Every once in a while I read an article that leaves me speechless. This is one such article. [Excuse me while I go weep in a corner.]

We bought a fixer-upper. I was a first-time home-owner. I honestly had no realistic idea of what I was getting myself into. I don’t have any major regrets about the house or the projects we’ve done but homeownership is, on the whole, a lot of more work and a lot more expensive than I’d imagined it would be.

I see it every single day in my work – those earning top salaries deal with the same financial wellness demons as their lower-wage-earning counterparts. Lifestyle inflation, destructive money scripts, and other self-sabotaging behaviors and habits are issues that cross all gender, race, educational, and economic lines.

In the US, women are paid less than men. Black women are paid less than their white counterparts. And LGBTQ women are paid less than the cis-gendered population. At the bottom of this steaming pile of vile, systemic discrimination and bias and hate are transgender people who, even in a tight employment market, face a 15% unemployment rate. According to this article, “in most states you can still be fired for being LGBTQ.”

No amount of budgeting and financial literacy will fix the systemic, structural inequities present in our financial system. That doesn’t mean we, as individuals, should give up, not budget, not learn or care… we need to work to effect change on both a macro and a micro level.

I learned early in life that being seen as intelligent and competent had much more to do with one’s gender, skin color, and personality than actual intelligence or demonstrated level of skill. The study discussed in this article is just verifying what most of us already know: classism and elitism are alive and well in America.

Surprise, surprise! It’s not the much touted tropes of financial indiscretion keeping millennials out of the housing market, it’s structural and systemic policies coming back to bite a generation that had no hand in the policy-making.

This is not the time nor the place to re-litigate my arguments in favor of higher education. I’ll let the arguments and supporting data in this article do the work for me.

Why can nothing be simple? We Americans make everything so complicated. Our collective, internalized, securlarized Calvinism is constantly at odds with our love of conspicuous consumption. We don’t take vacations because the new status symbol is being too busy and indispensable to take time off work. And, yet, when we do vacate, we’re spending more than ever on our vacations.

Adding to the complexity, how many Jacks and Janes are still paying for their last vacation and how long will they pay compounding credit card interest on this summer’s getaway?

Millennials have every right to be pissed at the Baby Boomer generation. Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman and their collective Prosperity Gospel Bootstrap bullshit are reason enough.

Although this article is specifically addressing student loans, the points they’re making are universal – traditional financial literacy efforts have and will continue to fail. Factual knowledge isn’t enough to change behavior. Throwing facts at people without context is a waste of resources. Better, proven-effective approaches are available. Like, say, money coaching.

A budget by any other name — be it a Happiness Allocation or the term I use occasionally, a Money Map, is still, in the end, the same thing. On the one hand, it’s semantics. On the other hand, I believe that our language is important and if one term sucks the joy out of life, choose a different term!

I emphasize that budgeting is a verb, not a noun. And there’s no right or wrong. It’s all about our values and our goals — not others’, and certainly not the “experts’.” I think “Joy” is overrated and hollow but, again, that’s a semantics thing, right? I value security and freedom. So my budget is my Freedom and Security Allocation tool. What would you prioritize when allocating funds?

As a money coach, this trend makes me cringe. I’d much rather teach people to save in installments, in advance, for their tees and jeans. One might be tempted to point out that the customer isn’t paying interest but someone is — the merchants. And no way they’re taking the hit to their bottom line so the cost gets passed back to the consumer through higher prices.

I freely admit to being a bit of a skeptic about the “science” of economics and to being intrigued by heterodox economic theories. As such, I found this article an interesting read.

Things that make me go hmmmm….

I’m new to this topic/debate (UBI and/or guaranteed jobs) and, to be frank, like the podcasters I’m (at least a little) ambivalent. But I found this conversation on Medium’s Civic Skunk Works to be interesting and informative and therefore thought it worth sharing.

News and details of this breach are just beginning to come out but it’s going to be a doozy. The things to understand here are 1) “customers” are anyone and everyone who has a credit card, ever had a loan of any type, etc and thus has a credit rating — you’re likely a “customer” even if you’ve never had any direct interaction with Equifax or have ever even heard of them; and 2) the quantity and quality of the details the hackers know about the victims of this breach are deep and personal — our social security numbers, previous addresses, entire credit history — all the information you are often asked to provide in order to prove you are you.

An interesting study about “soft information” and loan outcomes by gender of both lender and borrower.

According to this Wall Street Journal article, the big three credit reporting agencies (TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax) have agreed to no longer include tax liens and civil judgements on credit reports unless they meet more stringent identity-matching criteria.

I typically find these “10 Things…” -themed articles annoying, useless click-bait but I thought this one had some entertainment value and was rather low on the annoying scale: 7 Weirdest State Tax Laws.

Take a few minutes to watch this PBS Newshour piece on the cost of banking for the poor and vulnerable. Triple-digit interest rates? How can that possibly be legal?

I found this article to be intelligent and refreshingly meaty compared to the tired old hackneyed “Top 5 (8, 10, etc) Things” articles that PF bloggers are so fond of.

The full title of the article is Seven Mental Biases That Can Impact How You Invest but all seven biases impact our everyday money decisions as well, not just our investing decisions.

*The article was originally published on LearnVest but I can’t in good conscience provide a link to LearnVest because that site has very annoying pop-ups and the article is divided into tiny chunks over multiple pages to maximize their page views and ad counts.

This article speaks to one of largest disconnects I perceive in the field of personal finance — how does one get from living the day-to-day getting-by life most of us experience to having enough money to actually have need of a financial advisor? There’s a really big gap between having a couple hundred or a few thousand in a savings account and having enough funds that we feel we need professional managerial advice.

It’s that space, that gap, that I work to fill. Want to get to a place of needing a Financial Adviser?  Work with a Money Coach!