013 Having healthy conversations about money – Part 1, with Carl Richards
A few weeks ago, I was honoured to be interviewed by Carl Richards for his new Talking About Money workshop that launches right around now.
For those of you who don’t know Carl Richards, you may be familiar with his most famous work. Through his simple sketches, Carl makes complex financial concepts easy to understand. Otherwise known as The Sketch Guy, his column has appeared weekly in the New York Times since 2010.
Carl is also a Certified Financial Planner, an author and a frequent keynote speaker at financial planning conferences around the world.
The goal of Carl’s Talking About Money workshop is to give people the tools and confidence necessary to have conversations about money that don’t end up in arguments. When you sign up for Carl’s workshop, one of the pieces of content you receive is the interview you are about to hear.
Carl has kindly allowed me to share this part of his Talking About Money workshop on my Retirement Café Podcast.
In our interview, we talk about how to have healthy conversations about money. We don’t get taught how to talk about money at school, and it’s not something we tend to teach our children at home. So we grow up assuming a conversation around money is something that fits into a spreadsheet or a calculator.
As a result, these money conversations can cause people quite a lot of stress and often end in arguments. Because money is emotional and evokes all kinds of feelings.
Carl wanted to include my perspective on how to have positive conversations about money in his workshop because he understood that my somewhat different approach to retirement planning is grounded in listening, understanding and asking the right questions.
In our interview, I explain to Carl why and how I have learned to facilitate great conversations around money and share some of the tools and techniques for doing so. I stress the importance of active, intelligent listening in all conversations – especially those about money – so we can all have more positive outcomes around our money.