but when do I start talking about it? I had different ideas and different thoughts, but I actually experienced a life event back in 2015 that really kind of set the trajectory for the books that I’ve written and the whole owning the Dash brand.

And it’s a little bit of a sad story, but I had a cousin who was really famous in the fitness world. His name was Greg Plitt P-L-I-T-T and Greg was on the cover of over 250 fitness magazines. Really if you looked at his body and looked at mine, you wouldn’t believe we’re the same gene pool but that’s beside the point. But the long story short is Greg unfortunately passed away in an accident back in 2015. And even before vlogging was a thing, his fans and followers would kind of email him questions on life and fitness and he would do video blogs to answer those questions.

And as a way of remembering him, I started watching those videos and realized a lot of his philosophies, as they applied to fitness, could also apply to finance. And I thought, how could I kind of serve a testimonial to him? I decided why not write a book about it. And oddly enough, one of his concepts was on the idea of death and owning the dash. Basically, the dash is on your tombstone between your birth and your death dates, that period in between. Just kind of taking ownership of your life, we only have so much time, we don’t know how long it’s going to be and really just making use of that time.

And so, I wrote the book, it was a neat experience, a big learning experience and it was really written for young families but it was received very well. A lot of people enjoyed it. And they started to say, “Well, that’s great for young families. What about a book for older families or for those making the transition into retirement, kind of preparing for that next phase?” And so, I decided when COVID started, to take on that journey. And I would write during the evening hours after my family would go to sleep.

And at the time, as I said, a 14 year old daughter now, but at the time she was about 11 or so. And she was one of those kids that just does not sleep at night. And so, I’d be writing and all of a sudden I’d hear from my side door, “Hi daddy.” And she’d be there standing there 10 o’clock at night to very late hours, much later than she should be and she started to write next to me.

And we came up with the idea of eventually writing a children’s picture book that taught a basic financial lesson. And that turned into Dash & Nikki and the Jellybean Game. And from that point forward, we decided, hey, this is really exciting, this is fun and kids love it. And so, the five kids books have now been released and number six is coming out later this year so it’s been a lot of fun.

Amy: That is so fantastic. And I love that you’ve included your kids in it. It’s just so, so good. I’m so excited to kind of get into this a little bit and talk about why it’s important to start young, and how valuable that is. And then I kind of want to get into your books a little bit and just how you bring this big concept that I think even a lot of adults feel overwhelmed by and make it doable for children.

So, I’m really curious to get into that with you, because I know it’s possible. I love doing stuff like that, but I want to hear how you did it and I’m super fascinated. So, let’s talk about finance and starting young because I think what we know is that with compounding things, the earlier you start the better. But how does that translate to children? Why does it matter to start so young?

Anthony: So, I think that we understand certain concepts, why it makes sense to teach your children to brush their teeth at a really young age and why kind of setting in certain habits if they do it, it becomes natural to them. It becomes kind of, they don’t even have to think about it. They just know in the back of their mind I’m doing this because if I don’t do it my mouth is going to smell bad. Or if I don’t take a shower then somebody at school might think I smell a little odd or whatever it might be.

And it’s just taking care of ourselves, how to eat properly, all those little things that seem kind of common knowledge even though we all struggle with them even as adults. But when it came to kids, going back to the point of parents asking, “How do I start talking to my kids about these things?” What I found was a really common trend is that parents often associated talking to their kids about money and they focused on the more complex things like how do I talk to my kids about investing or trading or trying to learn how money itself works.

And that can be done maybe in middle and high but it’s really hard when children are in their elementary school years, they don’t make money. They don’t know how to earn money and so they can’t associate value with money, but they can understand basic concepts of just why parents do the things that they do. Kids love to play grownup. So, if you go to the grocery store, they would love to be the parent going around going to the grocery store. They love to make the dinners. They love to try to act like their parents.

So, what I realized is that I need to find some way to help introduce lessons that really focused more on the real basic fundamentals of understanding kind of the emotions we feel when we make decisions. Because the sooner we can understand that connection of emotion and decision making, the easier it becomes to be aware when you’re about to do something that might be more of an impulse. And usually, those impulses are things that get us into trouble when it comes to money.

