Last week I shared a post on why acting on your economic privilege matters. Today we are going to dive into the how. How should you act on your privilege? What action steps can you take? 

Before we start I want to make clear that every single one of us is going to have a different answer to these questions -- and that’s a good thing! We are all different, have different life circumstances and different values and therefore have different goals. The important thing here is that if we all act, we will be able to make real change in the world around us. 

Step 1:

The first step to creating your individualized action plan is to determine what kind of actions work best for you. Answer the questions below to start narrowing in on a path: 

• Do you have a platform that can be used to share information and action opportunities with others? 

• Do you have wiggle room in your budget (or can you make some that is aligned with your values) to be able to give money to organizations and/or people? 

• Do you have time that you can donate to organizations or causes? 

• Do you have connections to resources that could help others?

• Do you have specific skills that can help others? 

Step 2:

Once you know what type of actions work for you, then you need to determine what values are most important to you. This can be done with a simple brainstorm. Try to narrow down to 1-5 core values that are most important to you. Here’s a list of potential answers just to help you get going:

Climate change, affordable childcare, racial reparations, affordable housing, voting, health and wellness, access to education…

Step 3: 

After you’ve narrowed down to a list of specific values and a list of specific types of actions you want to take, all you need to do is combine them! Note: that is often way easier said than done. I recommend taking at least 30 minutes to map out the specifics (i.e. I will donate to X organization, I will share Y resources with Z group of people). 

Step 4: 

This can be the toughest one: follow through. Schedule time on your calendar so that you actually take the time to do the work you need to do. Set reminders on your phone so that you don’t forget. 

Recognizing, understanding, and acting on your economic privilege is not something that you can do once and be finished with. In order to create more economic justice in the world around us, this will need to be a continuous process. I’ve shared a framework to help get you started, but please note that this is just one of many paths you can take. For some of you it may not feel like enough right now and that’s great - go further! For others of you it may feel like a bit too much and that just means you need to take more time to reflect and work through those feelings. That’s okay!  

As always, I’m here for you and your money journey, wherever you may be on that road. 

XOXO

Last week I shared some tools for how to better understand your economic privilege and a few ways to act upon that privilege. At the end of the post I wrote that this week we’d be discussing how to determine what actions make the most sense for you and how to get started on those actions. However, as the week progressed and I worked on that draft it became clear to me that there was a missing link: why you should act on your economic privilege. So, I’m rearranging the posting schedule and moving forward with the why this week.  

The United States has an economic disparity problem. Income inequality is higher than in any other G7 country (Canada, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, UK). The wealth gap between the richest and poorest families has more than doubled since 1989 (read that again please), and, compounding this, the redistribution of wealth through taxes and federal spending does very little to shift the income distribution throughout the population.

This isn’t a political issue - it is a humanitarian one. We can have a range of beliefs on the government’s role and correct economic structure for this country and can still agree that the widening wealth gap is problematic. It is problematic because:

• It causes health disparities that in turn cause inequalities in access and outcomes (i.e. more disease and more death for those lower on the socioeconomic ladder - just check out the stats on COVID-19 if you’re skeptical).

• The current system doesn’t allow for free-will and ownership as it is almost impossible for folks to move up the socioeconomic ladder. This trend goes in direct opposition to one of the core values in the founding and creation of the US: individualism.  

• The wealth gap is intertwined with environmental disparities that cause physical and mental health issues and contribute to global environmental issues as a whole.

• The wealth gap stifles creativity and ingenuity, thus hurting our economy and well-being as a whole. Just think of all the businesses, medical breakthroughs, and inventions that are not being made because folks are unable to get access to capital, time, or other resources to make them reality. 

While there are larger, structural forces that could impact the trends in our economic disparity, I believe that it is too big of a problem to wait for those to be put into place (if they ever will be). Instead, we, as individuals, have the power to use the areas of privilege that we have to improve the lives of those around us, and, I hope, that if you are reading this newsletter you agree with me. 

Next week we’ll revisit specific action steps you can take and the process for how to decide which make the most sense for you, your values and your lifestyle and money goals. 

As always, I’m here for you and your money journey, wherever you may be on that road. 

XOXO

Last week I shared the first of several posts in a series on economic privilege. I talked about how many people are beginning to touch on their own privilege during the current social justice movement, but that recognizing it alone does not do enough. 

This week, I want to dive deeper into how to unpack and recognize your economic privilege and how to begin to transition this understanding into actions that are aligned with your values. Be forewarned: this is not something that you can just do in a day and be done with. As a lover of checklists I am always tempted to action-item away my own personal emotional and developmental work, and I suspect a few of you have similar tendencies. So, for those of us who like to cross things off lists, know that working on your own understanding of privilege and how you want to move through and impact the world around you will be an ongoing checklist item. Think about it more like “drink water” as opposed to “file taxes”. 

