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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Discover the path to a wealthier, more sustainable future
Money for Change: How to Reduce Waste, Build Wealth, and Create a Better Future for All is a startlingly insightful and compelling book that redefines personal finance through the twin lenses of environmental sustainability and community, offering actionable steps to not only improve your financial health but also make a positive impact on the planet.
Kara Perez, a visionary in sustainable personal finance, shares her unique approach to breaking free from outdated financial advice, demonstrating how you can achieve a fulfilling life that values community, sustainability, and financial well-being. Filled with real-world anecdotes, cutting-edge research, and hands-on money exercises, this book equips you with the tools needed to take immediate action towards a brighter, greener future.
You'll explore topics like:
- How to navigate the challenges of thrifting, tackle eco-anxiety, invest ethically, and engage in environmental justice, all while securing your financial future
- How overconsumption and reliance on fossil fuels became the norm and how we can find practical alternatives that work better for us and the planet
- Why systems, and not individuals, are the real problem
Ideal for young professionals, growing families, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and financial planners alike, Money for Change is more than a book—it's a movement towards integrating financial success with environmental stewardship. Join Kara Perez in transforming how you think about money and take the first step towards building wealth and creating a better future for all.
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Seitenzahl: 292
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
COVER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PRAISE FOR
MONEY FOR CHANGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE: WHY CARE?
WE’VE ALREADY DONE THIS, ACTUALLY
WHERE TO START WHEN EVERYTHING FEELS BROKEN
MONEY IS A TOOL FOR CHANGE
SO WHY CARE? CHANGE IS THE ONLY CONSTANT
WHAT ELSE AM I DOING?
CHAPTER TWO: QUESTION SYSTEMS, DON’T BLAME PEOPLE
HOW DID WE EVEN GET HERE?
COMMERCE VS CAPITALISM
A REMAKING IS POSSIBLE
IT’S ALL JUST AN EXERCISE IN CREATIVITY
CHAPTER THREE: SUSTAINABLE SPENDING + RETHINKING CONSUMER CULTURE
LIVING LIKE A CUBAN
HOW WE DEVELOPED OUR CONSUMPTION PROBLEM
SHOPPING AS A HOBBY
HOW TO RESHAPE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH SPENDING
OKAY, SMARTYPANTS, WHERE CAN I FIND THIS JOY YOU’RE HARPING ON?
CHAPTER FOUR: YOUR SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLE AND THE SOLIDARITY ECONOMY
FREE CHILDCARE? IN THIS ECONOMY?
MONEY IS CREATIVE, ACTUALLY
FOOD SOLIDARITY FOR ALL
HOW YOU CAN BEAT IMPULSIVE, ASPIRATIONAL, OR UNNECESSARY SPENDING
INCORPORATE CREATIVITY INTO YOUR FINANCIAL LIFESTYLE
CHAPTER FIVE: HOW TO BUILD YOURSELF A SOUP SWAP
STRONGER TOGETHER
THE ANTI-ANXIETY COCKTAIL: ONE PART MONEY, ONE PART TIME, TWO PARTS PEOPLE
WHAT “IT TAKES A VILLAGE” REALLY MEANS
HOW HELPING MOVE A COUCH SAVED US MONEY AND BROUGHT US SOUP
ACTIVITIES:
CHAPTER SIX: SUSTAINABLE INVESTING AND HOW TO BEAT FINANCIAL EMOTIONAL OVERLOAD
INVESTING WHEN YOU’RE A HATER
WHERE TO START: BUILDING YOUR GREEN MONEY PLAN
WHAT ARE YOU SAVING AND INVESTING FOR?
THE AREAS OF YOUR MONEY YOU CAN CONTROL
A QUICK EXPLANATION OF HOW BANKS WORK
CHOOSING A GREEN BANK
SUSTAINABLE INVESTING 101
SUSTAINABLE INVESTING STRATEGIES FOR YOUR IRA
SUSTAINABLE INVESTING STRATEGIES TO MAKE YOUR MONEY GREENER
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
OPTING OUT TOTALLY: LEAVING WALL STREET BEHIND
ACTIVITIES:
COMPLETELY DIVEST
Resources
CHAPTER SEVEN: GREENWASHING: WHAT TO LOOK FOR AND HOW TO AVOID IT
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE NICE TO THE BAD GUYS
HOW TO AVOID GREENWASHING WHEN YOU’RE JUST A REGULAR PERSON
CHAPTER EIGHT: ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE FOR ALL
LAND, LIBERATION, AND A DAMN FINE TOMATO
MAKING TOP-DOWN CHANGE
THE BUY-IN: NOBODY’S FREE UNTIL EVERYBODY’S FREE
CHAPTER NINE: POWER TO THE PEOPLE
HOW DO YOU EAT AN ELEPHANT?
