WCI FEW Live Virtual Event 2/6/25 - Julia Myers, PharmD, MBA

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Welcome. It's nice to see everybody still rolling in here. Thanks for sharing where you are tracking your money. I know since Mint disappeared a lot of us had to find new homes. So thanks for for sharing that. Welcome back. It's so great to be here. It's been a while since we've been together. So lovely to see you all. I hope you're having a Great start to 2025. We are excited to be here and we are super excited over here at White Coat getting ready to head to San Antonio in a few weeks for WC Icon and that is going to be our next few event which obviously will be an in person get together and we hope we get to see a whole bunch of you there. And while we're in the chat, tell us if you're going to be there real quick. I'd love to see if any of you here are going to be there. We'll add to helping me get even more excited but we're going to be having an in person Happy Hour on February 28th and that event is going to be fun. That's going to be hosted by one of our friends, a fellow few member, a few presenter. So SC Gutierrez, some of you may have heard her presentation. Her company is going to be hosting that event so it's going to be a ton of fun. If you have a few shirts from last year, please bring it and wear it. If you don't have one, you're going to get one. And if this year's happy hour is anything like last year's, it's going to be a fantastic evening and we are very excited to see you guys there. If you can't make it to wcicon, however, we wanted to give you a discount as well, a little promotion we have going on right now for a virtual ticket. So from now until February 27th you can get a hundred dollars off a virtual ticket. And while we would obviously love to meet every single one of you in person, attending the conference virtually is still a fantastic option. And you can join live during the three day event or you can watch on demand anytime after or listen to it podcast style and still get all of that amazing content and value. So it's a great option. Head to wcievents.com you can use code VIRTUAL100 at checkout if that is something that you are interested in. So we hope to see you there either one way or the other. Okay, as usual we are going to have a Q and A after the presentation. I want to jump right into it. So just as you're listening. If you have questions, please throw those questions in the chat and we will collect all of those. And then when we're, when Julia is done with her presentation, we will do our best to get all of those answered. So I'm super excited to introduce our presenter tonight. Dr. Julia Myers is a highly sought after speaker. She's the founder of Generational Wisdom and a leading expert helping mid career doctors overcome mom guilt so they feel confident in raising financially mature kids without entitlement. As a keynote speaker, Julia has empowered hundreds of wealthy families to transform their money mindset and regain control over their generational wealth. She has spoken at the White Coat Investor conference and she's a repeat speaker at the DLP Extraordinary Family Legacy event. As a doctor of pharmacy with an MBA in healthcare administration and 15 years of corporate and clinical experience, Julia is also the quintessential working mom as a mom to five children, which is crazy and amazing. Julia is intimately familiar with the pressures facing parents today. So I personally am super excited to learn from her. And without further ado, let's just turn the time over to you, Julia.

Thank you so much, Megan. Thank you everyone for choosing to spend your evening with us here at White Coat Investor. Financially empowered women. Let's start with just taking a deep breath. Let's all breathe in together. Some people feel comfortable closing their eyes and we're going to breathe out. We're going to breathe out everything that we've thought we knew about money, everything that we felt about money, every story we've told ourselves. And we're just going to kind of rebuild our story tonight together. So if you stay to the end, I've got a great handout for you. But if you do have to leave earlier, juliam.com fe all lowercase, you'll grab your handout. When I think about money, I have to go back really, really early to think about my first memory of money. I remember sitting around that heavy wooden table in my D and he said, we're going to count tonight. And it was a bag of coins. And little did I know, maybe that was foreshadowing my career as a pharmacist. With counting. 2, 4, 6, 8. That was my first memory of money. It wasn't emotional. It wasn't a story I told myself. It was just a practical thing that showed up and we had to count it and then we rolled it. If you're old enough to remember rolling coins and putting them into sleeves and then you were so proud when you hit 50 cents and you had a Whole roll of pennies, which I did hear in the news this week that maybe we're getting rid of pennies. I don't know. We'll see. And then your hands smelled like money for days after rolling the money. Those were my first memories of money. And when I think about money, at some point it shifted from a thing, that thing that I just transacted with. I kind of put it in to get bubble gum. And then at some point, I got a little bit older and I started looking around and I realized, does money equal happiness? Those people that have money seem to be happy. Maybe if I had money or more money or someday enough XYZ amount of money, then I'll be happy. Anybody else relate? Because, yeah, when I'm thinking about those things that are just our first memories of money, I'm like, how did it show up that way? When I'm speaking to a large group of people, I will sometimes head to the back of the room and ask the adults in the room, what do you think about money? What are you thinking that money is in the front of the room? Those kiddos, you bet those kiddos are saying, money's a thing, Money's a cash. Money is cards, money's credit cards. And what I asked the back of the room is then, hey, back there, those adults in the room, what do you think money is? And you know what they say? They don't say a thing. They don't say a noun. I start getting adjectives and adverbs like shame, like guilt, like stress, pressure, debt, loans, taxes. When in our story did money go from being a thing to being a feeling? We're going to unpack that today, and I'm going to help you find the power that you have to kind of rewrite that narrative. And before we jump in, I want to know who's in the audience tonight, so help me by dropping this in the chat. Which generation are you from? And then the caveat. Which one do you most identify with? Because I am a cusper. Did you know that's a term? Jason Dorsey calls it the cuspers? When you're like half of a generation, maybe