522: How to Teach Your Kids About Money with Scott Donnell

Hal Elrod: Hello, friends. Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals podcast. This is your host, Hal Elrod. And today, we’re talking about how to teach your kids about money. So, now, if you don’t have kids or you don’t want to have kids or your kids are grown out of the house, probably, episode is not for you. Skip to another Achieve Your Goals podcast episode. But if you do have kids at home, like I do, I’ve got an 11 and a 14-year-old, there may be no one better in the world to teach you about this subject than Scott Donnell.

 

And Scott and I met six months ago in Florida at an event. We’ve become friends since then. I am currently on page 126 of his book, Value Creation Kid: The Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed. He also is the creator of the GravyStack app, which is an app that gamified teaching your kids about healthy earning, saving, investing, and spending habits, healthy money habits. And since 2011, Scott’s companies have helped 7 million kids learn leadership, fitness, and financial competency.

 

He is a father himself of four children. And he is also the founder of DinnerTable.com. And DinnerTable.com, ton of free resources to help you and your family create a legacy. And you’re going to hear today why he believes that it’s heritage, not inheritance, that we need to pass on to our children. And I’ll explain what that means in today’s conversation. I love talking to Scott. He’s just brilliant at what he does. This is his area of expertise. It is his mission. It is his passion to help families and help kids learn about money.

 

Before we dive into the episode, I want to thank our two sponsors for today. And first and foremost is Organifi. Now, I don’t talk very often about Organifi’s Green Juice because it has an ingredient that I personally am allergic to. Not many people are allergic to it. It’s ashwagandha, so I don’t use that product. However, I thought I’m doing a disservice by not telling you about Organifi’s number one selling product. It’s how they launch their business. I don’t know how many years ago, eight, nine years ago, but their Green Juice is a way for you to boost your health, get all the vitamins and nutrients that you need in a very quick, efficient, effective way. So, meaning, like, we all wish we had time to sit at home and chop up vegetables and put them in the juicer and then clean the juicer. And if you do, that’s awesome.

 

But for most of us, it’s not practical, it’s not efficient. Organifi’s Green Juice is a way that for I think is $3 a day, less than $3 a day. Maybe it’s less than $1.50 a day. Sorry, I’m doing the math wrong. But for an affordable daily amount, you can get all the nutrients that you need in a quick scoop of a delicious tasting Green Juice. So, head over to Organifi.com/Hal. That is spelled O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I, Organifi.com/Hal. Check out their Green Juice, their Red Juice which I just took about an hour ago before my workout. Check out their Protein powder. They’ve got a new sleep supplement. You name it. Organifi covers all of your health and nutrition needs in the form of organic whole food powders that mix in water, juice, milk, a smoothie, you name it, for a quick and efficient way to get all of the health nutrients that you need.

 

And last but not least, if you want to improve your sleep, our sponsor CURED Nutrition may be the best option for you. They make a product called Night Caps and also Night Oil, same product, two different formats. In fact, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see I’m holding up the Night Caps, which are capsules, and the Night Oil, which is a dropper that goes under your tongue. Now, I use Night Caps when I travel. I use Night Oil every night at home, so just as a tip for you. And I also encourage you to start small. Instead of a full dropper, which is what they recommend on the bottle, I actually use about a third of a dropper full. I find if I really need to sleep, a full dropper knocks me out, but I just want to keep sleeping in the morning.

 

So, now that I’ve got my sleep under control, I use a one fourth or one third of a dropper, and then I wake up feeling refreshed and I sleep well. So, something for you to consider, if you’re struggling to sleep, use a full dropper full. If you’re like, I’m kind of struggling, but I want to wake up refreshed, etc., consider playing with the dosage and using a smaller amount. If you want to improve your sleep, head over to CuredNutrition.com/Hal, that is C-U-R-E-D, CuredNutrition.com/Hal, and use the discount code H-A-L for 20% off your entire order and it will help you sleep, like it’s done for me, for my COO Tiffany, for my neighbor Hillary, and thousands of listeners of this podcast.

 

So, all right, without further ado, let us dive into this conversation. You’re going to love Scott. If you don’t know Scott Donnell, this is your introduction. It’s my pleasure to bring him to you and bring you into his world on how to teach your kids about money. Here we go.

