Playing the Long Game: Gamifying Love, Wisdom, and Money in Family Wealth
Buddy Thomas
Buddy Thomas is the author of Love Wisdom Money: The Family Fiduciary’s Guide to Generative Wealth. Through stories and lived experiences, Buddy shows how it is possible to protect family assets while deepening the relationships that give wealth its meaning. The true calling of the family fiduciary – the leader entrusted with guiding the family toward both financial and emotional continuity and well-being.
Love Wisdom Mondy gives wealthy and aspirational families a clear path forward for stewarding their wealth meeting both legal duties and moral responsibilities.
Today Buddy serves as a family wealth and advanced estate planning consultant to enterprise families, helping them sustain their legacies by preparing future generations to follow. In 2024, Buddy turned over the reins of Superior Planning Family Office, serving HNW and UHNW families since 1982 to his successors. Over the years Buddy has established more than 50 virtual family offices, providing family members, their associates, and most trusted advisors with what they need to collaborate on major family wealth decisions. He has served hundreds of trustees, successor trustees, beneficiaries, and their advisors as they walked through the planning, building, and estate settlement wealth transfer processes.
Buddy has written extensively on family wealth, including, The Widow’s Bridge – The Surviving Spouse’s Guide to Emotional and Financial Well-being and The Coming Widow Boom: What You and Your Loved Ones Can Do to Prepare for the Unthinkable. He has produced over 200 videos to educate family fiduciaries, through real life scenarios, on confronting the challenges and complexities that others have encountered. Buddy has presented to family leaders, their offspring, and advisors, through the University of San Diego, San Diego State University, the Financial Planning Association, the Purposeful Planning Institute, and Tiger 21.
Buddy is a trustee of the Catholic Community Foundation of San Diego and Build-A-Miracle (a cross-border non-profit dedicated to enriching the family wealth of the poorest of the poor in Tijuana, Mexico). He is Co-Chair of San Diego Rotary Club 33 Bequest Society, as well as a member of multiple other community and service industry councils and committees. Buddy has also developed family office policies and procedures (Superlan® Systems, LLC), and software (Advice Engagement, Inc.) to simplify and gamify big picture planning and implementation, while enabling family members to participate.
Buddy is a Certified Financial Planner, Accredited Estate Planner, Chartered Life Underwriter, and Chartered Financial Consultant. His life mission is to emplower family leaders to share their wisdom with loved ones in a way for them to generate their own wealth. Buddy and his wife Liz, live and have two sons in the San Diego CA area, and are actively involved in several philanthropic endeavors.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Welcome back to the Tamarind Learning podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kirby Rosplock, and I'm so excited because today we're going to explore how families grow, not just their capital, but their capacity, their character, and connection across generations. We're diving into a really interesting conversation that blends both the head, the heart, and some hard-won practices with a gentleman that I have come to greatly admire. His name is Buddy Thomas. He is a pioneer in the virtual family office concept and the founder of superior planning family office. Since 1982, Buddy has worked with high networth, ultra high networth families to safeguard those assets that they've built over time while strengthening those relationships and that gives those assets their meaning. So he's a CFP and an AEP, some more designations, and he's guided successor trustees, beneficiaries through complex estate settlements while helping families, leaders, and advisors collaborate more clearly and humanely. That's a nice thing. But he's also a prolific educator. So again, that's why he resonates so much. He's He's featured on podcasts and in articles, known for translating fiduciary duty into everyday language and practical rituals. One highlight, he's helped design and run dozens of virtual family offices, giving families real decision practices without real-world damage.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
So today, I'm super excited because we're also really talking about his new book. He's written this book, Love, Wisdom, Money: The Family Fiduciary's Guide to Generative Wealth. It's It's a concise story-driven framework for sustaining wealth across generations. It's anchored in love, which again makes my heart sing, but it's guided by wisdom, and it has wonderful stewarding principles throughout. It's available now in multiple formats, and it argues that without love and wisdom, money alone can quietly erode the very families it's meant to serve. So, Buddy, welcome to the show. We're thrilled to talk about how families and their advisors can cultivate generative wealth that outlasts market cycles and strengthens the people who steward it.
