What I Learned About Money from Women Who Never Talked About It
A generational audit of the financial silence that got handed down — and what I'm choosing to do differently.
“No, and we never talked about it!”
My sister and I are driving up to Santa Barbara for a weekend getaway. The car is the most sacred space for private thoughts, and apparently for the most socially taboo behavior: discussing money, specifically, that no one taught us how to manage it.
Both of us had to learn on our own. She laments not checking her credit score until her thirties, out of fear of what that number might mean for her life. I didn’t have a credit card of my own until I was 23, and I was so scared of it that I set an alert for any transaction over $50. I look back at that now with equal parts shock and sympathy. I often feel I can’t walk out of the house these days without spending $200 just to exist. Twenty-three-year-old Laura, with her $50 spend alert, would be huddled in a corner.
The good news is that I have healthier views on credit cards now, and my sister looked at her credit score, built a beautiful life, and passed her hard-won knowledge on to her kids. But the conversations we keep having — in cars, in kitchens, in the margins of otherwise ordinary days — are in service of understanding what made us both start from scratch. No one taught us how to handle money. And that silence didn’t come from nowhere.
The Women Who Knew and Didn’t Say
My money education, or lack thereof, lives largely with my mom, who is still here and who I ask detailed, curious, sometimes slightly invasive questions about money regularly. Getting her to answer is a coin flip — I receive as many demures as I do answers. She comes from the generation that believed talking about money was gauche, and her of all people still standing on that belief is, frankly, wild to me.
My mom was an accountant. My Excel skills are padawan-level compared to her expertise at wrangling numbers into their place. Every line audited, every charge confirmed, every check accounted for. My mom can manage money. I just wish she had sat me down at some point to teach me her masterful ways.
I have never balanced a checkbook in my life. I was 28 before I started going through my bills line by line to check for inaccuracies.
I don’t blame my mom for never sitting me down to explain how money works. Because I don’t think anyone did it for her either.
Note to self: ask mom who taught her how to balance her checkbook, and when.
Her generation didn’t talk about money. If you needed help, or weren’t doing as well as the people around you, it was a point of shame. Not malice — shame. There’s a difference, and it matters when you’re trying to hold space for someone you love while also keeping a door open that was always meant to stay closed. I try to do both. It sometimes takes using Mjolnir as a doorstop.
The One Belief I Never Questioned
Not talking about money was something I never questioned growing up. It just was. The sky is blue. Don’t put your hand on a hot stove. Don’t talk about money.
It wasn’t until I found The Financial Diet — two women discussing money unapologetically, out loud, on the internet — that I thought: I want to talk about it too. It made it less scary. It helped me work through my fear and eventually turned me into the friend people feel most at ease approaching when beginning a financial journey. One questioned belief, and here we are.
I changed the pattern. I tell friends when something isn’t in my budget. When coworkers ask what I make, I tell them. I tell my mom how much is in my accounts, where that money lives, and how much help she could count on from me if she ever needed it.
A quick caveat, because this matters: talking about money is time-, situation-, and person-specific. I’m not advocating for telling everyone everything. My emphasis is that embarrassment and shame shouldn’t keep you from having honest, necessary conversations with the people who need to know.
Here is the key takeaway: don’t talk about money with everybody — but do talk about money with everyone who matters.
What Actually Helped — Two Things, Not Ten
The Financial Diet gave me one solid skill and one mindset shift. That’s it. Two things. And they’ve done more for my financial confidence than any budgeting spreadsheet or savings calculator I’ve ever tried.
I’m sharing them here not as a prescription but as a proof of concept. These worked for me. If they resonate, take them. If they don’t, that’s fine too — you’ll find your version. The goal isn’t to do it my way. The goal is to start looking.
The skill: just look at your money.
You don’t have to change anything. You don’t have to have a plan. You only need to look at it and see what’s going on — what’s coming in, what’s going out — without judgment. That’s all your first step needs to be. Simple advice, but affirming in ways I still can’t fully explain and remain grateful for every day.
When I was just starting out, anyone who told me to open a specific account or invest a specific amount went straight to the trash. I was so scared of money that moving it from the one checking account my parents opened for me in high school felt terrifying. “Just look at it” was the break in all the noise I needed, at exactly the right time.
The mindset shift: money is a tool, and a tool unused is just a tchotchke from TJ Maxx collecting dust.
Most people understand intellectually that money is a tool to be used. But the lived experience of that idea can be buried under scarcity programming, or overwhelm, or the quiet despair of not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. All of that is real, and when it was my reality, I used a grading scale.
When I looked at my spending, nothing was “bad” or “good.” It got a grade. Internet bill that kept me connected while I finished college? A+, money well spent. Same with rent. The trick with bills is to grade them on whether the end product is doing its job. For discretionary spending — groceries, mostly — I asked harder questions. Did I eat all my bananas before they went bad? Did my well-intentioned bagged salad rot in the back of the fridge again? The answers informed the grade, and the grade informed the next grocery list. Not the list the person I wished I could be would write. The list for the person I actually am.
Now I look at my money every day and grade it once a week, though the rubric has evolved as my habits have. I’m not watching numbers go up or down. I’m staying accountable. Knowing what’s in my account and which bills are coming lets me spend with confidence, without worrying about every dollar. The weekly check-in still lets me go line by line: to see how my money is working and whether that work is earning an A+ or quietly failing the class.
Doing It Differently, Quietly
My sister checks her credit score now. I ask my mom invasive questions, and she answers more of them than she used to. We are all, slowly, changing what got handed down.
It isn’t a clean break. It’s more like holding a door open with whatever you have available — Mjolnir if necessary — and hoping the person behind you walks through it a little easier than you did.
That’s what I’m choosing. Not perfection. Not a complete rewrite of everything I inherited. Just the quiet, ongoing decision to look at the thing, talk about the thing, and pass something better forward when I can.
What’s a money belief you inherited that you’ve never actually decided if you agree with?
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