For most of my life, my relationship with money has largely been fear-based. I was raised in a middle-income home, with a single earner, four children, and continual expenses. Money was never plentiful, and conversations around it were always dipped in extreme caution.
After speaking to women around me, I realized it wasn’t just me—growing up in brown homes, girls are seldom included in conversations about investments, inheritance, and similar topics. You may have listening ears, but you’re neither expected to contribute nor required to.
What ends up happening is that you develop a very disconnected relationship with money. This lack of confidence isn’t innate but learned through systemic exclusion. Brown girls grow up internalizing the belief that money management is a male domain, which affects their career choices, salary negotiations, and willingness to take financial risks.
Looking back now as a 34-year-old woman, my journey with money has been quite unsettling. I’ve only ever focused on one aspect of growing finances: saving. Save where you can, when you can, and lock it up in the bank. I am actively changing this now—whether it be buying real estate, studying the markets, exploring mutual funds, or switching banks—and wow, it does feel very empowering!
My lack of understanding around money has impacted so many areas of my life, from negotiating a better salary when I was working, to underquoting for services in my business, to feeling very intimidated around making investments, regardless of their size (lots of overthinking, too).
When boys are taught how to invest, save, and think about building wealth, they’re basically handed a roadmap to a future full of opportunities. But for so many brown girls, those same lessons never come our way. We’re left out of these crucial talks, and it leaves us playing catch-up when it comes to understanding money and building our own financial independence. It’s not just missing a few chats here and there—it’s about missing out on real chances to create a life on our own terms. This cycle has to end.
We need our families to make space for us to be part of money conversations—whether it’s about budgeting for the month, saving for something big, learning how to invest, or exploring all the avenues to grow money. Needless to say, we deserve a seat at that table, period.
And here, I’d like to plug in my latest project: Brown Girls Invest. For all those who did not have the opportunity to learn earlier, it is well and truly never too late to start! BGI is a community that rests on knowledge-sharing, helping one another, and learning and growing together, so go on and give us a little follow.
To wrap it up, I deeply believe that if we show girls that money is a tool for freedom and let us join conversations around it, we gain real power. Including us means breaking cycles of dependence and building confident, empowered women who know how to handle their finances. And that changes everything for our futures.
