Meg's Money Story

In this episode of Disrupt Your Money, Meg gets real about something most of us never slow down long enough to examine: our money stories. She kicks off Summer School by putting herself in the hot seat first, sharing the messy, very human path from “I’m a CPA, I should have this all figured out” to “oh…my money baggage runs deep.”

Through childhood memories, high-school credit cards, and more than a few overdraft moments, Meg unpacks how privilege, scarcity, and mixed messages shaped the way she thought about safety, success, and “enough.” 

If you’ve ever felt ashamed of your past choices, stuck in credit card cycles, or convinced you’re “bad with money,” this episode is your permission slip to tell the truth about where you came from—and start rewriting your money story with compassion, strategy, and community instead of shame.

⏱️ In This Episode:
 00:00 Introduction & the return of Disrupt Your Money Summer School
 02:34 Why Meg is going first and sharing her money story
04:48 Growing up with a single mom & early money dynamics
06:24 Grandparents, “not enough,” and mixed money messages
08:38 High-school credit cards, early debt & money shame
09:40 The simple daily system Meg uses now to keep spending in check
11:56 The “go to school, get a good job” script—and when it stopped working
15:27 Teaching herself money after debt, overdrafts & financial stress
18:37 How culture, family, and identity shape the way we approach money today
19:19 Invitation to share your own money story & join the Summer School conversation

🔗 Mentioned in This Episode:

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Well, hey there, and welcome back to another episode of Disrupt Your Money. This is a particularly special episode for me today because we are about to start something that is very near and dear to my heart. So a few years ago, many years ago actually now, at this point, when I had my first company, one of the things that I did as part of that process was to start my very first podcast called One for Womankind. And the podcast was all about how we as women can show up for each other and support each other in small but really impactful and meaningful ways. And I did something really fun on that podcast that I absolutely loved, and it was called Summer School. So for our summer episodes, I invited all of my best girlfriends on, and we talked about a range of hot topics. Everything from menopause to dating to being single to all of these really critical topics that women should be talking about. And that we decided to just let it all out and really get deep and raw and share all of our feelings about these things. And it was so much fun. Not only was it fun for me because I got to sit down with my best friends and learn more about them and engage in these really interesting conversations with them, but our community loved these conversations because they were raw and they were honest and they were meaningful. And so I was actually talking with a few of my girlfriends a couple months ago, and one of them said, Why don't we do summer school again? And at first I said, Well, I don't know. You know, my podcast now is completely different. It's a very different style of podcast, very different topic. But then I thought, wait a second. I literally just wrote an article on why we need to be talking about the money stuff more with each other, with our families, with our friends, with the people in our lives. I was like, it would be ridiculous of me to not invite my friends on to disrupt your money, to talk about the money stuff with each other, right? So I'm really excited to share that we are bringing back another, or I guess the first season of summer school on this podcast, but another season of summer school in my life, we are gonna be bringing that to you this summer. It's gonna be a series of one-on-ones with my very closest girlfriends that I am really just excited to share with you. We're gonna be covering lots of different topics about money. Some are gonna be a little more lighthearted, some might be a little bit deeper. You're gonna learn a lot. You're probably gonna get to see and hear some stuff about our lives that, you know, maybe we don't share with everybody, but I think is really important to share here as part of this bigger conversation. And so that's gonna be happening in the next, starting in the next few weeks. But before we officially kick that off, or maybe as a way to kick that off, I thought, why don't I go first? Because the cool thing about when my friends come on is I kind of get to sit in that interview chair and ask them the really interesting questions. But nobody's doing that for me. So I decided to put myself out there first and I'm gonna share with you today a little bit about my money story. Because you're gonna hear a lot about my friends' money stories in these conversations, and I know it's gonna resonate with you because I'm sure for a lot of you, you're gonna hear some things that sound really similar to your own money story. And so I wanted to share mine to begin with because I often think that people think, just because I'm the money person or I'm a CPA, that everything is just fabulous and that I've always been really great with money and that I don't have any money issues. And let me just tell you, it is so far from the truth. Um I struggle with money and I have always struggled with money. And so today on this episode, I want to share just a little bit with you about what my money story and my money journey has looked like. Um, one, because I think it's important to be open and vulnerable and talk about these things. Two, because I think it may help you maybe see some similarities in your own money story, your own money journey, and know that you're not alone. And because I also think it's really important that you understand that I'm not sitting up here preaching to you. I am