Episode 9 - Charting Your Course: Family Finance with Jenni Sisson
Join Jenni Sisson, "Mama's Money Map" host and mother of five, as she shares her budgeting blueprints for single-income homes. Dive into the dynamics of household budget management and the transition from homemaker to freelancer. Discover strategies for tackling medical bills through self-advocacy. This episode is a treasure trove of advice for families aiming to achieve financial stability and teach their children about money.
Episode Highlights
(04:32 - 05:42) Financial Responsibilities
(06:59 - 08:46) Evolution of Family Budgeting
(12:11 - 12:42) Income-Based Family Size Forms
(14:43 - 15:30) Discrepancy in MRI Costs
(18:32 - 19:28) Instilling Financial Habits in Kids
(22:28 - 23:15) Teaching Kids Responsibility
Connect with Jenni Sisson
Connect with Jenni on LinkedIn
Connect with Deb Meyer
Website: WorthyNest.com/podcast
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Full transcript
Deb Meyer (00:01.179)
Hello and welcome to the Beyond Budgets podcast. Today's episode is with Jenni Sisson. She is a mama five and she's also the host of the podcast, Mama's Money Map. And I'm so excited to have her on today. She's gonna share a little bit about why family finance is so important to her and also just talk about the evolution of her journey. They're a single-income household, so they approach budgeting a little bit differently. And I just wanna share some good feedback from her. So.
All right, let's kick it off, Jenni. We met at FinCon a few years ago and I think we instantly hit it off. Maybe it's the fact that we're both moms and we have this personal finance interest, but can you share why family finance is so important to you?
Jenni Sisson (00:46.058)
Yes. I think it's cause family is so important to me. And it's, I guess I treat finances as kind of an outgrowth about how to raise my family. Like it's a means to an end. So I think that's part of the reason, that was the reason that kind of fell down the personal finance rabbit hole. Like I have a really distinct memory of sitting in front of this like computer that my brother-in-law had cobbled together from old computer parts and my little baby was crawling around on the floor and I was sitting in my bathrobe like, and I was looking at my empty bank account online. I was like, how do I do this? How do I make this work? And so, and that was kind of the, this like watershed moment for me of like, I have to figure this out because there are people that depend on me figuring this out. So that's kind of where that came from.
Deb Meyer (01:24.238)
Right?
Deb Meyer (01:34.843)
Yeah, yeah. And I know just in the podcast and some of the things you've been putting out there, you've been pretty honest about, you know, you and your husband coming from this place of single income, trying to make it work and especially having a large family. I mean, that's a whole different ballgame. One or two kids is one thing, but it's a whole different ballgame when you have, I would say, three or more is, you know, there's just a lot of extra planning and thought that has to go into that. So.
Jenni Sisson (01:54.046)
Right?
Jenni Sisson (01:58.866)
Yep.
Deb Meyer (02:03.643)
Share a little bit more about how you guys have approached budgeting as a single-income household, why you think it's important to approach it differently than a dual-income household.
Jenni Sisson (02:14.226)
I think, and we've kind of gone through iterations of me not working at all, me working a little bit and then now that my kids are older, I freelance right and so I work a lot more than I used to. And that's evolved too. But back when we were really a single-income household, we kind of, it was much more of a divide and conquer mentality. So my husband was the primary breadwinner and that's kind of how we designed our family is kind of a more traditional route where I would stay home.
Deb Meyer (02:36.993)
Mm-hmm.
Jenni Sisson (02:43.93)
and manage the kids and the house and he would take care of earning the money. And so my primary contribution to the financial part of things was to save and like stretch the dollars because, you know, like you said, managing like three or more kids, it becomes crowd control. That is definitely a full-time job. And so adding like adding more like true money-making responsibility for me would have made our life far too complex.
