The Road to Financial Healing

Girl, Get Your Money Straight: A Sister's Guide to Healing Your Bank Account and Funding Your Dreams in 7 Simple Steps
By Glinda Bridgforth

If you're tired of feeling powerless over your finances and are ready to start funding your dreams, then come on girl-it's time to get your money straight! Author and financial expert Glinda Bridgforth knows that healthy money management is rarely just about dollars-it's about getting to the root of why we spend what we do and recognizing the emotional and cultural issues that play out in our unhealthy financial habits. Girl, Get Your Money Straight! presents her seven-step program for holistic financial healing-an upbeat, empowering road map that you can use to identify your heart's desires, break away from negative spending patterns, pay off outstanding debts, develop a spending plan, conquer the checkbook blues, and create new wealth. Filled with Bridgforth's warmhearted wisdom and advice, and complete with worksheets exercises, affirmations, and inspiring stories of African American women who have found financial peace of mind, Girl, Get Your Money Straight! is a fresh, fun, and eminently practical guide to healing your bank account and building a life that you love.

Chapter 1

Whether you are one of those sisters who owe more than they own, or you are scuffling to make ends meet on a solid income that would make your mama's jaw drop and say, "Girl, you make how much money?" believe this: We can all learn to shrink our debt, expand our investments, and cultivate financial health, wealth, and peace of mind.

Believe me, I know this is true. The publication of Girl, Get Your Money Straight! marks my twenty-fifth year as a financial professional. After a successful career as a retail-banking executive, I have worked for the last decade as an independent consultant, coaching sisters just like you and me through the often tricky waters of money management. I call myself a financial recovery specialist, highly experienced in helping clients who are financially challenged in a variety of ways. I assist them in designing and implementing a personalized program of debt reduction and planned spending to stabilize their finances, dig themselves out of familiar money and credit traps, and ultimately build up savings to invest for their futures.

While I have worked with hundreds of clients from all ethnic backgrounds and walks of life, I have been astonished by the number of eager black women who have flocked to my popular group workshop, Money Management: Achieving Prosperity and Debt-Free Living. In 1994 I presented this workshop for the African American Women on Tour Conference, and a standing-room-only crowd of more than two hundred African American women of all ages showed up at an Oakland hotel, ready to learn the strategies and techniques that would help them get their money straight and foster true financial healing. They brought enough energy into that room to light up the whole city, and it was a beautiful sight to behold.

I stood before that audience as a money-management expert, but just as important, as a sister. As an African American woman, I know firsthand our hunger for straightforward financial information that directly connects with how we live, the feelings we have about ourselves, how we interact with the world at large, and the dreams we want to realize.

I also stood before that audience as a firsthand testament to the powers of change that lie within each and every one of us. I am not the kind of financial expert who has always had it all together in my own financial life. I've dealt with many of the challenges typically faced by upwardly mobile African Americans who have come of age since the 1970s. Having benefited from access to education and job opportunities most of our parents didn't have, I am part of a generation of African Americans whose buying power is expected to exceed $533 billion in 2000, up from $350 billion in 1990.

That's a 70-percent increase over the last decade! But access to larger incomes doesn't automatically bring the confidence and knowledge it takes to manage money well and turn it into wealth. Some of us grew up poor or were raised by folks who grew up with very little and unwittingly passed on to us high levels of insecurity, self-criticism, and self-doubt in all areas of our lives - especially in finance. And like many Americans, once we have money in our pockets, many of us quite innocently get caught up in our capacity to consume. Eventually, we find ourselves bogged down by overwhelming debt and bad credit habits that have been fueled by psychological vulnerabilities that undermine our confidence to control our financial lives.

I help clients, as I once had to help myself, to examine and work through the close link between how we feel about ourselves in relation to money and how effectively or ineffectively we manage our financial lives. Since both psychological and practical barriers prevent us from moving beyond compulsive spending to planned spending and conscious wealth building, I have found that a holistic approach - that is, one that incorporates both the emotional and the practical and works to heal the individual as well as her bank account - best facilitates change. Such an approach worked for me during my own financial recovery, and I've since found that it works for the hundreds of clients I've seen in my practice and in the workshops I've conducted over the last ten years. Taking a close look inside our minds and hearts is often the key to taking control of our fiscal responsibilities.

Copyright © 2002 by Glinda Bridgforth

About the Author

is founder of Bridgforth Financial Management Group, a company that emphasizes holistic coaching. In 2006, Glinda appeared on Oprah in a five-part series called "America's Debt Diet." The author of the bestsellers Girl, Get Your Money Straight! and Girl, Make Your Money Grow!, she writes articles for Essence and is featured regularly on television and radio programs nationwide. She lives with her husband in Detroit.