Why are financial education services so expensive?
When I get upset about something in the world, I write about it. Why? Because sometimes, I feel like I’m legitimately taking crazy pills because it seems like nobody is talking about a certain topic. Today, I wanted to discuss how expensive financial educational services are. More specifically, I wanted to discuss those who put on the facade that they care about social justice issues and helping the underprivileged while charging prices that are insanely out of reach for those individuals.
If I’m being honest, part of writing this is because I want to be held accountable as well. I don’t know if The Antibroke will take off, but I’d like to think that I’ll do better and not sell out to make a ton of money.
Seeing people charge over $200 for an hour of their time while saying they’re tyring to help marginalized groups is absolutely insane to me.
We’re broke
My life is amazing these days, but it wasn’t always like this. Today, I have money in my checking account 5 days before payday, and that’s not something I used to have. I was spending down to my last penny by the week before payday. I was truly living “paycheck to paycheck”. Even if I did have an emergency come up and had to drain my checking account, I have credit cards to ensure I don’t overdraw and get the insane overdraft fees.
But let’s be honest, I wouldn’t even need to turn to credit cards if I didn’t have to because I have an emergency savings account. I also have investments I could sell. Worst case scenario, I could tap into one of my two retirement accounts.
This is something that I was never able to do until my mid-30s because my financial life was a hot mess. I grew up with no money and had parents that didn’t teach me any of this.
Yesterday, my girlfriend and I went to try this new pizza place, and it was in the same parking lot as the place I worked when I first got sober. It was crazy because it really showed me how far I’ve come in the last 10 years.
Back then, I didn’t have a car. Everyday, I was waking up at 4:30 AM to catch a bus at 5:30 AM to get to that job at 7 AM because it was across town. Where it was located, there were a ton of places to eat, but I was telling my girlfriend how the most I could do for lunch was spend a few bucks at Sweet Tomatoes to get a little bag of like 5-6 mini muffins. I couldn’t even afford to go to the Five Guys right below our offices, and I definitely couldn’t go to any of the actual restaurants in that area.
During that time, I was living in an apartment in a terrible part of town, and I had to go grocery shopping at the $0.99 cent store that was next door.
Why am I telling you this? Because I was ridiculously broke, didn’t know anything about money, and the last thing I was going to do was pay someone hundreds of dollars to teach me. When you’re in that type of situation, paying that much money for a non-necessity is laughable.
So, how’d this topic come up?
Let’s get “progressive”
I recently came across the YouTube channel The Financial Diet, and I love it.Their target audience is millennial women. Although I’m not a woman, I’m a millennial, and I enjoy the video essays because it helps people with financial education while also discussing systemic issues. They also do a podcast where they interview regular people about interesting financial topics like how they got into and out of massive amounts of debt.
The host of the channel is Chelsea Fagan. She has an interesting story from what I can gather. She sounds like she grew up without much and worked terrible jobs. She even worked at a resort or country club where she saw how awful wealthy people were. Now, she’s got her financial life in order and hosts this channel.
Well, recently I found out she had a book, and I decided to check it out. I just started it, and this is where this topic came up. In her book, Beyond Getting By, it starts out discussing systemic issues and class issues that hold many people back while the rich just get richer.
That’s awesome. I love it. But then, I had to stop to write this.
I barely started this book, and right after Chelsea discusses Dave Ramsey and his Christian shame-based approach to financial advice, Chelsea discusses this awesome woman Lindsay Bryan Podvin.
Or at least she sounded awesome until I looked her up.
Lindsay is a financial therapist, and she’s the founder of Mind Money Balance. On her page for “money mindset coaching”, the main header says, “Helping progressive millennials understand their relationship with money.”
I’m a progressive millennial. Let’s discuss some of the values of progressives real quick:
We know that there are systemic issues holding many groups of marginalized people back in the United States and around the world
We understand that while things have gotten better for women, people of color, the LBGTQ community, but they’re still far behind and still face many struggles
Due to how the systems were setup for straight white men, many groups did not benefit from generational wealth
We believe in true equality of opportunity because we know that some people start ahead in life while others start very far behind
TLDR: A lot of people are financially screwed no matter how hard they try.
