Want to Raise Financially Responsible Children and Teens? Teach These Simple Skills…

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we are talking about how to teach our kids about money and finances so they can have a healthy relationship with money, develop initiative, be generous, and really just turn into adults with the financial literacy skills they need. This is a topic a lot of you have written in over the last couple of years asking me to cover. I think it’s one that’s not really addressed enough. I meet a lot of teens and young adults in my practice who really struggle around money, from managing finances to understanding their paycheck and taxes, to saving and lots of other issues. And you’d think this would be something that we would teach kids in school, but no, we have them take things like precalculus and physics, but we don’t require personal finance or other important life skill courses. So as parents, we really need to be responsible for helping our kids learn these skills so that we can minimize problems for them later on. And I can’t think of anyone better to chat with about this than my friend Scott Donnell. Scott is a serial entrepreneur who has dedicated his life to both physical and mental health. He’s the founder of Apex Leadership Company, a fitness fundraising and leadership program for elementary schools nationwide. Apex has net profited $110 million for schools and now has 55 franchises and 3.6 million customers across the nation. Scott is also founder of the Hapbee, which is a wearable tech specializing in ultra-low frequencies and can record small magnetic fields from chemical solutions. Its ability to play safe low energy, magnetic signals enable it to replicate feelings, such as happy, alert, relaxed, calm and sleepy. It’s one of my favorite wearables, but maybe we will do a different show on that. Currently, Scott is working on a project called GravyStack, the platform to raise financially capable, generous self-starters. He is also a dad. Scott, welcome to the show. I’m so excited that you’re here!

Scott Donnell 

Good to be here. I need a smaller bio.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I condensed it even from what they said. So it’s important. You’re such a multi-passionate entrepreneur, you’ve got so many projects that you’re working on. Every time I talk to you, there’s new exciting things that you’re doing. So I’m actually really curious how you got interested in helping kids around things like fundraising, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, like how did that come about for you?

Scott Donnell 

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I’m a serial entrepreneur. I only do things I’m super, super passionate about that I love that can impact a billion people, and I was one of those kids that there was nothing available for my brain when I was a young kid, right? I was definitely not the normal one. There wasn’t any sort of financial literacy coaching as a kid, made a lot of mistakes, didn’t know a lot of things. But I started my first little business when I was like eight years old, I was making bead Gecko keychains. I actually have one I just showed on a TV show. I found one like this. I used to hire my buddies to make them for a quarter. And then I’d sell them door to door for $1.50. And I got suspended because none of my friends were going to recess or lunch, they kept making bead geckos for me. And I literally got suspended, so my supply chain got cut. But it’s really funny, I learned a lot. But here’s the thing: Schools don’t teach this stuff. And when I see a big need and a big opportunity, I go full speed after it to try to help people with it. So we wanted to try to create a way to teach financial literacy to families and kids and teenagers, but in a fun way. That’s why GravyStack — it’s gravystack.com, just so everybody knows, you can go there and join the waitlist for our app. But we want to build the actual bank account with debit cards, a real bank: Withdrawals, ACH transfers, everything. We wanted to actually create games for kids and challenges for teenagers to complete to earn a financial literacy certification. So we created 100 challenges in games that I wish I had as a kid, and that all of our partners and our team and our investors and advisors wish they had when they were young, to be able to be fully financially capable by the time they were in high school or middle school, right? 

A lot of times people think, oh, they will just get out in the real world, and they will figure it out when they are in college. And guess what? You don’t figure it out. You just make all the mistakes. Not to mention, you saddle yourself with six figures in college debt, which is a huge burden for a long time. So anyway, we there’s this huge problem right now. Did you know that they are expecting 40% of student loans to default by 2026? Trillions and trillions of dollars. So this is something — and here’s the harder part. I’m an entrepreneur, I do children’s business fairs with all the kids in our town for fun, and we teach them business. I still don’t even have a full plan to teach my kids about financial literacy, and neither to any of our friends. Even our best business friends with young kids and kids in middle school, high school, they have no actual written roadmap to teach their kids everything about money: How to make it, how to manage it, how to invest it, how to save it, how to budget, how to protect it, how to borrow it correctly, right? Nobody has a plan. So we thought, wow, this is a huge hole, what if we can create a game that is the plan, that parents can just open up for their kids and give them a debit card, and they learn all of these tools inside of the app, as a real bank. So that’s what we thought we would do is help all the other parents like us have just an outsourced roadmap to get their kids to be financially independent. That’s the goal.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