Jenni Sisson (03:12.582)
And so it was easier to be like, okay, you take care of this part, I'm gonna take care of this part. And we had to have a lot of good communication to make sure like, okay, there's, you know, there's no ripples in our income, right? Okay, there's no ripples in our expenditures, right? And so we, it involves kind of a distribution of who's doing what, and then a lot of communication to make sure that everything still gets taken care of, regardless of like who's doing it.
Deb Meyer (03:39.247)
Mm-hmm. Sure, sure. So I guess when you're thinking about it from that standpoint, when you were on the single income household track, did you have much of a say in how the budgeting went or did you kind of leave that responsibility to your husband since he was the sole income earner? Like how did you, from a practical standpoint, kind of view that responsibility and management?
Jenni Sisson (04:08.322)
So I don't know if ours is the exception, rather the rule, but I manage like all the money. Like he makes it and that's his financial contribution. Like I researched the, um, like the investments we're going to do for retirement. And like, I was basically like, we would meet maybe like once a week between once a week and once a month. It wasn't like, you know, religious schedule we had, but excuse me, but we would meet and
Deb Meyer (04:12.488)
Okay.
Deb Meyer (04:23.695)
Mm-hmm.
Jenni Sisson (04:37.486)
talk about and I would basically like report to him, okay, this is what we're doing. This is how much savings we have. This is how much debt we have. This is how much we've paid off. This is what's coming down the pipe. And he's like, okay, hun, sounds good. That's how it works. And it's funny. Basically, like I said, that's kind of how we designed it too is when we first got married, or before we got married, we're like, oh, we should probably talk about who's gonna do finances in our relationship. And he looked at me and I looked at him and he says, do you want to do it? And I said, No, do you want to do it? And he said,
Deb Meyer (04:44.659)
Sure.
Jenni Sisson (05:07.058)
No. And I said, well, I'm more of a control freak, so I guess I'll do it. It's literally like almost verbatim how our conversation went. So, and, and like I said, I don't know if it's more of the exception than the rule, but that's, and it, it's kind of nice. And I think it has helped me. Cause I've struggled with some, some guilt for like, not contributing financially, which is silly, right? I'm taking care of like kids in the house. Like I realize in my mind that that's ridiculous.
Deb Meyer (05:14.344)
That was the default.
Deb Meyer (05:32.371)
Sure.
Jenni Sisson (05:34.982)
And my husband has never like guilted me for staying home. But I think that has helped me feel like I'm financially contributing on the saving side, on the making sure we're spending in our budget and paying off debt. Side, you know, so even though I'm not out there generating income and making sure that the income is enough for our family.
Deb Meyer (05:55.455)
Mm-hmm. And then with the freelancing that you're doing now that the kids are a little bit older and school-aged Is that going more towards some of the longer-term financial goals for your family like retirement or college savings? Is that on a practical level how it's how it's managed as a dual income household now?
Jenni Sisson (06:15.462)
It's our needs that have kind of evolved. We've actually moved around geographically a lot. And so before we were living in a lot of lower income or not lower income, a lot of lower cost of living areas. And so a one-income household, even with a lot of kids was a lot more durable and say like rural Texas than where we are now we're in a suburb of Salt Lake. And so part of what I make.
Deb Meyer (06:27.282)
Okay.
Jenni Sisson (06:40.814)
covers the different like we mindfully chose to move to Utah, we have a lot of family here. We're both like Four Seasons people and the heat of Texas was really getting obnoxious. So there's a lot of reasons why we moved here, but we knew that it was going to take more money to live here than it did in Texas. And so part of that goes to living in a place that's more pleasing and a better quite frankly, better fit for our family.
Deb Meyer (07:08.924)
Mm-hmm.
Jenni Sisson (07:09.874)
And then part of it too is we're, we would like to get some real estate investments. We have a couple of rentals right now in rural Texas. And we'd like to grow that. And we're also saving for our own house because when we lived in Texas, we were renting because his company paid for our housing, which is lovely. But we're working on that. So we're working on some more long-term financial goals and the money that I can bring
Deb Meyer (07:20.551)
Okay.