you remember the late, you know, 70s, early 80s, but you're still technically a millennial. I'm a cusper, Right. So I'm a very early millennial. They used to call us Gen Y. Nobody really calls us Gen Y anymore. And then the youngest folks in our workforce are Gen Z right now. How many people have worked with Gen Z, hired Gen Z, trained Gen Z? What I think is Fascinating about Gen Z compared to maybe the millennials, or even Gen X is the average age they start working. Usually we think about money and work. When you're a kid, you don't just inherit loads of money. You usually have a purpose, you usually have to earn it in some way. Millennials, the average age, how old do you think it is when they get their first job? If you're a millennial, it could be babysitting, it can be dog walking, lawn mowing. What do you guys think the average age is if you're a millennial? You're right, guys. 12, 13. Recent research shows that our Gen Zers not even two generations later, which a generation, by the way, used to be 30 years, then it was 25, then it was 20 and goodness, this last generation barely even made 11 years. We now have Generation Beta on our hands. If you've delivered those babies, thank you. Welcome to 2025. You're a new generation. So spoiler alert, Gen Zs, the average age of their first job. Which is why this conversation is so important. Talking about money and mindset, what age do you think a Gen Z is when they get their first job? Older than 20. Actually 22 and a half is the average age they start earning money. Why? That is three really interesting reasons when we're talking about Gen Z. Well, one, they're doing sports and how could they be doing sports plus athletics? These kids are going to get nil money and scholarships, right? They're going to, you know, not have time for work or I've got to focus on college and I'm going to get that first job. I'm going to skip doing those typical service jobs. I want to jump right into that six figure job at 22 and a half. And no wonder. We're talking to them about how to punch a time clock, how to show up on time and all the things. So I'm laying that foundation because in this room we've experienced different generational influences and we then are now leading that next generation as moms, as aunties, as grandparents. And we got to set a few things straight that are within our control. So if we're talking about our kids or grandkids, depending on where you fall, I welcome Jen Beta into the conversation. I updated my slides since Megan and I talked earlier in the late Christmas season last year. There's a new generation. So what generation are your kiddos seeing? Some Alphas, I'm seeing some Z's. If you sit around my dinner table, I've got third grade, fifth grade, eighth Grade A freshman in college and a senior in college. So I've got Gen Z and Gen Alpha all together and it is such an interesting conversation. When we talk about the world, we talk about how we feel, we talk about emotions, and you bet we're that unusual family that talks about money. So I want you guys to go back into memory lane just a little bit. I shared my earliest memory. I was blessed that it was just a transactional thing. I remember going into the bank and opening my first bank account. My daughter remembers sitting on the computer next to me opening her first bank account. Very different first memories. So I would love to see in the chat or holding it, maybe it was an uncomfortable memory, maybe it was one of anger or emotion yelling from the other room about scarcity, not making ends meet. Let's just hold space for what your earliest memory of money is and that as a kid you didn't know any better. That's all you knew. And after we leave tonight, we're going to be able to rewrite that story for our kids going forward. Because when we think about money, we think about the stories we tell ourselves and really what shapes our money mindset. This ever evolving left brain of the transactional, the numerical. I promise we're only going to cover one equation in this whole presentation. We don't need pharmacy calculations for anything we're going to do tonight. We're also going to balance that with our right brain of emotion and feeling and abundance and scarcity and everything in between. Because as moms, we carry a big load. Sometimes just getting it straight in our own brain is the best place to start putting our own mask on first. So we're going to walk away in the first part of our conversation tonight with one of my signature frameworks. Everybody's got to love a good fishbone diagram to go back to the classroom. We're going to unpack it in a fishbone. And where we're going to go is basically just start at the very beginning. What are those influences that shape the beliefs that we have about money? And then what are those beliefs that now shape our mindset? What we think is possible or impossible. And we're going to walk through. What I found in my research are the four main financial influences we're going to draw, if you're a note taker or a digital person, a box. And we are going to do an exercise that's this cute little exercise that very quickly fills up some of our emotional bucket, our love tank, if you will. But I'm going to call it the belief box. So let's go ahead and let's identify our fishbone and we're going to talk about the four influences that drive our financial beliefs. Again, we're going to put on the hats or the perspective of we are the child for this first part of the exercise. You haven't earned money yet. You maybe have birthday money or you maybe have some sense of what money is as a currency or something that your family values in a certain way. Your parents go off to work. But as a kid, your generation really shapes the way that you think about money in two distinct ways. The first one being technology. I alluded to it earlier that my first memory of money was rolling coins to take them to a physical bank. Now we think about technology and digital banking. Everybody in their comments as we were joining the call this evening was talking about digital tools and how we do banking. I don't think the silent generation and I don't think many of our older boomers, whether they're the patients or our grandparents or our parents do digital banking. I had to venmo my mother in law one time and she goes, I don't Venmo, but you can write me a check. And I had to go find a check. So you guys are smiling because sometimes when I'm working with really large audiences, I'll say, okay, everybody pretend that you need to pay me $5. What are you going to do? And you bet. I get all four types of currency. I get checks, I get cash, I get credit cards or debit cards or plastic. And then I get people just holding up their phone or tapping it to me. So just in our room tonight, how we grew up as children, the technology that was around that led us