What's Your Money Story — And Is It Running Your Financial Life?
There's a question I ask at the beginning of every conversation about money.
Not "what's your portfolio?" Not "how much do you have saved?" Not "what's your risk tolerance?"
I ask: what's your earliest memory of money?
Every single time, something shifts.
People pause. They go somewhere. A kitchen table. A parent's face. A moment of wanting something and being told no. A feeling of pride or shame that settled in early and never quite left.
That moment is the beginning of your money story.
And it's probably running your financial life right now — whether you know it or not.
What Is a Money Story?
Your money story is the subconscious narrative — the beliefs, values, and emotions — that drives how you think and behave with money, heavily shaped by early-life experiences.
For many women it sounds like:
Money is something other people manage.
Wanting wealth is greedy or unfeminine.
Investing is complicated, risky, not for me.
These aren't facts. They're stories. But they function like facts because we've lived inside them so long we can't see them anymore.
"Am I Doing This Right?"
I had a conversation recently with a woman who had started investing. She was doing it — actually doing it — and yet she kept asking herself the same question:
Am I doing this right?
On the surface it sounds practical. But underneath it was something deeper.
She didn't see herself as an investor.
She had internalized a picture of what an investor looked like — and she wasn't in it. Confident. Certain. Aggressive. Decisive. He — and it was always a he — didn't second-guess himself or factor in his values. He just moved.
She wasn't moving like that. So she assumed she was doing it wrong.
But she wasn't doing it wrong. She was doing it differently. And different, in this case, meant better.
The investing world was built by men, for men. The language, the metrics, the celebrated behaviors — all coded masculine. No wonder so many women show up and feel like they don't belong.
We weren't doing it wrong. We were handed someone else's rulebook.
Rewriting the Story
The first step toward building wealth isn't learning about index funds or asset allocation.
It's understanding the story you've been living inside.
Because until you see it, it keeps making decisions for you.
What's your earliest memory of money? Sit with it. Write it down. Notice what feelings come up and what beliefs live underneath.
That's not a small thing. That's the beginning of everything.
Ready to rewrite your money story alongside other women? Borderless Wealth is a 6-week program where we start exactly here — and move all the way through to investing with intention. Our current cohort is full, but sign up to be the first to know about the next one.