Hey, {{first_name}}
I was half watching The Lorax this weekend and something stopped me cold.
Ted asks about real trees at the dinner table, and his mom shuts her own mother down. Not now with the magical fables, okay. Grammy Norma sits there and takes it. She waits for her daughter to leave the room. Then she tells Ted exactly where to find the Once-ler and she says, I knew I could break her. Go!
She knew she was going to get talked over. She waited it out. She was holding the map the entire time.
That was my abuelita.
She was the black sheep. She left Venezuela for better possibilities at a time when women rarely got to be trailblazers, and her family had a lot to say about it. She went anyway. La vida es para ser feliz. It is the first page of my book, credited to Abuelita.
Then my mom raised me on her own and never settled for anything she could not walk out of. I have never been financially dependent on anybody thanks to the women I looked up to growing up.
Three women, one decision.
Here is the part I want you to actually do something with, because nobody in my family passed down property. What got passed down was the assumption that you can always leave, and that assumption costs money to keep.
So this week:
Open one account in your name only, at a different bank from the one your everyday money lives in. Out of sight, out of the running total in your head.
Automate one transfer for the day after payday. Fifty dollars counts. Twenty counts.
Give it a size, so it has a finish line. Three months of your rent or mortgage first, six months eventually.
Give it a name that says what it buys. Not savings. Mine is named for what my abuelita did.
If you are partnered, this can sit completely in the open. Money in your own name is a normal thing for a grown woman to have. It stays there so that leaving is always possible, whether or not you ever do it.
And if the reason you cannot fund it is that you are the one everybody at home calls when money gets tight, start with this instead. The Family Money Plan walks you through setting your Support Number, the amount you can give without setting yourself on fire, and it hands you the actual words for the conversation.
If you are the black sheep in your family right now, somebody younger is going to grow up assuming she can always leave, because you went first.
La vida es para ser feliz.
Te lo mereces,
Ixamar