Buddy Thomas
That's a lot. But thank you so much, Kirby. I'm so excited to be here today. We've been talking about this for a while, and We are definitely kindred souls who just want to get the word out that managing family wealth can not only be healthy, but it can also be fun and educational for everyone. It's just an opportunity for everyone. I'm just so delighted to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Well, Buddy, one thing I love about your book is that it has some insights that I just was blown away by. We could talk so many different pieces. There's so many nuggets of knowledge. But I want to dig into this idea of gamification, like play, having fun. And that's something that I think you really inspire in your practice. And you argue that families protect assets best when they also grow that love and wisdom, that connection. Where do you see gamification fitting into that mission? What problem does it solve that maybe lectures and binders just don't work so well?
Buddy Thomas
It's one word. The word is engagement. Every time I know when we play games with our families, some of our children like to play games, and some of them don't. But if there's a game that everybody likes to play, then we're all in. That's when the love flows and the competition flows. Competition is something that I believe was designed by God to make us better by comparing ourselves to others and competing with others. It's a very healthy... Competition can be a very healthy thing, and that's the root of gamification.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
I love it.
Buddy Thomas
But there's one more thing about it. There's competition amongst ends of the individuals, and then there's the competition against the world. There's this world out there and it's chaos and everything. If we gather together and we play the game in the world, that based on our values, now that's where the magic is.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
That's the magic. Now, those skeptical families, those families are like, Oh, no, we don't do that. We don't play games. How do you get those to be adopters and engaged participants?
Buddy Thomas
That is what a fantastic question because that's one of the hardest things to do, particularly for the next generation, because they've already got their idea of the world, and then the parents have their idea of the world, and they're not the same. So they look at it as playing two different games. And so, well, I'll just wait until my parents are done playing their game, and then I'll play my game. So it's a barrier How do you do that? That's what it's taken me 40 years to figure out because we've had so many different families in so many different configurations. I can get into that if you want me to.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Well, if you had just a quick example, maybe, of a family who was like, Yeah, we're not doing that. What was it that made them turd the tide and then see the value of this?
Buddy Thomas
All right, well, There's two things that come to mind. First one is a family where the patriarch and matriarch were very, very conscious of intergenerational wealth. The children women were just doing their own thing. The matriarch and patriarch designed this wonderful estate plan, and they said, You're part of it, and we showed it to them. There were three daughters, and two of them said, Good, I'm all in. I could see how that could be fun. The third one, whose husband was a lawyer, said, I've talked to my husband and he decided that we don't want to participate. I looked at the father and he said, Well, that's too bad because this is the way I'm doing it. You would think that would cause conflict. There was a little pushback, but the way the parents set it up where they set up trust for each one of the children and said, My state plan is going to flow into trust for each of you that I'm creating at this moment, and I will be the trust ski of it for a while until I either pass away or you show me that you're going to take it and do what you want.
Buddy Thomas
And that's when the kids got engaged because it hit them that, oh, this is the game. This is the way it's set up. So I have to, What's a trust? And what's in that trust? And now they're asking questions, and that's engagement. So it doesn't happen all the time. Everybody dives in and says, I'm going to play that game. Yeah, let's go play the game. It's, Oh, what's in it for me? Oh, my inheritance is going in there. I guess I better pay attention. Then once you have their attention, this is such a fascinating game that I haven't seen anybody not engage in it once they realize that there's a future in it for them, and that future is bigger than anything they thought about.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's pretty mind-bending if you're a beneficiary and you haven't had the big reveal conversation or you haven't had the openness in your family. It sounds like gamification can create the context for some of these really bigger life realities. Helping a family maybe think about that gamification context. Tell us, in your words, what exactly is it or isn't it? When teaching fiduciary judgment and family governance, how is a gamification approach maybe really helpful?
