Paige Afendoulis: Episode 958

Transcript

[0:00:31] BB: Today on Author Hour, I’m talking to Paige Cornetet. She’s authored a new book titled, My Dad's Class: An Intentional Structure for Teaching Kids about Money and Life, and here’s a brief description. As a parent, it’s easy to feel insecure. What vital knowledge from your childhood should you pass on to your kids? How do you teach the importance of kindness and respect, and when do you introduce the concept of money? How are you going to be intentional with the lessons that you impart? For Paige Cornetet and her three siblings, a childhood designed by their dad was a series of educational experiences woven into family activity. From investing in McDonalds as a stock market activity to using chore assignments as an opportunity for negotiation, the Cornetet kids gained insights into important subjects at an early age. Now, in My Dad’s Class, Paige is sharing the strategies and principles her dad used to lay the groundwork for a happy, successful life. Told from the child’s perspective, this is a parenting book unlike any other. Paige shows you how to get creative with tactics you’re already using and customize a plan that works for your family. Parenting is not always easy but that doesn’t mean it has to be hard. Here’s my conversation with Paige Cornetet. Welcome into The Author Hour Podcast, I’m your host Benji Block and today, I’m honored to be joined by Paige Cornetet. She’s just authored a new book titled My Dad's Class: An Intentional Structure for Teaching Kids about Money and Life. Paige, we’re so glad to have you here on the show with us.

[0:02:09] Paige Afendoulis: Thanks Benji, I’m so excited to be here, I can’t wait to dive into why I wrote it ,the book, and I’m looking for just speaking with you today.

[0:02:19] BB: Absolutely. So you are the founder of Spend-Then and the creator of Millennial Guru. Tell us a bit of what you spend your time focused on, the important work you’re doing in the world, Paige?

[0:02:31] Paige Afendoulis: Yeah, so I kind of have two aspects to my businesses and really that encompassed me, but it’s all about yourself and your wealth. Millennial Guru is my workshops and trainings that I do with a bunch of different companies and teams, and it’s all focused on taking your talents and turning them into strengths. I decided to add another layer on to that of, “Okay, not just only yourself.” Now that you understand your personality and what you’re good at and how you’re good at it and how you do it is, managing your wealth, and what does that look like? Because it’s so custom and so individualistic, and I wrote these three financial children’s books with Spend-Then, my hope was to get it into the arms of kids, early and often. Not that it’s too late for us millennials, but I figured I’d start earlier, for the parents and the families to read these to the kids and open up these conversations with their family’s young. Yourself and your wealth are the two. I should do your health, but that’s my third level, right?

[0:03:40] BB: Well, you’ve been spending time focused on books and things ,so we can save health for the next project, but I love that as you’re focused. I know that this book, specifically, it finds its roots that, you’re getting ready to become a parent, you start looking back, you’re thinking on what your parents did, the type of environment that they created for you as kids growing up, the lessons then that you're going, “All right, this is what I learned, how am I going to teach my kids this?” Talk about how this project goes from maybe something you’re considering as you’re about to become a parent to, “Okay, actually, I want to share this with the world and put this in the form of a book.”

[0:04:17] Paige Afendoulis: Yeah, that’s a great question. I have been thinking about this book for a long time. I feel like it’s been in the back of my mind for about seven to eight years and really, in 2020, with the world locking down and becoming a parent, it was like, you know what? I have a lot of reflection time, and I want to write this book because it’s not only going to help me put together the structure of my family and my parents and what they shared, but also be able to help other families and other parents, people stepping into the role of new parents of, “Well, how do I teach my kids about money and how do I teach my kids about life skills and how do I impart this wisdom down to them while being intentional?” Because they’re going to learn from you no matter what, whether it’s good or bad, but how can I put a lot of impact and intentionality into my children?

[0:05:14] BB: I love that. Dad’s Class as a title, it’s not just a cool little for a book, it’s a real thing that you grew up with. So, you grew up in a very interesting situation where your parents were very intentional. Talk about that a little bit to set the scene.

