This week marks the middle of Pride month. The LGBTQ community faces many financial hurdles just as we still face social and civil rights hurdles. Some hurdles, like acceptance, may take a lifetime to overcome. Others, such as improving financial well-being can begin immediately. Take the euphoria of Pride and help yourself on your own parade to financial fitness. Use the tips in my free Pride Guide – Take Pride in Your Finances.
It’s true that there are a variety of factors working against us. For example, LGBTQ folks often feel the need to live in expensive metro areas such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles to feel safe, feel accepted, find community, and find fulfilling work. Many LGBTQ people tend to overspend in their youth influenced by glossy lifestyle blogs and other social media trying to keep up with the gay Joneses. This spending is a bit celebratory, but is also sometimes perceived as a need for building community and acceptance. With age usually comes the wisdom that your friends will always be your friends and you don’t need to spend to impress. This takes time, and the debt incurred can be a challenge to overcome. LGBTQ folks still face hiring and workplace discrimination at various levels. This can lead to earning less, sporadic employment, or under employment, and compounds financial hurdles if you are living in a high-cost area and have a spending problem. We are making progress in society at large, and marriage equality has been a huge boost socially and financially. Here are a few things to keep you moving proudly forward.
Click for your free Pride Guide. Happy Pride!
Take Pride month euphoria and carry it forward with you into your personal life. Take Pride in your personal accomplishments and regularly build on those. Take Pride in the fact that you acknowledge we can all be better with our finances. This year, you can get my free Pride Guide to help you start. It covers the basics. Start small, like with your saving and spending, and build on those successes. Your first step is to simply acknowledging you want to be better about your financial health and wealth.
Look at your most challenging area first. This is very personal for each of us and it may be spending, earning, lack of savings, etc. Take one small step each month to make that less of a challenge. If it’s saving, look at ways to increase saving. If it’s spending, review and revise your spending plan using the PERK method in the Pride Guide. If it’s earning, document your performance improvements at work over time and ask for a raise. Are you interested in a side gig? That could help you earn more if you have the capacity to take on more work.
Review your cash flow. Look at it monthly and calculate an annual estimate as well. Prepare a simple personal balance sheet of assets and liabilities to see where you stand. This exercise is valuable because it can help you with spending, saving, and earning. It really clarifies what’s going on in your financial life.
Most importantly, folks need to focus on building a cash emergency fund. Next, work on destroying debt. I am often asked which should occur first? The answer is that you work on all areas simultaneously, but in the beginning, you may need to focus more in one area. That’s where my final tip comes in: get help.
You can now search for a fee-only, LGBTQ friendly adviser from resources such as the Certified Financial Planner board of standard’s letsmakeaplan.org, or the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA), or the XY Planning Network (fair disclosure, I am a CFP® in good standing, and a NAPFA and XYPN member). As an LGBTQ community member, I can relate. And as an independent CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, I can help you take Pride in your finances. Contact me and let’s get started. Happy Pride!
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