I have moved the newsletter over to Substack, there you can find everything I’ve written since 2021. Click the link to read past posts and sign up for future posts!
I’ve also started a Financial Freedom podcast, featuring past students explaining their favorite lesson and what it’s meant to them years after the course. You’ll get a good taste of what you’ll learn in FF1 and the people you’ll meet. Check it out here:
My friend Jennifer Villeneuve and I guest-wrote a blog post for Chip Conley’s Wisdom Well, called “Is women’s soul work different than men’s?” You can find it here. In it, I quote Sara Avant Stover, who wrote in The Book of SHE: Your Heroine’s Journey into the Heart of Feminine Power:
“In reality, our lives as women cannot be represented by a straight line. Rather, our journeys take us through a series of circular initiations. Each crisis that lowers us into the dark underworld calls us to listen to and trust ourselves in ever-deepening ways. We have been led to believe that partnering with our darkness will make us crazy, but the truth is that only denying our darkness can do that.”
I continue by writing, “Letting go of the single narrative that a ‘good life’ is a long rising ascent followed by a gentle voluntary descent allows for more individuality, diversity, and freedom in our life journeys.” It got me thinking about lesson 2.9 in FF1, where we talk about Paula Pant’s idea of mini- and semi-retirements that punctuate a longer career, as opposed to a sprint to crossover into FIRE.
I’ve always been an advocate of working straight through, because as Charlie Munger said, “The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.” Semi- or mini-retirements mean that compound interest never works for you; you have to keep replenishing your nest egg with your own life energy. But I’m curious if women don’t find the sprint to FIRE appealing. Keep in mind: my own 20-year FIRE journey was punctuated by at least 4 years of voluntary and involuntary unemployment. As those of you who took FF2 know, that’s part of why I think going as fast as you can is better: you want to outrun your need to work before capitalism outruns its need for your labor.
The other interesting piece of the blog is Jennifer’s two developmental pathways: the masculine voice focusing on independence (“separation”) and responsibility for oneself, and the feminine voice emphasizing interdependence (“connection”) and responsibility to others. This has been a core sticking point for many students: FIRE seems to be a solo journey that disregards the community. Jennifer’s point is that we may go through the same stages, but in a different order and purpose. The blog post goes deeper into our thoughts so again, I hope you read it with Financial Freedom in mind. Our paths might go in different orders, but that miracle of compound interest thing always favors the early bird.
A few lessons and thoughts on the Gamestop debacle. A short explanation here about how this stock went from $20 to $483 a share in two weeks, and why it was important.
Invest, don’t gamble. This was speculation. In other words, guessing. The name of the Reddit group was WallStreetBets. When you put money in the stock market, don’t “bet.” When you invest in the long term (as FF2 students know, low cost index funds), you are riding the rising tide of the American economy. Do that. Don’t gamble your hard earned life energy away. When you bet, the house always wins.
Stop paying attention to “the narrative.” The story was “the little guy” shoving it up and killing “the big guy.” From what I’ve read, one hedge fund lost over $2 billion on their short call. But 75% of the gains went to 9 rich people or other hedge funds. As the stock crested and fell, the small investors, the little guys, lost all the money. Because they were “invested” in the narrative of beating the big guy, they bought high and stayed in when there was no financial rationale for the inflated price anyway.
Side note: it was little guys and big guys. Studies show that men “invest” more recklessly, thinking they are “smarter than the market.” They inevitably lose. Women earn a higher return, because they don’t do irrational (frankly stupid) things like this. (Their problem is they invest less because they earn less money and they are less trusting of investing generally) The people who lost money in GameStop were overwhelmingly young, white males, novices in financial markets. The people who made money were overwhelming older, white males, experienced in financial markets. A novice poker player would never think they could bring down a table of World Series of Poker champions. But here a bunch of young men threw money in, thinking they could.
