Anita Rao
Money was not a topic of frequent conversation in my household. I only really began to understand my family's money situation in comparison to my friends. As an elementary school kid, I felt like I never got the flashy stuff my friends did. No Limited Too t-shirts, orders from the Delia's catalog or my own American Girl doll. We shopped frequently for clothes at consignment stores. But as I got older, I gained some important perspective. Realizing that traveling overseas wasn't how many folks spent their summers and not worrying about affording a college education was a huge luxury. While my parents were often frugal when it came to material things, it turns out that was much more about their values than their pocketbooks. I am now in my mid 30s, more than a decade into my working life, privileged to have no debt and a year away from getting married. So I have been in deep thought about my money situation, my money story and what I want it to look like in this next chapter.
This is Embodied, I'm Anita Rao.
When it comes to money, I've learned from my immigrant parents that savings are important, and so is sharing your wealth with family in need. But figuring out how those beliefs shape my relationship with money today is work I am just starting — right here, right now, with this episode. Up first: better understanding my money story. The concept at its core is pretty simple.
Steven M. Hughes
A money story is all of the things that you've experienced around money.
Anita Rao
That's Steven M. Hughes. He's a financial therapist and money reiki practitioner. He says that if you want to start reframing your relationship to money, a goal like "budget better" isn't going to cut it. You have to go deeper.
Steven M. Hughes
As we think about our money, if we don't explore the things and the roots that have brought us to the money decisions that we make, then we're not really starting from the right place — or we're not giving ourselves the opportunity to have a strong relationship with money as we could. And so our money story includes the things that we heard when we were growing up, the things that we've experienced around money, and what our parents experienced when it comes to money, what their parents experienced when it comes to money. Because if you grew up in a household where your parents were in a house that came from humble beginnings, then it's not a surprise that they may be frugal when it comes to raising you and your siblings — whether they have, quote unquote, "a lot of money" or not. And so embracing our money story helps us really start from the beginning instead of starting from the middle when we're deciding to make some big financial changes.
Anita Rao
Steven got his education in financial psychology and behavioral finance. But he doesn't just look at this stuff from a theoretical standpoint. He's practiced what he preaches. In college, he made what he's called every possible money misstep. And it took some diving into his own history to make financial changes in his life.
Steven M. Hughes
Both of my parents are from Jamaica, and I'm a Jamaican American here in the United States. And you know, just like any other immigrant parent, they were really focused on us getting a really good education. But we very seldom talked about financial education in our household when we were growing up. And experiencing, you know, financial challenges and not talking about them, kind of set the stage for me to make those money missteps in college and not really talk about them or process them. And so, I did have seven maxed out credit cards, I had overdraft fees to the point they closed all of my bank accounts, I had repossessions and eviction. My credit score was at 385 at one point, and I didn't have people that I could say, "Oh, this person would be able to help me because their financial position is what I want." And so, you know, these experiences that I had, I felt like, who should I share them with, because maybe everyone's going through them. But as I've gotten older and, you know, had more experiences, more education to help more people through the same things, I've really seen that it's not just the decisions that I made around money, but oftentimes the way that I was raised. Or the things that I heard or thought about money that dictated the way that I was making these decisions. And so now my work is really around helping people get to the roots of their money challenges. Not to say that they are bad at budgeting or can't save, but really taking a step back to figure out what did they hear about money when they were growing up? What are some money myths that they don't acknowledge or align with how they feel about money now? And exploring those things, because those are things that I had to explore for myself.
Anita Rao
Your money story might look very different from Steven's, which is the case for organizer and money coach Morgan Curtis. Morgan helps people with inherited wealth redistribute their financial resources in ways that align with their values. And she ended up in this line of work in large part because of her own money story. Morgan comes from a wealthy family, but she didn't quite know what that meant for her own future until a specific moment in college. It all started with a broken down Volkswagen Passat.