to thinking about money was absolutely different and absolutely influencing the way that we think about money. Also as kids, we were shaped by world events. I remember my parents talking about their first memories of money and the scarcity they had. My mom, to this day, I love her, still keeps Cool Whip containers and reuses them for leftovers. We still save one chicken nugget just in case somebody gets hungry later. So those world events absolutely shape that financial influence around you. When we think about those world events of TSA and 9 11, I knew life before traveling when my whole family could walk me to the gate and traveling was a luxury. Now my kids or my gen zers, they only remember taking off their shoes and going through security. To them, that's normal. And then my gen alpha kids, the youngest ones at home, they don't remember life without Masks. So when we're leaving the house in the morning, it's phone, keys, wallet, mask. Anybody else do that? Those world events are now shaping what we think and what we believe. Moving over to the right, if you're taking notes, we're going to shift to the right part of our paper. We're going to talk about our family. Remember, we're the kid. We depend on our family, most likely for our needs, for our wants for money. Most likely that's parents and grandparents. It may be some extended family members you want to honor those families that were multigenerational and had different influences. And so when we think about family and we think about our childhood, that earliest memory exercise that we did, I bet your family's in it. My research says that that is the strongest influence on you as a child is your family. So keep that in mind because pretty soon we're going to talk about why that strong influence is the most important. As we move down into our third influence, we're going to talk about culture. We're going to talk about those things that are slower to change that, you know, pass through generations. It's not a hard and fast rule, but it's the way we think about things. So for the women in the room, when you were growing up, who did you ask for money? For me, it was my dad said, hey, I need this or can we buy that? And he took care of the checkbook. It wasn't until I was doing some research that I realized that it wasn't until 1972 women could even have their own mortgage without their husband. That's a huge culture shift. We also think about careers. We think of one income households or single working households. And how that's maybe shifted what we think about our financial beliefs. Can men earn as much money as women? Can women earn as much money as men? And those are those slower, more cultural influences that I want to acknowledge are different in the Western world than in other parts of the world. Culturally, it's not common to have a bank account in a lot of South American countries. I was in Central America for two weeks recently, and some countries have bank accounts and the rest are just on cash. And culturally, that's a big shift. That's an evolution. And then we think about Eastern culture, we talk about Eastern careers and Eastern education or more non traditional Western culture. Absolutely. The patriarchy or the matriarchy all play a role in our financial influences. And last but not least, in that fourth bucket of financial influence, we have the social. We have the rapidly evolving hashtag trending things that as kids we met the Joneses, we grew up with, the ones with the new car on the left or the dysfunctional household on the right. But you heard about it, you saw them arguing, or you saw them leaving and going to work, or you maybe shared meals and experiences with them. And socially as a kid, your world or the people you usually touch and are around, that's how it was for me growing up. And yet for our kids, I want to acknowledge that their world is now instantly, literally the entire world. My daughter told me that this summer was the summer of going to Italy and we missed out because we went to Italy last summer. And she couldn't believe how disappointed she felt. And I just think back to my childhood and that social peer pressure is so insanely different today than it was when maybe I was growing up, when all I wanted in my very comfortable middle class household was a new pair of those Adidas sneakers with the three lines on it or the Adidas jacket with the toggles. To me, that was like how I showed that money or finances were important. And yet when my parents told me no, which was more often than not, that was really my biggest lesson that I took away from my childhood and building this belief box that we're going to think through. When they told me no, it wasn't because we couldn't afford it. And I remember that really clearly. I remember my dad and my mom saying, we don't think that that's important or we don't think that that's where we want to spend our money. And I still to this day use that phrase with my kids. Because when I hear we can't afford it, I hear scarcity or I hear a lack of or an insufficiency when probably there's a way for us to figure it out if we really wanted it bad enough. And so that was a really unique moment for me. And what I'd like to do is have a stay in this childhood moment just for a minute or two. Let's fill out our own belief box. Let's fill out what are those things that are coming up for you in your childhood that you believe to be true about money? We're going to take about a minute and just think, what are the things that you believe? Do you believe that women couldn't be doctors? Did you believe that women couldn't be the president or rise to a certain level of affluence or education? Maybe you wanted to be the first woman in your family to do something when it came to money? And doing big things and great things. Maybe you wanted to break away from that culture that said you couldn't have a mortgage or an education, an advanced education. Maybe it's socially that you were always told, no, we can't afford it. And you felt that scarcity or that insufficiency. And I want to hold space for those beliefs. And as a kid, you weren't responsible for any of those things. They kind of happened to you. You were just there for the ride. You started with an empty box of beliefs, and it was full by the time you moved into adulthood. So we're going to write some of these down. What do we believe that we thought was true when we were a kid? And we are going to teleport into being a grown up. We are going to teleport into that next phase that says, now I'm an adult, and guess what? I am carrying my childhood beliefs in my backpack and I'm going to put on a whole nother backpack because the world says I'm an adult, and I now have twice as many things to worry about. And so we have that box. That is our childhood belief box. But now, guess what? We're in the messy middle