Buddy Thomas
Well, first of all, I didn't set out to gamify this. It happened as a result of my My desire to simplify things. In the book, I talk about simplification because every family member has a different level of understanding a different desire for understanding, a different capacity, different set of time to do to get involved in the game. The most important thing for them to get started is simplify things for them. Bring it down to wherever they are, meet them where they are in a way that they can understand. As much as they want to get involved, they can. The more they understand, the more they will be involved. It all started with simplification. Then I worked in an office once that had a conference room in the lobby, and there was a receptionist that sat outside the conference room, and there were a number of other professionals in this office, and we would share the conference room. We were all in the state planning. It was a life insurance agency. She commented on me one day as I was walking out of the office. She said, Are you selling life insurance in there? I go, Yeah.
Buddy Thomas
She goes, Well, why is it that everybody else that's in that room is so serious and you and your clients come walking out of there laughing? The point was that we just were enjoying the process because once you get past this fact that we're talking about death, it's a big, beautiful world. Making it simple to understand and then getting people engaged in the game just makes it that much more fun and that much more productive.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
I just am curious about the mechanics. Tell me, are there points? Do you level up? You have a time bound? I think about a traditional game or heads-up display. Tell us, in your mind, how do you operationalize? How do you actually get people to think about this concept and then these pretty substantial and serious topics? When I die, what's going to be left? How do I make sure it's distributed? How do my family fall in line with what I hope my wishes are? How do they be productive citizens with all this?
Buddy Thomas
The simple answer, back to simplicity, is this is the The cool thing about this game is you have a very traditional way to keep score. It's called dollars. That is the result. The problem that most people get into when they start talking about estate planning is they start talking about the dollars first instead of the love and the wisdom first, which has more value than the dollars. If it's nurtured and cared for properly, it will last It can last for generations where dollars are spent. They come and they go, and you either preserve them and grow them or you spend them, and then they're gone. By not focusing on the dollars and focusing on who the family is and what they want and what they value, who they are is what they value. So trying to get back to answering your question is by keeping it simple. This is where our friend Jay Hughes came in, and he introduced me with his book, Family Wealth, that there was financial capital and human capital and intellectual capital. And I started to talk about that to my clients, and their eyes would blaze over because human capital, it sounds like, Is that trafficking?
Buddy Thomas
What are you talking about? When I looked at it, I thought, What would my mother say human capital? How would she define it? She would go, Oh, you're talking about love? That's where we came up with love. Intellectual capital is really from a family point of view, it's wisdom, and then financial capital is money. Once again, bringing it down to those simple terms where everybody can relate to it. Now you have everyone's feet on the ground, and now you introduce things from their point of view. They're engaged, and everyone's engaged. Then you can have the professionals come in, and they can play the game, too, because we're all playing at the same level, no matter how sophisticated it gets. Some people will dive deeper into it, but people know the street value of what it is that they're talking about. I think that's the baseline line is the street value of looking at things.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Yeah. I love that dollars might be one metric to quantify success. Did someone blow it all or lose it all or spend it too quickly or not run the right things. But I could imagine there might be other milestones based on those other love and wisdom that can also show you the choices that you're making, the people you associate with with the good work that you're doing. Those action items are also part of this game, right?
Buddy Thomas
Well, it's impact. The big word there. If it's money on one side, it's impact on the other side. The impact could be, how much fun are we having? How are we loving our family by doing this? How are we contributing to the community, to those things that we care deeply about? What impact are we having there? It's impact and money, and they're, I love Venn diagram, and they overlap each other. Then the third, there's impact, money, and then growth. Growth is intellectual growth, physical growth, monetary growth. Are we growing? Are we healthy? That's why one of the chapters in the book is called Healthy, Wealth, and wise. It's like a recipe for soup. All the ingredients are going in there, and then it either tastes good and it's healthy or it's not. That's what we're trying to do. I never used that analogy before, by the way.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
It's novel. It's anything can happen on the Tamarind Learning podcast, so you're good. Well, I love the idea that there's all these different ways to look at success and to look at how you're building a generative family culture. Talk to us about... You have this idea of like, Quests, and Walk us through what that means, maybe around prudent distribution decisions or values lines investing or managing conflict and repairing if you have some bad conflict in your family?