Morgan Curtis
I was raised in a family where it seemed like we had everything we needed — maybe even more than enough — that no one was even talking about how to understand our position in the world. And see, I had that car and my dad had originally bought it. So I was like, oh, when I sold it, "Dad, here, what should I do with this money? It's yours, it was your car." And he said, "Well, you can keep it, but as long as you invest it in the stock market." And that was his first attempt at financial education for me. And I was like, wait a second, I'm a student activist who's been organizing for fossil fuel divestment at the college campus where I am. And, huh, investment sure sounds like the opposite of divestment, maybe that's not something I want to do. But I, at that time, I thought, okay, maybe I could invest in some solar panel companies or something that might be aligned with my values. And so, I opened up a brokerage account and went to go transfer over the $1,500, and when I opened that account and logged in for the first time, there was $350,000 in the account. And I froze, I was shocked. I hit refresh, I was very confused. And when I called my dad to be like, what's going on? He was like, "Oh, no, you weren't supposed to know about that." And, yeah, right away, I was like, "Dad, I want to give away this money. I don't want it."
Anita Rao
That is a wild — I mean, I cannot imagine how wild of an experience that must have been of, just, kind of, seeing those numbers that, you know, don't even seem real at that point in your life — like, that amount of money, $350,000. But you come from a family line that has built wealth over generations. It's something you, kind of, picked up on a little bit as a kid. But then after this experience, you really began to dig into your family lineage. So tell me about what you learned about where that money came from, and how you began to feel once you started getting more information.
Morgan Curtis
So I had one, kind of, early family memory that started me thinking about all this, was — I was an avid reader of the National Geographic Kids Magazine. I remember one time reading about the tar sands — this huge, industrial project in the place known as Canada — and the impacts on the water and on indigenous people there. And I remember being in tears, going into the kitchen and being like, "Dad, this is so terrible." And he said, "Oh, like, your grandfather invested in those same companies running those tar sands projects. They're really profitable." And I was devastated, but also confused. I didn't understand, I didn't think my grandfather had ever been to Canada. I didn't know what investing was, and I, kind of, tucked that memory away until later. But yeah, as I started to research my family at the same time as I was organizing and starting to get educated — especially by my peers of color — about the roots of the climate crisis in white supremacy, and in colonialism, in capitalism, I started to look at — huh, I think my own family has really participated in a lot of those same systems. And, yes, my family were amongst some of the original settler colonizers of what we now call the United States — what we now call New England — and have held positions of political and economic power passed down over the generations, including land ownership, and shipping companies, and gold mining, and participation in the Atlantic slave trade. And as I learned all these things, it became ever more clear to me: This money is not mine. It was stolen from other people.
Anita Rao
Steven, I want to talk about this, you know, the a-ha moment that you had in your life about money, and you realize all of these emotions that come up when you have those moments. How do you then take people from those really emotional realizations into thinking more deeply about the psychology behind their money behaviors, and why they are doing what they're doing?
Steven M. Hughes
One thing that I try to get people to understand is that the decisions that they made in the past were the best decisions that they could have made with the information that they had. And a part of my practice is really connecting the things that they want to do with their finances with things that they're already doing positively in their life. Money management is a skill that a lot of us, kind of, gloss over, or it's not explained to us in that way. We just have an expectation that since everyone uses it every day, or it's something that we talk about in generalities and not specifics, that people have a better handle on it. And so that gives people the, really, the space to start thinking about how they can get out of their situation, and even changing the language that they're using. Even something as small as when we're talking about financial net worth — to put the word financial in front of the term net worth, so that people don't equate their actual self-worth with what they have on their net worth sheet. And so I want to help people really take that stress off of the table, so they can do the things they want to do.
Anita Rao
Money is connected to so many things in our lives — thank you, capitalism. So interrogating your own money experiences — and figuring out what you want to do with that information — is a journey that can start any time. We asked a few listeners to dig into their own money experiences, and this is what they told us.
