By Mark Heeter

Where to begin?

I feel a bit overwhelmed by the number of ideas right now, not knowing exactly where to start, and not knowing exactly where the first steps will lead me, what corner of the big picture we’ll land on.

As I think about it, though, this journey will begin with the center, and I will always come back to the center, so I can start again. We can launch in a different direction, down a different path, toward a different goal. So we can start again.

I just scribbled down some ideas over the last few days, a couple words and a few phrases. The first one: delayed gratification. The next word: disciplined. Roth? Autopilot? What you do with your money = what you value. The word (youth). They can overlap.

This jumbled word soup, thrown together, is a pretty good analogy for how many of us think about money, countless ways it touches our lives, yet not always well-connected. These things mean something to me, and I think they might mean something to many of us.

What financial lessons might we have learned or experienced in our youth and over time, when our families, friends, and environment were modeling behaviors and showing us how to interact with the money that’s such an important part of our lives? And what lessons and behaviors are youth today seeing and absorbing? What are their questions? And how can we help them find answers?

This is where we begin.

The complexity of our financial lives is with us from our early childhood, is compounded the minute we marry, and again the minute we have children. And there are countless more milestones. We move through jobs and onto careers, but mostly what we do is watch our parents, then brothers and sisters, and then our friends – each one with their own money stories – then society, and now influencers that flood us with ideas about how to behave with our money.

We learn how to spend first. Then we learn how to earn. It could be a little allowance or that first little job. Habits, ideas, and behaviors around money – like anything – start very young. Frankly, I think our money life revolves around two very powerful emotions: fear and greed. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either, and we all have some of each, but their importance in much of what affects our money lives cannot be overstated.

I’ve learned some lessons, like everyone, about this. I have a deep commitment to trying to helping people – especially younger people – explore some of the basics about living the best money life that they can. I am just as eager to learn as I am to share. I want to learn where they are and what questions they want to ask. This can be a wonderful journey, thinking about tomorrow’s money moves. What will the next step be? I won’t claim to have all the answers.

But thinking about tomorrow’s money moves is where we begin.