Ep. 6 - MONEY

Transcript:

Sophia (Voicememo): When I was 18 years old, my mom took me to Chase Bank and helped me open my first checking account. At that point I had no idea how to balance a checkbook, per se, so as a teenager and later on in my early 20s, I kept just, like, emptying my checking account over and over again. And that kind of set the tone for my financial literacy for the early part of my adult life. I hear about so many of my peers and my friends that are my age, have investment accounts and are watching their money grow and change. And I literally have no idea about any of that stuff. But I can say that as a parent now, I am starting to teach my kids what little bit I know about putting your money away, saving your money for a rainy day, what you can spend, what you shouldn't spend. And I'm hoping that as they grow older that I will know a little bit more, as I'm now working with a financial advisor, about how to help them plan for their future.

You're listening to "The Talk", a podcast where we explore the possibility of creating a radical new communication environment between parents and children. An environment that's open, honest, and candid. And where nothing is off limits.

Craig: My mother is the one that taught me how to balance a checkbook. I immediately forgot, and did not take that advice.

Shari: We had a lot more than my parents did when I was little. When Grandpa was away in the service, she was home with two little toddlers, and not a stick of furniture. She didn't even have a radio, and she had a dollar left over from paying all the bills to get through the week. So I guess I always thought, "Wow, I'm not going to complain. If my mom can do this then I can do it."

Craig: We were living in a camper and getting ready to buy a house. And I was working—we actually were able to set some money aside. So I purchased a camcorder and a stereo system. And mom was upset that I purchased that stuff.

These are my parents, Shari and Craig, who you may remember from episode one.

Jeremy: Do you remember that? Do you remember him buying those things? He said that he bought them without talking to you about it?

Shari Crawford: I didn't know about it until after we moved into the house.

Jeremy: Yeah. How did you feel about him doing that?

S.C.: I didn't think it was very nice that he didn't talk to me about it. I think I remember thinking, "I thought we had agreed not to do stuff like that." But it was his money. I mean, he was earning the money, and...

Jeremy: Well, but it was the family's money, right?

S.C.: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy: Was that your way of sort of protecting yourself from being hurt by that? Making that rationale that it was money that he had earned so he had the right to spend it?

S.C.: I don't even know as I thought that. I guess I think that now. He's a big boy, he could make that decision if he wanted to. But I would have spent it on something that was a little more practical.

Jeremy: Like a house?!

S.C.: Or a pair of boots, you know, like mud boots or something. Or a coat. But I can see where he would have wanted to, you know, have something special for the family or something.

Craig Yaddaw: I knew that we would be moving in, and I was thinking you guys are getting to the place where we're going to want to start capturing some of the stuff that you're doing. And I should have talked to her about it beforehand. I think in the back of my mind, I was thinking she would, like, kibosh it pretty heavily, and so I just went and purchased it. But I know that that was one thing where I should have said, you know, "Let's talk about this." And just presented my argument that, you know, we don't have much that aside, but right now we have the opportunity to get these things. And I think that it's going to be important for us to capture the moments—the things I just told you—and for you to have an opportunity to listen to the music that you wanted to listen to. These would be good family building tools.

Jeremy: If he had brought that up as a conversation, what would your reaction have been to that, do you think?

S.C.: I probably would have been much more practical. And, you know, I understand him feeling that way, I certainly do. I know that I was very, very thrifty. I made a lot of clothes for you guys. We picked up toys from garage sales. We made curtains. We went to the library, which was free. I think I learned how to be creative with food. I mean, one time he was working for a company that sold TV dinners. One time he came home with a whole case. And I spent all afternoon separating the food out—all the chicken into one container, all the potatoes into another container, because I didn't want to just fix TV dinners. And I could be much more creative with the food separated. And all the applesauce and one container. And we ate off that case of TV dinners for a few weeks I think!

Jeremy: Did part of that proclivity or that sensibility come from your parents, or was it fully out of necessity?

