Think you're "bad with money?" Reduce financial stress without blaming yourself

I, like many of my peers, came into adulthood assuming I was “bad with money.” I spent my 20s accruing credit card debt and student loans, working low-paying jobs with no retirement plans or health insurance, not thinking about investing and never checking my credit score.

I didn’t get a financial education in school. I grew up in a working-class town surrounded by adults scraping by week to week and striving to lift themselves into the middle class. Responsible money management, to me, seemed to involve a lot of restriction and sacrifice I could never sustain. Or some gems of knowledge I’d never understand. Some people could achieve wealth; I was never going to be one of those people. I was destined to scrimp and save and worry about money for the rest of my life.

After about 10 years of this fraught relationship with money, I started working in personal finance media — a job that came with all the trappings of responsible adulthood and a masterclass in our financial products and systems. I learned I wasn’t destined to be “bad with money” — but I lived in a system that survived by keeping me (and many others) in that mindset.

“Shame often stems from societal and cultural expectations, particularly the pressure to have it all together,” says Kristie Tse, a psychotherapist and founder of the online therapy practice Uncover Mental Health Counseling.

Tse points out a key way shame plays into our cultural relationship with money. “Financial struggles can be perceived as personal failings, leading to deep-seated shame.”

Until learning how our financial systems work, I took for granted the way our culture individualizes money. When I struggled to keep up, I internalized all of the responsibility and shame that came with it. When I did well, I took all the credit. As I learned more about how these products and systems work, though, I realized just how much they set up so many people to be “bad with money.”

For example, I had a low credit score despite paying all of my bills and rent on time every month for years. It didn’t improve when I started repaying credit card debt or my student loans. It didn’t start rising until I opened a secured credit card — then it shot up about 100 points in just a couple of months. Despite being responsible enough with money to hold a job and keep a roof over my head, I could only benefit from this key metric of my financial life once I had access to the financial products it was built to support.

Typical financial advice perpetuates an emphasis on individual responsibility and ignores these kinds of inequities built into our financial systems. It insists that a low credit score reflects financial irresponsibility, for example, but ignores the ways credit scoring excludes so many folks — like renters, whose payments aren’t reported to credit bureaus; low-income folks who can’t afford the collateral for secured credit; Black Americans, who were deliberately excluded from credit and wealth-building for centuries; or LGBTQ+ folks whose protection from blatant discrimination in lending wasn’t codified until 2021.

“When I look at some of the attitudes that Black Americans have to financial institutions, I have to affirm or validate that reaction as being justified, because the financial services space has not historically been a friend to Black Americans,” says Rahkim Sabree, an accredited financial counselor with a focus on overcoming financial trauma.

Sabree notes the way community and family histories can travel through DNA and cultural experiences to pass financial trauma and beliefs across generations.

Those experiences, he says, “are going to all have a profound impact on how we Internalize our relationships with money.”

Regardless of your financial circumstances, so much of financial stress is the feeling that you’re not doing the so-called right things with money. You feel like you should spend less, save more or invest smarter, for example. You experience the stress of constantly trying to keep up with what you believe you should be doing — even if typical financial advice isn’t in line with who you are or what you’ve experienced.

Sabree points out that we often ignore the fact that financial advice isn’t delivered with us in mind. We try to follow the tenets of popular financial gurus, which shove aside the lived experiences of whole communities. Much of the work he does is to help folks recognize that dissonance and validate the impact their experiences have on their relationships with money.

That validation, he says, is a key step to casting aside the shame our culture thrusts onto your relationship with money and moving forward in a way that makes sense for you. Having these candid conversations about the obstacles that exist in our systems helps him empower the clients he works with.

Sabree says the point of validating experiences of discrimination isn’t to make you feel like a victim. Rather, it’s to put you in a mindset of “expecting the setback” so you can navigate it rather than feel ashamed and disempowered by it.

“Building a healthy relationship with money starts with dismantling the myths and expectations that fuel shame and embracing a more compassionate, realistic view of one’s financial journey,” says Tse.

To reduce your financial stress, let go of the shame so much financial advice makes you feel. Understand that you live in a system that thrives on your taking full responsibility for your financial circumstances so you never turn a critical eye to the ways that system is to blame.

Next time you feel stressed about money, ask yourself what’s at play that’s out of your control, and what’s within your control to keep moving forward toward your goals. Instead of turning to conventional financial advice to ask “what should I do?” seek financial education to ask “how does this work?”

That lets you stop trying to follow financial advice that was never meant for you. When you understand how financial systems and products work — including the ways they’re designed to work for or against people like you — you can begin to understand how they’ve contributed to your experiences and circumstances and choose the next move that makes sense for you.