STARTING A FREE STORE
BIKEABLE COMMUNITIES NOW
PROTESTS AND DIVESTMENT
YOUR TURN
EPILOGUE
REFERENCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Guide
COVER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PRAISE FOR MONEY FOR CHANGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
BEGIN READING
EPILOGUE
REFERENCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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PRAISE FOR MONEY FOR CHANGE
“A step‐by‐step guide to reframe our relationship from generational to ecological wealth that centers the wellbeing of a society, culture, and planet. In our pursuit to become environmentally conscious in our individual purchases, we must also extend ourselves into community care that builds resilient systems for the future of societies. Kara’s book is accessible, fun, and relatable for people to create a sustainable future.”
—Isaias Hernandez, Founder, Queer Brown Vegan
“Money for Change presents an easy‐to‐follow, encouraging, and actionable blueprint for building your own sustainable financial house.”
—Stephanie Seferian, author of Sustainable Minimalism
“Kara’s book is a refreshing take on personal finance, focusing on sustainability and practical money strategies. It uniquely addresses how to balance our idealistic goals with the world we live in, offering clear steps to align our financial decisions with our values. This book is perfect for anyone looking to make their money work for a better, more sustainable future. Highly recommend giving it a read!”
—Dasha Kennedy, Founder, The Broke Black Girl
“The next time I’m in a financial‐existential doom spiral, I’m going to curl myself around Kara’s book. Kara does an incredible job of compassionately booping you on the nose with the truth, but then gives you tangible, creative action steps towards deflating the dark feelings. The biggest relief for me is that she isn’t asking us to each build revolutions from the ground up; she lays out an accessible menu of options, from “How to find free sh*t in your community” to “Here’s how to divest from Wall Street completely, for real.” Money for Change is a map and a manual for how to do money and still sleep at night.”
—Berna Anat, Founder, Hey Berna
MONEY FOR CHANGE
HOW TO REDUCE WASTE, BUILD WEALTH, AND CREATE A BETTER FUTURE FOR ALL
KARA PEREZ
Copyright © 2025 by Kara Perez. All rights reserved.
Edition History This book was previously published as Green Money © 2025.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available:
ISBN 9781394357178 (Paperback)ISBN 9781394357192 (ePDF)ISBN 9781394357185 (ePub)
Cover Design: Jon BoylanCover Image: © Eric Ferraz/ShutterstockAuthor Photo: Courtesy of the Author
For everyone who believes in the beauty of the world, and every girl who was ever told she talks too much.
You all have a magic inside of you, and the world needs to hear what you have to say.
INTRODUCTION
In June 2022, my partner and I declined to renew our lease in Austin, Texas, and booked tickets for a two-month-long trip to Mexico, Costa Rica, and Colombia. These were countries we had both long dreamed of visiting but had never had the chance. For the last three years my partner had been working full-time while going to school for his master’s. I’d been building a business and trying to maintain it during a global pandemic. My partner had graduated just two weeks earlier, and I knew that if we didn’t take this summer to do a big trip, we likely never would. He’d find a job and get three weeks annual vacation, max. Work would get prioritized, vacation time would get devoted to family trips, and I knew I’d regret not taking the opportunity when I had it.
We’d picked these three countries for two reasons: excellent hiking and a chance to practice our Spanish. Despite being half Dominican, my Spanish is intermediate at best, and my partner’s is all learned from classroom settings. (He’s got a great grasp of the grammar and a terrible accent.) Hiking, and just time in nature in general, is our favorite joint activity and what we plan most of our trips around. We’re campers, kayakers, and wild swimmers. Something about being near trees, man, it just does it for us! The chance to hike in Oaxaca, Mexico, the rainforests of Costa Rica, and in the jungle of Colombia was basically a dream come true. Nature nerds, on a trip to celebrate and experience nature.
