There are a lot of things I love about running TFD, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that one of the absolute best things is the near-complete absence of dudes. The core team is five women, nearly all of our contributors are women, our audience is almost entirely women, and most of our industry friends are smart, funny young women who have undertaken the same task of bringing financial literacy to other young women. Our lawyer, accountant, and web developer are dudes, but with the exception of those relatively-rare interactions, my professional life is decidedly female — something that not everyone gets to experience, and something that I won’t have forever in my professional life. It’s an experience I cherish, particularly when I consider that for most men, the idea of being surrounded by 90% men in an immediate professional context is totally normal. I have been, more than once, the only woman in the room. To experience the reverse is freeing and empowering.
And beyond just making my day-to-day work life a warm and rewarding thing, being exposed to so many brilliant and ambitious women has been powerful for my social life. It’s now totally normal for me to enjoy a weeknight dinner with a few women where we exclusively talk money, business, and politics — it’s not something that was totally absent from my life before, but it was certainly a rarer thing. As the lines between peer, colleague, and friend blur, I realize that the “boy’s club” of most of the professional world (where the effortless networking tends to happen, over whiskeys and steaks and back-slaps) is something that desperately needs recreating for those of us who have always been, by nature, excluded from it. Long story short, forming a “girl’s club” has felt like a vibrant and necessary thing in my recent life.
Erin Lowry, founder of Broke Millennial, is one the members of said informal “girl’s club.” She’s a whip-smart and deeply warm person, whose interest in making women better with money is genuine and egalitarian: she believes that anyone can learn to speak the language of finance, no matter what they’re working with. Erin was kind enough to sit down with me last week and talk about her money philosophies, her mistakes, and how she navigated New York City on $23,000 a year. Enjoy our interview below!
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