204. The Money Tree: What to Water, Prune, and Replant in Your Finances

What if improving your finances isn’t about completely changing who you are—but learning what to water, what to prune, and when to plant something new?

In this episode of the Money & Legacy Podcast, Laura uses the story of three trees to explain how your natural money habits, unhealthy financial patterns, and developing skills all shape your financial future.

You’ll learn:

• How to recognize and strengthen your natural money tendencies
• Which expenses, debts, and habits may need to be pruned
• Why intense debt payoff can sometimes cause the joyful parts of life to atrophy
• How to recover when a new budget or money habit doesn’t work the first time
• Why your children need to see you learning, adjusting, and trying again

Your financial legacy isn’t simply the destination you eventually reach. It is the way you live, grow, and lead your family along the journey.

Ready for support building a values-based money system that fits your life? Email Laura at [e-mail].

Learn more about working with Laura Sexton

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Episode Transcript

Audio Only - All Participa (00:00):
I've got two trees on my property.
One is thriving and the othernot so much.
So what do we do next?

Laura (00:10):
You are listening to the Money and Legacy Podcast with
Laura Sexton.
I'm helping families pay offdebt, grow wealth, and build a
legacy without sacrificing whatmatters most.
This is where money feels easy.

Audio Only - All Participa (00:23):
Hey, legacy builders.
I know I'm starting out talkingabout trees, and there are so
many directions I can be goingwith this.
But today, I wanna talk aboutthriving and not thriving when
it comes to these trees.
I've got two trees on the frontof my property.
They were planted at the sametime.
They came from the same nursery.
Everything about the trees isexactly the same except how they

(00:47):
are currently, growing.
It's like a tree, but it's kindof like a bush.
It's a decorative thing in myfront yard.
I probably should have looked upthe name of these two little
trees, right?
So we've got two of them.
They're both facing the samedirection.
They get the same amount of sun,the same amount of water as far

(01:07):
as I'm aware.
They're growing differently, andI thought that was interesting,
and I think that there'ssomething to be said here about
our children.
I've got five children that areall growing up in the same
house.
They have the same two parents.
They have the same DNA, more orless, and they're vastly
different people,.
The same is true with yourmoney.

(01:29):
You could have all of the samebeginnings and go down
completely different paths thanyour siblings.
You could have the exact samejob as somebody else and do
different things with your moneyand have a different outcome.
You are your own person, and forthis scenario, you are your own
tree let's talk about thesetrees, one that is thriving and

(01:54):
one that is not, and what it isthat we are going to do as a
family to fix these trees.
Now, we could have ignored thetree situation.
When we go outside and look,there's one of them, the one on
the right side of the house,it's lush, it's thriving, it
looks amazing.
The one on the left side of thehouse was thriving in the front
and dead in the back.

(02:15):
And I mean actually dead.
It was brown and a hazard.
So we could have ignored it andhoped that it was going to work
itself out, sometimes naturejust comes in and fixes plants
to be how they want it to be.
Or they're supposed to look likethey're dormant and then they
come back to thriving.
Nature does that sometimes.

(02:38):
But instead of just ignoring theproblem and hoping that it would
work itself out, which you dowith money sometimes, and you
know that you do, instead ofthat, we made a couple of very
intentional choices.
So the first thing we did is wedecided to continue to water the
good tree.
Now, as far as your money isconcerned, in this analogy, the
good tree is your natural bentwith money.

(03:01):
One of my children is a naturalspender.
You give her a dollar, shespends two.
I've got another child who's afull-on giver.
He just wants to give his moneyaway.
And I have another child that'sa saver.
She doesn't see anything that'sworth her time and her money
right now, so she's not gonnaspend her money.
She'll wait till next time Youhave a natural bent when it
comes to your money, and so doyour children, and you wanna

(03:22):
make sure that you nurture thatand you give that attention and
you help it grow because that isa very important part of your
money psychology.
I don't want you to ever get toa place where you feel like you
have to change.
Now, if you're a naturalspender, we have to put
guardrails up.
Obviously, we have to make surethat you are getting fed in the