Buddy Thomas
Well, there's another one word, and that one word is the truth. A lot of us dance around the truth or don't want to face the truth. There's many outages about the truth. But the truth is I see the truth like a beacon. It's like a lighthouse. There is the rock. The light is on top of the rock. That's where where we're going. That's our direction. I think when things get dicey or people have different opinions or they jump to your conclusions and have made assumptions, and they think those assumptions or those assumptions to them are their reality. Sometimes it's not a bad idea to turn on what one of my mentors used to say, the floodlight of truth. Then you just, this is the truth, and you get down to it, and then once you're all standing on the same ground and you love each other and you know that fun is part of life, then you can get back in the game.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Yeah, I love that. That's so insightful. Maybe you can share with us a story or a case where you saw a multi-gen family run into some problems and they gamified. They use the game construct as a way to break through maybe a real reality that they weren't able to solve.
Buddy Thomas
There's a number of stories, but one that just jumped out is we had a family where the father, the patriarch, had a stroke. They had a real estate Numerous real estate holdings. They had five children. One of them was a CPA. The father was closed. He played everything close to the vest until he had a stroke. His son the CPA, was his successor trustee. He didn't have an entrepreneurial mind, but he was more of an accountant. He wanted to do things right. So he dragged his father into their estate planning attorney and said, That's I was okay now, but that was scary. So what can we do about it to the state planning attorney? The state planning attorney called me. He and I have collaborated. We collaborated for years. He's just a wonderful man. I also mentioned him in the book. But he passed away during COVID. Anyway, the dad said, All right, I want to do the plan. The CPA said, I want to the plan. We all sat down and we talked about how the plan was going to work. He goes, Well, let's show it to the family. They rented a nice conference room at a resort.
Buddy Thomas
We had dinner, and then we came back after dinner. I think the dinner was afterward because this whole thing held up dinner. When we showed the plan and the son that was running the business, not the CPA, he went ballistic during the break. He sat there, he sat there, we showed it. We actually had a game board up. We had the estate game board up on it, and it's got, we call it above the line, below the line. This is taxable, this isn't taxable. What we're doing is we're doing this for tax purposes, but we're also doing this for family governance purposes. Here's all the game, and here's all the... You're all the players, and here's what everybody's set to do. You're already doing it this way. All we did is put a game wrap around. He looked at it as, You're eating my cheese. You're taking my cheese. Because he had it in his mind, Well, the family total net worth is X, and I get one-fifth of X. Now, all of a sudden, it's a game? What? What are you doing to me? And he just felt like he had been attacked. So during the break, we talked to him a little bit, and I just got him aside and I said, You can do this one of two ways.
Buddy Thomas
You can do it the way you have it in your head, or if you play this game, you're going to end up with twice as much, and you're going to have the whole family behind you. I know you feel like you're all alone now. And he said, Well, all right, I'll take a look at After the break, we came back, we finished it up, we had dinner, we're sitting around, we're having a nice bottle of wine. And he just came over to me and goes, I get it. We were fortunate. That happened in one day. I mean, blow up and the result all happened in one day. But it was because he saw himself by the game, he saw himself It was part of a bigger picture when he felt alone and he felt the whole world was on his back.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Powerful. That's really powerful. I mean, segueing from a super intense, that's a super intense scenario of business transfer, wealth transfer, communicating to parties, what's happening next. I love games because they can function to a little person, 8, 10, middle school age, high school, college. Talk to me how you've seen this gamification concept in your practice help cross those age divides. It's sometimes dimey. A lot of families and professionals of how to teach concepts or how to get people interested.
Buddy Thomas
That brings up another family that both of the couple had both been married previously, and they each had one child who was married, and each of their children had one child. We did, once again, we set up the game board for the parents so that we can show their children how the game worked and set up those trusts for each one of the children because their concern was, well, if one of us passes away, the other one's family is going to have to wait till the other one passes away because the way they had it is they had his, hers, and ours. If one of them passed away, then the spouse would get their portion, and their family wouldn't get anything until the other spouse passed away. So anyhow, they had these trusts set up so that each child got some inheritance when the first spouse passed away, the one that died. The father was explaining it to... So there's the matriarch, the kids, and the grandkid. Kids. He was explaining it to an eight-year-old, or maybe he was 10, and he was talking about how there's this trust and this is what his mother's going to get.