One afternoon in Costa Rica, we spent our afternoon at a beach along the Pacific side of the country. It was a short walk from our B&B, but we had to hop over fallen trees and brave a washed-out road to get there. When we made it to the beach, the view was stunning; a rock cliff dominated the left-hand side of the beach, and the ocean was a dark, deep blue that sparkled in the summer sun. There were two other groups of people there enjoying the space, and we strolled along the sand to find a spot to sit.
As we walked, I noticed that there was a lot of plastic waste on the beach. With every step I saw something new: a plastic fork missing a tong, one flipflop half buried in the sand, too many plastic water bottles to count. I mean the beach was almost as much plastic as it was sand.
I felt my anxiety start to rise. “Climate disaster,” a tiny voice whispered in the back of my head. “You thought you could run from your eco-anxiety, but it’s everywhere!” Even here, in one of the most eco-conscious countries in the world, which has done so much to protect and restore its native habitat, the impact of our climate crisis is evident. Our vacation here was to glorify nature, yet we kept seeing ways that nature was struggling. We found a spot to sit about halfway down the beach and my partner went for a swim. I took myself out for a walk along the beach, determined to collect as much trash as possible.
I didn’t have a bag, so I found myself taking many trips out and back. One trip I devoted myself to just gathering plastic bottle tops, of which there were thousands. One time it was shoes—flipflops, Crocs, even two sneakers. Then I focused on the water bottles, making probably five trips to gather just them. I focused on getting trash nearest to the water, figuring that I was keeping it from being washed out that very afternoon. I cleaned a section of the beach over the course of an hour.
One of the groups that had been there when we arrived got up to leave sometime around my seventh trip. An older man, probably early 50s, spoke to me as he passed by.
“Thanks for picking up the trash,” he said, giving me an approving head nod.
“No problem,” I replied. “It drives me nuts seeing it.”
But what really drove me nuts was this brief exchange. You see the trash too, dude! Why don’t you pick some up? Why would you rather sit on a trash-filled beach than contribute to making it better? Do you think it’s someone else’s job? Do you not care?
This book is about how to use your money when you care while operating under a system that doesn’t seem to. It’s about how to align your dollars with your values. It’s for people who know that we can use our money to create a more sustainable world, because the way we’re currently doing things is not working. We’re polluting the planet faster than we can clean it up, and we’re warming the planet even faster. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the floating island of garbage that’s just off the coast of California, is 1.6 million square kilometers, twice the size of Texas, or three times the size of France. The planet is on pace to hit 2.7° Celsius (4.9° Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, less than 80 years from now. You will probably be alive at that point. Your kids will be alive. What won’t be alive is many plants and animals. Agriculture crops are estimated to drop by anywhere between 5% and 12%. It’ll be hard to grow corn in California if it only rains ten times a year in California.
I don’t mean to bum you out, because this book is full of ways we can avoid that. It’s a call to action through how we use our money because money is a tool for change. We’re going to talk in depth about how we can all make small and big-picture changes in the world we currently have, because money is a tool for power. I’m not writing this book as a statement of doom and depression. I’m writing this book because I care, a lot, about our world and how we experience life on this wild and wonderful planet of ours. I want you to connect to your financial power and use it to help create the change we need.
I wrote this book because I want you to remember that we all live in nature every day, that we have made our whole lives here; nature is not something that we drive to on the odd long weekend to go camping. Nature is your backyard, and the route you take to work. It’s the coyote that runs across a four-lane highway and the bees that pollinate your vegetable garden. Nature is the tree that shades you as you wait for the bus, and it’s the river in your neighborhood that dries up by the end of July every year. I wrote this book because we are killing where we live, and we’re using a tool that we made up to do it. If we understand that tool better, and the systems it has created, we can save ourselves.
I want this book to help you think about money differently; it’s not just numbers on a screen or bills in a wallet. It’s power, it’s agency, it’s forward motion. I want you to be able to capture all that, hold it in your hand, and say, “Listen up, world. Here’s how we’re going to be doing things from now on.”