In the last post I shared a list of common instances in which folks experience economic privilege. Today, I want to walk you through a couple journaling exercises that I have put together to help folks dive deeper into their own understanding. This is HARD WORK, so I recommend starting with whichever prompt speaks to you first. Don’t worry about going in order and don’t worry about fully answering the question in one sitting. Instead, try out a prompt for about 10 minutes (or as long as you’d like!) and then give yourself some time to let it ruminate in your head. Come back to that same prompt in a few days and see if you have anything to add or if any new ideas have come to mind. Do the same with each question that feels relevant to you. 

Journal Prompts to Help Uncover Your Economic Privilege

1. What are some examples of times when you were given opportunities that other people may not have been offered? Did you recognize that as privilege at the time? In what ways have those opportunities helped you throughout your life? Note: one helpful way to answer this may be by creating an impact timeline (i.e. because of that unpaid internship I met the person who connected me with my first boss. That first job helped me learn x, y, and z which then made it possible for me to…).

2. Imagine that as a young adult (18 years old) you had the responsibility of economically caring for other members of your family. What school and career decisions would you have made? How would that have changed your life trajectory? 

3. Most people take their economic privilege for granted. When are some times that you have taken it for granted in your life? What if instead you recognized your privilege at that time? How would that have changed your attitude or actions? 

4. How would your life trajectory have changed if you had/have large student loans? Would you have made the same career choices that you have made? How would that impact your day-to-day life experiences?

Once you are primed and have begun to really understand your place in the spectrum of economic privilege, you may be asking yourself: “but what do I do with this information?”. The answer is, unfortunately, that it depends. It depends on your values and how you want to interact with those around you. I hope that for all of you it means that you’ll decide to use your privilege in a way that helps others, but the way you help will likely differ greatly. Below are a few ideas to get you started. 

• Use some of your cash privilege to donate to organizations that are aligned with your values (check out this post, this post, or this post on voting with your wallet)

• Use some of your material privilege to donate items to organizations that can help others

• Use some of your economic privilege to sponsor events 

• Use some of your economic privilege to donate your professional time to others (i.e. Verdi Advising has an ongoing pro bono client program and is now expanding to include regular pro bono workshops for nonprofit organizations and their communities)

• Use some of your connection privilege to help those who are less privileged than you (individuals or organizations) get connected with potential employers, mentors and donors. 

• Use some of your time privilege to volunteer with organizations that are aligned with your values. Not sure about venturing out in public during the pandemic? Totally fair! Lots of organizations have opportunities to help remotely. 

• Use some of your privilege to reach out to your political representatives (don’t forget your local ones -- they often are the most important!) to encourage them to vote in a way that is aligned with your values. 

  • Not sure who to call or what to say? Check out 5calls.org as a great first resource. 

Next week we’ll discuss how to determine what makes the most sense for you and how to get started on your actions. 

XOXO

Note: I posted an article on privilege almost exactly a year ago, but upon re-reading it, I realized that not only did it not go far enough, but that by only having one article I was doing a great disservice to my readers. 

It feels like everywhere I turn there are discussions about discussing privilege. The term comes up in conversations with friends in passing -  as in “I know and am grateful for my privilege, but…”. It comes up on my social media feed - as in “we need to confront our privilege”, and it comes up in news stories - as in “Tammy Duckworth didn’t come from privilege”.

Saying the word and acknowledging our own privilege, whether racial, gender, or economic (or all three), is good. Recognizing that it exists is an important first step, but it is only a first step and a pretty minor one at that. Conversations in passing, instagram and the periodic news story are all great forums for pushing a term to the forefront of our lexicon, but they are often not great spaces for going deeper (of course there are exceptions to this rule). I’ve been finding myself growing increasingly frustrated by the conversations, or, perhaps a better way of putting it, the “almost-conversations” that I’m surrounded by. 

It feels frustrating because I know through my day-to-day work that privilege runs deep within our understanding of our own financial realities and relationships. Privilege impacts how we earn, how we spend and how we discuss money. And those things -- the hows of money -- impact our society at large. By just touching the surface we are never going to be able to unpack our own privilege or make larger organizational and structural changes that will change the status quo. Instead, we just sit in the space of recognizing some guilt and shame we feel and hope that the recognition relieves us of our individual pain. Unfortunately, economic justice isn’t about individual pain, it is about collective disenfranchisement. 

