Acknowledgments

Part One: Preparing Your Mind for Financial Success
Chapter One: The Road to Financial Healing
Chapter Two: A Closer Look at History
Chapter Three: Money in the Family

Part Two: Seven Prescriptions for Financial Health and Healing
Chapter Four: Prescription 1: Set Goals That Speak Your Heart
Chapter Five: Prescription 2: Balance Your Checkbook and Know Your Net Worth
Chapter Six: Prescription 3: Develop a Spending Plan
Chapter Seven: Prescription 4: Track and Analyze Your Spending
Chapter Eight: Prescription 5: Pay Off Debt with Discipline -- Not Deprivation
Chapter Nine: Prescription 6: Save Consistently Without Being a Miser
Chapter Ten: Prescription 7: Get the Support and Expert Advice You Need

Part Three: Beyond Getting It Straight
Chapter Eleven: Building Wealth and Funding Your Dreams

Index

Chapter One

The Road to Financial Healing

Whether you are one of those sisters who owe more than they own, or you are scuffing to make ends meet on a solid income that would make your mama's jaw drop and say, "Girl, you make how much money?" believe this: We can all learn to shrink our debt, expand our investments, and cultivate financial health, wealth, and peace of mind.

Believe me, I know this is true. The publication of Girl, Get Your Money Straight! marks my twenty-fifth year as a financial professional. After a successful career as a retail-banking executive, I have worked for the last decade as an independent consultant, coaching sisters just like you and me through the often tricky waters of money management. I call myself a financial recovery specialist, highly experienced in helping clients who are financially challenged in a variety of ways. I assist them in designing and implementing a personalized program of debt reduction and planned spending to stabilize their finances, dig themselves out of familiar money and credit traps, and ultimately build up savings to invest for their futures.

While I have worked with hundreds of clients from all ethnic backgrounds and walks of life, I have been astonished by the number of eager black women who have flocked to my popular group workshop, Money Management: Achieving Prosperity and Debt-Free Living. In 1994 I presented this workshop for the African American Women on Tour Conference, and a standing-room-only crowd of more than two hundred African American women of all ages showed up at an Oakland hotel, ready to learn the strategies and techniques that would help them get their money straight and foster true financial healing. They brought enough energy into that room to light up the whole city, and it was a beautiful sight to behold.

I stood before that audience as a money-management expert, but just as important, as a sister. As an African American woman, I know firsthand our hunger for straightforward financial information that directly connects with how we live, the feelings we have about ourselves, how we interact with the world at large, and the dreams we want to realize.

I also stood before that audience as a firsthand testament to the powers of change that lie within each and every one of us. I am not the kind of financial expert who has always had it all together in my own financial life. I've dealt with many of the challenges typically faced by upwardly mobile African Americans who have come of age since the 1970s. Having benefited from access to education and job opportunities most of our parents didn't have, I am part of a generation of African Americans whose buying power is expected to exceed $533 billion in 2000, up from $350 billion in 1990. That's a 70-percent increase over the last decade! But access to larger incomes doesn't automatically bring the confidence and knowledge it takes to manage money well and turn it into wealth. Some of us grew up poor or were raised by folks who grew up with very little and unwittingly passed on to us high levels of insecurity, self-criticism, and self-doubt in all areas of our lives -- especially in finance. And like many Americans, once we have money in our pockets, many of us quite innocently get caught up in our capacity to consume. Eventually, we find ourselves bogged down by overwhelming debt and bad credit habits that have been fueled by psychological vulnerabilities that undermine our confidence to control our financial lives.

I help clients, as I once had to help myself, to examine and work through the close link between how we feel about ourselves in relation to money and how effectively or ineffectively we manage our financial lives. Since both psychological and practical barriers prevent us from moving beyond compulsive spending to planned spending and conscious wealth building, I have found that a holistic approach -- that is, one that incorporates both the emotional and the practical and works to heal the individual as well as her bank account -- best facilitates change. Such an approach worked for me during my own financial recovery, and I've since found that it works for the hundreds of clients I've seen in my practice and in the workshops I've conducted over the last ten years. Taking a close look inside our minds and hearts is often the key to taking control of our fiscal responsibilities.

The Psychology of Money Management

In the 1970s feminists first called attention to the source of a common pattern in women's financial behaviors -- a pattern of passivity and doubt in our ability to take control because of childhood socialization as females. We have commonly been taught and encouraged to leave to men any issues relating to power -- specifically control of money. A popular statement was "Oh, don't worry your pretty little head about such things." Psychologist Phyllis Chesler in her 1976 book Women, Money and Power explored women's attitudes, values, and ultimately our habits and actions regarding money in relation to our training and life experience. This social-psychological perspective struck a responsive chord with many people, but not until the 1990s were these psychological insights adopted widely by mainstream financial experts and used to help the general consumer. National bestsellers like Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin and The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman are two excellent examples of very helpful books that use this approach.