of that generation. We have parents and grandparents that never talk to us about money, that we now have to talk to them about money. We have to talk to them about this impending wealth transfer, the 1.2 now almost $3 trillion that baby boomers are going to pass. And a majority of that wealth is going to go to, guess what, you guys, to women, to the matriarchs that never had bank accounts or loans or even talked about money at wealth transfers. Real. And it's here generationally. We're going to talk about the role of retirement. We're going to talk that boomers have worked for it. Millennials are striving for it. Maybe they're going to do the fire thing, retire early. And Gen Z, you guys, they don't know how to even imagine retirement. They feel that they're going to have to work forever because there's not ever going to be enough for them to retire. When we think about the way the world has taken on debt and leverage, it can be a tool. Sometimes you get bit and sometimes you go far. But the way that we think about debt in our generation has absolutely changed how we think about money now as an adult, Gen Z, Gen Alpha cannot imagine going to school without loans. You guys, this is a real thing where if we were Gen X or Millennial, we were either getting scholarships or grants or we were able to physically work and go to school and pay off our loans in a reasonable amount of time. My daughter's applying to law school right now, and her dream school is UNC Chapel Hill. Her dad is a huge Tar Heel fan, Tar heel alum, and one year of law school, you guys, $60,000. She's running the numbers and looking at me saying, I don't know if there's some ROI in this. So generationally, how we look at debt is absolutely a way to that as an adult. There's so much more complexity to the financial influences we have moving over to family. How many of us have spouses, have partners? Growing up as kids, you didn't get to choose those people that you were around most of the time that fed you those beliefs about money. You did get to choose your spouse or your partner. And they came with, guess what? In laws. And what are the first fights that you usually have with your partner or your in laws? Probably about money. Some are savers, some are spenders. Some have belief boxes that are so full they're overflowing. Some have belief boxes that are so empty that they just never talked about it. It's an absence of knowledge or information or beliefs. And now you're not only the adults, you're now raising the next generation, and you're being reminded every day that their first memories of money are most likely going to come from you, they're going to come from your family, they're going to come from how you answer, can we buy this? How are we going to show up where that strongest influence, that power that is in that family arm is so strong? And let's not forget to lean into that as we start to think about our belief box. Now that we're adults, culturally, life got way more complicated. We're thinking about tradition, we're thinking about those things we learned growing up. And I'll share a fun story about a hundred dollar bill. My dad gave us a $100 bill when we graduated from high school if we could look him in the eye and tell him we never smoked. That was symbolic. That was traditional. He had always been a smoker, had always tried to quit. And from the day I remember asking him, what is this? What is this cigarette? He said, oh, I will give you $100 when you graduate if you tell me you haven't smoked. And you know what? I'm passing that tradition on to my kids. Two out of two that have graduated high school so far have earned it. They may have asked for a little bit of an inflationary adjustment. And I said, that's not the point. It's not the dollars. It's that, that hundred dollar bill, when you touch it and you hold it, you earned it. And that hard work sometimes equals money. And also rewarding for great behavior. Rewarding, incentivizing for the right choices. When we think about our culture and we think about transportation, I grew up in a one car household. Honestly, we had one car all last year. When my husband worked remote and I was transitioning into speaking. We were that really weird household. You look around now, everybody has a car. Teens have cars, moms has, mom has a car, dad has a car. Maybe we even have toys. Maybe we even have boats and vehicles and additional cars. Our stack of insurance cards is probably as big as our credit cards sometimes. And when we think culturally about housing, this is where another generational statistic just I can't forget it and have to share it with you guys. But the American dream used to be to own a home, have 2.5 kids and a dog. And now Gen Z, 82% choose to rent in perpetuity. 82% never want to own a home. And it's a huge shift in the culture of the American dream. And it's not really because they don't want the hassle of buying a house or they don't want to settle down or maybe those things we think about them because we're older and wiser. That's not always true, but I like to think that until my kids tell me wrong. And then the study was really interesting that it had to do that they just wanted to be in the city where they wanted to live in the action. And the only way they could do that is by renting because they couldn't save up enough for the down payment or afford a house in the city where they really wanted to live. Super interesting. We think about generational wealth and we think about the culture and the wealth transfer. We think about businesses being handed down, practices being picked up by corporations because there's nobody to sell it to. There's a huge shift in our culture when it comes to financial influences. And last but not least, our Joneses are all over everywhere. And there are pictures to prove it. Now we have a few funny pictures of the jalopies we drove in high school. And now you get caught driving one of those cars to school. My kids still do it, but they're not excited about it. The lifestyle, the keeping up with the dopamine rush that comes from being an adult and having your own money and being able to choose and spend and not being told what to do. What do you do when there's money to buy anything, but you can't buy everything? Fashion. Holy cow. Can we talk about how fast fashion trends change and come back? And that I'm sharing some of my makeup with my oldest teen? Or that she's giving me hand me down mom jeans because she's like, ah, they're going out of style and I'm wearing them now. Socially, absolutely shape our financial influences. And so when we think about that belief box and we think about it's heavier, it's fuller, it's messier, it might not look like a box anymore. It might look like a mumbled, jumbled piece of convoluted strength. And I want us to take a moment and think maybe we've done some