Berna Anat is about to become your favorite Filipino auntie. Over a Zoom call, I ask the self-proclaimed “financial hype woman” @HeyBerna if it was OK that I blew half a grand on a shopping spree over the weekend that included a designer purse and three pairs of new shoes.
“Oh, man, that’s how it’s gonna go: I’m gonna be out here enabling people’s purchases left and right,” she laughs. “If it made you feel good — it gave you joy and sparks joy in that moment — I think that’s OK.”
She adds the caveat that these purchases should come from a place in my budget that is set aside for whatever I want. While my gut feeling about budgets is “meh,” I like that Anat’s explanation about how budgets work puts me in the driver’s seat. Having more control is a great way to reduce anxiety, especially for us spiraling-out-of-control millennials and Gen Zers.
Another way of gaining control of the situation is by talking about money. “Talking about money? My parents told me to never talk about money,” you say. But talking about money is Anat’s whole premise in her new teen nonfiction release, “Money Out Loud: All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us.”
She shares that growing up in the Bay Area as the first-generation child of immigrants from the Philippines, her family “absolutely did not talk about money. We were lower middle class. We went through the 2008 housing crisis, filed for bankruptcy, all of that, and still no talks about money, no acknowledgment.”
“But at the same time, as a child, you’re still learning about money. It’s just if no one’s talking about it, you’re learning about it through context clues. You’re learning about it through the tension you feel in the home. You’re learning about it through what’s being unsaid,” she adds.
We all have money stories and just like Anat notes, my family didn’t talk about money directly, but my father would frequently give the excuse that he had to work…
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