Episode Two: What We Learn About Money and What We Don’t Talk About
Episode Takeaways
What we learn about money early in life shapes far more than our finances; it shapes our confidence, choices, and sense of control. But just as important is what we don’t talk about, and how those silent gaps influence the way we navigate money over time.
In this episode of Money, Meaning and Midlife Plot Twists, host Erin Hadary, CFP®, MBA, CAP®, CEFT®, explores how our early experiences with money shape the way we think, feel, and make decisions throughout life. Erin shares that her father’s belief that financial knowledge should never be limited by gender gave her a strong foundation of confidence and independence, which she now brings to her work with clients navigating complex financial transitions. The conversation highlights how money is not just technical, but deeply personal, influenced by family dynamics, assumptions, and life stages.
Throughout the episode, Erin emphasizes that true financial empowerment cannot be taught; it develops over time through clarity, education, and action. She discusses the importance of open family conversations around wealth, the challenges of generational expectations, and how thoughtful planning can create both stability and flexibility. Erin also shares her growing focus on intentional giving, helping clients align their financial decisions with what matters most to them. This episode offers a grounded perspective for anyone looking to move from uncertainty to greater control and peace of mind.
Key Talking Points:
- Erin’s early influences and how her father shaped her financial confidence
- Why financial empowerment develops through clarity and action
- Navigating family dynamics, assumptions, and generational wealth
- The importance of open conversations about money across life stages
- Aligning financial decisions with values, including intentional giving
- And more!
Explore the full episode to learn more about building clarity and confidence in your financial journey.
Connect with Erin Hadary:
Transcript
[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Money Meaning and Midlife Plot Twists with Erin Hadary a certified financial transition, certified financial planning professional and owner at Moneta Wealth Management. In this podcast, Erin helps people navigating major life transitions work through financial complexity with clarity. Here, Erin blends her human centered heart first approach.
With financial expertise providing guidance that’s both technically sound and emotionally insightful. She draws from her experience as an advisor engaging other life change experts for real talk conversations, and sharing stories from other midlifers who’ve undergone major plot twists of their own.
Join us to better understand your financial story and face your next chapter with confidence.
[00:00:52] Patrice Sikora: When you have a mission, you need to follow it. And financial advisor Erin had has a mission inspired by her own life experience. [00:01:00] I’m Patrice Sikora, and Erin, it’s good to see you again and be with you again.
[00:01:04] Erin Hadary: It’s great to see you as well. Patrice, thank you for being with me.
[00:01:08] Patrice Sikora: Well, I had such a good time on our first episode.
I’m looking forward to this second episode. I’d like to start out with you telling me about your history with money and relationships and the impact on your outlook and dealing with others.
[00:01:23] Erin Hadary: Great questions. Well, let me start with, I asked my father to actually be on this podcast.
[00:01:30] Patrice Sikora: Well, all right.
[00:01:31] Erin Hadary: He said yes.
He said, what am I talking about? And I said, well, as a daughter, I’d love for you to share. What did you want to teach me about money? My father is 76 years old, and I thought, oh, that’ll be an intimate conversation. And he said, what does gender have to do with money? And I said, well, that’s the mic drop for my father.
And if anyone wants to know, [00:02:00] why do I talk about money so directly and so confidently? It’s because I was taught by my own father. You just need to know it. It’s a tool. You need to be financially independent. You need to understand money language, you need to understand credit, you need to understand investments.
And he never thought that because I was a daughter, that I should know anything less than a son. I just think that’s so cool and I recognize as a woman in finance, as a leader, how few of us are around the table. How fortunate are you?
[00:02:39] Patrice Sikora: Yeah, that is so true. That is so true. Um, I am pleased to hear that because so many cases it’s the women who don’t understand the money, they don’t take, well, they don’t have the impetus to understand it.
Lemme put it that way too, because they may become widows and suddenly they don’t even know how to write a check for people who still write checks these [00:03:00] days. But
[00:03:01] Erin Hadary: I actually dealt with that, um, probably back in 2008. When the great financial crisis happened, I had a client who suddenly became widowed and she did not know how to write a check, and I had more money, education and knowledge than she did.
And I think that’s what gives me so much drive is to help others. I want them to feel empowered, and you can be a man or a woman and not feel empowered. You can feel like you need to. Maybe act like you know something, but that’s what having a financial advisor is about, is to be safe and to say, I don’t know much about this, but I wanna make a wise decision.
Could you help me? And that could be from maybe what we can consider more basic, um, financial, educational decisions, buying a house, and that can be to private credit and private equity [00:04:00] decisions. I have experience in all of that, and I rely on additional team members and experts. I never hold myself out to know everything, but I sure know a lot to know when I need to call in another specialist and say, you know, we’ve got a really complex problem here.
