This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello and welcome. I'm Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Psilocybin School. Today we're gonna talk about personal finance. Now this topic is something that can be very complicated, lots of different opinions, different recommendations and so on.
And it's something that a lot of people struggle with. If you don't understand personal finance, if you don't have good goals and good habits and patterns, you might feel that something's wrong with you. You may feel like everybody else has this knowledge, but you don't. Or if you get in trouble in some way, you might just start kind of ignoring what's happening with your bank account, your savings fund, your lack of savings fund, credit score, all those kinds of things. But then you also probably feel this vague sense of discomfort because you know you should be paying attention or at least you know there's something you should be doing.
Well today's story is about how a manager for a nonprofit organization who also describes herself as a queer punk artist created a series of personal finance workshops. To serve people she believes are not traditionally well-served by the industry. I'll tell you how she does it in just a moment. [Music]
Today's story comes from Hadassah Damien. By day Hadassah works as a technology manager for a nonprofit organization.
Her side hustle is teaching workshops in personal and small business finance right in the heart of New York City as well as online. Hadassah has an anti-capitalist but pro-stability message and she seeks out like-minded students. She describes as women, weirdos and outsiders who are interested in having stable lives. She points out that we don't have to like the system to learn to thrive in it, which is kind of an interesting preview of the identity politics that make up her target market. Hadassah describes herself as a queer punk artist with no family resources.
By working part-time professional jobs and running a series of hustles, she managed to bring her credit score from under 500 to over 800 and was able to put a down payment on a house and qualify for a mortgage, even after having previously defaulted on student loans. She says that learning to navigate the system from the outside led her to greater understanding. And after casually mentioning on social media that she should teach a class, she was overwhelmed with the response. Her friends and followers wanted to know what she did and how she did it, so she decided to put her first class together. This personal finance class, Fearless Money Management, discusses budgeting, cash flow, emergency funds, debt management and what ethical assets look like.
But Hadassah says the biggest thing she emphasizes is all about overcoming mental hurdles, getting out of your own way, dealing with overwhelm and inertia, all within a social justice-informed framework. It's not about getting your money in order because someone tells you to, it's because it'll help you be a stronger person. Her first in-person beta class had six students and the first public class had eight. It was a two and a half hour class held at an office she shares with three other people, which was booked during non-business hours. She repeated this a few times and then decided she would take the class online to reach more people.
Now setting up the online class was actually easier because she already had the documentation from the in-person class as well as a lot of blog posts she'd written on the topic. The much harder part was breaking down the lesson plans and slides into modules, kind of structuring her content in an orderly way. She also videotaped her in-person class and was then able to pull clips from the videos she could use online. She chose to build her website in WordPress and to structure the actual course, she used a plugin called Lifter LMS that helped her offer the features she wanted. I'll link that up in our show notes of course.
Hadassah students tend to come from the LGBTQ population as well as women and creatives. She charges a sliding scale for the course and she always includes a couple of free seats. Doing this gives her a better sense of what the market will bear and also what she feels good about receiving for the course. She finds this work empowering and she loves getting emails from students and clients who share their success stories. Overcoming fear, paying off debt, starting little businesses, naturally she finds these emails joyful and inspiring.
Next up, Hadassah is launching an interview series called "Let's Talk About Money" and another online class that's a larger and longer version. She also does personal coaching and offers an online meetup and community for a low monthly fee. [Music]
What can we learn about Hadassah's story? Well, as I said in the beginning, personal finance is a need and a lot of people don't relate to the prominent voices in that field. Even if they're advised to sound, a lot of people wonder if it really applies to them.
So here, Hadassah has found a population that she identifies with, they identify with her, and she has the authority through her own story to speak to them. And she speaks to them in a voice they understand. The sales copy for the course uses adjectives like fun, feminist, and fearless, which are three words that are probably not used very often when describing personal finance education. Now, speaking of prominent voices, Hadassah believes that much of the whole industry in personal finance is very patriarchal, and therefore she wants to provide an alternative. Now, at the same time, she also knows that some core personal finance principles don't really have an ideology attached to them.
So through her work, she's able to help people start building good habits who might otherwise not learn these things because they feel out of the mainstream. So how else could you apply this? Say you have influence in a group that is either marginalized or just doesn't identify with tradition or popular advice, somehow out of the majority circle. There are lots of fields that feel very inaccessible to a lot of people. Personal finance is one related to that, everything about taxes, preparing taxes, understanding how to do your estimated taxes.
If you start making money outside your day job, entrepreneurship in general, as you know, I believe that making money for yourself is absolutely empowering, brings more options into your life, and also allows you to feel a sense of pride in something that you've made. Getting into law school or med school or some other professional program that has a lot of gatekeepers, a lot of process that favors traditional applicants. If you can demystify that and bring that knowledge, maybe even those advantages to a disadvantaged population, then you're doing a social good and you're also providing real value. And it may not happen exactly like that for you, but if you listen to these stories, you apply them to your own hustle, you will see results. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better.
If you wanna learn about Hadassah's ride-free personal finance workshops, as well as a couple of other things we looked at, next time you have a chance, hop onto sidehustleschool.com/53. Thank you so much for listening. I hope it's helpful to you. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." I'll be back tomorrow.
