Transcription of Tom Shepard for the show Back to School #52
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 52, Back to School airing for the first time on September 9, 2012 on WLOB and WPEI Radio, Portland, Maine. Today’s show features Tom Shepard or Shepard Financial and also Currency Camp, Maggie Knowles and Elizabeth Fraser of Kids Gone RAW, and Travis Wiggett, licensed clinical professional counselor.
As our listeners may know, this is our 52nd show which means we’re almost at a year, and we’re pretty proud of it. We know that many of you are going back to school yourselves or perhaps are bringing your own children back to school. We know that here at Dr. Lisa Radio Hour, education is an ongoing process. We’re constantly looking for people who can enrich our lives with their insights and their experience, and this is what we think we’re doing today with Tom Shepard, Maggie Knowles, Elizabeth Fraser, and Travis Wiggett.
Whether you get information from Tom Shepard about how to educate your children on financial issues, whether you decide maybe I’ll try some raw foods after listening to Maggie Knowles and Elizabeth Fraser, or whether you get insight from Travis Wiggett about some of the emotional issues surrounding going back to school, we know that you’re enriching your own life and being a part of our community, so we thank you for that.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is pleased to be sponsored by the University of New England. As part of our collaboration, we offer a segment we call Wellness Innovations. The University of New England recently hosted a ceremony to celebrate the construction of its patient care center. This will be the clinical home of the University of New England’s College of Dental Medicine teaching clinic and dental simulation facility.
We’ll provide space for the University of New England to explore new models of inter-professional healthcare education and practice. The patient care center will be the first facility of its kind in Northern New England combining comprehensive dental education with high quality delivery of oral healthcare, as well as clinical training space for patient-centered primary care. For more information on the patient care center and the University of New England, visit UNE.edu.
Recording: This portion of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast has been brought to you by the University of New England, UNE, an innovative Health Sciences university grounded in the Liberal Arts. UNE is the number one educator of health professionals in Maine. Learn more about the University of New England at UNE.edu.
Dr. Lisa: You’re on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. I’ve long understood the connection between health and wealth, and understanding one’s money, and understanding where one gets riches in the world that aren’t just money. The next thing is that from the very beginning, we’ve had with us Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial as a sponsor, and he is someone who really understands things the same way that we do. He understands the connection between health and wealth. We had a conversation with him last year, in fact, our Health Wealth show. If you want to hear more extensive conversation with Tom, you can go back and listen to that.
Tom’s just been on a tear this year. He has restructured his own business. He has restructured his offerings to the community and he is all about education, and health, and wealth, and bring the wealth of his knowledge to the community. Thanks for coming in, Tom.
Tom: You’re very welcome. It’s good to be here again.
Dr. Lisa: Tom, you used to be an educator. This is our Back to School Dr. Lisa Radio Hour Show. It is fun that you’re here today whereas just kids are going back to school. First of all, why did you decide that it was important to come from education into finance?
Tom: It’s funny as you say, I used to be an educator because I still think of myself as one, but the big decision to jump out of teaching Math and Economics at a private school – Gould Academy up in Bethel, Maine – came as a result of my students taking some of my personal finance classes and suggesting to me that I should talk to their parents. I thought, that sounds like a really great career. My wife and I, Bethel was a little too small for both of us to have professional careers, and so we decided to go down to Boston, and I thought I would pursue this career, and 17 or 18 years later, it’s now the parents saying, “Talk to my kids.”
Dr. Lisa: You have children yourself.
Tom: I do. I have three, 13, 11, and 8. They are often times, I say, my biggest teachers with respect to what’s important, what’s a value, how do we spend our money. We’re constantly having to make decisions and make judgments about how best to raise them. At the same time, the patterns of how we do that with our children seem to also spill over into in what you need to do to be successful with your money as well, raise successful kids, be successful raising your money.
Dr. Lisa: Is it true that people will often follow patterns that they learn in their own childhoods?
Tom: Follow is one way to look at it but often times, what we find is that people don’t just follow patterns that they might have picked up when they were kids. They could also get stuck in those patterns.
Dr. Lisa: It’s an entrenchment that takes place, and then people maybe can’t move forward in their lives.
Tom: Right.
Dr. Lisa: It’s true that I said you were a former educator. I guess, that was erroneous because this is very important to you. You’re still an educator.
Tom: Yes, very much so.
Dr. Lisa: I know that you educate your clients as they come in, and you have your own organization, Shepard Financial that based in Yarmouth. You’re also putting together something really interesting for kids. That’s something you’ve been wanting to work on and wanting to do for a while.
Tom: When I was a teacher, I was trying to make Math relevant to the kids. There was not a fourth year requirement for Math at Gould Academy. I felt like a lot of the kids were going off to college but some wouldn’t. I wanted to not only make math relevant but also give them some real practical personal financial stuff that would maybe help avert some of the mistakes that I made, credit cards, and managing debt, and making decisions about how to spend your money, and how to save your money, and how to invest your money.
We created a class for the kids and it was great. We started off with only four. The second time I offered it, there were 17, so it clearly hit a nerve. When I moved back up to Maine from the Boston area and got involved with the school, I was a finance chair. We were talking about, can we do a better job on teaching kids about money. It’s a very popular topic right now. We need to do a better job of educating our kids about personal finance.