If you’re learning about it in the news, you’re too late. In FF1, one of the major lessons is to stop living in the news. In terms of investing, following news trends means you’re a follower. Following a trend almost always means losing money. I’ve learned this myself: dot com bubble 2000. Housing bubble 2004-2008. If you’re getting in because you “don’t want to miss out,” you’re too late. To get concrete, I bought a condo in 2005 because I was afraid I’d never be able to buy property if housing prices kept going up. I had to foreclosure on that house in 2010. Biggest financial stressor and lesson of my life. If you’re buying at the point when people, who have no professional knowledge, are talking about it, you’re probably going to lose. (Famous story here)
I think why so many people are afraid of investing is they confuse betting with investing. They hear stories of people losing everything when they bet. But the likelihood of losing money in investing is tiny, if you commit to a long period of time. It’s a commitment. And it’s letting go of the short term in favor of the long term. All of personal finance summed up right here: a long term perspective and commitment.
I’m teaching Money and Meaning, the Course. It’s about the constant need to “achieve” self-worth in our society and the feeling of never having of being enough. It’s about time, attention, satisfaction, scarcity, sufficiency and how they all relate to the two pillars of our economic system: consumerism and “workism.”
It will be a 8 lessons, 1 per week for 8 weeks. The course will be more contemplative than FF1 or FF2; the weekly reading will be only 5-10 minutes long. Instead of Zoom sessions, your weekly assignment is to have a “walk and talk” phone conversation with at least one other classmate. No one wants to be online more right now. So, the assignment is to go outside for a walk and have a phone conversation with someone about important stuff. You’ll be contemplating the emotional consequences of our economic system and how you want to be alive in the world. Hope you’re interested! Below is the first lesson.
Welcome to Week 1!
Read this snippet from an interview with psychotherapist and “soul activist” Francis Weller (full interview here, but only if you’re interested). As you do, consider about the intersection of modern society and money and Weller’s primary and secondary satisfactions. Try to move away from interacting with this course cognitively and sink into your emotional intelligence. Take time with the material and relax into it. This is a class in non-self-improvement: What comes up as you contemplate this?
Where do you feel it in your body?
Weller: [W]e need to restore what I call primary satisfaction. The things that we evolved with over hundreds of thousands of years that satisfy the soul at the most basic level; adequate levels of touch, you know, comforting in times of sorrow and loss, celebration and gratitude, gathering food together, eating together under the stars, telling stories around the camp fire, you know, laughing and playfulness together, sensuous erotic connection to the wider world. These are what made us human. But for the most part these things have disappeared. Now, we are left with secondary satisfactions— material goods, seeking power, rank, prestige, addictions— and these things never satisfy the soul.
Anesthesia and amnesia are the two primary “sins” of modern society.
We go numb to try to cope with the fact that we have not been granted what we need to thrive. The levels of addiction in our society are off the charts, and I’m not just talking about alcohol and drugs; I’m talking about shopping, working, sex. Addictions are an attempt to cope with intolerable states. The meager lives we are asked to live, in which we are often reduced to “earning a living,” are themselves intolerable. We are meant to have a more sensuous, imaginative, and creative existence. As children we are enchanted with the world, yet as adults we end up, as poet Mary Oliver said, “breathing just a little, and calling it a life.” That’s the anesthesia.
McKee: And the amnesia?
Weller: We are living in what writer and cultural critic Daniel Quinn calls the Great Forgetting. Many of us have forgotten that we’re a part of an ecosystem, a watershed. We’ve forgotten that we’re kin to all the other animals. We’ve forgotten that we need each other. We have forgotten what I call the “commons of the soul.”
For thousands of years we were nourished by being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of the elders, feeling supported during times of loss and grief, offering gratitude, singing together, sharing meals at night and our dreams in the morning. I call these activities “primary satisfactions.” We are hard-wired to want them, but few of us receive them. In their absence we turn to secondary satisfactions: rank, privilege, wealth, status — or, on the shadow side, addictions. The problem with these secondary satisfactions is that we can never get enough of them. We always want more. But once we find our primary satisfactions, we don’t want much else.
Though primary satisfactions are rare in our culture, we do experience them. We can remember what that felt like and let our longing for that state become our compass, telling us what direction we need to go to get back to those satisfactions. We can find them through our friendships, by spending time in nature, by risking being vulnerable with someone we trust.
The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.
And we must have compassion for ourselves, too. When I lead workshops on self-compassion, I begin by saying, “This is a weekend in non-self-improvement.” [Laughter.] We’re so driven to make ourselves “better” all the time, as if the better we became, the more people would like us. We are mercilessly hard on ourselves for our losses, our defeats, our wounds, our failures, the parts of us that don’t measure up.