Amy: I’m so fascinated now. So well, I’m fascinated the whole time but this, I’m getting more, this is just fun. Okay, so going back to what you were talking about and that idea of when we start young, we can kind of make it more natural. And that’s because those patterns were literally building in our brain. We’re literally building the neural pathways to automate things. So, the more we can automate, the less energy it takes to do things.

And so, like you’re saying, when we get into those habits, it actually almost becomes harder to not do something than to do something because our brain has it on autopilot so it can conserve energy to do the things that are not on autopilot. So, I love that you’re talking about that and bringing that into, hey, if we can start building these things, it’s habits and the way that they do things, then it’s just automated, which saves so much energy over trying to get them to develop these habits when they’re older and it’s just more work so, I love that.

But now I want to talk about because you brought this up, cool, so what you’re teaching is less around details of financial stuff and you’re talking more about emotion and how we make decisions. Tell me about this because this is so big.

Anthony: So, it was very interesting for me. I grew up in the finance world. I understood finance. I understood all the components, well, many of the components that go into that. And I knew how to write adult self-help books, going through that process. But when it came to writing a children’s picture book, I tried to seek as much knowledge as I could because it’s a totally different audience.

And there were some key lessons that really stuck out to me that I actually spoke to a coach in children’s books. And she stated, “When you write a children’s picture book, number one, it needs to be a certain length because the kids will get bored after that point”, which made sense. And the first version of my first children’s book was about three times that length so I had to cut it down.

But more importantly, one thing that she said that really stuck out is that in a children’s book, you don’t want the parent to be teaching the child what to do. It needs to be either a friend or a sibling, someone their age where they’re experiencing something together, and then they’re making a decision. And you don’t want to tell the reader what the decision is or what the emotion the child is experiencing. You can say it through what actions they’re doing, but you don’t want to say so and so felt sad. You want to say something to the effect of so and so started to cry or so and so started to have a sulky face or whatever it might be.

And the reason for that is that as parents, we know when we try to just tell our kids what to do, there’s about a 50/50 shot that they’ll do that or they’ll do the opposite of what we tell them to do. But when kids get to take ownership of their decisions and actually experience a story for themselves, then all of a sudden they can kind of relate to the characters. If children in a story are experiencing something, what are they thinking? What emotions is the child experiencing as they’re reading about that and discovering what’s happening?

So, it’s really very much a learning process. It’s not so much us just telling our kids what to do. It’s them learning the emotions that they feel when they see certain scenarios taking place and in a weird way, giving our children space to kind of reflect on those moments. And just as an example, the fourth book that I wrote was called Rohan and Nyra and Big Sister’s Bet.

And that story was the result of a game I played in my backyard with my son. We were just throwing the football back and forth to one another. And I said, “Jason, I’ll make you a bet, for every catch that you make I’ll give you a quarter and we’ll keep playing until you want to stop. But if at any point you fumble the ball then all the money is lost.” So immediately, many parents, they know where this story is going but in the story what happens is Jason came and Rohan in this, came up with a goal. He had something he wanted to get, a certain amount of money he wanted to make to get to that goal, a little toy watch is what he wanted to buy.

And so, he started to play the game with his older sister. She came home from college, and they had a football to play with and made the bet. And long story short, they get to that level but as he’s getting closer to that target goal, he starts thinking about other things he could buy with the money, bigger things, more exciting things. And he says, “I’ll go for a little bit longer.” So, with my son, we got up to $10, then we got up to $15, then we got up to $18.50. And I could see as we got further up, he was thinking more and more, but that emotion, that greed started to kick in.

And he said, “Just one more, dad.” And threw the ball and the fumble took place. And the reason it was such a memory for me was that after the fumble took place, he just stood there quietly and he stared at the ball on the ground because he knew he couldn’t get mad at me. It was his decision. And it was just one of those moments where I knew he’d reflect on that whenever kind of that, I had a goal and I went beyond that goal, I got greedy with my decision making. It’s those simple lessons. It had nothing to do with, well, in this case, it had a little bit to do with money, but it was more so about how did I react when put in this scenario? And it’s just a neat kind of experience to have him reflect. And he got over it and he’ll never forget that moment, I guess.