[0:05:29] Paige Afendoulis: Yes, well my siblings and I always joked that if my dad was not a business owner, he would have been a fantastic general. He’s very disciplined and very strict, but he always had a fun aspect of all of his training and the routines and the systems that he did with us. Every Saturday morning, we would sit down at a table, bring our notebooks and our pens and we would do a dad’s class. He talked about whatever was on his mind, whether it was something in the news or a business book that he read or just a specific thought, and he always did a really great job of making it age-appropriate to us. He didn’t start with stocks and investments until, I want to say, we were eight or nine or 10. So, it was always really fun how the lessons, now looking back, were all of them fun? No, of course not. But, I’m very appreciative now that we did that, and there’s a lot of lessons, and I still have my notebook which is so cool, to see my old writing like Paige with a heart over the ‘i’.

[0:06:38] BB: Of course.

[0:06:41] Paige Afendoulis: Yeah.

[0:06:41] BB: This is just a follow-up question but, what did your dad’s parents do? Where do you think that came from in him, to set this up for you guys?

[0:06:48] Paige Afendoulis: Oh, my grandparents are still very structured people. My grandfather and my grandmother, they have routines and structure. I feel like that was that generation as well, which was right after the war, so they were very humble and conservative and there was a lot of systems. I also feel like the personality of my grandparents, my dad got both of the structure from both of his parents, so we got double structure in our family.

[0:07:18] BB: Yeah, double down on it.

[0:07:20] Paige Afendoulis: Yeah, exactly.

[0:07:22] BB: So, last question as a behind the scenes, before we dive into the actual content here. When you’re working on a project like this, a book is no small feat, this takes—we’re joking offline but—two years of work, you’re finally in, that it’s going out into the world. When it’s a rough day and you’re working on this project, who are you imagining? Like who is the person you’re hoping is going to pick this book up and it’s going to be life changing for?

[0:07:47] Paige Afendoulis: Yeah, I really envisioned people like me that are stepping into this new parenting role, maybe have a couple young kids, are in this huge transitioning shift, and not necessarily just parents, it could be the caretakers, right? Or the grandparents or the people that are raising these children, and are like, “How do I teach them about money and knowledge and life skills and values?” and things like that. But I would say, probably 20s to 30s to 40s, the people in my age range that are becoming parents.

[0:08:25] BB: Well, let’s talk about the book here and I feel like you should talk a bit about your family. I know we’ve mentioned your dad here in Dad’s Class, but even just wondering like, what’s the house that you grew up in, and maybe paint that picture for us of you and your siblings and what life at home looked like?

[0:08:47] Paige Afendoulis: Yeah, well, we originally grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and then moved to Florida when I was eight. But a lot of these— it’s the memories that I have are actually very young, when we were in Grand Rapids, Michigan in our red brick house. My dad posted these sayings and laws, systems on our wall in big poster print. I believe he just handwrote them too. After every dinner meal, we would go over to these papers in a hallway and read them, and talk about them and do fun activities. For example, the first four sayings are, “I can do it, do what’s right, do your best, treat other people how you want to be treated, nice.” We would jump and do super stars, we were like four or five, right? He wanted to make it fun. We did this so much that all four of us, if you ask any of them, can recite them by heart. It is like chiseled into our minds.

[0:09:52] BB: Do you know where those ideas originally came from? Or, one day, Paige just wakes up and they’re on the wall and you’re reading them?

[0:09:59] Paige Afendoulis: Well, I was too young to ask those questions, like, “Oh, how did you come up with this?” But my dad and mom are avid readers. They read a ton of parenting books and just wanted to really absorb as much information as possible, of how to raise great kids .So there’s snippets of where they came from. For example, the five laws, that originally came from another book by Richard and Linda Heirs, and I mentioned that in My Dad’s Class. The other things I think he just, he and my mom created themselves, which is awesome.