S.C.: Both. A lot of it came from my parents. They were, and still are, very thrifty and very careful and...make do. They came out of the depression where you either grew your own food or you bartered for it or, you know, you paid a lot for it.

Jeremy: Did they teach you anything about money when you were a kid, and when you were growing up?

S.C.: We had allowance. I remember 10 or 15 cents a week. And then on Saturdays, we had the opportunity to earn five cents or ten cents for a job. And I can remember saving up my dollars for months and months and then going to visit my cousins, and treating them to the penny candy store. Treating them, like I was like rich or something, because they didn't get much of an allowance.

Jeremy: It felt good to use the little money that you had on other people?

S.C.: Yeah, I couldn't think of anything that I wanted to buy myself. My dad made my bicycle out of pieces he found on the side of the road. It was the best bike on the street. My mom made my clothes and she taught me how to sew. And so once she didn't really want to make bellbottoms and I would make them.

Jeremy: Yeah. You must have felt pretty grateful for those kinds of lessons and stuff as you became an adult and there was a need for you to, you know, be thrifty and save and be resourceful.

S.C.: Yeah. I don't know what we would have done. Probably just put you guys, you know, at a babysitter or something. And I would have worked.

Jeremy: Yeah. Were there things that you did to treat yourself? Did you have that mindset at all that you needed to take care of yourself in that way?

S.C.: It was a treat for me to be with you guys. It was fun for me.

Jeremy: I'm curious, when we were growing up, if you and mom felt like it was important for you guys to talk about family finances with us and that kind of thing. I don't remember much conversation about family finances.

Craig Yaddaw: Yeah. And, you know, we didn't do that, and we should have, in hindsight, I think we really should have. We didn't have a lot of money when you kids were little. You know, it was one income, and I had a couple of different jobs. And so much of this is in hindsight, but yet looking to the future, which I'm now in, and we're in, I really wish I had a better understanding of money. And a better understanding of how life progresses, and I think it would have impacted some of the decisions that we made. Obviously, you don't know you're doing all this stuff for the first time and. And I never really got that guidance from my parents because I don't think they really understood money.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think I've mentioned this to you before, but the other specific thing I remember you saying is, "I don't care what kind of career you have, just make enough money that you can have other people fix your car." To me, that was you saying, "Make sure that you can afford yourself some things that are going to that are going to make your life a little easier." Did you learn to fix cars because you had to or because it was interesting to you?

C.Y.: No. And therein lies the difference. You know, there are some people that just love cars. It was something I had to do because financially we just couldn't afford a mechanic. The message there really was: life is so short and don't spend it doing things that you don't want to do because of finances. Figure out the financial piece of it so that you can live life the way that you want to live it. I don't know when you start talking to your children about long term. You know, lifestyle. Their lifestyle for the future, and how much you should have saved up. You know, credit scores and all that kind of stuff. We really never had those conversations.

Jeremy: Yeah. I wish too that there had been opportunity for me to learn a little bit more about that stuff when I was young. And again, like like you said, I don't blame you and Mom. You guys were working with what you had and what you knew. And it's hard to teach your kids what you don't know. And it's hard to know what you don't know and then to teach your kids those things.

C.Y.: And that's a hard thing to hear, and for us to talk about. The fact that there's an opportunity here that I could have done something better, whether it was my fault or not, it could have been done better. And as a parent you kind of feel like, oh, jeez, well, there goes a regret.

Jeremy: You and Dad were married for nearly 20 years. When you and he split, what was your experience like financially around that? Were there realizations that you came to about what it would mean to be on your own financially?

S.C.: My income was pretty diminished. But I was working full time, but I was also working at my master's degree. So that really kind of pinched me. I didn't starve to death, obviously. One time at the house I ran out of firewood. Was toward the end of winter, but there were several weeks left of good hard snow, and there were three feet of snow in the woods. So I went in the woods right there and there were a couple of dead trees. So didn't I get my chainsaw and cut them down, and had a sled out there. And Grandpa was shaking his head with his hand over his eyes—"She's gonna kill herself!" But I think I cut down two or three dead standing timber, cut them up, and that was what I kept warm with the rest of the winter. It was, you know, a little tough. What else did I realize about finances? Oh, that I could do it! That I could pay my bills, I could pay for school. I ended up moving into an apartment, into a room to rent so that I could afford it better.