When I took advanced placement government in high school, my teacher told my class that news producers had a saying: “Bleed in the lead.” Meaning that as they assembled their evening broadcasts, the most shocking and usually negative story was given primary place. Look at any social media platform, and you’ll see that habit repeated; rage-bait content, content designed to make us angry, unhappy, or sad, is always the best-performing content. I think this mindset flows easily into how we describe, highlight, and talk about money and our planet. We share stories of destruction, death, and despair; more people than ever are living paycheck to paycheck in the US, while at the same time the Amazon is being destroyed so we can plant more soybeans.
This limits and, in some cases, breaks our relationship to both our money and our world. Why care when everything is a mess? Why pick up the plastic trash on that Costa Rican beach when it will be replaced over the next three days?
Divide and conquer has been a reliable military strategy since we first started fighting each other. That’s what’s happening now, with us and our power. Money is a tool with great power, if you can harness it. Connection to others and the land around you is another tool. Reconnecting to it, and claiming it, can and will change the world.
I don’t think a single person on the planet wants to live in a world with crop failure and plastic-filled beaches. I do think we live in a world where many of us are just far enough away from or confused by how everything works that we can’t make the connections between our decisions and their impacts on the broader world. Most people want to protect our gorgeous and delicate world. Most people want to build financial security for themselves. Most people want to save the whales and the bees. They’re just struggling with the gap between desire and behavior.
Throughout this book I’ve tried to break down how we can close the gap between the type of world most of us want and the one we currently have using money. Spoiler alert: usually it’s information awareness, behavior, and personal circumstances. So throughout the book you will meet people who come from different backgrounds, races, genders, and financial circumstances and who are all working toward greener money for themselves and a greener world for us all.
I think there is a greater than ever before desire for change. More and more of us recognize that the way we are living is out of step with nature and our own desires. More of us want to work less and live more. More of us are exhausted by endless advertising. More of us are pissed at wealth inequality. More of us are pushing back against systems and cultural norms that only benefit a few at the top.
Covid especially pulled the wool from our eyes. We saw how fragile our consumer society is and how bullshit our workplaces often are. People learned that their jobs saw them as disposable, as only valuable when worshiping that modern god, profit. Gen Z largely says that they want to work to live, not live to work. The social and financial contract in the US has long been “work hard, and you will be rewarded with a house, a family, and financial stability.” Less and less so is this the truth, with predatory student loan debt hanging around people’s necks, high housing prices and high interest rates making home buying almost impossible, and a 15-minute ambulance ride clocking in at $4,000 for many Americans.
There is a collective questioning happening around the world: “Why play a game that you can’t win? Why put the effort into a system where you are trapped in the struggle at the bottom while those at the top demand more and more for themselves?”
I answer that question in this book. It’s a bit of a paradox; there are chapters where I will explain how to survive and thrive under this system, and chapters where I will invite you to help change this system. There are advice, information, and action steps in this book. Our world is beautiful and complex, and not all of us can make the same choices or have the same abilities. There’s no one easy answer to all our challenges, and there’s nothing I can say that everyone can implement. There is no universal financial or sustainability experience that we can all have, thanks to the differences in culture, money, ability, health, and lifestyle. That’s okay! As zero-waste chef Anne-Marie Bonneau said, “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.” There’s degrees of change, and this book explores those degrees, from personal financial choices, to community actions, to legislative change.
I hope that this book will guide you to imperfect green money. I hope it will educate you, inspire you, and most importantly, engage you. I hope you will be open to change and will bring your imagination to this book. That’s the glorious thing about being open to new things; you have the opportunity to find freedom: freedom from fear, freedom from things that aren’t working, freedom to meet new people and opportunities. Change often feels scary, but on the other side of that fear is a whole new world.
I want to see that world. And I want to see it with you. We’re in this together, babes, even if we’re all bringing something different to the table. In order to change our financial lives, our financial systems, and save the planet, we’re going to need to work together. I don’t want only one person to be cleaning the beach. I want all of us to clean the beach together and then sit back and say, “Damn. We did that. And look how cute this beach is now.”
CHAPTER ONEWHY CARE?
Everything is on fire but everyone I love is doing beautiful things and trying to make life worth living and I know I don’t have to believe in everything, but I believe in that.
—Nikita Gill
I have been obsessed with money for the last decade of my life.
And for good reason: when I was 24, I was flat broke, desperately trying to find a full-time job, depressed, and struggling with my student loan payments. My full-time, posttax income that year was $16,100.