Erika
Hi, my name is Erika, and I live in Oakland, California. I'm a single woman living in my 30s, and I work for a nonprofit and live in one of the most expensive places in the country. I grew up with immigrant parents who achieved the quote unquote, "American Dream." My dad literally came to the U.S. with a suitcase and $20 in his pocket. They were incredibly frugal and smart with their money when we were growing up, so I didn't realize how privileged I was. But they paid for my out-of-state undergrad and graduate school education, so I definitely realized that I grew up upper middle class. I feel like I'm never going to be able to achieve the sort of financial success that they have, and that they came to the U.S. for me to have. It's honestly very stressful feeling that way.
Annika Findlay
Hi, I'm Annika Findlay, and I'm a college student. I would say that my family is generally, like, pretty, like, average middle class, but I did have the opportunity to go to a private school for high school. And I can always remember, like, talking with the other kids whose parents were not quite as well-off about how weird it was to go shopping with our friends. Because we would show up with the, like, 20 bucks we made babysitting last week, and our friends would show up with, like, $300 that their parents gave them.
Zuoyi Phang
My name is Zuoyi Phang, and I'm calling from Durham, North Carolina. I grew up in a household that money isn't always readily there without hard work and time. Both my parents worked in service industries since I could remember. I also went into the service industry after high school. I am definitely happy with my job, but it comes with challenges that limit me to support myself without wanting to look for another job. It's always an ongoing battle of, do I work myself to the bone with three jobs and not take a day off? Or do I manage with five or six days and then try to stay sane through it?
Anita Rao
That was Erika, Annika And Zuoyi. All three of them mentioned feeling stressed or anxious about finances. And now that I'm tracing back my own money journey, I'm noticing how often those feelings have come up for me as well. The anxiety definitely piqued post-college, when I was living in New York City and interning at a very cool organization with a very poor weekly stipend, and also working as a hostess at a Colombian restaurant. I had the privilege of relying on my parents for backup, but I really wondered if I would ever find a job in this field where I could take care of my bills by myself — preferably without having to come home each night and ice my shins with frozen peas, which was a given during my time at Bogota Bistro. In Morgan's work, she often encounters folks who need help dealing specifically with feelings of shame and guilt.
Morgan Curtis
I work with people who have inherited wealth, or maybe just class privilege, but not necessarily access to wealth yet in their families. And they've been educated, organized, brought into understanding that they are beneficiaries — we are beneficiaries of an unjust system. And the way I think about that is: Guilt is feeling bad about something you did. Shame is feeling bad about who you are. And guilt, I would say, is a really healthy response. It's an empathic human response to living in an unjust system and benefiting from it. And we can use it, it can make us shine a light on an area of our life that, up until this point, has been easy to keep hidden or ignore. But shame doesn't do that so much. I think shame can make us want to hide more. And so, a lot of my work is saying, like, "Wow, like, your guilt brought you here to the point at which, like, you're not willing to keep going forward, accumulating resources off of other people's labor, off of the destruction of our environment, off of an unjust economic system. And the best medicine for that guilt is action, is doing something about having benefited in this unjust way." And so I see the more action folks take, the more that guilt and shame is able to rest and recede a little bit.
Anita Rao
I'm curious about wealth redistribution on a more personal level, because there's so much pride wrapped up in money, and having money, and feeling like, you know, you need to be able to pay for all your own things. Otherwise it's shameful, or you're not caring for your family. If there are people who want to share wealth with a loved one that may be met with skepticism or discomfort, how do you encourage them to go about that and start those conversations?
Morgan Curtis
Yeah, we all live in this culture, in this system, that prizes individual success and making it on your own. And it can be awkward to try and make our way through to acknowledging in our relationships like, "Oh, I think I might have more resources than you do." And like, "Are you open to receiving some support for whatever it is?" A number of years ago, I had a friend who's Chicana, first generation immigrant, and she was applying to law school. And it was a big dream for her to be able to fight for the rights of her community. And we just had this sweet moment where I was like, "I feel moved — if you're willing — to, like, pay for your LSAT prep, and the test, and all that." Just as, like, me saying, like, yeah, your community thriving with your support is something that matters to me. This is me investing in our collective future.