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Assignment
Call someone in your class and do this exercise. I suggest a “walk and talk” for most of the lessons, but this first one, find in a quiet place in your home for the call.
Take some time for silence and calming your nervous systems together. When you both feel ready, choose one person to ask the other, quietly, “What is your deepest longing?“
If you are that person, start exploring the question. The other person will just listen. When you’re finished speaking, allow for silence. If necessary (and only if necessary), your partner asks the question again: “What is your deepest longing?” Don’t be afraid of long pauses, it’s the spaciousness this question desires. And needs. Trust the silence. Go through this pattern as many times as necessary until you’ve touched the core. You’ll know when you’ve reached it. Sit in your answer for a little before breaking the silence.
Then repeat for the other person.
After you are both done, have a conversation about your deepest longing. Think about one or two the happiest, most nourishing moments of your life.
Were your happinest moments moments of “primary satisfaction?”
What relationship does money have, if any, to it?
Are the twin engines of capitalism, working and consuming, about your deepest satisfaction? Or are they secondary satisfactions?
What did you learn from this deepest longing exercise? What is calling up within you as you contemplate this?
After you are done, post your reflection on (1) your conversation and (2) anything wonderful you have to share about the Francis Weller piece. Make it short, meaningful, and from the heart.
Are you sober, or sober-curious? Thinking about doing Sober October or know someone who is? The next cohort of Financial Freedom 1 is a Sobriety Cohort!
JD Roth, author of the personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly, recently wrote an article to explain his process of removing “net negatives” from his life.
He writes, “My aim is to decrease my depression and anxiety by removing people, things, and experiences that are net negatives and replacing them with people, things, and experiences that are net positives.”
A few months ago, one of those things he decided to remove was alcohol, with a plan to replace it with meditation and mindfulness.
You can read his entire article here.
I was doing a similar experiment with eliminating alcohol and marijuana to see how it changed my life when I enrolled in the Financial Freedom course two years ago.
Little did I know that sobriety, plus the experience I had in the course, would completely alter the trajectory of my life.
During the Financial Freedom course, I reflected on the times in my life when I’d chosen to get drunk and high over instead of other experiences:
When I stopped taking piano lessons in high school because I was often hungover on Saturday mornings.
In college, when I decided to get high on pot instead of attending a once-in-a-lifetime rehearsal with a jazz great.
Working at a ski resort in my 20’s, staying up late to spend all my tips buying drinks for people I barely knew, instead of saving for a place to live after the ski season.
The way I lived paycheck-to-paycheck no matter how much money I made.
And through it all, accepting that I’d be working until I was 80 years old to pay off my student loans.
I had a pivotal moment during the course, when I did an exercise to identify my values. I looked at the list, thinking incredulously: That’s how I should be spending my time? With these values guiding my life?
That’s when the realization washed down my spine like a river of electricity:
I could never drink or smoke pot again. I didn’t want to.
As my behavior changed, I felt my inner and outer identities aligning. I was learning to respect the sacredness of my own precious life. As I kept promises to myself, I began to trust myself. The course gave me both a new mindset and strategy that I put into action. I felt empowered, and I felt happier.
After taking Financial Freedom 1, I saved a six-month emergency fund, paid off my husband’s student loans, and saved a down payment for our new home. I began coaching Womxn’s Cohorts of the course, and now, for the first time, am thrilled to offer a Sobriety Cohort.
A woman with eight years of sobriety who was in one of my previous women’s cohorts says of her experience:
I was finally ready to clean up the wreckage of my finances that was a result of living in a fantasy world while drinking, and in early sobriety. I was ready to face my reality, and shine some light on the one area of my life that I still kept in the dark.
As a result of the course, I got clear on where I was in terms of what was in my bank account and what my money scripts were (what I grew up hearing and believing about money) and what I needed to do to change. I paid off all my debt, I stopped buying useless stuff, I embraced the concept of minimalism, and I’m making progress on my savings goals.
Because I am not spending money on booze, going out, fantastical vacations and material items, I have more money and energy to focus on the things that really do matter.
If you have sober friends, or know someone planning on Sober October, this is their cohort!
