Club Friday Q&A: Girl Math and Financial Anxiety, Decoded by a Financial Therapist
By Ruth Young
Image: Courtesy of Aseel El-Baba
Last year saw the rise of the “girl math” trend and I would be lying if I said I didn’t relate to some, if not most, of the videos and memes that crossed my various social media timelines. Around the same time, I also started seeing video after video of people telling me how to start up successful side hustles and where to buy all the best budgeting or financial tracking spreadsheet templates. All of this personal finance content inspired (or maybe forced) me to start thinking about my relationship with money, the anxieties I have around my finances and how that affects my spending. And this all came up in my conversation with Aseel El-Baba, the founder of Holistic Optimal Wealth and in-house financial therapist for Conscious Economics’ Mindfulness & Money program. (El-Baba bills herself as Toronto’s first financial therapist; prior to transitioning to therapy, she was a financial planner who spent a decade working in the Canadian banking system.) Read on for her take on why these anxieties exist and, more importantly, what we can do about them. Because if 2023 was the year of girl math, let’s hope 2024 is the year of financial understanding. — Ruth Young
@diaryroom girl maths >>>
♬ original sound - diaryroom
First off, I’m curious to hear how you carved out the role of Toronto's first financial therapist?
My background started in conventional financial advisory—I was a financial planner in the Canadian financial banking system, which entailed sitting with clients looking at financial plans, coming up with investment strategies, cash-flow strategies and overall holistic financial planning. A lot of clients started calling me their therapist, because when they came in to talk about money, they were really discussing a lot of things that intersect with money, like their identity, their careers, their marriage, their divorces, death, birth...
I didn't feel properly equipped to give proper psychological and emotional support, so I went back to school to pursue psychotherapy training. I trained for five years in a psychotherapy program, then merged my training and my financial background to become a financial therapist. I only later recognized that there's actually a Financial Therapy Association. I'm now a member; there's only a handful of us in Canada and I'm the only one in Ontario that I know of.
When people talk or think about financial planning, it's usually discussed in dollars and cents. The idea that our finances intersect with other aspects of life and can have an emotional impact doesn’t come up as often. Why do you think that approach to financial planning isn't as common, or isn't as discussed?
There's a few angles to that. Usually, the people who are driving the conversations are advisors or people trained in the bricks-and-mortar roles of money, the logistical side of it, the systemic, linear parts of money. They're not properly trained to expand the horizon of exploration. The other piece of it is, from the consumer perspective, money holds such emotion and weight. It's also a taboo in so many different cultures, so there can be shame and guilt associated with talking about money. You can't ask somebody how much money they make or how much they paid for a certain thing. There's just a heaviness to that approach, so we've naturally learned to separate money from the bigger picture. It's a murky territory that people are scared to venture into, especially with no support.
When you start to work with a client, what does that process look like?
Any financial therapist that you ask will answer that differently. There's a few reasons, including that the training on how to become a financial therapist in itself varies. I'm hoping eventually, there will be financial therapy programs in university, but for now there are two programs in the US. It's still new, though, so people who land in financial therapy vary in what their training looks like, and therefore offer different approaches. My personal take on it, and how I'm carving out my business, I no longer do financial advisory and financial planning. I help clients explore their financial traumas, and their mindsets and identity around money through their emotions, their thoughts, their behaviours. So, it's looking at all the areas that financial planners don't look at.
I know mindfulness is a part of your practice. When I think of mindfulness, I think of meditating and journalling—is that what you mean, and if so, how do those things help us understand our finances?
A lot of our financial decisions and behaviours are actually deeply, deeply emotional, so mindfulness allows us to understand and bring awareness to what’s driving these decisions. When our emotions are not regulated, that's when we engage with dysfunctional financial behaviours like impulsive spending, arguments around money or hoarding. Mindfulness tools allow us to address that emotional root. It also offers us the opportunity to be present and make informed decisions with the data. When we are in a flight or fight response, which money often creates because it is very linked with our survival, our logic is out the window. Mindfulness allows us to regulate so we feel safe again; it literally lights up the prefrontal cortex of our mind, which is the logical side that allows us to make better decisions. There's three basic foundations and they're very important: emotional regulation, ability to make logical and informed decisions, and ability to regulate the nervous system to avoid dysfunctional relationships or behaviours with money.
