Mad Money Parenting

For at least the last 18 months, I’ve been making a conscious effort to change my ‘Money Consciousness’. For as long as I remember, I’ve been ‘bad with money’. I’ve always pushed money, often spending beyond my means, either by taking short term loans or getting into debt, as I’ve always been determined to do whatever I want to do in life, to live as full a life as possible – despite my bank balance. Depending on what literature you read, this can be a ‘good thing’.

However, shortly after becoming a parent (no coincidence there?), my ‘no care’ attitude to money finally caught up with me. After possibly biting off more than we could chew – building a house in a foreign country – combined with the fact that we took our eyes firmly off the income-generation aspects of life – my partner, David and I found ourselves up to our ears in debts. Despite our best efforts to then generate income and put things back on an even keel, we just seemed to attract more bad debt, this time in the form of clients that didn’t pay their invoices, and eventually I took the decision to work far away from home in order to earn substantially more cash than I could here to attempt to ‘fix’ things.

This was almost an exact action-replay of the decision my father took in the 1970s – he was also self-employed, with a similar, though more conservative, carefree attitude to money. Whilst establishing the family home and its ‘security’, he attracted a string of bad creditors, in his case, his chosen business partners, and so, against a background of an economic recession in the UK, he took highly paid work in the Middle East to try and earn enough to plug the many leaky holes in their financial boat.

So how on earth have I managed to repeat his script almost to the letter? So many people have gasped when they hear my story of leaving my three and five year old sons for nearly seven months simply to try to pay the bills. I’ve been quite shocked myself at quite how well I coped, but of course, I had a precedent and I knew my parents had been through it (several times – my father made three trips in total to the Middle East and two to mainland Europe) and had survived.

However, I’m fully aware that neither my father nor I would have been in our respective situations if we’d had a different relationship with money in the first place and that my avoidance attitude to money itself is also an inheritance – one that I definitely don’t want and, of course, one that I’m determined not to pass on to my own children, the Mad Money Parenting. This is really what I’ve been working on for the last 18 months – I want them to be free of these limiting beliefs and to have a healthy relationship with money and be able to make good financial decisions.

Of course though, it’s incredibly challenging to redefine and rebuild your lifelong (to date) relationship with something that stirs such deep emotional feelings – I resent Money for taking my Dad away from me, so I refuse to acknowledge it as important etc. etc. It’s fundamental, deeply rooted and a firmly entrenched series of bad habits, all of which need replacing as soon as possible.

So it’s reassuring to know that help is indeed at hand – a few days ago, I was listening to yet another fab mp3 from the PhilosophersNotes series and was introduced to ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, subtitled ‘What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money – That the Poor and Middle Classes Do Not!’ - a series of (18!) books by Robert Kiyosaki (thank you Brian!) which are all about the fundamental differences in parenting messages about money that rich parents and poor parents give their children, constantly reinforcing either a rich money consciousness or a poor one. The books are specifically written to help parents like me pass on the right messages to their own kids. One quote from Kiyosaki on debt struck a deep chord with me, simply: “If you find you have dug yourself into a hole, stop digging.”

Although I’ve managed to work my way through the last seven months, of course, I haven’t fixed all our financial problems in one go, and now that the credit crunch is in full swing, if anything, matters are bleaker. But, as I said, during my time away I have had chance to focus on trading in my Mad Money consciousness for a different way forward (as Kiyosaki puts it “the avoidance of money is just as psychotic as being attached to money”). And I’ve decided, unlike my father, not to simply go off and do it again.

When faced with a dilemma, there are two useful pairs of questions you can ask yourself:

“what would happen if you did that?” and “what would happen if you did not do that?”
paired with “what will not happen if you do that?” and “what will not happen if you don’t do that?”.
These are the questions I’m asking myself at the moment – how can I best break the pattern and break the ‘spell’?

Stopping is a good start.

Read more PhilosophersNotes
Find out more about the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series.