If you’re looking for help with your finances, you’ll see one promise over and over again: every bank, investment platform, and advisor wants to help you take control of your finances.
We make this promise here at Zogo, too. It’s a core part of our mission statement, and for good reason – taking control means reclaiming power when it’s easy to feel powerless. It’s the confidence to navigate life from the driver’s seat and feel fully in control of your journey.
But to make this promise, we have to answer a question we hear from our learners again and again: so much of what happens to us financially is *out* of our control. What does “take control” actually mean in real life?
I became a financial educator because I started as a person with financial anxiety. I felt completely out of control of my own finances, so I set out on a mission to master my money.
But even after doing everything I could to “take control” — stashing away savings like a squirrel, investing in all the “right” places, buying the 50%-off fruit at the grocery store when I really wanted the premium grapes — I’d still watch my bank account with fear every time news about tariffs, interest rates, and mass layoffs started to spiral the economy. How could my $4 fruit savings compete with the cost of losing my job or my health insurance?
I quickly learned that I could make all of the “right” decisions in my power, but some outcomes are ultimately at the mercy of the markets. I was back in the place I feared the most, the dreaded financial passenger seat.
And I’m in good company. We’ve all seen that it only takes one sour market, one natural disaster, one pandemic, or any number of “once in a lifetime” events that somehow seem to cycle through our lives every two years to effectively slice the safety nets we’ve built and set our financial anxieties loose again. We consistently relearn that we can’t always make it on our own: during downturns, millions of Americans and businesses turn to the government or to other assistance to make ends meet.
At first glance, taking control might not seem realistic when our financial futures aren’t just in our hands. In some way or another, our financial futures are connected to nearly every other person in the world through the markets.
This is where the “take control” promise (and most financial education) falls short: it doesn’t connect personal finance to the broader economic puzzle pieces that can trap even the most well-prepared families in cycles of financial hardship. “Raise your income and cut the coffee” doesn’t do any good when there’s no income left and the coffee’s been cut.
So what can we do about this?
When we think about what’s really swaying our savings, there are two main roads we can take:
1. Throw out our budgets, buy the grapes we really want at the grocery store, and leave our financial lives up to chance. (My college self has already tried this approach, and I would not recommend.)
2. Acknowledge the ways we can take control of our money and work to protect ourselves as much as possible against the next shake-up. And maybe still buy the grapes sometimes.
Even when it’s tempting to doubt their impact, the basic skills of budgeting, saving for emergencies, and investing for the long term are just as important as ever. The better we set ourselves up for success when we can take control, the better we can play defense when circumstances are out of our hands.
These steps alone can work wonders to ease financial anxiety, but most people stop here and leave behind one of the most valuable things we can do for ourselves and our stress.
The greatest impact comes when we move beyond thinking of money in isolation and start seeing it as a shared system that links all of our wallets.
I began to change my own mindset around money by reading news headlines and summaries during small breaks in the day to learn about the policies and events that were trickling down to my bank account. It didn’t stop me from riding in the passenger’s seat, but it did help me sort facts from fear and gave me a much clearer view of the road ahead.
Zogo’s recent release of Money Minute has been a tremendous step in clearing this view for all of our learners. Connecting financial news to financial education is one of many meaningful initiatives we can take toward our mission to truly (and realistically) empower everyone in an out-of-control world.
Financial empowerment really boils down to understanding what we can influence and navigating what we can’t. It’s what taking control actually looks like. And it’s a promise we can keep.
Zogo is built for everyone - at every stage of life. To learn more about Zogo, please request a demo.