With the current financial market crisis and national anxiety about our economy, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about money.
Along with perhaps many others, I have gone on a big journey with money this year. I started my business, Lotus Blossom Style, exactly one year ago. I was new to owning a business and perhaps a bit green in more ways than one. While on many days I have felt great joy, pleasure, pride, and excitement from starting, growing and nurturing my own business, on other days I have gone through the darker side feelings of shame, doubt, confusion, frustration, fear, anxiety, exasperation, you name it... as I watched myself go more and more into debt while trying to get a business off the ground.
Having a heartfelt connection and determination to continue growing my business, I had no choice but to confront issues with money that I have never looked at before.
One of the best things I could have ever done for myself was take a workshop called "The Financial Whisperer" with Pegi Burdick, who I like to call the "wizard of financial emotional intelligence." The workshop is set up to help women examine and get insight into how they let their past manage their money today. It teaches women how to move forward with strength and confidence. Facing up to my financial challenges was not easy, but it was something that benefited me and continues to benefit me as I move forward.
According to the most recent statistics from the US Labor Department, women over the age of 25 earn 78.7 cents to every man's dollar and according to Linda Morgan, financial advisor here in Los Angeles, 80 percent of retired women are not eligible for a pension benefit. Yikes! Since women have lower earnings, lower retirement incomes, and live longer life spans (an average of seven years), women are definitely the ones who should be talking about money and especially money management!
Growing up in the environment that I did, I never felt it was necessarily "appropriate" to talk about money. No one ever sat me down to teach the birds and bees of finances. As a girl and then as a woman, I was taught to go for my passions, live my dreams. Not manage money. This is something perhaps I should have sought out myself, however I don't think I even knew enough to do that.
Now that I have found some resources to talk about money as a woman with women, I feel more grounded, stable and more financially emotionally intelligent. As I am preparing for marriage to a most wonderful fellow, I can enter as an equal and not as a "dependent." Maybe in the long run, as more and more women talk about money and the management of it, women's financial emotional intelligence will continually increase and we will live in a world with more equality in pay and maybe even a lower divorce rate.
What do you think?