Uncommon Freedom

Dreaming Together About Your Financial Future

• Kevin Tinter

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Want to dream BIG about your financial future with your spouse and start building momentum together? According to Kevin & Bekah, who have navigated everything from living in tiny apartments to 7-figure giving goals in their 20+ year marriage, it all starts with dreaming together.

In this episode, they share 3 powerful tactics for getting on the same page:

  1. How to brainstorm separately and then unite around a shared vision
  2. Making your money dreams visual and concrete to stay motivated
  3. Why casting a shared vision is an ongoing process to revisit quarterly

You'll also learn why 94% of great marriages discuss money dreams together (vs only 45% of okay or struggling ones), how to navigate very different money personalities, and why "prosperity with a purpose" is the real win.

If you want to stop fighting about money and start cheering each other on, this episode will show you how. Watch now to start turning your biggest money dreams into reality together!

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Speaker 1:

Welcome back, Freedom Fighters. Today we're talking about one of the most powerful predictors of marital bliss. No, we're not talking about sex today. That is dreaming together about your financial future.

Speaker 2:

Did you know that 94% of couples who describe their marriage as quote-unquote great discuss their money dreams together? Compare that to only 45% of couples in okay or in crisis relationships.

Speaker 1:

Coming up. We'll share three practical ways you and your spouse can start dreaming together, no matter your current bank balance. Back before we get started, yesterday was Mother's Day. Happy belated Mother's Day to you and to all the other moms out there. Ladies, I hope you had a spectacular day. You deserve to be absolutely pampered. Men, if you don't know how to take care of.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, public service announcement. If you don't know how to properly take care of your woman for mother's day, um, actually, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go talk to your wife. Say, on a scale of one to ten ten being absolutely spectacular give me a grade for how mother's day went this year. And then, if it's not a 10, say what could I do to absolutely knock your socks off for Mother's Day?

Speaker 2:

And then get that tip from your wife. I'm surprised you didn't say knock your panties off, but that's okay If you knock her socks off, then the panties will follow.

Speaker 1:

That is just the reality, right?

Speaker 2:

And then, ladies, I want to encourage you to ask for what you want.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Not selfish, to be clear. Clear is kind and communication is the results that we get. So how important is it to just say hey, this is what would be relaxing to me, and I don't think that was necessarily how I was raised, so it was harder for me to ask for those specific things that felt selfish, to just tell you. Plus, there was a romantic side of me that just wanted you to come up with like a magical thing in your head and over time you taught me by you. Plus, there was a romantic side of me that just wanted you to come up with a magical thing in your head and over time you taught me by. You would say, hey, you know what I'd really love for Father's Day or my birthday? I'd love to do this. And I'd be like, oh okay, well, that's easy.

Speaker 1:

It never crossed your mind, did it? To ask you or to what I wanted is not what you would have thought necessarily to do. No, not necessarily.

Speaker 2:

And now we make a practice of, even with our kids like, hey, no, we don't, we don't let them form the entire day, but we'll usually say you know what do you want?

Speaker 1:

You can give us some input when you're the child. What do you want for your birthday breakfast?

Speaker 2:

You know how would you like to spend part of your day, you know, and just asking those questions? And so I feel like it's such an important part of our marriage for uh, reducing disappointment and expectations that are not healthy by having those conversations. And so, yes, men, please ask and get a rating and be open. And then women, please speak the truth.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

In love for clarity.

Speaker 1:

And the reality is to absolutely knock your wife's socks off on Mother's Day. You're probably going to need a little bit of money. So it actually ties in really well to what we're going to talk about today. So here's. The bottom line is that separate goal setting leads to conflicting priorities and unnecessary money fights. So the first tactic is for each of us to separately brainstorm your top five short-term and long-term financial goals, then compare lists. Let's go back to the early days of our marriage. Were you already thinking this?

Speaker 2:

Yes, and way back in the time machine to when we were early married, would you say early married? Or when we started having kids, I guess?

Speaker 1:

Well, I mean even going back to, I think, the first couple of years of our marriage, my goal was that we would fully fund a Roth IRA and I think when we got married, that never crossed my mind. Exactly To max out, I think it was about $3,000, maybe $3,500 back in 1998, 2000 timeframe.

Speaker 2:

But that was-. How does he remember this people? That was 25 years ago.

Speaker 1:

I'm smarter than I look, I tell you all the time.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

But the bottom line is that was on my goal sheet and it definitely was not on yours.

