Financial Adulting. Ashley Feinstein Gerstley

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CHAPTER 1 What Is a Financial Adult?

      When I graduated college and started working in my first (and my second) job, I was far from being what I would consider a financial adult. One might expect that we would start acting like financial adults as soon as we get our first paycheck or move out on our own, but for most of us, it doesn't come until later (sometimes much, much later).

      What I've noticed from my own experience, and hearing from thousands of others about their money lives, is that there is usually some type of impetus for becoming a financial adult. Something happens that causes us to care about our finances. It might be wanting to switch careers, getting into a new exciting relationship, or watching a close family member suffer through a traumatic financial experience, but something happens that inspires us to take action.

      Now, it's important to acknowledge that the opportunity to not be a financial adult comes with tremendous privilege. Many people, much younger than legal adult age, have had to become financial adults due to stressful economic circumstances, systemic inequities, and poverty. In those cases, waiting for inspiration to become a financial adult was not an option. We talk more about this later.

Why Aren't We Financial Adulting?

When I give talks, I often poll the room of people and say, “Raise your hand if you think you should know more about money and personal finance.” It doesn't matter who is in the crowd, almost every hand goes up – every time. This even happens when I'm speaking at a bank. And I get it. I was one of those people who worked at a bank and didn't know anything about my own finances.

      When it comes to money and personal finance, most of us feel ashamed that we don't know more and haven't made as much progress as we'd like toward our goals.

      Missed Out on Early Basics

      But the truth is, we are not set up for success. Most of us didn't learn about personal finance in school and unless a parent or mentor went out of their way to teach us about money, we probably didn't even learn about it growing up.

      Talking to parents, I discovered that this was far from a malicious choice. Many found dealing with money so stressful that they didn't want to burden their children with that stress before they needed to. Others thought that they had made so many mistakes, who were they to teach their kids about money?

      Regardless of our backgrounds and upbringings, we get to a certain place in our lives where we have to deal with money almost every single day. Yet most of us have learned very little about it and it can feel too taboo to bring up our questions, even to our closest friends and family.

      Not to mention, many come from families where they are the financial first, like first generation. The financial first to go to college and navigate paying the tuition bills that come with. The financial first to have a W-2 salary and a 401(k) as part of their compensation package.

      You might even have an early memory where you asked someone like a parent or teacher a question about money and they shut you down: “Oh, we don't talk about that,” “You can't ask questions like that,” or “I don't know, I don't handle that.”

From these experiences, you end up internalizing the idea that money is an inaccessible or shameful thing, and not to be talked about and discussed. You probably make some major assumptions about money – that it's bad, not for you, or something only greedy people care about. When it's time to engage with your own money, you bring these beliefs with you and they have a great impact on your relationship with money.

      It might sound weird, but we have a relationship with money just like we have a relationship with a friend or colleague, in how we interact and relate to it. When we believe money is shameful and greedy, we might avoid dealing with it. Imagine if you treated your best friend the way you treat your money. I'm sure she wouldn't appreciate being ghosted!

      Unsure of Where to Get Help

      When it's time to figure out something in our financial lives, we probably start by googling (I know I did). I found pages and pages of results and resources with contradicting evidence and advice, often shaming me for my choices. I decided it might be easier to ask a financial professional or expert, but it was hard to know how to find someone and whom to trust.

The financial services industry is the least trusted of any other industry. Only 2% of people really trust financial professionals¹ – and for good reason! We hear horror stories from friends and see media coverage of the terrible things that happen. Between 2005 and 2015, 87,000 financial advisors (7% of them)² were disciplined for misconduct or fraud. And that's just the ones who were caught.

      Then there's the natural conflict of interest we feel in our own interactions with financial professionals. The people who are supposed to be educating us are the same people who are selling us things, and they earn big commissions from those sales. This can lead to a lot of misinformation and recommendations that are not in our best interest.

      Don't even get me started on the jargon and unnecessary complexity that's been perpetuated to keep the majority of the population out of the conversation.

      Money Is Tied to Emotion

      Money is also really emotional and in a lot of ways is very similar to food. I believe food and money are so similar that I wrote a book called The 30-Day Money Cleanse, which applies the principles of a juice cleanse to budgeting and developing our money mindset.

Sometimes we know exactly what we should be doing to reach our goals but really struggle to follow through on those actions. Nutritionists say, “Only eat until you're full” or “Weight loss is just about calories in minus calories out.” This all sounds simple but if it were actually that straightforward, there wouldn't be a multibillion-dollar dieting industry.

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