engaging and encouraging and inviting these conversations because I very much need to be a part of them just as much as you. Um, this is really not meant to be my pulpit that I preach from, you know, the ways of being great with money. So that is what we're doing here today. Let me just, let me start by going a little bit, I'm gonna go really far back actually. Um, and and you know, I sort of grew up, um, and for anybody listening, if if you're trying to like think about timing of all this, I'm let's see, how old am I? 30, I'm 38, I'm 38. So just to give you kind of a sense, like I was born in the 80s, um, you know, and I very much grew up, I was very, very privileged. Let me let me start off by just making that super clear. I am incredibly privileged. Um, I have had a lot of opportunities that other people haven't had. I fully recognize that. Um, but I was uh or am the child of a single mom. And when my parents divorced when I was seven, my mom uh went, you know, um went back to work. She had been a stay-at-home mom with me. She went back to work, she was a, became an um an elementary school teacher. Um, and you know, we all know teachers don't get paid a huge amount of money. In fact, they don't get paid nearly what they should get paid. Um, but nonetheless, we were okay. You know, we had enough money to to pay for housing and food and clothing and all of that. So I did not go for want of any of those types of things, any of the necessities. Um, but she was still a single mom, still, you know, raising a child on one income in a very expensive state. Um, and so there were things that I I didn't have as much of. Maybe, you know, I we didn't travel that often. I couldn't go on, you know, as many trips with my friends if I wanted to. I didn't have all the newest clothes or toys or anything like that. I mean, again, don't feel bad for me. I had tons of stuff and I was very, very happy. Um, and I and I I I never, again, I never felt like I was deprived of anything. Um, but money was always kind of in the background there of money's tight or there's not a lot of money. In fact, I remember many Christmases in a row where my mom would kind of prep me and say, you know, there's not, there just there isn't that much money for gifts this year. Now, here's part of the problem, and this is part of my money story, is that she would say that, but then sure enough, on Christmas, there would be a gazillion gifts under the tree. Um, you know, and and looking back, one of the um, one of the other pieces of my money story is that my grandparents, my mom's parents, um, were very, very big part of my life. So after my parents divorced, we actually moved up to Massachusetts, where they lived and lived with them for a few years. They had a kind of a guest apartment that we lived in, and I loved that. I loved that because I got to spend time with them, I got to be close with them. But I also loved they live in the, they lived in this awesome house with, you know, lots of land and I could walk around and I could play. And it was just a really great place to grow up as a child. Um, and they they had um, you know, they were in a better financial position. And so, you know, I think there were a lot of probably gaps where they would fill that gap. So, you know, when I think about those Christmases and kind of that setting of expectations that then never ended up really coming true, you know, I think oftentimes that's probably where my grandparents may have stepped in. Um, I know that they supported um my education when I went to a private high school. I know that they supported me when I went to college. I know that they supported me when I when I got married and had to pay for a wedding. Um, so again, it's this was again part of my money story. And I'm not saying this to um make a point or have anybody feel anything about me or my story, but these are the things we all kind of kind of go through, right? We all work through the stuff that creates our money story. And for me, it was always this kind of dichotomy of there's not enough, money is tight, and then you know, there is enough, and we live in this big house and we have access to all of these things. And again, even in the sort of money is tight feeling, still incredibly privileged because I had access to fantastic education. I never had any concern about access to healthcare or food or um, you know, really anything like that. So all of this kind of under this big cloud of privilege. I was never really taught how to use money. And I don't, that's not a I'm not blaming my parents or anything like that. I don't think a lot of us in our generation were. You know, I remember um maybe in like middle school, I think it was early middle school, we actually still had a home egg, a home economics class. Some of you may be in the same boat as me, most of you, but I think that was kind of when they were starting to phase out. Um, so we learned some things, like we learned how to use an oven and a washing machine and I don't know, some other random things, but we never talked about money. Or at least I don't remember talking about money in that class. It just never came up. So I never really learned this stuff. And when I went into high school, um my mom got me a credit card. I don't remember why, probably to pay for gas because I went to this high school that was kind of far away, so I had to drive quite a bit. Uh, and I did what any teenager is gonna do, and I ran that credit card bill right up and didn't have the money to pay for it and got in a lot of trouble for it. Um, that was kind of my first lesson, but I didn't really learn the lesson. Uh, I don't remember exactly what happened. I think I had to use my graduation money to pay it off or something like that, but it wasn't like this life-ending consequence, right? I mean, I didn't really learn that much from it. And what if when I went to college, I did the