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

Hal Elrod: Scott Donnell, welcome to the podcast, brother.

 

Scott Donnell: Good to be here, buddy. Let’s kill it.

 

Hal Elrod: So, we met, probably six months ago or so– no, about a year ago at the event, Dan Sullivan’s Strategic Coach event in Florida.

 

Scott Donnell: That’s right.

 

Hal Elrod: Yeah. My head of app development, Josh Eidenberg, introduced us. Here’s where I want to start, though, because I just saw you had kind of a bucket list moment where, I don’t know if it was on, probably social media. And there’s Scott Donnell standing next to Tony Robbins at Tony’s live event in front of however many thousands or tens of thousands of people. And Scott gets the mic, for how long did you talk for?

 

Scott Donnell: Just a handful of minutes.

 

Hal Elrod: Just a few minutes, right?

 

Scott Donnell: Five minutes, yeah.

 

Hal Elrod: But I mean, how cool to get to be on stage with Tony Robbins at his event. So, again, that would be, like the first thing that went through my head is, “What? How did Scott get on Tony Robbins’ stage? That’s crazy.” So, tell that story because you told that to me offline a while back.

 

Scott Donnell: Yeah, it was crazy. So, my whole world is teaching financial literacy and family legacy. We’ve helped 7 million families now in all our companies. And over the last 10 years, my goal has been, how do I find the best 100 families in the world? And that’s been my search. And I got 300 pages of notes, what I’ve learned from all these families in how they raise…

 

Hal Elrod: Look, how do you define best families in the world? What’s best?

 

Scott Donnell: Yeah, this is legacy. So, I don’t care about money. There are a bunch of billionaires in this group, whatever. But if you raise kids and grandkids and great grandkids to blow by the previous generation in all metrics, you’re doing something right. So, this is like family values and beliefs, mindsets and skill sets, financial competencies and their impact in the world. If every generation is blowing by the previous, you’re doing something right. And so, that’s what we’ve been codifying into our 18 strategies for DinnerTable.com. And Tony heard about it. And he said, “That’s what I did in the wealth world and in the health world.” He finds the best in the world and he codifies it. And so, that’s why he asked me to come and share.

 

Hal Elrod: Got it. Okay. Now, I like the details of that story because didn’t they see you at a table at an event, like one of Tony’s guys, and he’s like, “Who are you?” And then you got to come to– like, tell me a little, just give me 30 seconds of that because I remember that part of the story. I was like, how random that this guy that works for Tony just saw you at a booth talking to kids and families about financial literacy.

 

Scott Donnell: Yeah, we were doing the Children’s Business Fair, which we’ve been doing it for fun for like 10 years. And now there’s 2,000 of these fairs all over the world. And we were helping kids, teach them profit, cost of goods, how to pitch. Kids are bringing soap and slime and paper airplanes and whatever, making tacos. And then they invite all their family and friends. So, there’s a thousand customers at the fair. It’s a great way to teach kids money skills, right?

 

Well, we launched them into the booths and the music goes off. And I did the little, what’s the economy, what’s profit? How do you do a pitch? And then, Tony’s business partner walked straight up to me and he goes, “What is this? And who the heck are you?” And that’s how the whole thing started. We just started talking about GravyStack, our banking app for the kids and teens, and how it teaches money skills the right way. No more allowance. That’s crud. And then we just walked in through what we’ve learned from all these families. And he’s just like, “You got to meet Tony right away.”

 

So, I’m on a Zoom call with him two days later. And I thought it was going to be one of his reps, like another, an administrative assistant or something. And all of a sudden, it’s just Tony right there on the screen.

 

Hal Elrod: Tony and all his powerful presence. Scott Donnell, welcome to the…

 

Scott Donnell: Say yes, say yes. Yeah, it was crazy man. And it was a 10-minute call that turned into an hour and a half Zoom. And here we are.

 

Hal Elrod: You’ve gotten hundreds of inquiries since then, right?

 

Scott Donnell: Oh, yeah. The whole world wants what we’ve got.

 

Hal Elrod: I’m just lucky that I knew you. It’s like I knew you back when. I knew you before you graced Tony stage. And now, you’re too famous, man. Yeah, I was able to call in a favor and bring you on the podcast. So, today, I want to talk about your expertise, which is how do you teach kids about money and in the technical term is financial literacy. But that’s just a fancy way of saying how to be a good steward of money.