Jeremy: Before that time, had you ever managed finances or had a part in managing family finances or your own finances?

S.C.: Not really. I went right from high school to college and then right from college, within two weeks we were married. So I had never been really on my own, never on my own financially until those five years when I lived alone and managed my own finances. And I did great. My credit rating went sky high and I got my master's degree, paid it off and you know, I did fine.

Jeremy: Yeah. Do you spend money on yourself now?

S.C.: A little bit, not a lot. I don't feel the need to. I still love to do things and get things for other people. But sometimes I'll stop and get something for myself, like on the way home from school. I have a couple of coffee cards and I'll stop and do that just to treat myself a little bit. I did treat myself to some camping equipment that was not inexpensive, you know, a nice tarp and hammock set up for camping. And...once in a while. But I'm still real careful. You know, I like to make sure that everything is taken care of before that kind of thing.

Jeremy: Did your parents leave you anything when they died?

C.Y.: Well, not monetarily. I mean there's a lot of stuff that I treasure that I have here that were my parents. But no, there was no inheritance at all.

Jeremy: I know that's something that you've talked about and thought about with us. What is the importance level of doing that to you, for us?

C.Y.: Well, you know, at one point in time, it's about security. I want to make sure that if something were to happen, there would be something. Insurance policies and things of that nature. And then it became about, you know, as you guys were launched thinking, OK, I don't necessarily...it's not about security anymore. It's about maybe legacy. And to be honest with you, and I'm not sure if this is a healthy way of thinking, but it's about me saying I want to be able to leave something to my children because I want to feel like I had value. Is it important? Personally? If I've done my job, if parents have done their job and their kids are productive and secure and preparing for their future and are happy in what they're doing, then I would hope that it's not necessary.

Jeremy: To me, as you were saying that I was thinking that no money or legacy in that way that you could leave to me would be as important as the legacy that you've created just by being who you are. The legacy that you have built is not financial.

C.Y.: I'm pretty certain that on my deathbed I am not going to think, "Man, I wish I had spent more time in the office so I could leave my kids more money." Versus: I am so glad that we have had the time and I know my children at the level that I know them—and I'm getting a little choked up here—and my grandchildren and potentially my great grandchildren, and to be able to share their lives...To help them cope with life, maybe better than I was able to cope with life just by learning experiences growing together.

Jeremy: Well, we'll see once you're on your deathbed.

C.Y.: Yeah you will! You'll see when you open up that will too.

Thanks to my parents Shari Crawford and Craig Yaddaw for being willing to talk so openly about money with me. Coming up next, I chat with Melanie Hopkins, a financial consultant, writer, educator, and mother about why people don't talk about money and why we need to.

At the beginning of this episode, we heard a voice memo from a listener we're calling Sophia about feeling out of the loop as an adult when it comes to knowledge about money management, a feeling many of us, including myself, can surely relate to. Voice memos are a way that we can include stories from all of you about the conversations you wish had been part of your childhood, but never were. Or maybe were attempted by parents and caregivers with not-so-great results. I love listening to all your voice memos and can relate to so many of the challenges, confusion, struggles and successes that listeners share with us. Our next episode is all about gender and I'd love to know how you talk to your kids about gender, or what kind of messaging you received, whether healthy or harmful, growing up about gender performance, gender diversity, gender science, all of it. Does it drive you nuts when you see boy or girl specific merchandise in stores? Were you criticized or shamed as a kid for being drawn toward things or acting in a way that was not, "appropriate" for your sex? Do your kids know the difference between sex and gender and how they're related? If you'd be willing to share with our listeners, you can email your voice memo to thetalk@thetalkthepodcast.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Melanie Hopkins started her career working in the finance departments of nonprofit organizations. She quickly discovered a passion for guiding entrepreneurs through the key moments of building their businesses, and this passion resulted in the founding of her own financial consulting firm, Finance Friend. As a consultant Melanie has worked with over 200 companies, ranging from tech startups to artisanal candy companies. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Lifehacker Katie Couric's Wake Up Call newsletter, and on CNBC.