It’s awesome. And I think there’s so much around this for a lot of adults, a lot of us as parents, right around our own issues with money and finances and lacking confidence in how we are managing things. And so it sort of becomes this big gaping hole of well, it’s not being taught in school, and we are not knowing exactly what to do, or maybe feeling insecure about our own financial literacy. And so we just don’t talk about it, it becomes one of those sort of taboo topics of raising kids. Money, sex, we just don’t talk about them, right? We just go “Well I’m going to cross my fingers and hope they figure it out in adulthood.” And yet for something that is critical to our kids’ success in life, it’s really unfortunate that we don’t talk about it.

Scott Donnell 

If you don’t master money, it will master you. And I think a lot of people let it master them when they get older. And money is such a tricky thing. It really is like sex, because it’s very weird to talk about. It can be awkward, it can be difficult. And half the kids, they listen to mom and dad, they don’t want to listen to mom and dad. They want to figure it out themselves and become independent. We interviewed 1,000 kids, and we said “What’s your most important thing for the next year?”, and they said “independence”. Freedom from mom and dad, more responsibility. And we are like, “You’ve got to earn that. You can’t just you can’t just ask for it. You got to earn it”, right? But parents overwhelmingly just said, “Not only do I not have a plan, I don’t know what to say. I have money for my kids for college, I don’t want to tell them about it. I’m worried about when we tell them about what they have. Should we tell them how much we make? When do we have a conversation with our kids about how much money we spend and make as a family every month? This whole idea of allowance?” My number one thing is stop giving your kids stuff, period. We are creating in our app a way for kids to be able to do any one of 50 things around the house for money. Not the normal chores that they don’t get paid for, that’s just being under the roof. But sweeping the garage and cleaning it up, and weeding and they have 50 things that they can really do and get paid for. And so now when your 12-year-old says, “Mom, I want to go to the movies with my friends, can I have 20 bucks?” You’re like, “Sure, you have an app with 50 things you can do right now, and the money will be right there on your debit card to spend, the moment you finish. So go at it.” So it gives parents just this answer that instead of just becoming the Bank of Mom and Dad and teaching your kids what freeloading is all about, we can actually solve some of these simple problems that parents don’t talk about.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I’m glad you brought up the issue about allowance and chores and all that, because I long have believed, both as a parent and in my professional work with families, that there are certain things that kids need to do because they are part of the family and part of the household, and we provide them a house to live in and food to eat. So there’s a lot of apps and things I’ve looked at over the years, or even books that have been written that I’m like, oh — because they talk about that, sort of these charts and every little thing your kid does, they get money. And I’m like, no, that’s not — you do these basic things because you’re a member of this family, and that’s what we all do. That’s part of helping the household run. But there are things above and beyond that, that then — and so I think that’s a really important point, and it’s a question that I get asked a lot by parents because I think we they sometimes fall into the extremes of either not having kids do anything and just freely handing out money for everything their kids want to do, or the other thing of like every little thing they do, keeping track of it and paying for it. It’s like well, no, actually we need to figure out a better way.