People of all races and both genders are products of distinctive cultural histories and family messages that are passed on from generation to generation. These familial and social expectations influence the capabilities, competence, and expectations we have for ourselves in all areas of our lives. Black women, even though we have a longer collective history in the paid labor force than white women, may be especially weighted down by negative messages from our families and the larger society regarding both our personal and economic status, so it's hardly a coincidence that our financial affairs often mirror an underlying personal sense of inadequacy. In actuality, black women today are the products of generations of resourceful women and men who held their families together with little support -- material or otherwise -- and despite a lot of economic deprivation. But too often society calls attention to our historically degraded social status rather than our triumphs over it.

If we're going to get our money straight, we must become aware of various kinds of emotional conditioning and how we act it out in our financial lives. Perhaps black women more than anyone else can benefit from a holistic approach that addresses our commonplace emotional conflicts. Of course, there are many African Americans who do not struggle with money issues and who have perfectly healthy spending and saving habits. But those of us who do overspend are often caught up in an unconscious attempt to make ourselves feel acceptable in a world that often seems to be working against us.

In a society in which financial status is an important part of what makes people "successful," spending often becomes a means of self-affirmation. But spending to make ourselves feel better -- to feel as though we have a certain place in the world -- can actually trap us in a downward spiral: The more shame we feel over mounting debts and finances that are not as we'd like them to be, the more paralyzed we become, even prone to depression. And the worse we feel, the more we spend. Ultimately, our money woes can feel like a festering wound that never heals. Consider the following stories of two sisters who found themselves in a dangerous cycle of feel-good spending and debilitating debt.

Living Beyond Your Means

A typical client is Felicia, who at twenty-seven is challenged by the most important mental hurdle in controlling finances: setting priorities and making choices. Five years out of college, she landed a dream job as a marketing communications assistant in a cosmetics company. But despite its glamorous aura, the entry-level job pays only $27,000 a year. That doesn't go very far in covering her average monthly expenses of about $2,100. Her monthly take-home pay: $1,640. She has been living in the red and falling in deeper.

A young single woman with no children, Felicia loves to travel and has taken a big trip almost every year since college. She financed trips to Paris and Jamaica by using her rent money, after which she spent months juggling her other bill payments, scrambling to play catch-up. Delinquent payments severely affected her credit standing. Today she takes cash advances on her Visa just to buy transit cards to get to and from work.

The Secret Spendthrift Syndrome

My client Corliss, a vibrant and youthful forty-six-year-old sister who wears attractive baby dreadlocks, is blessed with an annual income of $57,000 and had $8,000 in debt. Her income puts her in the top 2 percent of African American women earners, and her debt burden isn't outrageously high. Still, Corliss shifted uncomfortably in her chair all through our first session. Other than a small 401K retirement savings plan, she had no significant assets. She was renting her apartment, leasing her car, and although she considered herself a homebody and no big-time spender, her paycheck barely covered her total expenses. She didn't know where her money was going and was afraid she wouldn't have enough to live on after retirement.

While she presented a confident image to the world, she admitted, "I'm very embarrassed by my financial situation. I'm forty-six years old, but I feel like a little child. Up until now I've never been willing to face my finances because it felt so uncomfortable. I just figure if I look good, everybody will think I'm okay. I've got tons of clothes, and it feels really good to shop. But usually by the time I get home I feel terrible and get an awful headache. It's a vicious cycle and I'm stuck in it. What's wrong with me?"

If you, like Corliss and Felicia, haven't yet been able to set a sound course for growth, don't worry -- this book gives you the tools you need to identify destructive money patterns and take charge of your home economics. I know that you can do it -- because I did. More than a dozen years ago I was burned-out by a high-powered banking career and by a marriage that wasn't working. My finances, too, were running out of control. As I worked to get my life back on track, I came to understand how not feeling worthy and not loving yourself can create patterns of money misuse, leaving us prone to compulsive spending to salve our insecurities. I believe that understanding these potential connections not only promotes health and healing for people suffering from acute financial problems, it can also be a source of valuable insight -- an instructive preventive measure even -- for many who never fall prey to serious binge spending and the like. We can learn how to avoid sabotaging our own financial security and use the same insights to increase our options for building wealth -- whether or not we ourselves are actually secret spendthrifts. I share my own story as a case in point.

Why This Book Is for Black Women

Now that you know my story, I hope that you will feel, "If she can make it through all that, achieve her goals, and find financial peace of mind, then maybe I can too!"

