I was twelve years old the first time I understood that we were poor.
Not in the softened, tidy way adults sometimes say it. I mean the kind of poor where my mum would stand before the shelves in a supermarket, adding prices up and calculating what we wouldn’t be able to buy- The kind of poor where my grandma used to bulk cook food and bring it over for us.
She had just lost her job. After 30 years in the company, the company was sold and shut down. She was not careless. I noticed her worries and tried to help. But nobody really explained things to me.
Money felt like weather. It happened around us. You earned it, you spent it, you ran out, you started again. No one talked about it. No one named it. That was the full lesson plan.
Fast forward twenty years. I have a law degree. I work in HR. I have been on holidays my eleven year old self would never have believed were possible. And still, most of my adult life, I felt the same low level panic at the checkout. The same feeling that money was something that happened to me, not something I could shape on purpose.
It was not an income problem. It was a language problem.
That shifted in 2021. Nothing really exciting happened. There was just me strolling and landing on the page of a financial coach for women. She was talking about financial literacy and how important it was and how no one taught us in school. Which really resonated with me.
This started my journey. I started reading up on retirement insurance, about emergency accounts. I started slow.
A budgeting hack here and there, a turnover on my insurances.
Then I read my first books about investing. ETFs sounded like the safe and logical way.
I opened up an investment account in 2023 and invested my first 100 € and then I did – nothing.
I was trying to get a feel on my emotions in investing. Because as I learned, you have to like the way you invest to be able to keep it up longterm and during recessions.
I like investing, I really do.
So after one whole year, I set up my automated payments. Into my emergency account, into my investment account and into my continued financial education.
I had changed a lot and rediscovered my love of learning. That had me set up a personal curriculum for me and of course finance had to play a part. So January was my financial education month. Not because January is special, I decided to make it special. As part of my One-Person Renaissance curriculum, I gave the whole month to economics and personal finance.
I read and am still reading about financial literacy, the psychology behind money and investing. About different investment strategies, from ETFs, bonds and shares to real estate, private equity and angel investments.
No more avoiding it. No more hoping it would somehow make sense later.
January is dark and quiet and a bit nothing. I used that flat, grey energy as a place to sit with the thing I had been dodging for years.
This is what I learned, what I read, what I listened to and why I think learning how money works is one of the most quietly radical things a woman can do for herself right now. And it had me max out my emergency accounts, freeing up investment money and living month to month without worrying at the register.
Note: this is not investment advice but a record of my personal experiences. All investments offer risks. Always do your own research before investing money.
Why Financial Literacy Is Actually About Freedom (Not Just Money)
Here is what no one tells you when you grow up with not enough money. The lack is not only in your bank account. It moves into your body.
It wires your nervous system. It decides how much risk feels safe, how much you dare to ask for, how big you let yourself want.
I spent years on a good salary and still felt breakable. Not because I was irresponsible. I knew how to stretch money. I knew how to survive. What I did not have was a clear way to think about money beyond getting through the month.
Financial literacy is what sits in that gap.
It is the difference between checking your balance and actually knowing what your money is doing when you are asleep. The difference between only working for money and, eventually, setting things up so money also works for you.
Robert Kiyosaki puts it bluntly in Rich Dad Poor Dad: the rich do not work for money. They acquire assets. The sentence looks almost silly when you first read it. It took me weeks to let it really land. Because to take that seriously, you have to completely change your idea of what it means to be doing well.
Doing well is not just a high salary. It is money that still arrives when you are ill or burned out or taking a break.
No one in my childhood ever talked about that. Not once. That is not a small missing piece. That is a whole other subject that never made it to the kitchen table.
The Two Things That Actually Changed How I Think About Money
I am not going to give you a reading list and wish you luck. I want to tell you about the two ideas that cracked something open for me and the books that delivered them.
Compound Interest: The Thing That Made Me Angry I Hadn’t Started Sooner
Albert Einstein allegedly called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world. I do not know if he really said it. The idea is still wild.
Compound interest means you earn returns not only on your original money, but also on the returns that money already made. So it stacks. Slowly at first, then faster. Not in a straight line. In a curve. An exponential growth to success.
The catch is that it needs time. Which means the most powerful thing you can do in your twenties and thirties is not to find the perfect investment. It is to begin. With whatever you can. Even if it feels small and a bit pointless at first. Don’t believe me? In his book “The Psychology of Money” Morgan Housel explains just how much of his wealth Warren Buffet, the GOAT of investing, made past his 60th birthday. Spoiler alert: a lot!
