You’re Not Bad With Money. You’re Just Not In Charge Of It.

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Financial Literacy Taught You The Language. Financial Authorship Is You Writing The Story.

So I once sat across from a financial advisor and yeah, I understood every single word she said and I let her do all the talking. You know how it goes. They ask you the questions. How long do you want to live? How much are you making? How much do you think you’ll need each month to survive? And then they take all of that and they put it in a box. Does your life fit in this box? Does this equation come out to this number? And whatever the box says, that becomes the plan. And I understood a lot of it, the vocabulary, the algorithm, the whole thing. And I still walked out of there without really having decided a single thing myself. I just let her tell me what was best for me based on her little algorithm.

But here’s what I want you to notice. I wasn’t confused that day. I was uninformed. I just wasn’t the one deciding.

What Financial Literacy Actually Solves

So welcome back to Expand Your Empire. I am Amanda and today I want to take a swing at something the entire financial world has been selling women for 20 years. And I want to tell you why I think it’s quietly kept a lot of us stuck.

It’s financial literacy. The books, the podcasts, hey, including this one, the courses, budgeting apps, color-coded spreadsheets. It’s had two full decades to prove itself. And look, it worked sort of. Millions of women can now define a Roth IRA, explain compound interest, read a balance sheet without flinching. And most of them still hand the actual decisions to someone else. A husband, an advisor, maybe their dad who set up the accounts 30 years ago and never got around to handing over the login.

So here is the question that I want to sit in with you for the rest of this episode. What if literacy was never the thing standing between you and your money? What if you already know enough? And the thing you’re actually missing isn’t information, but authority? Because those are not the same thing. And once you see the gap between them, you can’t unsee it.

Now let me be fair to financial literacy for a second because I’m about to be hard on it. Knowing the vocabulary of money matters. It genuinely does. You should know what an expense ratio is. You should know what a fiduciary actually owes you and what a person calling themselves an advisor does not. You should know why a 60/40 portfolio isn’t automatically the right answer just because it’s usually the default answer. That’s all real. Keep it.

But here is the line I keep coming back to.

Literacy answers the question, what does this mean?

It was never built to answer the question, what do I want this to do?

Those are different muscles. One is comprehension. The other is command.

The Advisor Who Became The Decider

So let’s go back to the story because that’s the whole point. A while after that meeting with my advisor, I actually started learning. I got curious about other things, the real estate and putting money into life insurance. And I’ve talked about this on the show before. So I went back to my advisor with it and she told me it wasn’t a good idea. That was basically it. Not here’s why, here’s the math, here’s the risk you’re not seeing. Just nah. She didn’t think it was a good idea and no real explanation behind it.

To be fair, it wasn’t that she said I couldn’t do it. It was that she didn’t think I should and I was supposed to take that and go home. Now I eventually moved things out and I did what I wanted to do anyway, but I want to be honest about how long it took me to get there because I think that’s the part that matters.

For a long time, I just assumed that she knew what I needed better than I did. And that’s the position that I think so many of us land in with the so-called experts. We assume they know our lives better than we do. And look, do advisors have their place? Absolutely. That’s not the argument.

But here’s the distinction that I had to learn the hard way. Are they advisors? Yes. Are they deciders? No. That’s the whole thing. Somewhere I’d let the advisor quietly turn into the decider and nobody handed me that authority back. I had to take it.

The Person At Your Kitchen Table

And I have to say the harder version of this out loud because we love to talk about the advisor and skip right past the person at our own kitchen table. A lot of us don’t just defer to the expert. We defer to our husband or our partner. And I want to be careful here because this is tender stuff. Sometimes it’s because we genuinely think he’s smarter about this, more capable, better with numbers. And sometimes it’s quieter than that. It is an old inherited idea that money is his lane, his role, and not ours. That somewhere it got decided that this particular job belonged to him and we just never questioned the assignment.

But here’s what I want to say to that woman, and I have been her. Your partner may be the most astute financial mind you’ve ever met. Genuinely, that is not the issue. And this is not about turning it into a fight or proving you can do it better than he can. It’s that you still deserve a voice in the conversation. You deserve to know what is actually happening with your money. To see the whole picture and not the summary he gives you, the actual picture, and to understand how it affects the rest of your life. Because it is your life. The retirement is yours. The exposure is yours. The chapter where the money either holds you up or doesn’t. You’re living that one too.

Now deferring to a smart partner still feels responsible, but it’s the same trap as the advisor just wearing a face that you love. And a woman who has no idea what’s happening with her own money isn’t protected by a competent husband. She’s just one life event away from finding out she was never actually in the room.

So the same rule, and it doesn’t get softer because it’s someone you love. He can be your partner in it. He can even be better at the spreadsheet. But the decision, this life, this money, you don’t get to be a spectator to it. You have to be in the conversation.

Being Informed Is Not The Same As Being In Charge

And because I think a lot of us have really felt it and not said it out loud. Somewhere along the way being informed got quietly swapped for being in charge and they got treated like the same achievement. But they’re not.

A woman who can define an annuity is informed. A woman who decides whether that annuity belongs in her plan and can tell you why is in charge. Most of us were trained very thoroughly to be the first woman, to understand the terms, to follow the plan, defer to the professional. That whole model was built for a version of you who exists to absorb information, not one who exists to embody it and make the call.