 

And I have a 14-year-old daughter, who right now, she’s all about spending the money. And I’m trying to figure out how to teach her financial literacy. My son is much more about, like, “Hey, can I earn the money, Dad?” I am on page 126 of your book, Value Creation Kid: The Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed. I just downloaded the app a couple of weeks ago. Our debit card just came in the mail. So, GravyStack is the name of the app.

 

And so, real quick, I actually would love for you to talk about the three, like to my understanding is there’s three aspects of the work that you do. There’s DinnerTable.com, which is training for families, online events, on and on. Correct me if I’m wrong, there’s Value Creation Kid, which is the book that teaches you how to, and I love this book. I’ve underlined so much in terms of really creating a paradigm for your kids where they’re not consumers, which is what our society teaches them to be, but they are value creators. They’re, hey, how can I solve problems in the world? That’s how I’m going to get paid, right? Not become a Kardashian, which is what our society is teaching. How we can actually solve problems, create value for other people? And then you have your app GravyStack, which gamifies saving, investing, and spending for kids. So, add anything that I missed in those three components.

 

Scott Donnell: No, that’s it, man. That’s it. So, here’s what we found. It started with the app, okay? So, we’ve helped all these millions of families and all of our companies. And we realized, oh, wow, schools are not teaching money at all. And money is the biggest fight in the home. And kids are not learning anything about all of this. And so, we started GravyStack as a tool. It’s a bank account with a debit card where kids learn to earn. They’re doing gigs, they’re covering their own expenses. They’re learning to save, spend, and share automatically with every dollar raised. There’s nothing like it in the world. So, the GravyStack app started it all.

 

And then, we got thousands of families in there last year and immediately, they all said, “We want more help,” right? It’s like Pavlov’s dog. You don’t train the dog. You train the owner. This is how financial skills need to work in the home. You have to train the parents. And so, then we wrote the book, which Value Creation Kid immediately hit bestseller list. It’s been ripping ever since. We’re very thankful. And then everyone started saying, “No, we want courses, we want get-togethers, we want a workshop to teach us all these strategies.” And that’s where these 18 strategies of family legacy came from with Dinner Table. So, now, DinnerTable.com is like our umbrella. It’s like, hey, if you want to crush it with the family for generations to come, get there, because you get the book there, you get the app there, you can start doing our courses and workshops. So, that’s kind of how this all evolved.

 

Hal Elrod: And DinnerTable.com, if I’m understanding correctly, and actually, I can attest to this just from the book, but it’s more than just financial literacy. It’s family values. It’s legacy, right? Am I correct? It’s beyond just the money.

 

Scott Donnell: Yeah, in fact, the money, it’s a piece of it. Because if you want to have a strong family, you’ve got to have the tools, which I consider GravyStack and the book, those are tools. But you also need mindsets and skill sets and values to be able to crush it as a family. And money is just a piece of that. Money can quickly go awry and mess up future generations very quickly. And no kids are learning. I just spoke at an event with 2,700 entrepreneurs. I said, “Raise your hand if you were taught great money skills growing up.” Zero hands. This is why we have our problem.

 

And so, you need a lot more than just money skills. In fact, money, no one even has an idea of what even money is. Money is a store of value, right? Everyone’s like, “Oh, I got to teach my kids money.” So, money becomes identity. If you just focus on money and it’s all you ever think about with the family, then it becomes like keeping up with the Joneses or they see money as status. They see money as identity. They see money as accomplishment, money like shopping therapy. All this stuff comes from seeing money in the wrong light.

 

Or on the flip side, they see money as bad. Money is evil. It’s in your hand and gone tomorrow. It’ll never be enough. And that’s a poverty mindset, right? So, money is one of those critical pieces you got to get right for legacy because if you don’t, you’ll just screw everybody up.

 

Hal Elrod: Yeah. When I was early on in my entrepreneurial journey, a coach, actually, I was at an event and the guy leading the event, and I don’t think he invented this, but he just said, “People, money is the root of all evil. There’s all these cliches.” And he said, “Money is just an amplifier of who you are.” He said, “If you’re a jerk, it will make you a bigger, more pompous, arrogant jerk. If you are a kind-hearted, serving, loving person, you’re going to help a lot of people with all that money that you make.” And I love that and that stuck with me. It’s the amplifier of who you are.