(03:43):
right way, where you get tospend your money on things that
you have permission to spendyour money on.
But we also have to teach you toalso do the other things, the
saving and the giving, right?
So we have to give it nutrition.
So if you're a natural spender,we intentionally give you
spending power.
If you're a natural saver, weintentionally give you things to

(04:05):
save for.
And we just have to payattention to it and continue to
water that.
Let it grow how it grows, andknow that it's okay for you to
be that way We don't, however,want to overwater.
If you overwater something thatis good, it will die.
It will drown.
A tree that is overwateredbecomes firewood.

(04:27):
We don't want to overwater.
You don't want to give it toomuch nutrition.
If you're a spender, we don'twant to spend too much.
The tree on the left side of thehouse, well, it looked good from
the front, but from behind itwas dying.
This is the opposite of yournatural money behavior.
This is the tree that needs somehelp.
And this is the part of yourmoney behavior that's going to

(04:49):
need some extra time andattention to be cultivated to
grow in a healthy manner.
So what did we do to our dyingtree?
We pruned it.
We had to cut away the piecesthat were not alive, and what we
found was there was a secondTrunk to the tree.
Now, I thought it was all onetrunk, and I was like,"We're

(05:10):
gonna have to take it all theway out and throw it away." But
it turns out there was one trunkthat was healthy, and then there
was one right behind it.
They have the same root system,but they came up in two
different trunks.
Do not ask me how.
I do not know how these thingswork.
So the one that came up behindit, the second trunk, we cut
off.
Now, it was bigger than thefront one, and it had more

(05:31):
branches than the front one.
However, it was dead.
So we cut it off.
And you know what happened whenwe pruned the part of the tree
that was dead?
The front part of the treestarted to encompass the back,
and the branches started to growin and cover the dead area.

(05:53):
Now, our tree is smaller now,but it's completely healthy, and
it's thriving.
But we had to intentionally cutoff parts of it that were
killing it.
And if we had left that biggertrunk there, the dead one, it
would have eventually killed thefront as well.
When we don't prune away thethings that are zapping our
energy or stealing our money, sothis would be credit cards that

(06:17):
you're paying interest on.
This would be car payments.
This would be thosesubscriptions that you were
signed up for, that you signedup for a long time ago and you
don't even remember, or you payfor Paramount Plus, but you
haven't watched anything onParamount Plus in three years,
but you're still paying for itThese are the things that we
have to prune away.
And when it comes to your moneybehavior, if you are not

(06:39):
careful, you can atrophy.
You can start to be so focusedon one area of your life that
you forget the rest.
So I see this a lot with myclients that are paying off
debt, and we are so intentionalwith paying off debt, and we are
absolutely ridiculouslyoverwhelmed with this is our
whole goal.

(07:00):
And trust me, part of that iswonderful.
When you are in the season ofpaying off debt, I want you to
be aggressive and vehement aboutit because I want it to be a
very short period of your life.
I don't want you to beaggressive and vehement about
paying off debt for a longperiod of time.
That would be obnoxious and, andhard.
But I want you to be vehementabout it in the short term

(07:22):
because the faster we can getout, the faster we can get on
with our life.
However, I have a lot of clientsthat have been paying off debt
for so long that when we getdone paying off debt, they
forget how to live.
The living side, the joyful sideof their life has atrophied.
And so we have to learn how togo from intense paying off debt

(07:43):
to living a little.
So sometimes as we get closer tothe end, we can talk about,
okay, what is life gonna looklike?
And we have to really workthrough that because that part
of our life has started toshrivel.
Again, this goes back to mywhole philosophy of values-based
money systems.
I want you to focus on who youwant to be eventually, the

(08:05):
legacy that we're gonna leave.
Who are we, who do we wantpeople to say we are when we
walk out of the room?
And that's the work that I dowith my clients.
It's not all debt payoff all thetime.
It is, what are your values, whodo you wanna become, and how do
we get you there?
And sometimes that's debt payofffull throttle as fast as we can,
and sometimes we build incelebration, and sometimes we