Scott Donnell 

Yeah, my buddy Chad Willardson, he’s in strategic coach with me. He is the author of Smart Not Spoiled. He’s a huge wealth manager in California. He’s got five kids. He’s an investor in GravyStack as well, and an advisor. He loves what we are doing. And he helped us create this menu of income opportunities for kids. So you have things like brush your teeth, and make your bed, and get dressed, and take out the trash. Those are like, “If you want to live in our house, you’re going to do these things. You’re going to put your dishes in the sink when you’re done and help after dinner.” Those are simple things. But there are a ton of other things that we can have our kids do to help us, and then help them learn. Helping cook, helping in the yard, helping in the garage. He actually has his kids, if they want to go to Disneyland, or they want to go to the movies or the arcade or pay for something at all, they actually can go around the house and find things to do and negotiate with mom and dad. So they are like, “Hey, Mom, Dad, I need $50 for this. I would like to do this, this, and this to get that. Is that okay?” Could you imagine your 14-year-old saying that to you? I would jump at that chance. So what we are doing is creating a system where the parents don’t have to be the bad guy or the bad girl here. You can just say, “Perfect, I want you to have the freedom to choose the things you want to do as long as they are healthy and not going to hurt your future or hurt you. And here is the opportunity sitting before you to do it.” Our app actually allows kids to get hired for gigs in their neighborhoods: Mow lawns, babysit, wash cars, pick up dog poop. It’s right there in the app. When you watch the revenue pipes, the money goes straight through the revenue streams into their save, spend, share jars. It’s all tech. You see the live flow of money. Kids have to understand how money flows in and out to get an understanding. And so yeah, we really want to teach kids to both make and manage money, right? If you just give the kids money, even if you give them a debit card with money on it, you’re just teaching them to spend. And I think it’s a weapon, it’s actually a weapon in their hands if you don’t train them properly.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And that training piece is so important, to your earlier point about we just sort of for years, hope, “Well when they get older, they will figure it out.” But it’s just like anything else, if we don’t guide them and teach them and develop the skills, ideally from early on, but at whatever age they are now, how do they then grow up to know how to do that? And I think we are this ties in for a lot of you listening, you may have kids who struggle as it is with things like impulsivity or poor executive function, or anxiety, or depression or whatever it might be, and let me tell you, the combination of those issues with also getting into major financial problems, or not understanding how money works, or not understanding how work works, that is a really bad combo. Those young people, then, come into my clinic, and now not only do they have the issues they were already dealing with, but now they have all of the angst and the trauma and the anxiety, and the feeling of incompetence, and all of that that comes with not being able to figure this stuff out. And so, I think we really do our kids a disservice when we don’t do some intentional teaching and guiding around these things when they are still at home with us.

Scott Donnell 

Yeah. If finances are the biggest problem with married couples, why don’t you think it’s the biggest problem with childhood development as they grow into adults? Because the first step is paying for stuff, and then you can deal with the emotion — there’s so much there, there’s so much anxiety and stress, and then you saddle them with credit card or a car debt or a college debt, it’s just weight on the shoulders. And we talk about this in the finance world, about passive income and investments and dividends and delayed gratification, and those types of investments. What they ultimately bring is peace, right? Financial peace to the individual because they know that they are making money in their sleep. Kids need to understand that idea. They need to understand that money is not something that is going to run your life. You actually can master money. You can have money be working for you, not you working for it. So that’s something that’s really powerful when you give kids this idea of financial freedom. We were laughing the other day. I mentor one of my good friends, John, his son, David. He’s 18 now, and I’ve been mentoring him for 10 years, and he’s a sweet kid. He’s amazing, smart, he’s got a great head on his shoulders. He’s actually buying his first property. He’s going to flip it at 18. Anyway, we were skiing, we were at the mountain going snow skiing. We were going up the hill, and he loves snow skiing. So we saw these four, I don’t know, 20 year olds, and they were smoking pot down like in the woods, snowboarding and skiing, and we were going to the left and I just went, “Alright, David, I want to teach you something.

Those kids down there in the woods are ski bums right now. They probably skied a bunch, but they are what I call short term skiers. Okay? They are just making enough money to ski. I want you to think how I think. I ski off of the interest payments of my investments whenever I want. I get to ski long term, because my money is working for me. I’m not smoking pot in the woods without any money in the bank, blowing it all on snowboarding, because then those people are going to have to quit and never ski again to try to figure out their lives.” There’s just simple little things like this where you can teach kids, like compounding interest, delayed gratification. We just did the marshmallow challenge with my four-year-old a few months ago. So we are like we sat Sawyer and Reagan down, Reagan’s four and Sawyer was two at the time. We said, “Alright, here’s a marshmallow. If you don’t eat it”… or maybe it was a cookie. Yeah, it was a cookie. Sorry.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

The original experiment was with marshmallows, though. Yes.