 

And to me, in some ways, I can look at this in different ways where it’s selfish of me to not earn more money because I will give it or I do give a percentage away. So, the more I earn, the more I’m helping other people. So, yeah, for me, it’s like if I would just go, oh, money’s bad and people are greedy and I just want to take care of my– it’s like, to each their own. I would never judge, like I don’t think there’s a right or wrong. But personally, I realize, like, oh, if I really focus on creating more value, helping more people, I will have more income to donate to the people that are less fortunate that might not have the opportunities to earn the income based on their socioeconomic background or the country they were born into or whatever.

 

Scott Donnell: That’s right.

 

Hal Elrod: So, you have how many kids?

 

Scott Donnell: Four kiddos.

 

Hal Elrod: You have four kids. And then you come from a long line of really successful entrepreneurs. So, you’re qualified to do the work that you do. First, it’s in your blood, right? So, I want you to talk for just a second about how your dad and grandfather, what they did. And then give just a few minutes on or a minute or two on your entrepreneur background leading up until the new book, DinnerTable.com, etc. So, first, dad and grandpa, the entrepreneurial background in your family and then your personal entrepreneurial background.

 

Scott Donnell: Yeah. So, I come from an incredible legacy already. So, four generations, mega wealth by creating a lot of value for millions and millions of people that never passed on the money. They gave it to widows and orphans and helped people all over the world, but they taught me to fish. And I could not be more thankful for that. I have zero imposter syndrome. I have zero guilt or fear or shame that what we’ve got in our life is not created from our value that we’ve created for others. And I was never robbed of that, thankfully.

 

And my dad, my grandpa, they built Inner West Bank. It was a number one small business bank in America, grew it to 90 branches. My grandpa was Ronald Reagan’s bank chair in the late 80s. Incredible heritage. But their big thing was we’re going to teach you to fish. So, I was shredding papers at six years old and first business at eight years old and third grade, and all of my cousins, like, we were trained in this value creation mindset. And it’s just amazing to watch generation after generation what happens when you do that.

 

The connection we have as a family is so tight. Our ability to create value, provide and help for so many people, it’s something that we want the world to start to understand. And of all the training and learning I’ve done in family legacy now with Dinner Table, our family probably did half of them well. And I’ll take it because that’s way better than most.

 

Hal Elrod: And I love the vulnerability there because that’s one thing that none of us are perfect, man. If you’re a parent, you’re learning on the job every day, right? So, anyway.

 

Scott Donnell: Everybody needs to learn at all times. In fact, let me say this real quick. When I say the word legacy, a lot of things get riled up in people. So, they either go, I don’t want to do legacy. That sounds like the Rothschilds and the Trumps and the Vanderbilts. I don’t want that. I just want to have my family and do well and blah, blah. So, that’s not what I’m talking about with legacy, but other people and there’s a lot of people, they go, “Ah, that’s not for me. I’m too late. I’ve had divorce or an estrangement or sickness or bank or business problems in my life. I hate my in-laws.” Like, they disqualify themselves from this idea of a lasting legacy.

 

And again, legacy is not about the money because we believe in heritage, not inheritance. A legacy is a last name that means something for generations to come. But here’s the deal, man. Legacy, if you look it up in the dictionary, it’s the events and actions and relationships that have a long-lasting impact in someone’s life, which means everyone’s going to have a legacy no matter whether they want it or not. The question is, do you want a good or a bad legacy? That’s what we want people to understand is we have the recipe. You just implement this stuff and your family starts transforming for generations to come.

 

So, for me, personally, my background, my first company was 15 years ago. My beautiful wife, Amy, she was a first-grade teacher. She spent her whole paycheck on her kids. And I was like, “What are you doing that you make $38,000 a year? This is crazy.” She’s like, “Yeah, we all do that.” So, I said, “Well, that stops now.” And I started a fun run school fundraising company that exploded, like it grew. I mean, we were in 10 states two years in and it was exploded. We raised billions of dollars for schools. It became a franchise system. We had 600 employees nationwide helping raise money and teach kids leadership and fitness and character traits. And so, that was the first business that really, really thrived and grew.