Speaker 2:

No, I was dreaming of. You know, furniture and, uh, I don't know, pedicures, things that, especially for the home I feel like for a woman. Uh, initially it's really setting up what feels like a home to us and not just a place to live, and we've moved a lot and we've had very limited budgets and, in fact, at one point, when we were actually starting to create good income, you gave me both the feedback and the gift that it was now time to ask for professional help with decorating, which was great, because I had always wanted to use someone who was more knowledgeable than me and could make things look really nice. My mom has that gift and I don't, so much I'm learning through the years, but because our budget was tight, not only did I not spend a lot of money, I bought really cheap things, I also reused things over and over again and I moved them around to different places and just made them work so that I wouldn't have to buy new things, and it often didn't look that great.

Speaker 1:

So no, actually, I think our, our houses, our apartments never looked trashy and I was grateful for your just acceptance of where we were financially and the fact that you did your best to you know even that first apartment on Witham Hill Drive in Corvallis, oregon. That was a maybe a 600 square foot apartment. It was tiny, you know one bedroom, one bath, one bath.

Speaker 1:

Tiny little kitchen, little living area, nothing special to write home about we loved it though but yeah, once again, it really the bottom line is home is where the heart is, and you can make a home about anywhere, and is it? Do we enjoy our nice home today better? Yes, but the bottom line is we didn't need it to be happy back in the early days.

Speaker 2:

No, and I would trade it in a heartbeat for the relationships that are built in this home and the people that live here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So that's a great reminder to separately brainstorm, because when you come together, you're going to learn a lot about each other, Just like if I said, hey, Beck, map out your perfect Mother's Day and then I mapped out my perfect Father's Day. When we share those with each other, they're going to look drastically different, drastically different. So this is really important. Action step is to narrow it down to three shared goals to pursue in the next 12 months.

Speaker 2:

Yep, such an important thing to go from separate to together, to have that unified piece. And you know, even if, once you get to those shared goals, you have some additional ones, then you could take turns.

Speaker 2:

That's definitely what we did on some of our lists was, you know, furniture and things were a big deal to me and investing in the future was a big deal to you, and we needed and wanted to do both and so we worked our way off of the list, you know, one step at it's kind of that steven covey concept of win. Win versus um a compromise in the office the win, win, win win, win, win.

Speaker 2:

Remind me, how that goes I don't know, michael scott came up with it. I'd have to re-watch the episode, but he was doing some type of problem solving conflict resolution with dwight which he's spectacular at. Yeah and it was like a way to create a win-win-win.

Speaker 2:

We'll be watching that episode next Good times, yes, but anyway, yes, you want to make a win-win and that's why having the shared goals is such a big deal, because if you're two people running two different directions and you're not sharing any of that dreaming any of that pursuit together, it really doesn't create a pathway for you to even work as a team. Like, I didn't necessarily want to go all in on your goals and you probably didn't want to go all in on my goals, but when they became our goals now, it's actually really fun.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely yeah, and by kind of maybe calling a compromise but learning okay, I'm going to support, I'm going to jump on board your goals and you're going to jump behind my goals. We're going to maybe have to adjust them so that we can both accomplish what we want. It just made it more fun for us in the process.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that actually takes me back to how we resolved and we're not. This isn't a conflict resolution episode, but you know, going back to the way we handled Christmas trees early in our marriage, right? So my family, we always almost always had a real Christmas tree growing up. I loved it. It was a great memory. No, we didn't cut them down ourselves, but we usually went to the tree lot and picked them out and strung popcorn and all the memories and your family no Christmas tree.

Speaker 1:

My family didn't even have a Christmas tree yeah, never had a real Christmas tree, and didn't even have a Christmas tree in my parents home until I was maybe graduated from high school. So, yeah, basically we relied on the fake Christmas tree that my grandparents had that we would go over and help them set up every year as a tradition, but we didn't have a Christmas tree in our home so talk about two very, you know, separate ends of the spectrum.

Speaker 2:

And when we first got married, uh, we did a lot of real trees.

Speaker 1:

I think initially because, well, no, because our first year you were dead set on the the real tree and we lived in oregon and our honda accord nearly got stuck. Uh we started with the real tree, we did, we did and we had some bad experiences that experience of nearly getting stuck scratching up the roof of our car with the needles and branches of the real tree caused me to instantly understand why my parents never had a real tree.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that is such a sad way to look at it. But yes, they were a bit of a headache, and then we actually went through a number of years where we found a compromise.