enlightenment work or we've evolved or up leveled our money mindset and we think about money differently. But let's hold a space for that time when we thought that money equaled something, that money meant something. It was more than just that tangible thing. It was now an emotional thing. And I want us to take a moment and just think through as an adult, what are those beliefs that you have about money generationally? How does it feel to talk to your parents about money or navigate their estate? Setting up your own legacy plan, Leaning into the power that's yours. Didn't even have to wave a magic wand, but it's pretty scary. You're now a parent and you are the strongest influence in your child's financial money stories. The American dream is changing, and socially the pressures are more intense than they've ever been. And just holding space for those beliefs, those things that we thought were true, and remembering the fact that our brain can't distinguish sometimes between the truth and a memory, what we imagined and what actually was. How many of us were in the room when we were there? We saw what happened and that's not how this person told the story. So I want us to take a moment and look at this belief box. Look at those things that have come up for us. Now let's just take a deep breath because not everything that we believe is true. That's the power and that's the scary part, because we now are charged with leading the next generation. And so when we think about that belief box, I'd love to see in the chat, we know that as children, your strongest belief was your strongest influence came from your family. Now that you're an adult, what is it for you? What is your strongest influence? On your belief box as it relates to your money mindset. Love the reflection. If you're not able to chat, I would challenge you to do this exercise with your partner and you might find that they're similar or different. And this is sometimes the greatest place to start the conversation about money. So many parents come up to me and say, I never learned how to do this. I never learned about money. Well, if that Fishbone diagram told you anything, whatever you would have learned is outdated anyway. So you can no longer use that as an excuse that you never learned how to talk about money. You can use this as a starting point. What do you believe about money? Or where did that come from? Or, you know, what do you think about digital banking compared to regular paper? Counting money, counting down a cash drawer. Those are safe, neutral conversations that if you lean in with kind of open arms and an open mind, you might find that everybody's got a money story. Maybe nobody's ever asked you what yours was. Maybe it's your chance to share your money story with your kids. Not giving you homework tonight until later, but that's a good one to get started is have you shared your money story, your beliefs, your childhood experiences with your kids? Because again, parents, you've got that strong influence. You're now also stuck between the traditions and more modern approaches. Like it or not, that rulebook, that handbook, that yellow pages. I had to tell my kids what yellow pages were the other day, and they were like, what about my privacy? And I said, but you use TikTok. And then we had a good laugh. I do want to call out that the financial pressures are so visible today. You could hide it pretty well before, you'd have families that moved away and maybe you didn't know what happened, families that split apart got back together. But now you see these financial pressures everywhere. The world is hurting, and I want to hold space for both the privilege and the affluence and the blessing that we have to all be here together tonight. And those people that don't know where dinner's going to come from or breakfast in the morning, those financial pressures are real. And we as parents get to choose how we tell that story and that narrative, because parents are going to remain the strongest influence on your child's financial beliefs. So what I want us to do is take a moment and let's think about our family and what we believe. And I'll share a funny story. This is a picture of us in Hawaii. I believed that families that took matching pictures on the beach were the better families. I believe that that meant we had a happy vacation. And what I am rewriting in my own belief box every time I see this picture is just because you buy the swimsuit, your teenager is not always going to wear it. Which one of these things doesn't look like the other? And yet we still can hold the belief that we can have a great time and that we can match and have fun, or we can not match and have fun? And so what I want us to do is have that picture in our mind of what that belief box was, and we're going to empty it, and we're going to start from scratch. Because you, the mom, the auntie, the grandma, the woman, the matriarch of the family, you get to build your future belief box for your family. Starting today, we're going to decide what we want to keep. We're going to decide what we want to let go, what no longer serves us, what's holding us back, what's in our brain that's telling us we can't, we're not enough, we're insufficient. And what's new? What is a new belief we want to try on again? We can imagine what it feels like to take that matching picture and what it feels like to smile. And then we can look at the real picture and say, it's just like I remembered it. And we can even be aspirational. We can think about our legacy, our next generation, our wealth, and our wisdom. What do we believe when it comes to money? So let's take a moment and let's create our family financial beliefs. Look back at what you wrote down. When it comes to maybe those beliefs that you really like, let's circle them. If there are some heck nos that holds me back, draw a line through them, release them. I give you permission to leave that behind and not bring it forward into your family. Let's think through your family, probably three, four generations of now. You're lucky five. You've got generation Beta. Now. We don't want to let go. But what we remember from our family growing up, what are some new ideas, some new phrasing that we want to believe and that we want to put into our money mindset. And aspirationally, what do we want our kids to believe about money? Does money equal happiness? I'm pretty clear with them. Money doesn't equal happiness. Abundance is happiness. Contentment is happiness. And those are all things that we can measure by feeling, but not quantitatively by counting. Giving us about 10 more seconds. Let's stretch. What is that thing that if you believed it were true, it would be about your family, about your relationship with money, about the freedom you feel, the abundance you feel, the creation that you have, the blessings