What Is Owed? The Case for Reparations. Until we look at we have and where it came from, are we talking about anything? In this class, we talk about the exploitation of Black bodies for wealth that has been part of the American project. Understand our anti-Black history and its implications for racialized wealth today. Until we discuss the systemic advantages whites have and how it may have advantaged you, where we talking about anything? Is giving all that up really in the cards for you? Is there a difference between a financially wise budget and a financially just budget?
So grateful for the 20 FFers that came to talk about a difficult topic: the intersection of racial justice and their personal finances. Some quick thoughts afterwards, from what I heard and from the notes of the session.
Selected notes from the discussion (thank you note-takers!)
What is our individual responsibility for a systemic issue?
Getting enough so that you can help others in some way, with time or money
FF is a personal hack at getting out of a systemic issue. But it’s still an individual journey. Your personal liberation doesn’t tend to the systemic issues. FF has been an individual enterprise, and we need to own that. Values-neutral is not value neutral: it silences things. To do a full accounting of our money, its sources, and its effects complicates the math of it. Values were put to the side to let the math take their place. Formulas don’t have racial justice in the FIRE equation.
There are different kinds of wealth in addition to the bottom line. Value of acting now with your wealth rather than waiting for $ down the line. It is a form of investment that can accumulate and compound. Not just quarterly balancing. (Vicki Robin’s money = time means that the value of your time contribution also compounds!)
Nonprofits have a saying: “no margin, no mission.” You have to have financial stability before you can reach out to others. So financial security is essential before reaching out.
Effective altruism is a group maximizing their income to give it away. (Engineers at Google who donate 90% of their incomes.) But is how you make the money important as well?
Austin brought up the idea that people being able to “take care of ourselves” is baked into white supremacy. This is a cultural value in the United States where we care more about ourselves than about other people, in terms of amassing wealth. We as a culture are obsessed about not being reliant on others, but other places in the world are more willing to be reliant on each other. If we want to form a better community, we need to start supporting each other.
Why do we feel so anxious and cling to the money we have? It creates a false sense of safety. However, community can also be a huge safety net and is probably actually more reliable in some circumstances.
My thoughts after the call
Going back to the first very FF lesson, our emotional scripts about money control how we use it. Yes, we have money vigilance (me!), money worship, money avoidance, and money status scripts. But the meta script that we have all learned is scarcity. Our money comes from a monetary system where money is only created through debt. It’s an enormously complex topic, but do your own research and you’ll see it’s true. This means the system as a whole always has a little more debt than money, which causes the fundamental anxiety we all experience in capitalism.
It’s much harder to give up the security and privilege you have without feeling emotional abundance. In this system, is it possible to move from scarcity to abundance? I think it’s very hard to really give to economic justice if (1) we’re taught to believe in economic scarcity and (2) it’s the reality.
I love Austin’s point that “taking care of ourselves” is a cultural value of white supremacy. In the book Sacred Economics (free online!) Charles Eisenstein talks about market economies, where you are rationally trying to maximize for yourself, and gift economies, where you give freely when you can and assume you will taken care of when you can’t.
“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars….You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
“You can’t have capitalism without racism.” - Malcolm X. Can capitalism be redeemed, i.e. decoupled, from white supremacy?
The key to a gift economy is identity. Think about family: when you were a child, your parents did not charge you for their emotional care, the food on the table, the shelter they provided for you. They did it out of love, because they identified you as theirs. You belonged to them. Families are the ultimate gift economy.
The key to a market economy: you are an individual. This sense of separateness is a spiritual one. It’s also the same Enlightenment sense of separateness that allows us individual rights, freedom of speech, and any sense of intellectual independence.
So when Audre Lorde says, “Without community, there is no liberation,” I believe it’s a much deeper, complex thought than we want it to be. Are we willing to give up our individual liberty to identify with the larger whole, a whole we as individuals may disagree with?
Is the “School of Financial Freedom” right anymore? Is freedom something worthy if it’s part of this ideology of separateness?
Back to the gift economy, there’s a lot of talk right now about white debt and reparations. But I wonder if accounting is the wrong way to value Black lives.
I notice my own resistance to the call for economic equity. “I’m an immigrant; what responsibility do I have for white supremacy compared to others?” But again, is accounting for “responsibility” and “debt” the way forward?
Will accounts be “square” if we gave reparations and paid off the “white debt”?
