Who taught You about money?
By Dana
As a child of immigrants, there were many things about the American financial system that were beyond the scope and understanding of my parents and caretakers. This is a barrier that many first and second generation students experience as they think about how to manage their money and build wealth. In my household, we only ever talked about saving (i.e. be as frugal as possible so you can save as much as possible), and never touched on topics like investing, or even credit. Thinking about college, the world of student loans was a daunting and scary place where the word debt was either talked about as the ultimate doom or thrown around like spare change because, well, it seems like everyone is in some sort of debt. As an adult, I knew how to do my taxes because I helped my family with theirs, and it was really only until this very MBA program that I finally (sort of) understood investing in the stock market and other opportunities like bonds.
For our project, we are tasked with creating an outline for a financial literacy program for women in Moldova. In researching financial literacy programs around the world, I’ve been circling back to my experiences, sometimes considering how they may compare to some of my peers. At some point in this research phase, I also found myself walking down the street or sitting on the T wondering of the people around me: Who taught you about money? What do you know?
For such an essential thing (almost everything in daily life revolves around money), you’d think there would be many resources—so many that you get information fatigue—but this is actually not the case. A lack of resources is then compounded by the fact that, of the few programs out there, many of them are inaccessible.
So our question then becomes: how do you teach money management to some of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised individuals?
In our conversations with our client, we constantly revisit questions of demographics: what is the best way for women to learn about topics that may seem taboo? How do we reach rural women with this program? What modules would speak to returning foreign workers? And how do we craft a program when the answers to these questions can get so nuanced? These questions are especially difficult to answer when there are virtually no regionally-relevant examples of existing programs.
Earlier in this project, I also questioned how effective our team could be without the cultural context and throughout the engagement, I’m learning how to ask more questions. Consulting is a collaboration between the consultants and the client. We have an outsider perspective and the time to do research outside of the organization, but the client has the ultimate vision and the context we need to be effective.
I used to be the type to think I had to have all the answers to people’s questions. Now, I’m learning that leading with curiosity is actually much more effective. Sometimes, the fact that we don’t know is where we have to start.
While we are closer than we were in the beginning, we still don’t know exactly what our final deliverable will look like, but we are continuing to ask questions of our research, of our client, of each other and bit by bit we are finding answers to the ultimate question: how do we teach women (in Moldova) about money?