Jenni Sisson (07:40.106)
You know, it's not, not all of it's used up by everyday living. So some of it can go more toward those things.
Deb Meyer (07:44.881)
Mm-hmm.
Great, great. Thanks for sharing that. So I guess just, I wanna hear a little bit more about your family story and how that budget has evolved over the years. I know you mentioned before we started hitting record that you had one year with some pretty extensive medical bills. If anyone's going through that right now, could you share a little bit about practically how to face a daunting challenge like that?
Jenni Sisson (08:12.298)
Yeah, it's kind of a two per question. I'll do the first part and then the second part. So our budget has definitely evolved over the years. When I first like, first started having kids and we were just a single in home household, we had come into some credit card debt. And at that point we were like, we don't want this as a part of our lives at all. This is super stressful. We gotta get rid of this. We gotta get this monkey off our back. And so at that point...
we were really, really meticulous with our budget. We wrote down everything we spent, everything we saved. Like every transaction got written down in the budget, down to the dime. And then after we got out of debt, we still tried to follow a budget pretty closely. But kind of in recent years, I've been a little more lax and a little more like 80-20 rule with the budget because...
Jenni Sisson (09:06.358)
From all those years of kind of having to be pretty frugal to, you know, make the dollar stretch, I'm not really one to go out and like, oh, that top is cute. I'll buy it. Oh, that purse is cute. I'll buy it. I'm that's not me. So because I've kind of built in though, like it's almost muscle memory at this point to just to like spend on the essentials and anything isn't essential, like, okay, let's talk about this as an expense. Does it fit? But, you know, I don't hem and haw over every dime the way I used to.
Jenni Sisson (09:36.318)
Um, so, so that has evolved with time. And I think part of it's just like, it's like learning how to cook. At first, you follow the recipe, like to the tea, you measure everything out and you like level it off with a knife and the whole, the whole bit. And then after you get pretty good at cooking, you know, about how much salt the soup needs. You know, about how much of one ingredient or another to put in. And it's, you don't have to measure it quite as meticulously to get a good outcome. And then with the medical bill. Um,
Deb Meyer (09:46.725)
Hehehehe
Jenni Sisson (10:06.302)
stuff. Yeah, 2022 was a doozy for our family. I had a surgery, my daughter had a surgery. So we had just a really awful year for medical bills. Normal, we're pretty healthy. We don't have a lot of like chronic conditions. And so this was like, kind of new territory for us. I tried to do everything right. So I even called up the provider the day before and I said, okay, insurance is going to cover this, right? And she's like, “Oh, yeah, honey, we don't we don't touch you until we preauthorize it.” And I was like, “okay, great. Awesome. I'm in the clear.”
So I go get surgery, I recover well, everything's good. And the I get the medical bills from the hospital, and anesthesiologist and the surgeon, and then pre-ops and post-op and insurance covers everything, except the surgeon's bill for the surgery.
Jenni Sisson (11:30.326)
They covered pre-op, they covered post-op, they covered the anesthesiologist, they covered the hospital stay, but not the surgeon's bill. And so anyway, we went back and forth between me and the doctor's office and the insurance company for a while and eventually the doctor's office was like,
“You know, we're just going to forgive this bill because it wasn't your fault because they were saying it wasn't pre-authorized.” And I called insurance was like, “I know it was pre-authorized because I called the day before and they told me the name of the insurance person that the office had talked to.” So that one got forgiven, which was really, really helpful. And it's $2,500. Yeah, it was huge.
Jenni Sisson (12:28.93)
Then my daughter, of course, it's 10 o'clock at night when my husband's out of town, right? That's when disaster always strikes. It turns out it's appendicitis. And so they have to rush her to the nearest city, which is two hours away to actually get surgery and take her appendix out.