Speaker 1:

I don't even know when we started that, but well, that happened, uh, I mean, when we moved to okinawa, japan, it just the, the real tree, became less practical. And then we moved back to oregon, which is I don't know if it is the, you know, christmas tree capital of the world, but certainly you go cut your own down there and it was actually a really fun family and we had a couple of friends, the Ely's and the Glasscocks. It was kind of an annual tradition, that's great.

Speaker 1:

I still didn't like all the work that went into it.

Speaker 2:

It was still a headache, but it was a fun tradition.

Speaker 1:

And then there was the year that the tree into or the home we built had probably space for like a nine-footer.

Speaker 2:

So we had three little boys, under the age of four probably, and in the middle of the night.

Speaker 1:

I was my police officer. We hear a loud crash. We had a very big tree, and for that house I grabbed the gun, clear the home, at least the upstairs, and then come down the stairs and see that the tree has crashed. Our tree stand did not hold it up right, perfectly balanced our fishing wire. I am not a good knot tire we even tie it up that year uh, I thought we tied it up after that year well, or as a result of that bottom line is we're on a tangent.

Speaker 2:

We broke a lot of. Yeah, we created a mess, we broke a lot of that year. Bottom line is we're on a tangent here. We broke a lot of yeah, we created a mess, we broke a lot of ornaments. It was very sad. So, anyway, we compromised into the Kevin Christmas and the Becca Christmas for a while, which meant every other year we each got our own way. So it was actually a really great way to do it for a while. And now you get to live with a fake tree every year and you're so happy.

Speaker 1:

And a fake tree every year and you're so happy and I buy a lot of air freshener there. We go like because we live in arizona and christmas trees just don't make sense the real one and we have like a 12 foot fake tree. That's pretty darn gorgeous.

Speaker 2:

Yes okay, so uh. Number two we definitely went on a tangent there for a little bit was keeping goals hidden or conceptual makes it hard to stay motivated when obstacles arise. That's a loaded one.

Speaker 1:

All right, just create a visual dream board or spreadsheet to track your goals and celebrate milestones.

Speaker 2:

So important, even in the health practice that we have. You know talking to clients about visualizing where they're going. You know cutting out pictures of things that represent where they're going, writing themselves notes, putting it on the mirror. You know just having a way to look into their future and speak to their future self so important. And when it comes to your finances, it's the same thing. If you have these concepts in the back of your head that are really far into the future, or you can't picture it with each other, it's going to be very hard to stay focused on it.

Speaker 1:

It just. Some practical examples are if, instead of just saying you know we want to take a tropical vacation, literally do the research to figure out what is the location or possible locations you want to go to, what's the cost going to be to get there? You know, are you going to fly coach, you can fly first class what type of resort? Or vrbo, or you know whatever you're going?

Speaker 2:

to stay, activities are going to do and exactly so that you can put some solid numbers behind this.

Speaker 1:

I'm trying to think of some other good examples. Just to make it very practical and concrete. The idea is you need to be able. It needs to be very specific.

Speaker 2:

Maybe it's a remodel for the family or something. So you have it drawn up and you have the plans and you know where you're going with it or the car that you want to buy.

Speaker 1:

Early on, when you started our business, one of the goals that you had, immediately right out of the gate you had this abundance mindset of this wasn't just going to be extra money, so I didn't have to do overtime, it was we're going to create some impact with this. And so one of your early goals was we wanted to be able to fund a ultrasound machine for a pregnancy resource center. That was great because we've always been very, you know, pro take care of the woman, take care of the baby in our marriage just values that we really believed in. But we had no idea what a ultrasound machine costs. So we had that on our list and then one year we got a large tax return. We thought, oh, awesome, we're going to go fund this dream and have a ton of money left over. And the reality is was it was a pretty large. It was by far the largest tax return we'd ever gotten and we were able to fund the dream. And that was about it.

Speaker 2:

The ultrasound machine.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, cost about five times what we thought it would cost. So the cool thing is we were still able to do it. We had a tiny little bit left over, but as far as really realizing goals, it's important to be more dialed in with it.

Speaker 2:

Exactly so. Your action step is to display your dream board somewhere. You'll both see it daily and imagine how much fun you could have with this. You know, for some of you it's going to be like you're going to put pictures on there. For some of you it might be data that you gather. You know, it depends on your personality style, but imagine having a shared dream. That is somewhere obvious, and if you have kids and a family, it's especially fun to do this kind of thing together.

