My Story
61% of women would rather talk about their own death than money.
I definitely used to be one of them.
Money is weird. It’s taboo. It’s for men. It’s for rich people. It’s for greedy people. It’s confusing. It’s too hard to understand. Good people don’t care about money. Women don’t care about money. Money is not for me to understand.
These were all the messages and stories I had myself believing for the first twenty-five years of my life. For so long, I lived into a narrative I had grown up consuming but never questioning. As a woman in pursuit of “goodness,” money wasn’t supposed to matter. And yet as I got older, I started bumping into all of the ways that this mindset was limiting me.
🆘 I had no emergency savings plan.
🏦 I didn't even know how to login to my retirement account.
😱 I thought investing was risky and scary.
🚩 I moved through life as though someone else would just take care of it for me.
As I started talking to my female friends and colleagues I realized I wasn’t alone. The research also confirmed this.
🤨 Women hold only 9% of positions in venture capital, 3% in hedge funds, and 6% in private equity.
🙄 A whopping 86% of investment advisors are men.
😟 Women think they won’t be good investors (only 34% of women claim to have a high level of investment knowledge, compared with 49% of men), but the numbers show that when women invest, they actually outperform men!
😮 Women keep an average of 71% of their money in cash (earning no interest, not compounding, nada) compared with 60% of men.
😳 A woman who earns 85k/year but never invests could lose out on over 1 million dollars over the course of her life. When you bring this down to the day-to-day level, that’s like throwing away $100/day.
And this isn’t our fault. This is systemic sexism at work. As women, we are socialized into a world that has us thinking, for a thousand different reasons, that money is simply not for us.
All signs are telling us that the world of money is by men and for men.
While those numbers are daunting, there's good news: the story that we're not allowed or supposed to understand money is just that — a story. And it's not a true one. Getting your financial life together sounds hard, but it’s not actually that hard. For most of us, we just need someone or something to interrupt this idea that we can’t get a hold of our own money. We absolutely can, but if you're not sure where to start, you are so not alone. Nothing is wrong with you.
🙍♀️ Maybe you feel nervous because you feel like you're coming to this conversation too late (you're not).
🤦♀️ Maybe you're ashamed because you don't feel as "financially responsible" as you could be (we'll learn together!).
🤷♀️ Maybe you're stressed because you think it's too late to ask the question, "what the f is a 401k?" (Again, I didn't even know how to login to my account until 3 years after I opened it).
That's why I started Ladies Talking About Money — for thoughtful, critically-thinking, & ambitious women who can one thousand percent make sense of all this money stuff but just need a gentle push in the right direction.
Who am I? I'm a Special Education Elementary School Teacher turned Certified Financial Paraplanner (FPQP™) and aspiring CFP® who's passionate about making sure women don't get left behind when it comes to understanding their money. Given my background with kids, I use super easy to understand language - not because you're not smart AF, but because this doesn't actually have to be that hard.
I provide financial planning + support to millennial women who, like you, are smart and doing amazing things in the world, but need some gentle guidance around money.
Here’s the truth: personal finance has basically nothing to do with our ability to understand math or complicated equations or numbers. It takes learning and practicing some good habits and knowing how to navigate an excel spreadsheet. That’s kinda it.
I’m not saying it won’t take any work, but the work is mostly getting past psychological barriers that tell us not to talk or think about money.