Deb Meyer (13:23.673)
Oh my gosh.
Jenni Sisson (13:25.194)
So I get the emergency room bill later on. And my surgery had me kind of freaked out, you know. And so I looked online to see like, okay, how do I save money on medical bills? And I had already kind of been researching this and I found a book that was super helpful that I really recommend. It's called Never Pay the First Bill by Marshall Allen.
Like that $20 investment saved me $7,000 that year. So I highly recommend that book. But in it, he talks about what's called upcoding, which is basically when doctors use codes to say what they did for you so they can bill the insurance company. And there's like hundreds, like thousands of codes. They coded my daughter's ER visit as a level five, which is like the highest code you can have.
Deb Meyer (13:57.263)
Wow.
Jenni Sisson (14:21.918)
There's no way, I'm not a medical professional, but there's no way that's a level five. And so I called him up and I was very sweet and I was like, hey, I think there was a mistake on this bill, it was coded as a level five.
And so I pushed back a little, they're like, well, let me talk to the manager, and we'll get back to you.
Deb Meyer (15:10.556)
Bang.
Jenni Sisson (15:20.75)
And I'm like, OK, this is probably going to go into the customer service vortex. I'll never hear from these people again. But the next day, they called me back and they said, oh, we're just going to not bill you for that. And I was like, OK. And so I'm like, great, $465. I do not have to pay. That's wonderful.
Deb Meyer (15:52.527)
Wow. So in both cases you ended up having these enormous bills but paid nothing because you advocated for yourself and your family?
Jenni Sisson (15:59.646)
Yeah. We still got the bill for the surgery, and that was hefty. And one of the other things in this book was applying for financial aid. And I was like, huh. And like, we didn't we didn't qualify for any like government programs or anything at that point. And you know, we were making middle income, not, you know, wealthy, but I'm like, okay, well, I'll just apply. It takes 30 minutes.
And the worst they can say is that I have to pay the full bill. I was shocked that we qualified for, I think it was about 60% of the bill was just written off and I'm like, wow. So I think it took me like 30 minutes and they didn't tell us about that at the hospital. I had to call and request it or they, I think it might have had just a form you print off online or something, but I'm like,
Deb Meyer (17:07.495)
just by filling out some paperwork for a half hour.
Jenni Sisson (17:20.938)
Wow, geez, it's worth asking at least for, and yes. And I guess like even people that make like six figures, and it depends on your family size. I think part of it too was I had already had surgery that year. And I put that on the form, like if you have extenuating medical circumstances and they know you're gonna have a lot of medical bills, and then like I said, a bunch of kids, that sure helps your case too.
Deb Meyer (17:24.731)
Definitely.
Jenni Sisson (17:49.77)
But yeah, I was astonished that we qualified. But again, worst they can say is no. So it's well worth it to ask.
Deb Meyer (17:56.963)
And then even for the residual bill, I would guess there's also potentially some payment plan you can work out with the hospital to pay it off over time.
Jenni Sisson (18:04.074)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure we were on a payment plan. It was like a no-interest because most people don't have, you know, I don't remember how much it ended up being, but you know, it was a couple thousand dollars at least. We don't always have that lying around, so.
Deb Meyer (18:15.215)
Oh wow. Yeah. And was this with... so you did have medical insurance going into both of these surgeries? Okay. And obviously, it already met the deductible for you guys. I mean even with a high deductible plan if you're talking thousands of dollars. Or it might have been an out-of-pocket.
Jenni Sisson (18:20.918)
Yeah, we did. We had pretty good medical insurance.
Deb Meyer (18:38.863)
Well, thank you for sharing some of those details. That's really helpful because I think the lesson learned, at least in your case, was to advocate for yourself, your family. Make sure you understand the bills, know that they could have miscoded things correctly, take a closer look at if there is any kind of financial aid available to apply for it, and even with that residual balance, you may be able to pay it off over time.