Anita Rao
Totally. I mean, that awkwardness can come up so often, because we're not used to talking about money. We don't have a lot of language for those conversations, like you mentioned earlier. So Steven, what are some ways folks can get through that awkwardness, maybe at first? How do you start those conversations with people who you've maybe never talked to about money before, even if it's your own family?
Steven M. Hughes
So, one is to expect the awkwardness. Money is a big taboo topic, just like sex is, and we don't speak in specifics about these things. So only talking about the positive things that happen in our money life, like, "Oh, I got this promotion, I just bought this house, I finally got this car that I wanted." That really sets the, kind of, a false stage of how we should communicate about money. And so really, the first thing, or one of the first things we can do is, to set the stage for truth-telling. In letting the person that we're talking to know that, "I want to share this with you, and I don't know all about this specific topic. But I want to share this with you, of what's going on with me." Make sure, when you're talking about money — since it is something that we don't talk about a lot — is to focus on one specific topic. Try not to hit a bunch of things at one time, especially if it's a conversation that you're introducing a challenge, like someone paying you back, or the fact that you are living paycheck to paycheck but have a big expense that you need help with. And that way you can focus on that one thing. And the other thing is that you may feel tense throughout the money conversation. And the best thing to do when that happens is to roll your shoulders back, open up your chest and take a deep breath. Because sometimes when we're having challenging conversations, they make us go into ourselves and make us shrink. And you could even see your, your posture right now if you're feeling some type of way about us having this money conversation.
Anita Rao
I literally just rolled my shoulders back and sat up.
Steven M. Hughes
And so really giving yourself the opportunity to speak with your whole body and to not let that nervous energy close you down is another important thing.
Anita Rao
And one other thing Steven said: If you're going to offer to help someone financially, do it with no strings attached. But what if you're on the other end of that conversation, and you're the one who has fewer financial resources? Things can also be tricky and uncomfortable. That's what we heard from a listener in Chapel Hill named Erin. Due to a recent move, a job change and two new kittens, she's recently eaten up a lot of her savings. And it's affected her relationships.
Erin
My sister is a nurse, and she makes a decent amount more than I do — like, double what I do. And when I visited her a few weeks ago, when I was talking about my worries about finances, she was a little bit quiet. And I got really worried that she thought I was, like, asking for money, and that made me feel really embarrassed. I feel the same way when I speak to my dad, and also my partner. My partner has offered to help with some of the financial burdens that the cats have added to my life, which is very sweet. But when he offers I always say, "That's not why I'm complaining. I just — it's on my mind."
Anita Rao
Steven, I'm curious to get your thoughts on Erin's story and how when you are in a conversation with someone — when you come from different money backgrounds — and you're wanting to share and be vulnerable, but you don't want them to, kind of, start giving you advice, or them feel like you're piling guilt onto them. Talk to me about how you would encourage her to, kind of, start those conversations,
Steven M. Hughes
I would tell Erin to start the conversation so that she doesn't feel embarrassed, going down the road, with them offering to help. Because a lot of us are problem solvers in our loved ones' lives. When we hear something is troubling them, or something is off kilter, we want to see how we can help. And so she should have that expectation, like, her sister and her father, her partner, they love her, they want to see how they can help. But if she just says at the beginning of the conversation, "Hey, do you mind if I just rant or express myself a little bit about how I'm feeling currently about money? Like, I'm not looking for solutions, but I do want to verbalize these things, just to get it out." And if they have the capacity to do that, they will say yes. And if they don't, there may be some ways that Erin can get these things out of her body without talking to, like, a sister, father or partner. By doing some really intentional, hot pen journaling, where she will write, like, a question or prompt at the top of her page, and just let her finger do the walking and talking.
Anita Rao
That makes so much sense and, kind of, setting the table for those conversations before you start to have them. Morgan, you've been in a lot of conversations in your own family about your choices with money and your desires for your inheritance. And I know this has been a point of conflict, especially between you and your dad. Can you talk a bit about your journey to navigate this, and where you all are with that today?
