Our CEO, Tara Johnson, recently sat down with Emmy®-nominated wealth Advisor and President of Platinum Wealth Management, Jennifer Rogers Markwell to discuss female financial empowerment. During the conversation, Tara was asked about her earliest memory of money.
What was your ‘money memory’ you had as a younger person, or teenager, that really sticks in your mind and has molded your relationship to money as an adult?
“Well, thinking back, I was pondering this a little bit earlier this week. I come back to this time and time again, how in the early days, my parents sort of brought us up to not engage in credit cards.
You don’t have a credit card, it’s only going to lead to trouble. Which, of course, kind of leads you to this place of internalising your ability to manage money. Right? So it was kind of implied that because of our age, talking about myself and my siblings, we couldn’t possibly understand what that means to have a credit card so we just never had one. I had a debit card only and a savings account almost through to the end of college.
And I remember chatting with a dear friend of mine, and I was of course, looking to purchase a really fancy camera because I was studying photography at the time. And he had mentioned taking out a credit card, and I was so against that – credit cards are evil, they’re bad news. He had to explain to me what credit is and what is does for you and why it’s important. Right? These concepts weren’t explained to me in a thoughtful way, which – no shade on my parents – is just how it was. They felt like they were protecting me and trying to set me up for success in their own way. But it had also kind of been demonised.
But having that credit card and what I came to learn over time, especially as I was looking to purchase a home with my now husband, it’s essential. You have to have that history, and you need to be able to show up and prove you can purchase things and pay them off like a responsible human. And so I often think of that conversation in a camera store with my friend who had to give me that come-to-Jesus talk that credit cards actually do serve a purpose and can be very important.”
Listen to episode 94 of the Platinum Talks Wealth Podcast here.