[0:10:39] BB: It is, it really is. So there’s these intentional sayings, there’s these five laws, there are things that you're recurringly going back to, and I’ll quote the book here, but you said, “Out loud, family sayings are, at their heart, your family values put into words. Done right, these are powerful statements that will stick with kids for life and empower them to act in ways that will be productive and help them be their best selves.” So, before we jump to how we would create these and how parents can do that, I wonder, now that you’re an adult, Paige, what’s a way you’ve seen this show up for you, where you remember and recall these family values that were repeated in your house so often?

[0:11:19] Paige Afendoulis: I have a great story for that is when I started my business. I was 26 years old, Millennial Guru, and our first saying is, “I can do it.” That is such a powerful statement of confidence. So I knew when I was starting my business is like, “I don’t know how It looks, I don’t’ know what it’s going to be like, but I can do it.” A lot of it just starts there, the courage to start something and do it. That’s a great way. I’m 26 years old and here I have these four sayings that I’ve said my whole life and first one is, “I can do it” So, I was like “Yeah, I can do it, that’s right, here we go.”

[0:12:04] BB: It’s so interesting too, because you had mentioned this earlier, but you think of, no matter whether your parents set an intentional culture in your house or if they don’t, you’re still learning either way. So a lot like the soundtracks that we play in our heads as adults, a lot of those come form our early years and what we heard repeated in our home. So, having a phrase picked intentionally like “I can do it” plays out in your life in so many ways, but if you just listen to your internal soundtracks on the negative side too, they also have roots. It’s just so important to be aware of it, I think is what I’d want to highlight here. It’s amazing that you have this, “I can do it” framework and man, wouldn’t we want to be the parents that pick intentionally what those phrases are, instead of haphazardly working through and hoping that kids catch on the values.

[0:12:54] Paige Afendoulis: Exactly, because I’m sure you’ve heard kids be like, “Oh, I can’t do that” you know? It’s like, “No, you can do it, you know?” And just being thoughtful with the words that you say and the family unity that comes with that too, and imparting independence really to your children. Because here I am, 26 years old, I’m going to start my own business and it’s like, first up is the courage and taking the breath and saying, “Yup, I can do this.” Because a lot of times, people are just afraid to try something new or do something, and I have always had that phrase pounded into my head. So I had it from the beginning.

[0:13:36] BB: I wonder, what does it look like when one of you siblings weren’t feeling it, or you have a moment where you are having some of this self-doubt? Because I think that living at home is messy, no matter how organized you are. So what did those moments look like and maybe how did your parents handle that stuff?

[0:13:53] Paige Afendoulis: Oh, my dad always had some fun saying or like we weren’t allowed to say, “I don’t know” in our house because as kids it’s like, “Well, I don’t know” and he’s like, “We don’t say that in our family” and it’s because he wanted to teach resourcefulness. It’s like, “Well, you can say I’m not sure, but I can figure it out” or I can ask somebody, and there was plenty of moments where we did not want to do it but there was never really a choice. The choice looked like, “Well, you’re going to do what I asked you do and you’re going to pick if you have a happy face or a sad face” so that’s your choice, your attitude.

[0:14:35] BB: That is, that’s the one controllable, right? It’s our attitude. Let’s talk about how we would implement this. There is intentional saying and there’s laws, you had family laws. So talk about the difference there and maybe what are some of the things to consider as we set this up for our family?

[0:14:53] Paige Afendoulis: Yeah, I would say that with the sayings, those are very much so actionable positive sayings from the four that we had in our house, and there is a lot of levity behind them, because you can translate it to a five year old or you can translate it to a 90 year old. Where the laws came in, they were just one word and there was consequences behind it, so it was really to maintain order and peace, those are actually two of the words within the household unit. To also understand that if you disturbed the peace, you’re a part of the problem. Or, if you are not respectful, or if you are not obedient, or you don’t ask permission before you do something, that there are consequences to that. So, the laws, I like them being sayings versus laws. I mean, in those words itself, you can understand it. So the laws are a lot harder and more consequence-phase where the sayings are a lot more open but encouraging and empowering.