Scott Donnell 

Yeah. That’s Stanford, I believe it was, and then they tracked all of them. But yeah, we did it with our daughter and son, and she waited for the cookie for the full five minutes. And he waited as well. And so they both got another cookie. And I said, “Alright, if you wait 10 minutes, you get the third cookie.” And Sawyer, who was two at the time goes, “Forget that.”, and Reagan waited the whole 15 minutes, and she got another cookie. And she said, “Dad, can I get a fourth cookie if I wait longer?” And I’m sitting here like, “Cha-China!” That is exactly what you want to hear as a parent. If you understand compounding interest and delayed gratification and waiting, not just trying to buy that immediate thing you want, but delaying it, you could get that thing for the interest payments of the investments and not lose any money, right?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And for those of you with kids, maybe with ADHD or related kinds of things, you might be thinking, “Oh my gosh, my kid could never do that.” But this is a skill, just like building a muscle and working out. This is a skill that actually we can teach kids over time. If you have a kid with significant executive function issues, it may take longer and more practice, but this idea of delaying that gratification, of managing those impulses, it’s so key for everything for kids as they grow, but especially when we start talking about money, because these are the kids that I see getting themselves in the biggest, real serious financial problems later on. So building that impulse control with money and everything else is so key.

Scott, I want to give people some tangible things. I want to think about this in a few different age categories because we have got listeners with little ones, we have got listeners who are going “Oh my gosh, my kid is already a teenager. I’ve missed the boat”, which no, there’s lots of things you can do. So let’s talk about for people right now who have younger kids, maybe they have got preschoolers, early elementary kids, somewhere in that age range. What are some of the key things that you think we should be talking about or practicing or doing with our kids in those years?

Scott Donnell 

Well, I think it’s really important, for starters, to treat your kids two years ahead. This is one of the best things I ever heard. Treat your kids as if they were two years older, and they will take on more responsibility and mature. And so thinking about that, kids, actually, by the age of four or five, they are actually really smart thinking about money. My son couldn’t even count to 50, he’s three, we had him earn his 24 points by doing things around the house above his chores. And he used those 24 points to buy a Nerf gun at the store. And in fact, it was only $20, and so he gave his sister four points, $1 each, and she got four points to be able to get this really cool little art set. Very cute. He’s three. He learned about delayed gratification. He learned about work ethic, he learned about how to earn something. He’s three. Very, very simple. He’s like, “Dad, how do I get this?” Because most parents are like, “Okay, let’s go. We are going to Target right now. We are going to go buy it because I want to make you happy.” I’m like, “No, no. Okay, buddy, here’s what you do. You’re going to sweep the garage, you’re going to get four points. If you help mom and dad cook for dinner, you’re going to get two points each time you do it this week.” I just made up things like that, those extra things that they wouldn’t do normally. He cleaned up the entire house twice, by the way, as a three-year-old, got four points there. He and I weeded for half an hour in the backyard. He got three points.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Can I say something about I think is really important here that you’re spotlighting, because I know a lot of families who say, “Well I say to my kid, ‘Okay, if you want the nerf gun, go sweep the garage,’ and whatever”, but what you’re talking about is intentionally making that connection of points, of earning money, not just the do something to get something at the store, but putting this piece in there around the actual finances of that. You do this to earn these points or these dollars, or whatever, and then you use that to go buy the thing, not just this to help me out, and then I go buy you the thing. You’re really connecting the dots there at an early age for them to understand the connection between the choices they make and what they do, and then being able to go purchase the thing that they want.

