The Alignment Edit Week 3: Money Management for Material Girls

Untangling shame, restructuring my systems, and becoming the woman who can actually hold wealth

This week’s Alignment Edit letter is late because, being completely honest, I was terrified to write it. I kept pushing it back, circling around it, pretending I was “busy,” when really I was just scared to look at this part of my life directly — let alone talk about it publicly.

But after publishing this week’s free letter, Smart Girls Don’t Want a Man, They Want Money, I realized I needed to…well, put my money where my mouth is and start talking about it. Nobody becomes wealthy by avoiding their finances, and definitely not by avoiding their own financial truth. So buckle up, sisters, and please be gentle with me.

Money has always been the one area of my life I talk around, not through.

I can process heartbreak. I can dissect career confusion. I can unpack my spiritual crises and identity shifts with ease. But money? Beyonce Mute Challenge!!! I’d rather sprint in the opposite direction!!!

Not because I don’t care — ironically, money has probably occupied more space in my mind than anything else — but because it touches the most tender parts of me. The parts I’ve long preferred to intellectualize instead of actually feel.

It brings up the little girl on food stamps, who turned into the teenager washing dishes for minimum wage at her elite boarding school while other girls carried Birkins to AP Literature. Then, the college student rebuilding a credit score she didn’t ruin (iykyk, and I hope you don’t), who still feels like she has to take on every internship or job opportunity to make any money that comes her way.

And then the early-twenties version of me who suddenly had money — real money — and had absolutely no blueprint for navigating it responsibly, sustainably, or with any sense of safety, and a deep-rooted fear of asking for help.

Growing up with chronic financial instability gave me resilience and creativity — I can stretch a dollar like no other — but it also made me equate money with safety, morality, identity, and worthiness.

Once I started making more money than I ever imagined, those beliefs didn’t magically disappear. They just evolved into new, sneakier fears: guilt around wanting nice things, debilitating shame around having more money than my family, confusion around what to do with it, and constant anxiety about losing it.

As my 27th birthday approaches, I’ve been grieving the gap between who I thought I’d be financially by now… and where I actually am: student loans and self-employed for the first time ever. No one tells you that becoming a financially independent woman — especially one building a career in an industry based on looking expensive — is a constant dance between ambition and anxiety.

My career is glamorous, yes, but increasingly “pay-to-play.” Looking perfect = more views, costs money. Travel = more views, costs money. Staying visible = create more content = costs money. Scaling any startup requires cash, and my personal brand happens to be what needs investing right now. And brands I work with? They pay on their own timeline — which is rarely the one printed on the contract.

Then there’s the business I had to shut down — the one I poured everything into, the one that poured every dollar back into itself, the one that still costs money to this day. A major issue with it resurfaced this week, cracking open a level of financial grief I didn’t even know I was carrying.

And I’d be lying if I said I don’t resent having to do everything by myself.

I am a single, self-employed woman with no financial help from anyone. Not unusual, I know, but uniquely difficult and definitely emotional. Hyper-independence has become a survival skill — one I’m excellent at — but it is exhausting. The single tax hits harder when you've built your life assuming you’d be married by now!

Still, no one is coming to save me, and I’ve always known that.

So this is the part where I stand up, stop spiraling, and face the truth.

I’ve been working on my relationship with money all summer, and the breakthroughs I’ve had have completely reshaped how I see myself, my value, and my future. Before we get into the systems I’m building for my financially aligned era, I want to share the money beliefs I had to dismantle — the ones that held me back for years without me realizing it.

Once I finally stopped avoiding my financial story, I realized the hardest part wasn’t looking at the numbers — it was confronting the meaning I had attached to them. Money has never been neutral for me. It was the backdrop of every good and bad childhood memory, every early ambition, every fear about stability, and every dream I’ve ever dared to dream. Before I could create any real financial system, I had to dismantle the beliefs that had quietly shaped almost every decision I’ve made for twenty-seven years.