Our Culture’s Influence On Our Relationship With Money, Selina Flavius, Founder of Black Girl Finance

With money habits formed by age 7, our culture and formative backgrounds undoubtedly play an important role in shaping our attitude towards money. The question is: as adults, how can we decode what we have subconsciously been taught and build a positive mindset towards managing our money?  

Joining me today is Selina Flavius, finance coach and founder of Black Girl Finance - the digital platform providing a safe space for Black women to get comfortable talking about money while helping them to achieve their financial goals. Black Girl Finance openly addresses and discusses the unique difficulties Black women face due to the gender and ethnicity pay gap. 

Black graduates are paid 9% less than their white counterparts. In this episode, Selina shares the long-term impacts of the ethnic pay gap, and how we can tackle it.

We also take a look at what we can do to aid our financial security during the pandemic, and why Selina believes personal finance is the missing piece in self-development. 

Selina’s book 'Black Girl Finance, Let’s Talk Money’ is out now. It’s a fantastic resource where she shares her best financial tips as well as her personal stories, goal-setting exercises and straight-talking advice. 

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1. Injecting intersectional nuance into our money conversations

We can often feel reluctant towards the idea of having conversations about money. Money conversations can be stressful and packed with emotion even when held amongst our closest friends and relatives. Research from First Direct (2017) shows that over half of women find it easier to discuss politics with friends over money, closely followed by religion (35%) and sex (30%). Not talking about money can hurt your finances and those around you. A lack of transparency where your money is concerned can take a major toll on your mental and physical well being, negatively impact the trust in your relationships and inhibit your ability to educate yourself financially.

When the topic of personal finance is divided along the lines of gender, money conversations become all the more important: research has shown that earnings discussions in the workplace help women realise their value and help them ensure they are remunerated fairly for their work (Trades Union Congress, 2019). However, such analysis fails to provide us with a complete picture when it comes to financial inequality stemming from lack of money conversations and disclosures. As more companies have been mandated to disclose their gender pay gap numbers and discussions on this topic have entered the mainstream, the interaction between gender, ethnicity and culture has largely remained ignored. 

On closer examination, we find that such intersectional nuances in money conversations matter: a sobering statistic from Runnymede Trust highlights that black female graduates are paid on average 9% less than white female graduates - the equivalent of £3,000 a year, with the gap only widening over the span of their careers. Research has also shown the that the intersectional feminism is key in understanding the economic impacts of the pandemic: women’s job losses due to Covid-19 are 1.8 times greater than men’s (McKinsey, 2020) and when we bring the interaction of ethnicity into this discussion, we find that black women have been even more disproportionately impacted than white women. Selina explains in the context of her own family, and extrapolates more broadly, that this impact is partly attributable to the sectors that employ more ethnic minority women being more vulnerable to lockdown measures and partly attributable to the fact that ethnic minority women typically receive less support where caring and domestic responsibilities are concerned.  

Given that systematic discrimination in finance is enforced not only by gender but by ethnicity and culture, it is “important to think about the money mindsets that are created based on our culture and our background”, Selina explains, as this understanding will help inform our solution for combating inequality. She recounts her own personal experience from the perspective as a first-generation Brit with Caribbean roots: “My background was that money wasn’t really spoken about…it was almost frowned upon”. It was this formative experience of money that inspired Selina to establish the Black Girl Finance community, driven by her desire to create a “safe space for Black women to talk about money” and to help them to achieve their financial goals. Selina describes how we can transition to a more inclusive approach to feminism in the context of personal finance and simultaneously strives to elevate female ethnic minority voices in the arena. She recommends free, online resources such as Runnymede Trust’s gender and ethnicity pay gap reporting and Fawcett’s pay discrimination ‘Right to Know Petition’ to help us in the process.

The Wallet by Emilie Bellet Vestpod Selina Flavius

2. “Pay yourself first”

In a financial wellness survey conducted by PwC, it was revealed that 71% of Millennials say that their stress level related to financial issues has increased over the last 12 months. And when asked what causes respondents the most stress in their lives, more said that financial matters than those who answered with any other life stressor combined. This comes no surprise to man, with the uncertainty of Covid-19 making it nearly impossible to financially forecast. Selina is a huge advocate of budgeting and financial planning. She argues that, faced with the current unpredictable climate, it is now more important than ever to draw on these financial principles to aid our financial security during the pandemic.

Selina describes “pay day” as a “pay myself first day”, subscribing to the personal finance philosophy that we should aim to make sure that enough income is first saved or invested before monthly expenses or discretionary purchases are made. The suggestion to “pay yourself first” can be highly effective when it comes to maintaining your pension, savings, and wider investment contributions each month. Regular savings contributions can be pivotal towards building a long-term nest egg. Alternatively, such savings may be put towards building up an emergency fund, which is essential given today’s economic uncertainty. If we are diligent in paying ourselves first, we can rid ourselves of the difficulty from living from payday-to-payday as we work towards our financial goals and freedoms.

3. Awareness is all

At a time when many of us are facing financial hardship, living from payday-to-payday can be a bleak reality. How then can we overcome the stress that comes with temporary financial difficulty, and what steps can we take so that we can ultimately pay ourselves first?

Selina explains that awareness of your financial situation is key in this context. Such awareness should stem from deep diving into the numbers associated with the money you have coming in and going out – to do this you should create a budget (if you don’t already have one!). By collecting your most recent bank statements, payslips, bills, and credit card statements, you will be able to form a more comprehensive view of your outgoings from which you can analyse potential ways to cut back on excessive expenses. This will enable you to set aside money to save and invest towards your financial goals. Once you have an emergency fund set aside, Selina tells us that managing money is not just about restricting yourself; once you have paid yourself first, it can be important for your wellbeing to have money set aside to treat yourself with.

Selina advises us that awareness of your financial situation is also knowing when to ask for help. If you find yourself having to constantly dip into your savings because of financial setbacks, relying on credit cards, you’re unable to pay your bills or you avoid opening letters from your bank, it is time to re-evaluate your situation and speak up. Financial help can come in a number of forms. Asking for basic financial help could mean relying on your close friends and family to hold you accountable for meeting your financial goals. If you are in a fortunate enough position, you might choose to go to a professional financial adviser or councillor. Alternatively, you may want to seek free and impartial money advice from organisations such as the ‘Money Advice Service’, ‘Step Change’ or the ‘Money and Pensions Service’. The most important thing, however, is to ensure that you reach out to others for support when you have fallen on tough times and need to get back on track towards financial security.

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You can listen (48 min) and subscribe here:

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Resources: 

You can follow and connect with Selina at:

 Selina shared some resources in this episode. All the links are below:

ArticlesMillie Ngai-LenoirPodcast, The Wallet, Motivation, Financial Planning, Financial Goals, Housing, Debt, Intersectional feminism, Racial GapComment