 

But being in thousands and thousands of schools, I started to realize, “Wait a minute, these guys are not learning. These kids are not learning what I would want my kids to learn. They’re not learning critical thinking or practical skills or financial competency skills.” And so, we just started diving into like why is this not happening. And so, that’s why we started the business fairs. And then fast forward now to GravyStack and Dinner Table, we want to give families these tools. And what I’ve realized is you can’t homework money. You can’t give a kid a debits and credits sheet when they’re 12 and expect them to be able to budget for the rest of their life. They’re not dealing in real money. A kid only learns in two ways. Fun and real-life experience. That’s it.

 

Everything else is hypothetical and complex, and it doesn’t actually apply to their life right now. So, we wanted to really focus on how do we make this stuff fun and real-life experience. And you only learn money by dealing with real money. You can’t give your kid 10 bucks to go given the offering plate and expect them to be generous, and then buy all their birthday presents for every party they ever go to and they don’t do it themselves, they never learn generosity. That’s why allowance never works. It’s your kids spending your money that you gave them. They’ve got to earn their own money, and then they need to save, spend, share, invest it.

 

Hal Elrod: Because that’s the only way they get it at an emotional level, right? Like, oh, what does it feel like to give $10 out of this money? I just earned it. Oh, it kind of hurts. I don’t want to do it. And then you do it and then you’re, oh, oh, wow, I helped somebody. That actually kind of feels good. But yeah, if it’s monopoly money, if it’s mom and dad money, you’re not going to get that real. I love that you’re putting it that way. That real life, emotional experience of what it’s like to do that.

 

Scott Donnell: And they’ll never learn to budget unless they have money they’ve earned and expenses to cover. That’s what most parents get wrong, right? Like, we say, hey allowance is socialism. Allowance is codependency. It doesn’t work. What you should do is what we call the home economy system. And it’s basically that way of having kids have expenses in the home that they’re in charge of, which gives them a motive.

 

Hal Elrod: Give me some examples of what those expenses would be.

 

Scott Donnell: Yeah. So, I’ll just go through the three E’s – expectations, expenses, extra pay. That’s the home economy. So, expectations are the things that your kids should do without pay in the home – make bed, clean room, homework done first, dishes, trash. Like, that’s your role in our family. You’re not getting allowance for that. That’s just an expectation. But then, what you do is you give them expenses to cover. Now, they have a motivation to do all the other stuff to help to get paid for. So, expenses are, like, it starts with toys and trinkets and tech, games, birthday presents for your friends’ parties. Have them be in charge of that.

 

I got a great story. My seven-year-old Reagan, last weekend, she was the only kid at the party that bought the present with her own debit card, spend jar and GravyStack. She earned it. Every other kid’s parents bought the present, wrapped it, and chucked it on the table, right? They didn’t even open the presents at the party, man. The party was over at the ninja gym, and everyone else left. But halfway through that party, Reagan runs up to me with the birthday kid. She’s like, “Can I please, can they open my present right now?” I’m like, “Sure.” They sit down in the middle of the ninja gym and she opens Reagan’s present and she’s beaming, and Reagan’s like ear-to-ear beaming. And every parent is like, “What is going on right now?” And I’m like, “Oh, Reagan is just learning generosity for the rest of her life.”

 

Hal Elrod: No biggie.

 

Scott Donnell: No biggie. But you give your kids things to be in charge of. So, social outings with their friends, sports equipment, even clothes, school stuff, if they’re going to go on a trip, like, have them plan the money if they’re going to go on some trip with friends or school or even a mission trip, like, have them be in charge of it and then give them a whole menu of ways to earn on top of the free expectations. So, we call that extra pay, which is all of our gigs. That’s the third E. So, you give them a ton of awesome ways to help out around the house or in the neighborhood that they can earn, and they have the motive now because they have expenses that they’re in charge of. And so, it starts with action gigs – sweep the garage, wash the windows, take care of the pool or the yard or the pets, or make a meal or clean a bathroom, alphabetize my books, for goodness’ sake. There’s so many things.