Jenni Sisson (19:08.754)
Absolutely. And they say 80% of medical bills have errors. I think that's a study done by Kaiser, which is a healthcare company. If anyone's gonna hide it, they would. But more medical bills have errors than not. So anytime you go to the doctor, just check and ask for like an itemized bill because they won't give that to you usually unless you ask, which is ridiculous, but they
Deb Meyer (19:08.763)
All of those are good strategies, for sure.
Jenni Sisson (19:35.134)
I mean, they have to give it to you if you ask, but they don't usually volunteer that information.
Deb Meyer (19:39.555)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and sometimes it pays to shop around too. I was on this newsletter for a healthcare sharing program where they were saying, you know, one guy was quoted a certain dollar amount for his outpatient surgery and then he went to a different medical center, shopped around, and was able to get like a 90% reduction by going to this other medical center.
Now who knows about the quality. Sometimes I'm a little leery when it's like, okay, one place is quoting you $10,000 and the other place is quoting you $2,000. Those are pretty different extremes and maybe the quality is different, I don't know. Just be careful making sure it's a good medical facility.
Jenni Sisson (20:21.85)
Oh, absolutely. But you'd be surprised though. I think it was the next year, my other son had to have an MRI on his leg. Now he was covered under Medicaid. I knew that wherever we would go because this is my adopted son. But I'm like, I'm just curious how much this would be. And so I called around to different places.
And it was hundreds of dollars difference for an MRI. And these are all like well-rated places, same city. Like it's the difference between a hospital and an outpatient. So if you get the, with the hospital, then it's going to be higher. Always higher, even if it's just for like an MRI or CT scan that doesn't like the care you get probably won't be that different. A surgery, maybe that would, you know, that might be different, but, but yeah, I was shocked at the difference. It was crazy.
Deb Meyer (20:56.987)
The bills are always going to be high.
Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for sharing some of that. I guess, you know, let's kind of switch gears, talk less about the expense side. And, you know, for a lot of parents, their big financial goal this year is to save more money. What would you say is kind of an important pillar to think about when your goal is saving more money in 2024?
Jenni Sisson (21:34.242)
For me, the biggest thing that helps me save is to turn it into a game, to like gamify it. And I call it, maybe this is silly, but it's I channel my inner squirrel. You know how squirrels love to like shove things away and like stuff things in their mouth and they, you know, I've never, you know, I'm not a squirrel, but I've imagined they get some sort of pleasure from this, you know, looking at their stash and, oh, I got lots and lots of nuts in here.
Jenni Sisson (22:01.49)
I kind of try to do the same thing with my savings. I look at my savings account and I'll be like, oh, it's like, the end number is like a four and I have to make it an even $10. So I just suck six more dollars away. Make it even, kind of like, you try to make the cereal and the milk come out even. It's kind of the same sort of thing.
And just playing those little psychological tricks with yourself of giving yourself a high five when you put 10 bucks into your savings account rather than go and grab lunch out to eat or whatever it is. Turning it into a game where you get the dopamine hit from saving rather than spending for me is really motivating. And some people, they'll do like a paper chain for like a debt payoff or savings, you know, where they'll tear off one until they reach their goal or like color in a thermometer type deal. But to get like a visual reminder. Yeah.
Deb Meyer (22:36.888)
Mm-hmm. To have a visual reminder, yeah.
Jenni Sisson (23:01.514)
So, and I think especially like if you're married, I think that would be a good thing to have, to keep it in both of your minds. Cause usually I think one spouse tends to do more of the money management than the other, just, you know, just, you know, logistically. So I think to keep it, to keep both spouses on board, working toward the same goal, I think that'd be super helpful.