same thing. I just never really learned how to be responsible about it. And I'm gonna be completely honest, through my 20s and 30s, it's something that I've always struggled with. What I have learned about myself, I'm gonna kind of skip ahead because I know you don't need this to be like a 45-minute money journey story. But what I have learned about myself is that I am really great at being organized and responsible when I have a system, when I have a process, when I have a plan. So, for example, one of the things I do now to keep my spending in check, to keep our household spending in check, is every single day I look at our credit card statement and I update our budget to actual and I look at kind of where our numbers are and how much left we have for the month. But I also know that when I don't do that, that's when I tend to slip. That's part of my money story, that's part of my money baggage. It's one of those things that I'm constantly having to wrestle with because I know that about myself. But it took me 30 plus years to figure that out and understand that. It took me a lot of credit card debt to figure that out. It took me a lot of um um falls and sembles to figure that out. Uh, so you know, and there's other things I want to touch on in a second, but I just want to say one thing about this. If you're somebody who has struggled with credit card debt or even any kind of money shame, I think that's a very big part of this process is really acknowledging it and getting comfortable with it and accepting it as a part of yourself, and then figuring out what shifts you need to make to get the desired outcome that you want. I don't want to be in credit card debt, I want to have extra money. So, what do I need to do to make that happen? I think I've also struggled with money quite a bit over my life because again, this dichotomy where I grew up in a world where a lot of people had money. My family had money, but my my like very small family unit didn't necessarily have that kind of money. And so there was this constant um, almost confusion, if you will, between like, where do I belong? You know, I go to this really expensive private school, but you know, we don't have a vacation home or something like that, you know. So it was like this, this kind of like it was just always trying to figure out kind of what where I was at and what made sense for me. I don't know if that makes sense for folks. Um, and so that was a big part of my money story, was like I just never really felt like I understood um where I was at. I also, and and and this um may be familiar for a lot of you. I also grew up in a family where I was told I could do whatever I want, I can be whatever I want to be, you know, very supportive, and that was great. But I also didn't grow up in a family with entrepreneurs. So I didn't know that that was even an option, really. I grew up being taught you go to school, you get a, you know, get a degree, you get a good job, you stay at that job forever, you know, you you be smart about your money, and then that's life is great, right? And that's what my grandfather did. And it worked for my grandfather and my grandmother. Um, it didn't work for my mom, and I don't mean that in a bad way, but you know, she had bumps along the way. And I think her generation was probably when that shift started to happen. Not, I mean, I think it's fully happened with my generation, where this idea that you're gonna get one job and keep it forever and that's gonna be enough to pay for your retirement just isn't realistic anymore. But I think it was starting to happen in my mom's generation, where pensions were starting to go away, where people were not necessarily staying, staying around for the whole, you know, eternity of their lifetimes. But so I grew up with this idea that that's what I was gonna do: go to college, get a degree, get a job, you know, get a have a pension, and that was gonna be my life. And looking back, now I get it that that was never really me. But at the time I didn't have a clue because I was very straight and narrow, type A organized. So that sounded like it would be the perfect thing for me. I didn't know then what I know now, which is that that idea of a very structured career is like the worst thing in my mind to me, for me personally. I love the freedom and the flexibility and the creativity of being an entrepreneur. And I'm so glad I discovered that. But I discovered it very late in life. Not very late, but I've later in life than I wish I had. I was in my mid-30s when I realized I think this is what I want to do. And not for nothing, but it took me a couple of stumbles to get here because the first company I started ended up being a company that I didn't really want to run. And so I got out of that and then started this. Um, but I bring all that up to say because of that, there was never any conversation around what to do with your money, because the path that was laid out for me was very simple. Get the job, you know, they'll give you a pension, and then that's it. You know, buy buy a house, you know, like put some money into savings, whatever. That was it. So there were never any conversations about how to spend my money, how to invest my money. I didn't learn about investing, I didn't learn about investing in stock market, investing in real estate. I didn't even learn about retirement savings really until I was in my 30s. In fact, I had, when I was uh worked in public accounting, I had a retirement account, but the only reason there ended up being money in there was because the company put it in for me automatically. Um I didn't elect to put anything because I didn't have a clue. You know, we have a um we have an episode, actually, it'll end up being before this one, um, the one where I do with um with Chlobear, Chloe, my um uh friend and and fellow money mentor, who um we actually talk about should we have financial