 

My five-year-old yesterday gets home from school and he wants to make a few extra bucks because he’s paying for his Legos he wants to get. He goes straight to the garage and starts folding up all the Girl Scout cookie boxes into a pile. And he comes in, he goes, “I just folded 30 boxes of Girl Scout cookies,” because Amy runs the Girl Scouts. He folded them up into a big pile, throw them in the recycling, and it was a $3 gig. And I’m like, “Dude, that was incredibly helpful.” And he’s like, “What else can we do? What else can we do?” That’s what you want. If you do this right, your kids never argue, they never ask you for stuff or money again.

 

Hal Elrod: They just do the gigs that get them the money, that get them the things that they need.

 

Scott Donnell: That’s right. And then you never argue with them over chores again. I mean, it’s like those biggest conflicts, right? So, this is how you do it. But my favorite part of those gigs is you want to throw in brain gigs. Okay? So, the ones I told you were action gigs, hands and feet. But you and I, man, our brain is our business. Why are we not teaching kids to use their brain to create value? So, a brain gig is all these really cool things you can do around the home that make it fun for them to do all these gigs. So, like, what if they plan the next family trip on a budget? What if your kids planned the trip, got the best flight pricing? What are we going to do? Uber or rent a car? Where are we going to stay on the budget? Where are we going to eat? What are we going to do? They will own that trip. I tell you what, they’ll never forget that trip. They’ll love every second of it. And they’ll probably save you a grand in the process. It’s a brain gig. Why not pay him 50 bucks, 20 bucks to plan your trip?

 

Hal Elrod: Now, our other brain games, when you haven’t watched like, a Ted Talk, is that being included in brain gig?

 

Scott Donnell: Yeah, we have hundreds of them. And every single one, they’re not teaching in school and they learn very practical life skills. So, a podcast, read a book, a Ted Talk, a PragerU, a YouTube video, go get coupons for the next grocery run, cancel subscriptions in our home that we didn’t realize we were paying for, go sell assets in the garage that we don’t want anymore and make 30 or 40 bucks by flipping them and we’ll give you a cut. These are all really powerful gigs that the kids love doing, and then when you mix them together, it’s all one big fun list and it’s never ending. And they’re learning all this stuff that you wish they’d learned in school.

 

Hal Elrod: Awesome. I’m excited. So, I’m reading the book, studying the app. And I’m excited because my daughter is 14 going on 20. And so, she basically has two summers until she is 16 and she wants to be able to buy a car. And so, what we told her is that whatever you save, we will match, right? So, we decided to meet her halfway. What I’m excited about is here’s the thing. She’s like, “How can I make the money?” And I’m like, “I’d rather you work with me.”

 

Because here’s the thing, selfishly, Scott, this is my little scheme that I’m working on, which is it’s harder and harder to get quality time with my 14-year-old daughter because she just wants a friend time, alone time, right? And if I respect her space, so I’m like, okay, this is going to give us opportunity where she’s going to work with me on stuff. But what I’m doing, as I was designing, and I’m like, okay, what could I ever do in my office and in my business? I’m like, wait a minute. What’s more valuable, her organizing papers or her learning, growing, and evolving as a human? So, I’m still in the early, like I’m brainstorming this on paper right now, but what I’m thinking is, well, in the morning, we’ll do exercise in the morning, like a Miracle Morning. And then we’ll go into eating healthy breakfast and then she’ll help with work for a couple hours. What I’m most excited about is I’m going to have a thing where she watches documentary, we’re going to eat lunch together, and she’ll watch a 90-minute documentary every single day during lunch. Then we’ll spend an hour debriefing and talking about it.

 

So, I love this because utilizing the GravyStack app and the Value Creation Kid book, just all these, DinnerTable.com, I haven’t gotten there yet, which I’m going to go as soon as we hang up here. But I’m realizing, like, I can just systematize influencing her in a positive way that also, I’m really mindful of, I want her to give me input like, “Hey, sweetie, here’s the buffet of things I’m thinking. Let’s discuss.” So, she doesn’t feel like dad’s forcing me to do all these things versus like, oh, you get to give me input, we’ll decide together. But anyway, man, just what you’ve created is like, it’s the solution for all of us parents that are just flailing, trying to figure out how to teach our kids about money and whether or not to buy them stuff. And yeah, man, so thank you.

 

Scott Donnell: Dude, that means the world. Thanks for saying that. And I feel like so much of what we’re saying is like, we got to stop outsourcing parenting. Dan Sullivan told me this. He said, “Hey, when COVID hit, two things happened. Number one, kids found out what their parents did for the first time ever,” right?