I felt that money was ruining my life. I was unhappy, earning an average of $1,000 a month living in Austin, Texas, and I was unable to do simple things such as go out for a drink without panicking that I would overdraft my bank account. I woke up in a breathless panic every night at 4 a.m., convinced I would be buried with my Sallie Mae paperwork. All my job applications were denied. Shame and embarrassment were constant companions. I felt like an absolute idiot for going to college and getting myself into student loan debt that I was struggling mightily to pay off. Financial stability, let alone financial safety, felt like a pipe-dream.
Money was a language that I didn’t speak. I was drowning in self-doubt and in debt, and in a full-blown quarter-life crisis. Money dominated my daily thoughts, mostly playing in an endless loop of “Oh, my God, I am going to die broke, and I don’t have enough to pay this bill, and I hate my life, and I’m a freaking idiot for doing this to myself.” I needed something to change, so I did what any millennial would: I googled my problems. Typing “how to pay off student loan debt faster” into Google went from a digital distress call to a rally cry in about 24 hours. I discovered the world of personal finance bloggers who were sharing their stories of debt payoff, reaching early retirement, negotiating high-paying jobs, and I realized, “Oh, snap. Some people know how to do this money thing.” And because ya girl is one stubborn and competitive lady, I decided that I would become financially fluent, come hell or high water.
Learning about money was a flashpoint in my life.
I dedicated myself to becoming debt free, cutting absolutely everything that wasn’t necessary out of my life. Goodbye weekly $2 Tuesday friend hangs at Shangri-La, hello drinking tap water at home and watching The Sopranos on my roommates HBO account. Since no one wanted to hire me for a full time position, I sought out part time work, cobbling together five different part-time jobs. I worked some combination of these jobs seven days a week to increase my income. I hustled hard, working as a caterer, freelance social media manager, freelance non profit fundraiser, high school lacrosse coach, and freelance writer. I also took odd jobs, like nannying gigs and even once waited in line for someone for $150 cash.
I started to budget, obsessively. Whenever I got paid from one of my myriad jobs, I sat down at my computer and painstakingly allocated each penny of that paycheck to my basic needs and my student loans. I finally began to understand how to save and even invest my money. With this obsessive strategy, I paid off my last $18,000 in student loans in 10 months on my less than $20,000 a year salary.
Becoming financially fluent changed my entire world. Over a period of two years, my financial situation went from “drowning quickly” to “can now float.” Where I had been stressed and overwhelmed by my student loans, I was now debt free. Where I had once had no cash savings, I now had $5,000 in my emergency fund. With each new financial milestone I hit, my anxiety decreased.
But why was money so hard in the first place? And why was I able to make such drastic changes, when so many other people in similar positions couldn’t? These were, and are, questions that I wrestle with constantly. Why do some people have houses with 15 bathrooms and some people sleep on the streets in the richest country in the world? Why do some people get a rush from spending money, and others develop anxiety around spending? How come most of us spend most of our waking hours working to earn more money?
We’re spending ourselves into an environmental hole and a mental health hole. When I was at my lowest income, I spent the most money. I spent a lot of my free time in Target, because Target is a fun, clean, and friendly place to be, and I was genuinely convinced that one more pretty notebook was the solution to my problems, instead of, you know, having more money to be able to actually afford my life. I didn’t connect my brightly colored notebook with the idea that I was using shopping to find a sense of control in my very out-of-control life. In fact, I didn’t think of my money outside of my own experience at all.
Which is a little strange, because money makes our entire world go round. Money is the key to modern life. Money, and specifically spending, has overtaken our whole lives and our whole planet in the past few decades. We need money to house ourselves, to feed ourselves, to clothe ourselves. We need money to take part in pop culture—you have to pay for HBO to watch the latest popular TV show, and you need money to buy tickets to see Taylor Swift live.
And the desire for profit, aka the money that businesses take home after all expenses have been paid, is what is fueling our global climate crisis.
Here are the financial facts: the average individual from a wealthy nation consumes 13× as much as the average individual from a poor nation. We have increased plastic production from 218 million metric tons in 2005 to 369 million in 2021 (UNCTAD 2022). Since the 1980s, we have built more homes with four bedrooms, while the percentage of two-bedroom homes being built has shrunk (US Census Bureau 2022).