Jeremy: So this episode is all about money and your business is all about money. Will you tell me a little bit about what you do?

Melanie Hopkins: Yeah, I work with entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses by empowering them in their own financial management. So I give them the tools to do it themselves.

Jeremy: As opposed to having, like, a financial team or relying on financial consultants for all those kinds of decisions.

M.H.: Right. And sometimes that's part of it. But what I find is there are so many adults, and adults who are so smart and doing such great work that are out there in the world that are completely uncomfortable talking about their finances. And there are also a lot of companies and services that enable that. And as a small business owner, I'm normally working with people who have maybe five to 10 employees. If you have outsourced all of your bookkeeping and all of your CFO services and you don't know what's going on, it you can create this anxiety that you've carried around forever. It is this perpetuation of money anxiety because of a lack of understanding.

Jeremy: Sure. You said that you see that often in adults. Do you feel like there is a disconnect or a lack of education coming from parents talking about finances, coming from educational systems, not focusing enough on people being aware of how to use their money and how to know about their money?

M.H.: Absolutely. Because of that, there's a deep shame that can be associated with it. I talk to people who went to Harvard Business School who can't get past that shame to admit that they don't know something very simple about money and transactional finances.

Jeremy: Yeah. Is it because they feel like everybody else out there seems to know what they're doing with it or there's like an appearance of that? Or I mean, just the fact that people don't talk about it maybe makes it feel like that, and it's not really true.

M.H.: Right! I mean, who taught them, right? Like Harvard Business School isn't teaching them. And I would think that that would be their job too, to make sure that they're conversant in money on all levels.

Jeremy: Yeah, I'm thinking about my own kind of relationship with money and how that started or didn't really start with my parents, because money wasn't really something that was talked about at home. And I think part of that was because there wasn't a lot of it. So my parents were not savvy because they didn't have the...I mean, they were frugal and they were you know, they were smart about the ways they used their money. But there was no investing happening. There were no 401Ks for my parents. So they didn't have those things that they could teach me about as a kid that could have set the stage for me to be more responsible and have a different relationship with money as I grew up. And from what you're saying, I thinks that is probably common. Even if there is money, it doesn't get talked about within the nuclear family.

M.H.: And I think what you're bringing up is not talking about investments and the big stuff and financial planning, but it goes all the way down to the little stuff and talking about how your family works, like, do you have a fixed income? If you wanted to go on vacation, do you have to change your behavior? Having those conversations with kids, I think sets the groundwork to have those bigger conversations when they get older and have it be open and be able to say we don't have the money for that right now. And for that not to be loaded and as emotional, it might still be emotional, but to be able to have that conversation.

Jeremy: And if you can have that conversation in a frank way, even if it feels emotional to you as a parent, having it out in the open can maybe help to break that cycle of that feeling about it with your kids.

M.H.: Absolutely. Yeah.

Jeremy: I'm thinking about my kids, too. They are three and five. And we talk about money, but there's still...Even at five, there's a good level of abstraction. But I wonder if you have thought of, especially with your daughter, I mean, how old is she?

M.H.: Two and a half.

Jeremy: Two and a half. OK, so she's pretty young, but she can understand things like giving and taking and transactional actions. And so I wonder what you're thinking about in terms of how you'll start to communicate those things with her in a more concrete sense.