 

Hal Elrod: That’s funny.

 

Scott Donnell: “And then number two, parents realized what their kids were learning or not learning in school for the first time ever.” And it really exploded this like, whoa, I can’t believe my kid’s not learning these things or learning this, right? Home schools have 5x’d in the last couple of years for that very reason. But what we’re saying is, it’s great to have school, like I’m not against the public school system, believe it or not. I’m not against extracurriculars and sports and even church and trips and things. What I’m saying is we can’t outsource parenting, which means you want to make sure that the critical stuff is learned in the home and not hope that somebody else was teaching it, right? I don’t want to outsource all education to school. I don’t want to outsource discipline to sports. I don’t want to outsource a skill to some extracurricular and expect that it was done. We have to make sure, like, especially values and mindsets and beliefs, these things have to be done around the dinner table, not some desk or court. So, it’s this outsourcing of parenting that I think a lot of parents have done, and they just thought that other people were covering the bases and they worked.

 

Hal Elrod: Yeah, you’re completely right, man. Yeah, times have changed a lot since you and I were in school. That is for sure. So, before we wrap up, there’s a quote in your book in Value Creation Kid that I wrote down, and I just want to hear you expand on it because I think that for people listening, or at least for me, it’s like value creation. I kind of get what that is, like, it reminds you the Zig Ziglar quote that you can have everything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want. I really believe in that, right? You help others, you create value for others, and then they compensate you. You created this awesome thing. I’m going to pay you for it. Awesome.

 

But there was a quote you said, having money allows us to focus intensely on creating more emotional and spiritual value. So, I’ll say to you, again, having money allows us to focus intensely on creating more emotional value and spiritual value in the world. What do you mean by that?

 

Scott Donnell: Yeah. So, our whole goal here with families is to teach their kids to create value. Okay, money is a store of value, right? It’s only a store of one type of value, material value. But material value is what you create and produce in the world. This is the problem solving and the wants and needs for others and serving others in a business world. But there’s two other types of value. There’s emotional value, which is how you think and feel and help other people think and feel better, right? And of all the people in my life, Hal, you’ve probably done the emotional bucket more for people in the world than almost anyone I’ve ever met. Emotional value is how you think and how you feel and help others think and feel better.

 

And then spiritual value is how we get outside of ourselves and focus on a greater mission or culture or calling. Like, a great company with a great mission, that’s spiritual value being created right there. When we said we were going to put a man on the moon, bring them home safely by the end of the 60s, our whole country came together. Immense spiritual value, right? I love God, like, incredible spiritual value. But you have to get people out of ego, pride, selfishness, which is where all victimhood and anxiety come from, and entitlement. You have to get them outside of themselves to focus on something greater than themselves. That’s spiritual value. And so, to the degree that money can be used to enhance creating more emotional and spiritual value in the world, that’s the ticket for our kids. And again, money is not bad. It’s just a tool, right?

 

Hal Elrod: Yeah. And so, you said having money allows us to focus intensely on creating more emotional spiritual value, which to me that would say right because if you don’t have money then and you’re struggling financially, you can’t even think about create, right? So, emotionally, you’re not. I know the lowest points in my life have been when my finances were out of line. And I was so obsessed with, “Ah, how do I fix this?” I couldn’t help anybody, even myself, right?

 

Scott Donnell: That’s right.

 

Hal Elrod: So, that makes sense. Having more money and teaching our kids those things now so that maybe, well, ideally, they’re better than we. As they go through life when they turn 18 and leave the house, they’re like, I know how to create value, right? And that’s just a mindset versus pay me, pay me, pay me, give me money, give me money, give me money. What’s the fastest way to the cash? I’m going to make the world a better place, and that’s how I’m going to be compensated.

 

You talked a lot about legacy and heritage. I know that there’s a free bonus that you told me that you’re going to give to everybody. It’s 18 strategies for family legacy. Can you talk about what that is, what it’ll do for people, and where they can get it?

 

Scott Donnell: Yeah. So, we have 18 strategies of true family legacy. I gave you a couple of them today. So, creating value, the value creation mindset, asking your kids every night before bed, who did you add value to today? It’s one of the best questions you could ever ask your kids. It gives them that lens, right? Sharon Lechter taught me that when we wrote our book. And she’s like, Rich Dad Poor Dad, CASHFLOW game. She’s like the godmother.