Amy: And that was a teaching moment. So let me ask you this question. In these books, I mean, I’m thinking of all kinds of different scenarios that that applies to in real life for our kids and for adults. Do you have questions or suggestions of discussion questions parents to ask? Or does it just kind of feel natural as they’re going through it, that there’s some stuff for them to kind of discuss with kids while they’re kind of reading through these stories?

Anthony: So, thank you for asking. Each book is actually, they all rhyme, all the books rhyme. And they’re written in a way that they’re actually meant to be read aloud. So, a parent reading to a child or a teacher reading in a classroom, something of that nature. And yes, the thought process would be to go through the full story so that the child can experience the full range of emotions kind of the buildup. And before we even tell them or ask them what they should be thinking, they’re already processing different thoughts in the back of their mind. So, if they can kind of see that through, see the failure that’s experienced in the books and we learn best through failure.

Amy: It’s very memorable.

Anthony: Yes, absolutely. But yes, at the end to actually sit back and reflect. Some parents can obviously personally reflect on similar scenarios that they’ve had. But to help parents and teachers along I’ve created a list of discussion questions that go along with each one of the books as well as games and activities that go along and they’re all free. I made them available on the owningthedash website, owningthedash.com. There’s just, the only thing you need is a password. And for your listeners the password is OwningMyDash! And the O, the M and the D are all capitalized, but we can put that online somewhere.

Amy: Yeah, we’ll put that in the show notes. Yeah, it’s just to make it easy for everybody because I think a lot of people are going to be fascinated by this. I think the concept of money and financial literacy feels so big and this is something I actually talk with people about a lot and how it feels like it’s one of the most underserved areas in education because it is so critical and it affects everyone, everyone, it affects everyone. And sometimes I do feel like we’re waiting a little bit long to start working on these skills so, I love that part.

And I love that you’re bringing it back to the emotion piece. Because even if you learn the theory around how money works, if you’re not able to manage the emotions around money and risk and that excitement and all of those things and learn to balance that well and figure out where your strengths and weaknesses are then it’s really difficult to kind of plan for yourself. And it’s interesting, as I’ve had kids grow up, some of them have more strengths in some areas than others.

So, some of my kids, if there’s money in an account and they see it there then they’re like “Ooh.” And so, we’ve learned some strategies around when your paycheck comes in, maybe have it go straight to your savings account and then only pull out what you need into your checking account and then that way you’re more likely to save. Or just little tips like that where they could kind of start learning how their emotions work, maybe start to manage them. But also learn strategy for what their particular styles are.

And then there’s other kids that maybe have a really hard time spending money even when they need to. And so, we say, “Hey, maybe we come up with a percentage, here’s the amount that you put away so you know you’re safe. And then there’s a part that you can put and just use for things that you want or that you need or whatever.” I love that you’re talking about the emotion around it, though, because

I think that is really the basis of all of the rest of it. And maybe when they feel comfortable with that, they can manage the details better when they get a little older, is that what you’re thinking?

Anthony: Absolutely. So, there’s two parts I would say to that. Number one is the sooner you can give children ownership in their decision making the more that they’re likely to remember it and feel value in what they’re doing. So, some parents have used the three buckets or a spend, a save and a give. And as an example, my daughter Abby is very much a giving person. My son Jason is very much a saving person. If he has it, he’ll hold on to it, which there are benefits to all those different approaches.

But rather than just a parent saying that you’re going to put a third here, a third here and a third here. You might have a conversation with the children and say, with parameters, say what percent, let’s say a minimum of 20% and then a maximum of this. But what percentage do you want to put into these different buckets? Do you want to put a little bit more toward the giving instead of toward the spending or towards the savings and so forth? And the more they feel like they have an invested interest in it, the better. So that’s the number one thing I would share.

And the other thing I would share, the reason that I think that the lessons very early are so important is one thing we as adults did not grow up with for the most part is a society based on technology. Where you can click a button and there are so many apps out there that teach things and a lot of them are wonderful, but also they’re built with your click desire in mind. They’re built with your emotion in mind. And one of the hardest parts is if children don’t develop the awareness of their emotions early.