What Financial Authorship Actually Is

So let me tell you what I think the actual upgrade is. And I’ve started calling it financial authorship. And I want to walk you through it and talk about what I mean because it’s not a vibe. It is structural.

Most women have been handed money as this stack of separate subjects. Income is one class. Investing is another. Insurance is a whole other intimidating thing. And then retirement is that anxious cloud somewhere off in the distance. And then estate stuff or legacy, you’ll deal with that later if ever. This is six separate subjects and you’re supposed to get an A in each one, one at a time, forever.

Financial authorship is when you stop doing that. When you stop treating them as six subjects to master and you start treating them as one story you are writing on purpose.

Here’s how the story actually holds together. And I want you to hear how simple it is once it’s connected.

Income funds the story. Investing grows it. Assets anchor it. Protection, that is your insurance, your safeguards, those defend against the things you can’t predict. And then retirement is the chapter where the story finally stops depending on your labor. And then legacy is what the story hands off after you’re gone.

That’s it. That is the whole architecture. Six pieces, one story.

And most women I know, they do have pieces of this. A 401k from a job two employers ago, a life insurance policy somebody sold them a dozen years ago, some vague low-grade sense that they know they’re supposed to do something about their retirement that they think about on a random night at 11 p.m.

Financial authorship is the decision to connect those pieces on purpose. To have a point of view behind them instead of a pile of accounts that just accumulated, that happened to you while you were busy being competent at everything else.

The Gen X Woman Specifically

Now I want to talk to a specific woman for a minute because this show has one listener and I know who she is. If you are a Gen X woman, you were raised on a particular script. Safe equals smart. Don’t be greedy. Don’t be reckless. Keep your head down and eventually things will just magically work out. The adults will handle the rest.

The adults did not handle the rest.

Retirement, whatever that means for you, is a lot closer than it feels. The accounts are still right now in a lot of cases titled in someone else’s name or running on someone else’s advice. And there is genuinely no more room to defer the decisions to some future, more confident version of yourself who’s going to show up and finally deal with it.

This is the part that needs to land. Waiting was never neutral. That’s the lie inside of all of this. It felt responsible. It felt safe. But every single year you spent outsourcing the decisions was a year those decisions still got made. But just by default.

And default usually breaks in favor of whoever’s most comfortable with the status quo, which is rarely the woman who stayed quiet to keep the peace.

That’s not a plan. That’s just what happens when nobody’s writing.

And I don’t want to say this to make you feel behind. I say it because I think you already feel it and nobody’s naming it for you. The anxiety that you feel about money is not a literacy problem. It’s the sound of a story being written without you in the room.

What You Actually Do With This

So now, what do you actually do with this? Because I don’t want to hand you a feeling and walk away. That’s the exact thing I am criticizing.

The first move is smaller and less dramatic than you think. It’s not a total financial overhaul. It’s not blowing up your life. It’s just picking up the pen.

For a lot of women, that starts with investing. Not because investing is the whole story, but because it’s the room women get talked out of standing in. It’s the conversation that has been happening around you, in front of you, sometimes about your own money while you just sat outside of it.

And I want to be really clear about who this is and isn’t for. This is not for women who are quote unquote bad with money. I actually think that phrase is one of the most expensive lies women tell themselves.

This is for women who are done outsourcing the decisions that shape the rest of their lives.

What you are building toward is the ability to understand the language, yes, but then go further, to ask sharper questions, to hear the difference between income and wealth because they are not the same thing. And the whole game changes when you can tell them apart. And to start making decisions from ownership instead of from intimidation.

That is the shift. From the woman who gets money explained to her to the woman who decides what it’s for.

The Reframe To Walk Away With

So let me leave you with the reframe that I actually want you to keep. Financial literacy teaches you what the words mean. Financial authorship begins the moment you decide what those words are going to build.

And notice the goal was never to know more about money for its own sake. You don’t get a prize for having the most vocabulary. I’ve tried. There’s no gold star for being the most informed woman at the table who still doesn’t decide anything.

The goal is to become the woman who decides what her money becomes. That’s the whole thing. That’s the empire. Not more accounts, not more knowledge you’re just too intimidated to use. It is a story you are actually writing on purpose with a point of view in your name.

And keep that with you. Because here’s the line that finally moved me.

Are they advisors? Yes. Are they deciders? No.

Your advisor, your accountant, your spouse, whoever’s been holding the pen, they can advise all day long. The deciding chair has your name on it. And it always did.

Your One Thing This Week

So here’s one thing I want you to do this week, and it’s a small ask, and it’s small on purpose. Pick one financial decision in your life that you’ve been quietly letting someone else make. The advisor you nodded along with, the recommendation you took without asking why, the account you’re not sure you could even find. Just one. And this week, be the one who asks the next question about it. Not hands it off, not defers it. Asks it. That’s you picking up the pen. That is chapter one.

And if you’re ready to stop hovering at the edge of the wealth conversation, if you’re done being the most informed woman in the room who still doesn’t get to decide, that’s exactly what Investing 101 is for. It’s not the course for women who are bad with money. It’s the foundation for women who are done outsourcing the decisions that shape their future. It gives you the language, yes. It gives you the better questions though, and the confidence to start making investment decisions from ownership instead of intimidation.

Link is in the show notes.

Financial literacy taught you the language of money. Financial authorship is you writing the next chapter with it.

All right, that’s the end. I’ll see you next time. And until then, keep building.