Deb Meyer (23:26.491)
Yeah, one of the things I always say is automate it, but with automation, you're not necessarily seeing it come out of, you know, the checking account or paycheck or wherever and going into the savings account unless you're regularly reviewing that savings account balance. So your idea of having a visual reminder, having some kind of game, I think is helpful because it motivates you more instead of just kind of putting it on autopilot and not really upping your game, so to speak. If you set the bar low on the automatic savings rate, you're not gonna be motivated to try to put more into it in a given month, even if you have some extra.
Jenni Sisson (24:02.446)
Well, yeah, well, and you can, you can, it depends on your psychology, right? Like if you're the type of person that if you pay attention to it, you'd be like, Ooh, that's lots of money. I can go spend it now. Then obviously automation is probably the better bet for you, but you can also like hybrid do a hybrid, like, so say, okay, here's the lowest bar we want to do with our savings and then. Like, and any little squirrel stashing we can do to add to that.
Jenni Sisson (24:31.242)
Like almost then you feel like you're ahead of the game, you're ahead of where you plan to be. So and that way on the months that are leaner, you like, okay, well, at least we have our base level coming out. And then the months where you know, maybe you get a tax return, or you get a bonus or something like, okay, let's squirrel away part of that. So you could you could blend the two if you wanted. Again, it just it all it all depends on what works for you.
Deb Meyer (24:35.027)
Sure. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So let's talk about kids and raising financially responsible kids. I know you have a wide range of ages and if you're comfortable sharing you can maybe give that range. But any tips for instilling great financial habits in kids at certain ages?
Jenni Sisson (25:10.822)
Our oldest is 17 and our youngest is seven. So we got quite the range of different cognitive abilities; different financial personalities too. So that's an interesting one and each kid is differently motivated by different stuff. And it's really interesting to see so I've got I got three teenagers.
When it comes to Christmas, it's really interesting to see one is like, “yeah, I want Raycon earpods” that he just had his eye on forever. He's like, I don't care if that's the only thing I get. I really want this more expensive gift. And then I talked to my daughter. She's like “no get me all the little Hello Kitty stuff.” She enjoys the quantity of gifts rather than high dollar amount and so they're all different. And so I think part of it is adapting the message to whatever resonates with them
Deb Meyer (25:52.604)
Yeah. Right.
Jenni Sisson (26:05.558)
Um, uh, I'll give you a good example. So our oldest is 17 and he's a car guy. He loves cars. And so he wanted nothing more than a car last summer. And so we told him, okay, we'll give you this much toward a car and the rest you get to, to earn yourself. And so he had a, so he got a job and he worked and worked and worked all summer. And, um, I got to take him. We actually got to the dealership.
It was a pretty cheap car that he earned. But they allowed him to do a layaway plan. They're like, “well, you're too young to finance it. And the dollar amount is too small for us to finance this. We'll just you give us this down payment, we'll hold it for you and you pay it off at this rate.” And then you know, they let him do that. And he got the biggest grin on his face. I have a picture of him when he bought this car … this old kind of beat-up car. But he was so proud of himself. And I was proud of him.
And I think it also like convinced him that he could save for something, because saving wasn't really his strong suit. So I think, letting them, you know, designing experiences for them, where they can see success in themselves, and also not shielding them from failure. I think that's, that's been a big one, like, because
Jenni Sisson (27:30.994)
You know, I mean, with every kid and this is young kids too, when they have money, you know, it’s burning a hole in their pocket, and they want to buy some cheap thing that you know is going to break in two seconds. And you say “okay, you can spend your money that way.” But I'm pretty sure that balloons gonna pop, you know, in about five minutes. And then when the balloon pops, okay, then you can after you console them from crying. Later on, you can break it down like, okay, so we're happy we spent our money that way, or we'd rather have had something different.
Deb Meyer (27:46.077)
Right.
Jenni Sisson (28:00.598)
You turn it into a learning experience. And I know this is a topic of much debate, and every family does it different. We don't really give our kids allowance, but we give them lots of. And with five kids, too, it's like, OK. To give a teenage, like that many teenagers a meaningful allowance, I'm like, no, get a job. But we do try to create opportunities.