I love solving this. I, I think that as we get older, my biggest observation is life gets more complex.
[00:04:26] Patrice Sikora: This is true.
[00:04:28] Erin Hadary: And whether you be in the sandwich generation where you are now starting to help your parents have to navigate cognitive decline and just being tired and they just don’t wanna do it, and they don’t pay attention to it, that’s one, some, one of those items that I help.
Families with, to parents who are trying to teach their teenagers or their young adults, or, I have clients that have 40-year-old children and they’re not saving for [00:05:00] retirement yet, and those 40-year-old children stand to inherit money, but they’re not getting anything because their actions don’t speak that they’re ready for it.
[00:05:10] Patrice Sikora: Hmm.
[00:05:11] Erin Hadary: And that is so important. We as a community, as a society need to come together and keep trying to lift each other up and be empowered because life keeps changing and you have to make smart money decisions if you hope for it to be there when you need it.
[00:05:30] Patrice Sikora: When did this become your mission? Just hearing you talk about it.
I can, I can feel the how important it is to you.
[00:05:39] Erin Hadary: Patrice, I don’t have a defining moment. I just know this is what I’m supposed to do. I’m in the right place at the right time.
[00:05:53] Patrice Sikora: Alright, very good. Has the focus of your mission changed over the years? [00:06:00]
[00:06:00] Erin Hadary: I’m getting more insight into, I wanna help people give. I think there’s a lot in the wealth industry of accumulation, but we’re missing another piece of it, and maybe it’s because of my own holistic thinking, my liberal arts education, but what about giving?
And you have to give it a sustainable way. You can’t give it all. You can’t give it to you endanger your own financial security, but there’s so much joy in helping others and we see it sometimes just around the holidays, but I love watching people be generous and being intentional. And so getting that clarity of what do you wanna give, I love doing technical tax planning.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a nerd. Uh, [00:07:00] I love to take advantage of a good QCD. And if you don’t know what that term is, that’s a qualified charitable deduction. But I need to know you. I need to know what makes you tick. And that’s really important. I just coming back to that clarity. I also want to work with people who want to find the joy in giving to, and I think that that can be a vote with your money to a cause that really matters to you.
It can be giving to family, it can be giving to a stranger. Um, there’s opportunities everywhere to come together as people. And to lift each other up and money is necessary in our current society.
[00:07:51] Patrice Sikora: And you mentioned empowerment just before, that’s not something that’s easy to teach or to share. How do you explain to people they [00:08:00] are empowered, they can share their money, they can get joy out of this.
[00:08:04] Erin Hadary: That’s a great observation. You can’t teach empowerment. I have the opportunity to witness watching people. Turn on, so to speak, and the light came on. They have peace of mind, the greatest. Feedback I get from my clients is I finally have peace of mind, like I know where I’m going. I have this money foundation, I have Clarity, and that’s the financial planning process.
As a certified financial planner, we are very thoughtful. I’m a fiduciary, and so I take a seven step process. It’s not a once and done conversation. It’s very hard to do a limited scope, project-based financial plan, and so empowerment comes from. Getting to know all the pieces of your financial story, [00:09:00] creating a customized strategy for you, helping you implement it, and then monitoring the progress.
So that empowerment comes from going around that process and really seeing, oh. Okay, I’m ready. I know where I’m going. I know the choices I’ve made. I have confidence in what I need to do, is the next step. I love that piece. I love that peace of mind. I love watching that kind of your shoulders just go up a little bit higher.
[00:09:37] Patrice Sikora: Yeah. Rather like, knowledge equals empowerment equals peace of mind.
[00:09:43] Erin Hadary: Yeah. And action.
[00:09:45] Patrice Sikora: Action. Yes.
[00:09:47] Erin Hadary: I feel right now that where we are in time in society is we have very little control. I, I read the news, um, just like you do, [00:10:00] and it can be really hard.
[00:10:01] Patrice Sikora: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:02] Erin Hadary: I don’t have control over that. But if you look at your own situation and you think you know where you’re going, you get to create control, and in some of that there is empowerment.
[00:10:16] Patrice Sikora: Are there patterns you see in families when it comes to, uh, knowledge empowerment and the, the desire to
[00:10:27] Erin Hadary: share? The families I often work with have very complex relationships and. Maybe there are assumptions being made, and so I think I would start there. One of the things is breaking down assumptions and getting everyone to talk about the assumptions that they have for everyone else in the room.
So when it comes to money and family and complex wealth, we start with a listening [00:11:00] conversation, a curiosity and saying, you know, I made an assumption that I’m gonna inherit wealth. Well, that may not be true. Um, I had the opportunity to have a family wealth conversation and dad’s worth millions. He’s not planning to leave millions to the kids or grandkids.