Morgan Curtis
First, just, really resonating with what Steven just shared around the importance of, just, framing the conversation before we have it. And in a way, checking for consent. There was really a chapter in my life where I wasn't asking for that. And I was, just, coming at it. Every single conversation was like, "Okay, how are we going to give back money in our family that was stolen from other people?" And in many ways, just kind of, spilling my own guilt and shame out into my family. And yeah, a lot of it's been about learning to understand more of his money story, and his experience of how he believes the world changes and gets better, and how he sees himself contributing to that. And looking for, okay, what overlap — however small — is there with the things that I care about? And leaning into that overlap as a possible place for collaboration. Yeah, I'd say we talk about money a lot less at the moment than we used to, and it's probably a healthy break for us.
Anita Rao
Well, I love mentioning, I mean, there is really a generational — I think — divide in money conversations. I mean, millennials and Gen Z folk — we came into our working lives with this understanding that maybe there's not going to be a social safety net when we're around and we got to, like, save and do everything we can to make as much money as we can, because we might not have a retirement — versus our parents' generation may have felt differently, and they may have been trying to set us up for that more secure future. So how do you help people who are, kind of, navigating the uncertainty about how they think about money and the future, and maybe the dissonance between how their parents thought about it and how they do?
Morgan Curtis
Something I work on a lot with the people I work with is thinking about how our dominant culture and economic system has had us see money as the number one best strategy for meeting all our needs. Like, you're sick, like, buy some expensive medicine. You need a house, buy some land. Like, you need childcare, like, hire a babysitter. And it gets to the point where, you know, I've worked with some clients who basically never asked for help. And so, a lot of the work I do with folks is, is money the most authentic strategy for you and your values to meet that need? Whether it's, like, your need for healthy food, being like, "Oh, I really, you know, I have to go to Whole Foods or I have to go to this expensive place." But what would it be like to join a community garden in your city where you're contributing a few hours in a month in exchange for, like, fresh vegetables that come from community? What would it be like to start a childcare cooperative with other parents where you rotate taking care of the kids? What would it be like to lean into webs of mutual aid and support that are, actually, what have sustained humanity for generations and millennia?
Anita Rao
Reframing how you think about money is not an easy process. Because once you pull at one thread, you'll realize just how much else there is to think about. Since my conversation with Morgan and Steven, I have been launching deep. Looking up details about mutual funds and my work retirement account, reading more deeply into what my bank is doing with my money and thinking a lot about how much of my salary I want to put towards donations and contributions to communities that are making the world a place I want to live in. There is so much more to this conversation, so don't worry, we will be returning to it. And if you, like me, want to start digging into money stuff after this episode, we're linking to some excellent resources in our show notes — including a wealth calculator and resource library from Morgan's website. As all of these ideas are simmering, I want to leave you with some final food for thought. One more reframe from Steven: think about money as energy.
Steven M. Hughes
For people who say things — this is one of the wildest things I hear people say is — that we should take our emotions out of money, or our emotions out of money decisions. It's because they don't understand that, one, emotions are, like, energetic information. So the more we understand that, oh, I'm feeling shameful, or guilty, or happy in this specific financial situation. Why is that? And when you investigate that, then you have a better idea of, well, should I keep using my money for this? Should I keep using my energy for this? And so when I break it down, in regards of money being energy, it's really to help people get back, like, come back to themselves. And the more that we, as a people, get back to understanding how our energy works — and how it even plays out in our financial lives — the more we will see those things align, so we can live a better, holistic life all the way around.
Anita Rao
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We also want to shout out the podcast "This Is Uncomfortable." They were the inspiration for this episode, and we got to feature some of their work on the radio version of this conversation. Check them out wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode was produced by Kaia Findlay. Amanda Magnus is our editor, Audrey Smith also produces for our show. Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer and Quilla wrote our theme music.
Until next time, I'm Anita Rao, taking on the taboo with you.