education in schools? And she takes a really interesting perspective, which I like, which is this concern over, yeah, it sounds great in theory, but do we trust um, you know, everybody to implement this well and teach people the right things? And it she's not wrong for having that concern because there's certainly a lot of really scary financial education out there. And I'm we're gonna probably touch on a lot more of that in future episodes. Um, but one of the things I say in this episode is that I really feel very strongly that we do need financial education in schools because we just don't learn this stuff. And maybe kids are learning it more now because they have access to TikTok and Instagram and all these things. Although, again, to Chloe's point, what are they actually learning? Are they learning the right information? Um, but we certainly didn't have access to this stuff then. So a very big part of my money story is actually needing to educate myself as I became an adult, as I made these mistakes and felt the consequences of them, the consequences of having too much credit card debt, of not being able to pay my bills, of not, you know, having my bank account go negative. All of these things have happened to me. And so I feel those very viscerally when people in our community are having those same struggles. And because of all those things, I've had to learn, I've had to teach myself. Yes, I'm a CPA. Yes, I went to um, you know, I got my undergrad degree and I went to grad school, but they don't teach you those basics in grad school. Or, you know, they don't like when you're becoming a CPA, they don't teach you the basics of financial and or money management. They teach you about accounting and bookkeeping and how to do tax returns. Um, so again, a big part of that money journey for me is really having to educate myself. And it's why I feel so strongly about financial education inside of the Equitable Money Project. And it's why my commitment is that our financial education will always be free because I do not want people to have a barrier to this information that I and so many other people had, you know, struggled to access when we were younger. So, you know, I think all of this is to say that as you hear some of these conversations with my friends as we do summer school, you know, we're gonna, like I said, we're gonna be all over the place with our topics. But I think you're gonna hear a common theme, probably amongst all of us, which is that even though we all came from very different, um, we do come from very different um socioeconomic backgrounds, we have very different financial um statuses, I guess, you know, in our current lives, I think there's that common thread of we all really didn't come to the table with a whole lot of education on this stuff. Um, and again, I think that's very typical for my generation. Younger people maybe don't feel that way. Maybe they feel like they have more access to it. But that is a very big part of my money story. And it's a very big part of um why I've struggled in the way I have. It's a very big part of why I do certain things, like my daily check-ins with my credit card statement or my weekly check-ins with my bank account. It's why I feel so strongly about financial education, both for myself and for our community. And so I think when you start to tell your money story, um, you start to realize where some of the things have come from. Um, you know, I've talked to clients, I was talking to a client the other day who said, um, you know, in my culture, we're not really comfortable with putting your money in the stock market. We put your, we put our money under the mattress. Um, and Chloe and I actually talked about this as well, this, you know, that how damaging that action can be because simply by inflation, you're losing money by doing that, let alone essential earnings. Um, and I'm not knocking this particular culture, but it's it's we all have this stuff, right? We all come from places, um, whether it's culturally, whether it's religiously, whether it's just simply our the dynamic of our family where we're taught these things. Um, and they they become our money story and they affect and impact the decisions we're making today. And so it's something that I'm really excited that we're gonna touch on with summer school, but it's also something that I really want us to touch on more and more with Disruptor Money. And I want each and every one of us to be aware of and to really think about because it does um make a huge difference in how we face and approach our money today and how we get to the place that we want to get to, which of course is true and complete financial um equity in this world. So I'm gonna leave it there because I think I've talked about myself for far too long, but I am super pumped for summer school. We are gonna be starting that in the next few weeks. So keep an eye out. It'll go all summer long. Uh again, every week a different conversation with a different friend on a different money topic. But we're gonna go deep and I think you're gonna love it. So thanks so much for being here. Thank you for letting me share my money story with you. You can um uh let's see, you can learn all about the podcast, you can submit a listener question or maybe just a little tidbit about your own money story. I'd love to hear that by going to disruptyourmoney.com. And as always, please don't forget to uh subscribe to this podcast and to leave us a review. We'd be forever grateful. Until then, friends, I will um see you. Thanks for listening to Disrupt Your Money. If you have a money question you'd like answered in a future episode, go to disruptyourmoney.com. To support the podcast, please rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want access to all of my free templates, checklists, resources, and guides, click the link for the Biz Money Library in the show notes.