Deb Meyer (28:13.78)
That was going to be my next question. Do you do allowance? I don't either.
Jenni Sisson (28:27.85)
So that if they want to earn money, they can. So it's like, anytime you want to clean out my car, anytime you want to wash the truck, like, you know, so there's opportunities there. Usually they don't opt to do that. They'd rather babysit for somebody else or, you know, earn money externally. But it also, which, and actually getting a job outside of the home, whether that's one-off things like babysitting and, or watching other people's pets or, uh, a more, you know, regular like.
Deb Meyer (28:42.824)
Right.
Jenni Sisson (28:57.57)
get hired at a fast food joint or whatever has really been a huge teacher. A huge teacher for my teenagers, because they're seeing more money come in. And so they're and all of them have had the realization like, Oh, I spend a lot of money on snacks at the gas station. Maybe I don't want to do that anymore. Like, but mom telling you that doesn't make it resonate with you.
But after you look over the last couple months, and you've lost 200 of your hard-earned dollars when you make $10 an hour, like how many hours does that equate to? Then the gears start to turn when it's their money that they worked for, the lesson sinks in a lot deeper. So that's part of the reason why we've chosen to do that. And again, every family is different.
Deb Meyer (29:44.315)
Yeah, I'm finding the same with my oldest. He's 14 and just seeing when we reviewed the bank account and he sees, “oh, I started the month with this and I'm down to this.” And I'm like, “okay, you have to go earn some more money or cut back.” You're spending one way or the other or both.
Jenni Sisson (30:00.734)
Well, and it gets them it gets them creative to like I have one son that loves his Spotify subscription. And so and he's 15. And so he's pretty limited on where he can get a job. But he's been pounding the pavement trying to find someone that will hire him at 15. And in Utah, it's legal to have to with parental permission, you can work starting at 14 or 15. And so just because you know,
And so he's gotten he split his subscription with like another friend and they like trade-off and so that it's a little cheaper that way because I think you can have like two users on one count. Um, and just, yeah, it's, it's fun and interesting to see they get creative in the lack of money, you know, of how they like, Oh, I don't have any money, but I want to give my sibling a Christmas present. Well, my daughter crocheted something for my other daughter, because she didn't have any money at the time, you know, it's, but again, mom telling you that is not the same as them feeling the pinch of not having money and having to come up with the solution themselves. And it's nice for them to do it while they're still under your roof and whatever mistakes they make are low stakes.
Deb Meyer (31:11.295)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, they're learning in a comfortable environment where, again, if something majorly goes wrong, we're still here to help them out. Whereas once you send them off in adulthood, college, or wherever, their first full-time job, they're not necessarily going to admit to you when they're getting into credit card debt or having lots of financial difficulty. So it's a very...
Jenni Sisson (31:18.778)
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, I bounced several checks my first year of college and there's been a couple of times my oldest has gone into the negative of this checking account and was like, okay, you know, it's good. I'm glad you learned those lessons sooner than I did. This is a good thing.
Deb Meyer (31:48.407)
Right, right. You just hope they truly learn them, don't repeat the same mistake, right?
Jenni Sisson (31:53.65)
Right. Well, once they get to a certain age, that's not in your control anymore. That's the hard part. That's the hardest part of being a parent is not being able to control your children. I mean, you don't want to, but you know what I mean.
Deb Meyer (32:01.159)
Exactly. Yeah, you're trying to instill great habits, and some of those habits they might take. Others they just kind of think differently, roll a little differently. Well great, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Where could listeners find you or connect with you if they're interested in following up and seeing some of the resources you have to offer?
I host the Mama's Money Map podcast, and you can find me on Instagram, same handle, Mama's Money Map.
Deb Meyer (32:38.971)
Perfect. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Jenny.
Jenni Sisson (32:42.262)
Thanks so much for having me, Deb. Good to talk to you.