Green Money (eBook)

How to Reduce Waste, Build Wealth, and Create a Better Future for All

Kara Perez (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
223 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-394-27410-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Discover the path to a wealthier, more sustainable future

Green Money: How to Reduce Waste, Build Wealth, and Create a Better Future for All is a startlingly insightful and compelling book that redefines personal finance through the twin lenses of environmental sustainability and community, offering actionable steps to not only improve your financial health but also make a positive impact on the planet.

Kara Perez, a visionary in sustainable personal finance, shares her unique approach to breaking free from outdated financial advice, demonstrating how you can achieve a fulfilling life that values community, sustainability, and financial well-being. Filled with real-world anecdotes, cutting-edge research, and hands-on money exercises, this book equips you with the tools needed to take immediate action towards a brighter, greener future.

You'll explore topics like:

• How to navigate the challenges of thrifting, tackle eco-anxiety, invest ethically, and engage in environmental justice, all while securing your financial future
• How overconsumption and reliance on fossil fuels became the norm and how we can find practical alternatives that work better for us and the planet
• Why systems, and not individuals, are the real problem

Ideal for young professionals, growing families, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and financial planners alike, Green Money is more than a book-it's a movement towards integrating financial success with environmental stewardship. Join Kara Perez in transforming how you think about money and take the first step towards building wealth and creating a better future for all.

KARA PEREZ is a Massachusetts-based financial entrepreneur and first-generation American. She is the Founder of Bravely Go, an organization that helps women take control of their financial lives. She is a recognized and respected member of the feminist and sustainable personal finance community.

Textauszug

CHAPTER ONE
WHY CARE?

Everything is on fire but everyone I love is doing beautiful things and trying to make life worth living and I know I don’t have to believe in everything, but I believe in that.

—Nikita Gill

I have been obsessed with money for the last decade of my life.

And for good reason: when I was 24, I was flat broke, desperately trying to find a full-time job, depressed, and struggling with my student loan payments. My full-time, posttax income that year was $16,100.

I felt that money was ruining my life. I was unhappy, earning an average of $1,000 a month living in Austin, Texas, and I was unable to do simple things such as go out for a drink without panicking that I would overdraft my bank account. I woke up in a breathless panic every night at 4 a.m., convinced I would be buried with my Sallie Mae paperwork. All my job applications were denied. Shame and embarrassment were constant companions. I felt like an absolute idiot for going to college and getting myself into student loan debt that I was struggling mightily to pay off. Financial stability, let alone financial safety, felt like a pipe-dream.

Money was a language that I didn’t speak. I was drowning in self-doubt and in debt, and in a full-blown quarter-life crisis. Money dominated my daily thoughts, mostly playing in an endless loop of “Oh, my God, I am going to die broke, and I don’t have enough to pay this bill, and I hate my life, and I’m a freaking idiot for doing this to myself.” I needed something to change, so I did what any millennial would: I googled my problems. Typing “how to pay off student loan debt faster” into Google went from a digital distress call to a rally cry in about 24 hours. I discovered the world of personal finance bloggers who were sharing their stories of debt payoff, reaching early retirement, negotiating high-paying jobs, and I realized, “Oh, snap. Some people know how to do this money thing.” And because ya girl is one stubborn and competitive lady, I decided that I would become financially fluent, come hell or high water.

Learning about money was a flashpoint in my life.

I dedicated myself to becoming debt free, cutting absolutely everything that wasn’t necessary out of my life. Goodbye weekly $2 Tuesday friend hangs at Shangri-La, hello drinking tap water at home and watching The Sopranos on my roommates HBO account. Since no one wanted to hire me for a full time position, I sought out part time work, cobbling together five different part-time jobs. I worked some combination of these jobs seven days a week to increase my income. I hustled hard, working as a caterer, freelance social media manager, freelance non profit fundraiser, high school lacrosse coach, and freelance writer. I also took odd jobs, like nannying gigs and even once waited in line for someone for $150 cash.

I started to budget, obsessively. Whenever I got paid from one of my myriad jobs, I sat down at my computer and painstakingly allocated each penny of that paycheck to my basic needs and my student loans. I finally began to understand how to save and even invest my money. With this obsessive strategy, I paid off my last $18,000 in student loans in 10 months on my less than $20,000 a year salary.

Becoming financially fluent changed my entire world. Over a period of two years, my financial situation went from “drowning quickly” to “can now float.” Where I had been stressed and overwhelmed by my student loans, I was now debt free. Where I had once had no cash savings, I now had $5,000 in my emergency fund. With each new financial milestone I hit, my anxiety decreased.