Buddy Thomas
And when his mother passes away, then he's going to get this. But there's this note that's involved where something has to be paid back. And the kid said, What? I owe my mother how much? And that got that eight-year-old engaged by looking at it as a game. So I hope I didn't take too long and try and explain it.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
No, I think the reality is there's lots of games that are more specific to younger kids, save, spend, give, the piggy banks and the lemonade stand and whatnot. But I do think some of these more complicated concepts, like you just illustrated, can be approached with those kinds of gaming concepts. Maybe Can you maybe even talk to us a little bit how even things like trustee discretion, how might that be gamified with a rising gen where a family member is trying to explain the rules of the road and working with a trustee? Have you seen approaches to gamifying even those types of relationships?
Buddy Thomas
Well, the first thing I have to say is the game is not the answer. The game is a tool. Yes. It's just a tool that we use, and it's a tool that we use because everybody is in the game. You're offered You're offered a seating the game. Now, most people, I don't say that, most football games, there's only two teams playing and there's thousands of people watching. But if you can get in it, that's when it changes. The game changes. I once heard a Super Bowl champion talk about everything changes when you cross that white line. Now it's just a field of grass and 22 men. And that game changes. So the people in the stands, they can yell and scream and all that, but they're not in the game. So The game is there to engage the family at the level of love and wisdom so that they can understand the tool that money is and how to use it and not let the score of the game, the money score of the game, ruin the engagement. When I first told my wife about gamifying, when I realized, Hey, that's what we're doing as we're playing games, she goes, Well, this is serious.
Buddy Thomas
You can't be playing with it. It took a while for her to understand. Even my own wife has walked with me this whole maybe some year to understand that there's this element of fun and there's this element of love and collaboration that we're missing. And that's really at the heart of the book is to get everybody on the same team knowing that with our love and our values and our vision and our goals, we can succeed and we can have fun doing it no It doesn't matter what happens.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Super powerful. Really impactful what you just said. I want to also pivot a little bit to talk about how gaming and gamification can actually be really helpful, say, in scenario planning or just thinking through things before they actually happen. You mentioned the estate plan earlier. Are there other examples where you've gamified, Hey, let's walk down these different scenarios so you guys can be literally in the game thinking about the impact of these types of decisions?
Buddy Thomas
Once you're in the game, anything is possible. Now, there are rules. We have estate tax laws, and then there are the rules of... There are principles, fairness, perseverance, all these different principles in life that make up a family's family values. Values are those principles that you value the most. I mean, it drives me crazy when somebody gives me a list of principles and says, Pick three. I'm going, What do you mean, pick three? They're all important. But that's how families are. They value one thing over another, and each family is unique. So working, that's the bond, that's the glue, the family values, what they value. And by the way, values change from generation to generation. So in estate planning, and this is where who are you as a family really comes into play. When we started running my firm, before we took on a client, they would fill out what we called a legacy questionnaire, and it pretty much identified their values in a way that we could set it up so that we would follow the things that they cared about the most. Then you have the children may or may not feel the same way, but when the parents say, This is how we feel about it, you guys can modify it when it's your turn.
Buddy Thomas
The point here is you can lead them to the water, but you can't make them drink the water. Only they can drink it. It's an old adage. But what this does is it gives them, Here's the water. Here's what I'm doing with it. Here's what our family values are. You guys get to decide what's next based on what happens in the world and when you take over. It's an evolution.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
It's an evolution. I can imagine this whole concept can help build a lot of good team building Communication, how to manage conflict. Not everyone's going to agree, but you might agree to how you're going to get to a solution or an answer. Talk to us a little bit about bringing this headset to... Some of these technical conversations can really transform engagement. I mean, that's where we started this whole discussion was engagement.
Buddy Thomas
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand that question.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
I see that again. Yeah. So I'm just coming back to the whole idea that gamification can be such a wonderful tool to promote communication Gamification, manage conflict, help set rules, and build that best practice, those knowledge and those skills, and also be really engaging. Tell us more how you've seen gamification help with growth and development of the human capital?
