for you. If you picked up this book, I'm hoping it's because something about the title Mom's Got Money: A Millennial Mom's Guide to Managing Money Like a Boss resonated with you.
I want to encourage you by stating I believe anyone can succeed with money no matter who they are, where they come from, or the type of education they have. Some of you have very different starting lines. You may even be the first person in your family to go to college or open an investment account. You may be wading through generations of financial trauma and unfair setbacks. You may be starting with nothing or recently left an abusive relationship. I see you. The best way I can help, as an ally, is to be your guide and have a steadfast belief in your ability to win with money.
I will walk you through the steps to gain financial confidence and take control of your finances. This book is more than teaching you about budgeting or how to raise your credit score. It's about helping you recognize your own abilities as a mom and showing you you're highly capable of making financial decisions.
Right now, you have a lot on your plate. Your family looks to you to make most of the household decisions. Sometimes, the weight of your daily decisions takes a toll. I know it's exhausting to be the glue. But, we have a choice.
We can let this responsibility frustrate us or intimidate us. We can stay up at night worrying if we're making the right decisions for our families. Or, we can step into the role of boss mama with full confidence. Because you see, taking charge doesn't mean being perfect. It means being powerful, being a planner, delegating, and anticipating that mistakes will happen. It takes leadership, some guts, and a little bit of know‐how. And guess what? You have what it takes.
By the end of this book, you'll no longer be a mom who worries about money and her kids' future. You'll be an organized leader who possesses all the skills necessary to run your family ship effectively.
You can have a 9‐to‐5 job or be a stay‐at‐home mom or a single mom and still become the boss of your financial life. Stepping into that mindset means you've committed to learning about money, and nothing is going to stop you from improving how your family handles it. It means you have so much fire in you, so much oomph, that nobody—especially not the naysayers—is going to stop you from reaching your goals.
From now on, when you think about your financial journey, I encourage you to consider that you have limitless potential. I want you to think back to when you became a mom, about how much responsibility you took on. If you can do that, surely you can handle a little thing like money, right?
But, how can you get there? The best way I can explain it is your brain is incredibly powerful. With it, you have the ability to cultivate a worldview and a mindset that can lead your family and you to a better life. Every single one of us carries within us lessons, triumphs, scars, and failures as they relate to our past, our relationships, and our money. We can use the failures as examples of why we're undeserving of the life we want. We can self‐sabotage. We can be overwhelmed. Or, we can decide to do something different.
But, in order to do something different, you have to radically shift your mindset. Your mindset is, to put it simply, your outlook on life. For example, when people discuss having a positive mindset, it usually comes with the glass half‐full analogy. But, what many people don't realize is that you can have a friendly, cheerful disposition while simultaneously harboring a negative money mindset, a lack of money confidence, and the weight of intense emotional labor (which I'll explain in full in this chapter).
Let's start with the first one. A negative money mindset, also called a scarcity mindset, shows up silently. It creeps quietly in the moments when you're deciding whether or not to donate to a cause (“I don't have enough money to donate”). It comes when your child asks to go to camp (“We can't afford that”). It slips in when your boss tells you to enroll in your retirement plan (“I've always been so bad with money. I don't know how to do that”).
When you have a negative money mindset, you feel like money is hard. It's confusing. You tell yourself it's too complicated, that you've always been bad with money, and that you can't figure it out. You try to learn about money but you quickly get overwhelmed. You might not want to ask someone for help because you feel like, as an adult and a mother, you should know the answers already. When you have a scarcity mindset, you believe—whether you realize it or not—that you don't have enough. It's hard to part with your money. You're afraid someone's going to come and take it. The worry sometimes keeps you up at night. Negative money mindsets are tricky like that.
Now let's couple that with a concept called emotional labor that's been gaining popularity as it relates to how women feel within their households. In 2017, Gemma Hartley wrote an article for Harper's Bazaar entitled “Women Aren't Nags—We're Just Fed Up.”1 This article deeply resonated with women, so much so that Hartley wrote a book on the same topic the following year, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward. Emotional labor, as she describes it, is the mental weight women feel because they manage hundreds of tiny, seemingly insignificant tasks for their households and their children.
Same‐sex couples also experience emotional labor. Trish Bendix wrote a response article to Hartley's piece entitled “I Live With a Woman—We're Not Immune to Emotional Labor,” which was also published in Harper's Bazaar.2 In it, Bendix explains that same‐sex couples can struggle with the same imbalance. For example, if one member of the partnership works from home, she might feel like she has to do more household work. For single moms, emotional labor is amplified. There is no one else to ask at home to help pick up the slack.
These tasks, which take up so much mental space, aren't necessarily put there by partners, spouses, or other family members. They are often the result of cultural norms and how society has evolved. For example, my husband never told me specifically, “Hey, you should be the one to email the twins' teachers, book parent/teacher conference time slots, and RSVP to every birthday party invitation.” And yet, I do these things. Part of it is because I like being involved in my children's schoolwork and lives, but maybe part of it is because I'm doing what I saw my mom do, even though she was a working mom too.
It's interesting that even as moms have entered the workforce in droves over the past few decades, we never quite lost that long to‐do list that comes with raising a family. Somehow, we feel responsible for, well, everything. For stay‐at‐home moms, there still remains the cultural pressure to be perfect, to plan dinner, to cater to everyone's needs, and to put yourself last. There's so much silent suffering and pain for someone who means so much to their family.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why?
After all, many families have joint responsibilities today and strong partnerships. For example, my husband is a phenomenal cook. He likes going to the grocery store (why, I'll never know.) You can often find him wiping down the counters and loading the dishwasher. He actually prefers to be the one putting dirty dishes in rather than taking clean ones out. Please, someone explain that to me.
But emotional labor, as Hartley and Bendix describe it, is more of a mental labor. It's the weight of the thousands of daily decisions that have to be made. It's anticipating everyone's needs, especially our children's. It's being one step ahead. It's a brain full of choices, of important dates to remember. It's feeling devoid of energy and conjuring up some more anyway.
It's the constant pressure to squeeze into the idea of what we believe is a good mom. And all of this internal chatter is invisible, so no one else knows it's there. How can our families show appreciation or say thank you when it's hard to quantify or see everything that goes on behind the scenes to keep the engine running?
Now,