He’s planning to leave them enough to be comfortable, but he wants them to work. He wants them to find. You know, their own voice, their own story. He doesn’t want them to suffer. And I think you hear that with other very famous people who are willing to talk about that. They want their kids to not suffer, but they’re not planning to leave their family wealth per se, to them.
They’re planning to leave it to charity.
Because they worked hard. I worked with a lot of first generation wealth stories [00:12:00] and then second generation wealth stories, and by the time it hits the third generation, I try to always segue, what were the stories? How did the first generation earn it? How did the second generation benefit from it? And often that’s an end education.
So I am very, very fortunate. I was able to go to college and my family was very clear. You pay for graduate school.
[00:12:28] Patrice Sikora: That’s fair. That’s fair.
[00:12:30] Erin Hadary: And I made decisions about where I would go to graduate school based on what I could afford. And so when it’s your money, you make different money choices. And when it’s a gift or it’s just feels like it’s someone else’s, sometimes you don’t make the smartest money choices or you don’t take full advantage of the fact that if this was mine, I would do it a little differently.
And I’ve seen that even in weddings. I’ve seen families gift so much money for [00:13:00] a wedding. That’s really fascinating. There’s a lot of joy for someone who’s giving the money. There’s a lot of joy for the person who’s receiving it. And sometimes there’s a lot of joy in the local community because money is available.
It’s unlimited, but it’s not really unlimited, is it?
[00:13:21] Patrice Sikora: You’re making me think, making me think of, um, parents who want their kids to understand the value of money. Yes. I want you to be comfortable, but I want you out there. I, I guess it brings up the question, when do they tell the kids how much they’re worth?
[00:13:38] Erin Hadary: I have seen it happen in your seventies and eighties. I have seen it happen in a will, and no one knew how much was there.
[00:13:48] Patrice Sikora: Wow.
[00:13:49] Erin Hadary: I have had the opportunity. To sit down with clients and say, would you like to have a family meeting and talk about money values without the numbers? [00:14:00] And sometimes parents say Yes, that would be really helpful to have a third party facilitate a conversation.
But I’m not gonna tell them how much they’re gonna get because I don’t know how much I’m gonna leave them. I may spend a lot on my own care. Because for a lot of seniors right now, they don’t have access to long-term care insurance. Long-term care insurance is no longer affordable for you or for I Patrice, unless you bought that policy years ago and even then it’s going up.
It’s very expensive. It’s very possible that money being left to the next generation can change dramatically if care needs change.
[00:14:41] Patrice Sikora: Very true.
[00:14:43] Erin Hadary: And so when you have these money conversations, sometimes people are crystal clear and they’re saying, I’m gonna give it to you for your first house. I’m gonna give it to you for your college education, and I’m gonna give it to you for your wedding.
And after that, you’re cut off. [00:15:00]
[00:15:00] Patrice Sikora: That’s a little harsh there.
[00:15:03] Erin Hadary: And then I also see family say, I’m okay with that because I really appreciate the fact that I had the head start. That I wasn’t carrying debt or student loans or things that were really heavy. Um, and that’s again, money and meaning and midlife plot twist.
All of it’s very complex. And making smart choices with money sometimes requires having a financial planner be in partnership with you to say, yeah. I know the industry trends, and right now it’s very expensive time. You may wanna approach this differently.
[00:15:43] Patrice Sikora: Erin, is there something we haven’t touched on yet in this podcast that you wanna make sure we do?
Otherwise, we’re gonna wrap it up and I’m just gonna tease it because you’ve got some great people coming on in your next couple of podcasts.
[00:15:55] Erin Hadary: I really hope that this podcast is a gift to [00:16:00] others.
[00:16:01] Patrice Sikora: Tell me more.
[00:16:03] Erin Hadary: I’m clear on my intention. Um, choosing to do a podcast is a little bit of extra work for anyone who doesn’t know about doing podcast.
Um, I came back and said, wow, I just took on a second job. I didn’t even know it, but I was never deterred. I feel very grateful for the privilege of being able. To use my voice and the experiences I’ve had to hopefully bring on guests and share their stories and empower others to be confident in the next step.
Because we all have twist. We have to navigate.
[00:16:47] Patrice Sikora: Outstanding. Alright, Erin, how can people reach you if they’d like to talk to you now?
[00:16:52] Erin Hadary: Patrice, I’d love for, um, our listeners to reach out to me on our website. That’s monetagroup.com/hadary, [00:17:00] and that’s H-A-D-A-R-Y, and you can contact myself and my team and we’ll be happy to set up a conversation, be about your own situation, or maybe even be a guest here on the show.
[00:17:13] Patrice Sikora: All right, listeners, please follow like and share this podcast and of course, join us for the next episode of Money Meaning and Midlife Plot twists. Thanks for being with us.
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