‘No ya, my husband takes care of that, I don’t interfere’
‘Investing, I don’t have the money for that’
‘No idea if I’ll build up a pension, I’ll see’
If I’m really honest, sometimes I find my job enormously frustrating. Because despite the 1000s of women we help with their money, there are still millions of women who do nothing with it. Who give this as a response when I gently bring up the topic of money. And then sometimes I want to rattle them.
Of course, this is something about myself: the control freak in me will not let my financial future depend on circumstances. And I have trouble putting myself in the shoes of people who do this (un)consciously. My bad.
This is also the feedback I have always received from colleagues, for example, I think too much and too fast ahead. My colleagues used to say “you go from A to Z but forget to tell us what B is.
Don’t get me wrong, I have the best job in the world and the amount of positive stories we read energizes us tremendously. But I want to get from A to Z, I want to be there already, with those millions of women. I want to help them take the first steps, I want to make them feel how much self-confidence you get from mapping out your financial future, I want to show them how good you feel when you know you can go in any direction if you manage your money well.
Sometimes I feel like a water carrier at a marathon and that runners run past me and say “no need. A mountain climber with an extra insured line and that the climbers say “I’ll see what happens. And that frustrates me sometimes. Just a little 😉
Perhaps I am no longer our target audience either, because I have taken matters into my own hands. The control freak in me couldn’t let this subject go to waste, and I put a tremendous amount of time and thought into my financial future. If you had asked me 10 years ago to take care of my money I probably would have said, “nah, no need.
When I feel this frustration, the gospel work sometimes becomes too much for me, I go to exercise or walk and repeat in myself: keep looking at the end goal. Step by step and sometimes it goes a little slower than you want, but keep going. Because persistence wins and we are going to succeed in showing and teaching millions of women how to use money to live on their own terms.
No matter what is said now, no matter what women think now or what they are convinced of, there will come a day when they say, “help me put my money to better use, because it’s frustrating not knowing this.