you've been given and how that helps you up level your money mindset. So I would love to know in the chat as we come back together, what's the belief that you're going to leave behind? I told you mine. The belief that you had to take matching family pictures to be that happy family that was Instagram worthy. I let that go. I am sharing with it publicly and with permission because when you have teenagers in swimsuits, you better get permission before you share any pictures or any stories. What's a financial belief you're going to leave behind? On the flip side, what's the belief you want to pass on? I shared with you the value of reusing Tupperware containers. Makes my mom so happy because it reminds her of her mom and some of the lessons she learned. So to this day, Chinese Tupperware is usually what I'll reuse. And that hundred dollar bill story, I hope my kids pass it on to their kids. When I think of traditions I want to pass on, as I grew up getting a new ornament every year for Christmas. We celebrate Christmas as Christians and every year it was an ornament. And then when I left the house and I grew up, I took my box of ornaments with me and I decorate the tree and the kids see me in my second and third grade school pictures with big glasses and crazy braided hair, crimped hair, and we smile and we laugh because that's a tradition that I never want to let go. Handmade ornaments, you bet. I'm keeping all of my kids ones. Maybe not the noodle ones because that's kind of not healthy or sanitary. Those are some traditions I'm keeping and absolutely going to pass on. When it comes to pressure, I just want to think about those things that really you're always going to feel pressure. In high school it was what college am I going to get into? And in college it was which med school am I going to go to? Which pharmacy school? And then it was which residency am I going to match with? And now it's which job am I going to take, which position do I ascend to next? Someday always comes, but there's always pressure at every level. And so whether you had a budget of $1, $100, $100,000, I want to give you the permission to just acknowledge left brain and right brain. It's hard, it's Hard to choose to save when you want to buy something right now. It's also harder to realize that you spent that money on something that you wish you didn't or that it gave you that rush. But now in the future, you're like, wow, I've got to pay this money back. So I want to let you hold the space for hard and remind yourself that it's not hard or easy. It's harder, harder. And so as we're building this belief box, we're going to get pressures always pushing on our box, our family bubble. I want you guys to double down and make that tight. Because if you're going to feel those influences poking on at you, they're going to feel like pressure when they're negative, when they're pulling you down, and when they're feeling kind of that. That dark, heavy feeling, and you're still going to feel those influences poking on you, lifting you up. Those are the influences that are positive and that feel like purpose. Those are the ones that have you leaning in, saying, I can give more when I earn more. Or when you look at your tax bill and you're like, dang, I'm sad I had to pay those taxes. And yet look at how much more abundant our life is because we can give or we can experience or we can enjoy and be appreciative for what we do have. You'll never be free from these influences. That baggage you carried as a child to now, that baggage you had as an adult to the new encompassing pack on your back that is your family, choose your heart. As we shift from that kind of more cognitive, just kind of exploratory feeling, part of our evening, I want to jump into putting it into action. And it starts with kind of a heavy story. So I'm going to chat here for a little bit. And that warning, this story might result in an uncomfortable realization that medication cannot always fix everything. A sudden awareness that certainty is an illusion. And that side effects may include rapid blinking, squinting, and seeing life from a whole new perspective. I'm a pharmacist, very familiar with medication mornings, as are you. I am way more interested in watching that happy couple walking the dog across my screen than listening to the medication disclaimer that's buried in those endless commercials. I never thought an adverse reaction would happen to me until it did. I never thought that when we placed this heart in a circle when we got married, that one month later I would lose my sight. I never thought my kids would be lucky, my family would be lucky. I lost my Sight, but they are. So I'm going to tell you what happened. I dialed my assistance number just like I had done hundreds of times before. This time, my voice was different. It was urgent. It was uncertain. Clear my schedule. No, I don't know how long. Remember when I told you I was having some changes in vision? Well, I have a spontaneous retinal detachment and I need emergency surgery. It says one month after I just got back from our family moon in Hawaii, where we took that family picture, where we took that picture of our hands in a heart and said, this is our new course for our life, for our family. I knew a retinal detachment was an emergency. I knew it led to blindness. And during my 18 years as a pharmacist, I believe that modern medicine could fix things. It could really fix everything, preferably with a medication and not with a surgeon. But that was my luck. So the next morning, after I called my assistant, I parked in the hospital lot where I had worked for years. Academic medical center, same parking spot. It was a different day because I wasn't walking in as the health care provider. I was the patient. And I was about to walk straight into something that medicine couldn't fix. Surgery, while complicated, successfully reattached my retina. I got a scleral buckle, fixed my retina. But the problem, everything else literally fell apart. My right eye was stuck in a down position. Hypertropia. The result? We needed to operate again, again, again, again and again. Five attempts to restore my sight, five times. I clung to that belief that the right doctor, the right treatment, the right procedure would bring my vision back. It didn't. Each operation actually added more scar tissue, pulling my eye muscles further out of sync. I saw retinal specialists, ophthalmology specialists. I saw corneal specialists. And eventually my right eye just became immobile, leading to my decision to stop believing in modern medicine and to stop further intervention and just accept my permanent double vision. For the last two years, I lived life with one contact in my left eye and one very blurry right eye and constant double vision. Looking at this picture, I didn't just lose sight in one eye. I lost my