Scott Donnell 

You have to do that. I promise you, it teaches them so much more about responsibility and personal work ethic, and they need to make a connection on what to do now to get something later. That is a really important part of maturation and development. One of the things some people say, some parents say, “Well, that’s too legalistic,” I don’t like to make it so intense that I’m never going to think — look, it’s on a spectrum. Everyone might give more or less. We are going to take our kids to dinner, we are going to pay for a lot of stuff already. But the more I can get them as they age, they grow, the more I can get them to personally understand how finances work, how you earn things, what Daddy does for work — We have 100 challenges, by the way, in GravyStack, the app, and these are my favorite part of the entire thing. And it is solving the exact problem you’re talking about. We have the dinner budget challenge: The kid gets 10 bucks from mom and dad on their debit card, per person in the family. They have to go buy food. I’m talking about a 10-year-old, a 12-year-old, whatever. They have to go buy food at the store and make dinner for the family. 10 bucks a person. But here’s the kicker: They get to keep the profit of whatever they don’t spend at the store for dinner, but they have to get a four-out-of-five-star rating from the family. And so they can’t just give them Top Ramen and hot dogs.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I was going to say, no 10 cent Top Ramen.

Scott Donnell 

But that’s the idea. It’s decision making. It’s prioritization, it’s understanding different pieces of this. So the kids maybe would have to do a chicken and a veggie and a drink and an apple. Maybe that’s only six bucks, and they were able to get a four-to-five-star rating for six bucks. They just netted maybe $25 for dinner. We have like 100 of those. A fake Zillow House Buy challenge of planning your next family trip. So they have to get three hotels, three flights, three car rentals, meals for three different restaurants, and then they find the best price to budget out the family’s next trip wherever they are going. And it could be something they do in six months or something they do next week, but they are planning it out. And they complete the challenge. We have 100 of those. So it teaches to save, earn, invest, spend, borrow, protect. Online security, we have challenges around that. Your persona online, things you say online never go away. Here’s how easily passwords can get stolen. We go through the whole gamut of financial capabilities, even life skills and character skills. And by the time they reach our 100 challenges, we have 10 levels. You can go like a diamond dragon level or something, and they get a downloaded certificate of financial independence for college, for a job. It has all the badges on there that they have completed. It’s an accomplishment. And not only do they get paid money every time they do these challenges from family and their relatives and mom and dad, but they are actually earning something that would be — We think that GravyStack is going to be the gold standard for colleges. Because it’s actual hardware. It’s like an eagle scout badge, but for financial literacy. Yeah.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Well, and what I love about that is in all the examples of the challenges that you’re talking about, the skills that are being developed there. Yes, it’s so relevant to the financial literacy piece of it, but those are skills that are so relevant across the board in kids’ lives, whether we are talking about decision making in school or work, we are talking about understanding how work operates, we are talking about delayed gratification, we are talking about prioritizing and figuring out pros and cons. So, really, what you created here is a platform not just for developing these financial skills, but really for teaching much deeper, much more valuable skills that they use in every part of their lives. Which is just awesome.

Scott Donnell 

Yeah, we teach investments. We literally have — let’s say you make $10 from one of your income streams, a gig, a challenge, an at home project. It goes through the pipes into our account. And then the kids and their parents choose, as one of the challenges, they choose what percentage of that money goes into what bucket. So save, spend, share, those are our three main buckets. And save is like save long term and save short term. Long term, I never touch it, here’s investing, your stocks, here’s a diversified portfolio. Shorter term might be like a Barbie or a video game or shoes or a phone, even more a car or college are actually mid-term. So they set maybe 30% goes into savings, maybe they set 10% goes into sharing, which is giving. We hook up to Charity Navigator. All 10 million nonprofits. It hooks up right there, you see goals, you have progress bars to those goals, and then the rest goes on to spend, which is their debit card, they can spend that on whatever they would like. They can keep saving it for whatever they want, they can go to the 7/11, whatever. So it puts the onus right back on the families to watch, in real time you see the little GravyCoins go through the pipes into the accounts that need to go into, and it’s just so valuable for educating people on the flow of money, where it goes. If you make 20 bucks, you shouldn’t say, “Oh, yeah, I can spend $20.” That’s not true at all. There’s a lot to pay, right?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

So for families, even without the app, they can start to think about that now with their kids, right? Your elementary aged kids and certainly your middle school and high school age kids, sort of that bucket system. What are some tips around that for maybe a parent who’s like, “I haven’t done anything with this. My kids are now in elementary and middle school. Should I start with the bucket system? What should I start doing with them?”