I’ve made some attempts to go into different schools, and have conversations, and see if we can get that niche topic woven into things like History, and Writing, and English. I have been somewhat frustrated by that process, and so we decided to go out and create our own organization that’s called Currency Camp. We’re launching it. This is almost like the launch right here on the show. We’ve got a Facebook page that should go live very shortly.
What it is right now in its first iteration, its birth, is an eight-week class that we’ll be teaching this fall, and will take kids through the seven different states of money, and weave in some good solid Math, and make it interesting, and fun, and hopefully, it will be a great learning experience for this first group of kids that go through it.
Dr. Lisa: Where is this being held?
Tom: One of the things that we were really interested in doing was not putting it in a school building. We’ll be hosting this first eight-week class in a conference room upstairs of Doc’s Café in Cumberland, Maine.
Dr. Lisa: Doc’s Café itself is relatively new.
Tom: It’s very new, yeah.
Dr. Lisa: You have a lot of good, fun energy that’s starting up there.
Tom: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa: What types of kids are you looking for? Do they have and what ages?
Tom: I want to try and keep this group fairly close in age to each other. I like to say that this first offering is for high school students only. I know that there is a group beyond high school that could really benefit from going through this program, and I am sure that if we tailored it specifically to younger kids, it could work too but this group is sort of going back to my roots and saying, “Guys, here I am again but I know a lot more now than I did 17 or 18 years ago when I was offering it basically as a Math class, but it’s going to be a lot more than that this time.”
Dr. Lisa: It’s important that you offer it in Cumberland because this is where you live.
Tom: Yeah, it’s where I live. My daughter is 13. She is in eighth grade, so I will not encourage her to come to this first class but it would be really cool if we could get this kicked off and have it become a permanent fixture wherever, and she might be able to take it next year or the year after. We got one other adult who is very interested in it and she will be auditing the class along with me and helping me just make sure it does what we wanted to do. Then, she might take over and do a second offering. The two of us will be offering it twice maybe in the winter session, another eight-week program.
Dr. Lisa: Speaking of adults, I know that you also have classes that you’ve put out there and seminars you’ve put out there for adults in the community, and you have one that is also coming up. Currency Camp starts in September?
Tom: In September. September 17th. It’s a Monday night. That will run eight weeks. Then, on a Tuesday night, I think it’s the second week in October, we will be speaking at White Pine Community Church as part of their community connections program. That also will be a workshop on your relationships with money.
Dr. Lisa: For those individuals who are interested in these stages of money, there is an exciting project that you’ve been working on for the last year, I guess, that is now up on Facebook.
Tom: Yes, on Facebook, we’re going to write a book, and finding the time to write a book, and the money to write a book, and all kinds of other things that go into doing that. I got to a point where we needed it to be a little bit more interactive and write it in smaller bits and pieces. We’re using Facebook right now to try and get some of what we have written out there.
Our first set was a series that talks about the difference states or relationships that people have with their money. The second one that we did was on allowance and how it changes as your kids grow in each. Then, the one that we’re doing right now is a series where we talk about the parallel structures of time management versus money management. I guess, more than anything else, it’s me entertaining myself and I hope other people get some value out of it.
Dr. Lisa: You were profiled in Maine Magazine, I think, in June. Is that right?
Tom: In June, yeah.
Dr. Lisa: They talked a lot about your view of the world and your view of your work as being impacted by the way that you’ve approached livings. You were a lacrosse player. You’re still a lacrosse player. You still play basketball. You’re an adult man but you’re still in the game. Do you feel like that’s the way that you’re living your life, is just trying to be in the game?
Tom: Somewhere in writing about allowance, we ran across this concept of play in terms of a philosophy. The ideas that kids seem the way they play, they’re really into it. Their feelings are taken away from the play because they got 9000 other things to do. This philosophy about play at work really is about injecting that same focus and enthusiasm for what it is that you do, and when you do it, all of a sudden, something else happens. It becomes really enjoyable.
I know when I play lacrosse and I get into that place, some people will refer to it as a zone, it’s really, really cool to be playing at that level. It’s also something that happens at work. There are days where I just get in to that zone and you just get so much done. There are times when it happens as a family. You just get into that zone. The same thing is true often times with managing one’s money. You can try, and set it up, and make it happen, and be disciplined. You can work at it. You can save. You can invest but sometimes, it’s really just working at all those things and then, forgetting about it that you realize that you’re in the zone.
That’s one of the things that we aspire for our clients. It’s that that your money doesn’t become the thing that you obsess about all day long, but instead that it serves you in this way that allows you to drop it, be in a zone with it, and accomplish all these other things, and accomplish great things.
Dr. Lisa: How can people learn more about playing with their money, about going back to school with you, and Currency Camp? Where is the best place for them to go?
Tom: I still think the best place for them to go because I can get other places, is to go to our website at ShepardFinancialMaine.com. From there, you can click on the Facebook link, and that will take you over to Facebook. There is a very clean explanation of the different states or relationships with people with their money and you don’t have to go sorting around through Facebook looking for it. It’s right there. I still think that’s the best place for people to start if they want to learn more about us.
Dr. Lisa: Is that how they would get in touch with you if they were interested in becoming a client?
Tom: Certainly. Our e-mail address is there. Our phone number is there. In case you don’t want to get on to the computer or you don’t have one, our phone number is 207-847-4032. Our e-mail address is [email protected].
Dr. Lisa: Thank you so much for coming in today. This is Tom Shepard from Shepard Financial, and he is helping us go back to school.
Tom: Thank you very much.