Speaker 1:

And I think, if you imagine blueprints right because we're living in a house that we constructed over about a two-year period of actual construction there was we bought the property two years before we broke ground we spent every Friday for probably 18 months in our builder's office doing the design and planning things out. But the fun thing was we had blueprints that we could totally visualize what the house was going to look like, and so, as we were going through that building process, it was very fun and rewarding to know this is what we're working towards. So I think, when you're talking about goals, having that type of you know, break it down to something where it literally you know it's a blueprint for the ultrasound that you're going to buy for someone, it's a blueprint for the vacation that you're going to take, it's a blueprint for the retirement that you're going to have someday, whatever it is. Get it down to that you know tiny little, nitty, gritty detail so that you can really visualize it.

Speaker 2:

That's really good, babe. Okay, number three is casting a shared vision is not a one and done activity, oh my goodness. So true, but an ongoing process. And that is absolutely true, right? So many of us will say something and we'll want to have it, but we don't revisit it, we don't talk about it, we don't think about it all the time, and if it's not something that's important enough to you to be thinking about and really hungry for it, the likelihood of achieving it is very low.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So our third tactic is to schedule a quarterly money dream date to review progress and set new goals. So many of you, if you've listened to us for more than once or twice, you've probably heard us talk about our quarterly retreats. This syncs up very well to incorporate into your quarterly retreat. It's fun to kind of do a review of where you're at and also to start thinking about okay, what's next for us? What are we dreaming about? For us? That includes increasing our giving or maybe redirecting some of the giving, making sure that the giving that we're doing is being used as wisely and having the impact that we want it to have. It's talking about, you know, what's next for our kids? What's next for our marriage? What's our next projects that we're working on? How are we going to grow? How are we going to get better physically in our health, and things like that.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and I think it's important to have that next step ahead of you so that again it's like structural tension we talk about this again in our coaching business that you want to be able to reach to that next level and have something that pulls you up to that next level. But once you get there, you want to be able to stretch again. Otherwise you get complacent and you get settled, and so you know, one of the reasons that we do things quarterly is it breaks up our year, it allows us to reach for that next goal and then, when we get close to achieving it, we can stretch again. So we're not just settling and accepting something where you know we're called to bigger and better things.

Speaker 2:

And for us we have a lot of uh, we have a lot of our wishlist now. So there's very few things on there that are really for us that we dream about. Now we're at the stage. Imagine this you guys imagine having your um monthly dream date not even be about buying things for your own family anymore, like if you were at a financial place where you could just be well taken care of, and now you do the monthly dream date about your giving and what you're going to do with that, and that's very much where we are now, where we're impatient for the next ministries and opportunities that we want to support. So we're creating income for that and we're building into that with a lot of what we're dreaming about now.

Speaker 1:

So it's really fun. Honestly, we're trying to inspire all of you to join us on that mission of Uncommon Freedom. We talk about reaching your potential and maximizing your impact and for us, we literally we have giving goals that are going to require seven figures of giving money, not just earning money, like we literally we have ministries that were bought into their vision that we want to be able to fund at, you know, seven figure levels. So that's what this all is all about. You know we're we're blessed to drive, you know, nice cars, take some great vacations and, you know, enjoy mother's day and a in a beautiful way. But that's not just what this is about. It really is about the impact that we can have in the world prosperity with a purpose, guys, that's what we're talking about here.

Speaker 2:

It's what we stand for. We highly encourage you to build an uncommon freedom life so that you can start to give it an uncommon level and basically have ridiculous generosity. It it's so much fun and we want to invite you to that journey. So your action step is to book your first money date night for the next month.

Speaker 1:

Okay, no later than June. Yeah, and real quick. Just talking about this, I shared this when I was on Dave Ramsey's Entree Leadership. It was a quote. I wish I remember who I heard said this. But if you're kind of struggling with this whole money thing and still thinking that money is evil, remember the love of money is the root of all evil. Money itself is not, but if you don't think that money can buy happiness, then you haven't given enough away. I love that because, as we have increased our giving, the joy that we get to experience in just having a massive impact in the world and ministries and just doing things in people's lives, the reports that we get on, hey, this is, you know, the story was shared with permission, but this is, you know, this is an ultrasound of a baby whose mom was abortion minded and she, you know, she did our assessment. She came into our stork bus or whatever it might be, and she has since decided to keep this baby and oh, here's a one-year-old photo of it, things like that. It's pretty awesome.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely so. Dreaming together is one of the best investments you can make in your marriage, and when you have shared goals, you can cheer each other on and hold each other accountable.

Speaker 1:

So pick a night this week to do some blue sky dreaming with your spouse. Dare to imagine what you could accomplish together. Then take one small step in that direction.

Speaker 2:

Until next time, keep dreaming big together.