depth perception. I lost my sense of certainty. I lost my identity. I lost my career. I mean, who wants medications from a one eyed pharmacist that left me with a choice. And that choice is that every time I blink, I get to decide how I see my future. I get to decide what my mindset is. So instead of sitting at home watching tv, which I couldn't really do because of Limited vision. I discovered a new way to literally see life. One that can look through my left eye, the one that still works, and focus on what I've gained. Perspective, clarity, purpose. Or I can look through my right eye, the one that's immobile, that's blurry, incapable of bringing this world into focus. I can fixate on everything I've lost. Because we as humans spend so much time trying to fix things, trying to hold on to what we think we need. What if the real transformation stops when we stop fighting to get back what we've lost? Or to make those old beliefs true? And instead we just learn to see what's been there all along? Because life's not going to go according to plan. A job's lost, a relationship ends, a dream falls apart. And in those moments, the question isn't, can I fix this? Because sometimes you can't. And the real question is, where do I choose to focus? And so, for me, that was the irony. Losing my sight is what helped me see how much my family, my faith, my legacy really meant me. I found my purpose in my family, and I found what really matters most. So that secret I want to give you is close your eyes and blink. Blink again. Do it with me. You've got the power inside you right now to change how you see and what you focus on. Because I don't want you to have to have a catastrophic event to change your vision. What you do need is a clear roadmap of what is meaningful to you. You need to be able to not just feel it or believe it, but live it every day. Live it every. Every moment. Live it every blink. And that story is what led me to realizing we needed a family constitution. Because we need to know the preamble. We, the Myers family, the ones that took that picture on the beach, are still the same family now that our world is upside down and it's different and Mom's not a pharmacist anymore, and that's going to be okay. So we created a constitution. The second part after the preamble. I did have to go back to little social studies and figure out all these parts of our beautiful constitution, but it makes for a great experience for everyone this evening. What are those intentions that we have, those beliefs that we just built in that family belief box? What are the actions that we take on a regular, consistent basis to say that we, the Myers family, believe this, and that means we do this. Those are the articles and that third and final piece. Because constitutions are what living, breathing documents we're going to amend it and we're going to figure out when we need to change what we say we're going to do. Can't just be because we feel like it in the moment, but it can't also be because it's always been the way that we've done it. And so three parts to the constitution, we're going to break them down just a little bit further. You don't have to take notes because remember, I'm going to give you your own resource to build out your own family constitution. I don't want you to have to have a catastrophic story, to really have to just find what's important to you and then to put words to it. Step one is our only one equation for tonight. We have the blessing of affluence. We have the blessing of privilege. And with that comes some responsibility. Because price is very, very subjective. Price is very qualitative, hard to measure. So when I want to talk about value, I want to talk about what's the price I'm paying. The dollars, that physical amount that it goes down. The lessons that my kids learn when they forget their lunch the first time they get grace and then it's the second time $8.50 is coming out. So the value of packing your lunch the night before and then remembering it, that's a lesson that I want them to think about. We also have to think about the opportunity cost of every time we choose to spend money in one way, we are not able to spend it in the other. We're investing here, which means we can't do that. Every yes is a no. Every no is a yes. And then absolutely, we are busy ladies. We need to think about the cost of our time. That's how I like to calculate what goes into what we value. And again, that's not an equation I found anywhere. That's not anything I had explained to me. That was just something I discovered when I really sat down and said, how do I know what I value? And when there are so many beautiful words out there to describe my family, how am I only going to pick three? I'm going to use the values equation to help me get really clear individually. And then I had my spouse do it, and then I had the kids do it. And that's how collectively we all came up with what we valued as a family. Next piece is going to be intention into action because y' all know what if it's not in your calendar, it doesn't. What it doesn't happen if it doesn't go on autopay it's easy to forget. So those habits, those things that we look at our schedule, what does it say about what we value, who we are as a family? We, the Myers family, You look at our budget, what does it say about us as a family? How aligned is that with that family belief box you just built? Is it a gap? Let's take some intentional action to move us towards building that box that you just created this evening. And let's turn experience into revisions. You know, what is our process to adapt it over time? What's our process to kind of say, hey, that worked for us, or no, that didn't. We need to do this more frequently or way less frequently. And my favorite, favorite question, we probably have used this with all of our residents when they were in training as where the preceptors. How do you know that it's working? How do you know that it's working if your kids are vocal like mine are? Oh, they will tell you. And they very clearly said, please don't make us wear matching shirts on the airplane anymore. Please don't make us wear matching swimsuits. And then my youngest still likes to match with me in that swimsuit. So if you follow me on social media, you'll see that we'll sometimes still wear that swimsuit. So let's take a moment in the chat. What is one element of your financial constitution that you want to bring in your family constitution? What are you guys all about? Again, I'm going to say you can only pick three key values, but what would be something that would absolutely be in there? I saw some things in the chat earlier of experiences over things really like that. How would you live that out or how would you revisit that, depending on maybe the stage of your kid's age, the stage of their life, the key elements to your