M.H.: That's exactly where I've started. I have a very vivid memory when I was a kid of looking through a catalog probably around the holidays and circling all the things I wanted. And my dad getting like really agitated, being like, "You know we can't get all those things!" And it was the first time that I had any awareness that there was a connection between that want and the obtaining of those things, and the money. And because that memory is there, it has made me want to at least start there. Like when we need something, or when we want something there is a transaction. If it's a physical thing, you know, an item that we need to buy, we give money to the store—or often to the Internet—and then we get that thing. Right now, in near isolation it comes in the mail. But making that clear—that things aren't just for taking. You can't just walk through a store and and grab things. There has to be a transaction. There's a really great Toy Story short "Forky Asks A Question" on money. And Forky asks "what is money?" And it's really great for, I think any age, to get a really...to break down that abstract concept. Because Forky, being this new to the world character, is asking and getting a real answer that he only absorbs about 10 percent of, and it's great.

Jeremy: It occurred to me while you were talking about that, that we have two kids, so they constantly, you know, want each other's things or will be playing with something and the other wants it. And so maybe a good place when there's still an abstraction around money to start is offering to trade something, and then understanding that if your trade is not appealing enough, then he may turn it down. Does that feel to you like a good foundational tactic?

M.H.: Absolutely, because that breaks down the "well why money?" Why this piece of paper, or how are you getting the money to the store on the Internet, right? Because before it was the money that we use now, it was another form of currency. And that breaks that down a little bit.

Jeremy: Yeah. Harry's in first grade and recently he's been talking about buying things with his money. You know, there's a certain amount of money that he gets as gifts from relatives or for doing chores around the house or doing cleanup or whatever. We don't have an allowance system at this point. And so the conversation now is becoming like, OK, well, you can buy this thing or you can save your money. And he never wants to save his money because he's five. Young brains are not good at wrapping themselves around the idea of delayed gratification in general. But where do we start with that? And teaching them that saving some of their money is a good thing.

M.H.: A couple of ways to do that, the first being identifying something that he doesn't have enough money for right now and when he will have enough for that. If you know that there's a birthday coming and a grandparent is going to send another twenty dollars and that's going to get that goal, you can set that goal that way. I also think you really need to give them the opportunity to mess up, and blow all that money, and then the sibling gets to get the new thing or they see something that they want more. And they have that feeling of "If I had only saved or if I had only waited." And you don't want them to get too caught up in that, like always waiting, because there is for all of us that tension between living in the moment and making our lives as full and joyous as possible with experiences and sometimes with things, and saving for security. And you want to create that tension in a positive way within your kid. It's also giving them the permission to want money, I think is something that's tricky for me.

Jeremy: Yeah...

M.H.: Because that is such a natural thing—to want more.

Jeremy: And I feel like to me, there's like, oh, that's a slippery slope toward, like, greediness and like all this kind of stuff. But I think what you're saying is well taken because we don't want them to feel guilty for wanting things either.

M.H.: Right. Even if it's something that you're trying to make them aware that might not be available to another kid or another family.

Jeremy: We started talking a couple of years ago about things like wealth inequality and sort of bigger scale things that happen to do with money and responsibility. And where do we fit into the world of people who have a lot of money and the world of people who don't have enough money to eat. And the fact that there are structures in place that make it so that we have enough money to eat and that other people don't, and that even other people have more money than they can ever possibly spend. So I wonder what you think about impressing the idea of of using your money to help other people, while at the same time, you know, making sure that you are still stable. That you have the money that you need.

M.H.: That's really hard, and I think that that's something that, again, we struggle with as adults. What is really hard for a kid is having that five dollars in their pocket and being told you could help someone with this, but you're never going to see it. So I think going at that from "This is your five dollars, we can spend it on this and maybe we can save save some of it to give to a charity that you care about" if your kids are showing particular interests and concerns in the world. But I think outside of that, it is knowing that having more money does not make you more virtuous. It does not mean that you are smarter. It does not have any reflection on your character, and the money that we have in our privilege, it is our responsibility to use that to help other people in some way. And I think that can still be a little bit more of an abstract concept. You know, it's very different than budgeting or or understanding the nuclear family finances. And I think generationally, this is what we might not have gotten as kids because we were really raised to get the college degree so that you can get the jobs, you can do the thing and be on this ladder for the rest of your life. And detaching the money from worth is really important, and that's part of that conversation.