If you invest £200 a month from age 25 at a 7% average yearly return, you end up with roughly £525,000 at 65. If you wait until 35 to start, that drops to around £243,000. Same money each month. One change. When you start. That gap is compound interest doing its thing. And you don’t need a continous 7 % either. A few good years at 20 % will compeed with recession months and you will still make money.
When I read that, I did not feel motivated. I felt briefly furious. Nobody told me this at eighteen. Nobody told my mum. We were both playing a game we did not know had rules.
Morgan Housel’s “The Psychology of Money” is where I also started making peace with that anger. He does not just explain the mechanics. He explains why clever people make messy decisions with money. Why we do things that make no sense on a spreadsheet but feel safe in our bodies. It felt less like a finance book and more like someone finally describing why I act the way I do around money, without making me feel stupid for it.
One idea in particular stopped me: that getting wealthy and staying wealthy are two completely different skills. Getting wealthy requires taking risks. Staying wealthy requires the opposite: caution, humility, not assuming the good times are permanent. I had never separated those two things before. I had been treating them as the same thing, which is part of why my relationship with money felt so confused.
The Difference Between Earning Money and Building Wealth
Your salary is not your wealth. It’s your starting material. The two are not the same thing, and confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes a high-earning woman can make.
This one took me years.
I thought a good income automatically meant I was good with money. That it meant I was safe. That if I just kept earning more, the rest would somehow sort itself out.
Earning money is you swapping your time, your brain or your body for pay. It is you showing up. It is tied to your energy and your health. You stop, it stops.
Building wealth is you slowly collecting things that do not need you in the same way. Assets that have their own life. Rent coming in while you are off work. Dividends landing while you are in bed with the flu. Royalties turning up months after you did the work.
The Diary of a CEO podcast has a run of money episodes that finally made this click for me. The conversations with Alex Hormozi, Codie Sanchez and Daniel Priestley all circle the same idea from different angles. The people who end up with real freedom are not always the ones with the biggest salaries. They are the ones who learn the difference between making money and placing money. Who ask, every time it hits their account: where does this go that helps my future self, not just my today self?
The BigDeal episode “I Asked 6 Billionaires How To Get Rich” sounds like a stunt. It is worth listening to with a notebook open. The actual advice is not shocking. What hit me was how early these people learned the rules. They were shown how assets work, how risk works, how ownership works, while the rest of us were just told to get a stable job and be grateful.
The gender wealth gap is not just about pay. It is about what we do with what we earn. Women are statistically more likely to keep money in cash savings rather than investments. That gap compounds over decades, quietly, invisibly, until retirement arrives and the numbers tell the whole story.
📊 Info Box: The Gender Wealth Gap
Women in the UK hold, on average, 35% less wealth than men. In the US, women hold approximately 55 cents for every dollar of wealth held by men. A significant driver of this gap is not just the pay gap, but the investment gap. Research by Fidelity found that women who invest actually outperform men by an average of 0.4% annually, yet women are 50% less likely to invest at all. The barrier is rarely capability. It is almost always access to information and confidence that the information applies to them.
Sources: World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report 2023; Fidelity Investments Women and Investing Study 2021
How I Actually Studied This in January
January has its own mood. The world shrinks a bit. Parties stop. Shops feel quiet. You get social permission to cancel plans and sit on your sofa in socks that do not match.
Instead of fighting that, I started using it.
My study plan was simple. One book a week. I went deep on Rich AF by Vivian Tu ( a great introduction to all things money) and The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel rather than skimming five books and absorbing nothing. I listened to podcasts during my morning commute instead of music. I was driving, stuck in traffic and someone talked in my ear about interest rates or investment accounts.
I kept a messy notes document on my laptop. Every time I hit a word or concept I did not fully understand, it went in there. Later that day or at the weekend I would look it up, watch a short video or reread the chapter until it made basic sense in my own words.
I also listened to Emma Grede’s Aspire episode “How Not Talking About Money Is Stopping You From Making It.” If you grew up in a house where money meant shame, sighs or tight silences at the dinner table, please listen to it. She names the thing I had only ever felt as a knot in my chest. The way women are taught to be grateful for whatever shows up. The way we absorb the idea that talking about money is rude, greedy, unfeminine. That silence is not neutral. It protects the status quo. It keeps you from even knowing what questions to ask.