Buddy Thomas
Well, nobody knows where we're going. I mean, somebody once told me, The whole world's out of control, don't you? Don't think for a minute that it's in control. You have to accept the fact that This family wealth, the combination of love, wisdom, and money, is a growing organism. It's going to grow as long as everybody is bringing what they have to the table and growing. Conflict comes when, usually in my experience, is when someone makes an assumption, I think I said this earlier, and they assume what assume is the truth. Then they dig in their heels and they're challenged. But if it's open and you say, All right, tell us what's on your mind. Then the group of people playing the game with the world all have a say in it. I know a camel is a horse designed by a committee, but just because you have a seat at table when you're younger does not mean you have a vote yet, but you can still be in the game. You can still be heard. Even the most extreme personalities that I've seen in the most extreme situations, once they're heard and you can accommodate them to the point where the truth says, you can't go any farther than that, then they had their shot and now they know what that looks like.
Buddy Thomas
They know there's these barriers. I didn't know why I was studying psychology in college.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
No, you do.
Buddy Thomas
That's how it works. I don't know. I hope that was- Yeah.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Well, I think at the end of the day, games give us places to practice things. You're learning, you're bringing up a lot of of information that typically needs to get unpacked. So you're getting the hook of engagement saying, Hey, in the wealth transfer example, this is coming and you got to be ready for this. So that's prompting, I need to be ready. What do I need to do? What do I need to learn? Who do I need to be mentored by? Or what data and information do I need to study? So part of the game is just inspiring people to rise up and play it and be part of it and participate and not sit, as you said, on the sidelines saying, Whatever. I can imagine you bringing this to families and then other advisors that are that estate planning attorney, that tax advisor, whoever. This has got to be a whole world shift for how they think about working with clients. Tell us about advisors and their role in this whole process.
Buddy Thomas
Yeah, that's the The silo practice versus the... The silo approach versus the ensemble approach. My son is a musician, and when he went to school, we went to To a school, they had a program there that was a Bachelor of Science. It was a business degree and a music degree combined. It was called Popular and Commercial Music. They were required to put together an ensemble, and at the end of the semester, their final was to go to the House of Blues in New Orleans and put on a concert. They were an ensemble, and they played together. Later on, he met a solo artist, guy that was very good, and he's very popular now. But when he wanted to go big time, his producer said, Where's your band? You didn't have a band. What he did is he went to all his friends who happened to be in this ensemble, and now they're his band. You can only go so far as a solo practitioner. Every date it goes by, it's more important to be on the team, the advisory team. The team, the advisory team, and the team is made up of the people that the family could trust.
Buddy Thomas
They trust some more than others. If they have a most trusted advisor, that's going to be their lead guy. But there's a lot of talk in this industry about coordination, and now coordination isn't enough. They have to collaborate. They have to be an ensemble. What the game does is it allows them to... Everyone's looking at the three game boards. Lifestyle, portfolio, legacy. Those are the three game boards. It's like the board game, Tripoli. You're playing three games at once, but the score matters in all of them. The collective score is what matters. If we're all working together, the chance of winning that game is far greater than if we're in these silos where one doesn't know what the other is doing. In order to get the results that I've seen possible, the more cohesive that team is, the better. But the problem is that they speak different languages. You got legalese and investmentese and accountingese. The client It's the trustees, their head is spinning. This guy said this, but this guy said that, and I don't know what he's talking about. But if we bring it all down to this game level, then it allows everybody to get in and understand from their point of view what's going on so that collectively, the trustees who are fiduciaries who are ultimately responsible, can make more informed decisions.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
That's That's so powerful. I couldn't agree with you more. I also believe this gives people a unified place to speak with the client, not at the client.
Buddy Thomas
Very well said.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
How many advisors lecture and pontificate their knowledge area and the client sits back and is like, I don't understand derivatives and complicated estate and tax language. But if you bring it all to where they are and help them see themselves as a player, an integral and influential, influential in their own game, where they're going to end up at the end, whatever scores that they're measuring themselves by or their family's success by. But if the advisors jump in and play this collegially alongside one another, that's so powerful.
