Berna Anat is about to become your favorite Filipino auntie. Over a Zoom call, I ask the self-proclaimed “financial hype woman” @HeyBerna if it was OK that I blew half a grand on a shopping spree over the weekend that included a designer purse and three pairs of new shoes.
“Oh, man, that’s how it’s gonna go: I’m gonna be out here enabling people’s purchases left and right,” she laughs. “If it made you feel good — it gave you joy and sparks joy in that moment — I think that’s OK.”
She adds the caveat that these purchases should come from a place in my budget that is set aside for whatever I want. While my gut feeling about budgets is “meh,” I like that Anat’s explanation about how budgets work puts me in the driver’s seat. Having more control is a great way to reduce anxiety, especially for us spiraling-out-of-control millennials and Gen Zers.
Another way of gaining control of the situation is by talking about money. “Talking about money? My parents told me to never talk about money,” you say. But talking about money is Anat’s whole premise in her new teen nonfiction release, “Money Out Loud: All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us.”
She shares that growing up in the Bay Area as the first-generation child of immigrants from the Philippines, her family “absolutely did not talk about money. We were lower middle class. We went through the 2008 housing crisis, filed for bankruptcy, all of that, and still no talks about money, no acknowledgment.”
“But at the same time, as a child, you’re still learning about money. It’s just if no one’s talking about it, you’re learning about it through context clues. You’re learning about it through the tension you feel in the home. You’re learning about it through what’s being unsaid,” she adds.
We all have money stories and just like Anat notes, my family didn’t talk about money directly, but my father would frequently give the excuse that he had to work because “no money, no honey.” As a child, I jumped to the conclusion that my family, also first-gen immigrants from the Philippines living in the Bay Area, was poor, especially if my father had to work from early in the morning to late into the night. And maybe for a while that was true. But as a grown-up, I also understand that my father was making choices to budget for costs that the rest of the family did not even agree to.
One of those was college. While I am grateful to be a debt-free adult, I probably also wouldn’t have made the choices I did if my father couldn’t have footed the bill. Moreover, because of the deeply rooted scarcity mindset ingrained in him, footing the bill comes with a nonmonetary IOU that I will be paying back for the rest of my life — a feeling that other Asian children will immediately recognize.
That’s my money story, and man, it is not easy to share, but it does shape the way that I am as an adult in all aspects of life.
“We have to go back through the stories that we were told or not told about money and pick out, is this healthy for me? [Maybe you might say,] ‘I’m going to keep this; I’m going to compound on this.’ Because it’s not all unhealthy,” Anat tells me. “And then we also have to pick out the things that were inherited from generations back. These are things that were inherited from my grandparents’ trauma or other ancestral trauma and [I] have to cut that out for myself because it’s not serving me, and it’s not helping me while I’m trying to budget and learn how to do money as a millennial adult in America.”
But at what age should we start talking about money? Of course, some of my parents’ rationale about not talking to me about their money choices or money, in general, was to unburden me. But now as an adult, I still don’t really understand this money thing, and I want to do better for my child in the future.
Anat recommends starting to talk about money whenever it comes up, particularly in light of the fact that Gen Z and Gen Alpha were basically born plugged into the internet. In fact, they’re not interested in budgeting, which makes these conversations a bit scary — buckle up, boomer!
“What they’re most interested in is investing,” Anat explains. “They’re interested in investing, more than [they’re interested in] credit cards and budgeting and debt and things like that. They want to know about investing because they hear so much about investing through the internet. You’ve got people on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter talking about the Gamestop revolution, or that ‘I’m 15 years old, and I made a whole bunch of money off of crypto,’ or ‘I’m 18 years old, and I can retire now because I bought an NFT.’ It’s very sexy.”
Gone are the days when investing and finance are, as Anat says, “male, pale, and stale.” But she warns that an early interest in investing without a basic understanding of financial literacy is dangerous: “My fear is that they are being wooed by the sexy fast type of investing. I want folks to be equipped. I want to rewind the energy a little bit from young people and be, like, hey, investing at the most basic level is this: Take care of yourself. Once you’ve taken care of your future self, great, get crypto, get NFTs, whatever.”
First a shopping spree? Now NFTs? “That Berna is an enabler,” you might be thinking. In that you’d be right. Anat is an enabler of fully informed decision-making and a sound budget.
She shares not only how to budget and about the basics of personal finance (i.e., taxes, bank account types, credit cards, loans, and more), but also comes at it with a savings-and-satisfying-cravings approach. (That phrase is all me — but that’s what spending time with @HeyBerna does to you; you become the master of catchy slogans and metaphors.) Because what are you going to do with your leftover money when you die? Be buried with it? Her debut is easy to read and even reminds the reader to take breaks. Talking money is dense stuff, but Anat makes it as light and joyful as she does every day on her TikTok account.
That’s not all the wisdom my kababayan has to offer in “Money Out Loud.” She also talks about how financial status is not a determinant of your value or worth. (Looking at you, fake-Gucci-bag-toting titas!) Eight in 10 Americans have some consumer debt and that’s nothing to be ashamed about. We each contend with the twin devils of racism and capitalism, and they are no joke.
“We have to be able to get a holistic look at the entire financial system. The capitalistic rules that we were born into, and had no choice but to obey once we became adults — really even before we became adults — because we have to understand that a lot of what’s happening to us financially is not within our control. A lot of what has happened to our ancestors financially was out of their control as well,” Anat shares. An example is the Homestead Act, which gave 160 acres of land to 1.6 million white families, but only 6,000 Black families as a source of systemic oppression. Today, 30 percent of Americans are descendants of beneficiaries of the program, a majority of them white.
She shares, “It had more to do with power, with bigotry, with racism, with systemic oppression. It’s incredibly important to understand the entire landscape so that at the very micro level, you stop blaming yourself entirely for all of your financial issues and all your family’s financial issues. And then at the macro level, you understand that it is not just about budgeting and saving and debt. It’s about getting your financial head above water.”
It’s perfectly fair to say that the circumstance you landed in was out of your control, but moving forward, Anat’s book gives you back control and a plan to move forward so that you can live your life — *Rihanna voice* hey, ayy, ayy, ayy.
For me, “Money Out Loud” helped me discern where my conceptions — and misconceptions — about money came from. It taught me to set money dates with myself (instead of spreadsheeting after every purchase) and to do what works for me.
Personally, my money story is a reminder to close my laptop if my child asks me to play or if he has a sports event or whatever. It is a lesson to not be greedy about money because you cannot bank memories that you missed out on.
Now, if only Berna could work her magic on my eating habits and diet.
Financial hype woman, content creator, and debut author Berna Anat wants us to step away from the “male, pale, and stale” history of financial literacy. Money can be me$$y, especially for marginalized folks who don’t have that inherent money knowledge. So what better way to freak out her Filipino immigrant parents than by doing the unthinkable: talking about money. Loudly, with teen nonfiction “Money Out Loud.” You can find Anat online at @heyberna on all platforms, at www.heyberna.com, or curled up with her nieces watching “The Office.”
Images provided by HarperCollins