[0:16:05] BB: As you have now been in this phase, you have kids. What does that look like for you, did you modify it? Has it evolved for you? Did you just kind of copy paste the laws and these sayings or how did you think about it?

[0:16:20] Paige Afendoulis: Yeah, my husband and I are still working through that because I would love it to always just be me, right? Like, “Oh, this is how my family did it, so let’s just do it this way” But I have a partner and his upbringing looks very different than mine. So we are still in process of tweaking things and editing them because we’re in the early stages, so we got some time to think about it.

[0:16:45] BB: Fair, I wonder, what do those conversations look like for the two of you? Because, you grew up in a very unique situation. My parents (and they are wonderful people) we had some intentionality, but I wouldn’t say this level. So, when you are just bringing in two people with vastly different experience, what do those conversations looked like?

[0:17:03] Paige Afendoulis: I feel like we actually enjoy them, because to contrast and compare what our core values as a couple are, what we liked about our upbringing, what we didn’t like about our upbringing, who is going to be in charge of what. We got a puppy last year, that’s been very fun to observe each other with the discipline and how we’re handling things together. So yeah, I would say the conversations that we have together are very open and I am a lot more of like the executor, where my husband is a lot more of the idea guy. So, he has really great ideas to bring to the table, so it is just more of putting them down and nailing them down together as a couple. I would say, one of those for the two of us would be family is like end all be all for us. We both have great relationships with our families, vice-versa like with our in-laws, so there would be something around that a family and what is more—how does that show up and what does that look like for us as a couple and a family.

[0:18:09] BB: Great conversations to have, to bring that sense of unity and alignment. I am excited for you guys to continue to keep working this out. It’s funny, we’re pretty deep into this conversation and I have yet to bring up money, which is in the title, My Dad’s Class: An Intentional Structure for Teaching Kids about Money and Life. So, let us go to the money side of things. What has been the most beneficial thing for you that have translated from as a kid, the conversations around money and how you understood it, what has translated well into your adulthood Paige?

[0:18:43] Paige Afendoulis: I would say that just the understanding of how money works and what it’s for, as well as the structure of money, has been really great. As I was learning about money and my family, and what that means, there is also a sense of emotions and values as well that are being imparted with money. My dad talked about investments, that was always a huge topic, to accounting, to owning your own business one day, to understanding how a bank works and understanding what transactions are and which side of the table you’re sitting on. So, I felt like when I went to college, I learned very quickly. I had all of this knowledge around money and I’m just comparing myself to my peers and I was like, “Yeah, I know how that works like don’t you know how that works?” I am not getting these free credit cards, are you kidding me? That’s not free money, right? That is a debt, I knew people that got credit cards like, “This is great!” $20,000 later, like free money, but again, they didn’t know. So, I understood credit versus debit, all these different topics around money because I learned so young. I was in the room where it happened and I love Hamilton, in the room where it happens, I was always included in the room where it happens. So because of that, I always knew I have the education, I have the experience around wealth and money and structure that comes with that.

[0:20:29] BB: It’s interesting because if we hope to make change, then that means generational change. Like parents who maybe didn’t have that structure, didn’t grow up in the room where it happened, are now trying to navigate and figure out, “How do I teach my kids?” In fact, you say many people avoid talking to their children about money because they have a deep fear around the topic. Speak to that a bit.