I definitely have to start thinking of money in this way! A lot of the personal finance content I’ve seen recently has revolved around the “girl math” trend. What do you think about social media trends like this—are they helpful or dangerous?
I guess it depends on the trend, but a lot of them reinforce stereotypes that we're really trying to break away from. I mean, there's always a humorous angle to it—“girl math” blew up because of how funny and relatable it could be. And certainly, we can shed light on heavy topics using approaches that are light-hearted, that are relatable, that are engaging. But it also comes with the responsibility to use it to raise awareness in the right direction, not just reinforce inaccurate stereotypes like girls are just not good with math, or we’re shopaholics or we're just expected to make poor spending decisions. These things are dangerous and laughing at them is not helpful in the long run. So, I think we can use these trends, but be wise in what we're trying to do with them.
Do you think the popularity of these trends is associated with our anxieties around money and how we cope with them?
A lot of our spending decisions, or any behaviour around money, are coping mechanisms. This is what I tell my clients all the time, especially when we start bringing awareness to this work: what you're able to identify today as a problem was at one point in your life a solution. So today, you can look up and understand that this spending is not helpful for your financial health, but maybe at one point you had to spend to deal with your anxiety or abuse or whatever it is that you were going through at that time. So, it's helpful to put these things in perspective for sure.
It could be my algorithm trying to tell me something, but a lot of financial influencer content has been popping up on my feed recently. Is there a way to incorporate this type of content into a healthy understanding of your finances, or is it best to avoid it completely?
I follow a few financial influencers who share different tips and tools, and they are really helpful and relatable. [But not everyone is.] I think you just have to be strategic in who you're listening to; you need to know that they're credible, and also avoid taking specific investment advice when somebody doesn't know your situation. There are certain red flags to look for, like get-rich-quick schemes, or people promoting certain angles and not being nuanced about the bigger picture.
What is your best advice about how to approach this year from a financial perspective?
I really think it's important that, just like we sometimes want to build and deepen existing relationships with our partner, our friends, family or community, we start approaching money as something we build a relationship with. Right now I’m working on a program called Date Your Money that will encourage people to explore the role money plays in their lives, the values they have about it, so that they can be more informed and engaged in this area, will help transform their financial health.
That’s such a clever way of framing this idea. Is this program available yet?
Right now I'm gonna be building a workshop around it, but in the future, I have different events with this theme in mind. I also talk about the attachment styles we have with money, because the attachment styles we have with relationships tend to show up in how we deal with our finances, too. I identify as an anxious attached person. It's very clear to me how my anxiety and anxious attachment shows up in my financial behaviour. My business partner Rhiannon has an avoidant attachment style. And it's also very clear in how it shows up with her relationship with money. So we're working on a quiz for our website where you can fill out a questionnaire and find out your own attachment style with money and get a personalized tip sheet. First of all, this is about bringing awareness of what that looks like in a financial context, because people often know it in a relationship space, but also to offer some tools to work with people’s specific attachment styles.
For more advice, follow Aseel on Instagram and check out Conscious Economics’ Mindfulness & Money program.
Thank you for reading this week’s Club Friday Q&A! Still looking for intersectional pop culture analysis? Here are a few ways to get more Friday:
💫 Subscribe to the (free) weekly newsletter, or join Club Friday, our paid membership program. Members get early access to Q&As with pop culture experts and Friday merch, as well as other fun perks.
💫 If you’d like to make a one-time donation toward the cost of creating Friday Things, you can donate through Ko-Fi.
💫 Follow Friday on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and (occasionally) TikTok.