At Monday’s official launch of the DC Saves campaign, Colleen Daily, the executive director of Capital Area Asset Builders–a lead partner in the DC Saves campaign and a Grantee Partner–explained that a great deal of the work in helping people, particularly low-income people to build wealth, is not financial.
It’s about beliefs about money, far more than it is about money itself.
Getting people who haven’t grown up with money to believe the message that they can build wealth, she explained, is what it’s all about.
And is often the hardest part.
When she said this, I couldn’t help but think back to last week’s Philanthropy Forum on Families, Money and Philanthropy: Building a Legacy Across the Generations, where donors and potential donors of The Women’s Foundation gathered to talk and think through–with speakers like Carrie Schwab Pomerantz, Loribeth Weinstein and A’Lelia Bundles–the legacy that money can have through philanthropy.
I must say, I didn’t expect the event to be terribly applicable to me, being without a family foundation or huge philanthropic legacy and all.
But what astounded me was that it was actually about everyone, and how much our families have to do with how we view money, giving and the everyday financial habits that build wealth or hold it at arm’s length.
Over lunch, sitting around my table, we discussed not strategy or programming, but rather our personal stories and lessons of money, wealth and planning for the future.
By the end of lunch, I was referred to as the Junior CPA, after sharing that balancing my mom’s checkbook and writing all the checks for her to sign, which I did along with my sister as of the age of 10 largely because we loved it, trained me to be the fiscal hawk I am today, making sure my accounts are in balance, that I’m not charging more than I can pay off and that my credit history is clean.
My engagement with my finances today came directly from my mom’s teachings that managing money wasn’t scary or overwhelming. That even a kid could do it.
Over and over, the stories came and reverberated, tales of single moms teaching their kids how to conserve on things from electricity to water, to role modeling good habits and how those translated into their daily lives today. Some learned to stretch a dollar when their mom showed them how she stretched a casserole, and others learned that even when financial hardship comes suddenly and unexpectedly–due to divorce or death–that families can recover and rebuild.
How in the lives of every woman at the table, their financial habits were almost an exact mirror of their parents’–and often, a single mother’s.
Bringing home in a very real way what Colleen said on Monday, and what Pomerantz said at the forum. That , “Money isn’t just about ‘the talk. It’s about lots of little moments and exposures throughout life.”
Which begs the question of what happens when there are no lessons about money, or money isn’t talked about in a home, or it’s seen as something foreign and scary and uncontrollable. A matter left to the fates, not financial planning.
That what we believe about ourselves and, in essence, our worth, has as much to do with what our bank accounts become, as who we become.
That teaching financial literacy goes well beyond building skills, to building new beliefs.
