I grew up watching my mother work two jobs.
She was a great mom, present and loving in every way that counted, and she worked the way she did because that was how she took care of us (there were three of us, so I couldn’t imagine that could have been easy in any way).
Watching her, I learned that doing more was what good people did for the people they loved. And I never stopped.
As a journalist, I have built a career I’m proud of, in a room that doesn’t always make space for people who look like me, and doing work that genuinely matters to me. And still, I say yes to almost everything, overdeliver before I ever think to negotiate, and feel guilty on the days I’m not producing. It took a two-hour workshop about money in Los Angeles to show me that the little girl watching her exhausted mother and the woman I am today are operating on the exact same instructions.
The workshop was hosted by Ally as part of their Money Roots program, a free four-part financial wellness series built around the idea that how you think and feel about money is what actually drives what you do with it. Jack Howard, Ally’s Head of Money Wellness and an Accredited Financial Counselor, led the room. She has been featured in CNBC, Forbes, and these very pages. She also coached on Side Hustlers, a reality series on the Roku Channel. I mention that because it shows in how she runs the room. You’re not being lectured about money, but actually doing the work.
There were about ten or twelve of us gathered that afternoon, a mix of journalism students, freelancers, and staff writers at different stages of their careers. Ally had specifically convened the session for those of us in media, which already made it feel different from a general financial literacy event. These were people who understood irregular income cycles, the invisible labor of pitching, and the particular exhaustion of working in an industry that has been economically contracting while simultaneously asking more of everyone still in it.
Howard opened the session not with a slide about compound interest but with a question: what is your earliest memory involving money, and what did it feel like? The room took a beat, and then people started going in.
Someone mentioned their parents asking if they had McDonald’s money before a road trip or a school outing, and the whole room responded immediately. Not just with laughter, but also recognition that makes you realize you were never as alone in something as you thought. If you grew up Black in America, you know that question and you know exactly what it meant. It was never about McDonald’s. It was about your parents quietly doing the math in their heads, trying to calibrate your expectations against what was actually in their wallet before you even got your hopes up, all without making it a bigger conversation than it needed to be.
We had all been shaped by moments like that one. We had just never been asked to consider how those moments followed us into adulthood and started making financial decisions on our behalf.
That’s the whole premise behind Money Roots, which was developed with behavioral finance experts, financial therapists, and money psychologists around a single core idea: the gap between what we know we should be doing financially and what we actually do isn’t a knowledge problem, it’s a psychology problem. The avoidance, the under-negotiating, the reflexive yes to more work at whatever rate someone puts in front of you, all of it traces back somewhere, and until you find that place, you’ll keep making the same moves and wondering why your financial life keeps feeling like it’s working against you.
The second hour moved into the distinction between values and goals, and somewhere in that conversation I stopped taking notes on the workbook and started taking notes on myself. The difference Howard drew was one I had never really thought to separate before: a goal is concrete, something with a finish line you can actually cross, like saving a certain amount or paying something off or finally reaching an income number you’ve had in your head for years. A value is what lives underneath all of that, and is the actual reason any of those goals ever mattered to you in the first place. It’s the thing you are quietly trying to build your entire life around whether you have named it that or not. Howard pushed us to name our real values rather than our aspirational ones, and then to sit with the harder and more honest question of whether the way we were actually spending our time and money had anything real to do with those values at all.
For those of us in media, that question has a specific sting to it. Most people in journalism and editorial work got here because they believe in something, whether that’s storytelling, representation, accountability, or getting information to the communities that actually need it. And many of us have quietly let that belief work against us, by accepting rates that don’t reflect the actual value of our work because the mission feels like justification enough, and in turn we avoid hard conversations about money because the work itself feels like the whole point. Howard was careful not to shame any of that, and you could feel the room relax when she didn’t. But she was equally clear that letting your values run your financial life without any real structure around them isn’t a form of integrity, it’s just a thing that costs you, and the cost tends to add up long before you think to look at it.
Somewhere in that second hour I understood something about myself that I had never quite articulated. My mother’s two jobs didn’t only teach me the value of hard work. They taught me that overwork was love, that doing more was what good people did, and that a full schedule was evidence of worthiness.
Sisters, I’ll be the first to say: it’s not!
I had carried that framework directly into my professional life and applied it so consistently that I had stopped being able to tell the difference between real ambition and a very old anxiety about not being enough. But I had been treating them like they were the same thing for so long that I didn’t know how to tell the difference anymore, and that confusion had been costing me in ways I was only just beginning to understand.
I left the workshop without a new budget, but with a more honest understanding of what has actually been running my financial life and why it has been so hard to change. All four Money Roots workshops are free through Ally. And if you’ve ever known exactly what the right financial move was and still talked yourself out of it, the conversation in that room might feel familiar.
Ally Money Roots workshops are free at ally.com/moneyroots.