Thanks to Melanie Hopkins for sharing her knowledge and experience with us, you can find more about Melanie and her business at financefriend.ninja. If you appreciate the work we're doing here at "The Talk" and would like to help support us, there are a few good ways you can do that. The quickest and easiest way to provide financial support is by visiting Buymeacoffee.com/coffeetalks. You can throw us as little as $3 or you can join our coffee club and support us with a monthly or annual donation. If you'd like to have something tangible in your hands in exchange for your support, you can pop over to the Thetalkthepodcast.com and purchase one of our brand new tote bags. They're made out of heavy duty canvas, printed locally in Brooklyn, New York, and feature The Talk's original artwork, created by Dana Gertz. If financial support isn't possible, but you'd still like to help giving us a rating or a review on Apple podcasts or just telling a friend how much you're enjoying "The Talk" goes a long way.

Jeremy: In my non pandemic life, I work as a professional musician. Jenny and I moved to New York in 2008 so that I could pursue that goal. After a year of hard hustling and networking. I met another drummer named Clayton Craddock, who graciously gave me my first work in union theater, subbing on an off Broadway show. In the years since, Clayton and I have crossed paths a lot and often get on the subject of parenthood, something that, in my opinion, he does really well. I caught up with Clayton last month to talk specifically about money.

Jeremy: The reasons that I wanted to chat with you for this money episode are because I think you're in a couple of different, sort of unique situations to speak to this. One, you've been a freelancer and in a nontraditional, or what is often seen as a nontraditional career. And also your experience as a single father. You've been a single father for a good amount of time. There's sort of a taboo about like talking about how much money people make, talking about what people do with their money. And I find that really interesting. And so I think that sort of bleeds over to the family dynamic, too. But I'm curious, when you were growing up, who you learned about money from and how.

Clayton Craddock: My father was a person that prepared taxes on the side for many, many years. He, I guess, kind of recently retired. He's eighty five now. But he told me a few things about money but didn't tell me everything I wanted to know. He always taught me to always have a little bit of cash in your pocket. He also talked about being practical. We all used to go out to dinner and I remember watching him as he got the bill from the server, you know, always take his glasses and go, you know, put them down like this [puts glasses down like this] and then look at the bill to make sure that nothing was being double charged or he'd got somebody else's bill. I just always wondered why he took so much time with that. So recently—not recently, but over the past 10 years or so—I started to become more careful with bills that I get from servers. And I look and I'm doing the same exact thing. But it's important because you don't want somebody to overcharge you. You don't want somebody to rip you up. You also don't want to take advantage of anyone else. You don't want to stiff the server. My father taught me a lot. My mother taught me a few things here and there, but most of the stuff I learned, I learned after college.

Jeremy: And not in college. What did you go to school for initially?

C.C.: It was 1984, I'll never forget. I wanted to go to Berklee College of Music, and I was like "Dad, I just want to be a musician. I just want to play drums." And he's like, "Look at all these jobs. Look at all these accounting jobs! It's 1984, look at this!" In the want ads, it's like all these jobs listing down the newspaper. But I was like, I don't want to do that. "But you need to have something steady, something solid. You should go to school for business." So I was like, OK, OK. So I went to Howard University and I studied business and I hated it. The first day that I got to Howard, I immediately heard the drums from the marching band, because I always wanted to be in the marching band. I heard the drum section and I went over there and I joined the band that day. It was like the first day that I was alone. So my focus was on the marching band and I took classes in the School of Fine Arts. Every music class I got an A in and every business class I got Cs,and Ds, and Fs. So, I found my way and I finally graduated with a degree in business administration. I just remember seeing people coming in there trying to get jobs working for Mobil Oil or Exxon and wearing a suit and tie. I was like no dude, I just want to wear a shirt and go play in a blues band tonight. So my focus was always on music, but in college I really wasn't learning about money either.

