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 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.
As women, we are socialized into a world that has us thinking, for a thousand different reasons, that money is simply not for us.
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.
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 bit. 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 us. To interrupt this idea that we can’t get a hold of our own money. Interrupt this idea that somehow we couldn’t understand money even if we tried. 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 created this workshop — for thoughtful, critically-thinking, & motivated 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 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, but because this doesn't actually have to be that hard.
In this workshop, Getting Your Financial Life Together in 7 Steps, we’ll walk through a simple seven rung ladder towards, you guessed it, getting your financial life together! Wherever you’re at in your financial journey, you are more than welcome here. I can't wait to learn with you.