Scott Donnell 

I mean, obviously, I’m biased, because we are building GravyStack. No one else is doing anything like this, right? So I think that’ll be helpful. It’s going to be cheap. It’s like a couple bucks a month. But I would say this: You can start with younger kids with three jars, right? Literally get three jars: One save, spend, share. You could put 10% to savings, 10% to giving, and then the 70% to spend, whatever. A bank account also works. The problem with bank accounts is the kids never log in, they never see it. So here is my best advice for families: This is an overall parenting advice. Bring your kids along with as many things as you possibly can as they are growing up. And I’m not just saying in the car somewhere. I’m saying tell them how you’re feeling that day. Tell them what’s going on in your heart that day. Tell them what’s happening at work with you. Talk about the price of dinner. Talk about the budget, the family expenses and incomes for the month. Take your kids along, if you have a financial planner, take your kids to the next meeting and have them ask five questions to them to learn. If you have kids in middle school or high school, take them to meet people that are entrepreneurs, or doctors, or lawyers, or engineers, or software coders. Find out what they love, and what they want to do, and have them get with those types of people young. Bring them along. The more people do that with their kids at a young age, the more successful and mature those kids become. You draw them up, you treat them a couple years older at all times, and that’s what works the best.

Because if you don’t do it, someone else is going to help raise your kids. Someone on social media, someone in their classroom, someone that they are going to idolize.

The other thing we have in our app, by the way — sorry for just spouting this stuff is like falling off my brain, we have this thing called the Money Motto Quiz. It’s one of our 100 challenges. They have to take our quiz and figure out if they are a hoarder, a spender, a consumer, a status spender, maybe they spend just to get the cool shoes because they want to look good. Maybe they are just terrified of money because their parents got divorced because they argued about money. So there’s a lot of these default de facto emotional polls when it comes to money that people don’t realize, and so we are going to try to feather some of that out and figure out what kids lean towards and try to help them cover their blind spots, things to appreciate about how they are wired, they need to know this stuff to have the right money motto when they are young. So there’s just a bunch of these things that parents can do to bring their kids along and help show them what’s going on in real time with their life.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I think that’s so critical. And it’s interesting to unpack all the reasons why we don’t do that. I’m a big proponent of showing your kids the utility bills. Show them paying that stuff. I can’t even tell you, I mean, you won’t be surprised by this, but it’s rare for me to have a young adult in my practice who has the first clue how much they will need. They want to get their first apartment. Not only can they not tell me sort of a range of what that rent might be every month, they can’t tell me what all the other associated expenses are going to be. They have no idea. I say, “Well, how much do you think you’ll pay for electricity? In a month?” Many of them in their mind, just sort of go “But wait, what do you mean I have to pay for that?” And then they can’t tell me what that might be, and so it’s all of this education that goes into that, and I tell parents, even of adult kids: You need to sit them down. When you’re paying the bills a couple times a month. When you do this stuff, you need to have them there with you to show them how this works and give them an understanding of this because they don’t know otherwise.”

Scott Donnell 

Yep, that’s another one of our challenges. They have to literally go through the entire credit card statement, the bank statement for the whole month, what came in, what went out, and set a budget for themselves. There’s a lot of these things that parents don’t even think about. We just made an investment and I didn’t even include any of our kids. And I’m thinking, maybe they would understand how daddy invests, to understand the return and the passive income that comes when Daddy invests, right? So there’s just a lot of those things. Bring your kids along. Bring them with you.