And they start, for example, getting introduced to trading, trading individual stocks at a very early age. There are apps out there that when you make a trade, confetti will come down or dings and bells will happen, and then the children start to associate. I get this dopamine effect or this joy effect once I do this, so I’m going to do it more and more. And the reality is that that dopamine is actually going to harm you down the road, because usually when you’re feeling one emotion or another, that’s when money decisions don’t go so well.

So, it’s a very difficult pattern, if we can get those awareness early in life, then when those decisions come because we’re not going to be able to avoid them. It’s a world where everything’s online. I mean even trying to teach kids’ money lessons with cash is harder and harder to do because everything is credit cards.

Amy: Yes, they can’t use it. Yes, I think that’s so interesting. And I think when you brought up the technology piece, I was kind of thinking of a different piece of it and I think you’re so right. You opened my eyes to even more of an issue around the dopamine rush, which of course, they’re trying to do. They’re trying to do it with getting you to buy games or upgrade this or that or whatever. And even in healthy stuff, it feels like learning how to do trading and whatever, They’re still giving you the rush.

But I think the other piece is too, is that I feel like there used to be such a barrier to being able to buy something you wanted. I remember having to order something through a catalog. And I mean that dates me a little bit, but yeah, there was so much more. You had to write a check. You had to go to a bank and actually withdraw money and everything is so instant now. And so, we used to have more time to kind of think through a decision and process and say, “Is this something I really, really want?”

And just have more buffer time, I think to really evaluate our choices, whereas now it’s just this instant gratification. I’ve got to have it. I can do it right now, and it’s done. And so yeah, being able to recognize the emotion around that and help them start to think through that and notice it about themselves so they can start to build a strategy around that is so, so good.

Anthony: And another thing I would share, going back to kind of letting kids have ownership in their decisions. One struggle that many parents have to experience is, whenever you go to, for example, the gas station with your little ones and they see that aisle of all the candy right at the front and just it’s perfectly placed right at eyesight. And my son would always negotiate. I have a negotiator and I love him for it, it’s a wonderful skill but at certain points it can be very difficult.

Amy: Yes, that’s very true.

Anthony: So, we negotiate. But one thing that really helped in that scenario is, I started to say, if I thought it was appropriate for him to be able to get something, I’d say, “Alright, I’ll get this, but you have to pay for 50% of it. You have to pay $75.” Whatever, how much weight I wanted him to put in. And for him being a saver even if it was 50 cents or a dollar, it’s now on him. How badly do you want this?

And you’d be amazed how, for all the parents with negotiators out there, give them some ownership. And if they don’t have any money left, well then the answer is no. But if they do have something through allowance or jobs they do or whatever it might be, it helps to avoid parent versus child strategy where instead we’re working together, but they have to think about it.

Amy: Yeah, they have some skin in the game. I love that, parent with your child working together, a team. Love it any time you can make that happen and we can. You brought up something though that just makes me curious, opinion wise, not saying right or wrong. Just curious about your opinion around allowances. That’s a question that I’ve had people ask me. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that.

Anthony: Sure, definitely. There’s lots of different opinions on it. And as we all know, you could have two children you raise the exact same way and they can be totally different people. So, every family scenario is a bit different and circumstances are different. But what I would share is that making money transactional, where if a child does this, then they get that can have repercussions down the road. Meaning that if a child, going back to having a negotiator, says, “I’m only going to do the dishes in the house if I get money for it.” That’s not how a household works for a lot of families.

So, I think it’s really important to, if you are going to do an allowance, which I do not have anything against an allowance but just make sure that you’re not sacrificing the family values just for the sake of the allowance. And then it doesn’t need to be something substantial, but if you are going to do an allowance, make sure there’s a system that can be followed. Just like we were talking about earlier, where when this comes in, we’re going to be aware of it. We’re going to make notice of what we do with that money.

Rather than just here’s a few dollars and go put it up in your piggy bank or maybe it’ll be under the bed somewhere five days from now, depending on how much they care about the money. An allowance is meant to be a tool for teaching. Honestly, money is really meant to be a tool, it in itself has no value until we give it value. So, to that point, when I wrote the first book, the one that kind of launched Owning the Dash kids’ books, it was called Dash & Nikki & the Jellybean Game. And are you familiar at all with the marshmallow study from years back?