But why was money so hard in the first place? And why was I able to make such drastic changes, when so many other people in similar positions couldn’t? These were, and are, questions that I wrestle with constantly. Why do some people have houses with 15 bathrooms and some people sleep on the streets in the richest country in the world? Why do some people get a rush from spending money, and others develop anxiety around spending? How come most of us spend most of our waking hours working to earn more money?

We’re spending ourselves into an environmental hole and a mental health hole. When I was at my lowest income, I spent the most money. I spent a lot of my free time in Target, because Target is a fun, clean, and friendly place to be, and I was genuinely convinced that one more pretty notebook was the solution to my problems, instead of, you know, having more money to be able to actually afford my life. I didn’t connect my brightly colored notebook with the idea that I was using shopping to find a sense of control in my very out-of-control life. In fact, I didn’t think of my money outside of my own experience at all.

Which is a little strange, because money makes our entire world go round. Money is the key to modern life. Money, and specifically spending, has overtaken our whole lives and our whole planet in the past few decades. We need money to house ourselves, to feed ourselves, to clothe ourselves. We need money to take part in pop culture—you have to pay for HBO to watch the latest popular TV show, and you need money to buy tickets to see Taylor Swift live.

And the desire for profit, aka the money that businesses take home after all expenses have been paid, is what is fueling our global climate crisis.

Here are the financial facts: the average individual from a wealthy nation consumes 13× as much as the average individual from a poor nation. We have increased plastic production from 218 million metric tons in 2005 to 369 million in 2021 (UNCTAD 2022). Since the 1980s, we have built more homes with four bedrooms, while the percentage of two-bedroom homes being built has shrunk (US Census Bureau 2022).

A majority of Americans say that climate change is a major threat to the country’s well-being, and 69% support the country becoming carbon neutral by 2050 (Tyson, Funk, and Kennedy 2023). In the US alone, 21 species went extinct in 2023, bringing the total to 671 species (US Fish and Wildlife Service 2023). As we make, buy, and ship more things, everything from water pollution to carbon emissions goes up. Carbon emissions set a new record high in 2022, hitting a global average atmospheric carbon dioxide of 417.06 parts per million (Lindsay 2024).

Today, we live in a world where 81 people have more money than 50% of the world. As of June 2023, the top 10% of US households held 69% of total household wealth. The bottom 50% of households held only 2.5% of total household wealth (Guzman and Kollar 2023, Hernandez Kent and Ricketts 2024, St. Louis Federal Reserve 2024). The official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5%, with 37.9 million people in poverty (US Census Bureau 2024). There are websites that track billionaires’ wealth growth. Type “spend Bill Gates’ money” into a search engine, and a website will pop up that lets you spend $100 billion on everything from flipflops to farmland to NBA teams, just to demonstrate how much money this one dude really has.

At the root of the good, the bad, and the ugly of life today is money. We need it, but it’s ruining our lives. We want to build wealth to protect ourselves, but hoarding money is causing huge problems. We want to look cute at our friend’s summer wedding, but that dress was made by an underpaid woman in Bangladesh in unsafe working conditions. We want to take a vacation from Los Angeles to Dubai, but the carbon we emit will stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

All of this seems overwhelming and, frankly, depressing. “It’s all a mess,” we tell each other. “What can one person even do?”

We Can Change

Things are the way they are because we make them that way. It’s a sneaky truth that we often forget: nothing is permanent, and nothing has to stay the way it is forever. If we want to have fewer species go extinct each year, we can protect and preserve more land for them to live on. If we want to have fewer people living on the streets, we can redirect the money in the federal budget to build homes and provide health services.

To simplify it: anything that we make, we can make differently. I mean that in a “we can choose to use recycled material to make that T-shirt” and in a “we can spend $1 billion less on the military budget and put that toward building housing” kind of way. Everything about our lives is a series of choices.

I grew up low income, and continued to be low income until 29, when I finally broke into a middle-class earning. Throughout my first 24 years, before I had my quarter-life crisis, I didn’t have very much money or any kind of financial education, but I had a lot of other things going for me. I was white, I was college educated, I didn’t have kids, and I was able-bodied. That meant a lot of options were open to me, and if I started making some different choices, I had a very good chance of seeing different results. I didn’t have to pay for childcare or take a job that allowed me to be home when my kids got off the bus, which meant I could work evenings at a catering company to increase my income. I never had anyone question my education, or make jokes about being a diversity hire only, which meant that I didn’t deal with certain types of workplace discrimination.

The single most important thing for you to know is that the world is the way it is because of the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.11.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft ► Geld / Bank / Börse
• Schlagworte: communal personal finance • communal personal finance book • environmental personal finance • environmental personal finance book • esg personal finance • Sustainable Finance • sustainable personal finance • sustainable personal finance book
• ISBN-10: 1-394-27410-6 / 1394274106
• ISBN-13: 978-1-394-27410-9 / 9781394274109