I don’t think people with privilege, white or not, will be willing to give up their houses, international flights, and “experiences” to pay off the “debt.” I just don’t.
My thought in my head is, the only way we can move forward is when we see that money is an expression of the love we have for one another. It is not debt that will cause us to work for racial justice, but love.
The fundamental brokenness of American society is our lack of kinship, particularly with Black Americans. Kinship is, as with family, a sense of “you are mine and I am yours.” If we had kinship with all, would there be inequality in criminal justice system, educational systems, job markets, and housing markets? Would we allow our kin to suffer so? It’s our sense of separation that needs to be rooted out.
“Mother Teresa diagnosed the world’s ills in this way: we’ve just ‘forgotten that we belong to each other.’ Kinship is what happens to us when we refuse to let that happen.” - Father Greg Boyle
On a practical level, what does money look like as an expression of love? I don’t have answers, but who do you share your money with? Who is in your “family” where no accounts are taken? Who do you identify as your own? Any Black people?
In a consumerist individualistic society, so much of our money is spent on goods and services for ourselves: food, housing, entertainment. How many Black people receive the money you spend? How can you spend money so it goes into Black pockets, giving them wealth?
Cornell West said that justice is love made public. Love is nothing other than kinship. Who belongs as yours? By dint of segregation (separateness, spiritual isolation), we have no kinship. Until we have kinship, will we ever have justice? So in the end, how you do end your separateness?
Thank you again for participating in the call. These thoughts will go to build the Defunding White Supremacy course in July. I’ll put a link to it here when it’s ready.
Also: Donate to black-led racial justice efforts and SOFF will match it.
As per my earlier post, I’m donating all my SOFF income to social justice causes this year. This summer all revenue will go to the Black Lives Matter Global Fund.
A group of my friends have gathered to pool resources to create a racial justice matching campaign. Starting June 15, any donation you make to a Black-led, racial justice organization will be matched with a donation from our community to @blklivesmatter. Just forward your donation receipt to BLMmoneypool@gmail.com. We'll take care of the rest.
We have over $29K in our matching pool, which means, collectively, we could raise over almost $60K in solidarity and support of Black liberation. School of Financial Freedom this summer is donating $5K going to that.
If you want to donate to Black-led organizations doing great work to bring about justice, equity, and lasting change, please send us the receipts. (Please add others in the comments): @snackblocpdx, @dontshootpdx, @mvment4blklives, @NAACP_LDF, @law4blacklives, @nationalbailout, @eji_org. If you want to help SOFF raise the funds for the match, please tell your friends about the Financial Freedom 1 summer cohort. All money will go into the fund.
It’s become apparent to me that a reckoning has come for the FIRE movement. For a long time, FIRE bloggers and teachers, including me, have preached “values-neutral” principles of personal finance. But if both our spending and our savings are embedded in white supremacy, one can’t teach personal finance without addressing the systemic racism that our money is both spent and earned in. Read more about the racial disparities in personal finance here. How can one earn, save, and spend ethically in a system that is fundamentally violent and unequal? I don’t know, but I want SOFFers to listen to each other and share in a Zoom community call on June 20 at 11am PDT.
I’ve gotten good feedback from my last essay, “Why I’m donating all my SOFF income to social justice causes this year.” I think as the world was convulsing and I was sitting in the safety of my own home, I began ask, “If I truly believe that I hit FIRE, that I have enough money to meet my personal needs, why do I need more?” That was the animating personal question. If I truly believed in 25x, I could donate any current income. On some level, it was a question of faith.
This quote has gotten me thinking about the racialized wealth in our country:
I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible...except by getting off his back.”
― Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do?
If I were to write and teach FF now, I would write the course very differently. I was blind or chose to ignore realities that people face with their personal finances because of our economic system, and this moment is teaching me that. Despite that, I don’t think that the principles of personal finance no longer apply. So now what? How do you reconcile the ideas and beliefs of saving for your future self with a desire for racial and economic justice? I don’t have answers, but here are some topics I’d like to talk about together:
How does racial inequity interrogate your beliefs of what you think of “what is enough?” If others systemically have less, how much is too much? If someone did an audit of your monthly budget, what would it say about your values? Concretely, can you still agree with the principle that 25x is “enough”? Or is it too much? Does your racial justice change your ‘x’, the annual spending you feel you need? Does it change what’s in your annual ‘x’? (Are you willing to put racial justice as a NEED or a WANT in your budget and decrease other consumption?) Or do you now dispute the entire enterprise, that ‘25x’ or ‘x’ or saving for the future is just at all?
