Talking about money might make you cry (and other lessons learned)
This spring marks four full years of running my business, Ladies Talking About Money, and working with some pretty incredible women one-on-one, in small groups, and in larger workshop settings. Today I’m sharing three lessons I’ve learned working alongside these wonderful women.
Everybody has feelings about money (and everybody thinks they’re weird for having feelings about money). I’ve worked with women all across the socioeconomic spectrum - women living completely paycheck to paycheck trying to put a thoughtful plan in place to pay off their debt all the way to women who’ve inherited multimillion dollar trusts and everywhere in-between. Whether you grew up poor, middle-class, wealthy, or some mix, talking about money is intimate for everybody (especially women, who are socialized to believe that we’re not supposed to be part of the conversation on money and that talking about it is taboo, unladylike - ugh - or inappropriate). All of the repression around this topic amplifies the emotions we feel when we finally open up about it. On a high percentage of my first phone calls with clients or potential clients, the women I’m talking to start crying. And then they apologize for crying as though they’re the only ones crying about money. And then I tell them that this happens literally all the time and there’s nothing wrong with them for crying.
Women are incredibly generous. Again, across the socioeconomic spectrum, women are disproportionately giving with their money (between 65-75% of donations are made by women! Wow and ugh!). Most of the clients I’ve worked with over the years spend a significant portion of their income on others - philanthropic donations, gifts to friends, or sharing with family. There can be challenges with being socialized as a women who is incentivized to be kind and giving and generous but also wanting to make sure you have enough money to take care of your own basic needs. This is a balance I try and help my clients tread.
You do not need to be a math whiz to understand how personal finance works. One of my favorite feelings is watching the women I work with realize how simple most of this money stuff is - with the proper gentle guidance, it’s highly possible to feel like you know what you’re doing with your money. So much of the “world of high finance” (disproportionately white men in suits) wants us to believe that we need to be experts if we’re even going to enter the conversation on money. That couldn’t be more false. Good personal financial hygiene is not at all complicated - fourth grade math is the threshold, but that’s kinda it.
All of these lessons are tied together with the simple fact that when we’re in community with other women talking about money, we demystify it and make it far less scary. So many women I work with were suffering in silence - because they were embarrassed (“I feel like I’m too late to start understanding money” or “I feel like I’m the only one who doesn’t understand money”), because they felt stupid, or because they felt truly overwhelmed about where to start. There is no such thing as being too late to the conversation, and I promise you, wherever you’re at, you aren’t stupid and there’s nothing wrong with you. Women couldn’t even get their own credit cards until the 1970’s, so it hasn’t really been that long that we’ve been able to even have skin in the game. You’re safe, you’re smart, you’re capable, and I’m rooting for you!
