Your Family Tree and the Clarity of Hindsight

Have you ever stopped to think about how seemingly small decisions in your past have literally changed the trajectory of your entire life?Let me give you one small example.

My father was born and raised in Gary, Indiana.My mother was born in NY but her family moved to Gary, Indiana where she met my father and they married.Gary, Indiana, back in the day was a bustling city not too far from Chicago with a manufacturing employment base due primarily to US Steel being the major employer.It was also the birthplace of Michael Jackson, so that is kinda cool, too!

Having a wife and five kids to support as the sole income producer, my father took a leap and grabbed a job as an Industrial Engineer with a large grocery store chain based out of Cincinnati.This took our family from Gary, Indiana, to Cincinnati, Ohio.Kroger’s was growing and they moved their employee’s a lot so we moved next to Sylvania, Ohio (near Toledo) and then to Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.

It was the next transfer that made a huge impact on our lives.Kroger decided to send my father to Nashville, TN.We were transplanted Yankee’s from up north crossing the Mason-Dixon line and entering a new world of the South at the ripe old age of ten!

Fast forward to today.Because my father took that job with Kroger’s and was transferred three times until we moved to Tennessee, look how this impacted multiple lives.Out of five children, four of them plus spouses still live in Nashville.The four kids in Nashville produced six grandchildren and three of them have stayed in Nashville and one is planning to move back after college.And one of those grandchildren is married and have just had a great grandchild born in Nashville.

My wife is from Toronto, Canada and married me over 30 years ago and has lived in the Nashville area ever since.Her parents were able to move to Nashville and retire here to be near us and their four grandchildren and great grandchild.That one decision forty-four years ago, my father made to take a job that required a move every few years literally impacted his wife and five kids, four spouses of the five kids, six grandchildren, one great grandchild and my two in-laws!

Seemingly small decisions can have a huge impact on the lives of multiple generations of families.It really makes you stop and think about how decisions each person makes in the present can trickle down decades later to future family members.If folks take the time to make calculated decisions, the benefits from these decisions can compound over time to make life better, or worse, for their family.

Too many people only pass down bad decisions to the next generation who, more or less, continue the tradition by making more poor decisions and then wondering why they can’t seem to make any progress in life.Ideally, the opposite would be true as well.Make good decisions and then give your children a leg up so they are not doomed to start from zero trying to scratch out a living in a brutally competitive economy.

What if you could decide to do something for your family that would impact not only you and your children’s lives but way on down the family tree?Probably the best thing you can do is to educate your children about financial matters and how to build true wealth at the earliest possible age.

Every child is born with no money.Their parents may be rich or poor, but every baby starts out in life the same way.No job, no income, no credit score, no money.So why is it possible for some babies to grow up as adults and be financially secure while others stay in a constant state of financial struggle with no hope of climbing out of the quicksand?

Educating yourself and passing on tips of what actually works after you try to implement new ideas into your life is the answer to stopping the cycle of misery.There is a prevalence of misinformation and miseducation that does not work in the real world.People are desperately searching for answers to the problem of not having enough money to live a lifestyle that does not consist of living on the edge of solvency from paycheck to paycheck.

This blog is my attempt to help guide my own children and, at the same time, open it up to the world to see that it is possible to go from no money at birth to more than sufficient money in order to live a great lifestyle.We just have to take baby steps to master the subject that is not taught in our obsolete educational system.

The starting point is to realize you have a problem and conventional methods are not fixing it.Then you must also have the desire to seek out answers and put them into practice to test them out in your life to prove if it will improve your situation.When something does not work over some period of time, it is back to the drawing board to search for the next potential solution.Never give up.Your family tree is counting on you to figure this out!