Now, back to Lindsay.
I went to her website because I’m a big advocate for mental health, so when I heard she was a money therapist, I wanted to see if she had a book. After a quick Google, I found her website. Whenever I do this, I check and see if their actions align with their spoken values. It’s easy to figure out by checking to see how much they charge.
Here’s the pricing:
Individual financial therapy: $275 for an initial 60-minute session and $215 for 55-minute return sessions.
Money mindset coaching: $275 for an initial 60-minute session and $215 for 55-minute return sessions
Power session: $427
And get this, she says many of her clients see her weekly for 3 months for the money mindset coaching. At an average of 4 weeks per month, that’s 11 sessions plus the initial session. That’s a total of $2,640, and that’s lowballing it.
I had this exact same issue when I read Wealth Warrior by Linda Garcia. Her book was all about helping the underprivileged Latino community, and she charges insane prices as well.
Not all of you reading this are as broke as I used to be, but maybe some of you are. All I know is that these prices would make me laugh myself into a coma.
If you truly want to help the less fortunate with their money, you’ll offer affordable services that can fit within their budget. In my opinion, one of the biggest problems with people who align with my politics is many are all talk and don’t practice what they preach.
Unfortunately, this endorsement from Chelsea now has me second-guessing her a little bit as well. But at least Chelsea makes free YouTube videos, which offsets it a bit.
Some of you may think I’m insane for this, and that’s fine. I often think that I have impossibly high standards. As someone obsessed with moral philosophy and ethics, I overthink all of these topics, but I think there’s an ethical way to do this for everyone to win.
What would be better?
I’ll just spitball some ideas real quick.
Sliding scale
Create an income-based sliding scale. If you truly wanted to help the less fortunate, offer your services at a much lower price for those who need the help and can’t afford more. Like, don’t get it twisted. I want people to make their money. I just take issue with saying that you want to help the underprivileged while pricing them out of your services.
A sliding scale would allow you to charge people your crazy high prices who make a lot more money. Hell, you could even charge them more than your current listing. That may even help offset some of the money you’re losing for a sliding scale.
Separate services
I try to look at situations from all angles and come up with the best arguments against my ideas. The primary argument I can see from the sliding scale is that your time is valuable. If too many low-income people signed up for 1-on1 sessions, it could book your schedule so you can’t take in higher-paying clients.
Some quick solutions to this are to cap how many low-income clients you take per month. You could also be super cool and just scholarship a few people each month.
A simple solution here is taking the time to setup separate services. Here are some simple ones:
Create an affordable or even a free course: This is a one-and-done thing. It’s general information that people can have access to. It’s not 1-on-1, but it’s something they can learn from.
Free or affordable eBooks: This is another option where it’s something you setup and people can easily access it to learn. I recently wrote a short credit repair book in a weekend that sells for $0.99. It’s not super hard.
Make free content: I’m a huge advocate for creating content on social media. Not only is it marketing for you, but it’s free content people can access.
Yes, each of these takes some time, but it’s something you can do to help you go to bed with a clear conscience knowing that you’re actually helping some underprivileged people.
These are just a few ideas, but there are many, many more.
In 3 days, I turn 12 years sober, and I got sober through Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. They taught me that “we keep what we have by giving it away”. They also taught me that being of service to others is the most important thing that we can do.
As someone who was broke for most of my life, I always thought how incredible it was that these meetings and my sponsor saved my life and it didn’t cost me a penny. All they asked was that you take what you learn and use it to help others.
I always think about how much better the world would be if more of us did that. Instead, most of us want to make as much money as possible to buy things we don’t need that won’t make us happy and to impress people who don’t even matter.
Again, I wrote this to hold myself accountable. On the off-chance The Antibroke takes off, feel free to shove this in my face if I start charging hundreds of dollars for anything.
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