Originally I had planned to write a financial book geared to an audience of all ethnic backgrounds, because that has always been the makeup of my client base. But while writing my book proposal I noticed that the examples of clients I had chosen to illustrate the financial problems related to low self-esteem were almost all African American women. This is not to say that women of other cultures don't have self-esteem issues -- they most certainly do. Everyone has these problems, but black women have more to contend with in developing a healthy sense of self in this society, and as a result, they often have a harder time establishing healthy financial habits. The range of resulting money problems can vary greatly, from anorexic-type patterns, where we avoid money or are afraid to spend it, to bulimic-type patterns of obsessive binge spending.

My financial program is distinctive because it doesn't focus exclusively on the hardware of personal finance. I don't advise, "Stop using your credit cards," and then exhort, "Just do it!" or "Just say NO!" Chances are you've already heard this message a million times before. Intellectually you know that it makes sense, but emotionally it somehow hasn't worked for you. A holistic financial program, however, helps you understand your attitudes and identify your behavior patterns. The techniques assist you in making the cultural, historical, emotional, and spiritual connections necessary to build a solid financial foundation for yourself and your family.

How to Use This Book

To begin financial healing, it's important to let go of negative energy by forgiving yourself and anyone else for whom you might harbor feelings of blame. Remember, my ex-husband and I had accumulated together $50,000 in debt that made me slow to forgive him and myself. But I did it eventually. When I paid off the last debt from that relationship, I felt a glorious sense of relief and accomplishment that restored my self-confidence. I keep it foremost in my mind, however, that compulsive debting is as addictive as compulsive drinking. To remain debt free, I must take it just one day at a time. With God's help and conscientious efforts to keep my money straight, I know I can do it.

I no longer have intense regrets about the financial chaos I created in my life because it gave me an opportunity not only to find my own way back, it also gave me my new and productive life as a finan cial recovery specialist with the expertise to help so many other people help themselves. I have a lot to be thankful for: I dearly love the work of helping people change their lives and find financial peace of mind.

Chapter One, the chapter you are reading now, is one of three chapters in Part One, "Preparing Your Mind for Financial Success." The next two chapters in this section focus on guiding you through your own internal psychological inventory about your relationship with money. This focusing will help you identify beliefs and emotions that sabotage your financial success, and uses exercises and tools like the genogram to analyze and evaluate money messages you have inherited from your family. I think of this internal work as the software of my program to get your money straight.

Part Two, "Seven Prescriptions for Financial Health and Healing," integrates the software with the hardware and provides a practical framework of basic money-management procedures -- proven cash-management and debt-management tools and strategies that can enhance your economic future. If you commit yourself to the systems and exercises in this section of the book, you will be able to:

• Recognize and move through any counterproductive ideas you may have developed about money, focus on why you've held such views, and change your thinking for the better

• Become aware of exactly how much income you need to meet your basic needs and live comfortably

• Learn to use effectively the recommended tools and techniques for keeping track of your finances

• Pay off your debts, remain debt free, and make it a habit to save and invest money for your future

Part Three, "Beyond Getting It Straight," is the concluding section of the book. It points you toward inspirational examples of sisters who have gone the whole nine yards, finding financial peace of mind and increasing personal net worth beyond their dreams.

In the book, I'll be coaching you through a series of exercises that will help you master each piece of the financial healing program. I strongly recommend that you keep the papers on which you do these exercises so that you can look back on them periodically to chart your growth and progress. You might want to set aside a brightly colored folder marked Girl, Get Your Money Straight! and keep it on your home desk or worktable. Put a photograph of yourself in happy times on the cover -- one with a big smile. You might even want to tuck the folder into your briefcase or keep it with you in the car or on the bus or subway so that in moments of weakness -- when you're tempted to go out for an expensive lunch or stop off on the way home to buy a new outfit after a bad day -- you'll be able to pull it out and tell yourself, "Honey, you've got better things to do with your money!" Besides, there's no better motivator than a glance back at how far you've already come.

There are three key things that I'd like you to keep in mind as you start off down the road to financial healing:

1. Be accepting of yourself and your present circumstances: Courageously examine your prior financial actions -- or inaction -- knowing you can move forward from where you are now only by making changes.

2. Be grateful for life's lessons: How often do you hear somebody say, "Thank God, this past-due electric bill has a twenty-four-hour notice to disconnect!" Probably never. Typically, we don't look at such crises as blessings. But if you do, you'll see that they can serve as timely wake-up calls to tighten up our game.

3. Be patient with yourself: Changing your habits from unconscious consumption to conscious wealth-building takes time. Measure your progress from month to month, using the strategies and suggestions in this book, and don't forget to give yourself mental and spiritual reinforcement -- an important part of the holistic financial healing process.

Okay, girl, are you ready? Let's get your money straight!

Copyright © 2000 by Glinda Bridgforth