So, let’s have a real conversation about privilege. Or, since this is just one small article, let’s at least start a real conversation about privilege -- one that we can come back to and continue to unpack over the following weeks, months and, let’s be honest, years. 

Since my expertise is financial, I’m going to focus on economic privilege, but I highly encourage you to have these same internal and external conversations around other forms of privilege (race, gender, sexual-orientation, body, nationality). 

A Guide for Understanding Your Own Privilege

First, we need to better understand the bare bones data on where we fall in the economic ladder of our society.

Because of the way we talk about money in this country (or rather, don’t talk about money), many of us assume that we are farther down the economic ladder than we are. The Pew Research Institute created a calculator that shows where you fall economically based on your geographic location, household income and number of members of your household. Take a minute to go find where you fall. Are you surprised? Play around with the calculator a little bit -- how easy is it for you to move from tier to tier? What happens if you pretend you got a raise? What happens if you add or subtract a significant other from your numbers?

My family falls within the middle income tier in the Los Angeles area, but only barely. If we have a good year financially (i.e. not a pandemic year) then we quickly move into the upper tier. Once our baby is born it’ll be slightly harder to stay in the upper tier because our household will be bigger and therefore each of us will have a smaller portion of the income allotted to us within the family unit, but I expect, based on past experiences, that over the next few years we’ll continue to earn more and therefore move back into the higher tier. The fact is that even though I am not part of the 1% of Californians (who make a minimum of $514,694 per year), I am far from poor. To see the minimum income to be in the 1% by state, check out this article. To learn more about the tiers and change in concentration of wealth over time in the U.S. check out this Investopedia article. 

Next, we need to understand the ways that we experience economic privilege and recognize that much of our success is buoyed by our own privilege. 

The American dream ideal encourages us to try to fit into the “I pulled myself up from my bootstraps” storyline regardless of our own backgrounds. My family lore certainly leaned into this narrative -- my father grew up in a upper-middle class neighborhood in the Milwaukee suburbs, went to college (granted, there were some bumps in the road for him during this time) and then worked his way from an entry level position at a bank up to Vice-President in a multinational corporation. He absolutely worked hard and he did move from near the bottom of the totem pole to very close to the top, but this is not a “pulled myself up from my bootstraps story”. My father is white, tall, has all of his hair and, while not receiving regular financial support from his parents after leaving home, benefited greatly from the place of economic privilege he was born into. 

Similarly, I grew up in a upper-middle class suburb of Chicago, went to a top rated public school (where I attended honors classes, which in retrospect, were blatantly tracked based on race), attended a private university paid for by my parents and then took advantage of the opportunities surrounding me to go into education and then, later, finance. I worked hard. I still work hard! I also am working within a societal framework that sets me up for success. Perhaps as a woman in finance, less so than my father, but I have removed myself from the typical financial industry in order to avoid the sexism that so often coalesces in large, male-dominated fields. Being able to remove myself was only possible because of my privilege. I knew that I could start my own business, I knew that if things went really poorly I could find outside work and I knew that family and friends would help me if needed. 

You experience economic privilege if any of the following is true (note: this is not an exhaustive list, just a starting point):

• You grew up in a neighborhood with good public schools

• You went to private school 

• You were taught specific ways to interact with those in power so that they would help you (i.e. writing thank you notes, dressing a specific way for specific events)

• You were able to choose your post-high school pursuits without focusing on cost or income

• You received at least some financial support from family and friends when you attended college and/or graduate school

• You’ve been able to take unpaid internships

• You have a network of friends and family who are able to help you get employment or other career related opportunities

• You do not have student loans

• You have not had to take loans or use credit cards in order to take advantage of non-paid or poorly-paid “great opportunities”

• You have been able to take advantage of career opportunities that cost you money instead of pay you money

• You are able to pay for equipment, materials and clothing that is “necessary” to be comfortable or taken seriously in professional settings

• You are able to outsource work, either professional or personal, to others that would otherwise take time out of your day

How many of these experiences have you had? Are you surprised by the layers of privilege you experience? 

Over the course of the next week I encourage you to spend time reflecting on your experiences of economic privilege. Take time to journal, think quietly, talk to close friends and family members to try to delve deeper into this work. You will not be able to fully understand your privilege in a week. Society has done an incredible job of creating social norms that make it very difficult to unpack the invisible threads that help us, but, with time and effort, you will be able to understand a lot and, perhaps more importantly, create neural pathways that allow you to continue to delve into this uncomfortable awakening again and again in the future. 

Next week we’ll turn to focus on how to transform your understanding into action, but, as I’m a big believer in the power of truly understanding your own desires and values before taking action, I’m going to leave it here for now. 

As always, I’m here for you in your money journey, no matter where you are.

XOXO