Jeremy: I think a lot of people's story is that when they were in college and being prepared for a career, or prepared to exist out in the world, that there was a real lack of education about how to deal with your money. Nobody tells you how to do your taxes, nobody tells you how complicated that process is going to be. Nobody tells you how to budget your life, pretty much across the board in school and college. I think that's a real problem.

C.C.: Yeah, people don't give the right tools at the right time because one of the things that I had a problem with in college, which a lot of college students have is being offered credit cards. And especially store credit cards. You're a student, you know, here's a store credit card! I remember going to a place called Circuit City and getting a stereo. I had like an $800 stereo, but how am I going to pay a hundred dollar stereo back? I don't even know why they even allowed that back in the day. But, you know, predatory lending, they'll do whatever they need to do. But eventually I paid it off working part time jobs. But yeah, I think it's a bad idea for people not to know the pitfalls early as possible.

Jeremy: So you did work in finance for a while, right?

C.C.: Yeah, I graduated from from Howard and I came to New York in 1993 with the intention of being a rock star. But in the meantime I had to get a job anywhere, so I got a lot of temporary jobs. And eventually I landed a gig at... not a gig...I landed a job at a place called Pershing, and I worked in the International Reconciliation Department. It was just an eye opening experience, but I realized it was very cutthroat and it really didn't align with my way of thinking. I was working there during the day and at night I was out there hanging out, meeting musicians and doing a lot of networking. So I just had to do what I had to do. But I left that and said, you know, I'm just gonna quit this and I'm going to be a full time musician, and eventually it happened. I didn't move to New York to work at JP Morgan Chase or MetLife or Chase Bank. I didn't want to do all that.

Jeremy: Clayton built his reputation as a skilled and reliable musician with a stint on the national tour of the Broadway show Footloose, with a heavy metal band called Evil Twin, who notably opened up for the '90s rock band Creed. And eventually he landed a full time job on an off Broadway show called Tick...Tick...Boom.

C.C.: But when that ended in 2001 because of 9/11 I started freelancing, and the inconsistency in income put a little strain on my relationship with my girlfriend at the time, then we had our daughter. Then that's what I decided to try to do, something that would be more stable, which was going to work for MetLife financial services. But that wasn't stable because it was pretty much all commission. So I went to a bank after that. So I started working at a bank. But then in 2005, I got Altar Boyz, which was steady income. I realized you can have a job as a musician and have steady income doing Broadway shows. I was like that's what I need to do.

Jeremy: And he did. During his time at the show Altar Boyz, Clayton got hired to work on the Broadway show Memphis, and then Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, and then Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations, all TONY Award winning shows. Then in March of 2020, Broadway shut its doors due to COVID, with no promise of when or how those doors will reopen now.

C.C.: And the funny thing about it...you know I've reached out to financial services industries and they've actually looked at my resume and said yeah, come in for interviews. And it's so funny doing interviews again and putting on my shirt and tie and, you know, you got to do what you got to do. I'm just hoping things will be better in 2021.

Jeremy: Talk to me about your kids. How old are your kids now?

C.C.: My daughter is seventeen. She's going to be 18 in January. And my son will be 14 in April.

Jeremy: Ok. Now that they're, like, teenagers and growing up and getting close to getting out into the world, I'm curious, as they get to this point in their life where they're going to start to detach, do you talk about their prospective careers with them? Do you talk about how they should use, spend, look at money? What their relationship with money should be like as they become adults?

C.C.: I want them to do whatever they want to do that makes them happy and excited. I know that my daughter, she's really into cooking. She's always been into cooking and she just got into four out of the five colleges that she applied to. Of course, being a musician is very difficult, and being a chef or being a cook, whatever you want to do in the food service industry is competitive and also difficult. But if she really wants to do this and puts her mind to it, I believe she can succeed at it.

Jeremy: And when they get to that point, you know, when your daughter is building her career and she starts to make money, do you feel like you've set the foundation for her when she has that money to know what to do with it? To know how to save what she needs to save, spend what she needs to spend? Do you feel like the conversations that you've had with them have pointed them in those right directions?