(08:29):
have to go back to what is yournatural bent and how can we
celebrate that while we areaccomplishing the goals that you
have to get you ultimately towhere you wanna go So we've got
this thriving tree, and we havethis dying tree that hopefully
is not dying anymore.
I think we've turned a cornernow that we've done the pruning,
and it's starting to look like afull tree again as it's

(08:52):
encompassing the back part aswell.
So here's the other thing wedid, because we did three
things.
The third thing we did was webought a new tree I know what
you're thinking.
You're like,"A new tree?
If I have one of the trees issupposed to be what I'm good at,
and one of the trees is supposedto be what I'm bad at, Laura,
what in the world could thisthird tree that you bought be?"

(09:12):
Well, my friends, it's a newskill.
It's a new skill, and a newtraining, and a new thing that
we're going to add into yoursystem.
Now, I will tell you, this newtree that we got, it died.
We bought a third tree, and itdied.
And you know what?
That's okay.
We're gonna go out, and we'regonna buy another new tree.
And sometimes when we get newskills, especially when it comes
to our money, we fail.
We s- fail once, we fail twice,we fail three times.

(09:35):
We fail with new things.
I don't know if you've ever seena, a baby stand up and start
walking.
They don't just all of a suddengo,"I'd like to start walking
today," and stand up and walkand never fall down again.
I'm a grown adult, and I stillfall down occasionally.
Babies, they get up, they take astep, they fall.
They get up, they take a step,they fall.
This happens.
And now, what do we do forbabies when they get up to walk?

(09:59):
We give them walkers.
We hold their hand.
We give them tools.
We walk alongside them.
We make sure that they aresteady on their feet.
We give them pillows.
You need new skills, and if youare having trouble acquiring a
new skill, you bring somebody into walk alongside you, to give
you the guidance, the, thehand-holding, to make sure you
don't fall off a cliff.

(10:19):
These are fabulous things tohave.
My husband and I are going tobuy another tree.
We're going to try again, andwe're going to change the way we
did it because the first time webought the tree, we thought we
were doing the right thing.
We did not do the right thing.
We're going to adjust becausethat's what you do.
You make adjustments.
You try again.
When it comes to your money, itis so easy to fall off the

(10:42):
wagon, but it's so much betterif you get back on the wagon,
and now you've learned a new wayto stay on.
You've learned a new way to notfall off.
You learned a new way to get youto where you ultimately wanna
be.
I've been listening recently toa book on the Oregon Trail.
If you grew up in the'90s like Idid, that was one of your

(11:03):
favorite parts of socialstudies, playing the Oregon
Trail.
But I've been reading aboutdifferent stories and things
about the people that wereactually traveling, and you know
what?
A lot of them didn't make it,but they were all willing to
try.
And I promise you, no matterwhat you want to do in life, if
you are willing to try, you aregoing to get so much more out of

(11:23):
the journey than you would everget out of the destination.
And your legacy is not thedestination.
Your legacy is how you act onthe way to where you want to go.
So my friends, you can continueto water your good tree, you
prune your dying tree, and youbuy a new tree.
All of those are differentpotential strategies And what

(11:46):
they show is the potentialwithin you.
I know beyond a shadow of adoubt that you are able to do
the things that you ultimatelywant to do in life.
You have the power to create thefinancial legacy that you want
to leave, and the relationallegacy, and the mindset, and the
tools, and the habits.
All of those are within yourcontrol.

(12:07):
Your kids are watching you, sodecide how you want them to see
you, and then be that person Allright, my legacy builders.
I'm gonna go outside and watermy plants, and I hope that you
know that whatever it is youchoose, I am here to walk
alongside you.
I would absolutely love to beyour guide, to walks beside you,

(12:29):
to hold your hand as you learn anew skill.
If you need any help, pleasefeel free to reach out to me.
You can send me an email,[e-mail],
all right, my legacy builders,until next week, go out and make
a difference