I did not finish every book I picked up this month. Some chapters lost me and I had to come back later. Which is okay, because from Day One I knew it was going to be a lifelong learning process, because money changes all the time. I argued with a few ideas out loud in my kitchen, specifically with Kiyosaki’s framing of the poor as people who simply do not understand assets, which I found a bit too clean given that some people are working three jobs and still cannot make rent. The ideas are useful. The framing occasionally ignores structural reality. I kept both thoughts.
That is the work. This is not about ticking off a reading list. It is about letting new ways of thinking settle slowly into your decision making, until you catch yourself doing something different on a random Tuesday and realise the reading actually worked.
The full 12-month curriculum is here if you want to follow along from the beginning.
Growing up without money does not mean you are bad with money. It means you were never taught the rules of a game you were already playing. That is not a character flaw. It is a gap you can close.
Q&A: The Questions You’re Actually Asking
Q: I earn a decent salary but I have nothing saved. Where do I even start?
Start with clarity, not action. Before you open an investment account or set up a savings plan, spend two weeks tracking exactly where your money goes. Not to judge yourself. To get an honest picture. Most people are surprised by what they find. Once you can see the full picture, you can make intentional decisions about it. The first step is always visibility.
Q: I want to invest but I’m scared of losing money. Is it actually safe?
All investing carries risk. That is not a reason not to do it. The relevant question is: what is the risk of not investing? Keeping money in a standard savings account with inflation running at 3 to 4% means your money is losing real value every year. The stock market, historically, has returned an average of 7 to 10% annually over long periods. That does not mean every year is positive. It means over time, the trend is upward. Starting small, diversifying and thinking in decades rather than months is how you manage the risk.
Q: I feel like financial content is always aimed at men or at people who already have money. Where do I find information that actually speaks to me?
Vivian Tu’s Rich AF is the most accessible starting point I have found. She goes by @yourrichbff on social media and her short form content is just as good as the book. Emma Grede’s Aspire podcast covers the psychological and cultural side of women and money with real directness. And the Diary of a CEO money episodes are worth your time regardless of gender. Good financial thinking is good financial thinking.
Q: I grew up in a household with financial scarcity. Does that affect how I handle money as an adult?
Yes, and it is worth knowing that. Research in behavioural economics consistently shows that financial scarcity in childhood shapes adult decision making in specific ways: higher risk aversion, difficulty with long term planning, a tendency to prioritise immediate security over future growth. None of that is permanent. But it does mean that for some of us, financial education is not just about learning concepts. It is about unlearning emotional patterns that were adaptive once and are now getting in the way. Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money is the best starting point for understanding this.
The Invitation
Financial literacy is not a luxury subject. It is not for people who already have money. It is the foundation of every other kind of freedom you want to build, the travel, the career pivots, the ability to say no to things that do not fit your life.
January is the month I chose to build mine. You can start any month. You can start today.
If you want to follow the full One-Person Renaissance curriculum, the overview post with all 12 months is here: The One-Person Renaissance: A 12-Month Blueprint to Becoming the Most Educated, Empowered Woman.
And if you want to make sure you do not miss February’s deep-dive into AI, technology and digital fluency, subscribe to the newsletter below. No noise. Just the good stuff.
Footnotes & Sources
- Kiyosaki, Robert T. Rich Dad Poor Dad. Warner Books, 1997. richdad.com
- Tu, Vivian. Rich AF: The Winning Money Mindset That Will Change Your Life. Portfolio/Penguin, 2023. yourrichbff.com
- Housel, Morgan. The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness. Harriman House, 2020. morganhousel.com
- Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. Harper & Brothers, 1946. Available via fee.org
- Dalio, Ray. Principles: Life and Work. Simon & Schuster, 2017. principles.com
- Fidelity Investments. “Women and Investing Study.” 2021. fidelity.com
- World Economic Forum. Global Gender Gap Report 2023. weforum.org
- Diary of a CEO Podcast. “Money Making Experts” series featuring Alex Hormozi, Codie Sanchez, Daniel Priestley. stevenbartlett.com/podcast
- Aspire with Emma Grede. “How Not Talking About Money Is Stopping You From Making It.” Available on all major podcast platforms.
- BigDeal Podcast. Episode #83: “I Asked 6 Billionaires How To Get Rich.” Available on all major podcast platforms.
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