There’s another cool resource out there, it’s called childrensbusinessfair.org. We started this like 10 years ago, doing business fairs for kids. I do them with my daughter, she’s five, Reagan, she did her first business fair last month. She had flower power. She sold little flowers vases for like five bucks. She sold out, she made $250 bucks. It’s basic. You set up at a park with tables and tents, and all the kids come, and they invite all their family and friends, you get hundreds and hundreds of people there, they buy from all the kids and every kid makes hundreds of dollars. It’s a brilliant idea. Three hours on a Saturday morning.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

It reminds me of when I was a kid and my brothers and sisters and I, we for a couple of summers made these things that we called Rock Buddies. We would paint the rocks and put little googly eyes on them.

Scott Donnell 

Yes! I’ve seen every bit. We have done it for 10 years, we’ve got thousands and thousands of kids who have done our program, and they all walk away with hundreds of dollars. And it’s so cool to see the things they come up with, but I think kids need to learn that confidence. What is profit? What are cogs? How do I pitch something to a stranger safely? How do I present something I care about? That gives so much confidence to kids when they do that, that’s just one more step. So childrensbusinessfair.org, it’s a free thing you can do. There’s like 800 of them happening every year now around the country. We just opened it up on this website for anyone to do. Anyway, yeah, there’s just a million things like that. I would buy the book Smart Not Spoiled by Chad Willardson, my buddy, that’s a great book, and then GravyStack, obviously. I’m building this thing to be the Holy Grail. We are going to make 100 challenges, debit cards. I think the thing you’ll love the most, Nicole, is we have this thing called The Inner Circle. So when the kids start, they invite an inner circle of family, relatives, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, mom and dad’s best friends to be in their inner circle. And the inner circle challenges them for the challenges. They hire them for gigs.

They pay for the next challenge, they give them encouragement on the wall, because every badge and every challenge completed and every goal goes on their wall, and they can send them congratulatory, thank you messages, and likes. And then my favorite part is The Inner Circle can actually send their own types of challenges eventually. So if you come across a video or an article, or a really cool Dave Ramsey, or whatever it would be, maybe it’s a TED talk on YouTube, you could one click share that into the app for the kids, and pay them to complete a challenge that you gave them because you think it’s something that’s really valuable. I think grandparents are going to go nuts for this.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I love the building, the connecting of the relationships to that to like, here are my people who can support me in this, and then just the positive reinforcement, relationally, of that, of these adults in their life being aware of what they are doing, and really pouring into them in that way and giving them positive feedback on that. There’s real power in that for sure.

Scott Donnell 

I can’t wait, I can’t wait. It’s going to be live.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Right. So it’s coming out soon. I know you’ve got it in beta. I’m super excited about it. I think this is really going to allow families to address this in a way that so many aren’t. And for all of you out there who are maybe feeling like, “Yeah, I’ve known this is an issue, I’ve kind of been anxious about, if my kid is going to be prepared in this way, but I don’t know what to do.” This is the platform to use. And I would say I mean, I don’t know Scott, you built the platform, so you tell me, but as I’m listening to you, I’m thinking, this is really going to be beneficial for a lot of parents, too.

Scott Donnell 

So 6 in 10 parents from our focus group said that they want this bank account for themselves. Forget Chase, right? So we are actually going to be opening it up to everybody because it’s not just for kids, right? The at home income jar that makes your revenue stream, guess what? That’s the same as a W-2 income, right? So your investment jar is your save jar, you could literally hook up your Schwab and hook up your investment account. I mean, we are going to open this up big time, but it’s going to start with families first. You’re going to learn with your kids, honestly. As I’ve been doing these challenges and building them out with a tech team and a coding team, we are all learning as we go from the best in the world to build this out. So yeah, it’s gravystack.com, it’s like gravy train and stacks of money. We had to make it sound fun, because it’s not a bank. It is a bank, but we want it to be fun. Banks are boring, we want this to be really fun. So it’s called gravystack.com. They can go to the website and just put their email in to join the queue. So the order in which they get us their email, we will get them their accounts, and send it out to them to download. But it might be live by the time they listen to this or not. But gravystack.com will have the answer there for them.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

