A Louder Call to Financial Literacy: Examining the Racial Wealth Gap
I began my journey to become more financially literate 6 years ago. I had moved to New York City and was making more money than ever before. Yet, somehow, I still felt like I didn’t have enough. How could that be? During my journey, I learned that debt (student loans and a car payment) was eating up the majority of my earnings and something needed to change. As I began to dig into becoming more financially savvy, I soon recognized our relationship with money can get complicated quickly. With more knowledge, I was able to make the necessary changes to how I spent my money.
Our relationship with money
Money has been taboo for ages. Thankfully, the age-old myth of it not being polite to talk about money is shifting towards a greater importance of discussing money and how it impacts our lives. As millennials plunge quicker and quicker into debt (with student loan debt hitting 1.6 trillions dollars), more of us are discussing, struggling, and learning how to balance the financial demands of living, preparing for retirement, building families, and paying down debt.
The need for change, and discussion on how to do so, continues to gain traction and become more necessary. With this conversation, we are talking about the gender and racial wealth gap, both of which apply to me directly. Black women have taken on a higher amount of student loan debt due to both of these gaps. How we engage, continue, and ramp up the needed measures to close both these gaps will depend on access, opportunity, and financial literacy.
Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) have typically been left out of the conversation and data when discussing wealth and how it is built. However, as the country continues to reckon with the impacts of systematic racism, people within and outside of these communities are starting to share, discuss, and get louder about the need for change. Nothing brought the racial wealth gap to the top of mind, more than Bloomberg’s article Unrest Spotlights Depth of Black Americans’ Economic Struggle which highlighted the disparities between net worth of Black and white households.
Looking at how wealth gaps impact generational wealth has begun shifting how young adults position themselves to create wealth. This requires financial literacy, sharing of knowledge, and conversations in and out of the home. Financial literacy and conversations about money elicit many complex feelings, but it is imperative to learn to navigate in order to ensure wealth is created and passed down. Feelings and mental health impact behavior and healthy, positive behavior is needed to grow money.
