Money Talks Around the Family Tree: Growing Our Financial Wisdom

Written By Mary Lou Daly
T-shirt says "Grumps, Est. 2025"

Celebrating the holidays with our children, my husband and I received several presents in anticipation of our first grandchild, due in early 2025. My husband received a T-shirt that says, “GRUMPS, Est. 2025.” The sleeve shows our granddaughter’s name and birthyear.

Our family tree is growing! I immediately thought about how we will share our money beliefs with this next generation—a hazard of the profession. Later, as we sat around the living room and discussed savings and paying off debt, I smiled. This was not a typical conversation when we were raising our children. However, since becoming a Certified Financial Planner in 2011, I’ve worked to weave money topics into our conversations. While this may sound foreign to most families, I love the prospect of helping individuals and couples, including my family members, better understand their relationship with money.   

These holiday moments reminded me once again why understanding our family’s financial history is important. Understanding your relationship with money goes deeper than tracking expenses and managing investments. It involves learning about your family’s financial history, beliefs, and patterns. A powerful tool for gaining this financial awareness is creating a family money tree, also known as a money genogram.  A family money tree is a visual representation of your family’s generational beliefs and patterns.  

Key Benefits of Creating Your Family Money Tree  

  • Reveal Unconscious Familial Money Beliefs  

These “money scripts”—whether “money is the root of all evil” or “more money solves everything”—often drive our financial decisions without our awareness. Money beliefs are learned during early childhood as we witness our parents, grandparents, and other financially influential people talk about and interact with money. You may be able to map these beliefs across multiple generations. Once the unconscious becomes conscious, you can identify which scripts are helping you and which are hurting you. 

  • Break Harmful Financial Patterns

Families often repeat financial patterns generation after generation. These patterns may include chronic debt, excessive frugality, or financial secrecy. Like the money beliefs, once you become aware of these patterns, you can make conscious decisions about which patterns to keep and which to change.  

  • Improve Family Communication 

Creating a family money tree can highlight financial conversations you may want to have with your family, conversations that families often avoid. You can openly discuss money beliefs and patterns found in your family money tree. These conversations can provide opportunities for sharing financial understanding and wisdom. They allow family members to ask questions, to gain a better understanding, and perhaps be able to apply lessons learned to their own lives.  

  • Enhance Financial Decision-Making 

Understanding your family money tree can provide valuable context for your current money choices. You may learn that your inability to trust financial institutions stems from a grandparent’s loss during a financial downturn. Or, that your spending habits were learned by watching a parent during your childhood. Awareness provides the ability for you to choose whether to continue with your money choices.  

  • Strengthen Relationship with your Partner 

In the beginning of a relationship, we may discuss our views on marriage, children, work and where to live. However, we rarely discuss our financial values, beliefs, and goals. Sharing your money tree or the findings of your money tree can help your partner better understand you and help you work together to find a path based on your beliefs to reach both your goals. You can also become accountability partners for each other as you work to tackle financial changes you’d like to make.  

  • Support Intergenerational Planning 

Making conscious money decisions can lead to building wealth, especially if you are working together with your partner towards a shared goal instead of working against each other. With common goals in mind, you can focus on how to leave a meaningful legacy for your family, one that builds and preserves financial wisdom and generational wealth. 

No matter your age or stage in life, crafting your family tree can provide you with insights that, as an individual, can help you build wealth; as a couple, can help you strengthen your relationship and build joint wealth; and as grandparents, can help you with all the above as well as supporting generational financial wisdom.  

For my family, we will work to learn the best ways to teach our children and grandchildren about money, through the modeling how to behave with it and how to talk about it, and especially learning age-appropriate ways to share our wisdom.   

As mentioned above, our children learn their money beliefs at a young age and then continue to strengthen those beliefs based on what they witness happening within the family. Building our money tree will help us to be better partners, parents, and grandparents, hopefully preparing the next generation to make wise financial decisions.  

How about you? As you think about your financial future, consider mapping your money tree.  What beliefs and patterns might you discover? What wisdom might you share with your family and future generations? 

This information is believed to be accurate at the time of publication but should not be used as specific investment or tax advice as opinions and legislation are subject to change. You should always consult your tax professional or other advisors before acting on the ideas presented here.

Mary Lou Daly
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