 

Hal Elrod: Which book did you write with her? Oh, Value Creation Kid, no.

 

Scott Donnell: No. She wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad with Kiyosaki.

 

Hal Elrod: Got it. Okay.

 

Scott Donnell: And when I wrote Value Creation Kid, she’s like, “No way, you got to hear the story.” So, that’s when she told me. So, that’s one of our 18 strategies. One of the other ones is that home economy system that I walked you through. One of the other ones is your kids need heritage, not inheritance, right? It’s more about what we leave in them than to them. This is why we want to use our resources to build more emotional and spiritual value. That’s what heritage is. It’s a last name that means something in your family. That’s just three of the 18 strategies,

 

And we have tools to help walk families through all of these so they can implement them. And so, yeah, if people just go to Info.DinnerTable.com or just click on the link in your show notes, just put in your info, we’ll send it over to you. And then if you guys want to follow up and get more of our resources or the app or have a conversation with one of our family legacy experts to help you out right now, just click there and book a call. So, yeah, that’s our gift for everybody.

 

Hal Elrod: Info.DinnerTable.com?

 

Scott Donnell: That’s right. Info.DinnerTable.com.

 

Hal Elrod: Awesome. Well, Scott, dude, seriously, you’re doing really good work. You are blessing a lot of families, and I just honor you for that because as a family man, that’s how I identify first and foremost. Before I’m an author or a speaker or whatever, I’m a family man. I’m a husband. I’m a father. And so, you’re impacting to me the backbone of our society, man. So, thank you for all the work that you’re doing.

 

Scott Donnell: Yeah, man, thanks for having me. And I’ll leave people with this, okay? Because this is probably the first time I’m going to talk about this publicly. Seven million families we’ve served. I think that money trauma might arguably be the hardest one. And let me unpack that for just a second because here’s one of our other strategies, what you don’t heal from, you pass down. And money trauma, man, as I’ve been on so many different stages, I mean, 40 in the last month, it’s been nuts. And I’m talking to families, dozens of families every day on this thing and this issue of money and your background of money, how you were raised, whether it was silver spoon, parents used it as status to pay for love and bribe and coerce, or you had no money and it was like scarce and you were not abundance thinking, you’re paycheck to paycheck, and you’re like, “I’m never going to let my kids deal with any of these problems.” This all causes money trauma.

 

And I think what separates money trauma from all the other painful things that happen in our lives is that money trauma is the only trauma we have to wake up and work for, for the rest of our life, until you heal from it. And it’s a crazy thought that imagine having all this crazy stuff in your life related to money affecting all of your decisions for work, everything you do every day now has to work for that trauma. People don’t understand this piece, and I’ve never met a counselor, a therapist that has said those words that money has trauma.

 

So, I think what I want to leave you with is like, hey, we tend to overcorrect from generation to generation. If you are silver spoon, you’re going to go towards like hard knock. And if you were paycheck to paycheck, you’re going to spoil and entitle. And we overcorrect this seesaw of every generation. And I think what we’re saying is the best way to go forward is to uncover what happened, heal from it and don’t pass it down and have the conversations with the next generation to bring them up the right way. And I think that’ll do more for our society than almost anything else. So, I want to leave people with that thought. How did you grow up? How can you heal from that? If you want more help, this is what we do every day. But just think about that. And what are the things you’re saying to your spouse or your kids or your friends? Your view of money is affected by everything you were raised with. So, I’ll leave you with that.

 

Hal Elrod: It’s so true. It’s such a central part of our society and most people, right? It’s not an area of expertise for them. So, that would make sense for it would create trauma and then be passed down. Well, everybody listening, the book is Value Creation Kid. Again, I’m on page 126. So, I got about 50 pages to go. The app, it’s called GravyStack. And then, you can get the free 18 strategies for family legacy at Info.DinnerTable.com.

 

And yeah, let’s take care of our kids. Let’s do the best that we can. And Scott, you’re making it. I feel like you’re making it easy, or at least a lot easier for parents to navigate the world of teaching financial literacy to kids. So, again, thanks, brother. Appreciate you. And goal achievers, I will see you all next week. Take care.