[0:20:56] Paige Afendoulis: Well, I think that’s a huge component of my book. Even if you didn’t grow up with this sort of education or in the room where it happens, you can still impart money lessons and money meaning and money stories to your kids, and you could start right there. You could start, “Hey, I didn’t actually have education around money and that’s why we’re talking about it. You know, that is why I want you to be a part of this conversation and look at our household budget.” Or , “Here’s $10 and you can either save it or spend it.” And have flexibility and play and experience with it, and have those conversations about it. Versus, “Oh, I need more money, I need more money, I need more money” right? I feel like teenagers are always like that with parents, “Hey, you’re going to Venmo me some money for this.” So, creating those systems with your kids early on and having those kind of open vulnerable conversations will be so impactful. But it first starts with you, because you have to realize like, “Ooh okay, this is a scary topic and this can be intimidating for me, let alone my kids, so where do we start?” You can start with just that, that “Hey, I didn’t have this education and that’s why as a family, we’re going to talk about it and learn together.” I think that’s really cool because maybe you always talk about parents teaching your kids. Your kids also teach you too. It is a two-way street, you know? Your kids can teach you stuff as well.

[0:22:31] BB: Any resources that you would point to for parents where, “Man, I don’t know if I have a well-rounded financial literacy” resources that come to mind, places you would send people?

[0:22:42] Paige Afendoulis: Benji, that is a hard question, you stumped me on that. Well, of course, my book, right? Let’s start there and then there are a lot of great activities, resources online that you can do individually, as a couple, with your kids, as a family and also, I am actually creating a bunch of activities as well from my book so that it can make it easier for the parents to do but read, listen, podcast. I mean, there is so much out there nowadays around the topic of wealth and money, and it can seem very confusing at first, but I think just start with awareness, right? That you know you need to find some resources, and go find what works for you, because it is such an individual topic that one thing that works for me may not work for you, and everyone’s life looks different too, and budgets look different, so just start.

[0:23:41] BB: Yes, start. I think it’s so interesting how when there is an area where we’re not real sure, the tendency is to plug our ears, close our eyes, and hope that it goes away. You don’t want to be that type of parent, which hopefully is why you’re picking up this book. I think that is so common in money conversations, is if there’s something that feels too complicated for you, instead of getting educated, you move away from it. Pointing people towards resources and actually looking things up is important. It goes back to exactly what you grew up with, “Don’t say I don’t know” say, “You go find out” right?

[0:24:18] Paige Afendoulis: My dad would be very proud of that, yes, I will figure it out.

[0:24:22] BB: Okay, so if a parent is going to leave this episode with action items beyond going and picking up this book, which is a must now, but what is the call to action that you would invite us as we close out our conversation, Paige?

[0:24:35] Paige Afendoulis: Ooh, I would like to end at the beginning and just impart that you can do it. You can do it as a parent, you can teach your kids this, you can create structure, and it’s not scary. It is going to be fun and it is going to be a learning experience for your family. I think bringing, the wisdom of your ancestors, of your family, the good and the bad, is so impactful for your children. Not only your children, but their children. So, you can do it and, I believe in you, so read my book and start today. I hope that you get one thing out of my book, and do it.

[0:25:16] BB: Yes, again, this is a hyper-practical book. I know we spent some time on the why and the values and that sort of thing, because I think that you have to have that groundwork laid, but again, I would just stress this book is one where you’re giving actionable advice. It’s full, chuck full of action items that people can implement. Paige, what is the best way for people to stay connected to the work you’re doing and yeah, where can we find you online?

[0:25:38] Paige Afendoulis: Yeah, so millennialguru.com, spendthen.com, as well as mydadsclass.com. I got a couple different websites but those are my three companies. So, check any of them out and I have contact information on all of them.

[0:25:54] BB: Perfect. Again, the book is called, My Dad’s Class: An Intentional Structure for Teaching Kids about Money and Life. Paige, thank you so much for stopping by Author Hour today.

[0:26:06] Paige Afendoulis: Thank you. I appreciate it.

[0:26:09] BB: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find, My Dad’s Class: An Intentional Structure for Teaching Kids about Money and Life, on Amazon. A transcript of this episode and all of our previous episodes is available at authorhour.co. For more Author Hour, follow the podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.