Financial “freedom” or financial “independence” is rooted in Western liberalism. The Enlightenment taught us that we are individuals and fundamentally autonomous from others. Financial freedom depends on this myth of the “self-made man.” But as Audre Lorde said, “Without community, there is no liberation.” There’s complexity here, because we have both self-agency and a product of our inequitable environment. Remember Will Smith’s fault vs. responsibility in lesson 3.1? What’s the balance between responsibility for your own finances and its ties to the larger system of economic injustice? What’s fair if the entire system is polluted?
White families have ten times more wealth than black families. Our nation built wealth for white people on the backs of black and brown people. Ta-Nehisi Coates described America’s legacy of systematically transferring wealth from black bodies to white ones in The Case for Reparations. What would it mean to transfer your wealth to “defund white supremacy”? Because if we don’t talk about that, are we actually talking about anything?
I would sum up the conversation as the tension between what’s financially wise and what’s financially just. Can you, as an individual, do both? I don’t know where our conversation on Saturday will lead, but it has to lead somewhere different than the road we were on. If you’re interested in talking next Saturday about the intersection of racial justice and personal finance, email me and I’ll send you a Zoom link. The call is meant for FF1 grads because we all have the same base of knowledge, but if you want to share with a friend, please do.
To add another voice to this essay, I want to offer something a current FF1 student wrote in lesson 3.4, the one where you make the video about your personal vision of your future:
I think the reason I delayed so long to film my video was it felt so out of the current context of our world to be talking about the amazing life I had because I so diligently saved all my money and reduced my consumption, so this dissonance of FI and the long-standing wealth and opportunity gaps has been top of mind. (I can also recognize that fundamentally, systemic oppression of Black lives isn’t a new thing, but this particular convergence of events seems to be taking hold in different ways for me.) I was listening to an interview on the Money Circle Podcast earlier today–guests were two Black women talking about the racial wealth gap. One of them asked a question (pointed at white folks) along the lines of “If someone asked you to give up 50-60% of your wealth tomorrow to make this right, could you do it?” https://www.instagram.com/p/CBdp5jgH1sj/ Knowing even with half of what I have I’d be “better off” than so many folks are today, it’s still hard to consider that question…which is good. New meanings to consider for “enough” and for the role of the collective in addressing these inequities.
Side note: the interviewee was not suggesting this idea of all white people giving up 50% of their wealth as a solution–and was acknowledging the necessity of systemic change vs. individual change, but the question still had weight to it for me.
Hope to see some of you on Saturday June 20th.
Photo by lucas Favre on Unsplash
Have you ever been spit on because the color of your skin?
I have. Until now, I’ve only told this story once in my life. I usually hide it, even from myself.
As a young child, I grew up in Chinatown, Toronto, almost entirely surrounded by other Chinese immigrants. My first memory of white people was when I was four year old, walking hand-in-hand with my grandmother down the street, and two white boys spit on us as they rode by on their BMX bikes. I turned and caught the eye of one of the boys sneering at me as they rode away. My grandmother didn’t react and kept on walking. What I learned from her was, you have to suppress your rage. You have to swallow your bitter humiliation to survive under white supremacy.
Suppressing rage is a lesson that I’ve heeded all my life. It does a person of color no good to let white people know about the litany of indignities living under white supremacy. Yes, even in liberal, progressive New York/San Francisco/Portland. It’s still white supremacy, just a different type. It’s the type that says, “I can say this racist thing to you because, you know, we’re friends, and I’m a Good Person Who’s On Your Side.” Or being excluded from the dating pool. Or being passed over for professional promotions (interesting note: I’ve never received a promotion in my life). You have to, as so many other people of color know, suppress rage and swallow humiliation.
Forty years later, spitting on Asian Americans is something white people still do.
This is context for understanding why I’m donating everything from SOFF to social justice causes this year. All the income this spring went to a COVID relief fund to Asian immigrant workers. This summer, all the money will support Black Lives Matter.
Why? Because money is not only a financial matter, it’s a moral one as well.
