An Understanding of Basic Finance Born From a Global Pandemic

By Gyasi N. Barber

After thinking about the racial wealth disparity in the United States between Black people and White people, I knew I couldn’t just keep this knowledge for myself. After all, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the median household wealth for White people is $134,230, compared to $11,030 for Black people. 

I’m sure some of you have taken the “opportunity” since we’ve been working from home to pick up a hobby, do some leisure reading or something else to make up your time. If we took all of the people who picked up a COVID hobby, we could make a pretty large club. 

In the first few months of the pandemic, I definitely watched a lot of movies, read some books and spent a lot of quality time with my partner, Maddie and our dog, Champ. I also decided to gain a better understanding of and control over my finances. Before the pandemic, I always found different opportunities to spend money as a young adult with very few responsibilities living in the greatest city in the world (<3 NYC). 

However, when things closed up, so did my spending. I missed the flexibility, but I grew to appreciate the time to evaluate what I was spending and what I was actually getting out of it. I came to realize that I wasn’t getting much. Nice clothes, electronic goodies, falling for Instagram sponsored content. Not a good look for your boy. The reason why I wasn’t getting much is because of how I defined “much”. I was getting goods, yes, but those goods wouldn’t appreciate or help me in the future. 

So I reevaluated. I didn’t stop completely, but I made a conscious effort to think about what I was consuming. If I saw a nice candle on Instagram, I still bought it. However, it was nice to have a little extra money to pay down my credit card bills, student loans and actually start saving. I do want to take this time and say that, during the pandemic, I was able to keep my job and I already make a decent amount of money. For that, I am truly blessed.

I started reading more about basic finance, investing and anything related to it. I took a few classes on Udemy that were really insightful and got me thinking about how I could continue to help myself and the people around me to gain some control of their financial future. 

It took a few months to really understand everything that I needed to do to get my financial education on track. I figured out the best way for me to set a budget, I made a short-term plan to pay down my high interest debts and I started putting money away for an emergency fund. Then George Floyd was murdered at the end of May, and everything changed. 

It was a pivotal moment–especially for me, a Black man in the United States of America. It took me a while to come to terms with what everything meant and how I felt about it. I decided to enlighten and educate White people so they could understand how this all came to be, but to be honest, I felt angry, tired and I really wanted to give up a lot of the things I had taken on during the last few months. 

While I did donate a lot of my extra money over the following few months to various charities, bail bonds funds and really anything I deemed worthy, I decided that my long-term financial goals should not change. After thinking about the racial wealth disparity in the United States between Black people and White people, I knew I couldn’t just keep this knowledge for myself. After all, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the median household wealth for White people is $134,230, compared to $11,030 for Black people. 

Just as I did during the immediate months following the murder of George Floyd, I’m now choosing to help enlighten and educate people on their understanding of personal finance. I believe that there are people out there who were just like me last year. At the beginning of last year, I did not have a handle on my high interest debt, I was spending more than I was making and I was thinking too emotionally and not financially enough about my non-essential purchases. So I am starting a blog that will uncover my current journey as well as the journey of others. It will also break down why we as Black people are in situations like I was in last year to begin with.

I hope to help some people, but I hope you will enlighten me in return. I hope you’ll join me on this journey, and that you’ll use this space to connect, ask questions, and empower yourselves along with me. You can look forward to a conversation about the psychology of money and how our backgrounds affect how we consume as well as an honest conversation about the difficulties of setting budgets (but hopefully how to set one anyway).