Amy: Yes, absolutely, yeah.

Anthony: So just for your listeners, it’s basically a study where they put children in a room. They said, “I’ll give you a marshmallow. I’m going to leave. And when I come back, if the marshmallow is still there, I’ll give you another marshmallow.” And they studied to see which kids could resist.

So, in this case I have a brother and sister who might look just like my own kids. We’ll hold that to the side, but they wake up one morning and there’s a letter waiting for them, inviting them to play the jelly bean game. Where they each get 10 jelly beans to start off the day. And for every hour that 10 jelly beans are still on their plate, they get five more.

And one of them, Dash the saver, you can guess. He immediately takes another plate and puts it on top of his plate so he can’t see his jelly beans anymore. So, the temptation is out of sight and out of mind. Whereas Nikki is a bit more impulsive, waits about 30 seconds, and those jelly beans are gone. And throughout the story, basically what we see is that Dash’s pile is growing as Nikki’s is empty. And there’s a twist that happens in the story because that would be a terrible story if all of a sudden just one person had all the jelly beans and the other one just has to watch.

But Dash has some compassion that gets built in there which I think is really important. Money also involves charity and giving to others and helping raise other people up. But the reason I use jelly beans is because that is a currency that children understand. If you have a joy for Halloween, one of the my biggest joys for Halloween was going home and negotiating what candy I’m going to trade with my friend.

So, there are different ways you can understand, we know our children well enough to know what things they do value and what things they understand and what things they may not. And you don’t necessarily have to have money as the only source of value. There’s other things that can be done.

Amy: And I love, when you said the title of the book and I haven’t read it yet. I want to go get it now. When you were talking about the jelly beans, I was like, “That’s good.” And it was taking me back to, I always try to teach my kids about taxes and how taxes worked. And we just had Halloween, and they all had their candy. And so, we did a whole lesson on taxes with everyone’s different Halloween candy. And some people had to pay more tax than other people. Anyway, they were suddenly very invested in taxes and they did not care before that.

When I talk about it in carpool, they’re like, “Mom, stop, we’re bored.” But as soon as their Halloween candy was involved, they were like, “Oh, my goodness.” Anyway, so, I love that you did it with jelly beans. And I love that you’re teaching about the emotion and some of the character traits around how we manage money because like you said, it really isn’t about the money itself. It’s about behaviors and emotions, because emotions affect our behaviors and all that. So that is so, so good. I love that you’re doing this. Thank you for doing this. And we are out of time, but I want to know where do we send people to get these amazing books?

Anthony: They can see the books are available practically everywhere books are sold, but if you go to owningthedash.com O-W-N-I-N-G the D-A-S-H.com links, all the books are there as well as the adult self-help books. And as I said, there’s a for educators tab that has links to all of those added exciting games and discussion questions.

Amy: Amazing. I love that you’re creating a space for teachers to be able to use it in the classroom because we know we can impact from there. And then for parents too, that really want to do something about this. They know they need to, but don’t really know exactly how to translate that and how to make that work. So, I love that you’re doing this. Thank you so much. Thank you for talking to me today. And I’m pretty excited to go check out your books too.

Anthony: Thank you for that and it’s been wonderful. It’s been a great conversation.

Don’t you just love all the fun things we’re learning on the show together? Well, we wanted to give you a chance to practice a little bit of it at home. And so, we made you a special freebie just for being a listener here and you can grab it at planningplaytime.com\special-freebie. That is planningplaytime.com\special-freebie. So what this freebie is, I’ll tell you, is an amazing alphabet activity that you can start using with your kiddos and it is based in play and is so fun.

You can use dot markers with it, you can use Q-tip painting, you could use circle cereal. There’s all kinds of options, but you can print it out today and get started. Just head over to planningplaytime.com\special-freebie and we’ll send that to you right away.

Thank you for hanging out with me today for this fun chat on Raising Healthy Kid Brains. If you want to see more of what we’re doing to support kiddos and their amazing brains, come visit us on our website planningplaytime.com. See you next week.