Brunch & Budget has closed down and it’s time for me to say - Free Palestine and end this genocide now 🍉
Hey, it’s Pam 🦋
Let’s take a little walk together 🚶🏻♀️🚶🏻♀️🚶🏻♀️
Brunch & Budget started with a simple mission - to help people who were afraid to talk about money, give folks a safe landing place to break bread, find common ground, and feel good about their finances. My first ever official time someone paid me for this work was June 16, 2014. Nearly 10 years, 879 one-on-one brunches 🍳🥓🥞, and 405 clients later, I think we accomplished it.
I decided early on that Brunch & Budget needed to be a registered investment advisor (RIA). If I wanted to give investment advice the responsible way, help people choose their 401k options, or open IRA’s–heck, even telling someone to keep their money in savings instead of investing it counted as investment advice–I had to be an RIA.
Being an RIA was expensive to maintain - from the compliance consultants, state registration fees, forms and manuals, licensing fees, continuing education classes, etc. It also meant we were subject to a lot, like A LOT, of random rules for the privilege of giving investment advice.
For instance, I wasn’t allowed to post testimonials on my website or cherry pick which clients to leave reviews on Yelp or Google. I had to archive all of my social media posts via a third party service (that I had to pay for). I’m going to have to keep all my books and records stored for the next 5 years, which means paying for a cloud service I wouldn’t otherwise be using.
The industry made me feel small and stuck in many ways, but I felt like the RIA was the right thing to do - we wanted to be accessible and also accountable to our clients in a clear way. I was brunching with more and more people of color who had either never seen a financial planner or had terrible experiences with them.
Dyalekt and I got this idea that there needed to be a space for people of color to talk and learn about money, where they could learn about the systems they were up against and find fellowship with other POC who were first generation–college grad, in this country, potential homeowner, artist, business owner, making more money than their parents ever had.
When Dyalekt and I first started See Change, a colleague posted about it in a financial planner Facebook group and the first comment that came back was that the program was as inherently racist as Jim Crow laws, because, you know, ‘reverse racism.’
Eventually, I left a lot of the financial planner groups and went deeper into the racial wealth equity world. I was often the only CFP at these conferences, and certainly the only RIA. Brunch & Budget was still helping a lot of people who needed financial planning through an anti-capitalist, racially inclusive lens and we had just started incubating See Change, so I wanted us to be informed and equipped to the maxxxxxx.
Throughout the pandemic, it felt like people needed us more than ever–we had a months-long waitlist and were beyond capacity. We made moves to expand and potentially scale…. right when mortgage rates doubled and inflation tripled. We found ourselves at the end of 2022 having to let employees go because the revenue never caught up to the expansion plans. The smaller team helped our cash flow for the time being, but we were seeing first hand the realities of how our communities were struggling financially.
Fast forward to the fall of 2023 - I saw what was unfolding in Palestine, talking to friends and clients about it, and it was weighing heavily on my mind whether to speak up publicly.
My first concern was, I had employees to think about. I didn’t want them to feel like they had to speak on it or be caught in the middle of possible trolls or doxxing because of something I personally posted or shared about Palestine.
So I kept quiet.
I would find myself scrolling through my IG feed, seeing influencers and people I admired one by one make statements about Palestine, calling for a ceasefire. They had tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. They had influence. Maybe they had a responsibility to say something, but maybe I didn’t.
So I kept quiet.
Was I really someone who needed to speak up about this? Did my voice need to be in the mix? I looked around at my industry and many of my colleagues had no posts or statements against the genocide happening in Palestine (shout out to the Rad Planners Collective for organizing a collective voice around this 🙌🏼)
So I kept quiet, too.
By the end of April 2024, our revenue and reserves weren’t keeping up with the payroll–even after I had stopped taking a salary. My business partner and I made the tough decision to close the business at the end of May so we could give everyone the best possible severance. We wanted to end the business with the same values we started with - taking care of people first.
It’s amazing how showing up for the big moments gives you the space to show up for the small moments.
This weekend at a friend’s bbq, our 4 year old son was running around with handcuffs, trying to put his dad “in jail.” Dyalekt stopped dead in his tracks and said, “we don’t play jail.”
“But what if they’re the bad guy?” Our son asked.
I said, “Too often, people are put in bad situations and are making choices to try to survive. We want to ask questions and find ways to help, not just put people in jail.”
A few minutes later, he came up to me, put the handcuff around my wrist, and said, “these are healing cuffs now, it’s medicine, do you feel better?” He ran up to his dad and put the cuffs around his ankle and asked if the healing cuffs made him feel better too.
My friends who overheard smiled knowingly–we were all grappling with how to have these difficult conversations and help our little ones process all that is happening in this world.
Later that day, I saw this post:
What is happening in Palestine is atrocious, horrific, and needs to end. Every time I look at my child, I think about the tens of thousands of children and babies, women and men, who have been murdered in this genocide, and the oppression going on in Sudan, the Congo, Haiti, the Philippines….
“Every single voice of outrage is needed right now. Yours included.” @carolinejsumlin
I want our son to find this when he’s older and know that no voice is too small to speak out against genocide, murder, and war.
The time for brunch is over.
Now is the time for liberation. Now is the time to Get Shameless. About everything.
We are looking forward to the next chapter and we’ll see you at the next protest 🍉
love y'alls!