C.C.: One of the one of the downsides of being a single father is that you can't control everything. I was the first one to get my daughter a debit card where I put money on the card that she could spend, you know, to have her have an allowance. But I haven't shown her how to budget. Showing her my budget is one thing. But I guess one thing I could do is to show her budgeting software and how you can put things in. But I wanted her to get her own job so she can get her own paycheck so she can see if you get $1000, you're only going to get $700 of net income, because there's taxes. I just haven't had the time...I shouldn't say I haven't had the time. I just haven't done that in the way that I would like to do, because she hasn't done what I did when I was younger by going out and get a job and getting that paycheck. So, no, I haven't really done what I'd like to do as far as showing her budgeting and how things will be if she was out on her own. So that's still a work in progress.

Jeremy: And your son is a few years younger than your daughter. What is his relationship with money like right now?

C.C.: My son is all set up with delayed gratification. He can get money from his aunts, from his uncle, from his grandmother. And then the next thing you know, he's like, "Dad, I have $480!" I'm like "Man, you've got more money than me! What the..?" So he's a saver, he can save! He's like "Dad, I'm buying my loft bed this weekend. I got the money, I'm going to buy it." So he can wait to get what he wants. It's fascinating to watch that. My daughter, she's into thrifting. So she's like, "Look, I got this whole outfit for eight dollars." I'm like, man, she's like...she gets ten dollars, she's like, man, I can buy two shirts, some pants and some shoes. So she tries to stretch her money. So I think those are pretty admirable, admirable things about both of them.

Jeremy: Absolutely. Do they get those qualities from you or have they just sort of figured those things out.

C.C.: I think they figured those things out. I have a different approach. Which is not the best at times, but I'm glad to see them being miserly. You know, saving money is definitely a good thing. And of course, I've learned to be able to stretch things now with what's going on. But, you know, when you have a show and you know, you expect things to last for a long time, you're like, "Oh, man, I can buy this, and get another paycheck next week." You know, starting to rethink all of that now.

Jeremy: I know you think about retirement, right?

C.C.: No.

Jeremy: No?

C.C.: No, not at all, I don't even know what that is! I'm not playing drums forever, and I see that my father is retired and all he does is watch TV and read the paper. I don't want to just sit around doing nothing.

Jeremy: Yeah, I guess that's more what I mean by retirement. I mean, I think I know that about you that, like, no matter what your situation is, you're not just going to sit around. That's not you. You're not going to just, you know, vegetate. If you can get to a place where you're financially able to choose to do whatever you want...do you feel like you'll get to a place where you can achieve that, given the career that you've had and the volatility of it and all that kind of stuff?

C.C.: Yes, yeah, I'm determined, just like I was determined to become a successful musician. I'm determined to get to a place where I can move across the country or into Hawaii. Some place where amongst nature and nice people and the sun and the ocean, but yeah, I definitely intend to get to a point where I don't have to worry.

Jeremy: Clayton intends to use part of that time writing something he's already doing from his home in chilly, fickle New York.

C.C.: The place where you can see any of my thoughts and writing...you can look up ClaytonCraddock.com and you will see a link there for a newsletter called "Think Things Through". You can sign up for free membership or you could subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year and you'll get some interesting, thought-provoking content.

Thanks to Clayton Craddock for sharing with us for this episode. Thanks also to Melanie Hopkins, and to my parents, Shari Crawford and Craig Yaddaw for their reprise appearance. And to Sophia, whose voice memo kicked off the episode. You can find more information about our guests, as well as a transcript of the episode at TheTalkThePodcast.com. You can find "The Talk" on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest at @thetalkthepodcast, and if you'd like to help support us, you can do so easily by visiting Buymeacoffee.com/coffeetalks. Dana Gertz designed all of our original artwork, and our final thanks, with interest, goes to my wife, Jenny, and our kids, Harrison and Ezra for stress testing our new tote bags, which you can find on TheTalkThePodcast.com. Goodbye.