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:

1. 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?

2. 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?

3. 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.