A majority of Americans say that climate change is a major threat to the country’s well-being, and 69% support the country becoming carbon neutral by 2050 (Tyson, Funk, and Kennedy 2023). In the US alone, 21 species went extinct in 2023, bringing the total to 671 species (US Fish and Wildlife Service 2023). As we make, buy, and ship more things, everything from water pollution to carbon emissions goes up. Carbon emissions set a new record high in 2022, hitting a global average atmospheric carbon dioxide of 417.06 parts per million (Lindsay 2024).
Today, we live in a world where 81 people have more money than 50% of the world. As of June 2023, the top 10% of US households held 69% of total household wealth. The bottom 50% of households held only 2.5% of total household wealth (Guzman and Kollar 2023, Hernandez Kent and Ricketts 2024, St. Louis Federal Reserve 2024). The official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5%, with 37.9 million people in poverty (US Census Bureau 2024). There are websites that track billionaires’ wealth growth. Type “spend Bill Gates’ money” into a search engine, and a website will pop up that lets you spend $100 billion on everything from flipflops to farmland to NBA teams, just to demonstrate how much money this one dude really has.
At the root of the good, the bad, and the ugly of life today is money. We need it, but it’s ruining our lives. We want to build wealth to protect ourselves, but hoarding money is causing huge problems. We want to look cute at our friend’s summer wedding, but that dress was made by an underpaid woman in Bangladesh in unsafe working conditions. We want to take a vacation from Los Angeles to Dubai, but the carbon we emit will stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.
All of this seems overwhelming and, frankly, depressing. “It’s all a mess,” we tell each other. “What can one person even do?”
We Can Change
Things are the way they are because we make them that way. It’s a sneaky truth that we often forget: nothing is permanent, and nothing has to stay the way it is forever. If we want to have fewer species go extinct each year, we can protect and preserve more land for them to live on. If we want to have fewer people living on the streets, we can redirect the money in the federal budget to build homes and provide health services.
To simplify it: anything that we make, we can make differently. I mean that in a “we can choose to use recycled material to make that T-shirt” and in a “we can spend $1 billion less on the military budget and put that toward building housing” kind of way. Everything about our lives is a series of choices.
I grew up low income, and continued to be low income until 29, when I finally broke into a middle-class earning. Throughout my first 24 years, before I had my quarter-life crisis, I didn’t have very much money or any kind of financial education, but I had a lot of other things going for me. I was white, I was college educated, I didn’t have kids, and I was able-bodied. That meant a lot of options were open to me, and if I started making some different choices, I had a very good chance of seeing different results. I didn’t have to pay for childcare or take a job that allowed me to be home when my kids got off the bus, which meant I could work evenings at a catering company to increase my income. I never had anyone question my education, or make jokes about being a diversity hire only, which meant that I didn’t deal with certain types of workplace discrimination.
The single most important thing for you to know is that the world is the way it is because of the choices we make every day. Nothing is set in stone; nothing is preordained. If you decided not to go to work for the next three days, that would change your life. (You’d probably be fired.)
If we decided to set federal price limits on insulin, that would change the budgets of millions of Americans. (They’d probably save money.)
These changes might be short-lived or long-lasting. But they are the direct results of new and different choices made at both personal and systemic levels.
Take that, and zoom out, and you basically have our entire world. Everything, from how we earn money to where we spend it to the clothes we wear to the movies we watch, it’s all the result of choices being made, actions being taken, and those effects compounding as we do the same thing over and over again.
When I was broke and financially uninformed, I spent the most money. It’s expensive to be broke! I paid extra in things such as credit card interest because I couldn’t pay off my bill in full each month. Plus, I was mainlining endless television shows and social media posts about how other people were spending lavishly and being told that that’s what success looks like. It was nonstop comparison of my broke and sad life to people who were jetting off to Italy for the summer. Why wasn’t I like them? What was wrong with me that I couldn’t figure this money stuff out?
For most people in the US, money is our number-one source of stress. A 2023 study from Deloitte found that among Gen Z and millennials, finances and the well-being of their family was the number-one stressor (Deloitte Global 2023). Money is the number-two reason for divorce. We need money to house ourselves, feed ourselves, and clothe ourselves. Money runs our world, affects our mental health, and shapes the industries around us.
So it stands to reason that if we can change our money, we can change not only our personal lives but the very world that we live in.