Buddy Thomas
Love I heard it said once, and it's one of my addages now that we all listen to the same radio station, WIIFM. What's in it for me? And that's normal because we're individuals. But once we realize that there is such a real life thing as win-win, and if you can get win-win, win-win, win-win, win-win, win-win, that's when it's magic. But you can't do that if each one of you have a different agenda. So this is where you check your ego at the door, and it's that mastermind concept from Think and Grow Rich back in the '30s or whenever that was written. It's, check your egos at the door and let's put the problem on the table and let's see how we can put our minds together so that everybody wins. It's It's theoretical until you've seen it work over and over and over again. That's one of the benefits of age.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Yeah, I know. That's so cool. Again, I think we live in a world where people genuinely want to play and they want to engage. Yes, this is real-life stuff. But if we can make it accessible and approachable, I think I think we're going to have a better result. That's my intuition, right?
Buddy Thomas
Well, that's how I see, how I've seen the way it works. I'm getting pretty old, so I guess I'm going to take this with me forever.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Well, I think you're leaving a lot on the table, no pun intended. So I'm excited. Let's jump into a quick speed round before we wrap it up here. So, Buddy, what do you think? What are the biggest points or progress bars for these types of families that they should be focused on?
Buddy Thomas
What are the biggest what?
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Points or progress bars, the metrics or the markers for them.
Buddy Thomas
The markers for them, I think, are to meet regularly. Meet regularly, set realistic goals, and measure them regularly. See how you're doing, and then learn from what you did, and Reset those goals. Plan, execute, prosper, repeat.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Love it. What's the best age to start the money game?
Buddy Thomas
As soon as you could I talk. As soon as you can talk, I was just with my nephew and his kids, and they're already talking about love, wisdom, and money just because of their uncle. You know that there are these three things. So the sooner they're in the game, the better. And neither of my sons got involved until I set up little game boards for them to do their own thing because you could play this game by yourself. It's way more fun with others.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Yeah, I love it. Would you say this is a cooperative endeavor or a competitive endeavor or both? How do you see gaming?
Buddy Thomas
It's It's a collaborative endeavor, and it's competitive in that you're competing against possibilities. If the family can all agree to step into the possibilities, then it's game on. But in order to win, and the more you collaborate, the better your chances are of making good decisions and whatever winning is means to you.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Is there a card that you wish every family would add to their game deck?
Buddy Thomas
A card that they would add to their game deck? Yeah, it would be the fun card. That's the most important. I think that's the most overlooked thing, particularly when it comes to money, because everybody gets serious, and you have to be serious. But who was it? Einstein said, Life is a game. First, you learn the rules, and then you play to win. And the word play is the offering.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Well, Buddy, this has been such joy to talk to you today. And thank you so much for bringing all of your love, wisdom, and money insights to the Tamarind Learning podcast. I can't believe how much we've covered. Please remind us where listeners, viewers today can to access your book and your more about you?
Buddy Thomas
Well, we have a Love Wisdom Money website, https://lovewisdommoney.com/ and the graphics in the are there. There's A couple of hundred videos, little short videos I've done over the years. There's a lot of resources in there, and we have a team that's building it. So just because you saw it this week doesn't mean it's going to be the same next week. So please visit us at Love, Wisdom, and Money. I mean, just not and, Love, Wisdom, Money. But thank you so much, Kirby, for this. This is a joy to me because you get it. The more people that get it, the more fun we're all going to have, the more successful we're all going to have. This is just a perfect venue to do it. So thank you. Thank you.
Dr. Kirby Rosplock
Thank you. Well, I'm the one who has to be grateful because shared your time and your treasure. And if this episode helped you, anyone who's out there listening, watching today, think differently about family learning, fiduciary leadership, love, wisdom, money, please like, subscribe, and follow the Tamarind Learning podcast, and definitely get your book, Buddy. I mean, it shares so much insight, and it's really illuminating. And I think people have fun learning about how they can apply this practice among all the other wonderful insights. So again, Buddy, thanks for joining us at the Tamarind Learning podcast today.
Buddy Thomas
Thank you. My pleasure.