family constitution. That is going to be your homework. Ooh, Katie, adventure. Absolutely. If you're feeling a little stuck. Oh, I love praying together. I love that. I'm going to share with you ours and I'm going to share with you the most current vision. Always, always on a living, breathing document. This is not to influence what you think you should be doing. We are not shooting on ourselves. We are not shooting on the room. No, we are being open to inspiration, to thinking about what could work for us and what serves us and what doesn't. And so this is our family, my beautiful, lovely family. And I like to say we, the Myers family, value love, learning and travel. We choose to spend our time, our money, and our attention on things that align with our values. We live confidently and boldly in honor of the legacy we're building. Our home feels calm and organized and smells like fresh baked cookies or peppermint. We meet annually to set goals and to share our favorite memories and superlatives. During the holidays, we meet monthly as a family to discuss our schedule, finances and our goals. We're generous with our resources and we show love in all relationships through respect, kindness and prayer. We travel all together at least 14 days a year and mom and dad travel together alone at least once every quarter. We try something new every quarter and we prioritize experiences over physical items. When there's a conflict or disagreement, we take ownership and responsibility and demonstrate active listening and we give grace. We are united in this Constitution and we will discuss and amend our Constitution when there is a majority vote. And so with that, I want to conclude the talking part of this evening and I would love to give you two pieces of great resource. One, we're going to stay and chat. We are going to discuss what came up for you. We're going to discuss maybe those things that are on your heart. You don't have to come off of camera if you don't want to. I'd love to see your face drop it in the chat or the audio if you do have to go and put your little to bed. I totally understand. I want you to know that I'm here. I'm a free resource. Juliamyers.com Sew you guys are the only ones seeing this. It's a Google document. I would love for your feedback. I would love to know how this served you, how this exercise benefited you and how it's going. Because our family constitution's evolved in the last couple of years since I lost my sight and I can absolutely say is some of the best work that I do. Because when we talk about ROI and we talk about return on investment, the only ones that it really matters to are your family. They're the ones that will be there and not remember how late you stayed at work or how many extra shifts you picked up. They're going to remember how you made them feel and what wisdom, what beliefs, what values you passed on to them. And that is how we build. Generational wisdom is that legacy that's beyond us, that's beyond the wealth and it's the ability to just know that we have the control, we have the power to refocus every time we blink every moment on what's ahead of us and what we stand for. I'm Julia Myers, thank you so much for your time and for your attention and I would love to jump into some discussion with everyone.

Okay, awesome. Thank you, Julia. That was wonderful. I am very excited to get started on my own family constitution. I love, I love the concept of that.

If you've.

Anyone who's been here before has heard me talk about the power of intentionality and that's a huge part of our family and our both financial goals and the way we live our lives. And so that's just beautiful alignment and will give us so much to focus on. I'd love actionable things that you can actually do. So I'm super excited to get started on that. Thank you so much. Okay, we are going to move on to the Q and a portion of our, our evening here.

I'm looking through the chat and absolutely. When you can buy anything, what do you buy? You can't buy everything. And so having that constitution is one of our go to's. Especially around the holidays. When we don't do a big gift giving around the holidays, we do a big trip planning and everybody gets to like pick that thing that they want to do on the trip and they all get a day and they've got a planet, they've got a budget for it. They look up, you know, the different things about the place that we're at, that's how we kind of navigate, you know, some of that. Because you're right, we can afford Christmas and travel and we're choosing to say, nope, we would rather do that. Or that weird family that doesn't eat out unless it's like a birthday or we're traveling. Like we cook so much at home. It's kind of a crazy thing. But it's. What's the phrase Dave Ramsey uses? Like it's normal to not be or it's normal to be broke. Okay, Julia, there's a question in the chat. It says, do you have suggestions for dating and talking about finances while dating and vetting? Oh, great question. I find that talking about money is a pendulum, right? You either totally avoid it or we all know those people that are on the other side and that's all they talk about. They're talking about the stock market and the interest rates and what deal they're underwriting and all the things. And I think that when you're dating, step one is to know about yourself, where you fall in that pendulum and then kind of finding out like where's the other person falling? Is it something that they're going to be avoidant or they're going to be something super. I don't want to use the word aggressive, but like overly obsessive with. And where do you feel that alignment before you even start talking numbers, you can really clearly sometimes find, like, motivation or different things. I'm less traditional when dating. Like, it's okay to receive as a woman, but it's also really nice to be able to provide. And funny story, the first time I went out with my husband, he actually forgot his wallet when we were dating. And yeah, I bought dinner the first time. So I would say throw out those traditional rules or those things that you should be doing when you're dating and lean into kind of what feels comfortable. That knowing that's in our belly, that sometimes our clinical brains really want to keep us. There's got to be a right answer. There has to be a certain amount of net worth or this prenup has to say this or that. And really it might be just that knowing. It's a great, great question. And I like that Julia, too is because a lot of your finances tie to what your values are and how you spend money. And so I think having those value talks and what's important can really lead into then how you spend your money related to those values. The hosts of the White Coat Investor are not licensed accountants, attorneys, or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.