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Welcome to the Women’s Personal Finance Wednesday Roundup! We started this series back in 2018 on TreadLightlyRetireEarly.com to showcase the fabulous women in the online personal finance community who are talking about money online. Even now, there is a perception that women aren’t good with money, don’t care about money, or don’t understand it on a granular level beyond perhaps knowing how to coupon and score a good shopping deal.
These roundups are our way of doing a small part to change that perception. There is no shortage of women online doing their part to make it clear that they DO understand money, and these posts are meant to amplify that fact.
Why does it matter? Because representation matters. Because reading and hearing stories from those who (may or may not) look like us show us that yes, we too can figure out this money thing, that we too have important stories to tell. And that we too know quite a lot about money and are experts worth listening to.
Since Women’s Personal Finance has grown up to get its own website, it’s time to transition these roundups over here to the dedicated website. Same great content, new home!
Our Women’s Personal Finance Facebook group on Facebook also has a sharing thread on Fridays, and that’s the place to read all the blog posts written by members over the previous week. If you’re looking for more articles written by women and nonbinary folks, that’s a great place to continue reading (plus we have plenty of great discussions on finances the rest of the week as well!).
If you don’t have the time or inclination to go searching down myriad posts, though, we will be continuing this series every week to showcase some of the best of the new content we read. If you ever read a post you think we absolutely need to consider for this roundup, please let us know! We are always open to reading new blogs and want to celebrate those newer voices as well as the more seasoned ones.
And with that, here is the best (in our opinion) content by women and nonbinary folks this past week. Let us know what you think in the comments! We love discussion.
Table of Contents
Women’s Personal Finance Weekly Roundup #75 (Actually, 214)
1. It’s okay to not be okay The Bloggess
“We will struggle. We will fail. We will win. We will fight. We will come out stronger in some ways and more brittle in others. We will crawl our of the darkness again to see that these lies that depression tells are just that…lies. We will wonder at how far we have come and we will wish we could look back at our past selves and say, “Hey, sweeties. Keep going. It’s going to be okay. You’re okay. I promise.”
So today I look with hope at a future self I want to believe in as I imagine her saying what I’ve said to past me so many times before. “It’s okay. Put your head down and rest when you can. Ask for help if you need it. Give yourself the time that you need. This struggle maybe not be the part of life that shows up on instagram reels but it is just as valid and important and real. You are stronger than you think. You are magical, even if you feel so far from it. You are loved more than you know and the lies your brain are telling you are not to be believed. You are not alone.”
2. How to Create Safety and Security Without Accumulating Wealth Iris Brilliant
“Many of us with radical politics and access to inherited wealth want to increase our giving, but we get stuck. We get paralyzed by a fear that we will one day not have enough, so we reach out to financial planners to tell us that magical number to ensure we will always be safe and comfortable. We tell ourselves once we find that magical number, we will be able to finally relax and not worry about the future. For people of color, queer people, and women, this feeling might be layered with real experiences of oppression and a desire for protection from violence in society. But we know in our hearts that it doesn’t feel right for us to hold onto more money than we need when the majority of the world does not have enough resources to survive. We struggle with the tension of wanting to align our money with social justice values but fearing for individual security.
The problem is, until we address the underlying ways that our lives rely heavily on transactional relationships and individualism, we will remain trapped in the cycle of unconscious wealth accumulation.”
3. Greatest Misses: Writers on Failure The Growlery by Sara Lippmann
”At 25, I assumed this was the way things worked. I’d come from the world of magazines (remember magazines?!) where deadlines activated me and freelance checks sustained me (barely) and no one offered content on bowties or aphrodisiacs without a contract in hand.
Of course, I was operating under the false assumption that input equals output. Work hard, and the work will be recognized – typically, through monetary compensation. I failed to see the privilege and gross entitlement, not to mention the dangerous patriarchal misguidedness, of such a capitalistic notion.”
Thanks For Supporting These Creators!
As always, if you’re looking for a categorized list of self-identified women and nonbinary folks writing and speaking about personal finance, here is the comprehensive guide to the Women of the Financial Independence Community.