Spend Smarter This Wedding Season: Travel, Tipping, and More, (featuring The Knot)
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Sean, can I be a little soppy?
Elizabeth, you say soppy, I say sappy.
Either way, we're both crying, so let's do it. Thank you, because I was going to be soppy regardless. So, Mother's Day is around the corner and I get so emotional thinking about all the values that my mom instilled in me and all the values that I get to instill in my son. Mother's Day also had me mulling on the money lessons that I learned over the years watching my mom.
I feel that. My mom and I are really close, and I feel so grateful for all the lessons that she's taught me over the years, financially and otherwise.
Welcome to NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast, where you send us your money questions and we answer them with the help of our genius nerds. I'm Elizabeth Ayola.
And I'm Sean Piles. This episode, we're chatting with a listener about budgeting for a wedding, including who you should tip and how much.
But before that, let's talk about lessons we learned from our moms when it comes to money. Sean, was your mom open with you about her finances growing up?
Yes and no. She taught me the importance of being frugal and how to be creative when money was tight. But I didn't have a deep understanding of our household finances, which is probably a good thing.
My mom didn't tell me much about her personal finances, but she did tell me about the cost of her bills often, with an emphasis on how expensive things were, of course. And she'd add somewhere, that's why you have to work hard.
Yeah, absolutely. I was often told that if I didn't finish my food, I was just throwing money away. And that's something that I still hear in my brain every time I don't finish my plate.
It sounds like we had the same childhood, Sean.
Yeah.
All right. So let's take a trip down memory lane. What would you say is the earliest money-related lesson that you learned from your mom?
I feel like we're in therapy here, Elizabeth. Well, my mom was one to let me learn my own lessons with some gentle guidance. And one that comes to mind is around my allowance. My sisters and I had to split up household chores to earn our allowances and how we chose to spend them was up to us. I remember one week when I was really young, I spent all of my allowance on gumballs. I know it might sound kind of weird, but there was this specific type of gumball that I was really into. My mom asked me if I was certain that's how I wanted to spend all of the money I had earned doing my chores. And I said, 100%, I want these gumballs. Well, the next day when I was at the store and I saw whatever Pokemon toy caught my eye and I couldn't afford it, that was on me.
And my mom said, hey, if you hadn't spent all your money on that candy, maybe you could have saved up and purchased this next week with next week's allowance as well. And that is how I learned to save up for things I wanted. What about you, Elizabeth?
That is such a good lesson. I think the one that stands out for me is that sometimes creating financial security requires sacrifice. So I grew up with an immigrant mother who left Nigeria in her teenage years to start a new life in the UK. She left around the age of 16. So she would go back and forth between the UK and Nigeria over the years. But eventually she settled in London. And by this time, she had six kids and she was the breadwinner. My dad was more focused on pastoring. Yes, I'm a pastor's kid. Well, she had to separate my siblings and I for a while and put us with nanny so that she could work and create financial stability for our family. And then I'm so proud of her because within a few years and with lots of hard work, she was able to buy a home for us to live in and we all were able to live together again. But she did have to sacrifice most of her time and also her family being under one roof in order to get there.
Wow, that is an incredible story. I'm really impressed by all that your mom had to do to manage you kids. I mean, I can barely manage a household with a cat and a dog and a gecko. I can't imagine having six kids.
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