So the sooner you get on the list, the sooner you’ll be able to get a login and get in, so do that. And I just want to encourage our parent listeners around, if this is an area that you feel some personal anxiety, shame, regret incompetence, whatever you are so not alone, and this is an opportunity to support yourself with that and support your kids and really have this next generation of our kids be a generation that sort of breaks this cycle in a lot of our families of not talking about this stuff — for you to give your children the gift of not growing up to feel the way that you maybe feel about money and finances, and there’s just such empowerment in that. And so, I want you to feel empowered around this, as opposed to feeling like “I don’t know what I’m doing.” This is just it to me what you’ve created here for all of us. It’s just such an empowering thing.

Scott Donnell 

I will say this, it’s never too late. Okay? Even if your kids are out of the house, it’s not too late. There are so many things that families can do to help their kids learn. And again, it’s this idea of bringing them along, teaching them what’s going on in your relationship, in your marriage, in your heart, in your finances, in your world. And the more that you guys work through these things together — I love the idea of apprenticeship, right? Because mom and dad don’t have to be the ones that know everything to teach their kids. Your kids should learn from the best of the best anywhere, right? And so you find a local financial wealth manager or planner and go ask, go interview them with your kids for an hour, you’ll probably learn a million things. If you feel like you’re struggling as a parent, why don’t you go with your kids to other people and interview them and follow another entrepreneur or apprentice with somebody who you respect or they want to be like. Go along, learn a bunch. I can’t wait to learn alongside my kids as they are growing up. Are you kidding me? You’re never too old, we should be learning until the day we die. And by the way, kids know, they are growing so quickly in terms of technological advances and how fast kids learn online, they are not scrolling new channels anymore. 

They are getting fed to them on their phone. Delayed gratification is one of the most difficult skills to teach because of Amazon Prime, and immediate gratification on social media. We have to teach them grit, we have to teach them the value of hard work and delaying to get something more valuable in the long term. And then when it comes to money, so much of it is digital. We are moving away from cash. We don’t have any cash around the house. Maybe like in the lockbox a little bit, just in case the apocalypse happens. But it’s a dumb way to think in the first place. But kids don’t see money around. They never see you spend money. It’s credit cards, and it’s BillPay, and it’s whatever. My friend’s 10-year-old son was at an Amazon checkout on his desktop the other day. And he had a $10 bill, and he was trying to type in the unique identifier on the $10 bill, that federal ID code. He was trying to put it in the checkout discount code in Amazon and he’s like, “Dad, why can’t I get the $10 off? It’s not working.” And we laugh at that. It’s like, “Oh, that’s how they think” Duh, they think that way. And so we have to be able to help our kids learn in the spaces they are in. And so that’s why being able to understand the flow of money, the digital side of currency, we are going to be teaching DeFi as well, and crypto. Kids can actually earn Grit Coins in our app, and it’s going to be fantastic.

Not just money, but it’s going to be really fun. We are going to teach them how to pick stocks. They go around their house and they find stocks, and we ask them questions about them, they can invest the chunk that they set aside. So anyway, it’s never too late. You’re going to be fine. You just have to sit down and write out what are the 5 to 10 things that I wish I had learned when I was young, and that I feel like my kid, it would be super valuable for them to learn, and then go find the people to help if you guys don’t know the answer.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Such a great tip, and so many amazing things that you shared. And really, everybody go to gravystack.com and get signed up so that you can access it as soon as it’s available to you. I just think there’s no other tool like it. And, Scott, if there’s one thing I know about you, it’s that you will continue to innovate and add and continue to build this thing out to be on the cutting edge of everything that comes down the pike with all of this, and so I think that’s helpful for people to know, too. So thank you for being here today, for sharing all of this and really just for the amazing project that you’re working on. I appreciate it.

Scott Donnell 

Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And thanks to all of you as always for being here and for listening. We will catch you back here next time.