In class, we talk about consumption as a moral issue, specifically in terms of resource use and climate change. The main lesson is frugality. But even if you’re frugal, the choice of where to spend is still a moral one. You can figure out how much of your spending is NEEDS, WANTS, and BULLSHIT. This will help you with your budget. But it still doesn’t answer where your money should go.
Any economic system benefits those in power most. Our consumption typically reinforces the status quo by giving money to the powerful. Progressives say that your spending choices are political choices. But it goes way beyond that. In a racist society, where you send your money is a moral choice.
In class, we talk so much about “how much is enough?” Our economy is a circle of interdependence that both consumers and businesses to sustain the whole. My income comes from your spending, and your income comes from my spending. If everyone decides to stop spending, no one has a job. (We’re experiencing that right now in the first few months after COVID with the national savings rate up to 33%) That uncovers two paradoxes that I can’t solve. First, the FI movement relies on others NOT doing it, if everyone did, the economy would collapse. Second, economic growth is fueling our environmental destruction. But I do know this: if you are holding more than enough, that means the money cannot circulate to others that need it. Again, my income comes from your spending and my spending comes from your income. If folks hold onto their wealth, the poor have less. Having more than enough has racial justice implications.
Vicki Robin (author of Your Money or Your Life) once told me that financial independence is when you get to devote your time and attention to what you truly care about, without having to worry about the money. You get to forget about your own individual, egocentric problems and serve the world by solving the larger problems around you.
Financial independence means that I get to choose how I interact with white supremacy. I have much more freedom to choose what I say and support what I believe than when I had a job. In the end, financial freedom is really moral freedom.
With financial independence, I want my time, energy, and money to support social justice causes. The spring income from FF1 and the Gratitude Dojo went to the Jade District COVID relief fund. We raised over $7,000 for immigrant workers, most of whom would not have received state unemployment benefits or the $1,200 federal relief check.
The biggest social justice issue we have right now is that we live in a virulently anti-black society (read The Case for Reparations if you want a summary). It shows up in every system: housing, criminal justice system, and—critically to someone who teaches personal finance—the job market and wealth. But the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, killed in February while out for a run in Georgia; Breonna Taylor, killed in her home in March by police officers in Louisville; and George Floyd, killed by police officers in Minneapolis, and many others, have shown how virulently anti-black this country is. While my experience as an Asian American does not compare to the experience of being black, I can see that, right now, people are choosing to no longer suppress their rage. Right now, people are no longer swallowing their humiliation. Now is the time. Black Lives Matter has entered the Overton Window. Now is the moment.
The income from the summer FF1 and FF2 cohorts will go to the Black Lives Matter Global Fund. Tell anyone you know who might want to take Financial Freedom 1; we’ll be having curious and courageous conversations about how FF and financial empowerment are part of a more equitable world for black and brown folks. We’ll discuss the freedom that financial independence really brings: the freedom to say no.
If you’re a person of color, or simply someone who needs help with tuition, reach out. We’ll make it work.
We ALL should be donating to changing our current system of white supremacy. If you feel like you’ve done well and benefited from the status quo, consider giving to the cause yourself. How you live in this country is a moral act. Right now, use your money as a moral act as well.
Does it make you feel uncomfortable to say that you love money? Most of us have a complicated relationship with money, one where we don’t want to think about its central importance in our lives. But whatever we have: our homes, our education, our sense of security in the world, money had a central role in providing it for us.
I got to visit Vicki Robin for a couple of days and talk about taking the RE out of FIRE. Her message was that FIRE people should stop talking about early retirement. Early retirement simply isn’t attractive to people with the motivation and ability to reach financial independence early. It’s freedom to do what you want, with integrity, without regard to needing to make money.
One of the big takeaways in FF1 is “It’s just math.” It’s something I repeat multiple times to people. Personal finance is just math. And not very hard math. You just need two numbers, your income and your expenses, and from that you can figure out when you hit financial independence.
But I’m wondering if it’s really not about the math at all. It’s really about the principles you live by.
You can read the SOFF newsletter Money and Money on Substack. Additionally, you can listen to the SOFF podcast, which features past students explaining their favorite lesson and what it’s meant to them years after the course. There you’ll get a good taste of what you’ll learn in FF1 and the fellow students you’ll meet in the course.
